I like this post. I've been thinking for a while that I feel like I am doing pretty well in terms of epistemic rationality, but I have quite some trouble figuring out what I want or what I even endorse on reflection. I noticed with your wizard post that this was not something I would ever have come up with, because I would not have looked for "true names" of the thing I want in fiction.
Below I was brainstorming some examples where I could get more of what I want.
Notice: With my ego-dystonic wants I probbaly have more room for improvement. Perhaps the goal should be to not have ego-dystonic wants? They are the main drivers why I have a hard time with agentic-ness.
With Ego-syntonic wants, I alread do this. For example just before reading this post, I was asking myself if there could be a company doing long-read sequencing for consumers like John who are peculiar and want to understand themselves better (soon concluded this would be worse than MetaMed, so then thought about other people who might be interested in long-read sequencing).
My ego-dystonic interests I don't know that well how to deal with. I remember one of my post-rationalist friends commenting that it seems like I seem to only do things I consider useful. For example I get absolutely addicted to improving and competing on metrics. Number go up! For example, hobbies/games that sucked me deep in the past include: juggling, cubing, chess, dominion, learning all japanese kanji with anki (and just staring at the stats ~5-25% of the time), making predictions on metaculus (trying to not be too tempted to maximize points), the universal paperclips game etc..
I now don't pursue any of the above, because improving on these doesn't give me enough improvement in other areas of my life I care about. I also notice unless there is a competitive element where I feel like I have worthy competition, the metrics loose their appeal after some time. Problem with Japanese was also that the only reason to do this particular one was to proove to myself that memorization is not that hard. I recently started using anki more again to remember math and science knowledge, but it doesn't quite feel as addictive when I have to curate all the cards myself. With the kanji, I had premade cards. I was allowed to just grind through.
With Metaculus I had strong frustration that the thing I was competing on was easily goodharted into something that wasn't teaching me anything. I enjoyed Manifold because the incentives were in line, but then the new problem was that this was incentivising me to be more distracted than I would like, so I stopped using Manifold much. I absolutely loved the thinking physics question challenge. My main bottleneck here was friends who were capable and motivated enough to compete with. I had thought of starting a local workshop in Melbourne to work together on problems we don't understand. My thinking there was that the hard step seems to be finding problems that everyone is excited to work on. Now I am thinking the best solution is probably just having some array of challening problems to pick from and then you choose something that everyone finds interesting. Perhaps the first challenge is to come up with lots of cool problems.
Part of me is thinking though, tradeoffs are terrible. Perhaps playing chess, cubing or playing Zelda some of the time and spending some of the other time working on illegible problems despite less outside motivation might be the way to go. Obviously, most of the real value is in places where no one can compete with you sadly. Any place where it's convenient to compete (online games with elo matching being the prototypical example), is where the least of the value is. Finding creative ways to improve my skills by being motivated by competition might be an exception here though. Like running or workshops of the sort Raemon is running.
Hm... writing this took me 90 minutes. Ben claims you can write a reasonably long lesswrong comment in under 30 minutes. I already failed the halfhaven challenge, because I would not be able to think of something neat that felt like a round idea to put in a blogpost. Also writing my blogposts took way too long. I did notice that the 500 word lower limit was holding me back there in not publishing short things (I hated the blogpost drafts where I would have a neat 100 word idea and then expanding them to 500 words felt absolutely impossible and wrong). I do think I often like reading rambly comments. I don't like reading super rambly comments. I do find it hard to find the balance here (in general I find it hard to write about internal conflicts as they are happening). Here at the end I went back and forth between writing out what I thought was my takeaway from this. I do think internal conflict is a huge part that makes my writing slow.
Both of these examples show a similar mental move: (encounter a fantasy) -> (figure out how to bring that fantasy into reality)...
To me, this move feels particularly foundational and load-bearing; it’s a core part of a healthy agentic human mind. It’s the mental move...
This resonates with something in me. Something kinda malnourished and shaky and weirdly shaped but it resonates all the same. Most of the things I like best about myself, that I'm proudest of having done or that have caused other people to be impressed with me or that nourished me to do, were things that had this pattern. I'm trying to do more of that now. Thanks for painting it so clearly.
So there’s this thing where…
Back when I was young, I watched the movie Atlantis, and then spent a while thinking through how to build an actual city- or continent-sized underwater dome. What materials would be required? How much would it cost? How would light and heating/cooling work? Etc.
A similar example: I watched the Harry Potter movies, and then spent a while thinking about how to build a quidditch field with flying broomsticks kept aloft via magnetic levitation. Or a golden snitch capable of flying around my room; that one progressed to the point of fiddling with physical prototypes (which did not work, to be clear; I was a kid, I did not have any serious engineering knowledge yet, and I did not understand just how far beyond my knowledge-at-the-time such a project was).
Both of these examples show a similar mental move: (encounter a fantasy) -> (figure out how to bring that fantasy into reality). It’s fun, trying to work out the key steps and details to make the fantastic real. Even if it often fails.
To me, this move feels particularly foundational and load-bearing; it’s a core part of a healthy agentic human mind. It’s the mental move which goes from e.g. “Man, it would be cool if I could just make my own covid vaccine” to “Wait, what exactly is involved in making a vaccine, especially if one doesn’t need to pass clinical trials (because it’s for self use)? Are the biohackers already doing this? Let’s do some googling…”. Or Aella bored at an orgy going from thinking “Man, I wish someone would just come drag me off despite my apparent lack of enthusiasm” to “Wait, what kind of party structure would make that actually viable, what would the vibe and rules be, which friends can I rope into organizing this, …”. Or any number of entrepreneurs going from “Man, I wish I could just <blah>” to “Wait, what would actually be required to allow people to just <blah>? What’s needed technically? How could one deliver it to customers? What kind of pricing would be necessary, and how much would people be willing to pay? …”.
Notably, I don’t think most peoples’ thinking most of the time routes through the (fantasy) -> (planning) move. Instead, we tend to be less backchainy and more forwardchainy: noticing when options are available, and then deciding based on whether an option feels locally-good or locally-bad. There’s no particular fantasy or vision driving that kind of thinking.
Looking back, the (fantasy) -> (planning) move has been a core driver for me to learn a lot. I considered questions like “How would one build a continent-sized underwater dome?”, and questions like that left me strongly feeling the need for a structural engineering course. I considered questions like “How would one make a quidditch stadium with real flying broomsticks?”, and questions like that left me strongly feeling the need for a course in electrodynamics (... which includes magnetic dynamics, but the course is usually called “electrodynamics” or something like that). I considered questions like “How would I make a real living dragon?” or “How would I make a robot to do my chores?” or “How would I make a water fountain which can maintain a 3D human shape made of water?”, and such questions left me feeling the need to study developmental morphology or underactuated control or computational geometry. As a general rule, if I felt the need for the same subject from a few different independent questions, then I studied the subject.