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All of BeleagueredPotential's Comments + Replies

Open thread, June. 12 - June. 18, 2017
BeleagueredPotential00

I spent a good year and half trying to answer questions related to the points you brought up after first seeing the mind-body specialist, although you gave me some good perspective.

and that is a characteristic symptom in people who have a purpose they regard as supremely important, who find absolutely no support for their attempt to pursue it, but who continue to regard it as supremely important

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And then at some point it affects your health.

Actually I only discovered the purpose a couple of years after the myalgic encephalomyelitis set in, before t... (read more)

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Open thread, June. 12 - June. 18, 2017
BeleagueredPotential00

This was extremely helpful in figuring out what to do, it hadn't occurred to me that a Bayesian calculation would be useful here. After tallying up all the variables I came to the conclusion that my current methods had a lower chance of helping me than I had always implicitly thought. What I referred to as “extreme risks” may not even be the truly risky options when considering other factors; like how the longer someone has myalgic encephalomyelitis the less likely it is they can get better. I realized the types of solutions I’ve been trying give me the me... (read more)

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Open thread, June. 12 - June. 18, 2017
BeleagueredPotential00

I find myself in a potentially critical crossroads at the moment, one that could affect my ability to become a productive researcher for friendly AI in the future. I'll do my best to summarize the situation.

I had very strong mental capabilities 7 years ago, but a series of unfortunate health related problems including a near life threatening infection led to me developing a case of myalgic encephalomyelitis (chronic fatigue syndrome). This disease is characterized by extreme fatigue that usually worsens with physical or mental exertion, and is not signific... (read more)

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4Mitchell_Porter
I'm going to take a wild guess, and suggest that your attitude towards FAI research, and your experience of CFS, are actually related. I have no idea if this is a standard theory, but in some ways CFS sounds like depression minus the emotion - and that is a characteristic symptom in people who have a purpose they regard as supremely important, who find absolutely no support for their attempt to pursue it, but who continue to regard it as supremely important. The point being that when something is that important, it's easy to devalue certain aspects of your own difficulties. Yes, running into a blank wall of collective incomprehension and indifference may have been personally shattering; you may be in agony over the way that what you have to do in order to stay alive, interferes with your ability to preserve even the most basic insights that motivate your position ... but it's an indulgence to think about these feelings, because there is an invisible crisis happening that's much more important. So you just keep grinding away, or you keep crawling through the desert of your life, or you give up completely and are left only with a philosophical perspective that you can talk about but can't act on... I don't know all the permutations. And then at some point it affects your health. I don't want to say that this is solely about emotion, we are chemical beings affected by genetics, nutrition, and pathogens too. But the planes intersect, e.g. through autoimmune disorders or weakened disease resistance. The core psychological and practical problem is, there's a difficult task - the great purpose, whatever it is - being made more difficult in ways that have no intrinsic connection to the problem, but are solely about lack of support, or even outright interference. And then on top of that, you may also have doubts and meta doubts to deal with - coming from others and from yourself (and some of those doubts may be justified!). Finally, health problems round out the picture.
3ChristianKl
One of the core questions of rationality is: "Why do you believe what you believe?" Specifically, why do you believe that this doctor will be able to help you in a way that others can't? You can also write down the likelihood of different outcomes. Given that you had success at improving your condition with one mind-body paradigm, why not try others? Given that you speak about travelling to the US it would also be worthwhile to know where you are living at the moment to know about what's available to you.