I made a very large life bet (military firefighter → educator), lost alignment, and I want a single practical first question someone totally lost can ask to quickly map their expectations, align them with concrete goals, and expose major cognitive biases.
Well taking advantage of gwern's request and the fact that I already showed my ass on Lesswrong, and it seem to have been well received. I'll continue from there.
I bet heavily on a professional identity that fit my values—saved lives, taught others, belonged. Over time I found the institution’s ethics and my own diverged; I lost more than I expected (Ouch! I told four stories about it here)
And for me, in my own biases, maybe from a goodhart mostly, I had lost everything. So I became a bum for a while.
With help, I started asking what other, hidden bets I’d made about myself: “Was I betting on being empathetic? Altruistic? Respected?” Those are weird-to-predict, high-variance bets.
What would be the first practical question someone who is completely lost could ask themselves to organize their mind and align expectations with concrete goals?
Well, I've seen several models for defining needs, qualities, and virtues, such as Elieser's 12 virtues of rationality. They're very motivating; they seem to fit with my prejudices, but:
How did you arrive at these virtues step by step? What was the order? So they didn't quite work for me, or they seemed like definitions on a very mythological level. How can I bet that Gaia, the mother goddess, will help me more than Uranus, the father goddess?
I really enjoyed Eliezer's Fun theory; I find it interesting, a good starting point for mapping my expectations, what motivates me, and what fills me with satisfaction.
The first division for my fun that seems operational to me isn't immediately "fast vs. slow," but intention: change within myself or change in the world. I call Inward the choice to specialize personal iteration processes—metacognition, self-data, training plans—and Outward the focus on strategies that leverage intuitive and cultural knowledge to modulate the environment. Only then do I bring in Kahneman: S2 (deliberate thought) is the toolbox for internal iterating; S1 (accumulated intuition) is the engine that operates in rapid environmental interactions. This order—intention before mechanism—reduces the risk of optimizing for the wrong signals (Bomhart-style) because it first aligns the target, then chooses the tool. In short: define "where I want to change" and then choose "how" (S1 or S2).
It's a classic question, maybe a little more specific but, my hypothesis is that, even though there are many heuristics, the first cost-benefit question that divides the waters is still: do you want to be more reflective or intuitive? Be more Inward or Outward? Bet in Gaia or Uranus?
What is the single, first practical question someone who is completely lost should ask to (a) rapidly map or clustering their expectations?