I think defining "good person" is very hard, and that it's very hard to prevent people from gaming this metric, and very hard to judge people correctly (imagine a group of 4th graders trying to judge which one of their teachers is more intelligent, for instance. My point is that judging something which is above yourself is difficult as you judge relatively to your own standards which aren't as universal as you assume)

For now, what society considers a "good person" is mostly somebody who they have no dirt on, which ends up being somebody who is harmless and uninteresting. Because we focus on avoiding negatives rather than on cultivating positives, most people who try really hard to become "good people" just become pathetic instead (for instance the Nice Guy stereotype).
I'm reminded of the quote "If a tree is to grow into heaven, it's roots must grow into hell", and I think that's a less naive take on goodness in man than what society is currently promoting

I don't follow this sentence

Your inhibitions exist to protect you. At some point in your life, something conditioned that inhibition, and the brain now thinks that not having the inhibition is dangerous, so it won't let you dissolve it until it's convinced otherwise. You can probably turn down an inhibition since it's quite easy to argue that most inhibitions are exaggerated, and that's the idea with the "magic dial" in Book review: "Feeling Great" by David Burns

So I think the extent to which you can change your state of mind depends on how many restrictions your mind has put in place, how many regions of this space are "forbidden regions". Some people won't allow themselves to do anything weird or "cringe", and for some people, this is true even if they're completely alone, which tells me that they've internalized some panopticon mechanism of protection against social judgement.

I also think we worry because we're afraid that if we stop worrying, something bad will happen. In other words, the worrying itself is a self-defense mechanism. Same with things like guilt and unhappiness, the beliefs are "If I stopped feeling guilty, I might do something bad", and "if I stopped being unhappy, then I might stop putting effort into my life". So unhappiness is a contract we make with ourselves. "I'm allowed to be happy once I achieve X, but not before"

So ultimately, most of the things controlling these mechanisms seem to exist in our "core beliefs". Some people also speak of "core values" and "identity" as additional restrictions, but I think these may just be other kinds of beliefs.

This is also reminiscent of spiritual practices

Indeed, teaching wisdom is really difficult. Most people will have to experience things themselves in order to get them.

I think the "trust the universe" thing is a bit like placebo (positive belief with positive results), a bit like praying (believing that a state will be reached, a bit like visualizing the future you want (anchoring a goal state and believing that you will reach it), and a bit like confidence (the belief that you can reach valuable states).

Believing that something is possible is highly useful. Have you seen how records (like in sports) improve over time? You can go 100 years with minor improvements, and then somebody beats the record, and now many other people, now realizing that it's possible, beat the old record as well.

And do you know the story of George Dantzig? A professor wrote two unsolved problems on the blackboard, and Dantzig, thinking they were homework, solved both of them. To tie this into the writing above, it's seems like limiting beliefs hold us back in life. Spiritual people seemingly attempt to lift these limiting beliefs by statements such as "Mind over matter" and "Belief can move mountains".

I think strong beliefs are a factor in some mental illness, though. Delusions of grandeur for instance. Some also describe depression as trapped, negative priors.

Finally, I'd like to bring up fight/flight/freeze/fawn. The difference seems to lie in your belief in your own strength (capacity for fighting), and your belief in the trustworthiness of other people (that fawning won't be used against you). Also the legitimacy thereof, are you allowed to use your strength, and are you allowed to be weak? Self-defense laws conflict with the former, and if you're a pillar of strength for many people, it will conflict with the latter. I'm not yet sure how to seperate "freeze" and "flight" though.

This past paragraph is useful to think about, as you want to grow stronger under pressure rather than weaker. To flip "Oh no I'm so useless" into an "I will show you!" and a "what if I fail?" into an "I will do my best". I think manipulating your beliefs can make you more 'antifragile'

The resistance likely comes from the accumulated cost of taking many actions, whereas living in the moment is easy. To give an example: Taking a single step is basically always easy, whereas walking 10 kilometers is not, but walking 10 kilometers is just many, many single steps.

Being able to shift ones headspace or "mode" is a valuable skill, and I can do it to some extent, but there's also sometimes something which gets in the way, and I think it's likely that the mind, in order to protect itself, limits our control over it. By manipulating your belief system, you can lessen your inhibitions, by lowering the perceived threat of less control. 

As you probably already know, we lack a language for talking about these things, making it hard to communicate methods and personal breakthroughs in self-manipulation. For example, how would one write a guide on relaxing ones body? Even my own breakthroughs and methods are lost at times. I can write them down, but future me can't always replicate them. So I might read "trust the universe" and get closer to a flow state, or forget exactly what I meant by that.

Interesting post, by the way!

It's not about the goal, but the process. The strongest drives result in the greatest people. The ideal person is not the strongest, but him who seek strength the most. While said person might become one of the strongest, it's all a result of his attitude, his values, and his instinct (his strong drives), and it's these which are valuable. For people who can thrive in suffering, suffering cease to be a problem. I only have a small affinity for suffering now, but I had a large one last time I had a mixed episode (hypomanic and suffering at the same time, a perfect description of this state would be "Dionysian")

Suffering often occurs because the gap between what is and what we want, so it motivates us towards greatness.

By helping those who suffer, you lessen their need to grow, or worse - you cause them to depend on the help you're providing. Perhaps, without your help, they'd be forced to improve themselves, reaching the point of being self-sufficient.

The ubermensch is him who always improves, and always grows stronger, either without the need of suffering and challenges, or because he seeks suffering and challenges.

Have many people on here not hit rock bottom, or experienced something terrible, only to overcome it and grow as a person? These kind of improvements are not minor by any means!

I take it to mean "Judging yourself harshly = judging other people harshly". If you think anything less than an A is poor performance, then you will also judge your friends if they get less than an A. If you criticize other people for suboptimal performance, then you put a burden on yourself to perform optimally (if you're too intelligent to trick yourself into accepting your own hypocrisy, at least, which I think most LW users are).

Higher standards helps push us towards perfection (at least, when they don't lead to procrastination from the fear of failire), but they also make us think worse of most things in existence.

So the bible makes a valid point, as did Nietzsche when he said "I love the great despisers, because they are the great venerators and arrows of longing for the other shore" and "There is wisdom in the fact that much in the world smells foul: nausea itself creates wings and water-divining powers!". I'm not sure how this relates to AI, though. It seems to apply to value judgements, rather than judgements about right and wrong (as truth values)

My reply turned out to be a bit long. Perhaps you can jsut skim it for the aspects you care about?

I think wrapping science in spirituality can work, but for people in this community, it's probably tempting to think in objective, well-defined tokens rather than thinking in the concepts and subjective tokens which align with how the brain works and with ones own values.
But the rules of the mind and the rules of mathematics are entirely different, and ones "objective" quality of life matters much less for well-being than their subjective worldview does, which is partly why we're not really getting any happier.

If you try walking, and thinking consciously about every movement you make, you will probably find that walking becomes much harder. Your mind also has its own symbolic language which is much more efficient than mathematics for many things, and science is sufficently inhuman that it's destructive not just to human errors, but to human nature in general.

My suggestion here was that we adjust what science is so that it no longer creates the problems you are pointing at

You could partly do that by correctly stating that everything is relative, and thus that an absolutist worldview might not be ideal. But moving further than that is difficult as people have an almost religious view of science. They think that the subjective doesn't matter much, that things are only worth something if you can prove them, that science can discriminate between good and evil or morality and immorality.

People also seem to either reject reality, or desperately attempt to construct a morally correct hypothesis which explains the pattern they see in reality, and then make up excuses as the hypothesis repeatedly fails to predict the future. The idea that people seek the truth is a lie, they can only be objective about things that they don't care about too much, which is why controversies repeatedly form around things connected to politics and morality. People who don't realize this don't even have a basic understanding of themselves (or other people, or humanity in general) which is the actual cause of our problems.

science can be quite spiritual and can generate well-being when it's driven by genuine wonder, curiosity and intention to make life more wonderful

It can when you put the latter first, so that science becomes second. That feeling of wonder literally requires a lack of complete understanding. The people who enjoy science the most are those who know it the least, and they will become disillusioned until they once again meet something that they don't understand, which causes an explosion in possibilities bigger than what you can wrap your mind around. "The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will make you an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you", the latter part is only true because we don't understand quantum science. It's our good luck that we didn't manage to "solve" science.

And again, we have to watch out for Goodhart's law. If you "improve" peoples lives in a way which makes them miserable, then it's not an improvement, even if the metrics state otherwise. Another reason I dislike scientific views is that I think it results in Moloch. the only winning move is not to play, and the only way to avoid playing is if the optimal solution remains unknown. Psychologically speaking, having full information about something seems really undesirable. Possibly because you do the mental equivalence of when the state reduces human lives to numbers on a spreadsheet.

I'm autistic so thinking objectively has always been easy for me, I appear "better" at scientific thought than most, which is why I'm so conscious of all the pitfalls one can run into. Anyway, I think the many psychological issues appearing in society are directly connected to the domination of scientific thought and the death of religion, and thus that you're trying to solve the problem with the tools which caused it, and that you only consider this a good idea because you feel something wonderful in science... Which actually exists in yourself (or in your relation to science). The whole "beauty in mathematics" is, I think, the brains reaction to symmetry and harmonious patterns, making it beautiful in the same way that music is beautiful. Of course, a lot of things can be made possible through science, so it's not incorrect to perceive a lot of hidden value waiting to be discovered. It just has to be for the sake of humanity instead of at the cost of humanity.

But everywhere in society I see a hatred of humanity and attempts of destroying it. Usually in order to make humanity "better" or "more moral", which translates into destroying aspects of human nature or replacing them with less human ones. An easy example which is not too controversial is destroying "laziness" and making people into efficient workers. Which also hints at the fact that the optimization of "productivity" and the optimization of "humanity" go in two different directions, meaning that we'll start our own darwinistic process of destroying human aspects (as the genetic "fitness" values inhuman/objective things). Which is ironic as the purpose of technology is improving human life, rather than to, say, replace it.

Could you maybe define the terms 

I think that science is a way of thinking and a way of doing things, as well as a way of encoding something else. If I were to describe a beautiful painting just in writing alone, then I would have encoded the image in text, reducing something visual to something linguistic. But in that process, the image would be completely destroyed, so this "encoding" is impossible. Likewise, if I define science, the definition would be a pointer at best, and not science itself.

My understanding of spirituality is something like psychological well-being and tacit knowledge and wisdom. This is rather vague perhaps, but communicating wisdom is inherently difficult, and the text is only, at best, a pointer. If you replace your intuition of substance (like your personal experience of love) with your scientific understanding (that love is 'merely' chemical reactions), your brain might lose faith in its own experience, regard it as empty, or destroy the subjective value associated with it.

What I'm describing here is how the mind relate to its own sensory inputs, ideas and associations, which are all more fundamental to your brain than your conscious beliefs (for instance, even if you believe that a phobia of yours is irrational, your mind may still believe it).

Are you recommending here that people should not use science

I think science can be used to the extent that it can help, but that people often consider science to be universal, or attempt to "encode" everything as science so that they feel at home working with the problem (when the only tool you have is a hammer... ). If your aim is well-being, then well-being should have a higher priority than science. Too often, I see that people are unhappy, unfulfilled, and unwise because their perspective on life is too objective, too logical, and too rigid. These characteristics apply to logic and math and scientific thought, but not to human life. You may miss this if you think that math and logic are more fundamental than life, or that things are only "real" if they can be encoded and reasoned with.

what is the thing that you are talking about that is being separated from reality?

Your perception. If you see a cat with your own eyes, that's a direct experience. At first it's raw sensory input, then your brain categorizes it as "a cat", which is an idea. If you later remember that you saw a cat, then your memory is a pointer to the experience you had. We seem to use more and more pointers, and forget that they're pointers. For instance, you may think that science is good in itself, but it's only good because we can use it for things which we consider valuable, so it's these things that we're actually aiming at, and not science. (I do realize that this is no longer a disconnect with your perception, but the distance between concepts and ideas, thought of kind of like a graph of nodes and edges, in which distance can be defined)

Another example of a disconnect is when people say "lying is bad" instead of "the consequences of lying are bad" or when they say "X is bad because it's illegal" instead of "X is illegal because it's bad". These may be obvious enough, but our culture definitely have a lot of shorthands which people don't realize are shorthands, and a lot of derived ideas that people mistake for the root that they stem from. I believe that Simulacra Levels and their Interactions may be a consequence of this

I've been hinting at similar conclusions for a while, and people have written books about how you can't live on spread alone for 1000s of years. You can try to incorporate spirituality in science, but I predict that you will be unsuccessful. The more scientific somebody is, the less they tend to care about everything spiritual. They might ask you to prove it to them, or tell you that Jung was a hack, or downplay psychology because it's not a "hard science" and therefore not real. I even find that some people consider the death of humanity as good thing as less humanity means less errors. I've also seen some people who don't understand the problem even when it's explained to them, they can't tell that something is missing. By objective metrics, things are "improving", and the high rates of mental illness (which should tell them that something is seriously wrong) just seem like another problem that they can "solve with science". "their chemical balance is out of whack, is all!". Allegedly, their lives are good so they should be happy and if they're not happy then their brains are wrong and we should fix them)

I don't think science is a good framework for non-scientific things. If you wrap spirituality in science, you kill whatever substance you had by reducing it to something mundane and mechanical. Like if you were to describe love in terms of chemical reactions and conclude that it's what love "really is". And it frankly wouldn't matter even if you were correct, as what you need for well-being isn't correctness but belief in substance or whatever the opposite of disillusionment and nihilism is. 

What you seek is joy, fulfillment and wisdom, so why not aim at that directly? Using science to fix the problems that science caused feels a bit like putting out a fire using fire. Let me also warn you that meta-science is worse than science. The more degrees of separation to reality, the worse you're off mentally. 

Mistaking a metric for what it represents is a form of separation, not living in the moment is a form of separation, living in the map instead of the territory is a form of separation, being objective or attempting to be an observer is a form of separation. Meta-science is two layers of disconnect. Speaking of which, I belive that the tendency to model how other people model oneself has gotten much worse lately. It's too many pointers (simulacra perhaps?)

I see! I think we largely agree then.

It does depend how you explain yourself, but in the end, you're just wording the same thing (the same preference) differently, and that's still assuming that you know the reason of your own preference, and that they have a reason.

The logic seems to be "when the truth looks bad, it is, therefore you must pretend otherwise", which adds a useless layer on top of everything obscuring the truth. The truth isn't always more valuable than pleasant lies, but when this constructed social reality starts influencing areas in which it does matter (like medicine, general science and ways of doing things, like parenting), I find that it's harmful.

I'll also admit that I don't find preferences to be a problem at all. Even though most preferences are shallow (occuring before conscious thought). I think both lying about them and inferring something from them is more harmful. All this perceived intent where none exists is what causes aspects of life to be so unappealing. I find most peoples perceptions to be unhealthy, by which I mean lacking in innocence, resulting in a sort of oversensitivity or tendency to project or interpret negative signals.

This is sort of abstract, but if we assume that racism is solved by not seeing color, then moral evil can be solved by not looking at the world through such a lens. Favorable and unfavorable outcomes will still exist,  the dimension of "pure/corrupt" feelings associated with things will just disappear. This may be throwing out the baby with the bathwater though.

I find that subjective measurements are punished harder than objective ones. You are sometimes forgiven for claiming that "science shows X", but personal opinions are rarely allowed to discriminate, even if they, by their very nature, and meant to do exactly that. Example: "I want to date X type of people" or "I wouldn't date X type of people". For almost every category of X, you'll be judged hard for your preferences, even if you didn't consciously choose any of them.

I don't think it's just about shouting the loudest or most convincingly. At least I want to stress that what counts as "convincing" is more emotional than rational, in all cases where the rational is less pleasant to the ear. Some people can see through this and side with the truth, but I think the ratio of them is too small to counter the effect.

Since this is mostly about value, objectivity can't help us. Even if it could (through agreement about metrics), the relationships of real-world data is too complex. War feels terrible, yet it's great for technological advancements. "War is good" is not a common opinion at all, it lost, and the positive effects are rarely even considered. Society tends to think of things as either entirely good or entirely bad, but if you consider 3 or 4 links of cause and effect, such thinking becomes useless. But society generally doesn't look that far, and neither does it like people who do. People who look that far ahead will advocate for terrible things now to bring about good things later (accelerationism, revolution, eugenics, etc). But it will happily make the locally best choice even when it's completely unsustainable.

Anyway - I think making the correct choice requires some willpower, for the same reason that it requires willpower to eat salad rather than a burger. But the average person, to the extent that they're "moral", tends to be weak. No willpower, no backbone, no abiliy to resist temptation, conflict-shy, afraid to assert themselves. Stronger people suffer from this effect, for they can either make the worse choice, or get called "evil" for making the better choice. To use an example which may be familiar to you, how do you save somebody who is addicted to something harmful or procrastinating important work? You either aid their destruction, or take their pleasure away from them, and both choices are painful.