All of WSS's Comments + Replies

And, the degree to which people wanted things was even more incoherent than I thought. I thought people wanted things but didn't know how to pursue them.

How does one figure out goals and what to want? Usually I find myself following the gradient of my impulses. When I can find coherent goals, executing is relatively straightforward. Finding goals in the first place is IMO much harder. If you map it onto the question of how to find meaning in life, it’s more colloquially recognizable as a hard thing!

1CstineSublime
As someone with the opposite problem, who can babble countless goals that interest me, and is rigidly married to a few interrelated ones (i.e. make music videos, make films) but struggling to execute them anywhere near to my liking, I hope I can provide some insight into how to find goals or what you want. I believe that big goals are no different than small goals in terms of finding them. I'll be happy to write a post on this if any of this seems intriguing or useful but here's the dotpoints: * If you have heroes, who are they? What adjectives would you use to describe them? For example, I would describe one of my heroes, Miuccia Prada, as "innovative" "insightful" "paradoxical" and "sophisticated". I could make it my goal to cultivate one of these qualities in myself, and that would require finding an exercise or even enrolling in a course or activity which would allow me to do so? * i.e. the go-to example would be if you want to be more 'charismatic' take up public speaking, join a amateur theatre troupe as that is meant to be a means of developing it. * If you don't have heroes, who among your social group or friends have the traits or manners that you most envy (in a non-destructive way)? Same as above. * Both of these exercises can be inverted by looking at people you detest or at least have a strong aversion to. Pride and Shame are good indicators too of what you want. * Coming up with goals is easy, committing to them is hard. Just babble. Here's a template: "I would feel proud if I had a reputation based on fixing/making X". Prune out the ones that don't elicit a passionate response.  * Analyze your Revealed Preferences on groceries as an Economist would. Everything from buying biodegradable dishwashing detergent to anti-aging wrinkle cream to tickets to a  UFC match are all commitments to a certain lifestyle or living with certain principals or values. Those commitments should point you towards broader patterns of goals Okay sure? But what work
2Ben Pace
I make space in my week to be bored, and where there are no options for short-term distractions that will zombify me (like videogames or YouTube). I usually find that ideas come to me then that I want that take a bit more work but will be more satisfying, like learning a song on the guitar or reading a book or doing something with a friend. Chatting with friends who are alive and wanting things is another way I notice such things in myself, usually I catch some excitement from them as I'm empathizing with them. I wrote the above before reading Anna's comment to see how our answers differed; seems like our number 1 recommendation is the same!  Cleaning things out also works for me, I did that yesterday and it helped me believe in my ability to make my world better.  I also concur with the grieving one, but I never know how to communicate it. When I try, I come up with sentences like "Now vividly imagine failing to get the thing you want. Feel all the pain and sorrow and nausea associated with it. Great, now go get it!" but that doesn't seem to communicate why it helps and reads to me like unhelpful advice.

I am pretty far from having fully solved this problem myself, but I think I'm better at this than most people, so I'll offer my thoughts.

My suggestion is to not attempt to "figure out goals and what to want," but to "figure out blockers that are making it hard to have things to want, and solve those blockers, and wait to let things emerge."

Some things this can look like:

  1.  Critch's "boredom for healing from burnout" procedures.  Critch has some blog posts recommending boredom (and resting until quite bored) as a method for recovering one's ability
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3CronoDAS
This is often my problem - I think "I could probably do it if I really wanted to" and "I'm not doing it", and conclude "Therefore I don't really want to do it (strongly enough)."

Talking about frame control, the implicit message of looking at your phone while someone is talking to you is “I’m bored and I don’t respect you enough to fake it”. The frame OP was imposing consciously or unconsciously was that the speaker was low status enough that she could publicly ignore them with impunity, and they were right to call her out on it.

More generally, I have a pretty poor view of the post’s argument in general. Frame control is just another word for value and status alignment, aka most of normal human interaction. This is only a danger to... (read more)

If this post piqued your interest, I’d highly recommend Principles of Neural Design as an overview of our current knowledge of the brain. It starts from a bottom level of energy conservation and information theoretical limits, and builds on that to explain the low-level structures of the brain. I can’t claim to follow all the chemistry, but it did hammer home that the brain as far as we can tell is near maximally efficient at its jobs.

I think this is attitude is incredibly common among a lot of sports and hobbies outside the mainstream. In the US at least, the significant popularity of basketball, football, etc. over rec-league-only sports such as ultimate frisbee, quidditch, etc. means that the mainstream sports are a much stronger sieve to filter out genuine talent and skill. Perhaps consider that part of the reason you learn to play the digiridoo is that its way easier to become one of the comparatively best digiridoo players in your community than violinist. Consider also that this ... (read more)

I think a good tie in here is the idea that we all have various forms of capital: social capital (your relationships / tribe), personal capital (your skills), and financial capital (your money / property). The reason to frame these as capital is to prime the notion that these are all fungible goods that can be exchanged for one another, and that all lie on the same axis of giving the owner more options and greater leverage. On one level this is just describing the halo effect, but I think you could also use it as the explanation. If capital in one area can

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Here’s my take on a good Venn diagram layout that doesn’t try to convey extra information, and avoids the problems you and the parent mentioned: https://i.imgur.com/tKPzfLM.png. Make the rectangles full height, and give them rounded corners so it’s clear that these are subsets of a larger space and not just vertical bars (it’s unclear with square corners that there are 2 overlapping sets and not 3 adjacent). Only caveats are that this is not instantly recognizable like your standard Venn diagram, and is only really usable for 2 subsets.

2Conor Moreton
Yeah. I hadn't thought to go full column height, but this definitely resembles one of the options I thought was most promising. I think you may have identified the best option for square diagrams that match the use case in this post.

6: When will it end?

Brook: You know what, I think it’s far more likely that you’re messing with me than you actually shot me. But I’ll concede that it is possible that you did actually shoot me, and the only reason I’m standing here talking to you is because I am forced to take an Everett branch that allows me to be standing here talking to you.

Avery: Well actually, in most of them you end up bleeding out on the floor while you tell me this.

B: And then I die.

A: From my perspective, yeah, most likely. From yours, there will be some branches where a team

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