I didn't realize how *much* of my internal landscape is constructed out of social beliefs until recently. Lots of this awareness came from things like, someone would ask me what I think of X, and I'd say "I don't know, I don't know enough about X yet. I'll check experts." 3/
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And I'd look at what the smart, authoritative people (according to me) said, and I'd be like, "probably they're right, so my guess is something like that."
This is a reasonable thing to do! But included in this was fear of deviation from what was (according to me) authority
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As in; I suppressed investigation into my actual beliefs, because I was afraid I would come to a "wrong" conclusion (according to my authorities) and then look stupid. I was subconsciously checking the belief nets around me to see what beliefs would damage my social status
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I am, relatively speaking, a very high-deviance person when it comes to unpopular beliefs. You'd think social status wouldn't affect how I form beliefs that much - and maybe to some extent this is true - but my guess is I was still playing a status game, but a different one.
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As in, the belief nets around me I'm using - the authority structures, the social spheres - have simply always looked very different and disconnected from the nets most people use, and so it looks like I'm much less influenced by them. But no - I just have separate ones!
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(I might be being less charitable to myself here; I do think there's a *lot* of beliefs I developed by just going into my room and thinking very hard in isolation, and those are probably not very social beliefs. They also might only survive cause my social nets let them.)
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Once I started noticing this, it shocked me how much I found it in my mind, everywhere. I was subconsciously *refusing to allow* myself to actually check in with what I thought about things; if not about the core of a belief, then about how much weight I put on it, or the details
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This all feels very subtle and quiet for me, like I have to notice which beliefs are social gently, with a side-eye, let it osmosis in from the background. It feels like my mind is trying very hard to not allow me to see my social beliefs, and I can't fight it directly.
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But with this gradual shift in awareness for me is coming this weird new clarity about who *I* am, or something? Like it feels like I'm developing agency in a place I hadn't noticed I'd never had it. Or like, an actual burgeoning kernel of true confidence and inner authority.
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I feel like I had a shift like this happen years ago, but for emotions, like I hadn't noticed my *emotions* were social, and I had to gently learn that I myself was in fact a fount of expression, and I didn't need any permission from anyone else, my feelings needed no validation.
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I also might be slower than it because from the outside my beliefs look very non-social; my society reinforces a narrative that I am an independent thinker, and so this dampens the part of me that does meticulous, careful internal checking to see if I am in fact independent.
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I've been speaking in past tense but I don't mean to imply I've successfully 'fixed' this; it feels like the start of something. I also feel a lot of gentleness and compassion around the fact that I hold so many social beliefs; I'm not trying to eliminate them, just notice them.
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I'd say you're getting better at it.
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Not because I updated in the direction of AI research happening faster than I thought, but because *everyone else* updated on this. From my perspective, if you were thinking clearly about AI risk, then cool new stuff like Dall-E should *not* have changed your risk assessment much
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