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I think the first time I encountered this post I had some kind of ~distaste for, idk, the idea that my beliefs and my aesthetics need have anything to do with each other? Maybe something about, protecting my right to like things aesthetically for arbitrary reasons without feeling like they need to fit into my broader value system in some coherent way, and/or to believe things without worrying about their aesthetics? whereas now I guess my... aesthetics, in this post's frame... have evolved to... idk, be more okay integrating these things with each other? having a more expansive and higher-uncertainty set of values/beliefs/aesthetics? all these words are very uncertain but this is interesting to encounter
A more concrete thought I have is: I've noticed that my social environments seem to kind of organically over time shape my worldviews in a way that I sometimes find kind of meta-epistemically disconcerting because it makes me feel like what I believe is more determined by who I'm around than by what's true. I think this is a pretty fair reaction for me to have, but also, reading this post now makes me think that actually part of it is that being around people who find a given thing beautiful causes me to learn how to find that thing beautiful too? And that's not a bad thing, I think; at least as long as I don't forget how to find other things beautiful like I used to, and perhaps periodically explore how I might find yet other, more foreign things beautiful, and don't start to believe beauty is quite the same thing as truth.
I think, for me, memory is not necessary for observation, but it is necessary for that observation to... go anywhere, become part of my overall world model, interact with other observations, become something I know?
and words help me stick a thing in my memory, because my memory for words is much better than my memory for e.g. visuals.
I guess that means the enduring world maps I carry around in my head are largely made of words, which lowers their fidelity compared to if I could carry around full visual data? But heightens their fidelity compared to when I don't convert my observations into words - in that case they kind of dissolve into a vague cloud
...oh but my memory/models/maps about music are not much mediated by words, I think, because my music memory is no worse than my verbal memory. are my music maps better than my everything-else maps? not sure maybe!
for some reason these crows made me laugh uncontrollably
This is great, thank you.
I didn't quite understand how "Beware ratchet effects" fits into/connects with the rest of the section that it's in - could you spell that out a bit? Also I'm curious if there are concrete examples of that happening that you know about & can share, though ofc very reasonable if not.
oh yeah my dispute isn't "the character in the song isn't talking about building AI" but "the song is not a call to accelerate building AI"
as Solstice creative lead I neither support nor oppose tearing apart the sun for raw materials
Take Great Transhumanist Future. It has "a coder" dismantling the sun "in another twenty years with some big old computer." This is a call to accelerate AI development, and use it for extremely transformative actions.
Super disagree with this! Neither I nor (I have not checked but am pretty certain) the author of the text wants to advocate that! (Indeed I somewhat actively tried to avoid having stuff in my program encourage this! You could argue that even though I tried to do this I did not succeed, but I think the fact that you seem to be reading ~motivations into authors' choices that aren't actually there is a sign that something in your analysis is off.) I think it's pretty standard that having a fictional character espouse an idea does not mean the author espouses it.
In the case of this song I did actually consider changing "you and I will flourish in the great transhumanist future" to "you and I MAY flourish in the great transhumanist future" to highlight the uncertainty, but I didn't want to make changes against the author's will, and Alicorn preferred to keep the "will" there because the rest of the song is written in the indicative mood. And, as I said before, Solstice is a crowdsourced endeavor and I am not willing to only include works where I do not have the slightest disagreement.
If the main problem with changing the songs is that many people in this community want to sing about AI accelerationism and want the songs to be anti-religious, then I stand by my criticisms
hmm, I want to be able to sing songs that express an important thing even if one can possibly read them in a way that also implies some things I disagree with
If the main problem with changing the songs is in making them scan and rhyme, then I can probably just pay that cost.
you are extremely welcome to suggest new versions of things!
but a lot of the cost is distributed and/or necessarily borne by the organizers. changing lines in a song that's sung at Solstice every year is a Big Deal and it is simply not possible to do this in a way that does not cause discourse and strife
(I guess arguably we managed the "threats and trials" line in TWTR without much discourse or strife but I think the framing did a lot there and I explicitly didn't frame it as a permanent change to the song, and also it was a pretty minor change)
re point 1 - maybe? unsure
[edit: one issue is that some irregularities will in fact be correlated across takes and STILL shouldn't be written down - like, sometimes a song will slow down gradually over the course of a couple measures, and the way to deal with that is to write the notes as though no slowdown is happening and then write "rit." (means "slow down") over the staff, NOT to write gradually longer notes; this might be tunable post facto but I think that itself would take human (or really good AI) judgment that's not necessarily much easier than just transcribing it manually to start]
re point 2 - the thing is you'd get a really irregular-looking hard to read thing that nobody could sightread. (actually this is already somewhat true for a lot of folk-style songs that sound intuitive but look really confusing when written down)
As someone who likes transcribing songs,
1) I endorse the above
2) if you ask me to transcribe a song I will often say yes (if it's not very frequent) (it costs time but not that much cognitive work for me so I experience reasonable amounts of this as fun)
One thing that makes this hard to automate is human imprecision in generating a recording, espeically with rhythm: notes encode frequencies but also timings and durations, and humans performing a song will never get those things exactly precise (nor should they - good performance tends to involve being a little free with rhythms in ways that shouldn't be directly reflected in the sheet music), so any automatic transcriber will get silly-looking slightly off rhythms that still need judgment to adjust.
Oh, also I wanted to comment on the section of your other post where you mention that Solstice contained a number of what felt like barbs at religion.
This is a fairly valid complaint, I think. I am sorry you felt barbed. I agree that barbs at the outgroup are not a great Solstice strategy; I specifically aimed to keep conflict-theoretic content out of my program (and edited e.g. some of the Underrated Reasons To Be Thankful accordingly). I think these were less salient to me for basically cultural and positional reasons, and it makes sense they were much more salient to you.
It's also the case that there's not much I would do differently even knowing in advance that someone would have this reaction, because (a) I disagree with some of the examples, (b) nearly all of the examples are in songs, written by people other than me, and already known and beloved within the community, and as such very difficult to change.
(The one example that's not from a song I think you may have misheard - what I said there was "this next song started as a sort of, intra-religious rebuttal against overly literalist interpretations of the Bible", which is not anti-religious.)
I guess I also draw a distinction between rejecting some religious practices and being mean to religious people.
The Brighter Than Today verse is very much a thing I wouldn't write that way myself but will by no means change because everybody is extremely attached to it. (I've heard a very similar complaint about it from a very secular friend, and I think you and she are basically right but I don't disagree with the song strongly enough to refuse to sing it as is.)
But like I do think there is pretty substantial validity to your feeling here anyway, especially given that it is not uncommon for rationalists to be much more antitheist and anti-religious-people than this. Sorry about that.
[note: I initially read this post like a month ago, forgot to comment, have not reread now before commenting]
Thanks for writing this, as the creative lead I really like seeing what people think!
I like your geological review of Song Of The Artesian Water. (I also like your factual nitpick of Bold Orion, elsewhere.)
I want to somewhat disagree with some of your overall approach to the content of Solstice, largely exemplified here:
There is a phenomenon in comparative theology where people are much more sensitive to whether the theology is correct in a talk than in a song. If you say a controversial doctrine in a talk, people might get upset, come up and argue with you afterwards, or even start attending a different congregation. If you put the same doctrine in a song, people are more likely to smile and sing along. People know this, and sometimes write extremely partisan songs that take advantage of the phenomenon. 'Know This That Every Soul Is Free' comes to mind as an example. The appropriate response is to take the content of songs as seriously as the content of talks. Their words probably do reflect the author's intent.
This song is the most explicit statement of the future that the rationalist community hopes to build.
A thing about Solstice is that while there is a creative lead who curates and sometimes edits the content, plots the thematic arc, and writes new content to connect the dots and lay out the overall ~philosophy and claims of the program (which might be different year to year!), the content is really quite crowdsourced and represents a patchwork of beliefs and ideals that all point in somewhat the same direction but not exactly the same direction.
As I said at the start - it's not a liturgy, it's a reflection. (A series of reflections, rather.)
Even though I chose every piece in the program, edited some of the song lyrics, and had creative input into the speeches, I would say the only pieces in the program that I agree with fully with no reservations are the speeches/interludes I wrote myself. (Maybe not even those depending how strict you get with "no reservations" - there are any number of clarifications I could add that would slightly improve the accuracy of my content but make the program interminably long and boring. (I spent a lot of editing time cutting wordcount.))
With speeches other people wrote for the program, I made a lot of suggestions; the authors took some of my suggestions and not others. This is as it should be! A lot of the point of having community members get up and speak their own words is so that they can speak from the heart, from what they know and believe, from their own experiences in the world. Of course I'm not going to choose a speaker who wants to talk about something antithetical or just orthogonal to my Solstice concept - but neither do I expect anyone to align 100% with all of my beliefs and priorities, and this is fine and good.
With songs it's even worse. Songs have to rhyme and scan. This trades off against optimizing your meaning with anywhere near as much precision as you can in prose. Obviously this doesn't mean you can throw out the whole project of having your words mean things you endorse! But you probably won't be able to chisel your meaning as finely; you have to accept some degree of poetic license and/or being merely directionally correct.
One example that stuck in my mind is that - admittedly in a footnote to your other post - you said:
The most doomy statement I recall implied that there was a proof that alignment would fail. The speaker expressed hope that there might be a subtle flaw in that proof, much like there was a subtle flaw in Kelvin's argument that manned powered flight would not work."
This refers to these lines in I Have Seen The Tops Of Clouds:
This isn't a thing that our past selves expected -
Lord Kelvin assured us that steel cannot fly;
His mistake was quite subtle, and all we need hope for
Is similar errors in proofs we'll all die.
I don't know if Dan Speyer (who wrote these lines) believes it is literally true that there is a literal proof we'll all die. I chose this song and wrote new music for it because I felt strongly that the song said an important thing that I wanted in my program, and I certainly don't literally believe this. I think this is Close Enough to things I do believe that I don't feel it's out of place in my program. (And there are other parts of the song that I am much more closely aligned with and which are the main reasons I wanted to include it.)
Editing songs is quite costly. Firstly in time and effort (which are at an extreme premium during Solstice prep, it's SO much work) - making things rhyme and scan is no small task. But also, many Solstice songs are passed along from Solstice to Solstice with the expectation that, over time, people will learn them and sing them from memory. (This expectation is very much a reality with a lot of Solstice songs at this point.) Violating people's expectations about a song they already know is a pretty significant cost actually - not insurmountable, and we do edit songs sometimes, but not at all trivial.
(I made a tiny change in What A Wonderful World - from "they'll learn much more than I'll ever know" to "they MAY learn much more than I'll ever know" - and I got a LOT of feedback about that!)
Not to mention that you'll never get all rationalists to agree on what the One Truest Possible Form Of The Song With No Errors Or Wrong Emphases Or Unwanted Implications is, and we don't have a central authority to dictate that, which is good. (Another, related, part of your approach I disagreed with is the note that maybe Gretta shouldn't be sharing wisdom on a problem she hasn't fully solved for herself. I don't think anyone has fully solved the problem of grief and fear for themself, and I don't think anyone ought to go around claiming they have. We're all just people trying to figure out the world and sharing our little bits of hard-won wisdom with each other, trying to piece together a patchwork model of the world and how to live in it.)
With Great Transhumanist Future, I very specifically tried to frame the song as one possible vision of a bright future, rather than the one true thing we're all aiming at. This is very much a case where I endorse the song as part of a pluralistic mosaic of visions, and agree with many parts of it, but don't necessarily see every thing it yearns for as a thing I myself want in my future, and absolutely don't want to claim anyone else must. But I think the rich detail of a specific vision is far more interesting and motivating (including for noticing where one might disagree!) than a sanded-down universal vision that only contains what everyone agrees on.
It's fair that there's only so much framing can do, though, and like, it makes a lot of sense to me that given that you feel in general only very partially value- and goal-aligned with rationalists, you will also feel pretty unaligned with a lot of the stuff in Solstice and largely with the arc overall. This is very valid, and I appreciate you sharing this perspective! I just wanted to note that I think you might be interpreting the program in a significantly more narrow and prescriptive way than it was intended.
I notice that you have a lot of specific examples of bad answers but no specific examples of good answers - are good answers just obviously good, or are ~all answers not specifically called out as bad answers generally good, or something else? Would be curious to see some examples of good answers.
Some lyric change ideas tossed around in a brainstorming session in the choir Discord:
- fjords and empires and all
- glaciers, sovereigns and all
- states and seas and stones and all
- seas and sovereigns and all
- seas and pyramids and all
You don't necessarily have to have every individual person showing up every week, though, just often enough that the thing happens in aggregate. Choir manages weekly during concert season and biweekly the rest of the time! D&D groups often manage weekly. It's still hard but it's not, like, completely obviously impossible like "every person shows up every week".
I think in addition to the "specific individual people I've personally hurt" case, there's the case of people (or animals) who were probably hurt structurally downstream of choices I've made (e.g. animals hurt by my consuming animal products, or perhaps, like, people in coerced labor situations who made products I bought, or something), or possibly also people I chose not to help (e.g. homeless people who asked me for money I didn't give them)? I think in these cases (but also some ~interpersonal-conflict-type cases) I have a kind of conflicting mix of (a) an urge towards compassion (b) something like a block on compassion, a flinching away from letting myself feel it (c) sometimes something like anger for ~putting me in a situation where I feel this way?
I think in these situations one case for prioritizing & making space for compassion on purpose is that in fact it's often already there but I am fighting it and tying myself up in painful and useless internal conflict, whereas if I can find a stance where I am allowing myself to feel it and still make tradeoffs about it, I do not get stuck in this way. But it can be hard given the ~block on thinking about it.
Whereas I guess in the Hitler case (or, personally my default example of person-who-I-find-it-unusually-easy-to-hate is Stalin) my default stance doesn't have all that much compassion in it so rather than removing a block I have to cultivate the compassion in the first place? But if I'm going ahead and thinking about it there's not necessarily the same kind of mental block involved. So I guess it's harder in some ways, easier in others.
Here it is!
This was so adorable I showed it to all my housemates and we read the book aloud together.
(Note for any future Solstice historians that this is not the full program! Also any future Solstice historians should bug me to put the program up on https://secularsolstice.github.io/ if I have not yet done this by January or so.)
A cool thing about the amount of critical mass we have in Berkeley is that we can do things like have a rationalist choir! And more generally a rationalist culture, things like "songs everyone knows and will sing along with if I have a singing night", and a large set of people to find friendships and relationships in if one is picky, etc. It does have the drawback that it's easy to get stuck in a local optimum of only hanging out with rationalists, which is suboptimal in some ways. But the benefits are also pretty substantial imo.
What does "somatically aware" mean here?
I think there's also a constructive kind of "not feeling totally safe" where you know that the future is unknown and you could lose the things you have and it is worth both putting in some effort to make that less likely and to cherish and enjoy what you have now. But yeah, it shouldn't be a high-alert state, and I'm not really sure how to better describe the thing that it is instead.
I have not read all the words in this comment section, let alone in all the linked posts, let alone in their comments sections, but/and - it seems to me like there's something wrong with a process that generates SO MANY WORDS from SO MANY PEOPLE and takes up SO MUCH PERSON-TIME for what is essentially two people not getting along. I get that an individual social conflict can be a microcosm of important broader dynamics, and I suspect that Duncan and/or Said might find my "not getting along" summary trivializing, which may even be true, as noted I haven't read all the words - just, still, is this really the best thing for everyone involved to be doing with their time?
Interesting, I was thinking of that as basically in the same category as "persistent insistent frames"!
There's also some kind of thing about "when is it okay to just have a frame and not particularly try to make space for other frames, and when isn't it". I think "in your own blog post" is probably a place where it's basically fine to just have/present your own frame (ditto for, like, a song); in contrast to a conversation with another person where it's supposed to be a collaborative thing and instead one person kinda sets the frame. Though I guess there are sometimes blog posts that strike me as excessively stuck in one frame and/or exert pressure to fall in line with that frame - just, the threshold for that is maybe higher than for behavior in conversations.
This post is a weird experience. It makes mostly reasonable claims but it's aggressively objectifying-male-gaze-y in a really unpleasant way and I strongly feel that content with that property should not be on LW without at minimum content warnings to that effect (which in this case would, uh, need to come before the title somehow) but preferably at all.
(Trying to say more about that intuition:
- it feels like it assumes the audience will be male (and having LW contain posts that are assumed-male-audience feels quite Unwelcoming (this word is overused but I think this is centrally what it's for))
- it feels like it sticks the reader straight into an objectifying frame without warning; I think warning/consent to engage with this frame is somewhat necessary here)
I think this problem might be largely due to automatic crossposting? I think it's, like, okay for blogs with these properties to exist in the world (though I don't want to read them) and I expect the blog itself provides enough "content warning" through context. But pulling the post onto LW by default seems bad.
I think ozy has written posts I've liked where they said a lot of similar stuff in a less intensely annoying way.
heh, basically all of the things you note as problems are things that make me actively enjoy the song more! I find the enjambment & mild irregularities & unexpected rhymes clever and fun. agree they add complexity but also that it's okay for this song to be a bit complex (though I'm somewhat biased towards cooler-and-more-complex things since I'm a choir-type person)
I think relentlessness can also be a bad way to learn childrearing, if the child takes more spoons than you've got and you start doing really bad at it and end up abusing or neglecting your child or yourself.
Yeah I think this is somewhat implied and I certainly don't take you to be saying the opposite of it, though I think it would be useful to state this more explicitly as well.
(But also I think how deterring a punishment people find this varies by person; there's definitely situations where I think it would be better to just do the rude thing but this is extremely hard to do because that punishment feels Very Bad.)
I like this. Also I think this is a "some people need diametrically opposite advice from other people" thing - some people need to be shown that "this is rude" is a valid kind of judgment to make, other people need to be shown that it's okay and good to do rude things sometimes (which is also true imo). (I think I'm natively more in the second group.)
Ahhh I see, I missed that it was 8pm-8pm, not midnight to midnight, thanks.
Wait, is it down? I can see the front page fine without using any workarounds
Yeah, I think the reason sexual abuse is wrong is because it has an unacceptably high risk of traumatizing someone, not because it always in all cases does. (Sort of like drunk driving.)
I think this is just one particular subcase of "strong urges are hard not to follow" (other examples: cravings for food one knows is long-term unhealthy; some instances of procrastination (choosing a short-term fun activity over a long-term beneficial one when you don't endorse that); sexual arousal (separate from romantic feelings); being tired/sleepy when you endorse doing stuff that requires overriding that). It certainly is a notable subcase of that, though. I've sometimes described having crushes as having my utility function hijacked (though in a way I usually endorse - I tend to be pretty aligned across versions of myself on this axis).
I do think that if I did this my responses would be more biased than yours because I would not be willing to send the survey to all the people I have contact info for, in part due to concerns kind of like this. But even biased data would still be interesting and useful, probably.
I'm now tempted to run such a survey of my own...
Copying over some thoughts from a text conversation I had about this post, since that’s easier than writing them up properly. Adding section headers for readability; utterances not marked “[friend]: “ are mine.
-------------------
0. beginning
[friend]: I like this! In particular I like the concept that it's reasonable to have beliefs that you can't prove on request, because the internet often assumes it's not
[friend]: (but also yeah, it's very important to note that if you have those then you shouldn't expect other people to take them on faith)
yeahhh
I sort of think the second thing is more important in discourses I'm in
or like
1. arguments which don’t acknowledge they’re about private beliefs
…I think in some disagreements there's a lack of acknowledgement that the kinds of arguments being made are fundamentally not a kind of thing that can convince people in the absence of direct personal experience replicating those arguments?
that these are private-belief kinds of justifications masquerading as public-belief ones
and that it doesn't make sense to have an argument about it where you think people disagreeing with you are doing something wrong
[friend]: yeah, absolutely
[friend]: I think which issue you run into more depends on specific bubbles
and it makes more sense to mutually acknowledge this
2. terminology request
...this makes me want terms for "private-belief kinds of justifications" vs. "public-belief kinds of justifications"
3. how common are truly public beliefs
also it kind of makes me wonder how common truly public beliefs really are
I kind of think it's very common for beliefs to rest in part on personal experience that's not super replicable or transferable by argument
even if the "personal experience" is like, reading papers in which X kind of thing repeatedly turns out to be true, or like, a doctor or nurse seeing a lot of patients who present a certain way and learning to have doomy feelings about some combinations of symptoms
(thinking in part here about some things [nurse friend] has said about her experience, re: the second thing)
4. when to rely on others’ private beliefs; converting private beliefs to ~public ones by demonstrating calibration
which is also now making me think of emergency situations and when you should act on someone else's private belief they can't fully justify to you
I guess if you have reason to think they're in general well calibrated then that's justified
though it's still much iffier than coming to agree with a legible argument
also possibly people can convert some kinds of private beliefs into ~public ones by demonstrating being well calibrated?
5. how common are truly public beliefs, part 2
[friend]: I think there's a fair amount of truly public beliefs, where I know something mostly because I looked it up
[friend]: or I guess even more cases where I kind-of-knew something because of illegible cultural osmosis but when I wanted to tell someone about it I looked it up and it turned out to be an easy wikipedia-findable fact
[friend]: also one can hope that if doctors/nurses see a lot of patients who present a certain way and this turns out to be a consistent sign of a specific problem, at some point someone will write this up and make it legible-ish
6. how useful are public vs. private beliefs
[friend]: ... although there's also the problem where you can make something a kind of public-belief by e.g. pointing to a paper about it, but then it turns out that people who know more about it than you have private-beliefs that actually most of the papers in that field are wrong, and this can get really complicated
[friend]: because we have a vague feeling that public-beliefs are more correct, but they aren't always
This reminds me strongly of the concept of Radical Acceptance, which comes from Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and which I agree is often a necessary part of seeing and engaging with reality as it is. (Perhaps, more specifically, grieving as described here is an example of a way to achieve radical acceptance?)
This reads as a rewrite of (some parts of?) the punch bug post (which I didn't like at the time) with several years' more wisdom. I really appreciate the careful precise delineation of the exact things you do and don't mean; I think this works very well here.
Sometimes kind of! Though I wouldn't say it's "bogus" for me exactly, just that there tends to be a tradeoff between time spent planning/reflecting vs. time spent taking concrete actions, and I'm somewhat prone to a bias in favor of the former - but I do think most of the time when I do this kind of thinking I do find it useful, it just isn't always the most useful thing I could be doing.
Also sometimes the stuff on my mind that I feel I Must think about is not actually related to the stuff I'm trying to concretely make progress on, but is separately useful to think about. Here too I don't always think this type of reflection is the most useful thing for me to do right then, but it's sometimes hard not to.
Hmm, I agree that the thing you describe is a problem, and I agree with some of your diagnosis, but I think your diagnosis focuses too much on a divide between different Kinds Of People, without naming the Kinds Of People explicitly but kind of sounding (especially in the comments) like a lot of what you're talking about is a difference in how much Rationality Skill people have, which I think is not the right distinction? Like I think I am neither a hyper-analytic programmer (certainly not a programmer) nor any kind of particularly Advanced rationalist, and I think I am not particularly susceptible to this particular problem (I'm certainly susceptible to other problems, just not this one, I think). I think it's more that people doing the salvage epistemology thing can kind of provide cover for people doing a different thing where they actually respect and believe the woo traditions they're investigating, and especially a lack of clear signposting beliefs makes this hard to navigate.
Sometimes I'll be distracted by a thought or feeling or event and feel like I can't move forward with whatever I was doing until I sit down and process it (usually in writing, often in a small Discord channel). Sometimes I will procrastinate on work and the way I will do that will be talking about whatever's on my mind. In general I tend to have a strong urge to talk about/write down my thoughts and poke at them until they make more sense to me.
(It does also happen that instead I avoid doing this with some kinds of things, and it's not good for me, and that does especially happen if I'm extra busy with other stuff, I guess.)
(which isn't to say that I wouldn't benefit from doing more of it, or that I don't do more of it when I have more slack. but I don't think it disproportionately suffers relative to my other priorities.)
Huh, interesting! I think to some extent the way my mind works forces me to fairly often spend time on #3 even when low on slack, even sometimes at the expense of the other things. So for me your initial reasoning feels more applicable.
Copying over some free-form thoughts from Discord about ways this post feels relevant to my life:
-----
one thing this makes me think of is how my action menu shrunk to like five things in fall 2020
because there was covid and that severely limited the available activities, and then I moved and then, before I had unpacked, found out I have to soon move again, so I couldn't access most of my stuff OR most of my space since it was taken up by boxes, and then also some of the time the air was poison so going outside was also not very much an option
and then I think.... the fact that a bunch of options got greyed out by actual circumstances and I got used to living a very limited life... also somehow ~broke my ability to think of new options that could potentially work even with the constraints that existed?
I guess this post is mostly about that kind of psychologically greyed-out options that aren't driven by real constraints
but it was interesting how the real constraints had this additional effect
and then I moved again and the situation was somewhat better but I was so used to this very limited life that it was hard to actually expand my action menu much even though I theoretically could
I did eventually kind of
but much more after vaccines and reopening
though I'm still catching up, also
my stuff is STILL in boxes to an embarassingly large extent
- hmm, articulation of thought: one benefit of cleaning my room is expanding my action menu / un-graying-out options
because many actions require or at least benefit from various objects and if the objects are actually accessible that helps
another maybe interesting thing is I absolutely knew at the time [i.e. in fall 2020] this was the case [i.e. that I was having a greyed-out-options problem]
that there were probably things I could do that would be better
but it was so so hard to think of them let alone do them
I read this a few months ago and thought about it out loud in a Discord channel with the intent to turn my thoughts into a nicely structured comment here eventually, and then I never ended up doing that. So instead I'm going to do a lower-effort version of that, where I more or less copy my thoughts from Discord with only light editing, because that seems better than nothing. I'll put in section headers for readibility, also.
0. start
this is a really good post imo
and one that's relevant to me
[due to the fact that I often have low/fluctuating levels of energy/spoons, and am not great at reliability]
I really appreciate the part at the beginning where Duncan patiently explains the value of having social norms at all
it feels very "nerd who has gone through the valley of bad rationality and come out the other side with a better understanding of why that fence was there"
some of the post's object-level recommendations are things I have learned to do but have to sometimes keep reminding myself to do, and sometimes go through periods of failing harder than usual at when my capabilities change
I guess actually maybe nearly all of the things are things I already try to do? just without quite this much theory about it
I like having the theory about it though
I could treat it as a checklist
I think a thing that would be useful for me to do is to come up with a bunch of examples for each point
1. reliability equilibria & why lower-reliability ones are good sometimes
one thing that I think is missing from the post is discussion/acknowledgment of different... reliability equilibria
like, the first example that came to mind is that I just today cancelled a planned coworking session because I am too tired to do it without being miserable
but, it's already understood between me and the other person that such things will be cancelled sometimes? I guess this probably hasn't been explicitly established in words before but both of us have cancelled on each other before and yet continued to be willing to set up new plans in the future
and this is good, I think?
if such plans required 99% reliability I would be way less willing to make them
which for some things would be the correct tradeoff! there are plans I should be extremely hesitant to make because they legitimately require really high reliability
but coworking isn't inherently such a thing; it could be a thing like that for some people but I think that, given two people who find low-certainty plans acceptable, making such plans creates more value than not making them
this makes me think of the recent discussion [in this server] about [sometimes] enjoying not being the most late person to a thing
I think one reason I sometimes enjoy this is that it's an update on the level of reliability expected here?
in some contexts, lower-expected-reliability is a better fit for me personally. so evidence that I'm not wildly out of norm is really good for me
(e.g. today a coworker missed a meeting with me because she forgot about it and went to dinner. I can imagine contexts in which this would annoy me greatly but in this case it actually made me feel kind of relieved because a workplace in which this is an allowable level of [occasional, infrequent] fuckup is more hospitable to me than one where it isn't. [since I'm posting this publicly I feel the need to clarify that this is not a type of fuckup I am personally prone to. but I have sometimes slept through an early morning meeting due to not hearing my alarm, when particularly sleep-deprived. not a Very Important one though.])
though there are certainly also contexts where updates in the "this is a lower-reliability-expectations equilibrium than I thought" direction are unpleasant!
like if I have plans with someone and I care about those plans a lot and they seem to be prioritizing the plans less than I am
2. proactive communication
also sometimes it annoys me if someone flakes on something at the last minute when they could have told me earlier
even if I'm fine with the thing being cancelled
though this kind of varies
and this is a thing I sometimes fail at myself
(one of Duncan's prescriptions is in fact "loop the renegee in as soon as possible")
this is a thing I've tried to get better at - e.g. I've mostly ingrained the habit of giving people I'm meeting up-to-date ETAs if I'm running notably late
in the past I would much more often delay telling them this as much as possible because I dreaded the moment when they find out how late I will be
also this part:
"I'm happy to schedule a 50% chance of a lunch on Saturday, if that works for you, but if you need a firm 'yes' or 'no' then I have to say 'no.'"
I've started doing this^ much more often, though I'm still less systematic about it than this
I mostly do that during time periods when I have unusually low energy / bad mental health, and it sometimes takes a while to notice that this is the case
3. making fewer plans
this thing:
Perhaps I’m agreeing to things too quickly in general, or not giving myself enough time to rest, or failing to acknowledge that no, it’s not just a bad week, this is just the new normal, at least for this month or this year.
so yeah, this:
If I can’t be confident that I’ve nailed the problem down, the next step is simply to increase my error bars. Make fewer commitments in general, through a top-down conscious effort, or make each individual commitment looser, giving people more notice that I might bail or flake.
though there's a problem where it's not always feasible for me to make only as many commitments as I can reliably handle
4. more proactive communication, reputation effects, self-prediction & calibration
in which case yeah one of my strategies is to try to inform people of this
it helps in a sense that I am already known to flake on things sometimes?
anyway it might be useful for me to make a more systematic habit of actually estimating how likely I am to succeed at various plans, and telling people those estimates, and scoring and calibrating my predictions over time
I've had this thought before but not followed up on it in a systematic way
though I do give people such estimates sometimes when it feels salient and appropriate
I read about half this post before realizing that this concept is intuitively familiar to me from the process of translating poems/songs: very often a poem or song will have certain specific bits that are going to be extra important to get exactly right (e.g. the title, or something conceptually loadbearing, or a particularly clever or emotionally impactful line) or unusually hard for some reason (e.g. it's trying to get across a very specific or finicky or culturally specific concept, or using clever wordplay, or it's self-referential like "a fourth, a fifth, a minor fall, a major lift"), and when considering a new translation it usually makes sense to start brainstorming from those bits, because every line you write will affect what can go near it, so it makes sense to start with the lines where I'll be lucky if I can think of one good thing that scans, and then from there try to fill in the other lines (which hopefully have more degrees of freedom) with things that not only scan but also rhyme with the hard parts. (Also because sometimes you won't think of anything for the hard parts, and then it might not make sense to invest a bunch of time in working on the rest of the thing.)
Strong +1 to Focus Mode; I'm not doing the rest of this but I do find it extremely valuable to be able to temporarily turn off things that are going to pull my attention in twenty different directions unexpectedly. I use it when I'm working and also sometimes when I go on walks where I want to be able to use my phone to take pictures and check maps but not to be distracted by the Internet.
Thanks for sharing this! I'd be interested to see the qualitative data sorted by whether the person was vaxed at the time.