Happy New Year! Here's the latest and greatest installment of rationality quotes. Remember:
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Well, it's not that I'm not confident that they're useful to me. They are! They help me make choices that make me happy. I'm just not confident in how useful pursuing them is in comparison to various utilitarian considerations of helping other people be not miserable.
For example, suppose I could learn some more rationality tricks and start saving an extra $100 each month by some means, while in the meantime someone I know is depressed and miserable and seemingly asking for help. Instead of going to learn those rationality tricks to make an extra $100, I am tempted to sit with them and tell them all the ways I learned to manage my thoughts in order to not make myself miserable and depressed. And when this fails spectacularly, eating my time and energy, I am left inclined to do neither because that person is miserable and depressed and I'm powerless to help them so how useful is $100 really? Blah! So, to answer the question, this is the mood in which I question my belief in the usefulness of knowing and doing useful things.
I am also a computer science/math person! high five
Aren't useful things kind of useful to do kind of by definition? (I know this argument is often used to sneak in connotations, but I can't imagine that "is useful" is a sneaky connotation of "useful thing.")
What you describe sounds to me like a failure to model your friend correctly. Most people cannot fix themselves given only instructions on how to do so, and what worked for you may not work for your friend. Even if it might, it i... (read more)