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They both tend to limit my (already limited) tolerance for it and make it much harder, although the depression makes it harder in general while the anxiety only makes it harder in higher-stakes situations, such as at work with a boss.
Your post is another interesting perspective I haven't delved into as much as I'd like. It reminds me of the parts work some of my friends are fond of - taking something negative in one's brain and asking, "but how is this useful? What is it doing for me? What is this piece of me trying to protect me from?" and then running with the result.
I'll have to give it more thought.
Fixed, thanks.
There's a joke in here about getting negatives wrong when depressed...
You're welcome! I'm glad it was helpful.
I also just looked up monotropism - I haven't run across the term before - and was like, yeah, that seems about right for me.
Interesting.
Call it...unintentionally intentional? It makes sense to me that the mechanisms between them are related in some sort of Unified Field Theorem of the Mind sort of way.
I also have mental metaphors involving thermal mass and emotions...
Huh.
As a fellow procrastinator, I'm right there with you. I've found, for instance, that downers (alcohol, barbiturates, etc.) can allow me to be productive if anxiety is the cause of the procrastination, but if it's depression than the downers don't help at all.
Sure - I'm always interested in hearing other perspectives.
What's your secret?
Is it yoga?
(I bet it's yoga.)
Not being very sad all the time is good for you, 10/10 recommend.
Words to live by, right there.
I think everyone has some experience with anxiety and depression; the alternative is literally ataraxia. The distinctions come with things like, "is it transitory or chronic?" and "is it ruining your life?" I'm glad you're not in that state anymore, though.
With regards to anxiety, I've had thoughts recently along the same track; maybe I'll write them up at some point. It's almost a case of "the dose makes the poison" - some amount of anxiety is natural and can motivate you, but too much and it prevents you from doing anything.
That's a fascinating description of your own state, and I hope you're working through it with your own resources.
For the post I was focusing more on a behaviorist approach to depression and anxiety, explaining what the resulting state/actions were by metaphor of how it felt internally, but I do also get the low mood and the feeling that everything is terrible.
I think I also get the 'lose the ability to perceive gradations of color' thing, which I think Scott's talked about before.
(I also had a nihilistic phase I grew out of. There's only so much 'depressed French people complaining' I can take!)
Thanks for sharing! I definitely like Scott's take on depression being a trapped prior.
When I'm depressed, sometimes a friend will make me go do stuff anyway and it usually makes me feel better, although I never expect it to make me feel better. Even when I know that it will.
Brains are weird.
Thanks Anders! That means a lot, I really appreciate it.
Thankfully I've seen my psychiatrist and I've switched to the next medication, which is doing a better job. I'm also looking into getting Ketamine treatment; I'll probably make a post about how that goes.
You may!
Zoloft managed the depression but not the anxiety, and Lexapro the anxiety but not the depression.
For what it's worth, I have zero expectation that anyone else would share my exact response to the medications; both have helped plenty of people in the past.
I think this post highlights some of the difficulties in transmitting information between people - particularly the case of trying to transmit complex thoughts via short aphorisms.
I think the comments provided a wealth of feedback as to the various edge cases that can occur in such a transmission, but the broad strokes of the post remain accurate: understanding compressed wisdom can't really be done without the life experience that the wisdom tried to compress to begin with.
If I was to rewrite the post, I'l likely emphasize the takeaway that, when giving advice or attempting to transmit such wisdom, the point is that you have to take the time to convey the entirety of the context of what you're saying, unless you're just reminding someone of something they already know. "Don't zip your wisdom, just transfer the whole thing" might be a better title than "wisdom cannot be unzipped", for the practical application of the lesson.
I do like - and intend to continue - inserting pieces of related knowledge into posts, in the way that this post teaches a little about what compression is in the course of conveying its message. I think that benefits the discourse, and by assuming a low level of shared knowledge, makes the post friendlier to newcomers and beginners.
I don't see this as a conscious choice people make to not solve the problems the institution they're a part of is supposed to address. I agree that many of the individuals within the institution are working in good faith and genuinely care.
The issue is that the incentives of the people are not the same as the incentives of the institution itself, which are to grow and attract more status and money, which happens when the problem is seen as harder and more important.
Yes, Climate Change is obviously not solvable by a few activists, but there's a finite amount of time/energy/money in the world, and it's not clear to me at all that it's optimally distributed between cause areas. More time/energy/money going into solving climate change means less going elsewhere.
I use homelessness as an example, but I believe the logic generalizes. You're right that in many cases, the incentives facing an institution aren't powerful enough to matter, or the people involved could/would just go do other things.
But there are also a lot of cases (see: almost all nonprofits) where people's jobs depend on the existence and salience of the problem, in which case I think the incentives do start to matter.
While I haven't looked at the data lately, there are a lot of institutions in the US, as I use the term. Surely of the many social ills they address there are some that solvable/solved?
While I used ending homelessness as an example, the salience of an issue matters too. Climate change organizations receive lots of funding because their cause is seen as an important priority. If that changes, their funding dries up. So they have an incentive on the margin to overemphasize the importance of their associated problem - they benefit from the problem, while generally not solving it. Hence, commensalism.
Thanks! I've been pointed to them by others as well; it's a good example of an institution surviving the death of their problem.
I do think that the case underlines how important problems are for institutions, in a sort-of "exception that proves the rule" kind of way.
They would need another problem to pivot to.
Also, I suspect that such a pivot on an institutional scale is difficult to pull off. People often prioritize altruistic work because they're passionate about a specific cause - maybe they were homeless in the past, or they were a cancer survivor, etc. That wouldn't necessarily translate.
This was well thought-out, thank you.
You're right about redefining the word/problem. I've been referring to this as "The Pivot" in my head.
It would still be better if we found a way to form institutions such that, once they had solved a problem, their resources were efficiently allocated to the solution of the next-most-pressing problem.
Wait until you discover the world of Worm fanfiction (*cue evil laughter*).
Very possible.
I do suspect, though, that your friends at least have an internal process of analysis going even if they're not working. (I could of course be wrong.)
Well said.
Quite true, and I considered being more specific about the kinds of relationships I was talking about.
For the sake of brevity I omitted such relationships.
What I did try to emphasize was that a relationship doesn't have to be equal to be reciprocal. So long as each party is getting what they need out of it, it usually counts. In a parent/child relationship, for instance, the parent is/should be getting something valuable out of the relationship, even though that something isn't reciprocity or emotional support.
As you say, the reward might be seeing your junior/student/child grow up and succeed.
I understand what you're saying. I wasn't familiar with the exact definitions of the political theory you cite.
I do think that it's reasonable to be bound by laws made before one was born, but only to a certain extent. Society changes over time, and over a long enough period of time I would argue - philosophically - that the society that passed the law is no longer the society I was born into. (And yet the law is still binding, because the law doesn't have an expiration date.)
That being said, thanks for the reply, and I appreciate the feedback!
Fair, and I forgot about the term stuck prior (I think I've heard "trapped prior" before). Thanks!
Great question.
You've got the basics - eat right, workout, sleep, etc., but just saying that isn't much help.
I've gotten a great deal out of habit chaining/trigger-action planning when used consistently; basically you create chains of actions that feed into one another so once you've started the chain, it takes no extra willpower to just keep following it to its conclusion.
For instance:
Wake up -> make breakfast -> get pills -> turn on sunlamp -> eat
is one, that makes sure I take my medication, eat breakfast, and get some light everyday (the latter is especially important in the winter).
Another is:
Meditate -> Workout -> Shower
which, while I mix up both the kinds of meditation and the kinds of workout, ensures all three get done, roughly every other day.
Do it consistently, and eventually you can just do them on autopilot. You don't really forget anything and somehow, not doing them becomes the unnatural state.
Hope that helps!
A good point, and I agree. Part of my thinking on this topic, and the desire to write on it, was sparked by Scott and others' debate on what mental illness and sanity really are (how much of it is social, how much biological, etc.).
Is there a term for a non-updateable belief?
I like the concept, although I wonder if you run into some kind of contradiction if you follow it all the way to the extremes. Is the belief that "all beliefs should be updateable" itself updateable?
I would 100% bring in European or otherwise non-English speaking transit experts to completely overhaul US public transportation. The US is particularly bad at this, and the expertise does exist in other places.
Agreed - measuring the magnitude of ongoing effects in property damage is very vulnerable to the rising amount and value of property.
And you have kabbalistically reminded me to start reading Worm.
My master plan has suceeded!
I've thought about an approach to this I call meta-regulation: regulations on what kind of regulations can be passed.
One of my favorite ideas is to limit the number of total regulations a given agency can set (or perhaps the total wordcount of its regulations, just to punish any gaming of this meta-regulation) to half of whatever it currently is. That way, once regulations are reduced to their newly declared peak, whenever regulators want to add a new regulation, they are forced to get rid of an existing one.
Hence they will be forced to do some form of cost-benefit analysis on the regulations they keep.
I've personally gotten a lot out of viewing myself as a 4D worm (a 3-Dimensional being stretched out across the fourth dimension of Time can be thought of as a sort of 4D worm), when I remember to do so.
A concrete benefit is that it renders procrastination moot - the task, if completed at all, is in the worm somewhere, so the specific location in time it finds itself is not particularly important. Which means it might as well be now.
There's also an emotional component - if I think of myself as some kind of weighted average of myself in the moment, I can be destabilized by emotion or trauma or just life throwing crap at me. If I think of myself as the average of the entire 4D worm, on the other hand, that's far harder to destabilize.
Your conception of every day being a microcosm of one's life is another way of looking at the same concept, where individual slices of the worm can be thought of as basically an MRI image of the life in question. Brushing one's teeth in each slice equates to healthy teeth for the entirety of the worm, and so on. Since we live in the individual slices, this is useful to think about, as we're really trying to shape the entire worm.
Of all of these, I found 8 most useful.
I quite like this.
Perhaps a better way to express my thoughts would have been "What goal do the structures of society create optimization pressure for, when it comes to childhood?" I believe that different societal structures create optimization pressures for different visions of what childhood is like, and this can confuse conversations about those structures.
This was very well said, and I'd be interested in reading a post fleshing more of it out.
I agree to some extent with what you're saying - but in today's society, (at least in the U.S. and, to my understanding, many parts of East Asia) children are subjected to optimization pressures from colleges and other selective institutions. I think there's a lack in clarity of thought in society at large about the effect this has on children, and more importantly, what childhood ought to be.
To your point, less optimization pressure on children does not seem to result in less achievement in adulthood - so perhaps that's the direction we ought to be aiming for?
Nostalgia can be a funny thing. I've been nostalgic for experiences that I would in no way want to repeat. Sometimes things are better as memories than they are to live through.
Thank you, this was very kind.
I think it's great that you did this and posted your results. I'd be super interested in learning more about what effect the Neuro is actually having, and why different people have such different experiences.
I think this functions well as an introduction to Charter Cities. It doesn't grapple with any of the real-world difficulties, but it shouldn't need to as an introduction.
It might be beneficial to mention the benefits of agglomeration effects as a justification of why cities are so often the engines of economic growth, and another point in favor of Charter Cities as opposed to Charter Villages, Charter Towns, or Charter Countries.
Broadly speaking, I'm in favor of defining Rationality as systematized winning.
To become a better rationalist, you have to have something to win (or something to protect).
So you need a goal that isn't directly "become a better rationalist". This goal could be to learn a new skill, accomplish some simple task, or literally anything else.
Some suggestions:
- Learn a Skill (Chess, Math, Foreign Language, Juggling)
- Dealing with Uncertainty (start using a prediction market, play poker for real money)
- Study the World (Pick a topic (Housing, Nutrition, anything), exhaustively research it, write up your results and post them)
- Optimize your Life (Research sleep habits, diet/exercise, etc., then apply results to your own life to improve it)
Attempt to complete the goal, using what you've learned. Take notes. Reflect. Get better. Iterate.
Remember, the goal is to cut the enemy; the Art is not to be studied solely in isolation.
2020 - and the pandemic in general - seems to have been a bit of a watershed moment for figuring out certain things about human nature and society in general for me as well.
I also like your characterization of post-apocalyptic fantasy as getting all the benefits of a modern technical civilization with none of the people-driven drawbacks.
Agreed.
While the zombie apocalypse is popular, I'd say an asteroid strike/supervolcano/other no-fault apocalypses convey a similar sense of relief.
That being said, I do strongly agree with the "heroic fantasy" angle.
I don't agree with your thesis about the CAUSE of such fantasies being pleasant.
I'm not sure I'd characterize the relief as pleasant, at least not in a positive sense. It's a removal of bad things (stressors), not an addition of good things. The cause of said fantasies is a desire to avoid feeling one's current burdens, by imagining a situation in which they don't exist.
I broadly agree that we're biased towards the past and against the future, although I think a large part of the latter is that we don't like the uncertainty involved in it.
While the AI debate is well beyond the scope of this post, I will say that I would expect the future to continue getting weirder the more non-human processing capability exists, and I personally don't expect this weirdness to be survivable past a certain threshold.
I've had similar experiences. It seems odd, but sometimes a crash can seem like a better option than takin g a test or attending an unpleasant family dinner.
It isn't, but the thought can be tempting.
What are some of the real-world consequences to this?
Will China ever admit it? I honestly don't expect the CCP to ever cop to this.
If so, what could the response be? I don't expect any kind of apology or mea culpa, much less any form of reparation.
I don't even expect gain of function research to stop.
Sure there are other environmental problems, but my experience of the main concern of modern environmentalists is climate change, largely because it's seen as apocalyptic in scope and thus the most deserving of concern.
As for deaths resulting from fossil fuel pollution, I suspect Epstein's response would be that we should be evaluating fossil fuel use in its full context. How many lives were saved/improved by access to the energy generated? How many people were lifted and kept out of poverty?
The largest effect in the article is also found in East Asia, which deploys large amounts of coal.
I think Epstein would prioritize lifting people out of energy poverty, at which point they would have the slack and the wealth to get to work on pollution, following a similar trajectory as we did in the US.