Struggling like a Shadowmoth

post by Raemon · 2024-09-24T00:47:05.030Z · LW · GW · 38 comments

Contents

  The first angle is metastrategy
  The second angle is something like "resilient self-ownership and locus of control."
None
39 comments

One of my favorite stories growing up was Star Wars: Traitor, by Matthew Stover.

The book is short, if you want to read it. Spoilers follow. (I took a look at it again recently and I think it didn't obviously hold up as real adult fiction, although quite good if you haven't yet had your mind blown that many times)

One anecdote from the story has stayed with me and shows up in my worldview from time to time.

The story begins with "Jacen Solo has been captured, and is being tortured."

He is being extremely tortured. He's in a white room, with a device connected throughout his nervous system, inflicting maximum white-hot agony. Whenever the suffering becomes so great that his body tunes it out, it gives him just enough time to relax to hurt all the more when it abruptly starts up again. 

Every day, an alien woman comes to visit him. She talks to him, during lulls in the torture, about philosophy and life and history. She asks him what he thinks about things. He says "I think I'm being fucking tortured. Can you please help?", and she kind of ignores him and goes on talking about philosophy and life and history and stuff. Sometimes he tries more clever ways to pry information out of her, to no avail.

After several weeks (or months?) of this, at some point he asks again "Seriously what the hell? Who are you? What is happening to me? Why are you torturing me, or, not helping? What is going on?"

She says: "Do you know what a shadowmoth is?"

"Answer my fucking question"

"Do you know what a shadowmoth is?"

"Fine, a shadowmoth is a life form native to Coruscant. They're silicon-based, their wingflutes make music once they leave the cocoon and can fly."

She nods, and says "Once, I saw a shadowmoth in its cocoon, struggling. Like you, I am sensitive to the force – I didn't merely empathize with it, but I felt it. When shadowmoths strive to break free from their cocoon, they are in pain. I felt it's pain. And I felt it's envy of the other moths, already free, flying, making music. I wanted to help it."

Jacen shudders. "Oh no, you didn't –"

"Yes. I cut it free."

"No –"

"It sounds like you know what happened next?"

Jacen says: "If they don't escape from the cocoon on their own, they'll never be strong enough to fly, and they suffer and starve to death, worse than what they were experiencing in the cocoon."

"Indeed."^[1]

The two of them sit for awhile. The torture machine gives Jacen another wave of White Pain. Then the woman says "Suppose you did want to help a shadowmoth. What would you do, if you couldn't cut it free? You might sit with it, and let it know that it's not alone, and that it's pain is in the service of it's destiny."

And then she leaves for the day.

And, then, it occurs to Jacen:

It's been months. They haven't asked him any questions. There is no indication that they particularly want anything from him. There is no indication that the White Hot Torture will ever stop.

What would he do, if this was literally the only thing there would ever be? Just him, and the White, and this inscrutable alien woman...

...basically, the only action he can do, is to change his relational stance to the torture, and learn to stop caring about it.

The last sentence of that chapter is "Jacen Solo begins to eat away at the White."

...

A few weeks later, he has basically invented Buddhist Enlightenment from first principles. He feels the pain, but does not suffer. He converses freely with the woman about philosophy and history and life and stuff.

And, then, his captors say "Congratulations. You have passed the first test. You are now ready for the second phase of your training."^[2]

---

Now, there are a few things I have to say about this.

First, to forestall the obvious objections: The transhumanist answer to "what if painful suffering is necessary to learn valuable life lessons?" is "skill issue." 

If you can't figure out how to let shadowmoths out of cocoons without them suffering and dying, maybe you can just invent better biotech until this is no longer necessary. In meantime, sure, have some equanimity about it. But don't let that equanimity stop you from trying to improve the world.

But, better biotech might take thousands of years (or, like, at least a decade) to invent, and you might have to deal with a situation in the meanwhile anyway. And I do think there is something powerful here about never losing your locus of control. And there’s something important about "Sometimes, at least for now, the best way to learn some things involves struggling and figuring things out for yourself. Teachers can help point you to the door but you'll have to walk through it yourself."

Also, perhaps the even more obvious first objection: in this story, the woman is out to manipulate Jacen into becoming a different sort of person. In the context of the story, I think that many of the changes to Jacen's character are actually good by Jacen's original lights^[3], but to be clear I do not endorse kidnapping people and torturing them even if you can argue it's for their own good somehow. Or, most things that that would directly be a metaphor for^[4]. 

But in the context of "things you actually consented to", or "things reality is forcing upon you without anyone else really being involved at all", there are two particular angles that come up for me a fair amount.

The first angle is metastrategy [LW · GW]

The goal of my rationality training investigation [? · GW] is not to produce people who are good at researching a particular domain, or solving a particular class of problem. If you are working in a known field, the thing to do is find experts in that field and learn from them. Sometimes they may need to improve their pedagogy, or learn to articulate their tacit knowledge better. You can learn to extract tacit knowledge from people, and you can learn to extract more knowledge from textbooks, etc.

But, for problems we don't understand yet [LW · GW], there may just not be an established field to learn from.

There, you need the skill of either inventing new skills, or connecting dots between disparate existing fields that nobody has yet integrated. I think you need some kind of generalized research taste, that tells you what to do when nobody in the world is capable of authoritatively giving you the answer, and the specialized research tastes of various fields might be subtly leading you astray, like a physicist assuming they can model everything as spherical cows, or an ML researcher assuming they can continue to be behaviorist about their research [LW · GW] as they push the frontier towards superintelligence.

For this reason, my training [LW · GW] is very "shadowmoth-y". Much of my process is "make people solve a problem they don't know how to solve, and challenge them to figure it out." 

I think there is some art to being "exactly the right amount of cryptic and annoying", and to finding problems that form a reasonable difficulty curve for people with various different starting skills. I don't know that I've hit this balance well yet. The transhumanist answer to shadowmothism still applies – if I can give people clues that help them learn the right metaskills without being so painful and annoying, all the better. 

But I try, where possible, to only give people the earliest hints on a thought chain, nudging them towards the right metatools to invent/remember the right metatools to find/remember the right object level tools to solve a given problem.^[5]

The second angle is something like "resilient self-ownership and locus of control."

Long ago, a friend of mine had recently emotionally grokked existential risk – he had known about and "believed in" it for years, but somehow this particular week things clicked and he was feeling more of the full force of it. He felt very afraid, and didn't know what to do.

He asked a mentor for advice. She asked "What does the fear feel like?"

He didn't articulate anything very clearly.

She followed up with "Does it feel more like a tiger is chasing you, or more like you want to curl up and hope that your parents come and fix it?"

"The second one."

She nodded. "I think that kind of fear does make sense in the ancestral environment (and often today). Sometimes you're afraid and it is the right thing to do to get help, and maybe curl up to conserve resources meanwhile.

"The thing is, though, that your parents really can't help you here. Mom can’t stop x-risk. So, that kind of fear... it just isn't very useful."

I can imagine people for whom this would be exactly the wrong thing to say. But, my friend nodded, and... something subsided in him. Fully understanding what the fear was for, and why it wasn't helpful, allowed him to process and let go of it. 

"Fully understanding an emotion such that you can let it go" is actually a separate topic, which deserves it's own post. For now, I'm bringing this up because the move of: "Oh, my [parents/friends/society] actually really won't save me here, I have to somehow change something inside myself instead of waiting, or trying to change something outside myself" is an important move to be capable of making sometimes.

This played a role in the first Major Grieving that kicked off my interest in Deliberate Grieving [LW · GW] – I thought someone had wronged me. I wanted my peer group to somehow decide either that yes, they had wronged me, and express that judgment. Or, judge that "actually, so-and-so really didn't actually wrong Raemon, this is Raemon's job to adjust to." Or something.

But, this was during the pandemic, and my peer group was busy dealing with their own problems, and it really didn't make sense to call a tribunal about it. 

What if social reality just wasn't going to issue a verdict here?

What would I do?

In that case, the thing to do was grieve. Recognize that yes, there was some legitimate reason that having Justice here would be right and good, but that it wasn't going to happen. And let go somehow.

More recently, I was dealing with an exhausting series of problems, and talking to a friend who was experiencing a very similar set of problems. I found myself saying "I want you... I want you to say that I'm Good. To say that I've done enough."^[6]

And my friend sadly said "Yeah. I also want someone to say that to me, Ray. 

"The thing is, getting that from outside isn't ever really enough. I think you need to somehow become the sort of person who decides for themselves whether they're good enough, and to not need it from some kind of external validation."

Fuck.

What if there would never be someone I trusted who could tell me I was Good Enough, that things were in some sense Okay [LW · GW]? 

What if I had to learn to do that myself? 

Or, worse, what if I had to really acknowledge that it was the wrong question to ask?

---

I think, for many people, it's important at some point to gain a true sort of independence, the way these fables and anecdotes gesture at. The Shadowmoth Struggle is still, often, a necessary part of reality.

The transhumanist rejoinder is still important. Sometimes your friends can help you. Sometimes you can invent better pedagogical techniques, or just actually tell someone they're Good Enough in a way that lands and that their soul really believes and updates on in an enduring way. We're social creatures. I'm pretty sure my human values ultimately say: it is good for people to help each other in this way.

But, I think it is also a worthwhile goal, to be the sort of person capable of enduring and growing and striving, even if at the moment you are an island.

Dig through the cocoon, such that your wings might make music in the skies of distant planets.^[7]

 

        It matters not how strait the gate,
        How charged with punishments the scroll,
.       I am the master of my fate,
        I am the locus of control.

                              – William Ernest Henley and Kenzie Amodei

 

1. ^{^}

   The metaphor of "moths struggling to escape a cocoon and needing to do so on their own" also shows up in the TV show Lost, but, in the relevant episode, the metaphor ends here, right before we get to the important bit.

2. ^{^}

   The second phase of his training is also fairly interesting. The rest of the book was mostly forgettable (in that I literally have completely forgotten it), although the very last sentence was also important to me so maybe it's worth it for that.

3. ^{^}

   It's left deliberately unclear – one of the things I liked about the story is that it's one of few stories I've read which do not spell out the moral, it just presents a bunch of things that happened, and leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions about it.

4. ^{^}

   (See also this comment by Tsvi [LW(p) · GW(p)] about why to be wary of this)

5. ^{^}

   I perhaps want to temper all this with "I'm not sure how well this works – I believe it has helped me, but is not at a point where it's very legibly justified, and it required quite a lot of hours which others haven't replicated"

6. ^{^}

   I want to add: I have had people tell me this, and it was helpful. Or otherwise help my struggles feel "seen" and respected. But there was something impermanent and incomplete about it.

7. ^{^}

   (But please do not kidnap and torture people even if you're pretty sure it'll help them self-actualize)

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