I think you are referring to ice-cream discussions.

Also, ice cream is trivial and not something I would probably ever bring up, unless we were specifically on the topic of "our ideas on the healthiness of ice-cream" (and then I'd only mention my ideas on the healthiness of ice-cream, not whether they should eat it). In the original comment I was answering in form of something that seemed important enough to be an issue.

(Upvoted)

That would not be a way to say it respectfully. Or desirably!

Probably the best way to think about what I mean by doing it respectfully is "would this make the person unhappy or uncomfortable?" If yes, that's not what I mean (this is a hard point for me to convey - I can say "respectfully" but it's hard to map to a case where the person isn't displeased, though that is what I'm talking about).

So what I would do (and was imagining). The person is comfortable with their weight. Ideally, they're happy, outgoing, achieving good things, being successful. The person enjoys eating ice-cream, they aren't going to change this soon, I know this, they know the things I know, and it's not a problem. If I thought it would bother someone, if there was nothing actually unique and useful I could point out to them, I wouldn't.

But if they asked me, while feeling pretty comfortable about themselves and looking to branch out, if I thought they might be able to lose weight, maybe be a little healthier, I would say "Yeah, of course!" (with the implication "You're certainly going to succeed, if that's what you want to do.") If they seem bothered, I'd mention that it's all good, certainly no need to if they don't want to. (Verbal tone here is important, and unfortunately difficult to express through this text.)

and if I knew them well,

I used this as a shorthand for "this is the sort of thing we could talk about happily, and that the person was interested in". (In my comment above, I mentally mapped to a case where I might actually convey helpful and/or unique information.)

None of this was very clear about my comment. "working to avoid any stigma", "respectfully pointing out" and "if they want more ice cream I'll support their decision" are tightly clustered descriptions of underly-specified things. The main thing is "is the person happy", "have I made them look bad," "are they interested," and "am I actually helping". I would point something out when the answers are anticipated-yes, anticipate-no, yes, and yes.

This is going to be controversial unless everybody somehow agrees that their wish is "wrong" by some standard.

Currently, even implying that someone is wrong makes a person look bad. For the person to be comfortable, it's very helpful to look after their reputations. This is part of why I wouldn't bring up the ice-cream thing in public. (The ice-cream isn't actually something I would care about - to my personal diet views, it's probably healthier than bread. But if you mapped it to a more serious analogous case.)

I cannot think of any objective standard to judge when such paternalism would be appropriate and when it wouldn't

Rather than an objective standard, I find it more helpful to think about my personal behavior. How much do I want other people to trust me? The more trust I want and the more I want them to be comfortable, the more I can look out for their interests.

This thinking (people cannot be trusted knowing what's good for them) is something nobody is willing to accept in general, but everyone is perfectly willing to accept in some specific cases or other.

I'm not sure there are actually cases where I'm perfectly willing to accept it, except for cases of trivial importance. Even if I go against their wishes, I'm quite averse to it.

Yeah, it's one of the trade-off cases. In general, I try to change the person's mind if I can, respectfully pointing out that my own belief is that that's going to harm them, but sure if they want more ice cream I'll support their decision. Broadly, I try to change people's minds and do what good I can for them, but avoid getting in the way of what they think they want now.

In the actual ice cream case, I'd likely just give them more ice cream while working to avoid any stigma attached to their weight or eating habits. If it were just us alone, and if I knew them well, then I'd be more likely to say something. My main goal would be to have them feel comfortable, that there's nothing wrong with them and there's nothing to be ashamed of, but if they want to be healthier or foxier, I bet they'd be very successful if they got more in shape. (I don't actually know much about weight solutions, but solutions for problems are usually findable.)

Your weakness as a writer (IMHO) is verbosity and generality (the two are often related).

I've been thinking about this, and I think that is my biggest problem. It actually seems related to the way I talk as well - I often recall over-informing in person.

The most recent post is something of a different style, hopefully shorter and easier to read. I look forward to getting feedback.

• Supergoals and goals known, but unconscious affective death spirals or difficulties in actioning a far goal are interfering with the supergoals.
• Supergoals and goals known, goal is suboptimal.
• Supergoals not known consciously, subgoal known but suboptimal given knowledge of supergoals.

You bring up a really good point here. I would say that my unconscious thinking was making oversights and unexamined assumptions in the pursuit of goals. For example, thinking "Okay there's a bunch of stuff that I want, but if I just become super effective at reaching goals generally, then I'll get those things automatically." Because it was overlooking other ways of reaching these goals, it both failed to be motivated by some helpful things, like programming study even if not impressive, and it also thought less creatively about how to hit the supergoal.

I have indeed been considering other routes. At the same time, there are some upvotes - a few people seem to be gaining something. If even one or two people can find ways to reach their goals significantly better, I would be happy with that. But even if the ideas bounce off LW completely, I still support some of the things LW does, and I don't want to get in the way of that. I'll see how it goes, but yes this is something I'm considering.

I appreciate your thinking here, but I'm worried that this is just going to turn into a thread where people list random songs they like. I mean, if "a cool love song" qualifies...

Great point, and a concern. At least for me, these songs are very particular. I have about 5000 songs in my collection, and about 300 made it into this list. Distinguishing this kind of song was something I found time-intensive, and there are many songs I enjoyed but that didn't actually make me motivated to go do things. My hope is that these particular songs are likely to be helpful - I think my past self would have really been helped by having something like this.

If emotional responses to songs are substantially personal in nature, it might be more interesting to discuss what mix of emotions most helps motivation, so everyone can solve their own optimization problem.

That's an excellent point. For me, the emotions can be either good or bad, but the critical thing is that the song is about a good thing I plan to increase or a bad thing I plan to decrease, that I am fully able to make that change, and that the song is not about looking impressive.

One of the main reasons I didn't include many songs is that I don't expect them to have this kind of association for others, though they do for me. And I expect other people to find songs that work for them but not for me. The only thing that really matters is that it works for you.

I am primarily referring to the unconscious drives underlying our actions, not our verbal goals. No matter what term I used to describe it, when I imagined myself doing very well in general relative to other people, spending every moment in focused and topical optimization, I was excited and driven to pursue the things I expected to make me like that. If I anticipated outcomes that did NOT involve me being that kind of person, there was far less unconscious drive to act.

Being hyper-competent was not a subgoal of programming or business, and if it were I would have your same critique. Being hyper-competent was a subgoal of having social success, having riches, being safe, a general assessment of "able to succeed even in difficult situations." Programming and business were rather what seemed consciously to be the best specific routes for achieving these things, but they involved not being the sort of hyper-competent person, and because I unconsciously desired that so much I was not, in practice, driven to pursue programming or business.

Similarly, unless you have already developed high competence in many concrete tasks, how would you recognise a mind that was a perfectly honed instrument for realizing your goals?

The term "perfectly honed instrument" is meant to convey an intuitive sense, not a technical description. But you would recognize such a person by them constantly engaging in what actually seemed to have the greatest marginal return on time, and probably by quickly developing unusually large amounts of skill.

Taboo "perfectly honed instrument", "hyper-competent" etc., and the goal dissolves.

Those terms refer to particular patterns of reality and not others - Bourne, rational!Quirrell, arguably rational!Dumbledore are all extensions of this intension. The average person is not.

Going up the pyramid of goals in such a context is an active hinderance, because the higher goals are harder to make operational.

By "going up the pyramid of goals" I'm referring to understanding more precisely the rules generating the particular, concrete situations we desire, and following a rule higher up on that pyramid. In other words, are there some things we could think of concretely, that once thinking of them, we realized were the real reason we had been motivated by something else was that we unconsciously anticipated it to lead to the first thing? This is something for each person to discover on their own, but it is something to discover.

"Beware affective death spirals on far-mode (sub)goals" or "Taboo specific terms in your goals to make them operationally useful" or possibly even "Check that your stated goals are not semantic stop-signs"

Are you doing those things already? Do they leave something left for you to desire in your rationality? These are all descriptions of much more surface-level techniques than what's being discussed here. This technique is about finding concrete things that make you think "hey, that's awesome, how can I get that?"