You don't get to have cool flaws

That's advice, not everyone is on the same side of a reasonable equilibrium it might be pointing towards. Like, premature optimization is not effectiveness, slack [? · GW] is vital.

I think this post contains a reasonable caution, but I get a pretty negative reaction from the tone. Especially the title and this bit

You’re not allowed to identify as these flaws. You aren’t allowed to revel in them and feel proud of them.

My instinctive reaction to this is "I'm allowed to identify with whatever I like, you don't get to tell me what I'm allowed to do". The post reads to me as the author trying to unilaterally impose their personal ideal of perfection on other people.

I think it's also a bit inconsistent to say that flaws are bad because they get in the way of your goals and therefore you shouldn't identify with them - since if you identify with your flaws, then maintaining your flaws is one of your goals, and thus they don't get in the way of your goals. Or to put it another way, why can't "how I look getting there" be a goal by itself?

well yes but also no [LW · GW]. don't get attached to your flaws, but be willing to give them space to exist, beware optimizing too much of yourself away or you'll end up in potentially some very nasty self destructive spirals.

Bad sleep schedule is another good example of something that gets romanticised when it shouldn’t.

The problem with this is that one day you'll see someone who has the same flaw you've been trying to suppress in yourself, and they just completely own it, taking pride in it, focusing on its advantages, and never once trying to change it. And because they are so self-assured about it, the rest of the world buys in and views it as more of an interesting quirk than a flaw.

When you encounter that person, you'll feel like you threw away something special.

This post makes an easy to digest and compelling case for getting serious about giving up flaws. Many people build their identity around various flaws, and having a post that crisply makes the case that doing so is net bad is helpful to be able to point people at when you see them suffering in this way.

This essay is an example of the ancient LessWrong genre, "dumb mistakes your brain might be making which feel obvious once someone points them out." I love this genre, and think You Don't Get To Have Cool Flaws should be included in the Best Of LessWrong posts.

It's so easy to make this mistake! In fiction, complex and beloved characters have flaws. Fiction can set examples we try to live up to. Flaws are easier to emulate than virtues. I can't train as hard as Batman, and I can't be as wealthy as Batman, but I can brood! Brooding is easy! But the flaw isn't why I want to be like Batman!

This is such a succinct essay that I worry my review might get longer than the essay itself and I'm just repeating the good points, but pointing out that people can identify with their flaws is worth the verbiage. Sure, perfection is hard, but flaws shouldn't be accepted stable parts of yourself. Why would you ever operate like that? Because the flaw is cool? Because it's been a part of me for a long time? Because it distinguishes me from other people nearby? Because it means less work? None of those are good reasons. 

I'm not going to fix all my flaws tomorrow, but I can at least remember that they are things I would fix if I could snap my fingers and change myself however I wanted.

Law of equal (or not so equal) opposite advice: The are some - probably few - flaws that you can keep because they are small and not worth the effort to fix or make you more lovable and unique.

Example:

• I'm a very picky eater. No sauces, no creams, no spicy foods. Lots of things excluded. It limits what i can eat and i always have to explain.

But don't presume any flaw you are attached to falls into this category. I'm also not strongly convinced of this.

I think this is pretty good advice. I am allergic to nuts, and that has defined a small but occasionally significant part of my interactions with people. While on the whole I'd say I've probably experienced more negative experiences because of it(once went into anaphylaxis), I've often felt that it marked me as special or different from other people. 

About 5 or so years ago my mom heard about a trial run by a doctor where they fed you small amounts of what you're allergic to in order to desensitize and acclimate your immune system to the food. She recommended it to me, but I being a stubborn teenager refused, the idea of losing my specialness a not insignificant part of my reasoning. At the time I was actually explicit about it, and felt that it was fine to want to keep a condition I'd kept for a long time. 

Nowadays my allergies are going away on their own, and while I still stay away from nuts I can tolerate them in small amounts. While I think that there might be people for whom keeping a condition would be reasonable, I think in general people underestimate and grow too attached to the occasionally malignant parts of their identity. 

It's very similar in fact to not letting go of wrongful ideas that are enjoyable to have. In that case, the comparison is clear. While biological conditions are not so easy to get rid of, people can and will blame you for not changing your mind about something that affects them. We're on LessWrong after all, what would be the point if we let something get in the way of our truth-seeking?

I wrote this after watching Oppenheimer and noticing with horror that I wanted to emulate the protagonist in ways entirely unrelated to his merits. Not just unrelated but antithetical: cargo-culting the flaws of competent/great/interesting people is actively harmful to my goals! Why would I do this!? The pattern generalized, so I wrote a rant against myself, then figured it'd be good for LessWrong, and posted it here with minimal edits. 

I think the post is crude and messily written, but does the job. 

Meta comment: I notice I'm surprised that out of all my posts, this is the one that seems most often revisited (e.g. getting 2 reviews for Best of LW, which I did not expect). I'm updating against karma as a reliable indicator of long-term value as a result: 2 posts I wrote got twice the karma, but were never interacted with beyond their first month. I think they must have been somewhat inspired by hype-shaped memes. 

This is an endorsement of the Review function! It has successfully weeded out popular-but-superficial posts of mine and taught me to prioritize whatever's going on in this post.  Karma alone has failed to do this. 

export INSTRUMENTAL_GOAL=change_yourself

Keep track of your past attemts to $INSTRUMENTAL_GOAL, so that you can better predict whether your future attempts to $INSTRUMENTAL_GOAL will succeed, and so better choose between plans that require $INSTRUMENTAL_GOAL and plans that route around it.

Vox Day (I imagine most readers here do/would despise him) theorized a more nuanced socio-sexual hierarchy than the simple Alpha/Beta dichotomy. In his hierarchy there exists the Gamma male.

In my understanding, it would be the Gamma who glorifies his flaws as if they make him especially unique and therefore misunderstood - when really it's more the function of an injured ego.