Welcome to Incrementally Strategic (I may change the name to something else that suits me better) a rationalist blog with an intended focus on phenomenology, mental metaphors, and becoming a strategic, creative person. Many of my insights here will build off of writings by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Anna Salamon at LessWrong, Nate Soares, Duncan Sabian, Brienne Yudkowsky, David Chapman, and others. I’ve found these writers instrumental to my mindset, and many of their posts have acted as beacons of light that I work towards when trying to over my mental burdens.
I’ve often wished that there was a deeper record of what it looked like to go from where I am now, or at least been recently – not goal oriented, nihilistic, not externally productive, not in control of my life, not feeling like I create value for others, disengaged – to a state of doing things outside in the world or otherwise enacting the skills Nate and others write about. I’ve found many internal barriers when I try to pick up these skills, or they have a high first-time energy cost. CFAR techniques, therapy, and the community has been wonderful for discovering and working through these, but I wonder how unique they are to myself. They provide a general technique for constructing and discovering the end-state techniques Anna and Nate describe, but I wonder if it’s possible to create a smoother path of learning. I think that a lot can be gained from analyzing what happens along the way during a shift, even if it is only an extended example of doing exactly the thing they recommend doing. I expect to write about my barriers, companion posts to other rationality bloggers (“look, I did the same thing and it worked / didn’t work!”), along with other things that seem interesting.
I called one set of barriers relating to nihilism “The Caring Problem”, and another could be “The Goal problem”. I was frustrated by how many CFAR techniques seemed dependent on having a goal, and how if only I had goals, then I could use everything I knew to optimize for that. The Goal would define how I built my systems, what TAPs I would create, how I spent my currencies. All these things – Something to Protect, Something to live for, Polaris, Wanting Things – if only I could have this fabled thing I could progress so much faster. It was possible for me to reach goals after much focusing or other vulnerability, and to access them as abstract facts later, but they seemed dull and uninteresting. My breakthrough was when the goal of becoming a goal-oriented person emerged. For the past month or two I’ve been obsessed with the idea of becoming someone who actually accomplishes things and who tries to change something other than themselves. I’m hoping that changing myself to change things outside myself will end the cycle, but I’m still partway in it. Writing in a way that others can see is part of this process.
There’s a problem with what I want to record – I may have started too late. Almost every part of the nihilistic, goal-sucky state has passed. To actually get to the point where I sat down and wrote an introductory post for a blog on the subject, I had to solve almost all of my relevant problems – so I can’t actually describe the transition as it happens as I wanted to. Instead I have to follow my notes and do my best at recreating the mental states. I may have lost valuable information. There is a common problem of productivity bloggers – they tend to be written by productive people, who often describe what they do, but not how they got there. They often have good insights about becoming more efficient, but there is something else – the mindset of creating, of becoming a Maker that seems more nebulous, that they have and not everyone does. I feel I’ve been close to someone who Does Things, but never quite there, I haven’t finished things, or capitalized on what I did, or had a reason for what I’m doing and I lose interest, among other things. Less Wrong users got at this a bit when they investigated Akrasia, but I don’t think they quite got there. I am not sure if this is a continuous difference of being more productive and goal oriented, or several discrete mindset shifts.
One transition that I have not completely made, but seems fruitful, is to value changing things outside of myself. Outside rationalist literature, I’ve usually hear this phrased as becoming a person who creates value for other people. That seems like it’s in the right direction — that it’s not self-enclosed and involves things, but it let’s other people determine what is valuable, and there are other methods of determining that. Another one I’m working is to go from valuing process, to valuing completion. Valuing completion do to some other instrumental goal seems like the direction to go, but again, I find myself confused.
