Wanting to Succeed on Every Metric Presented

There is something here along the lines of "becoming skilled at a thing helps you better understand the appeal (and costs) of being skilled at other things". It's definitely not the only thing you need because I've been highly skilled at improv piano, but still desired these other things.

What I want to point out in the post is the disconnect between becoming highly skilled and what you actually value. It's like eating food because it's popular as opposed to actually tasting it and seeing if you like that taste (there was an old story here on LW about this, I think). 

Making the cost explicit does help ("it would take decades to become a grandmaster"), but there can be a lack of feedback on why becoming a national master sounds appealing to you. Like the idea of being [cool title] sounds appealing, but is the actual, visceral, moment-to-moment experience of it undeniably enjoyable to you? (in this case, you can only give an educated guess until you become it, but an educated guess can be good enough!)

If the details are available within you

Maybe! One framing is: I expected "great accomplishments that people I admire say is good" to make me very happy or very liked, but reality was not as great, even negative sometimes. This pattern was hidden because:

•  I wasn't explicit with my expectations - if I was clear with how happy all A's would make me and paid attention when I did get an A, I would realize the disconnect sooner. 
  • Related: making explicit the goals that all A's helps me with (seriously considering why it matters in fine-grained details) would've been much more aligned with my goals than the proxy "get all A's". This serious analysis is not something I really did, but rationality skills of thinking an idea through while noticing confusions helped (I include focusing [LW · GW] here)
• I was in love with the idea of e.g. running a marathon and didn't pay attention to how accomplishing it actually made me feel in physical sensations, or how the process I went about achieving that goal made me feel in physical sensations. This even happened with food! I used to eat a box of Zebra cakes (processed pastry cakes) on my drive home, but one time I decided to actually taste it instead of eating while distracted (inspired by mindful eating meditation). It was actually kind of gross and waxy and weirdly sweet, and I haven't eaten more than a few of them these past several years.

I liked that you provided a lot of examples!

Thanks! Real life examples keep me honest. I was even thinking of your post [LW · GW], specifically the image of you scrambling to maintain and improve 10+ skills. How would you answer your own question?

Your bulleted self-inquiries are very useful. These seem like more playful questions that I would feel comfortable asking someone else if I felt they were being hijacked by a metric/scaling (where a more naive approach could come across as judgmental and untactful). 

Not all of your questions fit every situation of course, but that's not the point! Actually, I want to try out a few examples:

Long-distance running

What would it be like to be very skilled? I would be much fitter than I am now!, so less winded when doing other things. I feel like there's a bragging angle, but who likes a bragger?

What would suck? The long practice hours, I will likely be more prone to injuries and joint problems.

What's the good part of training to be a skilled runner? Consistently being outside would be nice. I think I would feel better after training.

What would be the bad part of training? That out-of-breath feeling and burning muscles is uncomfortable.

Are there people who aren't skilled long distance runners, but are still better in a meaningful way? Swimmers are very fit, have greater upper body strength, and aren't as prone to injuries (though looking it up, they do suffer shoulder injuries)

AI Alignment Researcher

What would it look like to be successful? Being paid to do research full time. Making meaningful contributions that reduce x-risk. Having lots of smart people who will listen and give you feedback. Have a good understanding of lots of different, interesting topics.

What would suck about it? Maybe being in an official position will cause counter-productive pressure/responsibility to make meaningful contributions. I will be open to more criticism. I may feel responsible and slightly helpless regarding people who want to work on alignment, but have trouble finding funding.

What would be great about the process of becoming successful? Learning interesting subjects and becoming better at working through ideas.  Gaining new frames to view problems. Meeting new people to discuss interesting ideas and "iron sharpening iron". Knowing I'm working on something that feels legitimately important.

What would suck about the process? The context-loading of math texts is something to get used to. There's a chance of failure due to lack of skill or not knowing the right people. There is no road map to guarantee success, so there is a lot of uncertainty on what to do specifically. 

Any people who also are great but not successful Alignment researchers? There's people who are good at communicating these ideas with others (for persuasion and distillation), or work at machine learning jobs and will be in good positions of power for AI safety concerns. There are also other x-risks to work on out there and EA fields that also viscerally feel important. 

I'll leave it here due to time, but I think I would add "How could I make the process of getting good more enjoyable?" and making explicit what goals I actually care about.

I may have been misleading, but my point is not about tradeoffs, but about not pursuing things that you don't actually care about upon reflection. 

Thanks for bringing this up. I believe explicitly stating tradeoffs is important because you may then realize that you actually don't care about them. For example, I don't actually care about being "enlightened" or reaching stage 10 in TMI (though I thought I did). I would have come to a better conclusion and had better meditation sessions earlier if I made the metrics I care about explicit. 

[Though, this isn't true for looking cool dancing or eating new foods because I don't know if I like them until it happens]

For the gamification one, they tend to involve a bunch of open loops that leave you wanting to resolve (where the cliff hanger is a great example). This causes thoughts regarding the loop to come up spontaneously. In context, the loops aren't that important, but locally, they may appear more important (like being angry at a loved one for interrupting you or preventing you from finishing a show/chapter/etc). I think being triggered in general here counts. Typical antidotes is the traditional "take a walk" and regarding meditation, better awareness and capacity to let go (not arguing that meditation works here, but may write a post on that)

This is different than cults and abusive relationships, where there is a strong motivation to leave your normal environment (the type of abusive relationship I have in mind is "you can't see your friends anymore"), making the local rewards and punishments more salient as time goes by. I may even include drugs w/ withdrawals here. The usual solution is leaving those environments for healthier ones to compare against, though this happens in transitions due to ideas coupling (bucket errors). [This feels unsubstantiated to me and would benefit from more specific examples]. The gamification one had two answers: "change environment" or "change your relationship to the environment". There may be some situations where you're forced in a horrible environment and your only choice is to change your relationship to your environment, but this would require some high-level meditation insights in my opinion. "Leaving" seems the most actionable response. Maybe "recognizing" you're in a cult is an important vein for future thought. 

The identity based will cause ignoring/flinching from incompatible thoughts. This may benefit from becoming more sensitive to subtle thoughts you typically ignore (noticing confusions was a similar process for me). I feel like meditating relates, but I'm unsure on the mechanism. It's mumble mumble everything is empty mumble.

There's also a thread on "horrible events cause you to realize what's important" to look into.

I actually just started drafting a post in this vein. I'm framing the question as "what are the relative advantages and disadvantages of explicit rationality?". It's a natural follow-up to problems we don't understand [LW · GW]: absent practice in rationality and being agenty (whether we call it that or not), we'll most likely end up as cultural-adaptation-executors [? · GW]. That works well mainly for problems where cultural/economic selection pressures have already produced good strategies. Explicit rationality is potentially useful mainly when that's not the case - either because some change has messed up evolved strategies, or because selection pressures are misaligned with what we want, or because the cultural/economic search mechanisms were insufficient to find good strategies in the first place.

"Rationality" was a vague metric for me when I first started reading the sequences. Breaking it down into clear skills (taking ideas seriously, noticing confusion, "truth" as predictive accuracy, etc) with explicit benefits and common pitfalls would be useful.

Once you nail down what metrics you're talking about when you say "rationality", I believe the costs and benefits of investing in becoming more rational will be clearer. 

Feel free to brainstorm as replies to this comment, I would enjoy a full post on the subject.

Thanks! Changed to "social appraisals". Someone's opinion is definitely a loaded term which may lead to pattern matching. I'm also fine with more novel phrasing since it's explained immediately after.