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benelliott comments on A Proposed Litany - Less Wrong
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I like the spirit, but the phrasing needs work. I'm probably not the best person to ask about this but here's what I can identify that needs improvement.
1) "learn to love finding out you were wrong" feels long and clunky. Can we say this in fewer syllables?
2) For some reason, having three sentences of the same form carries a lot of impact, while having only two feels weak. We need another sentence of the form "if you X, then learn to love Y". Perhaps we could change the third sentence to fit this form?
3) "If your emotions are not appropriate to your values" also feels long and clunky.
Sorry about not offering much constructive, but since I'm hopefully not the best writer on this site someone else ought to.
How about "If you love truth, learn to love correction"?
1) "yearn to discover your errors"?
For the second sentence, "If you hate illusion, seek to be disillusioned."
I don't have a rephrasing of the third, but something expressing the idea of "taking joy in the real" might work.
If I were to seek to be disillusioned my approach would be to acquire as many illusions as possible as fast as possible while also exposing myself to an intense yet unstable stream of real world stimulus. (The original version does not provide this kind of 'game me' exhortation.)
I think that with litanies you're supposed to pay attention to the spirit rather than the letter.
And good litanies manage to unite spirit, letter and aesthetics into an elegant whole.
Even at the level of 'spirit', "seek to be disillusioned" doesn't feel right to me. It misses the point. "Learn to love" actually conveyed a fundamentally better message.
I completely disagree. "Seek to be disillusioned" seems like exactly the message I would want to convey, like "actively try to remove all your misconceptions" but shorter. "Learn to love being disillusioned" seems a bit weaker.
That's fine, just so long as it is not presented as "a useful tool for rationalists, much like the Litanies of Tarski and Gendlin". There's just an element of ironic arationality to it that would make excessive repetition here cringe-worthy.
It does: if you love disillusionment, then your approach could be the same.
But with the possible exception of formalised mathematics, there is nothing that one person can say to another that cannot be "gamed". (I confidently expect that the instant reaction of most readers of LessWrong to that statement will be to try to think up an exception.)
This expression of my desire cannot be gamed.
(Self-reference might need to be included along with formalised mathematics. Arguably the sentence is not gameable because it becomes meaningless if gamed and meaningless sentences can't be gamed)
Maximise my utility!
I will brainwash you into representing your utility by a number on a piece of paper. Then I will write ∞ on it.
That isn't maximising my utility. That is maximising the utility of some other thing in the future.
All maximizations are going to take place in the future: they already haven't taken place up to the present.
Your complaint is that "that thing", the future you, isn't similar enough to the present you. Fair enough. It's hard to say anything about maximizing your utility as it is now if we assume zero knowledge about your utility function.
3) sounds like, "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one your with"
Other old hippies will know
But I was born in 1982...