I am reminded of Eliezer's refrain that "Consequentialism is what's correct; virtue ethics is what works for humans."
As you've learned, it's important not to over-estimate the level of your own agenty-ness, even if you're trying to become more agenty.
I've greatly benefited from purchasing fuzzies and utilons separately — not just in charity but in all of life.
That's all for now. Best of luck, friend.
A year ago, I thought honestly about my long term and short term goals. I concluded that "utilitarian concern for global human flourishing" was something like maybe 5-10% of my personal utility function. The rest is a combination of desire for personal happiness, and artistic development. Included with the "personal happiness" includes feeling like a good person, which I track separately from the "actually being a good person according to utilitarian ethics." (It's a lot easier to feel like a good person than be a good person. This is true even when I know that I'm only feeling like a good person)
I think utilitarian types need to be honest about what their values are. It lets you make more informed choices about what courses of action are long-term sustainable. And then decide either to craft a longterm plan you can manage (in which you continuously do reasonably good things for the world), or figure out how to spend your life going on various "binges" (i.e. spend a few months working full-time on an Effective Altruist project, then spend a few months vagabonding, or whathaveyou).
One my primary goals is to grow the Effective Altruist communi...
Usually, the feelings I have as I am shifting due to personal growth are intense, yet temporary - and I've changed myself a lot of times, so the temporary nature of those feelings seems to be a pretty well-established pattern to me. And the way that my ideas settle is always unexpected at first. Making a major decision during a transition could end you up somewhere you don't want to be later.
I once read the story of a person who decided to become a vagabond. She thought it would be good for her, but people treated her like a homeless person, and she was...
I performed a nearly identical set of operations for the first time when I was 23. I would recommend the following:
Allow your new networks to re-stabilize. This can take up to a few weeks or even a few months if you haven't recently experienced massive emotional trauma, or a few years if you have.
Once you've re-stabilized, run some internal simulations of potential situations you're likely to encounter in the real world, and how you think the "new you" will respond to those simulations. Do this for about a week, preferably choosing simulation
You sound like a fellow who could find a lot to relate to in Stirner about now. Maybe not quite yet. Maybe in another month.
In his terms, your old values had become somewhat fixed ideas, starting to feel like ties and fetters instead of your own will, and now you've turned a frostier eye to them as a valuer judging these values. You are creating yourself anew, feeling free to do so each day, and feel a sense of liberation thereby.
You did so explicitly at first, writing a new plan for yourself - The King is Dead! Long live the King! - but you were surprise...
(can't find post in the sequences in which Yudkowsky is amazed by the fact that some things are good just because they are old), and that caused interesting unusual life choices, such as not wearing formal shoes and suits.
Wearing formal shoes and suits is not good because it's an old tradition, it's good because people tend to do it in social contexts where other people expect them to do it. Even if dressing codes are arbitrary to a large extent, there can be significant social costs in not adhering to them.
Think of right-hand vs left-hand traffic rul...
(Not particularly related to the post, a technical quibble.)
Past beliefs/priorities/moral judgments are not the same thing as preferences of a past self. A past self can be easily mistaken with respect to its own preferences, so even closely following past self's preferences benefits from revising its conclusions. Cached thoughts pose a problem because they don't take new arguments and evidence into account, because they constitute a fixed understanding of a goal, not because they represent a fixed goal.
It's probably best to experiment for a bit and fall into the existential crisis till you come out the other side. It seems to happen to a lot of people. If things get rough, remember that people in this circumstance tend to get better in a few years.
Transhumanist altruism - e.g. the attempt to make life extension possible for everyone - burns out when you see that most people don't want this "help". In the beginning it's not a pure self-disinterested altruism anyway. It starts with individuals who want immortality for themselves and who want to share it with other people. Eventually it dawns on them that other people are living with a completely different sense of expectations and priorities; resigned to their finitude in the here and now, or just hoping to get their personal eternity handed...
Seems like a fancy geeky way to say that you are having a(n early) midlife crisis. You'll get your stability back once it's over.
The "criticism" section of the wiki article suggests that a midlife crisis is basically just a regular crisis that happens to occur in midlife, and that people can have crises whenever.
So it's really just a regular crisis!
good just because they are old
You're thinking of Free To Optimize, which says that keeping old laws has the benefit of making the legal system more predictable, so that people know the legal consequences of their actions / decisions. A little different frrom what you were doing.
As to point three, I don't have a very good memory for my past thoughts, plans, or valuations, so my analogue of abandoning a cached-self would be deleting, deprecating, or archiving the external records I do have, like daily journals, school papers, or internet profiles. Cutting...
The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
I think it's possible that a utility-maximizing lifestyle can actually be fairly hedon-maximizing, especially if you take periodic breaks and vacations (which are optimal for achieving high energy and motivation anyway, in my experience).
I think the real thing to keep in mind re: fuzzies and utilons may not be that you should always purchase them separately. (What's wrong with a package deal?) Rather, I think it's that you should operate...
Whenever this happens (and I get antsy if I go too long without it) I start thinking in terms of my future self's preferences. My past self, who made up whatever rules/habits I'm currently living by did this too, but he was farther away from my future self and thus had less data.
I like the recipe you used for unpacking your current preferences from your past commitments, based on layers of scope (personal -> impersonal) and time (now -> 3 months -> long term).
Vagabonding is a form of making your self as small as possible, so to be able to update your model of the world based on what is actually available to you now.
You're walking down a dangerous path, letting go of major parts of the pattern.
Keep in mind that the genetic differences separating us and our caveman ancestors are very minor, to judge the importance and impact of our mind-programming.
Deconstructing the past does unconstrain your present self - but is that a gain of options, or are you set aloof like a leaf in the wind? This moment's present is the next moment's past ("You have just begun reading the sentence that you have just finished reading"). What remains that will tether you to the common ...
In my experience of similar appearing shifts of person, what you are experiencing is the "instability" that is to become your new (and more) "stable" state. It will provide advantages and disadvantages and is, in my finding, a more optimal but longer term strategy for the living of life.
Remember:
Please help me see my way around a contradiction inherent in your request. Stripping away the labels you have chosen to use, you appear to be asking for arguments in favor of an amoral lifestyle over a moral lifestyle. Almost by definition, I can't give consequentialist reasons why you should choose to let go of consequentialist reasoning. I can point out that "vagabonding" might be really fun and you could gain some life experience, or something.
If you accept the reality of happiness setpoints, it is probably already clear to you that you wil...
Warning about the vagabond idea: If you quit your job and stay jobless for more than, say, a month, you will probably be discriminated against when you go looking for a job in the future.
Why I think this
I know a person who was having difficulty getting employed and did everything they could to get a job. Nothing worked. Then, they tried re-explaining an employment gap and they were employed quickly. The person speaks English and has a degree. This person had the type of skills that are useful in various industries and had applied in a wide variety
For very long I've been caring a lot for the preferences of my past selves.
Rules I established in childhood became sacred, much like laws are (can't find post in the sequences in which Yudkowsky is amazed by the fact that some things are good just because they are old), and that caused interesting unusual life choices, such as not wearing formal shoes and suits.
I was spending more and more time doing what my previous selves thought I should, in a sense, I was composed mostly of something akin to what Anna Salomon and Steve Rayhawk called Cached Selves.
That meant more dedication to long term issues (Longevity, Cryonics, Immortality). More dedication to spacially vast issues (Singularity, X-risk, Transhumanism).
Less dedication to the parts of one's self that have a shorter life-span. Such as the instantaneous gratification of philosophical traditions of the east (buddhism, hinduism) and some hedonistic traditions of the west (psychedelism, selfish instantaneous hedonism, sex and masturbation-ism, drugs-isms, thrill-isms).
Also less dedication to time spans such as three months. Personal projects visible, completable and doable in such scales.
This process of letting your past decisions trump your current decisions/feelings/emotions/intuitions was very fruitful for me, and for very long I thought (and still think) it made my life greater than the life of most around me (schoolmates, university peers, theater friends etc... not necessarily the people I choose to hang out with, after all, I selected those!).
At some point more recently, and I'm afraid this might happen to the Effective Altruist community and the immortalist community of Less Wrong, I started feeling overwhelmed, a slave of "past me". Even though a lot of "past me" orders were along the lines of "maximize other people's utility, help everyone the most regardless of what those around you are doing".
Then the whole edifice crumbled, and I took 2 days off of all of life to go to a hotel in the woods and think/write alone to figure out what my current values are.
I wrote several pages, thought about a lot of things. More importantly, I quantified the importance I give to different time-spans of my self (say 30 points to life-goals, 16 points to instantaneous gratification, 23 points to 3MonthGoals etc...). I also quantified differently sized circles of altruism/empathy (X points for immediate family, Y points for extended family, Z points for near friends, T points for smart people around the globe, U points for the bottom billion, K points for aliens, A points for animals etc...).
Knowing my past commitment to past selves, I'd expect these new quantificatonal regulatory forces I had just created to take over me, and cause me to spend my time in proportion to their now known quantities. In other words, I allowed myself a major change, a rewriting which dug deeper into my source code than previous re-writings. And I expected the consequences to be of the same kind than those previous re-writings.
Seems I was wrong. I've become unstable. Trying to give an outside description the algorithm as it feels from the inside, it seems that the natural order of attention allocation which I had, like a blacksmith, annealed over the years, has crumbled. Instead, I find myself being prone to an evolutionary fight between several distinct desires of internal selves. A mix of George Ainslie's piconomics and plain neural darwinism/multiple drafts.
Such instability, if not for anything else, for hormonal reasons, is bound not to last long. But thus far it carried me into Existentialism audiobooks, considering Vagabonding lifestyle as an alternative to a Utilitarian lifestyle, and considering allowing a personality dissolution into whatever is left of one's personality when we "allow it" (emotionally) to dissolve and reforge itself.
The instability doesn't cause anxiety, sadness, fear or any negative emotion (though I'm at the extreme tail of the happiness setpoint, the equivalent in happiness of having an IQ 145, or three standard deviations). Contrarywise. It is refreshing and gives a sense of freedom and choice.
This post can be taken to be several distinct things for different readers.
1) A warning for utilitarian life-style people that allowing deep changes causes an instability which you don't want to let your future self do.
2) A tale of a self free of past enslavery (if only for a short period of time), who is feeling well and relieved and open to new experiences. That is, a kind of unusual suggestion for unusual people who are in an unusual time of their lives.
(Note: because of the unusual set-point thing, positive psychology advice should be discarded as a basis for arguments, I've already achieved ~0 marginal returns after 2000pgs of it)
3) This is the original intention of writing: I wanted to know the arguments in favor of a selfish vagabonding lifestyle, versus the arguments in favor of the Utilitarian lifestyle, because this is a particularly open-minded moment in my life, and I feel less biased than in most other times. For next semester, assume money is not an issue (both Vagabond and Utililtarian are cheap, as opposed to "you have a million dollars"). So, what are the arguments you'd use to decide that yourself?