The urgency comes from noticing that the beliefs you're navigating by are likely insufficient, in light of new evidence. E.g. "There are no tigers around, so I can walk outside without getting eaten" is called into question when you hear a rustling in the bushes, and figuring out whether you can actually walk around outside without getting eaten can be pretty urgent. If you already know there are tigers are around, you just won't go outside, so the urgency isn't going to be there unless your beliefs are challenged in a time sensitive manner.

As applied to your situation, I don't know what chance you have of getting the same or similar salary or prestige. "No chance" seems pretty hard to justify given the immense possibility space and inherent uncertainty of the future, but I don't know your situation. It doesn't sound like the end of the world either way to me. I'm not saying it's not important, and if you've been navigating by beliefs that said you'd definitely keep that or more, then it totally makes sense that you'd be shaken when evidence comes in saying this might not be true.

At the same time, not everyone has to have the highest paying most prestigious jobs. Take my parent's old mail man, for example. He's got to be the happiest and most genuinely friendly person I've ever met. Not because he got the most prestigious job or hasn't had struggles outside his work life, but because of the way he chooses to relate to the world with openness to what it might bring. I admire that, and want to be more like that. Making lots of money is definitely nice, and prestige is a good sign you're doing things right and feels good for a reason. But I think a lot of what fuels these drives for salary and prestige is really an underlying drive for respect, and knowing that we're making the most of what we can. And I think he has that, more than a lot of people in much more prestigious and higher paying careers. He definitely has more of my respect than most others in those categories, and I suspect this is also true of people closer to him -- who tend to matter more than the broader society anyway.

If something happened and I found myself needing to deliver mail for a living it would be devastating to me. I've put in a lot of work and a lot of thoughts and expectations into being able to do other things that are higher paying and all that, so it wouldn't just be a giant loss I would also be largely lost. I wouldn't know what to do, where to go, and I certainly wouldn't want to give up on what I once had. If that's something like the potential reality you're navigating right now, I can't say "I get it" in that I haven't actually been there, let alone in your shoes. But I get why it'd be tough, and overwhelming. I hope to never get there. If I do, I know who I'm looking to role model. Proof by example that there's still something difficult to strive towards, which is very worth striving towards.

None of this makes any of it easy, of course. Life is a lot to figure out, regardless. Hopefully this makes it a little clearer what fuzzy light to aim towards, should your fear turn out to be a likely reality. And hopefully having a sketch of a line of retreat makes it easier to explore and figure out if it actually is.

Best of luck to you Joao. I'm looking forward to seeing where you go next, and how things turn out for you.

Belief is about how we think the world is. Fear is about what we think the world might be, or might become, if we don't act to preempt the outcome.

Both can change, because the world itself can change and we can get new information that changes what is most likely. The difference is that changing beliefs usually requires additional information. For example, if you believe that you don't own a bike, learning that your friend bought you one for your birthday will change that belief.

In contrast, when you hear a rustling in the bushes and run screaming "There's a tiger in that bush! It's gonna eat me!", does that mean that once you safely get out of that situation you will recollect and determine "Yes, there was actually a tiger in that bush"? Will you experience surprise when you don't get eaten? Or will you just think "I don't know if it was actually a tiger or not, but I wasn't gonna stay and find out!". Because if it's the latter, then you never actually believed that you would get eaten or just that there was a tiger in the bush, just that the possibility of "Tiger!" was too high to ignore and that you might have to run to keep from getting eaten.

That alarm shouting "Tiger!" raises some hypotheses which urgently call for attention, but you don't wait around until you believe "there is a tiger in that bush, and it is going to eat me". You're trying to get out of there before there is enough evidence to justify these as facts about reality.

If you find yourself "not in deep shit" and recollecting, will you look back and think "Wait, how'd that happen? There was no way out and now I'm out??? This doesn't make sense"? Or will it feel more like "Whew! That was a close one!" or "I'm glad that didn't turn out to be true!"?

As you look forward, do you find yourself still looking for ways out? Writing LessWrong posts in hopes of finding ways out? Because that behavior wouldn't make a whole lot of sense if you don't think there's anything there to be found. It makes a lot of sense if you're not sure what's there, and you sense a danger of losing your way out if you don't act.
 

"I'm in deep shit! There's no way out."

In other words, I believe I'm in the worst there is and that there's no way out; that's information.

Beliefs describe the world as you think it is. Fears describe the world as it might be, or might become, if you don't act so as to rectify things. This looks more like a fear than a belief to me, both due to the way its phrased and the way you're responding to it.

This is important because it changes the way we relate to the information.

If it's a belief, then it's just true, so far as we can tell. We can try to take in more information in hopes that we've misestimated, or we can try to figure out what to do about it, but it's kinda just the world [we believe] we're living in. And if part of the belief is "There's no way out", then that's pretty limiting.

If it's a fear, then that's not true. It's something that might be true, or somewhat more true on the margin than we've been giving credit for in our world models, but there's also a gap between what we do believe and this thing which we fear. This gap is likely to generate significant curiosity, once you notice that it exists. Questions like "Am I in deep shit?", "Is there no way out?", "How do/would I know?", "What would be the appropriate action to take if it were true, and how do I know that?", "What can I do to distinguish?,  "Is there something I need to devote more attention to, if I'm going to make sure not to be/stay in deep shit?". These questions can all be investigated relative to what we already believe, from information we already have. And if "There's no way out!" is just being raised as a hypothesis, then it might be getting raised early and preemptively -- and we're not bound to taking it seriously, at face value.

The important difference between beliefs and fears is that fears are not bound by requiring solid evidence before making strong claims and sweeping generalizations. "One person was a jerk to me" isn't sufficient to justify "Everyone hates me!" as the way reality is, but it might be enough to raise the hypothesis -- if you don't already have a secure foundation for rejecting such hypotheses.

Such fears are worth examining, because they are sometimes true, or partly true. But also, just because you thought it doesn't mean it's true. Or that you even believe it.

Noticing that makes it significantly easier to explore, in part because because it's only a "might" and "if we don't react in time", and that gives us room to move and to think. And also because we get to redirect our focus to finding out what's true about the world and let our beliefs update to match, instead of struggling trying to micromanage what we believe to be our own mistaken beliefs, ending up trapped in distinctions we don't see.
 

No, definitely not dark arts. The exact opposite, actually -- though the latter probably won't come across in this comment.

Again, I'm going to have to point at some distinctions which might feel like nits but which actually change the story completely. In this case, it's the difference between focusing on "coming off as sane" -- which I would not advocate -- and "coming off as obviously sane". Or perhaps more clearly worded "being visibly sane".

If you focus on coming across as sane, then you are Goodharting on appearing sane even if you aren't. "Reality doesn't matter, just [other] people's perceptions" does indeed lead to dark arts, and it has a ceiling. This is politician shit, and comes off as politician shit to anyone who is more perceptive than you take them for.

At the same time, the wise alternative is not "Other people's perceptions don't matter, just reality". Because our perception can never be reality, so what this means in practice is "Other people's perceptions don't matter, just [my own perception of] reality", while losing track of the conflation hiding in the presupposition. This conflation leads to not only shutting out error signals of less-than-perfect sanity, but also to blinding ourselves to the extent to which we've become blind. Us aspiring rationalists tend to be much more prone to this failure mode, partly for reasons that are flattering to us, and partly for reasons that are less so. People often pick up on signs that we're doing this subtle flinching, and it's perfectly rational for people to discount our arguments in such cases even if the arguments appear to be solid -- because how are they to know they're competent to judge? It's not like people can't be tricked with sophistry.

What I'm talking about is critically different than either. When it's just obvious that you're sane, it's not "seduced into a perception that could be believable". It's that the alternative visibly doesn't fit. Like, it's not true, and clearly so.

"Being visibly sane" requires both that you're actually sane, and that it's visible to others. The focus is still on actually being sane, while taking care to notice that if you can't get others to see you as sane this is evidence against your sanity. Not "proof", not "the only thing that matters", but evidence -- and something that will therefore soften your perceived certainty, if you allow your beliefs to update with the evidence.

It's true that if you don't provide receipts, this opens a window to deceive. It's also true that there's no rule saying that you have to abuse the trust people place in you. Do you trust yourself not to abuse it?

It's a hell of a question, actually. The moment people start trusting you too much and putting their wellbeing at risk because they didn't demand the receipts you expected them to demand, you tend to get a reality check about how sure you are of your own words and arguments. It's a very sobering experience, and one that is worth working towards with appropriate caution.

It's also an uncomfortable one. And if we're not extremely careful we're likely to flinch and fail to notice.

It seems to me you suggest the following:

I should.

Actually, no. I wouldn't suggest you should do any of that. What I'm saying is purely descriptive.

This may sound like a nit, but I promise this is central to my point

I suspect if you'd been on the line when I was actually talking on the phone to my mom about AI extinction risk, you'd have approved.

I'd be surprised.

Not that I'd expect to disapprove, I just don't really think it's my place to do either. I tend to approach such things from a perspective of "Are you getting the results you want? If so, great. If not, let's examine why".

The fact that you're making this post suggests "not". I could reassure you that I don't think you did terribly, and I don't, but at the end of the day what's my hypothetical approval worth when it won't change the results?

I think if I'd skipped talking about bioweapons, I would have triggered less skepticism in the first place. In fact, I think there's probably some way I could have talked about the AI extinction argument that she didn't think sounded crazy at all. If so, then the amount of exploring her perspective and so on I'd need to do would be dramatically reduced.

Rather than start with something that sounds crazy, then assure people it's not and convince them one by one, if we can actually make it not sound crazy in the first place, that sounds valuable.

I get that this might sound crazy from where you stand, but I don't actually see skepticism as a problem. I wouldn't try to route around it, nor would I try to assure anyone of anything.

I don't have to explore my mom's perspective or assure her of anything when I say crazy sounding stuff, because "He gets how this sounds, and has good reasons for his beliefs" is baked in. The reason I said I'd be curious to explore your mom's perspective is because of the "sounds crazy" objection, and the sense that "I know, right?" won't cut it. If I already understand her perspective well enough to navigate it without hiccup, then I don't need to explore it any more. I'm not going to plow forward if I anticipate that I'm going to be dismissed, so when that happens I know I've erred and need to reorient to the unexpected data. That's where the curiosity comes from.

The question of "How am I not coming off as obviously sane?" is much more important to me than avoiding stretching people's worldviews. Because when I come off as obviously sane, I can get away with a hell of a lot of stretching, and almost trivially. And when I don't, trying to route around that and convince people by "strategically withholding the beliefs I have which I don't see as believable" strikes me as fighting the current. Or, to switch metaphors, it's like fretting over excess weight of your toothbrush because lighter cargo is always easier, before fully updating on the fact that there are pickup trucks available so nothing needs to be backpacked in.

Projection onto "shoulds" is always a lossy process and I hesitate to do it at all, but if I were to do a little to make things a little more concretely actionable at the risk of incurring projection errors, it'd come out something like...

• Notice how incredibly far and easily one can stretch the worldviews of others, once the others are motivated to follow rather than object. Just notice, and let it sink in.
• Notice how this scales. No one believes the earth is round because they understand the arguments. Few people doubt it, because the visibly sane people are all on one side.
• Notice the "spurious" connection between epistemic rationality and effectiveness. Even when you're sure you're right, "Make sure I come off as unquestionably sane, or else wonder what I'm missing" forces epistemic hygiene and proper humility. Just in case. Which is always more likely than we like to think.
• Notice whether or not you anticipate being able to have the effectiveness you yearn for by adopting this mode of operation. If not, turn first to understand exactly where it goes wrong, focusing on "How can I fix this?", and noticing if your attention shifts toward justifying failure and dismissal -- because the latter type of "answering why it's not working" serves a very different purpose.

Things like "Acknowledge that I sound crazy when I sound crazy" and "Explore my moms perspective when I realize I don't understand her perspective well enough" don't need to be micromanaged, as they come naturally when we attend to the legitimacy of objections and insufficiency of our own understanding -- and I have no doubt that you do them already in the situations that you recognize as calling for them. That's why I wouldn't "should" at that level.
 

My mom didn’t buy it. “This is all sounding a bit crazy, Taylor,” she said to me. And she’s usually primed to believe whatever I say, because she knows I’m smart.

The problem is that these stories are not believable. True, maybe, but not easy to believe. They fail the “mom test”. Only hyper-logical nerds can believe arguments that sound like sci-fi.

Maybe only hyper-logical nerds can believe arguments that sound like sci-fi, but your mom only has to believe you. The question is whether you are believable, or whether you're "starting to sound a bit crazy, Taylor".

That's her sign to you that you need to show that you can appreciate how crazy it sounds and maintain your belief. Because it does sound a bit crazy. It's quite a leap from demonstrated reality, and most of the time people are making such leaps they're doing fiction/delusion and not actually calling things right in advance. The track record of people saying crazy shit and then insisting "It's not crazy I swear!" isn't good. If instead, you meet her where she's at and admit "Yeah. I know. I wish it was", it hits differently.

I can't remember if I've talked to my mom about it, but if I had to talk to her about it, I'd probably say something like "You hear of the idea that AGI is going to be completely transformative, and will have the power to kill us all? Yeah, that's likely real", and she'd probably say something like "Oh.". That's basically how it went when I told her the world was about to change due to the upcoming pandemic. I didn't "try to persuade her" by giving her arguments that she's supposed to buy, let alone spinning stories about how a bat had a virus and then these researchers genetically modified it to better attack humans. I just told her "Here's what I believe to be true", so that she could prepare. I was open to why it was that I believed it, but the heavy lifting was done by the fact that I genuinely believed it and I came off more like I was trying to share information so that she could prepare than like I was trying to convince her of anything.

In your shoes, besides making sure to acknowledge her point that it sounds crazy, I'd do a lot of genuine curiosity about her perspective. Has she ever experienced something that sounded crazy as fuck, and then turned out to be real? Not as a rhetorical question, just trying to understand where she's coming from. Is she aware of the massive impact drones are having in the war in Ukraine? Has she thought about what it felt like to be warned of the power of nuclear weapons before anyone had seen them demonstrated?

These aren't "rhetorical questions", asked as ways of disguising a push for "Then you should stop being so confident!" but as a genuine inquiry. Maybe she has experienced something "crazy" turning out to be real, and noticing will change her mind. Or maybe she hasn't. Or maybe it seems different to her, and learning in what way it seems different will be relevant for continuing towards resolving the disagreement. Giving people the space to share and examine their perspective without pressure is what allows people to have the experiences that shift views. Maybe she hasn't had the experience of running from a terminator drone, or being outsmarted at every turn, but you could give her that experience -- by pointing out the shared starting point and asking her to imagine where that goes.

She'd still have to take you up on that invitation, of course. If I'm wrong about being able to convince my own mom in a single line, it'd be for this reason. Maybe the idea would freak her out so much that she would be motivated to not understand. I don't think she would, but maybe. And if so, that's a very different kind of problem that you deal with by making arguments which are "more believable".
 

The distinction between "positive punishment" and "negative punishment" is useful here, and I think a lot of the confusion around this topic comes from conflating the two -- both intentionally and otherwise.

If you hit me for no reason, "positive punishment" would be hitting you back in hopes that you stop hitting me. I have to actually want you to hurt, and it can easily spiral out of hand if you hit me for hitting you for hitting me.

"Negative punishment" would be just not hanging out with people who hit me, because I don't like hanging out with people who hit me. I don't have to want you to hurt at all in order to do this, in the same way that I love my puppy and don't hold anything against her, but when she's jumping on me so much that I can't work I might have to lock her out of my room. Even if you get offended and decide to respond in kind with some negative punishment of your own, that just means you decide to stop hanging out with me too. Which obviously isn't a problem. And heck, by your (IMO appropriate) definition of "punishment" this isn't even punishment because it's not done in order to affect anyone's behavior. It's just choosing to abstain from negative value interactions.

We can't restrict "negative punishment" without restricting freedom of association and freedom of expression, and we also don't have to because sharing truth and making good choices are good, and there's no threat of spiraling out of control. It may hurt a lot to be locked out of all the fun spaces, and it may feel like a punishment in the operant conditioning sense, but that doesn't mean there's any intent to punish or that it is punishment in the sense that's relevant for this post.

What we have to be careful about, is when people try to claim to be doing freedom of association/expression ("negative punishment") while actually intending to do positive punishment. This comes up a lot in the debates between "You're trying to stifle free speech!" and "Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences!"/"I'm just using my free speech to criticize yours!". If you're responding to obnoxious speech with speech like "I'm gonna stone you if you don't shut up" then you're obviously trying to conflate threats of violent positive punishment with "merely freedom of expression", but it gets much more subtle when you say "Ugh, I don't see how any decent person could listen to that guy". Because is that an expression of curiosity from someone who would love to fill in their ignorance with empathy and understanding? Someone who harbors no ill will, just doesn't find that guy interesting? Or is it someone who actively dislikes the person speaking, and would like to see them change their behavior, and even hurt in order to do so?

This attempt to hurt people in order to change their behavior is positive punishment masquerading as negative punishment, and as such has all the same problems with positive punishment. If I try to give you the silent treatment because you didn't say you liked my new shirt, and you give me the silent treatment back, then it can easily escalate into losing a friendship that if we're honest we both wanted. Because it was never actually "I don't find any value here, so I'm pulling back", it was "I'm gonna pull back anyway, in hopes of hurting him enough to change his behavior".

People like Bob, Carol, and Dave are indeed at risk of confusing genuinely prosocial freedom of association and expression with positive punishment, because people like Alice are at risk of doing the latter while pleading the former.

However, they're also likely to recognize it as sincere if Alice looks more like she's doing the former than the latter. If the don't find out about what Mallory did until they ask Alice why she doesn't hang out with Mallory anymore, they're unlikely to see her answer as punishment, for example. Similarly, if she comes off more like "Careful with the puppy, she's friendly but sometimes too friendly!", that's technically communicating a bad thing, but it comes off very differently than if she were to get visibly upset and say "That dog is not well disciplined, it's not a good dog and you should know that".

It's not always clear whether a person is genuinely "just sharing information" or secretly trying to positively punish, but they are indeed distinct things, and having the distinction clear makes it easier to judge.

Okay, cool.

It would be better if the sequence would succeed in people having a clear idea of how they could actually apply the concepts to their lives and then doing that.

What would that look like, to you? Last comment it sounded like you were saying "More emphasis on the concrete take home lessons rather than burying in footnotes", but in this comment it sounds like you're pointing more at the motivation aspect which seems quite different -- and more in line with my focus. I definitely can't pass your ITT yet.

I'll share a little more about how I'm trying to do that, and maybe you can help me figure out how to do it better.

It comes back to our earlier discussion on expectation=intention=setpoint. Summarizing, you were pointing at the value of providing directions in helping people get from point A to point B, while I'm focused more on getting their intent set in the first place. I don't disagree about the importance of knowing how to get from A to B, but I find that like you're saying this time, a lot of the time motivation is limiting. If people aren't actually aiming at point B then they won't follow directions. If they are, then they're likely to ask for directions as needed. The opening example of the girl in the jacuzzi illustrates this well, as my object level advice wasn't anything her friends couldn't have told her, but the difference is that she asked for my input and dismissed theirs.

It's the same thing, on the meta level. Part of what I'm trying to do is motivate readers by demonstrating how solvable these things are and making more concrete and tangible that sense that more is possible (amusingly enough, the top comment chain there is about how nice it'd be to have akrasia solved), and part of what I'm trying to do is provide the compass and sextant needed to start navigating towards a solution. When you say "reading it motivated me to look at my procrastination more as a puzzle to be solved than something that's given", and "The sequence suggest that if I do procrastinate, then there's likely a reason why I'm procrastinating so applying the sequence to the problem was about looking for that reason", this is exactly the kind of thing I'm going for.

But it's not just that. When I hurt my foot and needed the prodding to try that technique, I had some faulty presuppositions that kept me from doing that stuff by default, which is why I needed the prodding and even the "technique". By the time I helped the kid in the fire poker situation, I had some insights which deflated some of these presuppositions, but I still had no idea how to apply any of the insights I'd learned to help this kid. Yet this lack of understanding of how to apply the insights did not stop me from behaving in accordance with my new perspective, and this new perspective brought about different results. Object level application of these insights can actually lead meta level understanding of what is being applied and why it works.

I'm aiming to directly undermine those presuppositions and begin dissolving the connective tissue that gets people stuck in the first place, by showing how things that look like "psychological problems" even in difficult or "impossible" situations turn out over and over to be disagreements propped up by unseen flinches. Like, "Maybe this problem isn't a given". "Maybe things ain't as they seem. What would that be like?". Trying to cast doubt on the pretense of certainty with which these disconnects are held together, so that when it gets to the footnote of "Maybe listen to yourself?" it doesn't take suspending people up in the air to get through. Or having a crush on someone, or whatever.

The idea isn't just that you turn towards existing problems as puzzles, it's also that next time there's something that would have gone over threshold, the idea that there are things you "can't get yourself to do" feels less credible and less enticing, and is less likely to ensnare you. So next time it comes out as "Ugh. I hate working on patents", naturally evokes "What's so bad about working on patents?", and applies the same active ingredient of "turn towards the objection" without ever needing to understand how to apply these insights to akrasia -- because nothing will stick long enough to earn the diagnosis. Noticing what's happening differently is important too because that can help us be intentional about the direction we choose to move, but it doesn't have to lead application.

I'm not sure how to give more emphasis to things like "Actually think through whether the objections your mind comes up might have merit after all" without detracting from the emphasis on "These things which we're so sure are intractable actually melt away when we aim true". And for my friend, if I were to try to convey the former before the latter has sunk in, and without suspending her above concrete, she'd have concluded "Tried that, didn't work", and left with nothing more than immunization against the solution. If things aren't going to come across 100% clearly, I'd rather people like her leave correct in thinking "Okay but I don't know how to put this to use" than incorrect in thinking "I do". Because at least the former at least leaves room for the desire to ask for directions.

Separately from how well it's working out, does that help make more sense of the choices I've made in presentation?

How would you do it, from the writer's side? What would you like to see/what would make you more likely to put things to practice, from the reader's side? I've tried to write in the way that I would have liked to see as a reader, but that doesn't necessarily match well to the actual readers.

That looks consistent with a rifle to me, though there are are really only a few moments as he's transitioning from the roof to the ground that it's easy to see he has something long in there.

The more interesting mismatch to me is with the terminal performance of that bullet. The lack of an exit is definitely not consistent with a 30-06 at 140yd striking his neck from that angle. I think I know how to explain it, but I'm curious if anyone else has tried to figure out how that could happen.

One thing I find helpful, is to outsource this to my mental model of other people, or actual other people. If you come at them with "This is definitely true", what kind of objections do they come up with? Not just explicit objections that they say, but also implicit objections that they don't know how to articulate. Once you've explored that space and know that all roads lead to them being fully on board -- again, not just in explicit claims but in revealed belief as well -- then you know that at least they can't come up with a reason you might be wrong.

It's still only as good as your other people, but if no one you know can find fault in your reasoning that's not a bad start.