evand comments on I need a protocol for dangerous or disconcerting ideas. - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Eitan_Zohar 12 July 2015 01:58AM

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Comment author: Eitan_Zohar 12 July 2015 05:15:57AM *  0 points [-]

People who work on drugs to cure horrible diseases don't spend 24/7 in an airtight suit in the lab, dropping samples on the floor because their hands are shaking. They go home and watch football and play card games and go to the kids' school play and stuff.

If they or their kids have the horrible disease? I think they'd react differently.

But being unable to disengage from the Big Problems and live your little ordinary life is not heroism, and it actively gets in the way of solving any of those Big Problems.

Not my Big Problems; they get solved from doing just that.

Find a meditation teacher and spend some time doing that. Practice > theory.

I'm going to have to disagree. I thought you were talking about philosophy when you mentioned "notions of personal identity and continuity, and whether this is an illusion."

Comment author: evand 14 July 2015 04:53:11PM 2 points [-]

But being unable to disengage from the Big Problems and live your little ordinary life is not heroism, and it actively gets in the way of solving any of those Big Problems.

Not my Big Problems; they get solved from doing just that.

How do you know? The question isn't whether obsessing fixes the problem; it's whether taking breaks speeds up the overall process. You don't need tons of hours to fix the problem; as you said earlier, a few minutes to explain the right insight is quite sufficient. What you actually need is the right few minutes of work, spent finding the right key insights.

Thinking longer about a problem is only helpful to the degree it produces new insights. As you've found, this can be very inefficient. If taking a break and not worrying about an unsolved problem increases the efficiency of future problem-solving even a little bit, it could well be worth it.