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SarahC comments on Something's Wrong - Less Wrong
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Voted up for extremely clear writing on an important topic, but I vehemently disagree with part of your thesis.
Agreed.
I disagree on both points.
First, it is not the critic who counts. A critic with no solutions and no realistic hope of inspiring any counts for nothing; a volunteer who builds one house with Habitat for Humanity is better than a state legislator who delivers a thousand eloquent speeches in favor of increased housing funding but ultimately fails to secure passage for any of her bills.
One could point to a handful of reformers who have successfully focused attention on an issue with good results; e.g., Rachel Carson criticized America's environmental practices and asked people to pay more attention to the environment. For Carson, though, the criticism came with its own realistic solution--during the prosperous 1960s, at a time when rivers were literally aflame with floating toxic waste, it was plausible to think that people would spend more resources on environmental protection if only the topic were skillfully brought to their attention.
Today, there is little interest in poverty in the US, and not simply because of ignorance; many people are more or less aware of the conditions in which the other half lives, and yet they don't care. Claiming (correctly) that poverty is very, very bad, without some novel or concrete solution, is highly unlikely to rouse the rich and the middle classes from their apathy. Such a claim is merely pleasant speech; one who makes it has no claim on the kind of glory that Teddy Roosevelt was praising.
Second, if there really are no solutions to a problem, not even partial ones, then, in my opinion, it really is OK to take no action to solve the problem. I would, e.g., like to talk to my dead grandmother; I have a few questions to ask her. Unfortunately, her body has been in the dirt for 10 years, and her living relatives do not remember her clearly enough for me to construct some sort of holographic emulation. Therefore, this is an impossible problem, and I do not want to talk to her badly enough to tackle an impossible problem the way Eliezer describes in the sequences.
May I feel badly? May I feel outraged? Sure, if I like. Or, if I like, I can try to cultivate a sort of detachment from the problem; I can try to let go. In this sense, it is "OK" that my grandmother is dead beyond recall. I experience her deadness as harmful; I would not wish the death of a grandmother on others, and yet, I do not see the wisdom in stirring myself up and urging myself to be especially upset. Where would the energy I get from being upset go? There is nothing to be done. My time and energy are better spent on problems that can actually be solved.
I debate policy issues with friends a fair bit for fun, in part because it helps me think about where I might want to work, donate money, or volunteer. If the economy can be fixed but not the criminal justice system, I want to know that. I don't really care how 'wrong' each system is in the abstract, because most things are 'wrong' to one degree or another; our world is much less than perfect. What matters is whether a system is worse than a system that could actually be implemented, or, more precisely, worse than a system that people within my circle of influence could significantly help to implement.
I think you raise some good points here.
I may have been encouraging people to "urge themselves to be especially upset" because that's a habit of mine, but you're right that it's not always a good idea to be emotionally upset when you can do nothing. What I don't like is this chain of events:
I think Stage 2 is fine; my problem is with Stage 3. The kinds of problems I'm talking about here are not literally impossible to solve; they're problems we don't know how to solve yet. Ideally, people who have stopped losing sleep and stressing out over a problem would still acknowledge and take seriously the fact that it is not a good thing. Put it off to one side, certainly -- but be prepared for the day that someone smarter than you has a good idea, and be willing to accept a solution if it arises.
Death is a good example of what I'm talking about, actually. Finding peace is a good idea. But I don't think it's good to be so wedded to acceptance of death that, if someone says "Here's something that might make people live much longer, or not die at all," you say "Well, that sounds like a bad idea. Death is a part of life."
For external, didactic purposes:
"Sour grapes" seems to be a pretty important mechanism to mitigate the devastating pain of inevitably failing to prevail in some social/status goal.
As for problems in the world, it's only with great emotional detachment can I, a cynic and self-certified possessor of uncommonly many correct beliefs, avoid useless sadness, bile, or rage. The alternative is to avoid thinking about such things, whether by denial or distraction.
Very well said.
Are you aware of any particular biases that tend to make people slide down the slope from 2 to 4? I find that I often slide down to 3, but rarely slide down to 4...for example, I often categorize death via old age as "not a problem," but will gladly listen to and occasionally fund other people's plans for curing aging; I was in the habit of characterizing a knee condition I have as "not a problem," but when someone called my attention to new evidence suggesting that a particular nutritional supplement reliably improved similar knee conditions, I went out and found a version of the supplement of the pill that I am not allergic to and used it regularly and got good results; I was in the habit of characterizing low interest rates on depository accounts as "not a problem," but as they continue to persist in the United States I have found myself devising policy solutions that might increase interest rates at low social cost, etc.
I am curious whether you think that despite my anecdotal-ly good track record I am still likely to inappropriately shift into 4 (rejection) on other issues, and, if so, what I might do about that.
I know this sounds slippery, but I don't think you're really doing what I think of as 3. You're not really stressing out about aging and knee problems, but you're aware intellectually that they're more negative than positive. Maybe I wasn't clear, but that's stage 2.
Stage 3 is when you stop categorizing these things as negative at all. People who say that "Death is natural" and therefore see life-extension as eliminating a good thing rather than mitigating a bad thing. People who decide via motivated cognition that global warming must be good for the world, simply because there aren't particularly effective ways to stop global warming. People who think "I'm bad at math because I'm not a nerdy weirdo" instead of "I'm bad at math but it would be nice to be good at it."
The bias that causes that is an inability to accept failure, even intellectually. Regular people usually learn to tolerate failures to the point that they accept them as "not a problem," and that's a healthy coping mechanism for life. (Though good things can also be accomplished by restless types who never manage to tolerate a certain failure.) It goes wrong when you can't even stand to put a negative label on things; when you can't say "I'm OK with my knee condition but if you tell me how to fix it I will." 3 is kind of a Pangloss attitude -- you don't even want to call an earthquake a negative event, because that would mean there was something bad that you couldn't fix. It sounds so crazy irrational that nobody would think that way: but I guarantee, people do.
Stage 3 sounds somewhat like a subgoal stomp (in reverse?). In both cases, main goals are being altered by folding in subgoals in an incorrect way. In a subgoal stomp, a subgoal which is important to the main goal loses its instrumental link to the main goal and starts acting like an independent goal. In stage 3, a main goal that drives a subgoal that looks infeasible gets reduced in priority because of the subgoal failure.
Oh, cool. That makes sense. Thanks.
No, that's true, I've listened to people who do that.
What was the supplement?
Hylauronic acid.
Thanks. I'm going to be starting with Schiff Move Free, which includes that. I'll post about whether it works.
I was impressed that it had 117 reviews (most supplements are lucky to get 5), with a high proportion of them favorable and very few negative. Is there any way to search for things which are that outstanding, without starting from what sort of things they are? (Maybe that should go in a discussion of Something's Right.)