one of the most unpleasant things i learned about myself from my years among the rationalists was that i basically had two completely separate sets of "beliefs," one of which i could actually act on and one of which was almost purely for signaling games
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this was common enough that we had terminology for it - "aliefs" were the ones you "really believed" and "beliefs" were uhhh the others
someone once said "there are beliefs... and then there are the things people say" which i also like as an alternative
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when i started getting into talking about rationality and AI risk and all that fun stuff i was, tbh, not really treating it as if it could have actual real-life consequences. for me it was almost purely an intellectual game which i enjoyed getting attention for being good at
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the set of "beliefs" i was using for rat signaling games felt like a natural extension of "schoolbrain." like i had been trained very well in the art of bullshitting plausible-sounding opinions about things i knew less than nothing about, for years
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that was annoying enough when i was just using it to impress people, but when i started turning schoolbrain on *myself*? that's when "akrasia" hit - my thoughts were full of "convincing" arguments about why i should do X or shouldn't do Y, meanwhile my body was like "nah tho"
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gradually i came to suspect that something was very wrong about how i was orienting towards "beliefs." i got into all the feelings stuff (which rats introduced me to!) in part to explore my "actual" "beliefs," which it turns out were and are often insane
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i don't mean this in a derogatory way, i mean they were held by young child parts disconnected from my adult reality. stuff like "if i make a woman angry at me i'll literally die," that sort of thing. "obviously false" but nevertheless running my life from the shadows
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We keep treating these beliefs as something irrational... which they might be in some global sense. But, they may be entirely rational in a more limited domain. I've been spending more time thinking about the niche domains that match up to my neuroses.
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right, i avoid using either "irrational" or "rational" like the plague. everything is highly contextual and sometimes the context was a situation from 20 years ago