Will_Newsome comments on The curse of identity - LessWrong

121 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 17 November 2011 07:28PM

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Comment author: AnnaSalamon 17 November 2011 11:56:10PM *  29 points [-]

I've seen this tried, for this stated purpose. My impression of the results was that it did not at all lead to careful, on-the-margins consequentialist thinking and doing. Instead, it led to a stressed out, strung out person trying desperately to avoid more pain/shame, while also feeling resentful at the world and themselves, expecting a lack of success from these attempts, and so acting more from local self-image gradients, or drama-seeking gradients, than from any motives attached to actual hope of accomplishing something non-immediate.

"Signaling motives" can be stuck on a scale, from "local, short-sighted, wire-heading-like attempts to preserve self-image, or to avoid immediate aversiveness or seek immediate reward" to "long-term strategic optimization to achieve recognition and power". It would be better to have Napoleon as an ally than to have a narcotics addict with a 10 minute time horizon as an ally, and it seems analogously better to help your own status-seeking parts mature into entities that are more like Napoleon and less like the drug addict, i.e. into entities that have strategy, hope, long-term plans, and an accurate model of the fact that e.g. rationalizations don't change the outside world.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 07 August 2012 02:05:49AM *  2 points [-]

Heyo, after your correction I still think the main thrust of my reply isn't changed. Your correction mostly just makes me wrong to think that you argued that people that disendorse their status-seeking parts don't have long-term plans, rather than that their long-term planning rationality is worsened. I think I still disagree that their planning is worsened though, but my disagreement is sort of subtle and maybe not worth explaining given opportunity costs. I also stand by my main and mostly-orthogonal points about the importance of not dealing with demons (alternatively, "not making concessions to evil" or summat);—another person you could talk to about that theme would be Nick Tarleton, whose opinion is I think somewhere between ours but is (surprisingly) closer to mine than yours, at least recently. He's probably better at talking about these things than I am.

Thanks for the brief convo by the way. :)