Nonspecific discomfort

To me, it also seems you undervalue introspection. This can be bad because if you think introspection is not useful, you will underuse it.

Most people I expect can't tell the difference between "I'm unhappy in my profession" and "I'm unhappy with my immediate manager"

That might be correct, not because it is impossible for these people to introspect, but because they have not learned it. Most people don't hold off on proposing solutions [LW · GW] but I would be surprised if they could not learn to do it.

I am sure I can tell if I am unhappy because of my job or my boss. It is likely I wouldn't have been able to tell a year ago when I thought I was good at introspection while being terrible at it. So terrible, that it is hard to imagine how I could have been worse.

How is that possible? Well, I thought I was good at introspection because I was very good at certain kinds of introspection. E.g. introspecting on how I do analytical reasoning, while I do it. But I was terrible at emotional introspection. I only had the concept of introspection. Now it is clear to me that there are multiple kinds of introspection. I was blind to emotions, without realizing this.

Before I got better at introspection, all of my negative feelings could have been described as nonspecific discomfort. But it was really not nonspecific at all. It was just that I had ignored and suppressed my emotions so much that they got disassociated from their actual causes. So I would feel bad but didn't know why. I basically did exactly what Hazard talks about here [LW · GW]. I did this basically for every negative emotion I experienced.

But then I discovered this tek [LW(p) · GW(p)] to introspect, and it seems to work quite well. I have applied it maybe 8 times now. Mostly to emotions that at first seem nonspecific. In my experience, most emotions are actually non-specific, even if they are temporally linked very tightly.

E.g. if I experience social rejection, I normally feel good at first but after 15 minutes I start to feel bad. It seems like it should be clear to me that this is because of the social rejection, but it's not. It will seem like the most likely explanation to me, but there will be uncertainty about if this is actually what is going on. This is ridiculous maybe I am especially bad at analyzing emotions without spinning up a conscious expliitit optimization process. But once I use the technique I linked above it becomes very clear why I feel bad. The interesting thing is that once you understand the underlying cause of the nonspecific comfort, it disappears. Without you doing anything.

This makes sort of sense. Once you have truly understood what a specific feeling "wants you to accomplish" there is really no more point in it sticking around. Now that you have understood the feeling you can either optimize for getting what the feeling wants, or you can realize that the feeling doesn't actually make sense in the current situation. Doing the appropriate thing will make the feeling go away. At least that is what happened so far for me.

I suppose it makes sense that if you've done a lot of introspection, the main problems you'll have will be the kind that are very resistant to that approach, which makes this post good advice for you and people like you. But I don't think the generalisable lesson is "introspection doesn't work, do these other things" so much as "there comes a point where introspection runs out, and when you hit that, here are some ways you can continue to make progress".

Or maybe it's like a person with a persistent disease who's tried every antibiotic without much effect, and then says "antibiotics suck, don't bother with them, but here are the ways I've found to treat my symptoms and live a good life even with the disease". It's good advice but only once you're sure the infection doesn't respond to antibiotics.

Could it be that most people do so little introspection because they're bad at it and it would only lead them astray anyway? Possibly, but the advice I'd give would still be to train the skill rather than to give up on understanding your problems.

That said, I think all of the things you suggest are a good idea in their own right, and the best strategy will be a combination. Do the things that help with problems-in-general while also trying to understand and fix the problem itself.

Age 25 was the big transition. Before then I focused on school and work, which kept me indoors and busy. Then I quit grad school and became more social, exercised, and lost weight. I quickly became much happier. In later years I slowly learned the importance of hobbies that use my hands or get me out of the house: cooking, gardening, biking, travel, fossil hunting, photography. I'm 53 now. Still looking for ways to have fun, but the list in this article covers the big ones.

I think that this nonspecific discomfort could be fractal: You believe that it's not always there, but there's a version of it that's always in the background, and you have learned to tune it out in everyday life (like e.g. a tinnitus that you tune out 99% of the time, but which you hear when lying in bed at night). Once you start investigating deeper and deeper, it becomes apparent in a wider range of states of mind.

I would also wager that especially strong nonspecific discomforts are the ones first identified once people start a little bit of meditation (those then are often resolved or at least made specific/their cause is identified) and the whole process is started on a more subtle & refined level.

I'm probably biased towards seeing meditation as a panacea, but if I was restricted to naming the three largest advantages of moderate practice, it would probably be “identifying nonspecific discomforts and showing their causal structure/source”.

Here’s @lsusr describing the rationale for using harmonics in computation — my research is focused on the brain, but I believe he has a series of LW posts describing how he’s using this frame for implementing an AI system: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zcYJBTGYtcftxefz9/neural-annealing-toward-a-neural-theory-of-everything?commentId=oaSQapNfBueNnt5pS&fbclid=IwAR0dpMyxz8rEnunCbLLYUh1l2CrjxRhNsQT1h_qdSgmOLDiVx5-G-auThTc [LW · GW]

Symmetry is a (if not ‘the central’) Schelling point if one is in fact using harmonics for computation. I.e., I believe if one actually went and implemented a robot built around the computational principles the brain uses, that gathered apples and avoided tigers, it would tacitly follow a symmetry gradient.