Recently, I was reading some arguments about Fermi paradox and aliens and so on; also there was an opinion among the lines of "humans are monsters and any sane civilization avoids them, that's why Galactic Zoo". As implausible as it is, but I've found one more or less sane scenario where it might be true.

Assume that intelligence doesn't always imply consciousness, and assume that evolution processes are more likely to yield intelligent, but unconscious life forms, rather than intelligent and conscious. For example, if consciousness is resource-consuming and otherwise almost useless (as in Blindsight).

Now imagine that all the alien species evolved without consciousness. Being an important coordination tool, their moral system takes that into account -- it relies on a trait that they have -- intelligence, rather than consciousness. For example, they consider destroying anything capable of performing complex computations immoral.

Then human morality system would be completely blind to them. Killing such an alien would be no more immoral, then, say, recycling a computer. So, for these aliens, human race would be indeed monstrous.

The aliens consider extermination of an entire civilization immoral, since that would imply destroying a few billions of devices, capable of performing complex enough computations. So they decide to use their advanced technology to render their civilizations invisible for human scientists.

What do you feel when you discover that your reasoning is flawed? when you find your recurring mistakes? when you find that you have been doing something wrong for quite a long time?

Many people feel bad. For example, here is a quote from a recent article on LessWrong:

By depicting the self as always flawed, and portraying the aspiring rationalist's job as seeking to find the flaws, the virtue of perfectionism is framed negatively, and is bound to result in negative reinforcement. Finding a flaw feels bad, and in many people that creates ugh fields around actually doing that search, as reported by participants at the Meetup.

But actually, when you find a serious flaw of yours, you should usually jump for joy. Here's why.

This is a sort-of response to this post.

"Things under your control" (more generally, free will) is an ill-defined concept: you are an entity within physics; all of your actions and thoughts are fully determined by physical processes in your brain. Here, I will assume that "things under your control" are any things that are controlled by your brain, since it is a consistent definition, and it's what people usually mean when they talk about things under one's control.

So, you may be interested in the question: how much one's success depends on his thoughts and actions (i.e. things that are controlled by his brain) vs. how it depends on the circumstances/environment (i.e. things that aren't)? Another formulation: how you can change one's life outcomes if you could alter neural signals emitted by his brain?

We also could draw the borderline somewhere else; maybe add physical traits, like height or attractiveness to the "internal factors" category, or maybe assign some brain parts to the "external factors" category. The question whether your life success is mostly determined by "internal factors" or "external factors" would remain valid -- and we call it "internal vs. external locus of control" question.

But what happens when we assign IQ to the "external factors" category?

IQ test is an attempt to measure some value, which is supposed to be a measure of something like quality of one's thinking process. So, this value can be seen as a function IQ(brain), which maps brains to numbers. Your thoughts and actions don't depend on your IQ score; IQ score depends on your thoughts. That's how the causal arrows are arranged.

But it's possible to ask, what can we change if we can change brain, conditional on the fixed IQ score. But then the "free will" intuition collapses; it's hard to imagine what we could change if our thought processes were restricted in some weird way. And such question is hardly practical, in my opinion. It's true that one can measure his IQ, and that IQ rarely changes much, but still: if you consider IQ fixed and external factor out of your control, then you must consider your thought processes restricted to some set and therefore, not totally under your control.

Define "things under your control" as "things under your brain neural signals' control", and then we will have a consistent definition, and we will find ourselves in the common sense domain. Declare that everything is under control of physics, and then we will, again, have a consistent definition of "things under your control" (empty set), and now we are in the physics domain. Both cases are quite intuitive.

But when we consider IQ external, "things under your control" are your thoughts, but not quite; we can control our thoughts, but only as long as they reside on some weird manifold of thought-space. I guess that in such case, your "free will" intuitions would be disrupted. Basically, we can't slice some part of what we call "personality" out and still have our intuitions about personality and free will sane.

TL; DR: You shouldn't consider any functions of your current brain state as external when discussing locus of control, since such viewpoint is actually counterintuitive and, therefore, makes you prone to errors.