Thoughts

I think that the act of writing is an exercise in thinking, so whenever I learn something important I try and write it down. Below you’ll find the most recent things I’ve been learning/writing about.

• A Difference in Pace

  The Coastal Elites Are Right Actually

• The Instrumentalization of Everything

  What we do matters, but why we are doing what we’re doing matters almost just as much. I agree with the premise of this article, even if the implications are hard to unpack. The choice remains for us to make: what is the highest good and where are we going towards? Even in a world where the highest “good” is pluralistic, we are limited by our humanity, and a pursuit of any intrinsic good comes at the sacrifice of another. At that point we might need to draw a line between what is good just for itself and what is good intrinsically AND instrumentally.. Could that be the source of the structural instrumentalization that we are seeing?

  // Instrumentalization is Making Everything a Means to an End – AEON

• The Value of Humanity if AI Becomes Smarter

  This is sort of in relation to what was said in the Citrini Research report. I think a lot of what is in the report is garbage, superficial vibe reporting masquerading behind the “this is an imagination of what the future could be, not what it will be” cop out. But saying that it has nothing of value to add neglects a question that we should be grappling with, and which this article from Wayfare excellently explores: Why are we scared of our intelligence being replaced? I agree with this article that our fear tells us about how we view and value ourselves, and thought it was a great read.
  
  // Alchemy of a Soul – Wafare Magazine

• Our Brains are Lazy

  Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self control when the next challenges comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. In a typical demonstration, participants who are instructed to stifle their emotional reaction to an emotionally charged film will later perform poorly on a test of physical stamina — how long they can maintain a strong grip on a dynamometer in spite of increasing discomfort. The emotional effort in the first phase of the experiment reduces the ability to withstand the pain of sustained muscle contraction, and ego-depleted people therefore succumb more quickly to the urge to quit. in another experiment, people are first depleted by a task in which they eat virtuous foods such as radishes and celery while resisting the temptation to indulge in chocolate and rich cookies. Later, these people will give up earlier than normal when faced with a difficult cognitive task.

  Thinking Fast and Slow, pp. 41-42

  While incredibly powerful, we only have so much energy to expand. A study done by Baumeister showed that when faced with tasks that are ego-depleting, people have a lesser ability to resist temptation or persist in difficult tasks.

  This phenomenon shows up everywhere. When doing something difficult, we can feel our attention pulled towards other things that are easier in the short term. When working on a tough essay or problem, we feel the desire to escape from the effort and check our phones or email as our brain tries to find an easier way to do tough things. The same thing happens when we are thinking through things. Despite our knowledge and intelligence, our brain wants to find a way that causes the least amount of ego depletion, so instead of thinking through first principles, we are pulled towards the answer that seems the easiest, convincing ourselves that the reasoning is sound to avoid deeper thought.

• Being Effectually Minded

  Goal Induced Blindness from Farnam Street

  Uncertainty is one of our least favorite conditions, we hate the feeling of not knowing what to do, and we dislike the frustration that comes from not having anything to really do. It leads us to believe that those who are successful are because they had the right goals from the beginning and were able to develop the skills necessary to execute perfectly on those goals. A successful entrepreneur was successful because their idea was so good and their drive was so intense that nothing could stop them from the success that they wanted. The truth is that the key to success is adaptability, or what Oliver Burkeman calls being “effectually minded”.

  Essentially, an effectually minded person has two main characteristics, they care about finding a goal that matches their abilities and they practice positive catastrophizing. Rather than finding a goal or an idea and doing everything that they can to become the person or build the relationships to reach a certain goal, they take the abilities and knowledge that they already have and find a goal or an idea that can be achieved using that. Rather than looking at (or ignoring) what they lack in the face of a lofty goal, they take what they have and find a goal or problems that can be solved.

  The other half is what the Stoics call positive catastrophizing, which is a lot sunnier than it sounds. While a lot of the time we might think of the end goal and the rewards that will come with it, an effectually minded person will instead choose to think about the cost. Instead of asking themselves how big the payoff will be at every step, they ask themselves the cost of failure for each action. Which allows them to realize that often the cost of failure is much less than catastrophic.