Academian comments on Narrative, self-image, and self-communication - Less Wrong
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Comments (51)
+1 for sharing; you seem the sort of person my post is aimed at: so averse to being constrained by self-image that you turn a blind eye when it affects you. It sounds to me like you that you are actively trying to suppress having beliefs about yourself:
I've been there, and I can think of a number of possible causes of this aversion:
Possibility #1: You see that other people are biased by their self-images in harmful ways, so you try not to have any self image that might resemble one that they would have. What you end up with is something like a "moral calculator" self-image, or a "really objective guy" self-image:
This distinguishes you from others in a way that doesn't activate your "don't screw up like them" alarm bells.
Possibility #2. You are mildly disgusted by human biases and limitations, and find using the story-like heuristics of "common people" quaint but distasteful. This gives you a "too good for that silly human-think" self-image, which biases you to ignore methods of thinking that are especially useful for humans if employed correctly (i.e., as moderate-bias-high-accuracy estimators). No one is saying go think like all your wrong friends now or stop having real-time assessments of things, and the fact that you interpreted the post in that way suggests that you are somewhat sensitive to this issue. I'm saying to spend some time understanding the strengths of common emotional heuristics like narrative, not just their weaknesses, so you can make a better decision about when and how to use them.
One final comment:
It should. This should also throw up a red flag:
You are not going to escape having to cache some of your thoughts. Computers do it, AIs are going to do it, people do it, and you do it. When I learned linear algebra, I made myself re-derive every theorem and its dependencies, back to the field axioms, in my head every time I used them... but eventually I had to stop in order to follow seminar talks that'll use 5 major results results in a span of 10 seconds. It was inevitable. And really, you don't add 12 to itself 12 times every time you compute 12x12, even if you feel like a calculator. You don't re-derive the distributive law from first principles every time you use a multiplication algorithm. And if you do, you're going to be unnecessarily --- dare I say irrationally --- slower than otherwise ;)
The best thing to do is accept this fact, so that you can start caching instructions like keep an eye out for the following exception to this other cached instruction or watch out I don't think I'm a calculator and assume I'm immune to biases arising from my own self-image.