= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
jimmy comments on SotW: Check Consequentialism - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (311)
Cleverness-related failure mode (that actually came up in the trial unit):
One shouldn't try too hard to rescue non-consequentialist reasons. This probably has to be emphasized especially with new audiences who associate "rationality" to Spock and university professors, or audiences who've studied pre-behavioral economics, and who think they score extra points if they come up with amazingly clever ways to rescue bad ideas.
Any decision-making algorithm, no matter how stupid, can be made to look like expected utility maximization through the transform "Assign infinite negative utility to departing from decision algorithm X". This in essence is what somebody is doing when they say, "Aha! But if I stop my PhD program now, I'll have the negative consequence of having abandoned a sunk cost!" (Sometimes I feel like hitting people with a wooden stick when they do this, but that act just expresses an emotion rather than having any discernible positive consequences.) This is Cleverly Failing to Get the Point if "not wanting to abandon a sunk cost", i.e., the counterintuitive feel of departing from the brain's previous decision algorithm, is treated as an overriding consideration, i.e., an infinite negative utility.
It's a legitimate future consequence only if the person says, "The sense of having abandoned a sunk cost will make me feel sick to my stomach for around three days, after which I would start to adjust and adapt a la the hedonic treadmill". In this case they have weighed the intensity and the duration of the future hedonic consequence, rather than treating it as an instantaneous infinite negative penalty, and are now ready to trade that off against other and probably larger considerations like the total amount of work required to get a PhD.
I wouldn't even allow that. I much prefer to treat such a sense as a (misguided) signal about the map, rather than a piece of territory that I intrinsically care about. Seeing things with this framing allows you to explore the signals with less distortion, and allows them to go away more easily once you take them into account. If you start treating them as things to worry about, then you get sadness about sadness, fear about fear, and other information cascades that can be quite destructive.
Additionally, on the cases where the irrational discomfort actually sways your decision over the threshold, you're training yourself to listen to things that should not exist in the first place, which just reinforces the problem.
This strikes me as a perfect lead-in to Spock style "Bah, my emotions SHOULDN'T exist, therefor I will just IGNORE them". This does not work well.
If we ignore a REAL negative consequence in our planning, we're going to get frustrated when the consequence happens anyway, because now it's an UNEXPECTED negative consequence of our decision. If we further decide that we're not REALLY having that negative consequence, then it will get further exacerbated by our unwillingness to accept the situation, and therefor our inability to actually do anything to fix the situation. It's entirely possible that we're now miserable for two weeks instead of three days.
Heck, It's entirely possible the whole thing could have been fixed by thinking about it and saying "I would normally feel bad, but since I'm aware of this, I can instead just remind myself of the awesome rational decision I'm making, and how cool my life is because of this Rationality thing!", possibly supplemented by a celebratory slice of cake to reinforce that this is a positive, not a negative, event. (And cake makes everyone happy!)
No no no, not that. That's terrible!
"listen" is ambiguous - oops. You want to acknowledge the feeling, but not act on it. Once you can acknowledge it, you can realize that it doesn't make sense, and then release that feeling and be done with it.
If I'm hungry, I can't just ignore that and continue to function at 100%. I can go eat and restore my blood sugar, or I can delay that hunger and function at less-than-peak efficiency because my body does not have all the resources it needs.
Emotions are the same way - if I feel upset or a sense of loss, I have to address that emotion. This is not always a simple "acknowledge and release" 5 minute process.
Believing otherwise will screw me up just as badly as believing I can cure hunger by "acknowledging and releasing" it instead of eating lunch.
I think we agree a lot more than you realize. Pretending that you aren't feeling emotion that you are feeling is a recipe for disaster. In your analogy, I recommend the equivalent of eating.
However, this doesn't mean that you yield to the emotions when they're pushing you towards bad decisions. It also doesn't mean you pretend that it has to be some big ordeal to fix the problem right. Those are both very bad ideas for more reasons than are obvious.
"eating" can be anywhere from a split second automatic response to a extended ordeal. If you know what you're doing, the Phd example is not more than a 5 minute process - I've walked people through worse things in about that time.
Please elaborate!
I "cheated" a bit, in that I had them spend ~15-20 minutes with a chat bot that taught them some skills for getting in touch with those parts of their mind. Actually working through the problem was a few minutes of text chat that basically pointed out that there was no magic option and that they needed to let go of the problem emotions. All the real magic was in putting them in the state of mind to shut up and listen.
I talk about it a bit here
I suppose the best analogy I could offer here is getting robbed. It takes maybe 5 minutes to get robbed. There's (usually) nothing you can do to fix the situation or recoup the cost. But people still feel bad about it for a while.
Your link seems to suggest, more or less, using hypnosis to just wipe out this guilt - except the examples you give don't really seem to address that emotional side at all. You're focusing on the intellectual acceptance of "yes, I should drop the PhD", which isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the emotional baggage that comes with that, the sense that you've wasted 2 years as a sunk cost that isn't even doing you any good at this point.
If you're really hypnotizing way that guilt, that emotional response, then I guess I am misunderstanding you. Is that the case? Because I would say that, based on my personal experience, that is seriously dangerous territory. Not to say you shouldn't trust yourself with it - I do it myself. But it is a technique I have seen cause a lot of people serious problems, and definitely not one I'd teach casually.
Haha! YES!
Yep. They're doing it wrong.
No no no no no! I'm talking about the emotional acceptance. It is a very different thing than intellectual acceptance, but that does not mean they can't track each other. If your mind is organized well, they do track.
Have you read Kaj's post on overcoming suffering and suffering as attention allocation conflicts? This is basically what I'm talking about
There is a very important distinction between suppressing emotion (perhaps successfully) and eliminating the cause of the emotion directly by coming up with a better way of handling the conflict. The latter is healthy and quite low risk compared to the null option. This is what I do - with or without "hypnosis".
Suppressing emotion is a recipe for disaster.