one of the worst things rationality did to me (or, you could say, i did to myself using rationality, idk) was teach me to use the part of my mind i had developed to do homework to run my entire life
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now i was very good at doing homework so this wasn’t a totally ridiculous thing to try, but it turned out i needed the coercive structure of school to provide the extrinsic motivation to make the whole machine work and without that fuel it mostly sputtered. hence “akrasia”
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it do be like this sometimes
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Hello to everyone else who was great at creating things and producing good work within fear-based coercive education and now has to learn motivation and discipline from scratch in their own, new, joy-based paradigm
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embrace your emotions, be lucky enough to be socially and financially secure, and try not to fall into many of the pitfalls on the way there
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I think that developing self-control is always a matter of appropriating control systems designed and installed so that other people can control you. I always think of the robot in the Asimov story that had its control panel out of reach on its back.
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Good news: they built one for you. Bad news: it is hard to get at.
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how is this a rationalist thing and not just like idk an ancient cultural custom of many civilized societies?
imperial-exam centric feudal china? material reward centric anglo-mercantile society? seems v strange to think that Yud psyopped extrinsic motivation
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Eleizer emphasized the broad application of rationality ("think about the problem for five minutes"), reframing it as useful in any situation where you want to "win". I think this was a community thing as well, people excitedly applying rationality to all parts of life.
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