Rationality: A Different Prisoner's Dilemma

There is a certain kind of person who notices that the world is full of suffering, and after they have noticed this, they feel obligated to remind themselves regularly, even to great personal detriment and into depression. These people cannot bring themselves to turn away from suffering even to maintain their own health... not until they are so overwhelmed by compassion for other peoples' pain that they are at risk of breaking down with stress and illness. Why? ... Likely guilt, because they would perceive it as selfish to deliberately ignore someone else's suffering in order to feel better themselves, even if there is nothing they can do about it right now. Likely also fear... that if they did turn away, they would be making themselves into monsters, joining the complicit majority of people who do not act to prevent suffering, who do not seem to care.

I am one such a person, and the kinds of people I make friends with are often prone to this phenomenon. Jennifer Freed calls it "The Empath's Dilemma," but I am not under the impression that it's a term in common use.

A friend of mine came to me tonight stuck in a mental spiral of concern and guilt I recognized as the state of someone being overwhelmed by the Empath's Dilemma, and I swooped in with my own concern, to reassure and comfort them, to shake off the undeserved guilt and help them toward a mental condition from which they would, hopefully, be able to get a decent night's rest.

And then they asked me, "How did you get through this sort of a dark night of the soul [...] whenever that night was for you?"

This is my answer:

I constructed a question. A scenario that might be put to people by which to judge their preferences in a pinch, like the old standard one about pulling a switch to route a train onto a track where it would hit only one person rather than five.

The scenario was this:

Imagine that you are a prisoner in a terrible prison. In your current position, you are almost completely helpless. Your contact with the other prisoners is minimal, and tightly governed. You cannot, now, save them... But you do know that they suffer. If you don't cover your ears at night, you can hear them screaming. If you don't turn your eyes away, you can see how the guards habitually beat and torture and belittle them.
Taken metaphorically, this is not far from the truth.

Your own condition is good compared to most of the other prisoners, but very bad compared to the free citizens who live outside of it. You do not, now, have the power to do anything that would stop the atrocities that happen here. You think you could grow to have more power, though, after your sentence is up, assuming you actually are released. And assuming you survive that long.

But you also know, because the prison is still here, that the free citizens, who have so much more power than you do, have found other things to do with their time than campaign and publicize and get this prison torn down or reformed. A lot of them don't even acknowledge that it's a real problem. You might worry that you will become like them, after you're free. Stuff all your memories of this place into a bag in a closet in the back of your mind and never dare to touch it, because it would hurt.

Well then? Every night, you effectively have two options.

A: You lay down with your ears uncovered. You listen to the screams, and harden your resolve that you will never, ever, allow yourself to forget or to deny what has happened here... but at the cost of your sanity, and a greater risk of not being able to hold a job or garner any respect after you leave.

Or B: You cover your ears, you close your eyes, you do whatever it takes to swallow your meals and nourish yourself despite the sickening surroundings, and you push away the pain and the fear enough to survive another day in as healthy a state as you can. Maintaining your self and your capacity, but increasing the risks of falling into a habit of denial and inaction.

Which one will you choose?

~~~~~

That's the Empath's Dilemma, the way I see it. People we call empaths will choose A far more often. Some will choose A any time they think they can do so without the pain killing them.

I contemplated this long enough to realize that neither extreme was "right". Given a choice between someone who always chooses A, and someone who always chooses B, neither one is necessarily better. This may be difficult to accept, because it's a very emotional question, and it can be hard to imagine, if you are particularly driven to choose A, for example, that someone could choose B and it wouldn't make them a worse person than you are. Knowing whether someone is more driven to choose A or to choose B could, however, offer some useful insight into that person's strengths and weaknesses.

The optimal solution does something vaguely analogous to maximizing the area of a rectangle which is SANITY units wide and COMMITMENT units long. If you let your sanity fall to zero, your capacity to help anyone will also be zero. If you let your commitment fall to zero, your willingness to help anyone will also be zero. In either case, the prison stands just as tall, and the suffering goes on.

So, sacrifice enough of your comfort to maintain your commitment, until your commitment is sufficient to fuel the most effective actions you could take. Do not sacrifice more.

Sacrifice enough of your emotional urgency to maintain your sanity and health, until they are sufficient to support the most effective actions you could take. Do not sacrifice more.

And recognize that knowing the perfect balance is functionally impossible. There are just too many variables in the environment. Calibrating your model to be more accurate is a fantastic excuse to be neither properly maintaining your self NOR acting effectively in the moment.

Err on the side of overestimating the cost of tweaking the model if you possibly can (because you will probably fail in the attempt anyway), and if you find yourself outside the prison, if you see an opportunity to act which is likely to help and unlikely to hinder, heavily weight your preferences toward taking it, rather than trying to make sure you should. Quantity over quality; it is a provably better cognitive habit to make many mistakes than to wait until you have a perfect plan.

The time that passes as you do things other than actively and visibly and tangibly fighting death and suffering in all its forms is a sunk cost. It is a fallacy that will drive you into irrationality and error to weight it so highly that it outweighs all the factors you actually do have any control over in your decision making.

The only choices you can really make are between the opportunities you actually see, to influence outcomes you actually have the power to affect.

And, actions taken to sustain yourself, your life, your sanity and in fact also your morale, are instrumentally necessary to preserving your own capacity to fight death and continue to fight death into the future.

You cannot stand to fight if you have laid down to die with the first of your fellow-soldiers to fall, out of compassion or love for them.
So get up. I will not tell you not to remember the dead and the dying.
But we fight for the living.

I decided to borrow that line from a video game trailer. It's been used in other contexts as well, but this is the one where I personally first saw it. a damn good line, in my opinion. Hell, it's a damn good motivational video.

I would not have communicated it in quite these words when I first built the question over five years ago. I had not even read HPMoR up to the Stanford Prison Experiment arc (where a call-to-action is realized in pretty similar terms) yet at that time.

If I had, I probably would not have constructed the question this way, as it would have felt like a form of plaigiarism.

Estimating Confidence in Astrology

Follow-up to a conversation about Zodiac signs...

I notice a strong correlation between the descriptions on a particular website for the Aries sign, and my own personality. I do not attribute this correlation to any particular cause, and would answer with a couple of vague notions off the top of my head and a shrug if asked to name a phenomenon that caused me to have "Aries" traits.

I do think that astrological signs in general describe collections of personality traits that tend to correlate to one another, such that if any given person possesses one notable trait of a given sign... take Aries and a hot temper as an arbitrary example... it is more likely that that person will exhibit any other given "Aries" trait than it is likely of a random member of the populace, regardless of whether Aries actually is that person's birth sign or not; I am not claiming that being Aries is the cause, only that, for e.g., having a hot temper, and having a passionate approach to romance, are positively correlated.

I don't put any particular stock in Astrology. If I had to take a wild guess, I'd rate the likelihood that the position of earth relative to the stars at birth has a significant and known effect on the development of a person's personality at somewhere in the ballpark of 10-20%, along with most other specific supernatural theories.

I do, from time to time, wonder about the idea, and how it could be true, if it were.

What I actually intended to express confidence in in any way was more or less like this:
If I were to link you to the specific article I found about the Aries sign and asked you to read it and select any given claim it makes about the Aries personality type, I would estimate the likelihood of that particular claim being true enough of me that bearing it in mind would likely explain some of my behaviour at around 80%.

Given that I don't think the stars are the reason, just that the traits described happen to coincide with how I turned out... If I were to make a numerical guess, I'd expect that 20% or less of the population of the Western world match their own Zodiac signs (whatever they may be) that well.

I think that Astrology, like Tarot and similar sorts of things that suggest meanings and explanations behind peoples' behaviour, may in some circumstances have some use in pushing the mind out of an established view to look at things from a new perspective. Reading about an Astrological personality archetype may prompt me to wonder if the perspective described is similar to the perspective of someone I have been arguing with, so that I have a theory that might help me understand them if it proves relevant, rather than being unable to come up with anything besides frustration when their preferences and values are not like mine.

There doesn't need to be any magic behind it at all to have that use. Rather, it is functionally a deck of cards, upon each of which is written, "Is it happening for this reason?" For any given situation, some of the questions will have no bearing on matters and may be discounted out of hand. To others, a good answer is a considerate, "Hm. Maybe. I'll look for evidence to confirm/refute."

If you take this view, then it follows that the mysticism and ceremony surrounding their use exists purely to lend weight and importance to the consideration of the possibility, without which it may be too easy to shrug off the competing theory in favour of one's existing worldview, even if it fails to properly account for the behaviours or events one is noticing.

Noticing Ignorance and Noticing Drives

Tonight I stayed up late having a wonderful date with my darling Ashlynn. Then I stayed up later reading articles on LessWrong. Eventually, I read this one on how easy it is essentially not to notice our own confusion, not just about big, complicated things, but one's own life and habits. "For it is a sad rule that whenever you are most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when you are most likely to forget it."
My desire to talk about this article inspired me to immediately and quickly solve several problems. Not knowing if I had an account on the website;
and then, not being able to log in properly after I had made one;
and then, figuring out where to talk about it even though it seemed I was unable to add additional comments (perhaps they have been closed due to the age of the article).
Bam bam bam. Suddenly I'm motivated, suddenly I'm here and blogging again, something I would ordinarily see as a bit of a chore, because it takes time, and is slightly challenging. Phooey. I may be reluctant to write, but I am almost always happy to have written.
The art of getting around to things and time management is an elusive one, certainly, and for me as well, but I am conscious of it, thankfully. If I am sitting around waiting to feel more inclined to do something, sitting around is not helping me; if I am taking time to relax, I would prefer to relax with the confidence and contentment of having accomplished an acceptable quantity and quality of the things I had set out to do already.
If I am not feeling able to cheerfully focus on my work, then... I'll be honest, I often forget to quickly "check in with myself". My drives will play an influence on my productivity and ability to focus long before they actively demand my attention.
Of course, sometimes it really is just as simple as the presence of distracting noise in the background. It can be hard to find a place in college to sit and work on homework between classes without being distracted by the noise of strangers' passing conversations. But other times, it's something else.
Am I tired? Am I hungry? Am I feeling unclean and in need of a shower? Am I feeling lonely? Restless? Am I worried about something?
I may be eager or anxious to finish things, but I have been thankfully getting much better at recognizing that I am not currently able, and then, instead of idling and waiting for my mood to change on its own if I'm too tired to get any real work done, I can do something productive like taking a nap.

To Share The Cup That Runneth Over

Someone on FetLife was asking for peoples' perspectives on the influence of our past parental abuse on those of us who have been abused and how it relates to our own desire to have, or to avoid having, children. Her voice was impassioned and full of a great deal of understandable internal conflict. It's clear she wants the good things that come with having children, and desperately wants to love and care for someone, but realizes that her scars may get in the way, and doesn't want to be a bad parent.

I would like to share my response with you all.

The best way I feel I can answer this is to tell my own stories related to it. 

I was inspired by the subtle, psychological abuses of my childhood to be vehemently vocal about bad parenting when I see it, especially when parents become frustrated with their childrens' natural curiosity and desire to learn, seeing virtually anything other than quiet obedience as disobedience, even when they only the actions of a young, inexperienced human engaged with the world and trying to gain the experience required to be a wise, functional adult.
And then later, I found VHEMT. 

I am not convinced that the human race has no chance of improving and willfully evolving socially and morally to progressively better states, and therefore don't think I actually want us to go extinct, but I definitely would prefer to see a smaller human race, with more quality, and less quantity, of life. The fewer people there are to share resources with, the bigger everyone's fair share can be. 

And this is why I've decided never to give birth, even though the thought is a fetish of mine.
However, it doesn't mean I don't want to be a mother.
I am still scarred and rendered dysfunctional by my own past abuses. In many ways the wisdom and sensitivity gained from my suffering has made me a generally very patient and level-headed person, but I am also prone to fits of anxiety and rage. Furthermore, I am young, and at the very beginning of my career. 

But someday, if I have greater financial stability, and if I have healed further and feel less controlled by my overpowering emotions, I will almost certainly want to participate in the growing and nurturing of children who were not born to me. I may foster-parent, or adopt. Or I may find my way into a nurturing role in my profession, or find my way into a household that accepts me in a role as a supportive carer and guardian to the children of someone else. 

Personally, I find it hard to believe that any child, even in the best and most well-adapted of families, could not benefit from one more loving, supportive adult in their life to encourage them to be the best that they could be; And equally hard to believe that any parent, even with the best luxuries and availability of resources and time, would not benefit from one more loving, supportive adult who could share the stresses of caring for a child when they become taxing, and thus prevent the build-up of frustration that can lead to that frustration being inappropriately taken out on the child. 

But to answer the question that stood out most to me in your post...
"If you feel, like you have love and tender loving care to give, who do you direct that energy to, if it is not kids?" 

Why... To everyone, of course. Neighbors going through hard times. Co-workers. Friends. And definitely lovers, whether they be short or long term. Absolutely everyone, not only children, and to be sure not only our own blood children, can use some Tender-Loving-Care. It is one of the greatest weaknesses of our Western society that we tend to forbid one another from taking responsibility for one another, and in turn, we forbid one another from asking for badly needed help. 

If you have love and Tender-Loving-Care to give, and you find no-one receiving it, if your cup runneth over with no-one to drink... Go to your best friends and congenial workmates, go to your lovers and partners and crushes, and if it is permissible within their circles, then go to theirs... go to those people with whom you can easily empathize, and encourage them to draw from your well of kindness whenever they are thirsty. 

All too frequently the only socially acceptable answer, to create a new life in to nurture and build up, because for some incredibly stupid reason we have been forbidden to nurture and build one another, is the only one that comes to mind. But especially for those of us who are damaged and who runneth over, but sometimes also run dry... We know in our doubts that creating a life for our love and care, and then becoming overwhelmed and filling it up also with our frustrations and tempers, becoming bad parents... Is all too real a possibility. 

Before you forge a new cup that you may not be able to fill all by yourself, then... I encourage you to seek out all of those cups near to your heart that are beginning to run low, and ask gently and patiently for permission to refill them. Break the stupid rules that forbid us from caring, mothering and looking out for one another. It is, of course, a delicate dance, and important not to be overbearing, but simply to be loving and available. But it's a well-known fact that parenting isn't easy. And this holds true whether the people you're parenting are children, or blood family, or not. 

I hope this helped.

Effective Use of Time

Well... I've gotten a bit more sleep and then uncharacteristically decided to look at some more things on LessWrong.com - still not committing to the basic sequences, but returning to the site out of interest.

I wanted to come back and correct myself about my motivations, because it seemed to me after reading this, this, and this, that I was deceiving myself further than I had perceived. I'm still not sure I have a motivation proper beyond self-destructiveness, which has fueled a lot of my activity since childhood, and laziness, of which I can say the same.

In "Humans are not automatically strategic", an outline is given for genuinely making the best use of one's time to achieve a specific goal, and it goes like this.

• (a) Ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve;
• (b) Ask ourselves how we could tell if we achieved it and how we can track progress;
• (c) Find ourselves strongly, intrinsically curious about information that would help us achieve our goal;
• (d) Gather that information (e.g., by asking as how folks commonly achieve our goal, or similar goals, or by tallying which strategies have and haven’t worked for us in the past);
• (e) Systematically test many different conjectures for how to achieve the goals, including methods that aren’t habitual for us, while tracking which ones do and don’t work;
• (f) Focus most of the energy that *isn’t* going into systematic exploration, on the methods that work best;
• (g) Make sure that our "goal" is really our goal, that we coherently want it and are not constrained by fears or by uncertainty as to whether it is worth the effort, and that we have thought through any questions and decisions in advance so they won't continually sap our energies;
• (h) Use environmental cues and social contexts to bolster our motivation, so we can keep working effectively in the face of intermittent frustrations, or temptations based in hyperbolic discounting;

The jist of the article was largely that these strategies exist and aren't really all that hard to come up with, but are very, very seldom used by anyone to actually achieve their goals.

I continually struggle with (g), which is probably a good sign that my first goal should be to find a doctor and associated counselor that I am able and willing to keep appointments with easily.

It says quite a lot that upon reading articles which presuppose that a rational person wants to maximize their effectiveness at attaining their goals I react with so much resistance and even offense I can almost feel it physically, like a feeling of resisting being pulled forward by the back of the skull. Why should I be offended by a completely logical presupposition? Because it challenges my ego, of course, and my right to call myself rational if there is nothing in particular I am putting all my effort into achieving. I feel I can understand better people who find my inactivity reproachable.

Recognition of my inability to act according to goals has spurred me into activity, though, and I'm investigating a venue or two of information according to (d) as well as getting around to some small things I'd been procrastinating on. On that subject, I have some dishes to do. Another time, bloggers.

Right... So...

Well, the first thing anyone should be able to see about this blog so far is that it has been a massive failure, and that I am incredibly lazy. This is a trend you are likely to see continue, because I have always been more or less incapable of self-imposed structure.

But! There is a reason I have returned, because I did in fact pop my head into LessWrong.com last night while nearly collapsing from fatigue (due to my own stubborn refusal to sleep until I have to, not because I had anything important to be doing) and found a couple of interesting things, one of which was a reiteration of the general wisdom that you don't get anywhere without actually taking a couple of steps... but not remotely in those words. "Quantity over quality" was the message of the post, the reasoning being that realistically, quantity of production and activity is the only way to achieve quality. That is, when you do something many, many times, you learn from your mistakes (if you're paying any attention, at least, and being rational about what you're doing) and hone your technique. There was a cute story about a pottery class that demonstrated this point neatly, too, though there's no citation, so it may be merely a mythical anecdote.

Here's the post, for those interested.

Some of the responses posted there are interesting to read, too, and raise interesting points, and I found myself investigating links as though trapped in TVtropes, because as bad as I am at committing to independently showing up and studying it, I am, really, I promise, interested in this stuff.

I found myself here, at a post about the moral void, and how it seems many people are so terrified of it, they will allow the concept of an external measure of morality to "turn off" their inner perception of it. Personally, I'm kind of proud that my initial reaction to the question "Would you kill babies if it was inherently the right thing to do? Yes or no?" was "In what circumstance could killing babies possibly be inherently the right thing to do? Are our theoretical babies all suffering from incurable and agonizing diseases, or being born to mothers whose bodies are incapable of surviving childbirth, or something?"... And my reaction after considering it for a moment, and especially after reading the rest of the post, was "No." Not, mind you, a "no" with 100% certainty. If somehow the imaginary stone tablet of the universe manifested itself to me without room for any doubt whatsoever and turned out to read that inflicting pain was morally right, it would give me something to pause and think very hard about, and probably very painfully. But I'm pretty sure that's impossible, so let's discount it for now. Oh, and by the way (in case you didn't visit the link), circumstantial morality like killing a fetus to be born to a mother whose body is unlikely to be able to survive childbirth is not what I'm talking about. I think, in this case, that would be the rational answer.

Next stop along the way was the Twelve Virtues of Rationality: Curiosity, Relinquishment, Lightness, Evenness, Argument, Empiricism, Simplicity, Humility, Perfectionism, Precision, Scholarship, and The Void - The void being the one whose name is least obviously indicative as to what exactly the virtue is, and that is precisely the point. This virtue is the as-yet unknown truth, that which makes any statement or observation true or untrue. It is referred to as the unnamed virtue, and several other things, and it essentially means "correctness", which is the highest goal of the rationalist, the other virtues all being ways of seeking it out effectively.

This page, though, led me to do some thinking about myself as a rationalist (without warning in a spontaneous conversation with one of my friends, because I tend to lose my train of thought and all its coherence if I'm not talking or typing to someone when I'm thinking something through - I was duly chastised for my rudeness and inconsideration), and come to the conclusion that as in many other parts of my life, my biggest problem is that either I have no motivation, I cannot properly identify or remember my motivation, or I don't accept my motivation as legitimate, and thus reject and suppress it, leading to the second explanation. These listed in increasing order of accuracy, decreasing order of self-deception. Why do I want to, why do I bother, to be rational? It doesn't guarantee financial success or security unless that's exactly what your motivation is, and it isn't mine. But it's not as hard to remember as I had expected it to be. What's my motivation? ... Well... Saving the world, of course, in little ways here and there. By teaching people. And yes, yes, I know I'm not doing that in the most effective way. I'm doing it in ways I can already, though, and trying to reach a higher level of mental health and self-acceptance. After all, I only have myself to do things with.

I guess I was inspired by the message of quantity over quality, and decided to stop procrastinating and actually post. I may have been actively suffering from paralyzing perfectionism without being actively aware of it in this case. Either way, I think it's a positive step going from never posting at all to posting once, several months after I told myself I was supposed to.

I'm not going to promise any kind of structure to the times I post here anymore. It was overambitious of me to do so. But maybe, just maybe, it'll at least be less than three or four months before I post again. I think so, but I may be exhibiting unrealistic optimism.