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SarahC comments on Something's Wrong - Less Wrong
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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.