I think threads like this might benefit from the rules that reddit.com/r/AskReddit uses (which have changed a bit recently, but the general idea stays the same): If you're asking a question with your post, put your own answer in a comment, instead of the main body. That enables people to vote on your example independently of the question itself.
Agreed this is a good idea. Will do it next time. Though I urge you to consider that the first description people read will shape their kind of response afterwards, so sometimes the "first mover advantage" is good for establishing, tacitly, what kinds of remarks and format of response will be used. (which is a mild instance of what I defend in the solved one)
Though it has some unfairness to it, which may be corrected by separating "expected form" from "first example". Shall do so next time.
Or you could put your answer in the body as an example, explaining that you've also posted the answer as a comment. Then people can vote on your answer independently from your question, and you can establish the expected form before people begin reading other people's comments.
Then that I will try on next time.
Just one thing: both you and gwillen mentioned "voting on your example"
I didn't think the point of giving an example was to allow for it being voted. An example is an example. Sure, one may like or dislike it, and think it more or less good. But why is the goal of voting an example important? For me, what matters is creating your own example, and helping those who put theirs.
Advice is 99,9% of time not a 1 bit thing that can be summarized in thumbs down or up.
But why is the goal of voting an example important? For me, what matters is creating your own example, and helping those who put theirs.
I agree with you. Receiving votes on our posts and comments is only an instrument to help us build better content. The content and how people use it is what matters.
Although the karma voting system provides imperfect information, it provides cheap imperfect information. Separating the question and answer seems like an easy way to make better use of the information that the votes provide. One benefit that I see from the separation is that you receive slightly more detailed feedback, like in a case where some people might upvote your post because of the thoughts that your question provokes but others may downvote the post because they take issue with your example. If enough people downvote the post because of the answer despite the quality of discussion that they think your question provides (which seems pretty unlikely), the post might become buried because of its low rating.
On second thought, No one actually undertook the exercise, which may have been related to the sheer size of the original post. I should edit it inside a comment now, and see if that changes.
Worst problem: My own crappy attitude.
Why it was the worst: I have none of the obvious attributes you read about in psych texts and self-help. I'm not a pessimist, I don't dwell on the past, I don't get angry, etc. This issue was very difficult to see clearly.
How I solved it:
First, I realised being too future-oriented was problematic. While I didn't dwell on the past, I was discounting my present situation far too much, perhaps pathologically.
Secondly, I realised my lack of an emotional response was due to a deeper emotional problem: resentment. Resentment is an interesting emotion. Resentment just kind of hangs out in the background, rather than making you do anything dramatic. Resentment seeks to eliminate its object, rather than harm it. This means it's usually expressed in withdrawal. If you're very anti-social and unemotional, you're probably suffering from resentment.
Thirdly, I realised I overlook a lot of my own negativity because I enjoy it so much. It's the source of my humour. I have a tendency to revel in it. Somebody getting in my way as I walk down the street will unleash a burst of perfectly enjoyable mental vitriol. I love a good rant. I didn't think this was a problem because it wasn't marked by strong emotion. It gave me a sense of superiority. I felt it was part of my personality.
I had all of these insights while reading a book on Tibetan 7-point Mind Training (specifically Traleg Kyabgon's The Practice of Lojong) but they are not necessarily contained in that book. It was really my own reaction to the radical altruism of the text that let me dig deep and find these problems. I did apply the book's idea of keeping watch on my own thoughts and letting go of the ones I now recognised as negative before they had a chance to snowball. This is an effective technique. You just have to develop a counter-habit of thinking, "Oh, I'm doing it again."
Outcome: I no longer hate people.
Why it was the worst: I have none of the obvious attributes you read about in psych texts and self-help. I'm not a pessimist, I don't dwell on the past, I don't get angry, etc. This issue was very difficult to see clearly.
First, I realised being too future-oriented was problematic. While I didn't dwell on the past, I was discounting my present situation far too much, perhaps pathologically.
I could have sworn "Dwell in the present (including not the future)" is a prominent notion in self help literature.
Outcome: I no longer hate people.
Fantastic. That'll make life much more pleasant for you!
It sounds like me, except that catching myself isn't really the problem. The problem is that I haven't found a way to ask my internal Grinch to stop once I've noticed it at work. It doesn't help that I have a tendency to be hard on myself and go meta. I'll notice that I'm being negative, get annoyed about it, get annoyed about me unproductively getting annoyed and giving myself negative reinforcement for noticing, and then I will have built up enough bad affect that whatever other lines of thought I have will be poisoned too. I realize the self fulfilling prophecy and needless complication of this. I'm not happy about it. Bad mood+self awareness=recursive bad mood for me, it seems. Have you any advice on this particular failure mode?
Only about 2 months. But I'm quite good at applying things once I've convinced myself of them, as long as they're relatively straightforward. In this case, I managed to become good at catching myself in these negative thoughts the same day. I think it could vary considerably from person to person.
... make it look as though it is obvious that anyone who is someone favours [x]...
That is a tactic of the Dark Arts*; it is manipulative and precludes intellectual honesty.
Also, you use 'obvious' and it's various forms three times in this post, and once in your other post (in a Darkly framed statement). I find the word jarring** in the contexts you've used it; whether others have as well I know not. Regardless, I recommend against continuing to use the word in that way.
*I may be using Dark Arts incorrectly; I use it and manipulation interchangeably.
**id est an annoying signal of hubristic arrogance and disrespect for one's readers' potential diversity of experience - particularly when not at all obvious or wrong.
Would you mind clarifying, which sense of 'jarring' are you using? v.intr.
Also, what are the Dark Arts? (there was a mental flash of Yudkowky talking against misterianists, also rang a bell about PUA and Star Wars, so better ask than sorry)
Ok, after your clarifications: Yes, this does have a manipulative character to it. It just strikes me as a situation where the ideal honesty is simply not achievable. A group will have tacit beliefs and assumptions, there is nothing you can do about it. First come, first served. So better that you, with your rational beliefs make the case for something before someone else absent mindedly cites a cached thought created by their moralist/super irrational aunt 15 years ago, setting the moral ground into an awful downward spiral.
Also, my recommendation is to use this for beliefs in which you are the first one to believe something in a group (cryonics as a classic case), so frequently people don't even have prior believes about the matters at hand.
Finally, at an emotional level, maybe you can fathom what is it like to be 17 and different from everyone around you, think that reality is fundamentally different from what they think, and that life should be lived according to different principles than the ones that guide them, every single one of them. Every human being you have ever encountered. If you do, I think you know as well as I do how arrogance, specially in the form of disrespect for authority, may come in handy as a survival technique.
If you don't, take my word for it. Sometimes arrogance is not a weapon of choice, but a weapon of lack of choice.
Finding the worst solved problem and the next unsolved problem in the same area seems like a good starting position for making a self-improvement plan. You know the boundaries of your skills and the area next beyond that.
My worst problem ever, solved: Having a good relationship. It requires social skills, knowledge of yourself, knowledge of other people, it changes with circumstances, and it also needs some luck.
Next problem, unsolved: Building a community. When I have some idea I consider good, even when I find some people who express enthusiasm, I can't bring them to work together. Either I am wrong at convincing those people to cooperate, or the ratio of "usable" people is naturally low and I am wrong at bringing my idea to enough people so that even the "usable" subset is large enough. Or both.
Other great problem, solved: Making enough money to buy my own home. The solution involved a great help from other people. I made most of money myself, but other people lended me the rest (my country was early post-communist at that time, the mortgages were not as widely available as they are today), and especially they helped me to find a good and affordable apartment (I absolutely would not have time to do so, nor the skills).
Next problem, in progress: Making enough money to become independent on work for some time, and then using that time wisely for my projects.
Other big problem, solved: Learning enough about Java programming and design patterns so I can write a nontrivial computer game (including menu, intro screen, saving game progress, etc.) reliably without bugs. Especially to understand the thread model and how it relates to events.
Next problem, in progress: Completing the game. ;-)
"We want to get people who would not be doing effective altruist stuff otherwise", which obviously creates obnoxious incentives for making threats of stopping one's altruism unless one is hired.
Altruists wouldn't make such threats. We shouldn't negotiate with terrorists; we definitely shouldn't hire them.
:) Awesome interpretation Larks. Still does not solve the issue of wannabe paid effective altruists out there, and leads them towards doing something else entirely. I"ve edited the original to look a little less pointy
It seems that both problems are related to your arrogance and you ought to address the underlying cause.
The solved and unsolved problem, I assume that is what you mean. Any tips on that? Travelling for extended periods to a place where I'm less interesting than the group (which I did a few times, at Singinst, Leverage) doesn't last long once I get back.
Mark Twain comes to mind:“Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.”
EDIT: this was originally in the main post. but gwillen et al made me think this was being counterproducive Here are my solved and unsolved ones. So I'll start to break the ice:
Solved: Being very different from the society around me and being the first many things within my culture, and yet being social and accepted. Here I mean culture in a fine grained sense, as in my peers in school, theatre class, university, friends of friends, dates and acquaintances. I do not mean my country, western society, or the whole of my city. For illustration, I was the first: Transhumanist, Singularitarian, Analytic Philosopher, Philosopher of Mind, Cryonicist, Anthropic-cist, Immortalist, Polyamorist, Multiversist, Open Relashionship defender, and probably some other stuff which I'm forgetting.
How it was solved: To begin with, some things about us we can't change easily. If I truly believed biological immortality is a good thing, the only thing I could have done to save face was being silent about it. If you are under stress (new in a new group for instance) this may happen for a while, and your true beliefs become crunched within you. This obviously is bad. One strategy that again and again I have found extremely helpful in my case is to bluntly state X, which assumes that position Y is widely held and normal, when a new group is being assembled, you meet one at a party, or if two groups are meeting for the first time.
Simple examples: You enter a group in formation unaware of their religious, or not, beliefs, very few minutes into interaction, or even as an ice-breaker, make a joke such as "Only a christian would think something so dumb". Alternatively, do the same for related beliefs, make it look as though it is obvious that anyone who is someone favours abortion choice over obliged maternity, or that homophobia was a common characteristic of the primitive pre-industrial age, which escaped becoming passible of death penalty just for pity of those educated in such brutish times.
When it Works: This works for any group that has not yet settled on implicit rules of behavior, whose normative status is still very flexible because no one felt like testing it. A newly forming group always has that, two merging groups as well, sometimes even an old one can. Definitely do it in your Less Wrong meeting with the new people who arrive.
Why it works: Our minds are well programmed to reorganize themselves to different sets of customs and behaviors, and extremely biased towards group acceptance. Thus, everyone wants to abide by the group's settled behaviors and beliefs. Newly forming groups are more frequent now than in our Evolutionary Environment of Adaptation, making us not so prone to boast around about tacit beliefs that ought to be held. But once you do it, it settles a lot. Everyone heard you saying it, and everyone didn't hear all others silently disagreeing even though they displayed agreement. Suddenly it becomes the standard of "how we rule in this shire", and you have a magnificently increased odds of getting 1)People to actually consider becoming what you said they already are 2) Acceptance and 3)Sometimes even a tacit assumption that you know this groups better than anyone else.
Now to the second part of our exercise:
Not Solved Yet) Finding a resources source that both satisfies my intellectual requirements and abilities, and my financial and leisure requirements. So this situation can be thus described: For the time being attached to Brazil for several reasons, I'd expect that having unusual knowledge and motivation here would be in my favour. Being a LessWronger, a Singinster, a Leverage Reseacher, having won a prize from Metuselah Foundation, written a book on Dennett, graduating from the best uni here, being one of the very very few people who study positive psychology here (as opposed to psychoanalysis or behaviorism) and having, in general, a frame of mind shaped by the brilliant minds that shaped the LessWrong community, speaking 4 languages, should be reason to either be welcome by a market overpopulated with under-educated people in some task that relates to my studies, or else to get invited to interesting jobs abroad.
Yet, the academy here shall forever fight those who are philosophers and want to study something besides history of philosophy up to the 1960's. And their weapon, not giving research grants, is a very sharp and accurate one.
The US academy on philosophy is unimaginably competitive for philosophy students from abroad, demanding an impossible combination of native language level GRE's, perfect 4's in average score in universities that don't have the 1-4 system and a much lower correlation between good work and good grades. Oh, not to mention letters of recommendation from famous teachers in the field, who live 10 thousand miles away from me.
Being scientific is not a requirement for those who seek psychologists, or a lecturer on self-help/personal psychology. People'd rather pay a charlatan that appears on TV making astrology-like claims, than someone who knows facts about happiness, distress and depression based on large N studies.
Jaan and Peter to the contrary, most philosophers don't bear the entrepreneurial spirit, the very idea of buying and selling material objects disgusts my philosophical taste (I also don't know why), also I don't have the programmer gear. I like the theory behind programming, but the doing of it feels like eating sauce less lettuce in an Italian ristorante.
There are the blooming Effective Altruism institutions out there, I even direct one! www.ierfh.org, but some constraints apply: Sheer lack of resources, not willing to relocate someone from Brazil all the way to country X, not willing to give up life and put 90 hours/week for 2 thousand dollars a month, and the funniest one, "We want to get people who would not be doing effective altruist stuff otherwise", which obviously creates obnoxious incentives for giving up one's altruism unless one is hired. Almost a Russell Paradox. It is not unreasonable, it is just funny.
There is writing, which is really cool, and I feel a strong urge of writing a different book every few weeks, the current one is "The Four-Hour Sex, Science, and Substances" which those who read Tim Ferriss books will probably grasp. The market in Brazil really sucks though, so I'd need to write in English and have an agent in the US to do all the bureocracy of optimizing for sales. (anyone interested, drop a message)
Thanks for the icebreaker bit! Useful insight.
Being scientific is not a requirement for those who seek psychologists, or a lecturer on self-help/personal psychology. People'd rather pay a charlatan that appears on TV making astrology-like claims, than someone who knows facts about happiness, distress and depression based on large N studies.
Did you test this claim against reality and actually advertise services as a life coach etc.? Can you work as an online therapist through LivePerson.com or a similar site? If what you do actually works, maybe it will spread through word-of-mouth. Maybe you can copy the promotional methods of whoever is getting themselves promoted most effectively but spread stuff based on science.
If you're fully fluent in >1 language, try translation work? I've definitely seen websites that hire people to do that though I can't recall any offhand.
Can you raise money for IERFH and tackle bigger projects (thereby becoming more impressive and raising more money)?
Not interested in translation work. Language habilities are more abundant than philosophical knowledge/transhumanist morals where I live by a factor of millions. It would be such a waste.
I was planning on raising money for IERFH, we had donations. But I am not psychologically good at that, it also would probably not give me, personally money. We need money for several other things that take priority. Since there are 30 collaborators, I'd expect someone else would be willing to do it, but pro-bono work has a simple rule, people do what they want to do, not what you want them to, or what is needed. They are doing it for fun anyway.
I also hold the untested belief that because brazil has such a smaller community of startup founders, internet richfolk and geeky entrepreneurs, there will be very little incentive to foster IERFH and similar initiatives. Finally, philanthropy in here is nearly looked down upon. As opposed to the US, where you see Oprah and Bill Gates saying "Hurray! Give your money away!" Notice that is an untested belief. Meaning I have failed to summon the courage/time/effort of trying to meet the big-shots here.
EDIT: No one was doing what the post suggests, so I accepted an idea from one of the comments, and embedded my response in a comment, not the post itself
I'd like to ask this question to you, and I'll respond it myself as well.
What Is The Worst Problem You've Ever Encountered and Solved? And the One You Didn't, Yet!
Some prior considerations:
1) I mean "problem" in a very general sense, it could be a math problem, an existential problem, a social problem, an akrasia problem, a disease problem etc...
2) I'd like people to give informative/didactic responses. Try not only to state the facts, but also to help someone who'd encounter similar situations to be able to deal with them.
3) When talking about the one you didn't, give enough specifics that someone would actually be able to help you.
The general idea is to teach people how to Win by example, taking in consideration all the shortcomings of biases etc...
Well, that is all. One solved, one not yet solved. State your own issues and help others here. Someone else's rationality is always welcome.