I think it depends on X. It may be something you have to evaluate on a case-by-case basis. I think if X was something that could have consequences for high-stakes or ethical decisions, I would prioritize working on it rather than working around it.

Pushing through it may not be the most effective strategy to deal with it in the long term. "Defeat X" may not be the most helpful metaphor. Defeat vs. work around could be a false dichotomy.

You may be looking for a general rule or rule-of-thumb for something where generalizations do not make sense. If you want a general rule, you may want to be more careful and specific about setting up the question. Right now, I have the impression that the question is too vague and the abstractions too mismatched to yield a useful answer.

Noticing something new doesn't mean that you have to add a new goal to your todo list. Simply noticing reality and being aware is often the best first reaction to noticing something new.

When it comes to actually adding new tasks to your todo list it makes sense to choose them in a way that helps with your overall long-term goals and vision for yourself.

“Should I work around X, or should I actively try to defeat X?”

I find that if I don't see the path to victory, I can often hem and haw like that. A solution is "baby steps".

Just start down one path, and see what you find. You don't have to have to see the full path before taking a step. If you went down a bad path, you can backtrack and go down the other.

I'm guessing that I'm not the only one here biased towards thinking over doing. Think, Choose, Do. More action, less contemplation.

This important divide is the question of optimizing around, or powering through.

The dangerous word there is "optimize". Because everything can always be better. So I try to think of a goal, and then do worse. What's the quickest, most half assed job I could do? How much of the problem would that solve? Get some solution as quick as you can, and then improve if you feel the need to. Often you won't.

[cross-posted from LW FB page. Seeking mentor or study pal for SICP]

Hello everyone,

I have decided to start learning programming, and I am beginning my journey with SICP-- I'm just a few weeks in.

I am looking for a study partner or someone experienced to chat for around 1 hour a week on Skype about the topics covered in the book to verify what I know and hopefully speed up the learning process.

Would anyone be willing to take on the above?

Thank you!

The writing style is ... potentially appealing to a certain sort of nerd. But I'm the sort of person who reads here and I stopped after the first paragraph, which has a geology joke, followed by a too-self-aware pun, then ends on the explicit statement that no one really understands handshakes. The typical mind does not know what the Mohs scale is and intuitively grasps social interactions, or at least it thinks it does.

"those pesky social interactions no one seems to get the hang of" comes across (to me) as signaling a lack of social competence and fluency then typical-minding it onto your readers, which signals low status and low awareness of self and others. Or, dropping our local jargon: "I am autistic and I have not noticed that most people aren't." You cannot hold yourself out as an expert to be listened to after undercutting yourself that much.

That feels a bit harsh but I'm going with it. As you say, you are assuming some frames of mind that are not typical. It is not just that you are not properly modeling normal people well -- it sounds as though you believe you have a great model of normal people while the presentation demonstrates the opposite.

What you're saying here in this reply suggests you think the problem is one of communicating with typical people, not understanding them. The problem is not (misunderstanding people) -> (communicating badly). Okay, it may also be that, but more so (misunderstanding people) -> (what you're telling them is wrong) because you are trying to "fix" a mind that you don't appear to understand.

Immediate ideas that come to mind: lots of CFAR goal-oriented techniques like goal factoring, pre-hindsight, murphyjitsu, seeking strategic updates, and urge propagation. You can learn those at CFAR itself or Anna might be writing up something on them at some point during this year.

From other stuff I've been exposed to: Generating 3rd option alternatives Noticing and rejecting Fool's Choices (presented with A but not B and B but not A, which you reject and then find a way to obtain both A and B) being sure to write down actual models for decision trees and assign probabilities to them finding people who failed in the past and avoid their failures thinking about what someone cleverer or craftier than you would do asking someone who is cleverer and craftier than you what they would do etc.

Some people hold on more strongly to their original beliefs if someone tries to convince them otherwise. This might have been in the book "On Being Certain."

I think this kind of persuasion is a lost cause but I am still sometimes drawn into trying, against my better judgement.

Even if you don't convince the non-rationalists you may learn some new mindgames, based on what they throw at you, their wacky justifications for their illogical ideas and their non-sequiturs.

On the other hand, I might just be off on a tangent. :(

If the person you're persuading makes a swatting motion, it means you're not getting through and your persuadee is annoyed.

It's awful. Sorry. There are probably Jehovah's Witnesses that would have had my attention for longer. In fact it's so awful that it's inviting the reader to take delight into finding ways of feeling smugly superior to the author. It's just the kind of thing to make your non-rationalist friends want to un-friend you pretty quickly.

You don't even know which were the challenges you were supposed to rise up to in this article, otherwise you'd have at least paid lip service to them. You seem to come from a place of utterly failing to understand the cause of the usual blase attitude towards super-altruism - the part of typical human psychology which makes us generally not want to take the burden of the world upon our shoulders. You have to understand that in order to argue persuasively against it. Instead you just assume the contrary as a default. You also don't understand why hard things are hard, that is, hard as in, you don't just read an essay on the internet and decide that your aversion to doing a superhuman effort towards an unlikely goal is suddenly a thing of the past. And the writing itself flows as well as nails on a chalkboard. You can almost physically feel the pat on the head.

Your friends are not going to become optimizers or effective altruists. Especially not as a result of this essay. Get over it. It's a sign that their excessive-earnestness antibodies are working well, and that they have a well-calibrated sense of perspective with respect to their likely impact on the world. Sure, it wouldn't be good morals to try to talk you out of your itch to improve the world, as it might seem like I'm doing, but at the very least you could go about it in a less socially and psychologically oblivious way, because proselytizing for weird causes is textbook How To Lose Friends and Alienate People.

This article looks like a good Part 1 of Many. I would normally expect this article to be followed by several more that go into detail about what good, rational planning actually looks like and how to do effective and useful research on topics like these.

Breaking things down into smaller parts and doing research sound like good ideas #1 and #2 of 20 or 30 needed to do really awesome planning.