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One thing that constantly amazes me on LW - already noticed it in the sequences - that I spent years going to Buddhist meditation centres trying to make my ego smaller, and it is here just casually assumed everybody has a small ego already out of the box. (Not sure it is the best terminology for it, but it will be clearer from the coming sentences.)
I mean here largely the aspect of relative status, praise, and similar things. With a big ego, feeling special can be very important and being outgunned by a bigger mind can feel very painful. This is something I cannot really describe well, it requires a good psychologists, but if you are not comfortable with yourself in general, you can easily invest all your ego into one feature of yourself, hopefully real, if not, fake. Such as that you are smart. But if you do that you need to feel the illusion you are the smartest person in the universe or else it shatters and you feel like a total nobody. Because there is nothing else you like about yourself or you base your identity on.
A psychologist would probably describe it as inner insecurity generatic outer narcissism, a lama would describe it as attachment to a fixed idea of the self. But what it is really like, if you have 20 things to like about yourself, then you can admit you are good but not best in some of them and you still have a good self image going. But if it is only one, you will feel the need to build a microuniverse where you are on the top of that scale.
Having a healthy small ego is not actually that easy.
I used to have this problem. Well, maybe still do, maybe just overcame this aspects of it. But I used to be just like the guys described here. (CW offensive language, Ignore if you can - the author is impersonating Begbie from Trainspotting.) Money quote: "I am extremely content with myself as a person. This state of mind is in fact not condusive to doing a technical job for a living. What drives people like engineers, surgeons, pilots or computer programmers to spend years and years mastering their craft, to go home and then do more research at home on their ‘pet projects’ (as a lot do) is a deep connection between their ego and their trade."
It is possible to overcome it. It is not easy. But I get constantly surprised how on LW it is more or less simply assumed that everybody has the kind of small-ego setup to use their intellect to actually useful purposes instead of desperately trying to prop up their collapsing self-esteeming by trying to loudly appear like the smartest kid on the block. And in this regard the blogger is right, about 80% of any STEM course will consist of the "look at me I am smart (if nothing else)" people not the "let's optimize things" people. So it is not easy at all and should not be taken for granted.
Honestly, for me personally it's not that I have a small ego - It's that my ego would be more offended if I was stuck in the sort of backwaters where I was the smartest person. I want to be the very best, not feel like the very best. To end up the stereotypical tragic genius who complains about how no one they know really understands or thinks like them, while everyone around them quietly smirks at how self important and arrogant those words sound, is not only sub-optimal but also a sort of failure, a blow to my ego.
Lesswrong (the name less wrong is relevant), transhumanism, all that is about being perfect, in a sense. We're striving to eliminate the minor imperfections in our thinking, so that we can actually be right all the time.
I don't think it has to do with "ego" so much as orientation towards truth and outcomes. The ego is attached to actually being right and actually being successful. Some people find it easy to admit to being wrong because it offends their ego more to be wrong than it does to admit to being wrong. The ego is still firmly in place, it's just less able to deceive itself due to the sort of mind it is piloting.
I guess what I'm saying is that ego, and the arrogance/humility spectrum in general, isn't a good model to describe the difference. You can be humble or arrogant to various degrees, but your orientation towards truth is a separate dimension.
For example, an extremely arrogant person might feel bad when faced with someone better than them, but if they have the truth orientation they can't take that feeling away by shunning that person because their ego cares about truth and won't let itself be tricked that way. So instead they hungrily observe that person and eat up their good qualities. And an extremely humble person with a truth orientation will do the exact same thing, simply because they do care about truth and outcomes.
And when these two people, humble and arrogant people with truth orientations meet, they hopefully understand each other and see that the differences in each other's arrogance/humility related mannerisms is just a superficial personality trait, and not that important.
Hm, the way you describe it it sounds like an individual version of guilt vs. shame cultures. Getting caught at being wrong without excuses is shame, being wrong even if nobody notices it but it matters for you is closer to guilt.
Hmm....yes, guilt and shame distinction does get close to what I mean.
But you must also add to this mix, the meta-cognitive skill of not fooling yourself to avoid guilt, to get the truth orientation I'm talking about. (Even the shameless who are perfectly happy displeasing others will get defensive and rationalize to fool themselves if you imply they are guilty by their own standards.)
Those with shame hide away from the judgement of others. Most people with guilt orientations will look for ways to justify to themselves, pull out all the arguments to avoid being ashamed in front of the their own mind rather than other people. In truth orientation, you don't worry about whether you feel guilty, you worry about whether you are and you additionally have the cognitive toolkit to avoid accidentally misrepresenting reality to spare your own feelings.
(Assuming large egos. A truth+outcome oriented person with a small ego isn't obsessing about guilt or non-guilt in the first place, they just notice the feeling of guilt as a useful indicator (of truth) and then act (for the preferred outcome). But the end result is the same regardless of the size of ones ego. (Whereas a person with a small ego who isn't truth+outcome oriented will just placidly dismiss the feeling of guilt but never really act.))
This is getting very Gita-esque isn't it. Which is interesting, because in many ways the Gita is intended as a rebuttle to the contemporary rapidly spreading Buddhism...
I understand everything except what the Bhagavad Gita has to do with it. The smartest programmer I know is a non-theistic krishnaist (apparently smart people can make non-theistic versions of everything, buddhism, judaism, paganism were the versions I saw as of yet), so I would like to know what you mean by this because it could help me figure out what he is doing there.
We had this weird discussion when I said the goal is to dissolve the ego and become impersonal in a good way, and he said yes, but then on a higher level you reassemble personality again and he said it is somehow related to the Gita.
Sure! But I think theism is irrelevant in this case. And this isn't mine, just the standard folksy Hinduism, the sort of wisdom you might get from a religious old lady. (And non-Abrahamic religions often do not map well to "atheism/theism" dichotomies. You won't really capture the way Indians think about differences in beliefs by using those terms, it's often not an important distinction to them.)
Now, keep in mind that a lot of what I'm saying is modern hindu exegenesis of the Gita. As in, this is what the Gita means to many Hindus - I can't speak to whether this interpretation actually reflects what people in ~5 BC would have read in it.
In the story Arjun doesn't want to kill his cousins (they're at war over who will rule) because he loves them and violence is wrong. We have to assume for the sake of argument that Arjun should kill his cousins.
Post-Upanishads and spread of Buddhism, a recurring theme in Vedic religion is duty vs. detachment..
Arjun first argues that he's emotionally attached to his cousins and therefore can't fight, and Krishna shoots it down with all the usual arguments against attachment that you're likely quite familiar with.
Then Arjun argues that it's his duty not to kill, that it would be a sin. Krishna replies with some arguments which could fairly be called consequentialist.
Finally Arjun argues that he's detached from the world and therefore he has no need to do bloody things, because he doesn't care about the outcome of the stupid war in the first place. To that, Krishna says "You do your duty without being attached to the consequences."
That bolded phrase is taken as the central, abstract principle of the Gita...it's the part people cherry pick, and we like to ignore or minimize the fact that it was originally spoken in support of violence. If you are feeling sad about a failure, an elderly person might come and try to console you with this aphorism. That idea has a life bigger than the Gita itself, growing up I heard it from people who've never read the Gita. (Just like many Christians don't actually read the bible, but have various notions about what it says).
Which is how it relates to our discussion - You can be very driven and truth+outcome oriented without actually tying your ego to the outcome. Loss of ego need not imply loss of drive.
Interesting -- before your post I associated the idea of ego-less duty with bushido, the samurai way of life / honour code.
That is interesting, because disregarding consequences to oneself is pretty heroic, but disregarding consequences to others... can be pretty dangerous. I can see how a dictator could abuse it Rwanda style "your duty to your nation is to kill all the Others, regardless of the consequences to them"... and yet, India is largely a democratic place today not known for unusually many atrocities e.g. not massacring civilians in the Kargil War or stuff like that, so it seems like that bullet was kind of dodged and this kind of very dangerous interpretation not used.
Right, but you're not literally disregarding the consequences - Krishna was very much in favor of consequentialism over deontological constraints (In this scenario, the deontological constraint was "thou shalt not murder" and Krishna said "except for the greater good") ... at least within that particular dialogue. The consequences are all that matter.
What you're doing is not being attached to the consequences. To put it in effective altruist terms, disregarding the ego makes you favor utility over warm fuzzies: Warm fuzzies appeal to your ego, which is tied to the visceral sensation that helping has on you, rather than the actual external objective measures of helping.
(Ultimately, of course, squeezing philosophy out of thousand year old texts is a little like reading tea leaves, and the chosen interpretation generally says more about the reader than the writer. It's not a coincidence that my interpretation happens to line up with what I think anyway.)
The cultural meme for non-violence for vedics is pretty strong. As far as I know, it's the only culture for which vegetarianism is a traditional moral value (though I suppose the availability of lentils might have contributed to making that a more feasible option.)
I think that's a necessary safeguard, because otherwise "doing what must be done without being attached to the consequences" can lead to pretty ugly places.