- The purpose of confessing your biases and flaws is to focus on fixing them
- There should be no pride gained by the mere confessing of flaws
- The important thing is to confess your flaws and then work on fixing them, a little bit at a time
- Rationality is not an end in itself - it is a means to some other goal
- Rationalists must have something that they value more than rationality
- Rationality should be useful
- Science beat religion because it could produce better technology, not because it could produce more convincing explanations for natural phenomena
- The relationship between loving Truth and loving usefulness is complicated
- If you love Truth 100%, you find it impossible to update your beliefs, because Truth isn’t constrained by mere accuracy
- If you love usefulness 100%, then you can find yourself taking up false beliefs because they’re useful to you in the moment
- People tend to grow as rationalists when they have something to strive for, something that is more important than their own lives
- Part of the aesthetic of rationality is subordinating rationality itself to some other goal
- There is a big difference between being satisfied with success and being satisfied with a plan for success
- Almost any level of effort will convince us that we’ve tried our hardest if trying our hardest is what we have set out to do
- Instead of asking yourself, “What can I do?” ask yourself, “What needs to be done?”
- Don’t try your hadest. Win, or fail
- The word impossible has two meanings
- Mathematically proven to be impossible
- Not immediately apparent how to do the thing that is being described
- Any time you don’t understand a domain, the problems in it will seem impossible
- Remember that confusion and impossibility are two different things, and confusion only exists in the map, not the territory
- Attempting to do the impossible is not for everyone
- Extraordinary talent is mere prerequisite
- Need to have extraordinary talent, and also be willing to wager years of your life on something that might not work out
- Perseverance has multiple timescales
- One form of perseverance is working 14-hour-days
- Another form of perseverance is working for a problem 2 hours a day for years at a time
- To do things that are impossible, you have to
- Not turn away from the problem (seconds)
- Work at the problem (hours)
- Stick to the problem (years)
- There is a level of effort that is higher than “tsuyoku naritai” – “isshokenmei”
- “Isshokenmei” is a making a “desperate effort”, as if your life and the life of your loved ones were at stake
- However, both tsuyoku naritai and isshokenmei involve making increasing amounts of effort within a given system or set of beliefs
- There is another level, “extraordinary effort”, which involves stepping outside the belief frameworks that you currently have
- Making an extraordinary effort involves attempting to solve problems in ways that no one else is doing, ways that may lead to ridicule or censure
- To make an extraordinary effort, you have to set out to solve the problem, no matter what
- Even then, there is no guarantee of victory – even after making an extraordinary effort, you might still lose and the problem might remain unsolved
- Losing will hurt, since making an extraordinary effort requires the commitment of a large amount of resources
- If you’re goint to put forth an extraordinary effort, you had better make sure that the problem is worth it