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comment by TimS · 2012-05-07T01:45:57.415Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The unconscious thought makes sense, and if I really HAD become that kind of super-effective person, then I would necessarily go about doing the things I imagined that kind of person to do. But the problem was that I didn't really have many goals besides being this kind of person; I unconsciously thought that if I could just become like that, this new and improved me would discover and handle these things “on his own”.

But there was no second optimization process there that would go do these things; I'm the person who has to be actually motivated to go do them. In the few moments in which I was feeling really driven (often after watching a movie or playing a game), there wasn't much more that I was motivated to do. I was already in the state of being this really focused person, and studying programming wasn't going to move me farther towards that goal.

This is the heart of this essay, and it is a fantastic point. I am still confused how everything else you've written was necessary to reach this assertion.

comment by CronoDAS · 2012-05-09T23:25:40.298Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

What are the actual goals which are important to me, that being super-effective could help me with? What do I actually want my life to be like? What dangers do I expect to encounter and would like to avert, and which awesome opportunities would I like to realize? What kind of social interactions and benefits do I want to achieve, that being impressive would be useful for?

I've tried to answer these questions and I always tend to come up with either no answer at all or with goals that I think are unachievable in practice. Advice?

Replies from: Viliam_Bur, FrankAdamek
comment by Viliam_Bur · 2012-05-10T09:06:15.400Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

If your goals are unachievable in practice, maybe it's because they are defined as "yes | no", as opposed to "more | less". The goals defined as "more | less" are usually achievable; there is usually something you can do to get "more" of something.

Is there perhaps some goal or a part of a goal than could be converted to the "more | less" type? Or "better | worse" or any other continuous scale. (Make more money than now. Donate to charity more than now. Have better social relationships than now. Have more and better sex than now. Learn Chinese more fluently. ...)

comment by FrankAdamek · 2012-05-10T03:35:46.768Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Unfortunately I'm guessing that you already put in some really solid thinking on this, and that there's not anything easy I can offer to either suggest a desirable thing you've overlooked or to provide more evidence for achievability. I put together the supplementary post but I'm guessing (if you're asking this question) that you read it and it didn't help much, and that you have good reason to expect that LOTR won't help (and that for a variety of reasons it might well not).

But a few ideas that seem fairly easy for us to see the appeal in, and that we can generally do something to increase. Maybe you'll find something here that strikes you.

  • Human beauty and sex. (To anyone reading this, I don't go in for manipulative PUA, but do endorse mutually positive, happy interactions.)
  • Children. This one is kind of a stretch if you don't see the appeal already, but you might try exploring it. I didn't get this appeal for a long time, and then I imagined in concrete detail raising a son or daughter in a happier world, where I could devote my time to them (if it's appealing in this world too, then by all means). Showing them the world, teaching them things, seeing them grow, them running to me and showing me things, I thought to myself "holy shit, that sounds awesome". People sometimes mention incredible joy in the birth and existence of a child, and that they would give their lives for their kids, and these things don't seem to be bugs. (Not to say other feelings are wrong - there are different unconscious strategies for different assessments about our situation - but that this answer isn't flawed.)
  • Survival, being alive. Life being way better than not-living, even if we don't see anything spectacular about it at the moment.
comment by Jonii · 2012-05-10T00:12:54.147Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This probably doesn't interest many of you, but I'd be curious to know if I'd hear here any suggestions to inspiring works of fiction with hypercompetent characters in them. Watched the Bourne trilogy in the middle of reading this post, now I want more! :)

My own ideas

Live: -James Bond Casino Royale/Quantum of Solace/Skyfall -House MD -Sherlock

Anime: Death Note Golden Boy

Replies from: arundelo
comment by arundelo · 2012-05-10T00:58:20.159Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The following all happen to be about hypercompetent thinkers. How inspirational they are varies.

  • Limitless. If you like the Bourne movies you'll like this. My favorite scene is when Eddie, the main character, is on the phone with his girlfriend while she is being pursued by a bad guy. It is a fun little dramatization of brains being mightier than brawn. (For me the main defect of the movie was that despite his chemically enhanced hyperintelligence Eddie does some stupid things in order to keep the plot wheels turning.)
  • Understand by Ted Chiang -- available in its entirety online! This novelette is kind of a takeoff on Flowers for Algernon. Unlike in Limitless, the protagonist doesn't do anything stupid, yet the story manages to be interesting.
  • R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing trilogy. I started this on Yvain's recommendation but somewhere in the second book my interest flagged or I got distracted by other books or whatever. I'd still like to finish it sometime. From what I've read of it, Kellhus (a super-smart rationalist who is also basically a ninja) is kind of an antihero, or at least morally ambiguous. He's very good at achieving his goals, but I don't know whether his goals are worth achieving.

Edit -- here a couple other things:

Replies from: FrankAdamek
comment by FrankAdamek · 2012-05-10T04:04:43.089Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

While being a bit anti-thetical to the point of the post, I recall a Slytherin motto that we become ourselves by following our desires wherever they lead us. In my own history, it was my desires to become super focused and productive that lead me to a lot of stuff I really value now. Was kind of a goal that defeated itself, in that to best achieve it I gave up the goal, but even so.

But a datum you might find useful is that most of these were some of my favorite media for years, I absorbed myself in them, and they mostly made me ignore everything except for self-improvement. In particular I was extremely fond of The Prince of Nothing series (it was primarily this series to which I compared LOTR). Understand is one of the few stories I have on my computer, House was an inspiration to me even before I found x-risk, I loved the Sherlock movies and owned the two most recent Bond movies.

These days I'm much more the person I wanted to be, but no longer care about being that kind of person. (I do value the results of being like that, but it's only the results I care about).

comment by Joanna Morningstar (Jonathan_Lee) · 2012-05-06T20:55:05.394Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

So, it seems to me that what you describe here is not moving up a hierarchy of goals, unless there are serious issues with the mechanisms used to generate subgoals. It seems like slogans more appropriate to avoiding the demonstrated failure mode are:

"Beware affective death spirals on far-mode (sub)goals" or "Taboo specific terms in your goals to make them operationally useful" or possibly even "Check that your stated goals are not semantic stop-signs"

As presented, you are claiming that:

I wanted to be a perfectly honed instrument for realizing my goals, similar to the hyper-competent characters in my favorite fictions

was generated as a subgoal of specific concrete goals (you mention programming and business). This seems to be a massive failure of planning. I would compare it to stating you would develop calculus to solve a constant speed distance-time problem, having never solved any of the latter sort of question. There is no shape to such a goal; to such an individual "calculus" is a term without content. Similarly, unless you have already developed high competence in many concrete tasks, how would you recognise a mind that was a perfectly honed instrument for realizing your goals? Taboo "perfectly honed instrument", "hyper-competent" etc., and the goal dissolves.

On the other hand, going up the pyramid of goals seems more likely to induce this error. Generally my high level goals are in farer modes and less concrete. Certainly "acquire awesome skills" is not something that I have generated as a subgoal of other goals; I have it as a generalisation of past methods of success, in the (inductive) belief that acquiring such skills will be useful in general. As subgoals to that I attempt general self improvement, for example learning to code in new languages or pushing other skillsets. Going up the pyramid of goals in such a context is an active hinderance, because the higher goals are harder to make operational.

Replies from: FrankAdamek
comment by FrankAdamek · 2012-05-06T21:26:45.949Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I am primarily referring to the unconscious drives underlying our actions, not our verbal goals. No matter what term I used to describe it, when I imagined myself doing very well in general relative to other people, spending every moment in focused and topical optimization, I was excited and driven to pursue the things I expected to make me like that. If I anticipated outcomes that did NOT involve me being that kind of person, there was far less unconscious drive to act.

Being hyper-competent was not a subgoal of programming or business, and if it were I would have your same critique. Being hyper-competent was a subgoal of having social success, having riches, being safe, a general assessment of "able to succeed even in difficult situations." Programming and business were rather what seemed consciously to be the best specific routes for achieving these things, but they involved not being the sort of hyper-competent person, and because I unconsciously desired that so much I was not, in practice, driven to pursue programming or business.

Similarly, unless you have already developed high competence in many concrete tasks, how would you recognise a mind that was a perfectly honed instrument for realizing your goals?

The term "perfectly honed instrument" is meant to convey an intuitive sense, not a technical description. But you would recognize such a person by them constantly engaging in what actually seemed to have the greatest marginal return on time, and probably by quickly developing unusually large amounts of skill.

Taboo "perfectly honed instrument", "hyper-competent" etc., and the goal dissolves.

Those terms refer to particular patterns of reality and not others - Bourne, rational!Quirrell, arguably rational!Dumbledore are all extensions of this intension. The average person is not.

Going up the pyramid of goals in such a context is an active hinderance, because the higher goals are harder to make operational.

By "going up the pyramid of goals" I'm referring to understanding more precisely the rules generating the particular, concrete situations we desire, and following a rule higher up on that pyramid. In other words, are there some things we could think of concretely, that once thinking of them, we realized were the real reason we had been motivated by something else was that we unconsciously anticipated it to lead to the first thing? This is something for each person to discover on their own, but it is something to discover.

"Beware affective death spirals on far-mode (sub)goals" or "Taboo specific terms in your goals to make them operationally useful" or possibly even "Check that your stated goals are not semantic stop-signs"

Are you doing those things already? Do they leave something left for you to desire in your rationality? These are all descriptions of much more surface-level techniques than what's being discussed here. This technique is about finding concrete things that make you think "hey, that's awesome, how can I get that?"

Replies from: Jonathan_Lee
comment by Joanna Morningstar (Jonathan_Lee) · 2012-05-07T01:13:47.564Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I want to note that I may be confused: I have multiple hypotheses fitting some fraction of the data presented.

  • Supergoals and goals known, but unconscious affective death spirals or difficulties in actioning a far goal are interfering with the supergoals.
  • Supergoals and goals known, goal is suboptimal.
  • Supergoals not known consciously, subgoal known but suboptimal given knowledge of supergoals.

The first is what seems to be in the example. The second is what the strategy handles. The third is what I get when I try to interpret:

This technique is about finding concrete things that make you think "hey, that's awesome, how can I get that?"

The third is a call for more luminosity; the second is bad goal choice. The first is more awkward to handle. You need to operationally notice which goals are not useful and which are. That means noticing surface level features of your apparent goals that are not optimal.

As I see it, speaking of an "intuitive notion" of "perfectly honed instrument for realizing your goals", or merely stopping at "particular patterns of reality" is the warning signal of this failure mode. Taboo these terms, make them operationally defined. If you have a sequence of definite concrete statements about what the world would look like if you were this kind of entity, then you have a functional definition of what you want from the goal.

Of course, the imprecise goal may shatter into a large number of actionable goals. It may be the case that the skills needed to achieve these subgoals have a larger scale skill to learn in them. Functionally, if that high level skill can't be stated with sufficient precision to go out and know success when it's seen, then more data is needed about this possible high-level skill before we can be confident it's there in a form matching the imprecise goal. So note it, do the concrete things now, and look again when there is a better sense of the potential high level problem to solve.

The bit of the post that I find most awesome is the couple of days taken to audit your goals, and notice that achieving your goals were being hindered by this urge. I am aware that when I noticed how badly broken my goal structures were, I had to call "halt and catch fire" and keep a diary for a couple of months. Being able to perform an audit in a few days would be incredibly useful.

Replies from: FrankAdamek
comment by FrankAdamek · 2012-05-07T03:28:34.284Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
  • Supergoals and goals known, but unconscious affective death spirals or difficulties in actioning a far goal are interfering with the supergoals.
  • Supergoals and goals known, goal is suboptimal.
  • Supergoals not known consciously, subgoal known but suboptimal given knowledge of supergoals.

You bring up a really good point here. I would say that my unconscious thinking was making oversights and unexamined assumptions in the pursuit of goals. For example, thinking "Okay there's a bunch of stuff that I want, but if I just become super effective at reaching goals generally, then I'll get those things automatically." Because it was overlooking other ways of reaching these goals, it both failed to be motivated by some helpful things, like programming study even if not impressive, and it also thought less creatively about how to hit the supergoal.

comment by Jonathan_Graehl · 2012-05-07T01:30:53.059Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I like your observation about stability/security. Being (formerly?) socially challenged, I wouldn't aspire to some great feat of extroversion, because I'd not imagine really holding any ground gained. Connecting sub-goals to terminal values in a close-your-eyes-and-really-imagine way is definitely good advice. I've actually tried it (unlike most bits of advice I approve of) and it really helps (either in achieving the sub-goal or in giving up the feeling of failing for not reaching it).

I'd still like you to edit down further (I read your "data diving" defense, which can save only some of your words). I'm thinking of things that are either obvious tautologies or near-repetitions of what's just been stated, like:

Sometimes the future is going to surprise us, but no matter what happens there are some sub-goals that will almost always improve the situation.

and

(Besides being sub-goals, some of these things seem to be top-level desires in their own right.)