Abandoning Cached Selves to Re-Write My Source Code Partially, I've Become Unstable

I am reminded of Eliezer's refrain that "Consequentialism is what's correct; virtue ethics is what works for humans."

As you've learned, it's important not to over-estimate the level of your own agenty-ness, even if you're trying to become more agenty.

I've greatly benefited from purchasing fuzzies and utilons separately — not just in charity but in all of life.

That's all for now. Best of luck, friend.

A year ago, I thought honestly about my long term and short term goals. I concluded that "utilitarian concern for global human flourishing" was something like maybe 5-10% of my personal utility function. The rest is a combination of desire for personal happiness, and artistic development. Included with the "personal happiness" includes feeling like a good person, which I track separately from the "actually being a good person according to utilitarian ethics." (It's a lot easier to feel like a good person than be a good person. This is true even when I know that I'm only feeling like a good person)

I think utilitarian types need to be honest about what their values are. It lets you make more informed choices about what courses of action are long-term sustainable. And then decide either to craft a longterm plan you can manage (in which you continuously do reasonably good things for the world), or figure out how to spend your life going on various "binges" (i.e. spend a few months working full-time on an Effective Altruist project, then spend a few months vagabonding, or whathaveyou).

One my primary goals is to grow the Effective Altruist community in a responsible manner, and one thing I've been wondering is "can and should EA-people people created, or do you need to find people who naturally gravitate towards EA goals and just help them sort out their priorities?"

I was once a non-EA person, and I became an EA person over the course of 7 years. So it's obviously possible for people who don't currently identify as world-savers to change their values, or at least think that they're changing their values. But trying to manage even that 5-10% function HAS been stressful for me and I'm not sure I'd have wanted someone to turn me into my present self without my consent.

This post seems like a pretty important data point. Though I'm not sure exactly how I should be updating.

Regardless, Diego - you seem like you've already made up your mind, but I do support you going off and vagabonding for a while (I plan to myself sometime in the future). I hope that afterwards you find some better longterm solutions that preserve all of your values.

Usually, the feelings I have as I am shifting due to personal growth are intense, yet temporary - and I've changed myself a lot of times, so the temporary nature of those feelings seems to be a pretty well-established pattern to me. And the way that my ideas settle is always unexpected at first. Making a major decision during a transition could end you up somewhere you don't want to be later.

I once read the story of a person who decided to become a vagabond. She thought it would be good for her, but people treated her like a homeless person, and she was technically homeless, so she started to feel like a homeless person... Homelessness was what her experience turned into.

I have a friend who travels the world and loves it. He decided to use a bicycle as transportation, catch his own fish, and sleep in a tent - but before he left, he saved $100,000 to make sure he wouldn't be worried about money. When you've got 100k in the bank, you're probably not going to feel as though you've turned into a homeless person, and that may be part of why things turned out well for him.

I can't tell you what lifestyle to live. You have to know what you want to get out of it. Then you have to know the pros and cons of each lifestyle. I can tell you this, though: If you try the utilitarian lifestyle for a while, and don't like it, you can always go back. Put your excess stuff in public storage for a few months and see if you like living without it. If so, you can call Salvation Army and they'll take it away. If not, you can have it back.

If you're going to go vagabond, it's a lot harder to switch back. If there is some way of testing that first, I would test it before trying that for real.

I can tell you this, though: My traveler friend is not an altruist. He spends all his time doing outdoors activities like kayaking and hanging out on beaches. If you want to be an altruist, you have to consider how you will make a difference, and that's probably not going to happen outside on a kayak. With no money to donate, no home office, and the random demands of survival disrupting your schedule, will you have the opportunity to make your most effective contribution to the world? Might having your needs met, like guaranteed food, shelter, privacy and office space be necessary to help others? They say "first help yourself." so I suspect that a utilitarian lifestyle would be a better foundation for altruism.

Note: Quitting one's job is not without risks, so trying the vagabond lifestyle might not be safe.

I performed a nearly identical set of operations for the first time when I was 23. I would recommend the following:

1. Allow your new networks to re-stabilize. This can take up to a few weeks or even a few months if you haven't recently experienced massive emotional trauma, or a few years if you have.

2. Once you've re-stabilized, run some internal simulations of potential situations you're likely to encounter in the real world, and how you think the "new you" will respond to those simulations. Do this for about a week, preferably choosing simulations that you could reliably replicate in the real world.

3. Go out and put yourself in situations where you are likely to test the veracity of your simulations from step 2.

Once you've shown at least a first-order predictive stability, give yourself about three to five years running the new software, and then do it again. Tear everything down and start over.

After three iterations of this (approximately one decade), look at all three processes and see if you're converging on a stable pattern of beliefs and behaviors, or if each iteration is effectively distinct from the others.

You sound like a fellow who could find a lot to relate to in Stirner about now. Maybe not quite yet. Maybe in another month.

In his terms, your old values had become somewhat fixed ideas, starting to feel like ties and fetters instead of your own will, and now you've turned a frostier eye to them as a valuer judging these values. You are creating yourself anew, feeling free to do so each day, and feel a sense of liberation thereby.

You did so explicitly at first, writing a new plan for yourself - The King is Dead! Long live the King! - but you were surprised that you didn't really feel much allegiance to the new King - that your heart didn't yet beat for these new ideas though your mind accepted them. Maybe your heart was just wary of taking on a new yoke.

You never know what a slave will do once freed of his shackles. And a slave shouldn't really be surprised if it takes him a while to settle on how he wants to spend his days, once liberated. Where to go? What to do? Probably he'd just want to spend some time exploring the possibilities. See the world that is now open to him, before settling down somewhere.

That's a little rambling from my Stirnerbot. If any of that resonates, give him a try.

(can't find post in the sequences in which Yudkowsky is amazed by the fact that some things are good just because they are old), and that caused interesting unusual life choices, such as not wearing formal shoes and suits.

Wearing formal shoes and suits is not good because it's an old tradition, it's good because people tend to do it in social contexts where other people expect them to do it. Even if dressing codes are arbitrary to a large extent, there can be significant social costs in not adhering to them.

Think of right-hand vs left-hand traffic rules, for instance. None of them is really better than the other, and the choice in any country just depends on historical accidents. Nevertheless, if you start disregarding the rule used in your country you will likely incur in very high costs.

That's a case where unconformity has no benefits and just extreme costs, in other cases, such as clothing choices, the tradeoff might be different, but you should keep in mind that when you break a rule there will be always some costs.

(Not particularly related to the post, a technical quibble.)

Past beliefs/priorities/moral judgments are not the same thing as preferences of a past self. A past self can be easily mistaken with respect to its own preferences, so even closely following past self's preferences benefits from revising its conclusions. Cached thoughts pose a problem because they don't take new arguments and evidence into account, because they constitute a fixed understanding of a goal, not because they represent a fixed goal.

It's probably best to experiment for a bit and fall into the existential crisis till you come out the other side. It seems to happen to a lot of people. If things get rough, remember that people in this circumstance tend to get better in a few years.

Transhumanist altruism - e.g. the attempt to make life extension possible for everyone - burns out when you see that most people don't want this "help". In the beginning it's not a pure self-disinterested altruism anyway. It starts with individuals who want immortality for themselves and who want to share it with other people. Eventually it dawns on them that other people are living with a completely different sense of expectations and priorities; resigned to their finitude in the here and now, or just hoping to get their personal eternity handed to them by a higher power in another reality.

It sounds like this happened to you. Your values and your ideas of what's possible make you a member of an extreme cognitive minority, but you were living as if other people share those values and ideas, or would naturally adopt them once they were exposed to them. That hasn't happened, you've woken up to the fact that something doesn't add up, and you've become more conscious of yourself. What you haven't done yet is to "theorize" your own difference from other people - i.e. develop a model of the cognitive majorities around you, and how and why you are different from them. Are you just inherently different from them, and always will be, or are your differences more the result of unusual personal circumstances?

In what you write, I don't see much interest in that last issue yet. You're still coming to terms with the possibility of living just for yourself; you're detaching from ideas in which you have been fruitlessly invested, so that you can come to know your own mind again; the last thing you want to do right now is to become abstractly preoccupied with other people again. But in time, you may want to resume your old activities but on a bigger scale, if you are willing to take the step of being someone who plants new ideas and values in other people. 99+% of the human race doesn't seek longevity; 99+% of the human race doesn't spontaneously join the campaign for longevity when it appears; but if you were to seriously shoulder the burden of, say, being the founder of a Brazilian Longevity Party, then you would find allies, supporters, and followers.

The magnitude of your success would depend partly on how well you understood the facts of political life and of life in general. You could start something like that, and still have it end up as nothing but a political sect with a few dozen members, if it was pursued wrongly. But if it was grounded in realities that are happening anyway, like the discovery and diffusion of advanced medical techniques, and the general increase in life expectancy, then it would have much greater potential. Similarly, if you were concerned not just with longevity but with singularity, Brazil is a power, it has all the ingredients to eventually create a singularity itself even if the rest of the world disappeared. There is a technical elite in your country and you could engage with them; but it would require a willingness to also engage with their outlook of worldly patriotic selfishness, rather than effective transhumanist altruism.

Seems like a fancy geeky way to say that you are having a(n early) midlife crisis. You'll get your stability back once it's over.

good just because they are old

You're thinking of Free To Optimize, which says that keeping old laws has the benefit of making the legal system more predictable, so that people know the legal consequences of their actions / decisions. A little different frrom what you were doing.

As to point three, I don't have a very good memory for my past thoughts, plans, or valuations, so my analogue of abandoning a cached-self would be deleting, deprecating, or archiving the external records I do have, like daily journals, school papers, or internet profiles. Cutting contact with friends and associates who remember things about me would also fall here, but that's a lot harder to do, practically, hedonically, and in good conscience. The argument for hiding the past is just as you say; it's refreshing, especially since I don't feel a moral duty to past selves. On the other hand, if you delete too much of your past, there are some difficulties not being able to reference old materials or accomplishments, so I'd recommend archiving and deprecating long or important works where possible. For example, sometimes I think about trying to recompile the collection of music I liked when I was younger, which I don't remember explicitly, even though I'm able to recognize individual songs when I rehear them. There's a little sense of loss not knowing what my music tastes are / were.

The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.

-- Daniel Dennet

I think it's possible that a utility-maximizing lifestyle can actually be fairly hedon-maximizing, especially if you take periodic breaks and vacations (which are optimal for achieving high energy and motivation anyway, in my experience).

I think the real thing to keep in mind re: fuzzies and utilons may not be that you should always purchase them separately. (What's wrong with a package deal?) Rather, I think it's that you should operate under some utility function that's a compromise of fuzzies and utilons, instead of aiming for just one or the other (and potentially leaving yourself open to periodic, messy willpower failures/preference reversals).

What would it be like to not have a purpose in life? When I was in high school, trying to decide what I wanted to be when I "grew up", thinking about my career was not fun. I knew I wanted to do something that I would enjoy, but my preferences didn't seem very stable--the appeal of different careers seemed to change hour to hour. I actually found refocusing on the goal of earning to give liberating. Now choosing a career meant analyzing external factors like earnings potential instead of my own unstable whims.

BTW, 80K have a bunch of blog posts on career choice and happiness:

• Should we sacrifice doing what we love to make a difference?, parts 1 and 2

• How to find a job you'll love

• Do you really know what job will make you happy?

• Don't do what you're passionate about, parts 1 and 2

Even if you have no altruistic inclinations whatsoever, though, I suspect high-paying careers are a good default because more money means more options. (Though this advice may only apply to people who are frugal; others may see their required standard of living rise with their income.)

See also: http://lesswrong.com/lw/bfy/you_only_live_once_a_reframing_of_working_towards/

Whenever this happens (and I get antsy if I go too long without it) I start thinking in terms of my future self's preferences. My past self, who made up whatever rules/habits I'm currently living by did this too, but he was farther away from my future self and thus had less data.

I like the recipe you used for unpacking your current preferences from your past commitments, based on layers of scope (personal -> impersonal) and time (now -> 3 months -> long term).

Vagabonding is a form of making your self as small as possible, so to be able to update your model of the world based on what is actually available to you now.

You're walking down a dangerous path, letting go of major parts of the pattern.

Keep in mind that the genetic differences separating us and our caveman ancestors are very minor, to judge the importance and impact of our mind-programming.

Deconstructing the past does unconstrain your present self - but is that a gain of options, or are you set aloof like a leaf in the wind? This moment's present is the next moment's past ("You have just begun reading the sentence that you have just finished reading"). What remains that will tether you to the common ground of the fabric of society that stretches and pulls the strings from the past?

If you take that project of yours seriously, there may not be an easy route back. Once you taught yourself to see the futility in your past selves' purpose, how will you unsee that?

In my experience of similar appearing shifts of person, what you are experiencing is the "instability" that is to become your new (and more) "stable" state. It will provide advantages and disadvantages and is, in my finding, a more optimal but longer term strategy for the living of life.

Remember:

1. You exist (i.e. "you think, therefore you are" - thank you Descartes)
2. Item 1. above provides at least one example of an indisputable truth that you may know. As a result, truth exists whether you know what that truth is or not.
3. Although it may appear less stable, your newer normal provides greater stability. After all a system which can be made unstable was not stable, it only maintained such an appearance.
4. Don't forget to rest and appreciate the work you have chosen for yourself. Doing so can only support your continued ability to strive further.

Regarding the concerns you have for the emerging new morality, I think you'll find well enough over time that you come full circle. There are experientially more options before you than you previously provided yourself. However, some of those are better options than the others. In the end, given the shared nature of existence your own most selfish interests will bear relationship to the greatest selfish interests of the other sentiences in said existence. There is some trickiness in that last statement but I stand by it. As you begin to come around this "full circle" what I would suggest you'll find is that you'll not only approach your previous state in a sense but that it will be supported by a greater appreciation of, awareness of, and capability in how to better obtain your goals.

Enjoy the exploration of your possible person states!

Please help me see my way around a contradiction inherent in your request. Stripping away the labels you have chosen to use, you appear to be asking for arguments in favor of an amoral lifestyle over a moral lifestyle. Almost by definition, I can't give consequentialist reasons why you should choose to let go of consequentialist reasoning. I can point out that "vagabonding" might be really fun and you could gain some life experience, or something.

If you accept the reality of happiness setpoints, it is probably already clear to you that you will probably end up just as happy no matter what you actually end up doing. You could choose to see that as a reason to go ahead and take the "moral" path. Or not. If you're actually asking which set of values are "right," well, welcome to the human condition.

I find that whenever I'm in a crisis, I almost always end up doing the thing which it was my first impulse to do. The real content of a crisis is in formulating the arguments which justify to myself and my important people that my gut feeling is the "correct" choice.

Warning about the vagabond idea: If you quit your job and stay jobless for more than, say, a month, you will probably be discriminated against when you go looking for a job in the future.

Why I think this

1. I know a person who was having difficulty getting employed and did everything they could to get a job. Nothing worked. Then, they tried re-explaining an employment gap and they were employed quickly. The person speaks English and has a degree. This person had the type of skills that are useful in various industries and had applied in a wide variety of industries. It wasn't during a time of economic trouble. Discrimination against people with an employment gap appears to me to be a widespread response among many employers and something that can happen even if the economy is fine and one has marketable skills.

2. Something that confirms this for me is that I have spoken with recruiters. The recruiters say that their clients request people with no significant gap in work history. They explained that they can't get those candidates hired because the clients don't want them and they have to make clients happy. I've seen job ads that specifically say you have to be currently employed in order to apply. It's no secret that employers consciously choose to discriminate based on an employment gap.

(The "Why I think this" section was added after the comment was down voted and people didn't seem to believe it. For me, this seems like common sense, so I didn't expect to have to explain.)

Some people who have an employment gap find it impossible to get employment no matter what they do, and employers are not going to take "I was trying out being a traveler" as a good reason for a gap. I'm not saying a month is safe, either. It's really not. It can take a month or three to find a new job anyway (depending on the amount of demand there is for what you do of course, so it could be longer...) and if you add additional time onto that because you're trying out being a vagabond, you might easily surpass the window of time where employers will consider you due to a gap in your employment history.

Also, I'm not sure what kind of job you might end up with if you haven't got an address. There are sweatshops right here in the USA, believe it or not. Some people end up there because they don't know English. Might you end up in some kind of horrible employment situation due to looking for a job with no address?

Consider this very carefully.