I radically distrust the message of this short piece. It's a positive affirmation for "rationalists" of the contemporary sort who want to use brain science to become super-achievers. The paragraph itemizing the powers of agency especially reads like wishful thinking: Just pay a little more attention to small matters like fixity of purpose and actually acting in your own interest, and you'll get to be famous, rich, and a historical figure! Sorry, that is entirely not ruthless enough. You also need to be willing to lie, cheat, steal, kill, use people, betray them. (Wishes can come true, but they usually exact a price. ) It also helps to be chronically unhappy, if it will serve to motivate your extreme and unrelenting efforts. And finally, most forms of achievement do require domain-specific expertise; you don't get to the top just by looking pretty and statusful.
The messy, inconsistent, and equivocating aspects of the mind can also be adaptive. They can save you from fanaticism, lack of perspective, and self-deception. How often do situations really permit a calculation of expected utility? All these rationalist techniques themselves are fuel for rationalization: I'm emplo...
The paragraph itemizing the powers of agency especially reads like wishful thinking: Just pay a little more attention to small matters like fixity of purpose and actually acting in your own interest, and you'll get to be famous, rich, and a historical figure! Sorry, that is entirely not ruthless enough. You also need to be willing to lie, cheat, steal, kill, use people, betray them. (Wishes can come true, but they usually exact a price. ) It also helps to be chronically unhappy, if it will serve to motivate your extreme and unrelenting efforts. And finally, most forms of achievement do require domain-specific expertise; you don't get to the top just by looking pretty and statusful.
How could you reliably know these things, and how could you make intentional use of that knowledge, if not with agentful rationality?
This is reminding me of Steve Pavlina's material about light-workers and dark-workers. He claims that working to make the world a better place for everyone can work, and will eventually lead you to realizing that you need to take care of yourself, and that working to make your life better exclusive of concern for others can work and will eventually convince you of the benefits of cooperation, but that slopping around without being clear about who you're benefiting won't work as well as either of those.
I radically distrust the message of this short piece. It's a positive affirmation for "rationalists" of the contemporary sort who want to use brain science to become super-achievers.
Interesting. Personally I read it as a kind of "get back to Earth" message. "Stop pretending you're basically a rational thinker and only need to correct some biases to truly achieve that. You're this horrible jury-rig of biases and ancient heuristics, and yes while steps towards rationality can make you perform much better, you're still fundamentally and irreparably broken. Deal with it."
But re-reading it, your interpretation is probably closer to the mark.
You also need to be willing to lie, cheat, steal, kill, use people, betray them.
This is false.
If we are talking about how to become rich, famous, and a historically significant person, I suspect that neither of us speaks with real authority. And of course, just being evil is not by itself a guaranteed path to the top! But I'm sure it helps to clear the way.
I'm sure it helps to clear the way.
Sure. I'm only disagreeing with what you said in your original comment.
Personally, I find that being nice and ethical is the best way to get a reputation for being nice and ethical, though your mileage may vary.
I don't have a personal statement to make about my strategy for gaining a reputation for niceness. Partly because that is a reputation I would prefer to avoid.
I do make the general, objective level claim that actually being nice and ethical is not the most effective way to gain that reputation. It is a good default and for many, particularly those who are not very good at well calibrated hypocrisy and deception, it is the best they could do without putting in a lot of effort. But it should be obvious that the task of creating an appearance of a thing is different to that of actually doing a thing.
Even a little bit of agenty-ness will have some lasting historical impact. Think of Benjamin Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, or Tim Ferris.
Can you go into more detail about how you believe these particular people behaved more agenty than normal?
In case anybody asks how I was able to research and write two posts from scratch today:
It's largely because I've had Ray Lynch's 'The Oh of Pleasure' on continuous repeat ever since 7am, without a break.
(I'm so not kidding. Ask Jasen Murray.)
If this actually works reliably, I think it is much more important than anything in either of the posts you used it to write - why bury it in a comment?
real agent with the power to reliably do things it believed would fulfill its desires. It could change its diet, work out each morning, and maximize its health and physical attractiveness. It could learn body language and fashion and salesmanship and seduction and the laws of money and win in every sphere of life without constant defeat by human hangups. It could learn networking and influence and persuasion and have large-scale effects on societies, cultures, and nations.
A lot of body language, fashion, salesmanship, seduction, networking, influence, and persuasion are dependent entirely on heuristics and intuition.
In the real world those that have less access to these traits (being people of the autistic spectrum, for example) tend to have a much harder time learning how to accomplish any of the named tasks. They also, for most of those tasks, have a much harder time seeing why one would wish to accomplish those tasks.
Extrapolating to a being that has absolutely no such intuition or heuristics then one is left with the question of what it is that they wish to actually do? Perhaps some of the severely autistic really are like this and never learn language as it never occurs ...
You do not have the robust character you think you have, but instead are blown about by the winds of circumstance.
Am I wrong in taking this to be a one-liner critique of all virtue ethical theories?
I've been thinking about this with regards to Less Wrong culture. I had pictured your "deliberative thinking" module as more of an "excuse generator" - the rest of your mind would make its decisions, and then the excuse generator comes up with an explanation for them.
The excuse generator is primarily social - it will build excuses which are appropriate to the culture it is in. So in a rationalist culture, it will come up with rationalizing excuses. It can be exposed to a lot of memes, parrot them back and reason using them without actua...
I loved this, but I'm not here to contribute bland praise. I'm here to point out somebody who does, in fact, behave as an agent as defined by the italicized statement: "reliably do things it believed would fulfill its desires" that continues with "It could change its diet, work out each morning, and maximize its health and physical attractiveness. " I couldn't help but think of Scott H Young, a blogger I've been following for months. I really look up to that guy. He is effectively a paragon of the model that you can shape your life to l...
Coming back to this post, I feel like it's selling a dream that promises too much. I've come to think of such dreams as Marlboro Country ads. For every person who gets inspired to change, ten others will be slightly harmed because it's another standard they can't achieve, even if they buy what you're selling. Figuring out more realistic promises would do us all a lot of good.
Excellent clarion call to raise our expectation of what agency is and can do in our lives, as well as to have sensible expectations of our and others' humble default states. Well done.
One way of thinking about this:
There is behavior, which is anything an animal with a nervous system does with its voluntary musculature. Everything you do all day is behavior.
Then there are choices, which are behaviors you take because you think they will bring about an outcome you desire. (Forget about utility functions -- I'm not sure all human desires can be described by one twice-differentiable convex function. Just think about actions taken to fulfill desires or values.) Not all behaviors are choices. In fact it's easy to go through a day without...
It might be simply structural that the LessWrong community tends to be about armchair philosophy, science, and math. If there are people who have read through Less Wrong, absorbed its worldview, and gone out to "just do something", then they probably aren't spending their time bragging about it here. If it looks like no one here is doing any useful work, that could really just be sampling bias.
Even still, I expect that most posters here are more interested to read, learn, and chat than to thoroughly change who they are and what they do. Reading, ...
The real question is: how big of an impact can this stuff make, anyway? And how much are people able to actually implement it into their lives?
Are there any good sources of data on that? Beyond PUA, The Game, etc?
People don't change their sense of agency because they read a blog post.
"In alien hand syndrome, the afflicted individual’s limb will produce meaningful behaviors without the intention of the subject. The affected limb effectively demonstrates ‘a will of its own.’ The sense of agency does not emerge in conjunction with the overt appearance of the purposeful act even though the sense of ownership in relationship to the body part is maintained. This phenomenon corresponds with an impairment in the premotor mechanism manifested temporally by the appearan...
You are not a Bayesian homunculus whose reasoning is 'corrupted' by cognitive biases.
You just are cognitive biases.
You just are attribution substitution heuristics, evolved intuitions, and unconscious learning. These make up the 'elephant' of your mind, and atop them rides a tiny 'deliberative thinking' module that only rarely exerts itself, and almost never according to normatively correct reasoning.
You do not have the robust character you think you have, but instead are blown about by the winds of circumstance.
You do not have much cognitive access to your motivations. You are not Aristotle's 'rational animal.' You are Gazzaniga's rationalizing animal. Most of the time, your unconscious makes a decision, and then you become consciously aware of an intention to act, and then your brain invents a rationalization for the motivations behind your actions.
If an 'agent' is something that makes choices so as to maximize the fulfillment of explicit desires, given explicit beliefs, then few humans are very 'agenty' at all. You may be agenty when you guide a piece of chocolate into your mouth, but you are not very agenty when you navigate the world on a broader scale. On the scale of days or weeks, your actions result from a kludge of evolved mechanisms that are often function-specific and maladapted to your current environment. You are an adaptation-executor, not a fitness-maximizer.
Agency is rare but powerful. Homo economicus is a myth, but imagine what one of them could do if such a thing existed: a real agent with the power to reliably do things it believed would fulfill its desires. It could change its diet, work out each morning, and maximize its health and physical attractiveness. It could learn and practice body language, fashion, salesmanship, seduction, the laws of money, and domain-specific skills and win in every sphere of life without constant defeat by human hangups. It could learn networking and influence and persuasion and have large-scale effects on societies, cultures, and nations.
Even a little bit of agenty-ness will have some lasting historical impact. Think of Benjamin Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, or Tim Ferris. Imagine what you could do if you were just a bit more agenty. That's what training in instrumental rationality is all about: transcending your kludginess to attain a bit more agenty-ness.
And, imagine what an agent could do without the limits of human hardware or software. Now that would really be something.
(This post was inspired by some conversations with Michael Vassar.)