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Swimmer963 comments on Complexity: inherent, created, and hidden - Less Wrong
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Comments (49)
It feels like a meaningful concept. For example, if I want to learn how to draw, or run a marathon, these are skills that most people can learn through approximately the same process, with a little willpower. Some people find it easier than others, but barring physical disability, almost anyone can train to run that marathon. If I decide I want to be more intelligent (rather than knowledgeable), there doesn't seem to be any way to increase this through practice and willpower, and not just anyone can train enough to, say, complete a degree in math.
How much willpower you have is also very likley affected quite heavily by your genetic heritage.
Which also seems unfair to me sometimes. I'm quite well endowed in the willpower department, but I watch friends my age struggle with things that seem so freaking simple, like going back to graduate high school, and eventually I realize it's not because they're not trying but because they struggle to keep up the willpower to make a continuous effort without immediate returns, and it depresses me. And there's nothing I can do about it.
I can understand why you feel that way.
Several LWers have spent quite some time finding and investigating the returns of several ways to boost willpower in order to complete tasks(doing more with less, building up willpower in the long term, short term willpower spkies like consuming sugar) and even IQ (nbacking, nootropics). So there are a few things you can do for your friends.
But what your are concerned about dosen't really seem to be fairness, at least not fairness in the usual sense of the word (note: I am not saying this in a disapproving tone!), but I'm not quite sure where you fit. Could you help me out? If so please read on.
In another comment you noted that trainable skills are an important category for you. Even in a system where everyone had the same starting conditions and same ability to self-modify for more willpower and higher IQs, differences would arise over time. Before answering if you would consider such differences fair, please consider the following.
People have different values, some values are rewarded by our universe more than others. The more generous reward can obviously be used to invest more than others do into enhancement. Would this bother you?
Now lets assume all values are locked in and are thoroughly homogeneous. Differences will still arise. Unavoidably so. Can you guess why this is so? Are you ok with that?
To answer the other half of your question:
Yes. I would consider it fair. Because if I lived in that world, and there was something I wanted to succeed, I would never be in a position where someone else could succeed at it easily while I struggled with transcendent efforts and might ultimately fail anyway. I might live in that world and not choose to self-modify for higher IQ, for example if I preferred to expend my self-modification energy on being more generous or more fun to party with, and I might end up with less money or fame or books published than someone else who chose intelligence, but I could have chosen differently if I'd wanted to.
Not all goals are created equal. Some are more difficult others less so. Many would still struggle.
Also even among those with the same goals, some will get lucky, and gains are likley to snowball over time into ever greater differentials.
I sympathize with such a position. I feel I would ideally like it if as many people as possible could acheive what is sometimes called self-actualization and pursue their other (differing) values.
However this leaves us with the many difficult questions of how to keep such a situation in equilibrium with ever greater Malthusian pressures (due to the lightspeed limit) and ever greater power differentials. I have been for the past year or so toying with the ideas of voluntary compacts enforced by self-modification (basically I agree to change myself so I care deeply about not altering the terms of this agreement, which naturally means that in the future I will try my very best to preserve this value and hopefully keep the terms).
But they'd struggle at achieving harder versus easier goals. I don't think Swimmer is suggesting all goals would be equally-easy to attain (we should rightly be suspicious if someone thinks that in a fair, self-actualized world, becoming an astronaut and becoming a teacher involved the same amount of effort), just that given two people trying to achieve the same goal (say, stability of person and health and shelter and income) by the same means, we would expect to see "luck" and the difficulty of the task determine probability of success.
I agree she wasn't suggesting this. However what I was pointing out is that this was a source of "unfairness" for people struggling to achieve one's goals that she hadn't touched on.
The 'unfair' part comes in when someone wants to be different, and I can't help them change even though I've already achieved what they want, seemingly without a lot of effort. For example, a friend of mine knows that she has poor willpower and self-control, and she commits to do things which are a good idea and will help her in the long run, but she finds the short-term pain overwhelming...and she has told me repeatedly that she wishes she could be more like me and be able to stick to precommitments. I would have an easier time with this if it was hard for me to make plans and follow them, because then at least I could detail the steps I followed, and if she failed to follow the same steps, it would be a matter of her not having tried as hard. But tasks involving willpower have always been easy for me, and I can't describe any steps I follow aside from "making a plan to do something productive, and then doing it even if I'm tempted to do other unproductive-but-fun things later."
[Attempting to analyze this thought pattern...] I think a lot of this comes from the fear that someday I'll encounter some task that I'll desperately want to accomplish, and no matter how hard I try I won't be able to keep up with someone who is talented in a particular area and does it without trying. I haven't encountered this before, because ultimately I am very stubborn and there's nothing I've really failed at. But watching my friend reminds me that "but for the grace of God, there go I."
I never understood willpower. If you don't want to do something, you could always, well, not do it.
Willpower is the ability to force yourself to do something even if you "don't feel like doing it", as you put it, because the action in question has consequences you want.
I don't understand how is it even possible to do something without feeling like doing it.
Do you also not understand how it is possible for the hare to catch the tortoise, for arrows to move, to learn anything one did not already know, or to do good of one's own volition? One can prove, with impeccable logic, that all of these things are impossible. Yet they happen. The logic is wrong, and the wrongness is not in the deductive system but in the ontology, the verbal categories that embody assumptions one does not know one is making.
You can prove with impeccable logic that there is no such thing as will power. Either you want to do something or you do not; you do what you want and not what you don't. Yet everyday experience tells us all (except those who have philosophised themselves into ignoring what they have proved cannot exist) that it is not as simple. We do, in fact, experience conflicts. That our verbal formulations of what is going on may fail us does not make the reality go away.
BTW, in your comment that Eugine_Nier linked, you say:
That's some rather steep temporal discounting. Does that happen in the short term as well? E.g. do you leave something undone because you don't feel like it, and later the very same day, wish your earlier self had done it?
Yes, I've seen it happen. I just don't understand it.
Well, sort of. I do have a tendency to let stuff go undone and be inconvenienced by the fact that it's not done (for example, I might run out of clean laundry, or put off getting a haircut for several months) but I rarely think of not doing them as mistakes to be regretted. I've learned all kinds of "bad" lessons that seem to amount to "putting things off never has consequences". For example, I once skipped a midterm exam in college so I could play Final Fantasy X, and in hindsight it turned out to be the right decision. (I hadn't studied - too much playing Final Fantasy X - so I would have done terribly. As it turned out, the professor accepted my excuse, I ended up passing the course.) Also, there's all that time spent playing JRPGs, in which you want to explore every side path before reaching the main goal and nothing ever happens until you, the player, take an action to cause it to happen.
Sometimes you distract or fool yourself into starting, and then it's not so bad after that. Like, you don't want to write a paper, so you start a video on youtube, and while you're distracted with that, tell yourself you're just going to open MS Word, and then maybe write something or maybe not; then you tell yourself you're just going to write 100 words, and so on. Do it a few times in a row, and the process becomes habit, and then you might not even have to lie to yourself about why you're opening MS Word, because it's not a conscious decision anymore.
You don't have to be unhappier not doing the thing than you are doing it, necessarily. You just have to be unhappy enough not doing the thing to keep trying to try.
That works for you? For me, the best way is to plan, preferably a day in advance, that 'I will write my essay on Friday night' or something. There is definitely a part of myself that resents having another part of myself 'trick' it into anything, productive or not.
Oh, for sure! "It's -20º C outside and I've been out of the house for 16 hours and I really don't want to go jump into a cold pool and swim laps for an hour, and I'll be exhausted after, but I haven't exercised in 2 days and I really should." This is kind of a worst-case scenario. Most of the time, for me anyway, the parts of me that do want to do something and the parts that don't are equally lined up. (For example: I don't want to swim because I could go home and play on the computer and go to bed early instead, but I do want to swim because I'll get crabby if I don't and I'll feel better afterwards if I do.)
To me, that reads as a more complicated form of "feeling like it"...
Can you give an example of it, since the one Swimmer963 offered doesn't qualify?
I tend to decide what to do by imagining my options and choosing the one that I feel the best about. To me, "feeling like doing something" and "deciding to do something" feel like they're the exact same thing. Maybe that's why I get confused when people talk about doing things they don't feel like or don't want to do? They have some kind of "override" in their brains that kicks in between feeling like doing something and actually doing it - which they call "willpower" - and which I'm not aware of having?
Maybe it does? Willpower is something that confuses me, after all.
Willpower seems to be about trading off short-term gains for long term ones. In the short term, doing a particular action may not be very pleasant, but in the long term, you do want to have completed that activity. People's preferences aren't generally stable, and what we "want" in the short term is not always the same thing we will "want" in the long term. We use the same word for both, but it doesn't mean that it is the same thing, or that it is impossible for a short term and a long term desire to conflict.
Well, even by this definition success will always be based on things beyond an individual's control. I'm assuming you mean success at something zero-sum like status. After all, since people will try their hardest to succeed (to their innate limits of willpower and drive), the factor distinguishing success form failure cannot be under their control.
Maybe dividing things into a continuum of 'under the individual's control' to 'beyond the individual's control' doesn't make sense. It's still something my brain tries to do, and it still feels unfair that intelligence would so strongly determine outcomes.
One of the ways my mind perceives this is basically as a waste. "Look these two sacks of meat expend nearly the same amount of resources, yet one can't feed itself while the other has positive externalities it dosen't fully capture. The difference being 4 or 5 standard deviations caused by just a few thousand genes. Can't we find a way to fix up the less productive one rather than wasting all that negentropy to build a whole new one out of the same atoms?"
Also I'm generally in favour of letting people improve themselves, it really sucks from an eudaimonic perspective that we can't do anything about such an important aspect of ourselves.
Transhumanism ftw.
Could you give an example of what you would consider 'fair'?
I think you can dissolve the argument by substituting "under individual's control" with "trainable".
I agree.
I think Swimmer is talking about the same thing Eliezer pointed out in Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK?