This was originally a comment to VipulNaik's recent indagations about the academic lifestyle versus the job lifestyle. Instead of calling it lifestyle he called them career options, but I'm taking a different emphasis here on purpose.
Due to information hazards risks, I recommend that Effective Altruists who are still wavering back and forth do not read this. Spoiler EA alert.
I'd just like to provide a cultural difference information that I have consistently noted between Americans and Brazilians which seems relevant here.
To have a job and work in the US is taken as a *de facto* biological need. It is as abnormal for an American, in my experience, to consider not working, as it is to consider not breathing, or not eating. It just doesn't cross people's minds.
If anyone has insight above and beyond "Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism" let me know about it, I've been waiting for the "why?" for years.
So yeah, let me remind people that you can spend years and years not working. that not getting a job isn't going to kill you or make you less healthy, that ultravagabonding is possible and feasible and many do it for over six months a year, that I have a friend who lives as the boyfriend of his sponsor's wife in a triad and somehow never worked a day in his life (the husband of the triad pays it all, both men are straight). That I've hosted an Argentinian who left graduate economics for two years to randomly travel the world, ended up in Rome and passed by here in his way back, through couchsurfing. That Puneet Sahani has been well over two years travelling the world with no money and an Indian passport now. I've also hosted a lovely estonian gentleman who works on computers 4 months a year in London to earn pounds, and spends eight months a year getting to know countries while learning their culture etc... Brazil was his third country.
Oh, and never forget the Uruguay couple I just met at a dance festival who have been travelling as hippies around and around South America for 5 years now, and showed no sign of owning more than 500 dollars worth of stuff.
Also in case you'd like to live in a paradise valley taking Santo Daime (a religious ritual with DMT) about twice a week, you can do it with a salary of aproximatelly 500 dollars per month in Vale do Gamarra, where I just spent carnival, that is what the guy who drove us back did. Given Brazilian or Turkish returns on investment, that would cost you 50 000 bucks in case you refused to work within the land itself for the 500.
Oh, I forgot to mention that though it certainly makes you unable to do expensive stuff, thus removing the paradox of choice and part of your existential angst from you (uhuu less choices!), there is nearly no detraction in status from not having a job. In fact, during these years in which I was either being an EA and directing an NGO, or studying on my own, or doing a Masters (which, let's agree is not very time consuming) my status has increased steadily, and many opportunities would have been lost if I had a job that wouldn't let me move freely. Things like being invited as Visiting Scholar to Singularity Institute, like giving a TED talk, like directing IERFH, and like spending a month working at FHI with Bostrom, Sandberg, and the classic Lesswrong poster Stuart Armstrong.
So when thinking about what to do with you future my dear fellow Americans, please, at least consider not getting a job. At least admit what everyone knows from the bottom of their hearts, that jobs are abundant for high IQ people (specially you my programmer lurker readers.... I know you are there...and you native English speakers, I can see you there, unnecessarily worrying about your earning potential).
A job is truly an instrumental goal, and your terminal goals certainly do have chains of causation leading to them that do not contain a job for 330 days a year. Unless you are a workaholic who experiences flow in virtue of pursuing instrumental goals. Then please, work all day long, donate as much as you can, and may your life be awesome!
That's exactly what I asked them.
The first one took a little prodding but eventually gave a somewhat passable answer. And he's one of the smartest people I've ever met. The second one just refused to address the question. He said he wouldn't approach it that way and that his decisions aren't that calculated. I don't know how you want to explain it, but for pretty much every person I've ever met or read, sooner or later they seem to just flinch away from the truth. You seem to be particularly good at not doing that - I don't think you've demonstrated any flinching yet.
And see what I mean about how the ability to not flinch is often the limiting factor? In this case, the question wasn't really difficult in an intellectual way at all. It just requires you to make a legitimate effort to accept the truth. The truth is often uncomfortable to people, and thus they flinch away, don't accept it, and fail to make progress.
I could definitely answer that! This really gets at the core of the map vs. the territory (maybe my favorite topic :) ). The physical/psychological distinction are just two maps we use to describe reality. In reality itself, the territory, there's no such thing as physical/psychological. If you look at the properties of individual atoms, they don't have any sort of property that says "I'm a physical atom" or "I'm a psychological atom". They only have properties like mass and electric charge (as far as we know).
I'm not sure how much you know about science, but I find the physics-chemistry-biology spectrum to be a good demonstration of the different levels of maps. Physics tries to model reality as precisely as possible (well, some types of physics that is; others aim to make approximations). Chemistry approximates reality using the equations of physics. Biology approximates reality using the equations of chemistry. And you could even add psychology in there and say that it approximates reality using the ideas (not even equations) of biology.
As far as psychology goes, a little history might be helpful. It's been a few years since I studied this, but here we go. In the early 1900s, behaviorism was the popular approach to psychology. They just tried to look at what inputs lead to what outputs. Ie. they'd say "if we expose people to situation X, how do they respond". The input is the situation, and the output is how they respond.
Now, obviously there's something going on that translates the input to the output. They had the sense that the translation happens in the brain, but it was a black box to them and they had no clue how it works. Furthermore, they sort of saw it as so confusing that there's no way they could know how it works. And so behaviorists were content to just study what inputs lead to what outputs, and to leave the black box as a mystery.
Then in the 1950s there was the cognitive revolution where they manned up and ventured into the black box. They thought that you could figure out what's going on in there and how the inputs get translated to outputs.
Now we're almost ready to go back to your question - I haven't forgotten about it. So cognitive psychology is sort of about what's going on in our head and how we process stuff. Regarding the subconscious, even though we're not conscious of it, there's still processing going on in that black box, and so the study of that processing still falls under the category of cognitive psychology. But again, cognitive psychology is a high-level map. We're not there yet, but we'd be better able to understand that black box with a lower level map like neuroscience. And we'd be able to learn even more about the black box using an even lower level map like physics.
If you have any other questions or even just want to chat informally about this stuff please let me know. I love thinking about this stuff and I love trying to explain things (and I like to think I'm pretty good at it) and you're really good at understanding things and asking good questions which often leads me to think about things differently and learn new things.
Interesting. I had the impression that religious people had lots of other terminal values. So things like "obeying God" aren't terminal values? I had the impression that most religions teach that you should obey no matter what. That you should obey even if you think it'll lead to decreases in goodness and happiness. Could you clarify?
Edit: I just realized something that might be important. You emphasize the point that there's a lot of overlap between happiness/goodness and other potentially terminal values. I haven't been emphasizing it. I think we both agree that there is the big overlap. And I think we agree that "actions can either be mind-state optimizing, or not mind-state optimizing" and "terminal values are arbitrary".
I think you're right to put the emphasis on this and to keep bringing it up as an important reminder. Being important, I should have given it the attention it deserves. Thanks for persisting!
It took me a while to understand belief in belief. I read the sequences about 2 years ago and didn't understand it until a few weeks ago as I was reading HPMOR. There was a point when one of the characters said he believed something but acted as if he didn't. Like if believed what he said he believed, he definitely would have done X because X is clearly in his interest. I just reread belief in belief, and now I feel like it makes almost complete sense to me.
From what I understand, the idea with belief in belief is that:
a) There's your model of how you think the world will look.
b) And then there's what you say you believe.
To someone who values consistency, a) and b) should be the same thing. But humans are weird, and sometimes a) and b) are different.
In the scenario you describe, there's a religious person who ultimately wants goodness and would choose goodness over his virtues if he had to pick, but he nevertheless claims that his virtues are terminal goals to him. And so as far as a) goes, you both agree that he would choose goodness over his virtues. But as far as b) goes, you claim to believe different things. What he claims to believe is inconsistent with his model of the world, and so I think you're right - this would be an example of belief in belief.
Yup, that's all I'm trying to say. No worries if you misunderstood :). I hadn't realized that this was ultimately all I was trying to say before talking to you and now I have, so thank you!
Well, thanks! How does that saying go? What is true is already so? Although in the context of this conversation, I can't say there's anything inherently wrong with flinching; it could help fulfill someone's terminal value of happiness. It someone doesn't feel dissatisfied with himself and his l... (read more)