That's great to hear! Yeah it can certainly lead to less action than is rational if you're not careful. These things can be decoupled but you have to actually do the decoupling :)

There's an okayness that someone with terminal cancer can have. There's an okayness that someone who's village will likely be invaded and murdered, along with their family, can also have. I recommend people find this okayness, rather than try to convince themselves bad things won't happen. It's a very rewarding okayness.

🫂 I get that, I was depressed and doing nothing for quite a while too.

So many young people have to come to terms with a possible early death now. It's doable, you can laugh and dance with a terminal disease, but it can be hard. This in particular can get existential...

I left a comment on the OP that might be helpful. Lots of other people seem to be saying great stuff too :)

Hey, I'm 21 and went through all of this a year or so ago and no longer feel stressed, anxious or graspy about possible (likely?) impending doom. If you'd like to chat I'd be happy to. Reading this I'm worried you'll burn yourself out and get incredibly depressed like I did.

The first step is not believing psychological pain is a necessary reaction to the situation we find ourselves in. I'm quite confident it isn't, but the coupling goes deep for some. The brain is fully creating your psychological reality, there are many intervention points.

Roughly speaking, what changed was I worked very hard on my mental health after depression and a breakup where I saw clearly how my poor mental health effected the people I love the most. I did this through a combination of various kinds of meditation, coaching, and a lot of first principles thinking and experimentation about how my mind works + trying to match on to what master meditators and emotional coaches were saying.

I'm still ambitious as ever, actually significantly more and more effectively (more energy and better judgement) compared to when I was in fight or flight. That really harmed my rational thinking. Deep okayness really helps with strategic thinking and coherence it turns out, though it's far from everything (oh, to have the textbook from the future. or from future me hehe)

Anyways, I caution you to not try and learn from those who are not skilled in calmly dealing with situations like ours with a smile. Eliezer is excellent at what he does but this is an art he does not know (and sadly, does not know he does not know.)

Learn to punch from those who are excellent at punching. Learn to kick from those who are excellent at kicking. For what I'm talking about, I recommend Joe Hudson and Shinzen Young, and can personally testify it all works. (Well, to the level I've reached, I'm not classically enlightened yet. I am capable of extrapolation though.)

Romeo Stevens and Roger Thisdell are great for more rationalist treatments of these topics. Romeo's post "mistranslating the buddha" for an excellent intro. Roger's talk at EAG about perception being the foundation for epistemology might be interesting to people as well! They speak in a bit less woo and more rat, though Joe and Shinzen are fairly good too.

Hope everyone's happy!

Do some inner work (emotional/meditative) to learn to process emotions and feel them without suffering. I highly recommend Joe Hudson's stuff. Huge missing piece of the rationalist project, we make emotional decisions and can't just "notice and be unmoved" by what we're feeling, you need to get back to a secure equilibrium where there's no big emotional experience you're avoiding.

Don't fall entirely into the rationalist frame, it has some great stuff and also a lot of subtle bias that can drive you half insane. Speaking from experience lol.

(Apologies mods if this double sent - in a plane rn about to take off.)

Do some inner work (emotional/meditative) to learn to process emotions and feel them without suffering. I highly recommend Joe Hudson's stuff. Huge missing piece of the rationalist project, we make emotional decisions and can't just "notice and be unmoved" by what we're feeling, you need to get back to a secure equilibrium where there's no big emotional experience you're avoiding.

Don't fall entirely into the rationalist frame, it has some great stuff and also a lot of subtle bias that can drive you half insane. Speaking from experience lol.

Comet King's wife

LW generally doesn't seem to value emotional intelligence and relational maturity very highly relative to intelligence and agency. I was similar, but creating a toxic situation which hurt the person I loved the most in the world totally changed my priorities regarding this. If you reading feel similar, "oh this isn't that important for me, I'm busy" consider unsong and that your robin could fall by your own deluded immature hands, without you even realizing it's happening.

It's hard to rationally convince someone of this, but you show some signs of missing stuff similar to not seeing colors re emotions. I'm not certain, but I think you'd would derive a ton of value from talking to a good coach/therapist re: empathy, emotions, possibly relationships. Idk if you know David Yu (co runs sparc) but he's who showed me the way I wasn't doing real empathy in a way that was intuitively grokked.

You're an exceptional alignment researcher but regarding relationships and emotional maturity I think you're highly underinvested & it's obvious to ppl who've invested more into those (such as me, obsessing over relationships and emotional stuff for the last ~6mo after a horrible breakup, a lot of coaching, meditation etc.)

Note: I'm not just indexing off the empathy posts, it's also "the value proposition of romantic relationships" post, this is something which most people intuitively feel relatively early on and don't need to derive. Several other signs too, such as not noticing you were depressed, again I'm not certain! But it's definitely worth exploring for you under uncertainty.

John, I think you are still missing something regarding empathy and it would be good for you to be open to that possibility. This post is a nice clarification but it still makes me think you don't get the thing in the same way I used to not get the thing with my ex. "Suspend viewing them as an agent" is the type of thing I also did, and yes, I could model her somewhat, but I was not really getting things emotionally.

I don't really view anyone as an agent anymore, some are more agenty than others, and wanting to mostly spend time with agenty people is fair, I don't think it's healthy to think about it this way.

Sure some people are cats compared to other people. Some neural nets happened to get better training data than others and have better initializations. Disgust and disbelief towards normal people is really not healthy imo, you shouldn't have to suppress or suspend anything.