so i used to go to these rationality workshops where people were developing rationality techniques that were supposed to make your life better, solve your problems, etc. it was a formative experience to repeatedly notice how these techniques failed me: i never wanted to do them
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so if winning at life is as straightforward as just doing these simple techniques, and I’m not willing or capable of even doing *just this*…
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yeah it’s important that i phrased it “the techniques failed me” and not “i failed the techniques” - as we used to say, “a plan you can’t execute isn’t a good plan”
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mmm I like that. I think something in the broader ethos made it really easy to twist toward self-punishment. something like “the rationality is right” which maybe implied for me that “I am the problem”
probably I’m projecting at least some!
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the personal thing I think I’m reacting to is poking around LessWrong and learning a bit of this stuff at SPARC when I was like 16. which is a great age for “there is a one true way” type thinking and an awful age for nuance. I kinda felt like I failed SPARC
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i think this was pretty common unfortunately 😔 we talked about this kind of thing a bit but never really knew what to do about it. looking back i think the problem was a lot more fundamental than we thought - the whole association of rationality with math = objectivity