GreenRoot comments on You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue - Less Wrong

46 Post author: Alicorn 17 March 2010 01:18AM

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Comment author: GreenRoot 17 March 2010 04:15:23AM *  11 points [-]

tl;dr: Why study yourself? Because

  1. You're interesting because you're complicated and you're you.
  2. You can convincingly ask people to adjust how they deal with you to your peculiarities.
  3. You can learn how to improve yourself and thus accomplish your goals.

Fair summary?

Would you say that improved self awareness can help you accomplish your goals directly, without the self-modification discussed in reason #3? Something like: learn more about what makes you happy, then do that stuff. This seems like a bigger payoff than #2 to me, worthy of inclusion in any sales pitch for self-study.

Comment author: Alicorn 17 March 2010 07:03:51AM 1 point [-]

Yes, the summary is fair.

Luminosity can be useful for discerning what makes you happy and then doing that stuff, but failure to do that seems to be more often a case of akrasia rather than identification. Fixing akrasia is a self-improvement problem.