I'm Screwtape, also known as Skyler. I'm an aspiring rationalist originally introduced to the community through HPMoR, and I stayed around because the writers here kept improving how I thought. I'm fond of the Rationality As A Martial Art metaphor, new mental tools to make my life better, and meeting people who are strange in ways I find familiar and comfortable. If you're ever in the Boston area, feel free to say hi.
Starting early in 2023, I'm the ACX Meetups Czar. You might also know me from the New York City Rationalist Megameetup, editing the Animorphs: The Reckoning podfic, or being that guy at meetups with a bright bandanna who gets really excited when people bring up indie tabletop roleplaying games.
I recognize that last description might fit more than one person.
And I wouldn’t really try to figure out how to be happy by looking at what religions say about it.
People have been thinking about the problem for thousands of years, most of the written answers we've got come from religion and philosophy. Maybe they're all terrible answers but virtue of scholarship, sometimes I read a book and check.
(Which is—I’m sorry to say it—perfectly illustrated by your whole “let’s look at the Wikipedia page for each religion and see how many times it mentions ‘happy’ or ‘happiness’” thing. Come on! Obviously that is a nonsensical thing to be doing here! It isn’t even a “quick and dirty approximation” to anything; it’s just noise.)
I mean, not total nonsense but it isn't a very detailed way to figure this out, I just couldn't think of a better way after thinking for sixty seconds that didn't involve doing some kind of literature review on each of them.
On the contrary, Buddhism strikes me as a religion which is deeply anti-life and pro-death (very “life goals of dead people”). I would not even consider going to such people for insights about joy, of all things. Hence my somewhat incredulous comment.
Checking: Have you ever read a book to learn about Buddhism before coming to the conclusion that you wouldn't consider going to them about it? Talked to a Buddhist for a while? Read a dictionary entry? A book review of some other book?
I'm not particularly disagreeing with your conclusion at the moment, just- dude, I talked to a few Buddhists in passing, they told me a bit about what they believed, I read a book about it, I wrote a review of the book. If it bugs you that I asserted "Buddhism is unusually X" in the preamble to a book review would this go away if I added a citation from the Dalai Lama saying something to this effect, because I still have the book and I'm pretty sure there's a line in there somewhere. I have watched you assert wilder things with less evidence though so I think this is an isolated demand for pedantry.
I disagree with #1
Okay, let me try starting from before that point then.
There's a bunch of things commonly referred to as emotions. Happiness is one. Anger is another. Sadness is a third. This list is not exhaustive but there's lots of lists of emotions, here's one.
Have you ever felt any of these, such that you could say "gosh, I'm really angry right now" as a fact about the world?
basically agree with #3, and agree with what #4 says but almost certainly not with what you mean by it. (I also—obviously—disagree with the notion that these things form some kind of meaningful sequence of specificity or claim strength etc.)
- wait. You don't think happiness is a thing that people can notice about themselves, but you do think there's some kind of circumstance that makes a particular person happy? Like, I could go to the beach, and I would be happy, but I couldn't notice that fact? I put them in that order because I assumed if you were going to disagree with one of them you'd also disagree with all the ones after, so I'm pretty surprised here.
It sounds like you've got the same thing going on that the book is talking about, and I'm either labeling a different thing "compassion" in my head than you and the Dalai Lama are talking about or something else is going on.
Possible but from reading the book I think that interpretation is unlikely to be correct. The authors seemed to think empathy itself brought some joy even in these cases.
Well… hard to say. The LW mods now pass that threshold[1], but then again they’re not beginning now; they began eight years ago.
My sense is that if the mods had waited to start trying to moderate things until they met this threshold, they wouldn't wind up ever meeting it. There's a bit of, if you can't bench press 100lbs now, try benching 20lbs now and you'll be able to do 100lbs in a couple years, but if you just wait a couple years before starting you won't be able to then either.
Ideally there's a way to speed that up and among the ideas I have for that is writing down some lessons I've learned in big highlighter. I'm pretty annoyed at how hard it is to get a good feedback loop and get some real reps in here.
Yes… essentially, this boils down to a pattern which I have seen many, many times. It goes like this:
...
In this case: a bunch of people who are completely unqualified to run meetups are trying to run meetups. Can they run meetups well? No, they cannot. What should they do? They should not run meetups. Then who will run the meetups? Nobody.
There are circumstances where trying and failing is very bad. If someone is trying to figure out heart surgery, I think they should put the scalpel down and go read some anatomy textbooks first, maybe practice on some cadavers, medical school seems a good idea. I do not think meetups are like this and I do not think the majority of the organizers are completely unqualified; even if they're terrible at the interpersonal conflict part they're often fine at picking a location and time and bringing snacks. That makes them partially qualified.
The -2std failure case is something like, they announced a time and place that's inconvenient, then show up half an hour late and talk over everyone, so not many people come and attendees don't have a good time. This is not great and I try to avoid that outcome where I can, but it's not so horrible that I'd give up ten average meetups to prevent it. Worse outcomes do happen where I do get more concerned.
It's possible you have a higher bar or a different definition of what a rationalist meetup aught to be? I'm on board with a claim something like "a rationalist meetup aught to have some rationality practiced" and in practice something like (very roughly) a third of the meetups are pure socials and another third are reading groups. Which, given my domain is ACX groups, isn't that surprising. Conflict can come for them anyway.
Hrm. Maybe a helpful model here is I'm trying to reduce the failure rate? The perfect spam filter bins all spam and never bins non-spam. If someone woke up, went to work, and improved the spam filter such that it let half as much spam through, that would be progress. If because of my work half the [organizers that would have burned out/ attendees who would have been sadly driven away/ maleficers who would have caused problems] have a better outcome, I'll call it an incremental victory.
And there ought to be “centralized” efforts to develop effective solutions which can then be taught and deployed.
waves Hi, one somewhat central fellow, trying to develop some effective solution I can teach. I don't think I'm the only one (as usual I think CEA is ahead of me) but I'm trying. I didn't write much about this for the first year or two because I wasn't sure which approaches worked and which advisors were worth listening to. Having gone around the block a few times, I feel like I've got toeholds, at least enough to hopefully warn away some fools mates.
. . . okay, wait, looking at your other comments below in this thread was this supposed to be a joke?
The ham sandwich replacement works pretty well in my head, I don't understand the Olympic medal analogy, and the lottery tickets thing is confusing to me. I agree people can be mistaken about what they want (though I don't default to assuming that) and I'm confused what you think a lot of people actually want and mistake for wanting to be happy? We seem to have some kind of communication problem or alternately pretty different experiences of happiness, and I'm not sure what's going on here. I'm glad we're on the same page about thinking by the clock and being strategic at least.
I'm going to try zooming way way out, and dropping any particular technique (mine or from the book.) Can you tell me where in these sequence you start to disagree, or alternately if you agree with all of the below?
Things I am not saying:
Largest world religions by followers: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Folk Religion. I know Christianity decently, and while joy is something you're sometimes supposed to get out of a life lived in accordance with God it isn't the point. (There are many Christian variants, I haven't dug into every interpretation, I think I'm generally right here.) Islam, I thought I read the Quran at one point but admit I can't remember much of anything. For Hinduism I read the Bhagavad Gita and remember the outline and some choice quotes, I assert that happiness is part of it but mostly in a "be happy filling your pre-destined role" way. Folk Religion is a grab bag of a bunch of different things and I can't tell why that got lumped under one category.
Sanity check; "happiness" or "happy" shows up 5 times in the Buddhism wikipedia page, 0 times on the Islam wikipedia page, 0 times on the Christianity wikipedia page, 1 time on the Judaism wikipedia page, and 2 times on the Hinduism page (one of those in a footnote.)
I am not Jewish, but the joke I've heard from several Jews is that Jewish holidays follow the structure "first they tried to kill us, then we won, let's eat"? I'm not saying that doesn't have a happy ending but step one is pretty bad. C'mon, Judaism doesn't have a monopoly on eating delicious food for holidays!
Do you want to be happy?
"No" is an answer. Maybe you want personal growth, maybe you want the accomplishment of some goal, maybe you want a ham sandwich. If you did want to be happy, and commenting on LessWrong posts did not make you happy, then I think you should consider what you're doing for a couple minutes then go do something else which will make you happier.
Lots of people want to be happy. Uh, citation needed and I don't have one. I think actively pursuing happiness is a pretty normal thing to do, albeit subject to all the usual mistakes that people usually make in pursuing any of their goals. I am in general a fan of people thinking for a few minutes by the clock about how to get what they want, maybe getting a little strategic about it. If being happy is not the thing you want then I suggest going and doing things that you think will get you what you want.
Right now I'm writing a reply to a LessWrong comment. I don't particularly expect this to make me happy. Earlier today though, I was playing some Magic: The Gathering with some friends, which did make me happy. I did that that because I was talking to them a week ago and had a thought something like "oh, hanging out with friends usually makes me happy, playing Magic usually makes me happy, I should see if they want to draft sometime" and then we planned a draft and invited people over. It worked pretty well!
Maybe I’m missing something here, but… actively pursuing “happiness” is already a somewhat weird thing to be doing to begin with; trying to pursue happiness by asking whether the thing that you’re doing will bring you happiness seems like an almost wholesale confusion.
Allow me to present the same outline with a few text replacements.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but… actively pursuing “a ham sandwich” is already a somewhat weird thing to be doing to begin with; trying to pursue a ham sandwich by asking whether the thing that you’re doing will bring you a ham sandwich seems like an almost wholesale confusion.
I dunno, that's how I've gotten most of my ham sandwiches. Seems a pretty good general approach.
I think of Ziz and co as less likely than 2std out, for about the reasons you give. I tend to give 200 as the rough number of organizers and groups, since I get a bit under that for ACX Everywhere meetups in a given season. If we're asking per-event, Dirk's ~5,000 number sounds low (off the top of my head, San Diego does frequent meetups but only the ACX Everywheres wind up on LessWrong, and there are others like that) but I'd believe 5,000~10,000.