All of MvB's Comments + Replies

Long story short, my doc and me tried methylphenidate despite my bipolar disorder. I can‘t remember ever having had such an inner calm and structured motivation. I seem to be in some weird niche of the ADHD space. Let‘s see how this proceeds, I am fairly optimistic that I am able to perform better according to my self-expectations now.

But consider: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38626-y

„We found that participants with higher intelligence were only quicker when responding to simple questions, while they took more time to solve hard questions.“

2Diziet
I thought the criticism on that specific quote was that the "higher intelligence" group, while taking more time, did solve the hard questions correctly, as opposed to not solving them correctly at all.

I was writing a lengthy answer about how I struggled with similar questions before actually becoming a father and how they all became relativized, but then it seemed a better idea to just give a little piece of advice: If you have a partner that seems adequate to you, go for it, you‘re probably already overqualified. Your words already speak of the love you will able to lavish on a child, and that is the most important thing to give. The rest is, as always, a matter of adaptation of strategy and tactics to circumstances that are beyond our control.

1Sable
Thank you, this was very kind.

This is what I needed to hear. Thank you.

Edit: I‘m not sure anymore. It gives me aches to even think about what might be worth preserving and what possibly isn‘t anymore.

Warning: potentially hazardous line of thought.

It‘s too late now for my father, but I have thought about consequences for the rest of my family that is willing to take the chance. My plan is now, in the case of onset of any type of dementia, to opt in for assisted suicide before too much damage will have occured. Careful planning should allow for near-optimal preservation, to the extent possible when and if this rather radical step becomes necessary. What could I possibly lose? Some years of cognitive and physical decline where any joy would be overshadowed by the losses.

And yes, the possibility you mentioned indeed provides at least a little comfort.

If I am still around then, I‘d be happy to lend you a hand turning over stones, no matter how long it takes.

Lyrics that came to my mind (from Bruderschaft - Forever):

I will walk this ground forever and stand guard against your name. I will give all I can offer, I will shoulder all the blame. I am sentry to you now, all your hopes and all your dreams. I will hold you to the light, that’s what forever means.

I‘ve just read „Think Again“ from Adam Grant. If vaccine whisperers succeed in convincing lots of anti-vaxxers to eventually protect their children, their approach may generalize. Even more impressive is the case of Daryl Davis, an Afro-American musician, talking hundreds of KKK members out of their white supremacist worldview.

MvB1012

I am very afraid that the best even a superintelligent AI can come up with would be uncanny puppet versions of the people we cherished or rather completely new people with just some similiarities, more akin to clone siblings than to the original individuals. What I actually want is what was left over of his connectome, and that is, for all I know, gone forever. Unless some AI can extract it from thermodynamical noise - which does not seem all that likely to me.

We don't know for sure what is personal identity and how much data is actually is needed for it, but the data is decaying while we are hesitating to collect it.

4Ilio
That might be right, but it’s also very possible that the connectome will one day prove easier to reconstruct using functional data (like a set of thoughts he would agree with, to fine tune a brain model from a distribution of possible brains given his genetic information). Brain models based on the anatomical data left from present day vitrification technics are probably excellent for C Elegans, but not necessarily as good for larger brains. Notice I might be biased from thinking to much about this for my own Alzheimer mother. Sorry for loss.

I could not really make sense of your comment, though I had actually done what you proposed a couple of years ago, until I had read Lucius Bushnaq‘s comment. Did that imply what you were trying to tell me or is there another aspect to what you call an intuitive understanding?

I cannot see how your last sentence holds. My subjective experience of time was, up to now, everything from the usual feeling of continuous time and total disarray during psychosis up to a feeling of complete timeless eternity during transcendental meditation. Instead if knowing how time feels like - I have had my share - I would like to understand how consciousness relates to time in the light of physics. Subjective experience can be deceiving in infinitely many ways, but there must be (at least I hope so) some objective underlying physical foundation for it. At least my inclination towards realism tells me that.

3Mitchell_Porter
Do the disarray of psychosis or the timelessness of meditation lead you to think that the "usual feeling of continuous time" is illusory?  My own experience of altered states comes from psychedelics, and from dreaming and sleeping. The usual feeling of continuous time leads to a certain ontology of subjective time, and one's relationship to it: continuity of time, reality of change, persistence of oneself through time, the phenomena of memory and anticipation. The altered states don't lead me to doubt that ontology, because I can understand them as states in which awareness or understanding of temporal phenomena is absent, compared to the usual waking state.  I cautioned you against using scientific ontology as your touchstone of reality, because so often it leads to dismissal of things that are known from experience, but which aren't present in current theory. For example, in your post you suppose that "spacetime is a static and eternal thing". My problem here is with the idea that reality could be fundamentally "static". It seems like you want to dismiss change or the flow of time as unreal, an illusion to be explained by facts in a static universe.  On the contrary, I say the way for humanity to progress in knowledge here, is to take the phenomena of experience as definitely real, and then work out how that can be consistent with the facts as we seem to know them in science. None of that is simple. What is definitely real in experience, what we have actually learned in science, it's easy to make mistakes in both those areas; and then synthesizing them may require genius that we don't have. Nonetheless, I believe that's the path to truth, rather than worshipping a theoretical construct and sacrificing one's own sense of reality to it. 

I wish I could pick up all your lines of thought, as I find most of them really interesting. Our energy levels seem to be very different at the moment, though - I am just recovering from mild depression and my thoughts are neither very associative nor creative right now, much less clear and coherent. I just cannot keep up with your stimulant-infused input right now.

Nevertheless, here is what I mean talking about a local optimum. I am trying to put appropriate energy into different aspects of my life, namely: Taking care of my family, doing a good job at wo... (read more)

1StartAtTheEnd
Re-reading my comments, the ideas which appeal to me are directly related to my level of arousal (dopamine level compared to baseline). It maps pretty well to the hierarchy of needs. Everything below is "boring" or "mundane" and everything above is "irresponsible" or "wasteful". You can re-read them in the future if they ever become relevant, until then you don't have to worry about them. It can help to view energy as a limited resource, but there's many kinds of energy, and fulfilling needs and building 'momentum' can give energy rather than using it. Maybe a good abstraction is the set "Physical/mental/spiritual". Your mild depression and my 10mg of ritalin don't change our actual levels of energy, but rather just our subjective feelings of energy. Worrying and stress does use energy though - thinking about work seems to use almost as much energy as actual doing the work. But stress and too much effort create waste products in the brain, which is probably why our brains make us feel tired. It's a defense against damage, like physical exhaustion. When we bypass this, with drugs or by a manic mood, we probably cause damage because we keep going without rest. It's easier said than done, but periodic effort and rest is more efficient than just the effort. The worst combination of these is pushing the accelerator and the brake at the same time. It's possible that you're pushing further and draining your limited resources (blood sugar and other cognitive resources), but there's also the possibility that you're draining other resources (neglecting seemingly less important things which help your mental health), that you're tired because of what you don't do rather than because of what you do. While the engagement in politics could stem from needless worry, it could also be an outlet for your unmet need to communicate, and the reward of correcting other people about something that you're knowledgeable about. In my own case, something drives me to websites like this o

Rather than telling me something completely new, you are actually condensing many of the things I already know in a very helpful way. I appreciate that. Instead of echoing your key points, I would rather point out where I really seem to struggle:

I my native language, which happens to be German, somewhere in the middle between the concepts of intelligence and wisdom, we have the idea of „Klugheit“. Klugheit is less about the theory of solving problems or knowing about what is the right thing to do in a given moment and in life, but all about putting it into... (read more)

1StartAtTheEnd
Do you know Nietzsche's concepts of the apollonian and dionysian, or Jordan Peterson's order/chaos duality? I think that rationalism often tends too much towards the former rather than a healthy combination of the two. Traditional wisdom is about warning and advice, which is about slowing down. This is healthier and safer for sure, but as your experiences with mania have shown, a little bit of chaos can be good. I say this because Klugheit seems to be regarded as a virtue, and all virtues tend to have these soft, calm qualities. Could it be that you're too theoretical and not practical enough? Knowing the answer is not the final step of the process, it's around the middle. Knowing how to be social, and being social, are completely different. Your knowledge only helps you when you go from memorizing it to internalizing it, making it an automatic part of yourself that you're no longer aware of. If you thought about every step you took, walking would be difficult. The knowledge has to be digested and integrated properly. If you're just learning more and more things without this process, it will appear like you know more and more, but you'd not see much benefits, which I'm sure would be discouraging. Indeed, this lack of observable benefits might make you lose faith in the knowledge that you have, so that you go searching for other knowledge, until you know the subject from so many angles and perspectives that you won't even know where to start implimenting it, a sort of having too much knowledge. No blame if that's the case, I learned all these things the hard way myself. Can you expand on what you mean about local optimum of adaptation? And have you thought about what your feeling represent? Moving away from your goal, parallel to your goal, like you're ignoring the main quest and clearing all the subquests instead, like you're doing well but seeing your personal projects stagnate due to regular life taking up too much of your time and energy? Perhaps a branch betw

This conversation increasingly develops characteristics of group therapy, but so be it.

Regarding values: Yes, the pursuit of knowledge and understanding along with the experience and creation of meaning are among what I perceive as my core values. My understanding of power has a big intersection with positive freedom and because of that, I seek more power and influence mostly as means to act upon my values. So far, so good.

Now that I have thought enough about the last few weeks and my thoughts and actions, I think I have figured out what actually bothers ... (read more)

1StartAtTheEnd
I didn't even think about that, I just like talking about these things. I will try to be somewhat concise, if anything interest you in particular I can expand on that or refer to sources which align with it (unless it's my original research) I think power is a great thing to seek, as it's perhaps the most versatile resource in existence. The overlap with freedom is true, but there's a few important things to know about freedom. Perhaps you should try learning for a specific goal? Learning for the sake of learning is fine, but there's always so much to learn. I don't even learn knowledge much anymore, but underlying core concepts. Still, effort is best when it's focused. It would perhaps be difficult if I gave you a blank piece of paper and told you to write a 1000-word story. Writer's block, etc. But if I told you to write 1000 words about power, then I think you could do that fairly quickly. People work best under some restrictions. Rules certainly helps creativity. Explaining this phenomenon is difficult, but I will make an attempt to figure it out in case it interests you. >My old ways of striving for self-transcendence are a bit at odds with my present life situation I'll be honest, I'm in the exact same position. I've always said I liked freedom, but I just really hate the chains of commitment, especially when other people dump them on me in such a way that they will fall if I pull away. Anyway, without commitment, you will never put 100% into anything, right? But that's where you shine the brightest. It's better to aim too high than too low, you need a goal that you won't hesitate on. These goals can be unified, you can improve yourself as you improve your relationship and career, and improve those so that you can improve yourself. But at least in my own case, social obligations makes it difficult to immerse myself in any of my own projects. I used to hate most of human conversation, I considered it the most inefficient method of information transferenc

Please go ahead, maybe it helps. I‘d just prefer not to give an answer before I‘ve figured out some stuff about myself.

1StartAtTheEnd
Right. I'll write some different things. Apologizes in advance for writing too much - it tends to happen when I take methylphenidate. (Btw, if stimulants stopped working for you, you might be low on B vitamins. Not sure if stimulants are a good idea if you have bipolar disorder or cyclothymia, though!) I think you might be feeling guilty because you aren't motivated to do certain tasks. There's a good reason you're not doing them. Could be anxiety about the outcomes, that they're vague tasks, that they don't have personal value to you, or that you need a break or to fulfill other needs. By the way, the hardest part is getting started, dopamine seems to sort of build up over time, rather than something which you collect before starting. Do you connect your goals to things which have meaning for you? I'm using my flaws to my advantage. I'm sort of arrogant, so if a post online says that learning 60 new words in a day is the human limit, then I will teach myself 100. That's more than I learned in an entire year in grade-school (I just couldn't be bothered). What do you actually enjoy? I enjoy experiments. I've studied while timing the impulses to stop, making a graph of these. Interestingly enough, the impulses slowed down. Turns out I can torture myself if only I'm making fun doing so. You like video games, no? I do too. Finding exploits in them has helped me a lot. I think we both came up with the idea of exploiting mania because we both like video games. And don't downplay the positive effects it has had on your spatial intelligence. A lot of what I do is actually optimize myself as a video-game character, and making your own life interesting is not much different from making a video game interesting - to disguise menial actions as meaningful fun. Virtual reality and AR is going to be big in the future, so I don't think your video game experience has been wasted. If you consider self-actualization the next game to play, wouldn't that be great? I bet you're reall

This was highly unexpected, mirroring my own experiences in a somehow unpleasant way and is indeed hazardous for me right now as I‘ve become a bit mentally unstable over the last weeks. Please give me some time to think this through and adjust.

1StartAtTheEnd
My bad! Take your time. I'm mostly okay myself, at least my mood is good, so if your troubles relate to my message I probably have an "antidote" or two. But I won't write anymore unprompted, just in case I make it worse. I hope everything works out for you!

I think I‘ve read something about the value of seemingly procrastinating behaviour a while ago. Right now, I have plenty of work to do, yet I am reading your reply and answering. Is this lost time or procrastination as commonly understood? I don‘t think so. It seems like meaningful exchange to me. And maybe updating my own self-model with the help of others is exactly what I really need right now to do better work later.

As for the feeling that something is going wrong with me: Increased awareness of the downward spiral does not easily translate into being able to stop or transform the process. It‘s part of my daily struggles.

1Johannes C. Mayer
You writing this message reflecting on if writing this message is procrastination is probably an indicator for that it is, at least not the worst form of procrastination, which would be about entering a mental state where you don't think and in some sense really don't want to think about if you are procrastinating because whatever procrastination you're doing makes you feel good or whatever and provides escapism and some parts of your brain wouldn't want to go away. At least that's my experience. The longer and harder you think about if something is procrastination and come to the conclusion that it isn't, the more evidence I would say this is that it isn't procrastination (at least especially if you're trying to correct for biases).

Well, maybe my underlying motivation for this question was the wish for some shortcut to overcome what I perceive as personal deficiencies. Throughout my life, I‘ve hardly had to work as hard as most people around me to complete mental tasks, and that has led me to live a rather decent life by now. And I‘m still making progress in terms of achievements that secure my material situation.

But being completely honest, I feel lazy and having fallen behind what I could be. The things I value most are intelligence, knowledge and understanding, and I just know a s... (read more)

4StartAtTheEnd
I've walked the same path for the most part, but I ultimately ended up elsewhere. Do you really value intelligence and knowledge, or at these things that you think other people will enjoy seeing from you? And are these core goals, or the means to something more concrete like power or influence? If your goal is actually knowledge and understanding, then my advice would be to set concrete goals, simply because vague goals confuses the brain, they prevent it from planning concrete actions, and the reward mechanism can't kick in if you don't have concrete sub-goal finish lines. You seem to be at a conflict with yourself (look up articles on 'Akrasia' for more). This problem is familiar to me, I've had to exploit my own tendency to obsess about certain things in order to get myself to study. External motivation is sort of masochistic, and rather than "pushing" yourself like this, I feel it's better to let yourself be "pulled" by something (carrot-and-stick, you know). I've got 100s of suggestions of what to do about this, and some of them are a little out there and perhaps even offensive in a way. Consinder this as a light example: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dark-arts You can use irrationality in a rational manner, just like you're trying to improve yourself by inducting what is technically mental illness. In any case, I feel like there's no objective sources to rely on, everything must come from ourselves. You know how you might start watching a movie which doesn't interest you at first, but then feel yourself getting carried away? Losing yourself in something specific might beat having a birds-eye view on things, in that the human sense of meaning is generally one of connectivity/immersion. I can write logical and objective advice, but there's already plently of that out there, and chances are that you've read a lot of it already with limited success. What I focus on is mostly the psychological side of things. Nietzsche said "You must have madness in you to give

Thank you, this has clarified the issue a lot for me regarding the time aspect of my problem, but the identity part still remains very elusive.

Answer by MvB32

Thinking about the responses, I have to come to the conclusion that this is a rather bad idea. The positive symptoms which I remember very intensely just don‘t make up for the decline in critical reflection of what one is actually doing, thinking and feeling. I had suppressed that to some extent, but it is clearly a major part of what I went through. Thanks for pointing out this aspect. Personally, I will probably try to work on healthy habits, routines and stay on my medication (what I would have done anyway).

I prefer to not examine this issue in a frame of pathologies. In the individual case, concrete symptoms and behaviours of course depend on the unique personality of the affected individual. Yet, when you know a person good enough, it is not that hard to recognize the changes taking place under hypomania, and from what I can tell they seem to generalize well. It is exactly not the possible impairments that interest me, but what I subjectively experienced as an improvement to my default condition.

I should have added that I have tried several proposed methods... (read more)

2nim
The point I'm attempting to make is that psychiatric diagnoses, such as "hypomania", are framed through a lens of pathology. A change in behavior or experience which causes no problems for the affected person and those around them would not be defined and studied in the same way that changes associated with problems are. Working from general research focused on pathologized changes of experience (ie clinical hypomania) is likely to yield resources that include negative states you'd rather not learn from while disregarding positive states that you'd prefer to emulate. Toward the goal of tailoring subjective experience, I think you're on the right track for breaking down the desired change into component parts and contemplating the parts separately at first. Whatever you end up doing, try to avoid discounting hedonic treadmill effects when assessing the sustainable effectiveness of various interventions, and try to include ambient factors such as location, sleep quality, valence of recent news exposure, etc.

Despite a little tear on the ego, it has some advantages not to be the smartest in the room. Having read here on LW a couple of years ago and now bit by bit picking up some of the stuff that happened back then and in the meantime, the dominant feeling for me isn‘t envy of the capability of others, but relief that there are enough minds in the world entertaining thoughts that at least partially reflect my own shallow ones on topics that I deem important, but have no one to talk about.

Unless it involves some mathematics that I am not accustomed to, it feels ... (read more)

2Johannes C. Mayer
I definitely think that one can become better at understanding and steering the world, by improving their cognitive algorithms. I am just saying that there are some low-level ones that can't be changed. So improvement needs to happen at a higher level. This then puts some hard limits on how much smarter you can get, and how much effort it takes to gain one unit of smartness. On the point that you are not sure what you could even do, I just want to say: Did you try? It seems like the most common failure case is to not even try. Another common failure mode to avoid would be to have the wrong expectations about how hard something is, and then give up, because it is so much harder than expected. The hardness is I guess some indication of intelligence. Some people will find doing math just much easier than others, just because they are smarter. But if you are trying to do something very hard, it might make sense to consider how somebody smart would feel doing this. Would they also struggle and find it difficult, because the problem before you is just intrinsically difficult? I think if you don't think this thought explicitly, the default implicit assumption is always that what you are doing is easy for everybody else who does it. "Writing a book is a struggle", is what I heard a professional author once say. Authors are authors, not necessarily because writing is a cakewalk for them. I would think more often than not, it is because they have managed to tune their expectations to reality, such that they no longer feel bad for taking the actually required time for completing whatever task they are working on. I found what you said about the pre-conscious feeling interesting. It made me slightly improve my model about how to avoid procrastination and depression. Normally I only procrastinate when I feel pretty down (at least the kind of "hardcore" procrastination where you do something that definitely is not productive at all, such as watching a movie or playing a videog