Jef_Allbright comments on Ask OB: Leaving the Fold - Less Wrong

9 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 November 2008 06:08PM

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Comment author: Jef_Allbright 09 November 2008 10:58:41PM 1 point [-]

Jo -

Above all else, be true to yourself. This doesn't mean you must or should be bluntly open with everyone about your own thoughts and values; on the contrary, it means taking personal responsibility for applying your evolving thinking as a sharp instrument for the promotion of your evolving values.

Think of your values-complex as a fine-grained hierarchy, with some elements more fundamental and serving to support a wider variety of more dependent values. For example, your better health, both physical and mental, is probably more fundamental and necessary to support better relationships, and a relatively few deeper relationships will tend to support a greater variety of subsidiary values than would a larger number of more shallow relationships, and so on.

Of course no one can compute and effectively forecast the future in such complex terms, but to the extent you can clarify for yourself the broad outlines, in principle, of (1) your values and (2) your thinking on how to promote those values into the future you create, then you'll tend to proceed in the direction of increasing optimality. Wash, rinse, repeat.

We wish you the best. Your efforts toward increasingly intelligent creation of an increasingly desirable world contribute to us all.