Whining-Based Communities

One of the greatest benefits I've gotten from (westernized) Buddhism is the idea that a resistance to reality is at the root of much unhappiness.

It seems absurd to me that the human mind so constantly wishes that reality was different - I don't see how it serves our evolutionary needs. But while I don't have an explanation, it is amazing how often I find myself denying reality instead of "Immediate adaptation to the realities of the situation! Followed by winning!". For example, when I encounter bad, unexpected auto traffic, whining is such a horribly unproductive reaction that it still boggles my mind every time I do it. Yet in many moods (already tired, stressed) it is my default response.

I think many rationalists would get a lot more personal happiness out of working on this single concept, as well as improving strategy for our causes, than many of the narrower and more complex ideas presented on OB/LW.

Well, I do have quite a bit of the "bitter loser" in me, but I don't go blaming other people for my failures. All I do is waste my time reading blogs on the internet and playing video games, so, as that other guy named Buffett put it, it's my own damn fault.

"But this is only part of Rand's message, and the other part is the poison pill, a deadlier appeal: It's those looters who don't approve of excellence who are keeping you down."

As lethal as I'm sure it will be to speak even faint praise of a person that is so widely hated that expressing loathing of her is a common 'applause light'...

That's not what Rand's message was. It wasn't even part of her message. One of her main points was, to use the classical phrase, that evil is ultimately impotent. The power of evil to harm comes entirely from the failure of good to recognize it and refuse to loan it its own power.

Rand's message was that people were keeping themselves down, that they had bought into ethical and ideological positions and accepted them without questioning, that they had accepted teachings which passed off poorly-disguised wolves as lambs long before they'd developed the critical thinking skills to evaluate the teachings. And that the teachings were that white was black and black was white, etc.

I am often struck that the people who declaim Rand's writings and ideas most vehemently, especially those that use their proclaimed disapproval to win the approval of others, almost always hold up crude parodies of what Rand actually said in the process, and rarely address her actual positions and their strengths and weakness (of which there are many in both categories).

I do think Rand was being a bit more complex than that. The whole point of "Atlas" is: the heroes are failing to win because they insist on acting as though they were in an ideal fair world, but those who who accept the status quo and work to win inside it will end up burned worse, because the system is structured to corrupt and consume them - meanwhile our heroes escape with virtue intact. "Atlas" constructs a spread of parasitic, beaten, adapting, fair-but-accepting, and fair-and-renouncing characters to illustrate this. Rand is trying to say "a rationalist who understood the rules of the game would decide not to play".

Really, the fault with "Atlas" is that it posits an awful world-spanning System that in factual reality, just doesn't exist. And without that premise it's two inches of wasted paper.

I'm glad to see that many others have pointed out EJ's mistaken interpretation of Objectivism. To add a prototypical passage to demonstrate the error:

Ellsworth Toohey: There's the building that should have been yours. There are buildings going up all over the city which are great chances refused and given to incompetent fools. You're walking the streets while they're doing the work that you love but cannot obtain. This city is closed to you. It is I who have done it! Don't you want to know my motive?

Howard Roark: No.

Ellsworth Toohey: I'm fighting you and shall fight you in every way I can.

Howard Roark: You're free to do what you please.

Ellsworth Toohey: Mr. Roark, we're alone here. Why don't you tell me what you think of me in any words you wish.

Howard Roark: But I don't think of you.

Of course the looters make life worse. So does rust. Their evil has no significance to an Objectivist's moral worth.

I have my own disagreements with Objectivism, but I find it interesting how Rand plays the moral Bogeyman for a wide swath of US culture.

I always interpreted the 'Looters and Moochers' differently; a corollary to the 'It's okay to Win,' statement saying 'It's okay that others Lose - they did so by their own hand.' Rather than offering an excuse for Rationalists/Ubermenschs/Super-Geeks to say 'Nice guys finish last,' I read it as an indictment of that very behaviour. Only 'Looters and Moochers' make excuses, blame others, and fault circumstances - the Super-Geek Wins despite all of those.

I'd wager that Ayn Rand would agree with me if I said this to her (if she wasn't too busy denouncing me for being a Libertarian), but what she intended is irrelevant when speaking about the effects of her work; and along those lines I think you hit the nail on the head. The self-proclaimed Objectivists I've met have all given off a creepy vibe. I think it might be due to misinterpreting Rand in precisely the way you described.

They call themselves Winners, imagine themselves as heroic protagonists (far superior to plebs like you) despite never having actually Won anything; it's all society's fault.

They might as well say: "Oh, I was behaving as a good Rationalist, but my opponent was Irrational! It's not my fault!"

Eliezer FTW.

disclaimer: the ranty part is not directed at yudkowsky

"From within that project - what good does a sense of violated entitlement do? At all? Ever? What good does it do to tell ourselves that we did everything right and deserved better, and that someone or something else is to blame? Is that the key thing we need to change, to do better next time?"

I dunno. I don't follow that many competitive endeavours but the people who cast about looking for excuses after a loss tend to be pretty good. Admittedly the people who go on about what a bitch you are if you make excuses also tend to be pretty good, as do the people who say stuff like only the results matter tend to be pretty good. (I'll also note I don't notice the middle group making any less excuses than average)

I also notice this among people I know.

People who are "bitter losers" don't tend to be very good but I expect the excuses are a product rather than cause of the problem. (and yes you can get into a bad self reinforcing system of excuses.) Of course being a bitter loser is something to avoid. But it's the loser part that's bad. The bitterness is never prior to the losing (and sometimes "fair enough).

But anyway, as to why casting about looking for excuses when you lose can be a good thing: if you're not really trying you're not going to care enough for there to be enough cognitive dissonance that you'll feel the need for an excuse. If you feel that losing is good enough, or that there's nothing to be done etc you won't need an excuse.

When losing It can be useful to feel like you should do better. If, to get that sense of should you have to cast about for something or someone to blame maybe you should do so.

If feeling entitled to victory makes you more likely to win, maybe you should feel entitled to victory.

And finally, if losing doesn't hurt you probably weren't trying at full capacity. One way to make it hurt less is to try less hard. Another is to make up excuses. Neither are optimal but one is obviously much more harmful and not everyone has the cognitive or emotional resources to react optimally (or more precisely, it's not optimal for everyone who doesn't to try to fix this due to oppurtunity cost as well as plain old normal cost)

Why write excuses off a priori? The important thing is to focus on winning.

Also, this is actually basically unrelated, but relevant to the same quote.

"What good does it do to tell ourselves that we did everything right and deserved better, and that someone or something else is to blame?"

If you really did do everything right and deserved better, and luck is to blame e.g. if you are playing tournament poker and make a bet at 60:40 odds losing shouldn't make you calibrate away from making those kinds of bets. You really, genuinely made the right decision. More generally doing things right does not necessarrilly entail winning. Don't become a responsibility fetishist (actually maybe do, but at least compartmentalise it), or a mystic that thinks lady luck bestows the winning cards on the player who deserves to win (hindsight bias.) Sometimes you need to defy the data (all this idiosynractic vocabulary is actually really useful. So much compression.)

Related to both of these points is I get really annoyed at people takeing more responsibility than they have earned. Taking responsibility for mistakes, fine, specifically stuff like "I could have done better, if I did this there wouldn't have been a problem" is probably healthy. Taking responsibility for everything that goes well, annoying and stupid: "I just went all in at 10 to 1 odds for a 50/50 payoff and won, clearly I cunningly outwitted my opponent" a great attitude for tilting (unsettling psychologically so as to cause suboptimal play) your opponents (and might be instrumentally useful to adopt sometimes, or even always, for that reason for some people) but as something you generally do, other than for this purpose (and/or used the same way as I described excuses could be earlier) is fucking terrible epistemology. Taking responsibility usually also means taking credit.

All of which was probably prompted by my hatred of people who, when they have a starting advantage, or get lucky, or just have more talent blame their opponents loss on self pity, excuses and so on. I forget where it was but there was an article about in which Eliezer claimed to have decided not to get anxious when doing public speaking after looking up at the crowd and not being anxious. A lot of this bitter loser stuff is self-fulfilling prophecy inflicted, in part, by this "making excuses makes you a loser" meme. Be satisfied with winning. You don't have to have the moral high ground as well as the actual win. especially when you make more excuses than the person you're robbing of them. This thing where every win has to be the product of cunning and outwitting, and anything the loser says is an excuse pisses me off. Just world fallacy?

But yeah there does seem to be something to all that positive thinking stuff. Specifically it can be easier to do something if you feel more confident, much like it can be harder to e.g. get angry at someone liable to punch you if you get angry with them.

I think the "only focus on winning" "there is no try" advice/attitude can be useful for bypassing anxiety problems. Don't give something any more space in your mind than is useful.

I think American Atheists might be better than objectivists as an example of a whining-based rationalist community.

I come hailing as a more learned Objectivist than I was before. This article actually caused me to go find an online Objectivist community for the purpose of observing them to see if your assertion was true. I've found that it is not. I have not met a single "whiny" Objectivist out of all of the Objectivists I now chat almost-daily with.

Objectivism holds a primacy of existence attitude towards reality, as opposed to a primacy of consciousness attitude. This means that reality comes before our wishes, and if we want our wishes to come true, we have to work for them. We have to affect reality to get what we want, not whine about it.

A real Objectivist would work towards his goals in a rational manner. A whiner is being irrational and is therefore not being Objectivist when they do it.

I find it interesting that all of Objectivism's attackers are people who don't even understand the philosophy. You can't just read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and think you know Objectivism. Atlas Shrugged shows Objectivism in action. Galt's speech gives you a summary of it. But to really understand it, you must pursue the non-fiction. I haven't seen a rebuttal of Objectivism yet given by a person who knew the philosophy they were trying to rebuke.

I think it's perfectly possible to maximize your outcome given current conditions while still being resentful that it is only a local maxima and there are much higher hills that you are being prevented from climbing.

You know, I hadn't noticed before, but the claim that rationality should make you win is isomorphic to a similar contention I have about ethics. I guess that shouldn't be surprising since ethics is tied to decision-making, and so is this definition of 'rationality'.

So I'll come out and say it - ethics specifies criteria for judging which (character|actions|outcomes) are the best.

"And if we can't win, it means we weren't such good rationalists as we thought, and ought to try something different the next time around."

This attitude, that somehow, every single obstacle to success or happiness is solved by rationality, is a mistake, I think. People are not in control of the amount of opportunity they have, and i don't think being supremely rational is a sure way to triumph. Victims of slavery and car crashes are extreme examples, but I think there's more subtle situations in which no reasoned plan of action can straightforwardly help you "win."

This raises the question of what positive attributes we can attempt to apply to this little sub-culture of aspiring rationalists. Shared goals? Collaborative action?

Some have already been implying heavily that rationality implies certain actions in the situation most of us find ourselves in, does it make sense to move forward with that?

Is success here just enabling the growth of strong rationalist individuals, who go forth and succeed in whatever they choose to do, or to shape a community, valuing rationality, which accomplishes things?

I think my problem is that far too often I make decisions as if I am in the "should universe" described here:

One of the failure modes I've come to better understand in myself since observing it in others, is what I call, "living in the should-universe". The universe where everything works the way it common-sensically ought to, as opposed to the actual is-universe we live in. There's more than one way to live in the should-universe, and outright delusional optimism is only the least subtle. Treating the should-universe as your point of departure—describing the real universe as the should-universe plus a diff—can also be dangerous.

Upon realizing how often I have this failure mode I have become more cynical to the realities of the world. But this seems to have its own problems disscussed here a bit. Basically by being a cynic and acknowledging the flaws in the world I become a whiner and end up being perhaps worse off than if I pretended the universe is the way it should be.

What I ideally would do to win is learn to project optimism and "not-cynicism" while still remembering my cynical knowledge of how not ideal the world is. Basically don't whine in public but remember why you might whine. This is very hard to do without picking up some level of cognitive dissonance though since your actions don't really match your thoughts. For some people it may be useful to trick themselves that everything is "as-it-should-be" at times through art or drugs to exhibit the optimistic behavior needed to win. This is precisely I think why not whining is so hard; our actions don't seem to match our beliefs/thoughts.

Has anyone figured out how to reach the state of behaving public not very cynically when needed while still remaining very cynical privately?

It's those looters who don't approve of excellence who are keeping you down. Surely you would be rich and famous and high-status like you deserve if not for them, those unappreciative bastards and their conspiracy of mediocrity.

Any Objectivists who believe this have missed half of Ayn Rand's message and are doing Objectivism completely wrong.

Not only did they miss one of the main points of John Galt's three hour long speech in Atlas Shrugged, but people who level this accusation against Objectivism as a whole missed it as well.

The point I'm referring to is that it takes two things for the looters to keep the men of ability down.

• Someone has a wish that their rationality should tell them they can never have, and they do not discard this irrational wish.
• Someone who has the ability to give the irrational man his wish fails to deny that of him.

When those two things happen, the man of ability has allowed the irrational man to fake his desired reality, and everything spirals downward from there.

The self-proclaimed Objectivists who say "It's not my fault!" aren't much, if at all, better than the looters in the book who also proclaim "It's not my fault!" They want their lives to be better, but rather than using their minds to make their lives better, they wallow in mediocrity and blame, not the men of ability, but the men of inability for their problems. Which is way more pathetic, in a way.

Let's be fair to Ayn Rand

Well, let's. Other than secondary characters like The Fountainhead's Henry Cameron (a great architect whose spirit has been broken), which of Rand's heroes are like this?

Surely you would be rich and famous and high-status like you deserve if not for them, those unappreciative bastards and their conspiracy of mediocrity.

You're showing stellar advertising skills with this WIN thing. I'm nowhere close. Honest applause and upvote. Now we gotta prepare something for the inevitable moment when the masses come and ask us how to WIN.

"There's not a one of us in this world, even the luckiest, whose path is entirely straight and without obstacles. In this unfair world, the test of your existence is how well you do in this unfair world."

Of course shutting up and multiplying, always advancing forward and doing the impossible is the way to go. But as said, the test of instrumental rationality is whether or not you succeed at what you've set yourself up to.

If rationality is being signaled for intellectual honesty's sake alone, or maybe pride, then this signal may not correlate with real world results, and is pretty vain.

By that I mean, that, for instance, I'm not above self handicapping myself, playing possum, and using other similarly dirty tricks, when I think that it'll help me further my goals eventually. If lightly self handicapping yourself, and playing that card, helps you receive help or advantages in excess of the loss you incurred because of that handicap, then it is instrumentally rational to self handicap.

Doing so isn't risk free. You may end up believing your own lie http://lesswrong.com/lw/4e/cached_selves/

Another great post, thanks Eliezer! But, if rationality is for you to win, shouldn't you try to keep it a secret from others? Like if you knew a way to make money in the stock market would you spread it if that nullified your advantage?

Is it possible that humans, with their limited simulation abilities, do not have the mental computational resources to simulate an irrational persons more effective beliefs?

This would mean that the 'irrational' course of action would be the more effective.

Immediate [and optimal] adaptation to the realities of the situation! Followed by winning!

The first sentence is rationality as process; the second is rationality as outcome [winning].

Shouldn't a "rationality is ..." slogan communicate both aspects, and not just one or the other?

I realize that "systematized winning" sort of hightlights both aspects, but I think that it still seems to imply that it's primarily about winning, when it's about both equally.

I see your point and your purpose, but I have 2 caveats:

• The fact that it would be wonderful and inspirational if rationality was always the winning strategy, doesn't mean that rationality is always the winning strategy.
• I think there are a lot of losers who handicap themselves by making excuses; and there are a lot of winners who believe that winning proves virtue, and not winning proves a lack of virtue. Both are wrong. But the winners are in the positions of power; and so their errors do more damage.

The whole issue resists analysis, because "my fault" vs. "not my fault" reduces to free will vs. determinism. As materialists, we kind of have to believe that nothing is anyone's "fault" or "accomplishment". At least, not in the old-fashioned moralistic sense.

I don't have anything to say but...

fuck yeah!