The Best of LessWrong

The LW team is encouraging authors to review their own posts, so: In retrospect, I think this post set out to do a small thing, and did it well. This isn't a grand concept or a vast inferential distance, it's just a reframe that I think is valuable for many people to try for themselves. I still bring up this concept quite a lot when I'm trying to help people through their psychological troubles, and when I'm reflecting on my own. I don't know whether the post belongs in the Best of 2018, but I'm proud of it.

I was surprised that this post ever seemed surprising, which either means it wasn't revolutionary, or was *very* revolutionary. Since it has 229 karma, seems like it was the latter. I feel like the same post today would have been written with more explicit references to reinforcement learning, reward, addiction, and dopamine. The overall thesis seems to be that you can get a felt sense for these things, which would be surprising - isn't it the same kind of reward-seeking all the way down, including on things that are genuinely valuable? Not sure how to model this.

I thought I'd add a few quick notes as the author. As I reread this, a few things jump out for me: * I enjoy its writing style. Its clarity is probably part of why it was nominated. * I'd now say this post is making a couple of distinct claims: * External forces can shape what we want to do. (I.e., there are lotuses.) * It's possible to notice this in real time. (I.e., you can notice the taste of lotuses.) * It's good to do so. Otherwise we find our wanting aligned with others' goals regardless of how they relate to our own. * If you notice this, you'll find yourself wanting to spit out lotuses that you can tell pull you away from your goals. * I still basically agree with the content. * I think the emotional undertone is a little confused, says the version of me about 19 months later. That last point is probably the most interesting to meta-reviewers, so I'll say a little about that here. The basic emotional backdrop I brought in writing this was something like, "Look out, you could get hijacked! Better watch out!" And then luckily there's this thing you can be aware of, to defend yourself against one more form of psychic/emotional attack. Right? I think this is kind of nuts. It's a popular form of nuts, but it's still nuts. Looking at the Duolingo example I gave, it doesn't address the question of why those achievements counted as a lotus structure for me. There are tons of things others find have lotus nature that I don't (e.g., gambling). And vice versa: my mother (who's an avid Duolingo user) couldn't care less about those achievements. So what gives? I have a guess, but I think that's outside the purview of the purpose of these reviews. I'll just note that "We're in a worldwide memetic war zone where everyone is out to get us by hijacking our minds!" is (a) not the hypothesis to default to and (b) if true is itself a questionable meme that seems engineered to stimulate fight-or-flight type reactions that do, indeed, hijack clarity