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Decius comments on Three more ways identity can be a curse - Less Wrong Discussion
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You can't make decisions based on what your future self would value, any more than you can make decisions based on what your past self valued. Even with TDT.
"Be yourself" means "do not suppress your identity". It involves avoiding the trap of thinking e.g. that because your knowledge of Asian adult film stars is low-status, you should conceal it even at the cost of added stress. If you are playing status games, you don't want to be yourself- you want to be high status. If you are not playing status games, your status is irrelevant and you should act accordingly.
Depression (a chemical state of the brain) is not laziness, nor lack of motivation, nor akrasia, nor lack of motivation. If you are referring to something other than a chemical state, try using 'melancholy'.
Personally, I have found that tying performance to ability to self-image is helpful at improving both, provided I also make careful use of cognitive dissonance: I deny that poor performance is the result of poor ability, breaking the negative feedback, while associating good performance with high ability and good identity. It's often uncomfortable identifying how my forced perception of high ability is compatible with focusing effort on improving my ability to meet standards, but I prefer it to the possibility of having high ability and high performance but low self-image (imposter state).
Basically, I explicitly prefer high self-image to low self-image regardless of ability or performance, and doublethink well enough that the mutual boosts dominate the exchange.
Why not? There's at least one predictable value shift I can think of coming from human biology, namely puberty, that a hypothetical prepubescent rationalist should absolutely take into account when planning sufficiently far into the future.
Yeah, but you're not going to value what your future self is going to value unless your utility function already includes "increase future self's utility" in it.
There's another value shift that every non-cyronicist has along with every believer in the second law of thermodynamics. Should we take that value shift into account while we live?
That isn't what "be yourself" means. Furthermore, if that was what the phrase meant, "be yourself" would be terrible advice to listen to. I don't talk about Asian adult film stars in places where it is inappropriate because I have an "identify" of a) not being entirely socially incompetent and b) not being wilfully irrational and sabotaging myself. Adapting to the social environment one finds oneself in is not a weakness, it don't mean you have sacrificed your identity. It indicates that you are well rounded individual who is adaptable, self aware and comfortable. A strong identity doesn't need to prove itself in every conversation via counter-productive self-expression.
False. (See Villiam's explanation.)
Misleading. While people's mental state's are based on chemical states and depressed individuals tend to have some differences in certain aspects of that chemical state, depression itself is not defined in terms of chemicals. In both theory and practice depression is a label based on a cluster of symptoms. So while lack of motivation does not constitute depression, lack of motivation combined with several other symptoms from the relevant group would.
What do you do when it is appropriate? Example: group is playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, and someone says "Why don't we try something crazy, like an Asian porn star? Do you pretend to be ignorant of the names of Asian porn stars because having that information is low-status, or do you volunteer the names that you know?
Territory and map in the depression discussion: The symptoms are what can be seen in living individuals, because the chemistry cannot be nondestructively measured. It's worth noting that by a strict interpretation of the DSM, only the diagnostic symptoms of depression qualify as immediate causes; suicide attempts cause depression, not the other way around.
I think you, and possible also the DSM, are confusing efficient cause, material cause, and formal cause.
I think that I'm accurately representing the implications of using a strict interpretation of the DSM definitions, where 'three out of five' is the necessary and sufficient condition for a disease to exist.
"suicide attempts cause depression, not the other way around." This can't be right. Speaking for myself, it's definitely wrong.
Even when you are not playing status games, other people notice your status, and it influences how they react on you. So unless your goal is completely independent on other people, you should pay some attention to your status.
For example, let's say that my goal is to find new people to join our local rationalist group. If I appear completely low status, most people won't even listen to me. And if they will, they will most likely associate LW as "something low-status people care about", so they will avoid it. Maybe one person in thousand will look at LW anyway, overcome the association with low status, and join. Yes, it is possible... but I made it needlessly difficult. You don't get extra points for getting the same result in a more difficult way.
On the other hand, if I appear high status, people are more likely to listen to me, more likely to remember what I said (until they get home and start their computers), and more likely to overcome the initial obstacles (e.g. to read a few articles from the Sequences). Then of course, some people will stay and most of them will leave. But the results will be much better than in the first situation, because more people who "have a chance to become a rationalist" really got the information, looked at the website, and didn't give up at the first obstacle.
People are like that. You should know it, and you should include this information in your plans. Even in rebel groups, there are high-status rebels and low-status rebels, and the high-status rebels have more say about the shape of the rebellion. Even the self-image is kind of a status of oneself in one's own eyes.
The true part is that if you optimize for something else and only use status instrumentally, at some points you sacrifice some additional status for more gains in the area you care about. Which will result is less status than if you optimized for status instead.
To use my previous example, I wouldn't want to make myself (and by proxy, the rationalist community) appear so high status that people interacting with me would be too shy to join. Even the fact that I am inviting people to join is not status-maximizing. (A status-maximizing step would be to tell them they are not worthy to join.) Therefore I am not trying to maximize my status... but I need to keep it high enough to get the message through.
Now that I think about it, I interchangably used "identity" and "status" in the post while the two are actually very distinct things. Identity is "I am" statements. If you're optimizing for identity you're trying to get as many people as possible to agree with the statement "I am __", where in the blank goes "a goth", "a nice guy", "intelligent", "rational", "a Democrat", etc. Whereas status is a consequence of at least two cognitive algorithms in our brain left over from tribal times, one which instantly assigns a status value to the people we interact with, and another that constantly maintains a status value for ourselves (self-esteem). If you're optimizing for status, you're trying to get other people's brains to assign you high status.
I would argue that optimizing for identity is mostly useless unless you're Boring Bob, or you need to fit in with a certain group of people who hate outsiders. Optimizing for status, on the other hand, is probably almost always useful, although you can of course be low-status and have healthy and satisfying social and romantic relationships.
I might edit the post to make this clearer.
I do not concur and I think this statement shows we are talking about different things.
Identity is the territory which informs "I am __" maps. Optimizing for identity doesn't mean convincing other people that their map of you is consistent with your map of you, it means at most making your map of yourself as accurate as possible.
That means that playing the status game is instrumentally useful. Play the status game when it is instrumentally useful. If playing the status game is inherently useful, play the status game. If neither is true, do not play the status game.
If your identity includes "Effective Recruiter for meetups", then maintaining an appropriate status better be part of being yourself.
The official definition of depression in the US is in the DSM-V and doesn't say anything about the chemical basis. If a bunch of psychological symtoms are present the person is per definition depressed.
Different people who are depressed are probably depressed for different reasons on the chemical level.
Using the official definition requires that we accept that the symptoms cause the depression. That conclusion is absurd, therefore the premise is absurd.
Of course, I've just realized that means that I've been using a nonstandard definition, but I think the OP was too.
No, depression is a term that describes symptoms. There are probably various distinct causes that can produce those symptoms.
You can cause a depression by hitting someone strongly on the head. Sometimes depression is produced by the way an individual deal with an emotional trauma.
I don't really think this is possible to do.
Of course, the example I gave assumes that Alice has the capability of self-modifying in the area of what she's passionate about, and not in the area of how much money she needs to be happy, whereas in reality for many people it may be the other way around.
Okay, but depression is a condition that often causes laziness. I'm not sure exactly what part of the post you're disagreeing with - if it's the quoted text, then that was written by probably one of the world's biggest contributors to the study of depression, so I don't think you should try to correct him unless you have strong credentials.
I was specifically objecting to where you generalized depression and low self-esteem as being similar or having similar effects. I suspected a four-term syllogism error when you summarized the expert opinion.
I have different objections to the conclusions of the people who study depression, and I don't recognize their contributions as constituting an authority that can be appealed to. That's mostly because they have a track record of being unable to predict the effects of an intervention.
I suspect a large part of that is because they also frequently make the mistake of implicitly taking the same half-reductionist position you take in this comment.
That's poor predictive ability regarding the result of an outcome.
The chemistry-as-cause belief is because the mechanism used to identify potential interventions is based on chemistry that is intended to make the brains harder to distinguish in destructive testing. Chemistry causing emotions and altering mental states is well documented and uncontroversial; depression being a chemical state with specific visible symptoms is exactly as strange as drunkenness being such a state.
The mistake I'm addressing, what I called "half-reductionist" in the parent, is the belief (or alief) that mental processes split into two types:
1) those that are reducible to physical/chemical processes and thus can only be analyzed or affected by chemicals,
2) those that aren't reducible and thus are analyzed or affected by psychology.
My point is that this distinction doesn't correspond to anything in reality.
How about 1) those that have been largely reduced to physical/chemical processes and thus can be analyzed or affected directly
2) those that have not yet been reduced and thus are handled differently.
First, why is this distinction relevant to the comment you made in the ancestor?
Second, the brain is a complicated system. Naively playing with the inner workings of a complicated system tends to result in all kinds of unintended consequences. In other words, just because we have some idea what chemical state corresponds to depression, doesn't mean using chemicals is the best way to treat it.
It does mean that you shouldn't conflate atypical serotonin levels with temporary loneliness after one's cat died by calling both of those 'depression'.
Do you have research that the temporary loneliness after one's cat died does not in fact involve atypical serotonin levels?
Also why is this relevant. Your statement implied that the similarity cluster that includes laziness, lack of motivation, and akrasia does not include depression. Even if laziness say turns out to involve a different hormone, or some other chemical and/or physical process, I fail to see why that's an argument against including depression in the same similarity cluster.
Are you a non-reductionist? Is 'melancholy' not also based on the chemical/physical (potatoe/potahto) configuration of your brain?
When it can be determined with reasonable accuracy whether someone was melancholic by performing an autopsy, you can call the two comparable.
Not that it really matters regarding the grandparent (autopsies aren't arbiters of what's based on a chemical state and what isn't, and what else but a chemical state would melancholy be based on? I would agree that the chemical changes associated with melancholy are certainly more subtle, but what does that matter?), but I'd like to know more:
Where did you get the impression that it can be determined with reasonable accuracy whether someone was depressed by performing an autopsy? Do you mean hypothetically, at some future point in time? I've never heard of such a thing being done. If you mean at some future point in time, then presumably the same holds true for melancholy.
Finding some abnormalities in some patients who have previously been diagnosed with depression and tagged for an autopsy upon death, yes, that's been done. But given a dead patient of unknown depression status, diagnose depression based on the brain, with reasonable accuracy? Tell me more.
I can't find the specific reference to a controlled "is this person depressed" study, so I may have false memories about that. It's trivial to find at least one reference to non-blind studies where a major difference was found between depressed individuals and those who died suddenly of natural causes.