Eliezer Yudkowsky list

The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious. Your unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps. That's schlep blindness.

None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

The overjustification effect threatens your fragile narratives, especially if you haven’t figured out what to do with your life. You run the risk of seeing your behavior as motivated by profit instead of interest if you agree to get paid for something you would probably do for free. Conditioning will not only fail, it will pollute you. You run the risk of believing the reward, not your passion, was responsible for your effort, and in the future it will be a challenge to generate enthusiasm. It becomes more and more difficult to look back on your actions and describe them in terms of internal motivations.

As I say, as our societies get bigger, and rely more and more on the Internet, fewer and fewer of us have to be very good at these creative and imaginative processes. And so, humanity might be moving towards becoming more docile, more oriented towards following, copying others, prone to fads, prone to going down blind alleys, because part of our evolutionary history that we could have never anticipated was leading us towards making use of the small number of other innovations that people come up with, rather than having to produce them ourselves.

Sebastian's 4 top videos.

Whatever the reason, when the meaning of the game outweighs the meaning of the world, something than enhances life has slipped into something that detracts from it. It’s an open question whether this situation should be called addiction. After all, classic drug addictions aren’t typically based in the search for meaning. But it is useful, in our attempt to understand why a person can get pulled into something that begins to take over their life, that the problem can even be based in something that virtually defines our humanity: our quest for meaning.

Take comfort in that fact. That decade earlier, a century earlier, a millennia earlier, someone just like you stood right where you are and felt the same things you feel, struggled with the same thoughts. They have no idea that you exist, but you know that they did. Embrace the power of this position and learn from it. It is an exhilarating moment, let it propel you.

Go and put yourself in touch with the infinite, because it helps you reconcile yourself a bit better with the mundane. Realize how much came before you, and how only wisps of it remain today, and that anyone can go and—to quote Murakami—breath death into their lungs like a fine dust. Breath it in so it becomes a part of you. Do it as often as you can, whenever you can: go and stand on hallowed ground.

Great essay, should get you thinking... | How to Drop Out -

Welcome to the Post-Productivity World -

By far the most common problem afflicting the writers in Michels’s practice is procrastination, which he understands in terms of Jung’s Father archetype. “They procrastinate because they have no external authority figure demanding that they write,” he says. “Often I explain to the patient that there is an authority figure he’s answerable to, but it’s not human. It’s Time itself that’s passing inexorably. That’s why they call it Father Time. Every time you procrastinate or waste time, you’re defying this authority figure.” Procrastination, he says, is a “spurious form of immortality,” the ego’s way of claiming that it has all the time in the world; writing, by extension, is a kind of death. He gives procrastinators a tool he calls the Arbitrary Use of Time Moment, which asks them to sit in front of their computers for a fixed amount of time each day. “You say, ‘I’m surrendering myself to the archetypal Father, Chronos,’ ” he says. ‘I’m surrendering to him because he has hegemony over me.’ That submission activates something inside someone. In the simplest terms, it gets people to get their ass in the chair.” For the truly unproductive, he sets the initial period at ten minutes—“an amount of time it would sort of embarrass them not to be able to do.”

I'll begin by stipulating that any field of study is helpful in training a student's mind to become more of a learning machine. Two hundred years ago, when life itself was simple (feed the horse, plant the corn) you needed to make school artificially complicated to stretch a student's mind. Once a student's mind was expanded, stressed, stretched and challenged, it became a powerful tool when released back into the relatively simple "real world."

The Education Complexity Shift observes that the real world has become more complicated than school. Imagine trying to teach a young child how to do the routine adult task of planning the most efficient trip by plane, or getting a mortgage, or investing. How about planning a wedding? How many pieces of software do you use for your job?

Good mention of the "Clean Hands Principle".

Philosophers profit from jargon too.

According to the hypothesis, people have a strong desire or need to believe that the world is an orderly, predictable, and just place, where people get what they deserve. Such a belief plays an important function in our lives since in order to plan our lives or achieve our goals we need to assume that our actions will have predictable consequences. Moreover, when we encounter evidence suggesting that the world is not just, we quickly act to restore justice by helping the victim or we persuade ourselves that no injustice has occurred. We either lend assistance or we decide that the rape victim must have asked for it, the homeless person is simply lazy, the fallen star must be an adulterer.

The internet is seductive. It allows us to be a fantasy version of ourselves without the pain of earning it. Our natural tendency to inflate, distract and rationalize are—all too kindly—confirmed, supported and inflated further still. Congratulation comes easy, problems are glossed over, everything finds an audience. It becomes so easy to talk online about what we are doing or what we plan to do that, hey, the next thing we know the day is through and we didn’t have time to actually fit in doing any of it.

The next time you see the red (1) alert from this group in the corner of your Facebook account, note it as a lost opportunity. Someone’s opportunity to work, to prove themselves, to say that thing which they claim to be compelled to say to the world, to make a difference, just evaporated. And needlessly so. Instead of seizing it, they came online and talked. They succumbed to taking easy credit instead of earning it the hard way. Don’t be that person.

The tragedy of Wiio’s law is this. Our most connected moments are with people we know we will never meet again. The moments of connection stay with us only to the extent that relationships do not follow.

A particularly frustrating feature of the U.S. narrative, for Muslims, is that it divides Muslim society into a progressive liberal and secular sector on one hand and on the other a regressive Islamist sector that seeks to impose backward Islamic traditions. America then seeks to promote the liberal forces and to undermine the Islamist forces.
This is not simply imagined. Currently in Congress there are efforts to ensure that U.S. funding of democracy promotion in Egypt only benefits liberal, secular parties and does not in any way benefit Islamist parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood.
To most Muslims this American perspective on Muslim society is simply incorrect and American efforts to choose the winner is really about America seeking to impose its Western secular model of governance and to eradicate the role of Islam in the public sphere. Since to Muslims Islam is, by definition, meant to be in the public sphere, American efforts are seen as seeking to undermine Islam itself.
The assertion that America is misreading Muslim society is supported by polling data. While Americans do tend to divide the Muslim public into secular and Islamist groups, polls show that Muslims do not divide so neatly.

Against Vacation (why vacations don't make sense for the thoughtful man) -

If I have romanticized nomadism it is because nomadism is a fundamentally romantic state of being. If you can sustain it, it is somehow fulfilling without any further need for achievement or accomplishment. The pursuit of success is, for the rooted, the price they must pay for immobilizing themselves geographically. The reward is something equivalent to the state of stable movement that is, for the nomad, a natural state of affairs.

Success itself in a way is very much a notion for the rooted; it is the establishment of some sort of stable self-propelled movement pattern through some sort of achievement space: up a career ladder; down a rabbit hole of skilled specialization; sideways through a series of stimulating project experiences. When there is no true north, no physical landmarks growing smaller behind you, and no fresh sights constantly appearing over the horizon, you need abstract markers of movement: degrees, money, a sequence of more expensive cars, a series of increasingly successful books, a growing readership for a blog, increasingly prestigious speaking gigs.

Some valid points, some I disagree with, very controversial according to Penelope's style.

I am nothing. It's simple. If I were smart, I might be afraid of looking stupid. If I were successful, I might be afraid of failure. If I were a man, I might be afraid of being weak. If I were a Christian, I might be afraid of losing faith. If I were an atheist, I might be afraid of believing. If I were rational, I might be afraid of my emotions. If I were introverted, I might be afraid of meeting new people. If I were respectable, I might be afraid of looking foolish. If I were an expert, I might be afraid of being wrong.

But I am nothing, and so I am finally free to be myself.

Herbert Blumer (1969), who coined the term "symbolic interactionism," set out three basic premises of the perspective:
"Humans act toward things on the basis of the meanings they ascribe to those things."
"The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with others and the society."
"These meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he/she encounters."

Don't forget who you once were... -

The key to happiness isn’t more money, more love, or more smiling (though these things don’t hurt). The true key is flexibility, the ability to adapt and acclimate to change, to disappointment, to your plans being shoved into the fire to burn as kindle. The better you are at adapting, the more likely you’ll be happy, to enjoy what’s in front of you and not live within the regret of what could have been.

Adventures in Capitalism: The Power of Love (And Investors) -

Suppose I were to say that I’m basically the person I want to be, that although I have ample flaws I don’t see any reason to strive to be something different. Doesn’t that sound sort of smug, lacking in self-awareness, complacent? That’s the downside. On some level, there’s a widespread cultural assumption that everybody could use a transformation, which means that nobody is ever good enough as they are.

The catch, in every case, is that "hard-wired" does not mean fixed.  All humans may feel these emotions to some extent.  But there's plenty of room to maneuver.  You can become less envious than you are.  Make an effort to monitor your thoughts and behavior.  Count your blessings.  Give credit where credit is due.  Focus on improving yourself instead of comparing yourself to other people.  Spend more time with less envious people. 

People whose work is to invent or discover things are in the same position as the runner. There's no way for them to do the best they can, because there's no limit to what they could do. The closest you can come is to compare yourself to other people. But the better you do, the less this matters. An undergrad who gets something published feels like a star. But for someone at the top of the field, what's the test of doing well? Runners can at least compare themselves to others doing exactly the same thing; if you win an Olympic gold medal, you can be fairly content, even if you think you could have run a bit faster. But what is a novelist to do?

A rationalist faced with an apparently obvious answer, must assign some probability that a non-obvious objection will appear and defeat it.  I do know how to explain the above conclusions at great length, and defeat objections, and I would not be nearly as confident (I hope!) if I had just clicked five seconds ago.  But sometimes the final answer is the same as the initial guess; if you know the full mathematical story of Peano Arithmetic, 2 + 2 still equals 4 and not 5 or 17 or the color green.  And some people very quickly arrive at that same final answer as their best initial guess; they can swiftly guess which answer will end up being the final answer, for what seem even in retrospect like good reasons.  Like becoming an atheist at eleven, then listening to a theist's best arguments later in life, and concluding that your initial guess was right for the right reasons.

Our purpose here at RationalWiki includes:
1. Analyzing and refuting pseudoscience and the anti-science movement.
2. Documenting the full range of crank ideas.
3. Explorations of authoritarianism and fundamentalism.
4. Analysis and criticism of how these subjects are handled in the media.

You have to take that extra step if you want to think clearly. But it's harder, because now you're working against social customs instead of with them. Everyone encourages you to grow up to the point where you can discount your own bad moods. Few encourage you to continue to the point where you can discount society's bad moods.

How can you see the wave, when you're the water? Always be questioning. That's the only defence. What can't you say? And why?

Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.

If I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to.

The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.

Low hierarchy does not mean no hierarchy. Through ethnographic and cross-cultural studies, researchers have concluded that the basic template for human social groups is moderately but not unerringly egalitarian. They have found gradients of wealth and power among even the most nomadic groups, but such gradients tend to be mild.

The dangerous, mind-freezing approach to reading has a very good word to describe it: erudition. My biggest fear is that I might one day become erudite. Somebody who reads and collects knowledge for the hell of it, rather than with interesting and specific questions and unknowns driving the reading. Too much reading is only “too much” if it teeters towards erudition.

Eudaimonia - Wikipedia -

The Best Investment You Can Make (HBR) -

Death Be Not Chic: The Fantasy of Death in Cinema and TV -

Achieve a general understanding of the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, Machiavelli, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Blaise Pascal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-Paul Sartre, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Paine, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ayn Rand

Read about the lives of Napoleon Bonaparte, Albert Einstein, Marco Polo, Helen Keller, Benjamin Franklin, Michelangelo, Adolf Hitler, Abraham Lincoln, Leonardo da Vinci, Ernest Hemingway, Augustus Caesar, Jean d’Arc, Ferdinand Magellan, Lewis & Clark, Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great, Genghis Khan, Henry VIII, Mark Twain, Horatio Nelson, Peter the Great, Louis XIV, Elizabeth I and John Lennon