I really like the ladder metaphor and think it can generalize out to many contexts where something has to go from point A to point B.

Examples.
1. Development economics will sometimes look at what the victorians did on their path to modern wealth for advice on what development countries should do. A lot of this advice doesn't quite work as the developing world has to contend with all the ways the existence of the very wealthy west changes the landscape (cheap imports, brain drain, etc).
2. Asking my parents for life advice they'll mention the importance of getting into a cheap mortgage on a single family house ...

I've been on a years long quest to shore up a decent morning & evening routine that's not tightly coupled with the routine of the rest of my life. IE that can survive me getting sick or going oncall. This post hit me at a time when I was trying and failing to maintain a lot of simple but high value routines (Easy stuff like journaling ~ every night, remembering to take out the trash before it became a problem, etc). On it's advice I setup some relevant forfeits ... and found that it did not work for me at all, about the same level of motivation as any other task management app.

The fact that loosing $5 a day didn't feel like any yoinked into my conscious awareness how much my relationship to money had started slipping in an unhealthy direction. I'd graduated school two years previously and started working at big tech ... and was getting bit by the lifestyle creep hard.

This context help me notice that this was a *problem* that I was bleeding capital out of inattention in ways that kept me coupled to a job that I didn't find that fulfilling or want to work long term - and the noticing gave me the push to *pay attention* to my spending and dial my lifestyle.

I post this here as I expect it might be a commonish experience, and I can recommend this as an easy self experiment to test where your psychological relationship to money is.

You mention how yumminess positively biases for novel things. I think it also negatively biases for habitual things in ways that make not being an idiot harder.

IE, a new relationship feels a lot yummier than the same relationship with the same person 10 years later - even though that relationship is much more valuable to me personally after those 10 years than at the beginning.

There's a dynamic where we don't feel yumminess for things we have and are confident that we will continue having, even when those things are very valuable to us.

Two thoughts.

1. This is a kind of strange gap in human cognition that seems prone to a lot of common and obvious failure modes.
2. I wonder if the societal concept of Goodness is an attempted patch, which would imply that rejecting the memetic egregore successfully is harder than just not being an idiot. (And often involves subcultures building their own memetic egregore to serve a similar purpose).

IE, feeling right is really yummy ... and it was ~ the memetic egregore of Rationality that got me to a point where being right is yummier than seeming / feeling right.

This feels related to generalized-hangriness - our values point in useful directions while on the object level being wrong.

IE, feeling right points to a desire to be respected and to understand the world, but is itself a bad object level way to achieve those goals.

So I'm not sure that "jettison the memetic egregore and pay attention to your and others' actual Values" is good advice, and I worry that actual is doing a lot of non obvious work that is kind of contradictory with defining Values as things that feel yummy.

There’s also something like “always be looking for and open to improvements” - be willing to spend the time tinkering.

The way I take notes started as “everything I read gets a file” and has slowly evolved into something much more powerful simply by me noticing when I’m experiencing friction and tinkering with stuff to try and reduce that friction.

Maybe I am just really not the target audience of this post - but I did not find this very helpful.

I (and again I might normal minding here) am not surprised that Confusion, or Anger, or Fear make sense and are useful. When I have wanted to discard emotions this was not what I meant.

Rather, what doesn't make sense is the biological feedback mechanisms of some specific emotions.

Anxiety is a good intuition pump. It makes me nervous and sweaty and kinda panicked. I forget things I'd otherwise remember, I stutter and look at the floor. You're totally right that Anxiety fires when we care about things - but I know that I care about this thing already - the Anxiety just makes me way more likely to fail.

I would much prefer to live a life without those effects - I would be much better at interviews, dating, public speaking, etc. Literally everything I care about is directly undercut by the effects of Anxiety.

Similarly, I would prefer to live without the biological effects of Anger - when someone says something snide about me in a meeting I want to respond with something smart and professional (which I do to ~ everything else people say in meetings) - but instead the flash of Anger means I have to go silent and suppress the desire to say something stupid and unprofessional.

To generalize I often feel like specific emotions hijack my body against my own interests. These emotions are responding to things I am already very well aware of and make accomplishing my goals difficult.

My guess would be that this hijacking is a leftover from our mammalian evolution. The brain flooding the body with chemicals in specific situations to force a fast and extreme response makes a lot of sense if you're a prey animal.

But my guess would be that these responses ~ never made sense for humans. I don't imagine that sweaty palms while you're stalking a Mammoth would actually help, or that doing the equivalent of something stupid and unprofessional when your social superior slights that you missed your spear throw because of said sweaty palms would improve your standing in the group.