olimay comments on A Sense That More Is Possible - Less Wrong

61 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 March 2009 01:15AM

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Comment author: Yvain 13 March 2009 11:04:30PM *  19 points [-]

Pjeby's working on akrasia? I'll have to check out his site.

That brings up a related question that I think Eliezer hinted at: what pre-existing bodies of knowledge can we search through for powerful techniques so that we don't have to re-invent the wheel? Entrepreneurship stuff is one. Lots of people have brought up pick-up artists and poker, so those might be others.

I nominate a fourth that may be controversial: mysticism. Not the "summon demons" style of mysticism, but yoga and Zen and related practices. These people have been learning how to examine/quiet/rearrange their minds and sort out the useful processes from the useless processes for the past three thousand years. Even if they've been working off crazy metaphysics, it'd be surprising if they didn't come up with something. Eliezer talks in mystical language sometimes, but I don't know whether that's because he's studied and approves of mysticism or just likes the feel of it.

What all of these things need is a testing process combined with people who are already high-level enough that they can sort through all the dross and determine which techniques are useful without going native or opening themselves up to the accusation that they're doing so; ie people who can sort through the mystical/pick-up artist/whatever literature and separate out the things that are useful to rationalists from the things specific to a certain worldview hostile to our own. I've seen a few good people try this, but it's a mental minefield and they tend to end up "going native".

Comment author: olimay 16 March 2009 05:49:57AM 6 points [-]

Yvain, do check out pjeby's work. I have to admit I some points I found myself reading OB as a self help attempt. I'm glad I kept up, but dirtsimple.org was the blog I was actually looking for.

Your point about mysticism is interesting, because I find pjeby's perspective on personal action and motivation has a strange isomorphism to Zen thought, even though that doesn't seem to be main intention. In fact, his emphasis seems to be de-mystifying. One of his main criticisms of existing psychological/self-help literature is that the relatively good stuff is incomprehensible to the people who need it most, because they'd need to already be in a successful, rational action mindset in order to implement what's being said.

Anyway, I hope pjeby chimes up so he can offer something better than my incomplete summary...