I've faced this problem and partially overcome it. I'll try my best to describe this. However, I've also been diagnosed with depression and prescribed SSRIs in the past, so my approaches to handling the problem may not fit you.
You have acquired your estimates of the dangers of the future by explicit reasoning. The default estimates that your emotional, unconscious brain provided you with were too optimistic. This is the case for almost everyone.
Consider that even though you have realized the future is bleak, your emotional, unconscious, everyday-handling mind still hasn't updated its estimates. It is still too optimistic. It just needs to be allowed to express this optimism.
Right now, you probably believe that your emotional outlook must be rational, and must correspond to your conscious estimates of the future. You are forcing your emotions to match the future you foresee, and so you feel afraid.
I suggest that you allow your emotions to become disconnected from your conscious long-term predictions. Stop trying to force yourself to be unhappy because you predict bad things. Say to yourself: I choose to be happy and unafraid no matter what I predict!
Emotions are not a a tool like r...
Does anyone have suggestions as to an appropriate response?
This is the universal condition of mankind.
Adulthood is grokking this.
I like the ring of truth in this but I have great difficulty with it. Like, to the point that it's becoming a problem.
Other people stop wanting the impossible, wanting more instant gratification than is good for them, wanting easier solutions than exist, etc., but I never, ever stop wanting all of it. Sometimes I feel like a great hungry maw with an infinite sweet tooth. Utterly unreconciled with the "universal condition of mankind" and unready to grapple with it.
This is a good point. It occurs to me that a disproportional number of people in this forum may have had the experience growing up of being the smartest, most promising kid in class. Maybe you were always put into the advanced classes even in subjects you weren't interested in. As you advance, the competition gets a little tougher, but you learn to push yourself, too.
For the overwhelming majority of people, this cycle has to end, early or late, with the shock of realizing that you are finally out of your league. Some poor bastard had to come to terms with knowing that he was obviously the dumbest physicist on the Manhattan Project, a net drag on the team.
The overwhelming number of people in historical times have died and been forgotten. How many people have lived? And of those, how many could possibly be even assigned a name by any historical records, let alone a place in popular memory?
Some poor bastard had to come to terms with knowing that he was obviously the dumbest physicist on the Manhattan Project, a net drag on the team.
Q: What do they call the person who graduates at the bottom of their class at medical school?
A: Doctor.
Civilization might collapse; I might get hit by a bus; or I might just claw through some of my biases but not others, make poor choices, and fail to accomplish much of anything.
If those things are true, then you were already enduring the possibility. Admitting it doesn't make it worse.
Rationality has stripped me of some of my traditional sources of confidence that everything will work out OK, but it hasn't provided any new ones -- there is no formula that I can recite to myself to say "Well, as long as I do this, then everything will be fine."
What do you need that confidence for?
In the last day or two, it's occurred to me that nearly all I have ever done in my life is try to solve problems and find the "right" answers, and one particularly perplexing puzzle I've been trying to solve, cannot be answered "correctly". It can only be answered by an essentially arbitrary choice on my part - a choice of what I want the answer to be.
One would think that this would be easy, then, but the catch is that to be "right", the choice has to be a choice, not an attempt to divine an optimal answer -- one that brings me the most pain or least pleasure...
I think I could help, but it would take a while. I seriously need someone else to be able to start doing that helping in the not so long term. For now, I will flatly assert that I expect an intense, rational effort to succeed by a quite moderate number of otherwise ordinary people to be enough to swing the balance for the light-cone's future, but such an effort must actually acknowledge human realities and work with them, rather than punishing people for their imperfections.
This might help:
If you genuinely attempt to succeed, then other people like you will also attempt to succeed, for the same reason rationalists can cooperate in the Prisoner's Dilemma. They will do so even if you get hit by a bus.
You are not alone.
Over on Hacker News, DanielBMarkham suggested a book detailing a modern take on the philosophy of stoicism. I got the book, and find it valuable. I don't agree with everything in it, and wish it had been written by a cognitive specialist instead of a popular author; but it specifically addresses being effective in the world without letting outcomes disrupt your tranquility.
I would never recommend this for anyone, but my personal solution has been very liberal quantities of vodka.
Primarily, the way I deal with this sort of fear is by attempting to be as aware as possible of what , specifically, I am scared of right now.
I often find that the vague fears -- civilization might collapse, I might not accomplish much, etc -- are built on top of more specific and personal ones, and that identifying the latter makes the resulting emotion much less paralyzing. (I also find that my specific and personal fears are often embarrassing as all heck, which is part of why I find it tempting to engage with the larger and vaguer ones instead.)
I don't mean to make this sound easy... it really isn't. But it is simple.
The concern is that it may not ever be better enough for me to register a sense of approval or contentedness.
Contentedness is based on the interaction of your desires and your outcomes. You are becoming more realistic about your outcomes (this includes 'expected outcomes' here because we are predictors and count the future as part of the present). What is the natural next step?
The future is an uncertain, scary place. That means normality is a win. Every day you and the people you love survive without injury is a win. Every day you sit down and improve s...
My brother doesn't really trust anyone until they have had some sort of crushing failure in their life. Something like a divorce, getting kicked out of school, going bankrupt, being permanently injured and missing the Olympics team, or anything where years or decades of effort towards a goal have to be substantially written off.
The idea is that the person you are after a failure like that is much more likely to be stable in the face of additional adversity if for no other reason than you've got a pretty extreme data point that extends the range in which yo...
To be honest, questions like these remind me of why it was completely stupid to aspire to being a rationalist. Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise. I'm reminded of how Draco Malfoy felt in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality when the main character seduced him to the dark path of science. A lot of religious believers are genuinely comforted by their nonsensical faith. Too late now, for me and thee (you who are reading this). We're fucked now, and there's no going back. Just have to make the best of it.
To be honest, questions like these remind me of why it was completely stupid to aspire to being a rationalist. Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.
...unless you have something more important to achieve than bliss, or expect that you might discover some such thing if you relinquish enough ignorance.
Phil Goetz would say that your technical guy is afraid of the driver's seat. Maybe he will be less afraid after you let him drive for awhile, or maybe you should just put him back in his preferred role like I did.
It seems like most people are reasonably satisfied with whatever kind of life they ended up having. To the extent that you are indeed like other people, this should be reassuring.
I "suffered" quite a bit from this when extracting myself from religion, which takes the "Univese has a fail-safe" feeling to great heights (it's my personal candidate for the strongest emotion keeping people in religion).
My advice is to "accept things one cannot change" and compartmentalize them away. This manifests in my attitude to survivalism: I am somewhat prepared for things I can do something about, but that 2-mile tsunami (or stray bullet in the head) possibility, well, I don't think about it (other than another reaso...
Most people don't do much, if any, work on being rational, and they do 'okay'.
Actually, the word 'okay' itself is a bit misleading here - there's an absolute meaning of the word that means something like 'having access to enough resources to survive', and then there's a personal one - whatever you meant when you said "fulfilling anything like my full potential to help others and/or produce great art", in your case. For the first definition, unless you're in an unusual situation, you should be pretty comfortable assuming that you'll be okay. (Well...
I think it's quite understandable to fear for your future based on the evidence presented.
I find the worst thing about such fears is the way they can detract from my ability to take useful actions.
I find one helpful method is to re-frame my thinking. No, I have no guarantee that everything will turn out "all right" for any given value of that. However, so far I have been through more than I once thought I could cope with. Am I unscarred? Certainly not. But I have work that I enjoy, people in my life I love and who care about me. I have food and s...
I've experienced (well, also currently experiencing) a related fear of a specific part of rationality. I've seen some people on LW and many more on OvercomingBias express beliefs that the conscious mind, the part I can call me, is so out of control that all it's good for is making up stories, rationalizing the actions of an unconscious mind guided by outdated programming and environmental factors.
Mostly, I think, I reject this idea because it would essentially mean declaring everything I've done, every decision I've ever made, and every decision I will mak...
I like your piece, Mass_Driver.
I hope you can tolerate my discourse as a sort of 'stream of consciousness'.
What is the proper contribution of a rational person that will give meaning and enjoyment in life?
I decide to test the question against the little I know about such things. What is the natural role of individuals in evolution? I believe it is simply to pass on the species to the next generation through supporting current living species success. Evolution has no interest in my individual skills and outputs. It wants another generation of my species. ...
Recently, I've been ratcheting up my probability estimate of some of Less Wrong's core doctrines (shut up and multiply, beliefs require evidence, brains are not a reliable guide as to whether brains are malfunctioning, the Universe has no fail-safe mechanisms) from "Hmm, this is an intriguing idea" to somewhere in the neighborhood of "This is most likely correct."
This leaves me confused and concerned and afraid. There are two things in particular that are bothering me. On the one hand, I feel obligated to try much harder to identify my real goals and then to do what it takes to actually achieve them -- I have much less faith that just being a nice, thoughtful, hard-working person will result in me having a pleasant life, let alone in me fulfilling anything like my full potential to help others and/or produce great art. On the other hand, I feel a deep sense of pessimism -- I have much less faith that even making an intense, rational effort to succeed will make much of a difference. Rationality has stripped me of some of my traditional sources of confidence that everything will work out OK, but it hasn't provided any new ones -- there is no formula that I can recite to myself to say "Well, as long as I do this, then everything will be fine." Most likely, it won't be fine; but it isn't hopeless, either; possibly there's something I can do to help, and if so I really want to find it. This is frustrating.
This isn't to say that I want to back away from rationalism -- it's not as if pretending to be dumb will help. To whatever extent I become more rational and thus more successful, that's better than nothing. The concern is that it may not ever be better enough for me to register a sense of approval or contentedness. Civilization might collapse; I might get hit by a bus; or I might just claw through some of my biases but not others, make poor choices, and fail to accomplish much of anything.
Has anyone else had experience with a similar type of fear? Does anyone have suggestions as to an appropriate response?