Open Thread: What are your important insights or aha! moments?

One day I realized that having patience and focusing on gradual improvement rather than quick fixes was necessary for deeply ingrained problems (like forms of akrasia).

Some others:

1. Taking breaks is not negotiable.

2. Maintaining social contact with someone is your responsibility, not theirs.

3. If you try to have too much control in your life, you'll become brittle and unable to handle unexpected changes.

4. "Willpower" is basically worthless. The best productivity strategy is to make productivity habitual.

   4.5. You spend the vast majority of your waking day completely unconscious, doing whatever you're habitually used to doing.

5. Adopting political labels is a negative sum game.

Not (very) applicable if you have a strong gender identity: I'd always been fairly confused as to whether I was a woman or a man, neither one really fit quite right. Five years ago I met my first person who identified as genderqueer, but generalizing from that (one) example I thought it a mere label - I didn't see how their behavior diverged substantially from their sex given gender. Last year or so, The Third Alternative, Keeping Your Identity Small, and applying being a linguistic descriptivist to my broader life came together. I'm a person, more or less human, and that's it. One can choose null (but of course, the vast majority of acquaintances won't notice...).

LW-inspired, off the top of my head, in no particular order:

1. Jealousy is conflating love with ownership (thanks, Alicorn!). Can be avoided if desired (but see 5 and 6).

2. You don't have to identify with and defend your in-group, but it's OK to do for warm fuzzies sometimes.

3. No one is a consequentialist, even if they insist they are. (See 5 and 6.)

4. The Universe does not care about you, and any examples to the contrary are likely selection bias. But it's OK to believe that sometimes (see 6).

5. Most people do not have conscious access to their real motives for behaving the way they do.

6. System 2 loses to System 1 in a direct confrontation every time. Work around the latter to internalize and achieve your conscious goals. But see 7.

7. Be very careful when messing with your System 1. It's not designed to be reversible. Unlearning is at least 10x harder than learning.

This is when I was eight or so, and it's the first aha! Moment that I remember. For the first time, I realized that = meant both sides were equal. Of course, I already knew that and paid lip service to it, but I had never really understood what it meant. In my mind, the LHS had had to be a computation of some sort, and the RHS had to be the result. I now knew that = meant that the two sides, whatever they may be, were the same thing.

It's very difficult to transmit this insight and have the receiver realize that this is a nontrivial insight. In my experience, only those who have had analogous experiences and those who teach math really get what I'm talking about.

1) You haven't learned from a mistake until your behavior actually changes in a measurable way. For too long I would think rationally about my life but was missing the important next step: action. (Meta: after this realization a while back I've been tracking 'mistakes' I make and the conclusions I can make from them and have found the exercise very useful).

2) Something more directly LW related: For most of my life I had thought we were beyond the reach of God, but not until I read Eliezer's thoughts on the matter did it really 'click' with me how far reaching and terrifying of an idea it really is. I guess what really clicked was how much the idea that 'everything will work out eventually' is leftover in my thinking from childhood religion and movies where the virtuous prevail.

3) That even the most scientific and rational practices can very easily become empty rituals.

I turned 55 the other day, and lately I've thought about my lack of an Adult Man's Skill Set (AMSS) for dealing with women.

Over the week end, for example, a cute woman in her 20's I had just met actually made eye contract with me and talked with me.

On the one hand, I enjoyed receiving that sort of attention from a young woman at my age, when in my 20's women generally wanted nothing to do with me..

But on the other hand, the experience made me uncomfortable because I felt like I had to bluff my way through it, and I kept wondering if she would pick up on the "tells," as poker players say.

Fortunately nothing bad happened, but these kinds of situations make me extremely self-conscious about my failure to develop the AMSS at the organically appropriate age.

I try to be skeptical of "ah ha moments" I have. However in one case I think it is logicsal for me to accept the "ah ha."

For many years I have done Zazen at a Temple (two hour drive ....) and at home. Being involved in budhism one hears alot about "the self is an illusion" or "ego-death." I personally kind of alieved they were just making things up. However one day me and some friends took a rather large dose of LSD in a park on a chilly fall day.

At one point I remember hearing this repetitive thumping noise for an hour or two and not being able to figure out what it was. When it finally occured to I burst out in hysterical laughter. The noise was my foot violently shaking and hititng what I was sitting on. I was of course shaking because I had been outside for about 6 hours at this point and was freezing cold, but it hadn't even occured to me that I was uncomfortable. My mental state after realizing I wa scold is hard to explain. I honestly conceptualized things as "there is a person outside who is very cold" but the fact that this person was me did not seem relevant at all. In general that there was one specific person associated to "me" stopped making sense.

Of course I am not claiming that this experience proves anything about budhism. But my previous "alief" was that it was impossible to lose one's sense of self, even short term. But since I had personally experienced this it must in fact be possible.

Upvote based only on posing an interesting question. I'd like to see more of that.

Now to answer your actual question, three examples:

• Reading anarcho-capitalistic literature I learned to look at governments in a different way, talking about a monopoly on violence owned either privately as in a monarchy or publically in a democracy and the consequences the authors draws from that. How to arrive at that viewpoint? Read about the opposing viewpoint, especially in politics and political philosophy.

• Reading Getting Things Done I suddenly realised why I like to do certain parts of my workflow the way I did, like putting all my thoughts into Evernote instead of scattering them on pieces of paper all over the place. The author says that the wholy system of organisation only makes sense if you trust it and I trusted Evernote to keep my thoughts where I put them. Also, implementing suggestions from the book helped to free up some mental space and I can think more clearly about other stuff. How to arrive at that insight? Read about other people's experiences solving the same problem or how they solved problems you did not know you have or you did not know could be optimised.

• Reading the preface to Jaynes' Probability Theory I realised that all the scattered thoughts about how thinking could go wrong are all facets of the same problem: Deviating from a general framework of probability theory and inventing ad-hoc methods with narrow proper fields of application but misusing them. How to arrive at that insight? Read about thinking in general.

There is a common thread to all these things: Read a lot. Follow the virtue of scholarship. Learn as much as possible in a field before you try to speak about it.

A last sentence: Reading is not the only way to arrive at insight, attentively watching the world around you, thinking about your past experiences, talking and listening to people, more the old than the young, are very viable ways too, and complement each other.

I wonder if Neoreaction bothers some people (David Brin, for example) because it pokes at the splinter in our minds: Neoreaction raises the possibility that people in the West have suffered from diminished lives over the past several generations because the Enlightenment Project threw out something we needed from the preceding traditional, hierarchical, patriarchal, aristocratic, tribalist, religious societies that modernity has supplanted.

I didn't realize Introspection illusion was a thing until hearing about the split-brain experiment in high school. Until then, I always assumed that when I queried my brain about its desires it always answered honestly, and that subconscious motivations were a load of crap.

Existential angst and worrying a ton about your obligation to society and so forth almost always turns out to be a projection of your worries about yourself onto society at large. You're not really worried about some abstract duty or obligation, instead you have a low opinion of your own competency/worthiness and are worried that other people will come to share that view if you're not able to measure up to some abstract standard,

You become your truest and best self when you work hard and with single-minded focus on a fulfilling, valuable project

and

Work to live, don't live to work; leisure and doing nothing "productive" can be valuable and an important element in maintaining a healthy inner life.

are both true at different times and under different circumstances and occasionally simultaneously. A "balance" between the two can be a dynamic balance.

Embarrassingly, I didn't have the "who feeds Paris" realization until last year -- well after I thought I had achieved a correct understanding of and appreciation for basic microeconomic thought.

I guess somebody has to mention this book on different kinds of insights and what amalgamates them

http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-What-Others-Dont-Remarkable-ebook/dp/B00BKRVU0G

Vigilance + Availability Bias = Fucking Yourself If you're always looking for the next problem, you'll experience a world much worse than the real one, and act more appropriately for that world, than the real world.

Jonathan Haidt's various moral modalities, and the different weightings people put on them. If you take the idea seriously, that people are relying on fundamentally different algorithmic processes for their choices, all sorts of things make sense very quickly. I apply the same idea to truth modalities, and many of the mysteries of the world dissolve.

Evolutionary Theory applied to Organizational Ecology What are the rules, who are the actors, and what are their interests? What are the different possible strategies in that ecology, which ones benefit an actor, and which ones cost an actor? The behavior of people in an org will conform to the organizational ecology, not to their preferences for behavior.

Anything worth doing is intrisically rewarding and called work.

You will always benefit from work in someway. Waiting for explicit extrenal incentives to do stuff is misguided. This is the message of "Work is it's own reward" or "Work rewards its doer". For example sometimes started to play with Blender because of learning complicates software and UI is fun. Then alter I found I had proficiency in 3D modelling and could work in the capacity of a game art employee with no additional "concession" to do work. When I was learnignthe software I thoguth I was wasting my time. When I was just happy to have the skills already learned I realised thast I would have started way later and it would have been way more painful if I postponed aquring those skills until I knew I needed them. Thus doing work tht you can do is like pciking an apple that is within reach.

people have motives for their actions and everybody does good things in their opinion

"Some people just want to watch the world burn" is an overused explanation. There can be legit reasons to object or resist the attempts of other people. it can be tempting to imagine how much more a situation would be to your liking if just one persons wouldn't do a thing they do or a detail were otherwise. However once you have identified that you are opposed to a detail of the world using addiotional emotinal energy is often counterproductive. It can seem emotionally categting to biuld enemy images. However control comes from understanding which is hard without appriciation. If you are going to truly affect another person you need to do it in their terms and not yours.

Sincerity is powerful It is worthwhile ot form a accurate unfalttering image of yourself instead of a inaccurate flatteging image. If you separate what you believe or handle form what really affects the situation anything you accomplish by believing/handling will have no (claimed) effect on reality. Being honest about being unsure or undecided is hard. Framing yourself as a ethically questionable agent or inconsistent believer can feel like losing. However it is quite easy to see that doing the opposite doesn't lead to winning. If you have legitimate reasons to believe unflattering things about yourself you have a legimate reason to refrain from beliveving the flattering thing. Sincerity isn't strickly be all, win all. If you are in a ambigious situation being an optimistic will nudge you to work into that direction. However in order to be in this boundary condition you need to have no legimate reason one way or the other. Pretending to be clueless might seem tempting but is insincere. Thus you should only allow yourself to be hero of your life only to the point that it is neccesary for you to keep waking up from the bed

This in reverse means that sincerety is to be suspended if it leads into illegimate action or inaction. If believing that the universe is less agenty than a a omnipotent active protector leads you to regard the universe as cold-blooded killer that is out to get you and emo-slit your wrists, the known inappropriateness of failure to contain blood within your body is a elgimate basis to require more stringent standards of argumentation than idle academic curiosity. A person whos beliefs are actually entangled with their actions and life in way more twisted way than a pure objective reading of english sentences would suggest places a special semantic to any line of argument. The situation is almost never in accepting a fact in place ofa silly unbased opinoion, but rather replacnig a very silly opinion with a less silly opnion. You are still responcible with and to the introduced sillyness.