On the attractiveness of having choice taken away.
(Just from my personal notes on EA. Applies to many other strong ideologies too, of course, this just happens to be on my mind right now.)
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This was my starting assumption with EA, carried over from my starting assumption about all of LW-style rationalism. It turns identification of the unique best option in all circumstances into a legibilizing fetish. Sometimes helpful, usually not.
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I think the idea of "too many choices" is actually a misframing and the paradox of choice is ill-posed. There are huge swathes of option space that collapse into a fairly small number of indifference classes, and the "real" options (which takes narrative insight to judge) are few
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Imo, the philosophically sound approach is to calibrate the appropriate amount of doubt to live with given uncertainty and ambiguity in circumstances, and adopt varied decision-making styles accordingly. Otherwise you risk projecting your fear of uncertainty onto the situation.
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Very interesting!
I wonder to what extent we can consciously calibrate, as opposed to it being something we don't actually choose.
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You can consciously calibrate it in the same way you can calibrate whether you can lift a weight safely. Depending on your weight training condition, you may be able to lift 50lb or 500lb. Near your upper limit, precise form matters. In the middle, you can be sloppy.
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