2018-01-08 RRG Notes
- Why is the state of human welfare so bad, even for those at the top of Maslow's Hierarchy?
- Lots of people have their basic needs met
- Food, shelter, clothing
- Relationships
- So why are they still unhappy?
- Claim that needs aren't being met
- Not enough money to be secure
- Social situation is precarious and anxiety-producing
- This may be true for some people, but for many people, these worries are completely disconnected from any external truth
- Some of the richest people on earth worry about financial insecurity
- Some of the most popular, well-connected people worry about social status
- Before we ask why we're unhappy, we should ask why we should ever expect to be happy in the first place?
- The role of happiness is not to serve as a baseline for human experience
- The role of happiness is to serve as a reward for successfully performing adaptive behaviors
- Citation needed, here - people have different baseline levels of happiness
- Just going by my personal evidence, most non-rationalists actually are pretty happy, by and large - claiming that people aren't happy makes no sense when most people actually are happy
- If people are happy all the time, then happiness fails as a behavior management tool
- Not really? You can be happy, and take away that happiness for failing at something
- But modern society is so good at providing for our basic needs, the periodic bursts of happiness we get have lost their meaning
- This produces aimlessness and anomie
- But this doesn't mean that modern society is bad - aimlessness and anomie are far preferable to a situation in which you're constantly stressed out over meeting basic needs
- If we're ever going to build a golden age of human welfare, we need to abandon the notion that there has been any point in the past which has been a golden age
- Anomie has replaced
- The terror of deprivation
- The soul crushing tyranny of tightly-knit all-powerful social structures
- Except, for most people in those social structures, it's not soul crushing. It's only soul crushing for deviants like you
- We can use the lab-rat/pellet metaphor as a model for the problems that people face as they approach the top of Maslow's hierarchy
- Under traditional circumstances, people experience life as a constant quest for small psychic rewards
- These rewards are earned for performing useful tasks that fulfill physical or social needs
- However, modernity allows humans to fulfill these needs with such ease that the rewards for their fulfillment loses all psychological weight
- This produces an aimlessness and loss of life-structure that people respond to by flailing about in various dysfunctional ways
- This phenomeon has afflicted elites for as long as we've had civilization, but now it afflicts ordinary people as well
- 3 basic solutions:
- Enlightenment (in the Buddhist sense)
- Restructure your mind and modify your utility function so that you no longer desire the sensation of successful reward-hunting
- Doesn't scale
- Buddhism has been the most popular religion in the most populous region of the world and it has only produced a handful of enlightened sages
- The premises are factually wrong, and this demonstrates a gross misunderstaning of Buddhism.
- Buddhism has never been the most popular religion in East or Southeast Asia - that distinction belongs to Hinduism, Shintoism, Taoism or Confucianism, depending on the locale and time period
- Moreover, you're eliding over the difference between Theravada and Zen Buddhism - not all Buddhism is about attaining enlightenment!
- Just annoys me because this is the rationalist equivalent of watching a bunch of anime and thinking that this gives you special insight into Japanese culture (or equivalently, watching MTV and thinking this gives you special insight into American culture)
- Create artificial needs whose fulfillment is associated with artificial rewards
- More commonly known as "setting life goals"
- This is not a bad thing
- If it's not a bad thing, why do you purposefully describe it with words which have negative connotations?
- "I'm not knocking it, except for the part where I knocked it
- Necessary if we want people to keep striving and achieving even though all their minimum goals have been met
- The problem is that this isn't enough
- Self-imposed needs are much weaker than basic needs in driving motivation
- You can't question the importance of basic needs like you can with self-imposed needs
- No one will ever call looking for food, shelter, clothing, etc, "pointless"
- Bad things happen when people tie too much of their identity to their goals... and then fail to achieve those goals
- People have a limited amount of drive and emotional resilience
- If people tie up large parts of their identity in their goals, it becomes impossible to question those goals without implicitly attacking people's identities
- People need some basis for psychological well being beyond succeeding at goals
- Narcissism
- Has an unfortunate negative connotation
- Could also be called "narrative-orientation" or "symbolic-orientation"
- Tell yourself a story about who you are and why your life is worthwhile
- Everyone does this to some extent already
- Create a narrative that explains who you are and why you're valuable, as a person
- Whenever you feel hurt or worthless, you check the circumstances of your life against the narrative
- If the circumstances still match, then you can reassure yourself that everything is basically OK and move on
- This is a semi-stable source of human welfare
- What are you referring to as "welfare", here
- The benefits of narcissism appear even when you're operating near the top of Maslow's hierarchy
- Benefits appear even when you're not achieving your self-imposed goals
- The problem is that narcissism has some spectactular failure modes
- People can build their identities around a bad identity
- Narrative that requires people to engage in constant destructive action to maintain
- People can allow their narrative to drift arbitrarily far from reality, so long as they have a shred of evidence or past accomplishment to allow them to maintain their narrative
- Narcissistic injury
- Narrative is always going to be somewhat in conflict with reality
- These conflicts have the potential to be damaging
- At best, they nullify the benefits of having a narrative
- At worst, if too much of your identity is wrapped up in the narrative, a successful attack on that narrative will leave you without a sense of self
- There are those who believe that many of the problems with the developed world are due to people dealing with narcissistic injury poorly
- The conventional answer to dealing with narcissistic injury is to be less narcissistic
- However, it may not be possible to be a functional human being operating in modern civilization without a certain baseline level of narcissism
- The task is to be able to construct one's identity in a way that delivers the benefits of narcissism without its weaknesses
- Three-pronged approach to creating identities
- Build identity around worth, virtuous stories, rather than crappy stories incompatible with utopian existence
- Whose utopia? Every utopia is a dystopia when looked at from a particular perspective, and every dystopia can be reinterpreted as a utopia for those who are privileged.
- If you're suggesting that some narratives are incompatible with utopian existence, then you first have to describe your utopia
- People have to be taught to keep one eye on reality so that their constructed identities don't diverge arbitrarily from the facts of the world
- Human relationships and social institutions have to be constructed to reinforce identities rather than tearing them down
- No, no, no, a thousand times no! I do not want more "safe spaces" for special snowflakes. I want the world to challenge identities. You should have to justify yourself to the world. The world should challenge you. It should not be a given that everything is okay and that you are a good person.
- My thoughts:
- I question the very premises of this article
- I do not think that the problem with the world is one of "affluenza". I think the problem with modern industrial civilization is
- We tell people that they have to perform economically meaningful, "productive" work in order to be a worthy human being
- We continually remove opportunities for people to perform this work by outsourcing it to robots or overseas countries
- Predictably, this results in alienation, as people either think worse of themselves, or recognize the hypocrisy in a society that constantly pushes for the importance of work, while making it harder and harder to get a job
- This isn't a problem with people's individual identities, it's a problem with society, and telling people to construct better identities for themselves won't save them from the social pressure that tells them of the importance of work
- In addition, I think this article falls into the rationalist trap of overthinking things
- Why should I spend time forming an identity rather than learning skills?
- Heck, why should I even bother spending time reading this article? I could be writing Python or learning Go (the board game or the programming language, I feel like either would be a more productive use of my time)
- Is our identity a real and definite thing, or is it just a useful model to describe a complex set of sometimes contradictory things about us?
- It's neither
- The purpose of identity is not to serve as a predictive model about what we or someone else is going to do
- Identity is about aesthetics, not making useful predictions
- Maintaining an identity narrative about yourself allows you to appreciate your own life in the same way that you appreciate stories
- This is good because people appreciate stories in a more powerful way than they appreciate facts about the real world
- Buh... wha?
- I don't identify (pun fully intended) with this at all
- But what if you don't appreciate stories? What if you appreciate the real over the fictional?
- Before we can talk about constructing narratives for ourselves, we need to talk about narratives more generally
- In the West, the dominant form of fiction has been the Literary Novel
- About normal people doing normal things, and having normal feelings
- Explores those feelings in detail
- This didn't set well with geeks/nerds etc. who wanted more exciting stories, so they migrated off into "genre fiction"
- Only, when re-imagining those stories, they ended up reinventing literary novels in the form of "coffeshop AUs" or "high-school AUs"
- Okay, really? You're going to draw generalizations about nerd culture from fanfic?
- Eventually all the cool parts about worldbuilding and setting and narrative get rounded off and all that remains is exploring the interactions between the characters themselves
- Uh... okay, maybe you need to stop reading bad fanfic and read fanfic that's competently written
- This is weird
- It's weird because it's wrong
- Why is it that we dislike people talking about boring emotional drama, but are willing to put up with boring emotional drama in novels and stories?
- Who's this we you're talking about? I don't tolerate boring emotional drama in either my novels or my stories - this is why I don't like reading Dickens or Austen (I read Jack London and Hemingway instead)
- A story, simply by virtue of being told as a story is acknowledged as a story worth telling
- Stories and narratives are rituals designed to allow us to process events in a more detached, contemplative, and emotionally-responsive way
- Someone being a protagonist in a story is a signal that their story is worth caring about, more so than those of the other characters
- People are capable of constructing narratives about themselves, and this is awesome
- It makes our experience less mundane
- Allows us to rise above the eternal scramble for small successes
- Allows us to define ourselves by more mythic concepts
- Yes, at the cost of severely harming our ability to perceive the world as it is, rather than the world as we wish it to be
- This person is advocating chuunibyou - a regression to adolescence where we all pretend to have special powers and are the protagonists of our own oh-so-special stories. Fuck that noise
- Sidebar:
- Since narratives are about aesthetics rather than truth, we can have elements in our narratives that aren't empirically valid propositions
- Example: elemental affiliations
- This is meaningless on a propositional level
- But people incorporate it into their identities all the time
- If you claim to be affiliated with fire, you claim to take on the traits of fire in some not-very-well-defined way
- This claim allows you to build a framework around the way you relate to yourself and others, and allows you to find resonances between events in the world and events in your own life
- See, that's exactly the danger. Those resonances are false. They are coincidences. You are reinventing the most dangerous parts of religion, and claiming that it's a good thing
- My thoughts:
- Why do we consider this person to be a rationalist?
- They are advocating anti-rationality - they are literally saying that you should blind yourself to reality in selective ways in order to build narratives that make you feel better
- This strategy is often spectactularly effective, right up it fails spectacularly - the annals of history are littered with people who believed grand narratives about themselves, got other people to believe those grand narratives, and ended up ruining not just their own lives but the lives on thouands, millions, or even billions of other people
- I don't dispute that narratives are powerful. My contention is that they're too powerful - because of our inherent biases, they're too effective at blinding us to reality and keeping us on a path that leads to disaster
- Balioc is, among other things a LARP-er
- Participates in "theater LARP"
- Each player is assigned a character and provided with a "character sheet"
- Character sheet mostly has narrative explaining the character's background and goals
- "Like a play, but without script or audience"
- Okay, so is "theater LARP" just a geek term for "improv"?
- LARPs can hit really hard and people get really into them
- Individual LARP experiences can have profound effects on participants
- People obsess over roles and roleplay experiences
- See facets of the real world through social or metaphysical lenses derived from games
- See, this is exactly the thing I was warning about in my commentary from above - this exactly the sort of thing you do not want to do if you're interested in seeing the world as it is
- Sometimes people shift their own personalities to better match the personality of a character they particulary identify this
- That's normatively awful - you're letting stories bleed over into the real world
- While this sort of thing happens with every narrative experience (TVs, books, etc) it happens much more often with LARPs, and that's surprising
- Why is it surprising? Books and movies allow you to remain somewhat detached from the narrative, whereas LARPs immerse you in it as a participant
- LARPs are a young medium
- Many of the narratives are unpolished
- Unlike other forms of media, LARPs lack descriptive realism
- Yet, despite the unpolished narratives and lack of descriptive realism, something about LARPs draws people in
- The most common explanation for why people get into LARPs is that it's escapist fantasy
- You can be the wizard or hero or whatever
- But why is this special to LARPs over other forms of interactive media?
- When people leave LARPs they don't talk about the escapist fantasy aspects - they talk about the emotions and relationships
- I would be interested to see a comparison between LARPs and tabletop roleplaying groups
- The stickiest parts of LARPs are the parts that are awkward simulcra of everyday life - why?
- Real life may be full of drama and wonder, but it doesn't feel like a story, from the inside
- But a LARP is a story, and your character is important, just by virtue of being in the story
- The other players in the LARP acknowledge your character as important, by virtue of also participating in the same LARP
- The LARP also provides a shared context that allows you to communicate your narrative self with other participants in the LARP
- In other words the LARP is pre-packaged psychological validation
- The problem with LARPs is that it's totally fake
- Well, that's one of the problems, and I'd argue that it's not even the most important one
- The identity that's being honored isn't your identity
- But maybe, if we can turn reality into a LARP, we can get the benefits of LARPing without the disconnection from reality
- My thoughts:
- I'm not sure it's possible - you're trying to bridge two things that are diametrically opposed to one another, and hoping that you can pull it off with a technical fix
- It's called the narrative fallacy for a reason. Narratives, by their very nature, impose a filter on reality, and cause you to ignore and rationalize things that don't fit with the narrative
- You don't get to choose ahead of time what your narrative filters out
- Identity can be viewed as a generalization of market segmentation
- People crave to be told what sort of a person they are, even though the categories they're divided into may be functionally meaningless
- Personality quizzes help people identify a place in the world for themselves
- Heidegger's concept of dasein, which translates to being is better understood as identifying as
- Dasein is all about exaggerating a particular aspect of yourself in order to fit in with a particular group
- The problem with dasein is that it makes it impossible to assess merit when questions of identity are in play
- It becomes impossible to state objective truths because the things being stated are inevitably caught up in the identities of the people saying them
- Do we want to try to channel identifying-as into safe forms of pretend-play or do we want to try to get rid of it entirely
- I suspect that balioc and I have exactly the opposite answer to this question
- You don't want to either neuter or eliminate people's drives to build identities
- Identity is necessary for hedonic well-being
- Identity is important insofar as it gives you a community to belong to
- The problem is that it then makes it impossible for you to meaningfully criticize that community without immediately triggering a whole host of built-in tribal reflexes
- If you don't rely on identity construction as a major part of your introspective well-being, you're suffering from major introspective failure
- Or, on the other hand, like the majority of people out there, we're not overanalyzing every little thing about ourselves and, as a consequence are actually having fun instead of wondering whether we're having fun
- Identity is a major cognitive hazard, and one of the challenges is to find out how to get the benefits of having a strong identity without its downsides
- balioc talks about the dangers of building strategies around unresolvable contradictions, and here they are attempting to do just that
- To balioc, identity is so tightly coupled to human flourishing it may as well be a terminal value
- Here we go with the undefined terms again. "Human flourishing" - what is that? What does a flourishing human look like?
- I suspect that balioc has a very particular view of what a flourishing human looks like and can only vaguely imagine a "flourishing human" that doesn't have a strong personal identity
- Identity is what defines the self and gives it form
- We consider self-actualization as the highest of Maslow's hierarchy of needs because the ultimate goal is to be able to look upon yourself from the outside and revel in the concepts that give it shape
- balioc's project is to ensure that the future that we construct is one in which people who need a strong identity for themselves can thrive
- See, they should have opened with this - saying, "None of what I'm saying may apply to you, but there is a tribe of us out there, and we would like to have our needs acknowledged," rather than pretending that everyone ought to have a strong sense of narrative about their own lives
- We need ways for people to create externally validated identities without losing touch with reality or opening themselves up to undue narcissistic injury
- This requires cultural engineering to set up incentive structures, compelling symbols and self-reinforcing behavior norms
- Even though this is extremely difficult, it's worlds easier than psychologically engineering people to not require an identity in the first place
- Is it? I'm not actually sure about that. It might actually be easier to biohack people (ems, whatever) to not require identity than it would be to modify culture to make identity formation more wholesome
