I'm pretty sure you're doing something wrong now. You're being very vague and not giving any examples so I can't troubleshoot anywhere near precisely, but clearly you're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and looking for the right sledgehammer for the job. You're not Augustine of Hippo; you may endorse a set of rules as the Sacred Laws Of Rationality That You Are A Really Bad Person If You Don't Follow, but if trying to follow them causes breakdowns, you're just wrong about the rules. Taboo "rational", and ask if each rule is a maintainable habit, possible to use explicitly in extraordinary circumstances, and if you actually want to do that. ("My life is worth exactly as much as some random stranger's" sounds nice, but nobody can actually follow that long-term.)
You don't say what kind of insane you are. You mention lack of social skills and that it's a big problem for you, but that's nearly orthogonal. For the first time in history, people are publishing useful guides to social life. Of course any oddity is going to make it harder for you, but go to groups that share your interests, and you'll find more people whose personality meshes with yours and fe...
I do not perform primate pack-bonding rituals correctly
Give three concrete examples from your life.
I will use this very post to illustrate!
You just asked, "give three concrete examples from your life."
My first instinct is that this is a challenge, an attempt to set me up as unreliable and "whiny" in front of the pack.
According to this instinct, if I fail to respond to you, you will have "called me out" - and by failing to respond, I will lose face.
Also according to this instinct, if I DO respond to you, no matter how I do so, you will manage to turn it around in such a way that I will appear to be lying or deliberately miscommunicating my experience for the sake of sympathy - and will again lose face.
My natural response to this instinct is to attempt to describe these examples in the most self-deprecatory way possible, but I know that any attempt to do so will cause me to seem contemptuously weak - and I will again lose face.
As I continue to process this dilemma, I attempt to work out the actual probabilities that any given decision I make will lead to a given outcome. However, as I do so, something internally pegs my "lose face" utility to +ERR.OVERFLOW, and the error cascades all the way through my multiplications and completely poisons ...
Oh man, I feel your pain. (Sorry, I meant: "Expression of sympathy and offer of alliance. Attempt to assert myself as a member of your tribe. Emphasis of my own experience in order to give additional weight to my advice, with the added bonus of gaining status in the community.")
Seriously, don't overthink. Yes, there are people whose every word and act conceals a hundred layers designed to raise themselves, lower you, and manipulate you, and who'll treat failure to answer each one perfectly as a personal insult. Your terrified analysis suggests that you've been around such people a lot. Don't hang out with those people. If you can't help it (coworkers, family), be irreproachable on the surface and ignore the deeper layers. Worst thing that'll happen is that they'll gossip behind your back, and horrifying as that thought is (What? It horrifies me!) it won't actually bring you harm.
Do think somewhat; you should be able to tell the difference between messages that mean "I don't feel like going bowling with you, but thanks" and messages that mean "I don't feel like going bowling with you, because I dislike you", to notice when someone is bored, to gauge and...
Your response suggests you have received a lot of negative feedback for your social interactions. Be careful not to overgeneralize those negative reactions to others. Especially don't overgeneralize from your interactions with your schoolmates, because the status games in school are not well correlated with achieving anything productive.
More generally, keep in mind that social ability is not a statistic (like Charisma on a RPG character sheet), it is a skill. Like all skills, it improves with practice. MixedNuts' advice to you is good, especially this post.
For whatever reason, being reflexive about social skills is extremely taboo in modern society. That means it is difficult for someone with social skill deficits to find someone what can provide helpful feedback for improvement. By contrast, a football player could listen to her coach for constructive criticism and suggestions on how to practice. But the fact that people don't talk about how to improve social skills does not mean improvement is impossible.
On LW, if something looks like a request for information, it's a safe bet that it means just that. And heck, you can't go wrong treating it like that, anyway. If it turns out it wasn't, the other person will be seen to be a troll, and they will lose face, and you'll have the moral high ground. I think that goes in general too, but it's certainly true here on LW, where the discussions are remarkably civilized.
What few clues given above lead me to believe that if you were to fix your ability to perform "primate pack-bonding rituals" correctly, a lot of this would go away. We are social creatures, and it sounds like for all your rationalization, social interaction is a significant driver for you.
Assuming this is the case, the short answer is that those ritual skills are learnable, and there's a ton of material on how to do so out on the web. Cognitive therapy may also help; however, in the end, you're just going to have to get up, get out, experiment with rituals and fail a lot to figure out how they work. You can't just learn it reading from books and the web. You have to actually go out and go through the actions, just like learning a martial art.
That's what I did. I still view people as machinery, as you probably do. But they're at least interesting machinery, and I know the interfaces well enough to do interesting things with them, including get the positive feedback that helps me maintain my outlook.
What if the very tools that I use to make decisions are flawed?
Everybody's tools are flawed. This blog exists because it seems reasonable to believe that the tools are good enough to do bootstrapping so that the flaws are smaller.
I'm going to write about some things which have helped me which may or may not be of use to you. I've worked on compassion-- it's tempting for me to believe that I'm the only defective person in the universe, and then try to fix myself. Coming in with that attitude is part of the problem, maybe even most of it. I'm better off to the extent that I can view my current state with a neutral or (much harder) benevolent attitude and work from there.
Also, it helped to realize that my current state has seven billion years of universe behind it. I can change for the better, but whatever is wrong isn't some intrinsic personal defect, and it isn't all my mother's fault either.
From the description you've given, which doesn't give much to go on, it sounds like you have some, but not all, of the same problems I do (in my case stress-related anxiety and clinical depression, compounding mild comorbid Asperger's and dyspraxia).
What I'd recommend in this case is that you access cognitive behavioural therapy. It's the only psychiatric intervention that has been actually shown to have any long-term effects (short of dumping people full of antipsychotic drugs, which have far too many bad side-effects for me to ever recommend them). It's ...
This may be a stupid question: How old are you? From the pattern of your posts I seem to detect a vague hint of an American high school. Please observe: American schools are severely broken. (1) Inability to function in such a place is not necessarily a sign of insanity. Consider whether, perhaps, you may simply be surrounded by hormonal teenagers with nothing better to do than assert idiotic status hierarchies. If you're not already familiar with it, Paul Graham's essay on nerds may be relevant to your interests.
That aside: Are you sure you are really try...
My name is Brent, and I'm probably insane.
Chorus: Hi, Brent.
what is someone who wishes to be rational supposed to do, when the underlying hardware simply won't cooperate?
Being aware of the biases, yet unable to adapt your reasoning to compensate, seems to be contradictory. When you say "I know I only think X because of bias Y, so my actual belief should be Z", you seem to already have solved the problem in that instance, by just switching them out (in lambda calculus: E[X:=Z]).
The unknown unknowns are in my opinion the crux of the problem:...
Alternate explanation for "insanity": If your IQ is high enough, you're likely to have problems fitting in with others. Normally I wouldn't suggest high IQ as a reason for not fitting in since an IQ high enough to cause that problem occurs in less than 1% of the population. However, here you are posting on LessWrong, a place that is known for it's intelligent members. (See Yvain's surveys to discover that most claim a high enough IQ for the average to be in the 140's). Not only that, but if you were using Bayesian techniques as a child and ex...
Have you tried being compassionate and curious about the parts of you that don't cooperate with your plans?
Perhaps it is easier to debug your approach to specific goals, than your general cognitive algorithm. For example, are you having trouble getting laid? Finding people to play board games with? Getting your room-mates to do the dishes without massive drama? Staying off the drugs that dull the pain?
If there is a specific issue, that's both easier to give advice about and easier to measure your success with; rewriting your whole utility function is perhaps not the place to start.
I have some similar problems and I'll try to explain them.
So I think that some of my failings may be attributable to having many contradictory values rather than to being failures of rationality. An example of values that oppose one another are the desire for social interaction and the strong sense of guilt that I experience at any social failing. If I try to optimize for one then I take a hit from the other and I still don't net very many hedons. The rational action here would be to modify and remove the errant value, but that's difficult.
In Neurotic spel...
My name is Brent, and I'm probably insane.
Then go to a therapist.
(In case you are confused, this is intended as sincere advice, not as an insult or challenge or whatever)
A pack-bonding ritual might be: "Bod feels a feeling of friendship towards Dave. Therefore he does something to signal that feeling of friendship towards Dave. In return Dave responds by signaling his own feelings of friendship."
If Bob isn't in touch with the feeling of friendship, his communication will likely to appear inauthentic. He will make little mistakes that give away that he doesn't feel it. If Dave picks up that Bob feels anxious about the whole process things get worse.
As long as you try to solve your social interactions purely by run...
My name is Brent, and I'm probably insane.
I can perform various experimental tests to verify that I do not perform primate pack-bonding rituals correctly, which is about half of what we mean by "insane". This concerns me simply from a utilitarian perspective (separation from pack makes ego-depletion problems harder; it makes resources harder to come by; and it simply sucks to experience "from the inside"), but these are not the things that concern me most.
The thing that concerns me most is this:
What if the very tools that I use to make decisions are flawed?
I stumbled upon Bayesian techniques as a young child; I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to perform a lot of self-guided artificial intelligence "research" in Junior High and High School, due to growing up in a time and place when computers were utterly mysterious, so no one could really tell me what I was "supposed" to be doing with them - so I started making simple video games, had no opponents to play them against due to the aforementioned failures to correctly perform pack-bonding rituals, decided to create my own, became dissatisfied with the quality of my opponents, and suddenly found myself chewing on Hopfstaedter and Wiener and Minsky.
I'm filling in that bit of detail to explain that I have been attempting to operate as a rational intelligence for quite some time, so I believe that I've become very familiar with the kinds of "bugs" that I will tend to exhibit.
I've spent a very long time attempting to correct for my cognitive biases, edit out tendencies to seek comfortable-but-misleading inputs, and otherwise "force" myself to be rational, and often, the result is that my "will" will crack under the strain. My entire utility-table will suddenly flip on its head, and attempt to maximize my own self-destruction rather than allow me to continue to torture it with endlessly recursive, unsolvable problems that all tend to boil down to "you do not have sufficient social power, and humans are savage and cruel no matter how much you care about them."
Most of my energy is spent attempting to maintain positive, rational, long-term goals in the face of some kind of regedit-hack of my utility table itself, coming from somewhere in my subconscious that I can't seem to gain write-access to.
Clearly, the transhumanist solution would be to identify the underlying physical storage where the bug is occurring, and replace it with a less-malfunctioning piece of hardware.
Hopefully someday someone with more self-control, financial resources, and social resources than I will invent a method to do that, and I can get enough of a partial personectomy to create something viable with the remaining subroutines.
In the meantime, what is someone who wishes to be rational supposed to do, when the underlying hardware simply won't cooperate?