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The difference between what I strive for (and would advocate) and "epistemic learned helplessness" is that it's not helpless. I do trust myself to figure out the answers to these kinds of things when I need to -- or at least, to be able to come to a perspective that is worth contending with.

The solution I'm pointing at is simply humility. If you pretend that you know things you don't know, you're setting yourself up for failure. If you don't wanna say "I dunno, maybe" and can't say "Definitely not, and here's why" (or "That's irrelevant and here's why" or "Probably not, and here's why I suspect this despite not having dived into the details"), then you were committing arrogance by getting into a "debate" in the first place.

Easier said than done, of course.

I think "subject specific knowledge is helpful in distinguishing between bullshit and non-bullshit claims." is pretty clear on its own, and if you want to add an example it'd be sufficient to do something simple and vague like "If someone cites scientific studies you haven't had time to read, it can sound like they've actually done their research. Except sometimes when you do this you'll find that the study doesn't actually support their claim".

"How to formulate a rebuttal" sounds like a very different thing, depending on what your social goals are with the rebuttal.

I think I'm starting to realize the dilemma I'm in. 

Yeah, you're kinda stuck between "That's too obvious of a problem for me to fall into!" and "I don't see a problem here! I don't believe you!". I'd personally err on the side of the obvious, while highlighting why the examples I'm picking are so obvious.

I could bring out the factual evidence and analyze it if you like, but I don't think that was your intention

Yeah, I think that'd require a pretty big conversation and I already agree with the point you're trying to use it to make.

I did get feedback warning that the Ramaswamy example was quite distracting (my beta reader reccomended flat eartherism or anti-vaxxing instead). In hindsight it may have been a better choice, but I'm not too familiar with geology or medicine, so I didn't think I could do the proper rebuttal justice.


My response to your Ramaswamy example was to skip ahead without reading it to see if you would conclude with "My counterarguments were bullshit, did you catch it?".

After going back and skimming a bit, it's still not clear to me that they're not.

The uninformed judge cannot tell him from someone with a genuine understanding of geopolitics.

The thing is, this applies to you as well. Looking at this bit, for example:

What about Ukraine? Ukrainians have died in the hundreds of thousands to defend their country. Civil society has mobilized for a total war. Zelensky retains overwhelming popular support, and by and large the populace is committed to a long war.  

Is this the picture of a people about to give up? I think not.  

This sure sounds like something a bullshit debater would say. Hundreds of thousands of people dying doesn't really mean a country isn't about to give up. Maybe it's the reason they are about to give up; there's always a line, and whos to say it isn't in the hundreds of thousands? Zelensky having popular support does seem to support your point, and I could go check primary sources on that, but even if I did your point about "selecting the right facts and omitting others" still stands, and there's no easy way to find out if you're full of shit here or not.

So it's kinda weird to see it presented as if we're supposed to take your arguments at face value... in a piece purportedly teaching us to defend against the dark art of bullshit. It's not clear to me how this section even helps even if we do take it at face value. Okay, so Ramaswamy said something you disagree with, and you might even be right and maybe his thoughts don't hold up to scrutiny? But even if so, that doesn't mean he's "using dark arts" any more than he just doesn't think things through well enough to get to the right answer, and I don't see what that teaches us about how to avoid BS besides "Don't trust Ramaswamy".

To be clear, this isn't at all "your post sucks, feel bad". It's partly genuine curiosity about where you were trying to go with that part, and mostly that you seem to genuinely appreciate feedback.

My own answer to "how to defend against bullshit" is to notice when I don't know enough on the object level to be able to know for sure when arguments are misleading, and in those cases refrain from pretending that I know more than I do. In order to determine who to take how seriously, I track how much people are able to engage with other worldviews, and which worldviews hold up and don't require avoidance techniques in order to preserve the worldview.
 

The frequency explanation doesn't really work, because men do sometimes get excess compliments and it doesn't actually become annoying; it's just background. Also, when women give men the kind of compliments that men tend to give women, it can be quite unwanted even when infrequent.

The common thing, which you both gesture at, is whether it's genuinely a compliment or simply a bid for sexual attention, borne out of neediness. The validation given by a compliment is of questionable legitimacy when paired with some sort of tug for reciprocation, and it's simply much easier to have this kind of social interaction when sexual desire is off the table the way it is between same sex groups of presumably straight individuals.

For example, say you're a man who has gotten into working out and you're visiting your friend whom you haven't seen in a while. If your friend goes wide eyed, saying "Wow, you look good. Have you been working out?" and starts feeling your muscles, that's a compliment because it's not too hard for your friend to pull off "no homo". He's not trying to get in your pants. If that friend's new girlfriend were to do the exact same thing, she'd have to pull off "no hetero" for it to not get awkward, and while that's doable it's definitely significantly harder. If she's been wanting an open relationship and he hasn't, it gets that much harder to take it as "just a compliment" and this doesn't have to be a recurring issue in order for it to be quite uncomfortable to receive that compliment. As a result, unless their relationship is unusually secure she's less likely to compliment you than he is -- and when she does she's going to be a lot more restrained than he can be.

The question, to me, is to what extent people are trying to "be sexy for their homies" because society has a semi-intentional way of doing division of labor to allow formation of social hierarchies without having to go directly through the mess of sexual desires, and to what extent people are simply using their homies as a proxy for what the opposite sex is into and getting things wrong because they're projecting a bit. The latter seems sufficient and a priori expected, but maybe it leads into the former.

 I want there to be a way to trade action for knowledge- to credibly claim I won't get upset or tell anyone if a lizardman admits their secret to me- but obviously the lizardman wouldn't know that I could be trusted to keep to that, 

 

The thing people are generally trying to avoid, when hiding their socially disapproved of traits, isn't so much "People are going to see me for what I am", but that they won't

Imagine you and your wife are into BDSM, and it's a completely healthy and consensual thing -- at least, so far as you see. Then imagine your aunt says "You can tell me if you're one of those BDSM perverts. I won't tell anybody, nor will I get upset if you're that degenerate". You're still probably not going to be inclined to tell her, because even if she's telling the truth about what she won't do, she's still telling you that she's already written the bottom line that BDSM folks are "degenerate perverts". She's still going to see you differently, and she's still shown that her stance gives her no room for understanding what you do or why, so her input -- hostile or not -- cannot be of use.

In contrast, imagine your other aunt tells you about how her friends relationship benefitted a lot from BDSM dynamics which match your own quite well, and then mentions that they stopped doing it because of a more subtle issue that was causing problems they hadn't recognized. Imagine your aunt goes on to say "This is why I've always been opposed to BDSM. It can be so much fun, and healthy and massively beneficial in the short term, but the longer term hidden risks just aren't worth it". That aunt sounds worth talking to, even if she might give pushback that the other aunt promised not to. It would be empathetic pushback, coming from a place of actually understanding what you do and why you do it. Instead of feeling written off and misunderstood, you feel seen and heard -- warts and all. And that kind of "I got your back, and I care who you are even if you're not perfect" response is the kind of response you want to get from someone you open up to.

So for lizardmen, you'd probably want to start by understanding why they wouldn't be so inclined to show their true faces to most people. You'd want to be someone who can say "Oh yeah, I get that. If I were you I'd be doing the same thing" for whatever you think their motivation might be, even if you are going to push back on their plans to exterminate humanity or whatever. And you might want to consider whether "lizardmen" really captures what's going on or if it's functioning in the way "pervert" does for your hypothetical aunt.

I get that "humans are screwed up" is a sequences take, that you're not really sure how to carve up the different parts of your mind, etc. What I'm pointing at here is substantive, not merely semantic. 

  1. The dissociation of saying "humans are messed up"/"my brain is messed up" feels different than saying "I am messed up". The latter is speaking from a perspective that is associated with the problem and has the responsibility to fix it from the first person. This perspective shift is absolutely crucial, and trying to solve your problems "from the outside" gets people very very caught up in additional meta level problems and unable to touch the object level problem. This is a huge topic.
  2. I had as a strong an aversion to homework as anyone, including homework which I knew to be important. It's not a matter of "finding a situation where you notice part of your mind attempting to write the bottom line first", but of noticing why that part of your mind will try to write the bottom line first, and relating to yourself in a way that eliminates the motivation to do so in the first place. I don't have situations where part of my mind attempts to write the bottom line first... that I'm aware of, at least. There are things that I'm attached to, which is what causes the "bottom line first" issues and which is still an obstacle to be overcome in itself, but the motivation to write the bottom line first can be completely obsoleted by stopping and giving more attention to the possibility that you've been trying to undervalue something that you can sense is critically important. This mental move shifts all of your "my brain is being irrational" problems into "I don't know what to do on the object level"/"I don't know why this is so important to me" problems, which are still problems but they are much nicer because they highlight rather than obscure the path to solution.
  3. "I want some kind of language to distinguish the truth seeking part from the biased part". I don't think such a distinction exists in any meaningful sense.

In my model, there's a part of your brain that recognizes that something is important (e.g. social time), and a part of your brain that recognizes that something else is important (e.g. doing homework), and that neither are "truth seeking" or "biased", but simply tugging you towards a particular goal. Then there's a part of your brain which feels tugged in both directions and has to mediate and try to form this incoherent mess into something resembling useful behavior.

This latter part wants to get out of the conflict, and there are many strategies to do this. This is another big topic, but one way to get out of the conflict is to simply give in to the more salient side and shut out the less salient side. This strategy has obvious and serious problems, so making an explicit decision to use this strategy itself can cause conflict between the desire "I want to not deal with this discomfort" and "I want to not drive my life into the ground by ignoring things that might be important". 

One way to attempt to resolve that conflict is to decide "Okay, I'll 'be rational', 'use logic and evidence and reason', and then satisfy the side which is more logical and shut out the side that is 'irrational and wrong'". This has clear advantages over the "be a slave to impulses" strategy, but it has it's own serious issues. One is that the side that you judge to be "irrational" isn't always the side that's easier to shut out, so attempting to do so can be unsuccessful at the actual goal of "get out of this uncomfortable conflict". 

A more successful strategy to resolving like these is to shut out the easy to shut out side, and then use "logic and reason" to justify it if possible, so that the "I don't want to run my life into the ground by making bad decisions" part is satisfied too. The issue with this one comes up when part of you notices that the bottom line is getting written first and that the pull isn't towards truth -- but so long as you fail to notice, this strategy actually does quite well, so every time your algorithm that you describe as "logical and reasoned" drifts in this direction it gets rewarded and you end up sliding down this path. That's why you get this repeating pattern of "Dammit, my brain was writing the bottom line again. I shall keep myself from doing that next time!". 

It's simply not the case that you have a "truth seeking part" and a "biased part". You contain a multitude of desires, and strategies for achieving these desires and mediating conflicts between these desires. The strategies you employ, which call for shutting out desires which retain power over you unless they can come up with sufficient justification, requires you to come up with justifications and find them sufficient in order to get what you want. So that's what you're motivated to do, and that's what you tend to do. 

Then you notice that this strategy has problems, but so long as you're working within this strategy, adding the extra desires of "but don't fool myself here!" becomes simply another desire that can be rationalized away if you succeed in coming up with a justification that you're willing to deem sufficient ("Nah, I'm not fooling myself this time! These reasons are sound!", "Shit, I did it again didn't I. Wow, these biases sure can be sneaky!").

The framing itself is what creates the problems. By the time you are labeling one part "truth seeking" and one part "biased, and therefore important to not listen to", you are writing the bottom line . And if your bottom line includes "there is a problem with how my brain is working", then that's gonna be in your bottom line.

The alternative is to not purport to know which side is "truth seeking" and which side is "biased", and simply look, until you see the resolution.

1) You keep saying "My brain", which distances you from it. You say "Human minds are screwed up", but what are you if not a human mind? Why not say "I am screwed up"? Notice how that one feels different and weightier? Almost like there's something you could do about it, and a motivation to do it?


2) Why does homework seem so unfun to you? Why do you feel tempted to put off homework and socialize? Have you put much thought into figuring out if "your brain" might be right about something here?

In my experience, most homework is indeed a waste of time, some homework very much is not, and even that very worthwhile homework can be put off until the last minute with zero downside. I decided to stop putting it off to the last minute once it actually became a problem, and that day just never came. In hindsight, I think "my brain" was just right about things. 

How sure are you that you'd have noticed if this applies to you as well?

3) "If your brain was likely to succeed in deceiving you".

You say this as if you are an innocent victim, yet I don't think you'd fall for any of these arguments if you didn't want to be deceived. And who can blame you? Some asshole won't let you have fun unless you believe that homework isn't worthwhile, so of course you want to believe it's not worth doing.

Your "trick" works because it takes off the pressure to believe the lies. You don't need to dissociate from the rest of your mental processes to do this, and you don't have to make known bad decisions in order to do this. You simply need to give yourself permission to do what you want, even when you aren't yet convinced that it's right.

Give yourself that permission, and there's no distortionary pressure so you can be upfront about how important you think doing your homework tonight really is. And if you decide that you'd rather not put it off, you're allowed to choose that too. As a general rule, rationality is improved by removing blocks to looking at reality, not adding more blocks to compensate for other blocks.

It's not that "human minds are messed up" in some sort of fundamental architectural way and there's nothing you can do about it, it's that human minds take work to organize, people don't fully recognize this or how to do it, and until that work you're going to be full of contradictions.


As an update, the 3rd thing I tried also failed. Now I ran out of things to try.

I wouldn't be discouraged. There are a lot of ways to do "the same thing" differently, and I wouldn't expect a first try success. In particular, I'd expect you to need a lot more time letting yourself "run free" -- at least "in sim" -- and using that to figure out what exactly it is that you want and how to actually get it without screwing anything else up. Like, "Okay, if I get that, then what?"/"What's so great about that" and drilling down on that felt sense until something shifts.

Sure took me a while, at least. And I wouldn't claim to be "finished"

The problem is that anything that is non-sexual love seems to be corrupted by sexual love, in a way that makes the non-sexual part worse. E.g. imagine you have a female friend that you like to talk to because she is a good interlocutor. [...] I expect that if you would now start to have sex with that female friend your mind would get corrupted by sexual desire. E.g. instead of thinking about what to discuss in the next meeting, a sexual fantasy would pop into your head.

How sure are you that this is actually a problem? Is it the hypothetical female friend that has an issue with just focusing on sex as much as you'd be tempted to, or is it a you thing? The former can definitely complicate things, but if it's the latter I'd be inclined to just run with it and see what happens. It's a lot harder to get distracted by the possibility of having sex immediately after having it.

My current strategy is to just not think anything sexual anymore, and be sensitive to any negative emotions that arise. I then plan to use my version of IDC on them to figure out what the subagents that generate the emotions want. So far it seems that to some extent realizing this corruption dynamic has cooled down the sexual part of my mind a bit. But attempt 3 only failed yesterday so this cooling effect might only be temporary.

Yeah, that's the inhibitory side of the equation. Kinda like fasting for a while and realizing that it's not necessary/helpful/appropriate to panic about being hungry, and chilling out for a bit.

But if you don't eat sooner or later or make an earnest effort to obtain sufficient food, it might not stay so easy to continue to set the hunger aside.


I feel like I have figured out a lot of stuff about this general topic in the last month. Probably more than in the rest of my life so far.

:) good.

I also realize now that this just solves the problem that I have had with romance all along. That is the reason why I did not like how my mind behaved. My mind normally just starts to love somebody immediately, overwriting all of the other aspects of the relationship. This is exactly not what I want love to be.

This does sound like premature/overattachment. I bet watching what happens to the other aspects of the relationship puts a damper on that impulse.

The ideal version of this is getting maximally close in a relationship via some context, and only once you get maximally close in that context do you extend the context. And then again you optimize for getting as close as possible in the new extended context, before extending the context again. And you add things to the context sorted such that you add the less impactful stuff first. Adding the component of love to the context should be very late in this chain. [...] I want love to be the thing that follows after everything else is maximally good. And I want the same to be true for other attributes. E.g. before feeling friendly with somebody, you should like them as much as possible, and get as close to them as possible, without that friendliness feeling there.

This sounds pretty idealized. "Should" is a red flag word here, as it covers over what "is", the reasons things are the way they are, and why you want things to be another way instead. In context, "maximally" is too because "maximally" on any dimension rarely matches "optimally" -- so whence this motivation, and what is being avoided?

That's not to say that it's wrong or misguided as ideals often have important value, but the real world tends to be messy and bring surprises.
 

Good, I'm glad my comments had the effect I was aiming for.

It's an interesting and fun project for sure. A few notes...

* I wouldn't expect to get it all figured out quickly, but rather for things to change shape over the course of years. Pieces can change quickly of course, but there's a lot to figure out and sometimes you need to find yourself in the right experience to have the perspective to see what comes next.

* I'd also caution against putting the cart too far ahead of the horse, even if you have pretty good justification. "Extension of non-sexual love" sounds right, but also just so much weird and unexpected stuff that it's hard to foresee in sufficient detail that it's likely that your perspective on what this entails isn't complete.

* Freedom to explore is freedom to learn, but also freedom to fail -- like removing training wheels from a bike so that you can engage with the process of balancing, but also risk falling. Managing this tradeoff can be tricky, especially when the cost of failure gets high.

* "Allocating specific periods of time to run free" reminds me of how I've been approaching my daughters developing appetite. Monday through Saturday she has to eat what we make her so that she gets good nutrition and builds familiarity with good foods, and on Sunday's she's free to learn exactly how much ice cream is *too* much and otherwise eat whatever she wants. I'm not entirely sure what to think yet and the arbitrariness of it bothers my sense of aesthetics a bit, but I'm relatively happy with how it's going so far and I'm not really sure how to do it any less arbitrarily in context.

I feel like had the technique been "Imagine ice cream tastes like pure turmeric powder", it would basically be the same technique.

 

It would.

In that case, I predict people would not have had these (from my perspective) very weird reactions.

We would. I would, at least, and I predict that others would too because the fundamental reason remains.

I haven't tried this, but maybe this would work for somebody who is fantasizing about eating ice cream, which causes them to eat too much ice cream.

If you think that you've been eating "too much" ice cream, presumably you have reason to believe some undesirable consequences will follow from eating this much ice cream. In this case, you can just imagine this will be the result of eating ice cream. There is no need to live in fantasy land in order to not eat things that reality supports not eating -- you just have to exit the fantasy you're in that is driving you to eat it.

I don't mean theoretically. While it does get more nuanced, this is the basis of how I relate to my tastes for food, and as a result I don't have any temptation to eat too much ice cream or anything else I recognize to be unhealthy. I used to, but it no longer appeals to me. Writing this reminds me how delicious liver is, and that I need to eat some more.

I am not reflectively stable. 

Right. And these are your opportunities to work towards fixing that :)

 I have the problem of having random sexual thoughts. It's not about imagining having sex with some person you love or anything like that. 

I'm not making any assumptions about what kind of sexual thoughts must have prompted this, nor any stance about what kind of sexual thoughts would be appropriate for you. That's for you to decide with yourself. If you say it's not working the way you want it to, I believe you. It's not uncommon.

What I'm pointing out is that you don't actually need to feed yourself false training data in order to do this, and doing so actively impedes the process of cohering into something resembling reflective stability. Whatever the valid reasons to not do the problem behavior, those can be used to motivate change, and when you do that you get far more interesting and better results.

It's not as simple as "Here's something I'm convinced is a valid reason, now will it go away?", but it is not theoretical either. Integrating one's sexual drives does change their shape, and this can have quite pronounced effects in ways that you wouldn't know to anticipate in advance.

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