Tag: motivation

Self loyalty

My cliff notes for “Self-signaling the ability to do what you want“:

The sunk cost fallacy can lead us to failures like overeating, where if there’s too little prepared food left to save after we are full, we eat it all, without recognizing that the costs of the food are the same whether we overeat or throw away the leftovers.

Willpower based solutions to this kind of problem, being manual, are weak; better to create a new pattern that consistently lets us see what’s in our best interest. For the above example, pre-committing to save the leftovers, no matter how small, can be an effective pattern interrupt. This worked for Nate (the author) by giving what the side of him urging him to overeat really wanted — food storage to stave off fear of scarcity — thus aligning all of himself toward the same goal.

Failing with abandon — “I’ve already failed a little so I may as well fail all the way and enjoy it” — is related to signaling failures.

The technique I’m describing — self-signalling an ability to do the right thing even if it seems too late — can address this failure mode in general.

Failing a little is a self-signal that you can’t succeed. By stopping after you’ve failed a little, before failing with abandon, you can send a new self-signal: That you can stop and do the right thing, even when it might seem too late.

Consistent self loyalty — doing the right thing by yourself in these situations (for example, being loyalty to the part of you that values not wasting food, over judging looks from waiters and other social norms pressuring you not to take home small amounts)  — builds self-trust. This is a virtuous cycle that disarms the impulse to fail with abandon.

This post is part of the thread: Replacing Guilt Cliffs Notes – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

Always be solving the problem

My cliff notes for “Moving towards the goal“:

This is simple advice, but sometimes that can be helpful.

When working towards an ambitious goal — say, ending aging — don’t ask what needs to be done right now, or what can you do right away. Rather, identify a goal. And if you can’t complete it literally tomorrow, identify what obstacles are in your way, and then simply move towards your goal by attacking those obstacles. If the obstacles are still large, break them down into small chunks, and so on.

This doesn’t mean working directly on the goal at all times. For example, perhaps getting out of debt first (focusing on this for years, even) will get you there in a shorter time span overall. There’s always some action you can take.

The challenge of staying motivated and focused when facing large problems makes moving towards the goal difficult.

But we humans can make a difference — when we try, we either succeed eventually, or die trying, having moved efforts closer for others to continue the work. So, to be effective, always be solving the problem, by always be addressing an obstacle between you and your goal.

This post is part of the thread: Replacing Guilt Cliffs Notes – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

Caring is hard

My cliff notes for “On caring“:

Due to the way our brains (fail to) process large numbers, it is possible for us to theoretically care about “all people” but also for us to only be moved to act out of care for very small numbers of imperiled people. We recognize the difference between 2 and 4, but at a certain point, large numbers lose their impact on the way we compute scale. This is a problem.

Caring for the world requires acting as though we felt the suffering of the many in proportion to the suffering for the few, even though we don’t. The stakes are high: All of the future of humanity — which is a potential number of individuals far beyond our own capacity to grok — is potentially impacted by us, now, and how we act. If we save one, or save the world, it feels about the same. Bt it shouldn’t; our calibration of care is broken. This is scope insensitivity.

The amount we give to charity — a proxy for the good we try to do in the world, to avert suffering — is generally driven more by social context than anything. We might give out of pressure, out of guilt, or out of desire to win a charity competition. None of these have to do with the magnitude of suffering in the world, or the value of giving. These factors motivate us to give some of our money when we otherwise wouldn’t give any of our money. Note that the problems in the world are worth a lot more of our money to address, but no one expects anyone else to give all of their money away. Social context matters more than scope.

For a given crisis that needs support, our reaction when approached by a canvaser soliciting donations is one thing; our reaction if we were face to face (or imagined being so) with the effects of the crisis on one individual (depending on the crisis, an animal [e.g. BP oil spill] or a human [e.g. Haiti earthquake]), is another. In the latter, we would generally be moved to help an imperiled individual right in front of us, and moved to pay others some dollar amount to help, as well.

I we further imagine multiplying that dollar amount we would pay others to help a single affect individual, by all affected individuals, that adds up horrifyingly fast, to a very large amount. — And that is just for a single cause. What about all the other crises that also affect animals/humans? If we extend our dollar value for saving an individual to all of those imperiled by all crises everywhere, then we begin to glimpse how bad of a state the world is in, and how much we ought to care.

Paradoxically, you can then realize that we can’t afford to even expend that minimal dollars-per-saved-individual effort, because of the opportunity cost of not saving all the other individuals imperiled (by all crises, the world over). This is independent of the value of their lives — they are worth far more. We come to realize that we cannot possibly do enough!

Originally, we devote our lives to service because no cause seemed pressing enough. Now, we are aware of the pressing importance of acting in service, for so many causes, but we are paralyzed by our inability to make even a dent in any of these problems.

What distinguishes prominent altruists is not that they care more, but that they have learned to distrust how much they care. They have learned that their sense of care is broken, due to scope insensitivity. Our sense of care does not work for large numbers; we feel an inappropriately small amount of care in proportion to all of the world’s problems. But, they also know that feeling care (which they don’t) is not required to acting care (which they do). They’ve switched from being driven automatically to care by their feelings, caring on manual control.

How, then, should we act? Well, it is hard to say. But one answer is that it isn’t enough to think you should do something: You need desperation that comes from realizing the gap between what the world needs and what we can give.

This is NOT about guilt you into giving more money to charity. Philanthropy is harder than we tend to acknowledge: It requires you have a lot of money (hard!), and give most of it away (unnatural!). Plus, guilt isn’t a good long term motivator [hence this whole series]. Try to do good because of intrinsic motivation, instead.

This post is part of the thread: Replacing Guilt Cliffs Notes – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

What matters

My cliff notes for “How we will be measured“:

What matters in the end, and how we will be judged, is what actually happens. Intention, intelligence, effort, and goodness don’t matter. It isn’t a social game. Others expectations for us aren’t what’s important. Others aren’t our enemies. Being rich or having status may be useful, but they aren’t ends in themselves. Pursuing retaliation, power, or other goals that are relative to others are tempting as grand objectives, but they are distractions from what really matters.

What matters is affecting the future. We define define desirable outcomes differently, and since all of our circumstances are different, this isn’t a fair game we all get to play equally. But one way or another, changes we can make in the future are what we live for.

Listless guilt comes from recoiling from thinking that nothing matters. Pointed guilt comes thinking everything matters, and falling short of fixing all the broken things. Acting to work towards our desired outcomes is the goldilocks approach. “At all times, act to ensure that our future is bright.”

Guilt has no place when this is the goal. It is backward-looking and unproductive; it does nothing to help ensure a bright future.

Thus, be liberated from guilt! — and play the game of making the future better. Whatever that means for you.

This post is part of the thread: Replacing Guilt Cliffs Notes – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

Defy

My cliff notes for “Defiance“:

Defiance is the third of Nate’s dubious virtues after desperation and recklessness.

Here, defiance doesn’t refer to defiant actions, but a mental state required before you can make defiant actions. It is a reflexive feeling of determination to act out of your own will, out of self-reliance, and without influence from authority, to fight against badness when you encounter it in the world. It is principled.

Defiance is characterized by a lack of hesitation. It needn’t be acted on without strategic thought — a petulant child may give in to eating the broccoli they hate, while cultivating a mental state of a child plotting to get their revenge in the end at the injustice. But, the child’s petulance was automatic, not a calculated decision. There was never a thought of whether or not to defy, whether or not to struggle against. Defiance employed this way should be reflexive.

Be intentional and principled with where to apply defiance. In many situations it can be counter-productive to your goals or an over-reaction.

As a rule of thumb, I suggest that it’s usually healthy to have a defiance reaction towards states of the world, and usually unhealthy to have a defiance reaction towards people.

Defiance as a driver of intrinsic motivation is very much at odds with Taoism or Buddhist notions of acceptance: You’re harnessing your defiant impulse against bad things to power you, instead of tempering your will to the “reality” of what you can accomplish to diminish your frustration. It is powered by channelling negative emotion, instead of transforming negative emotion.

It’s about being able to look at the terrible social equilibria we’re all trapped in and get pissed off — not because any individual is evil, but because almost nobody is evil and everything is broken anyway.

So this is how I suggest motivating yourself in place of guilt: Let the wrongness of the world trigger something deep inside of you, such that the question stops being whether you will capitulate or lose hope, and becomes how you will wrest the course of the future onto a different path. See the current state of affairs as your adversary; see the future as the prize that hangs in the balance. Shake off the illusory constraints, set your jaw, and rebel. Defy.

This post is part of the thread: Replacing Guilt Cliffs Notes – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

Play to win

My cliff notes for “Have no excuses“:

Sometimes we make a show of trying hard so that when we fail, we have an “My best effort wasn’t good enough” excuse. Preparing an excuse softens a failure, increasing the chance of failure by tempting you to fall back on it. This license to fail can be so powerful that it is tantamount to pre-deciding to fail.

If you were excused then you were helpless, and you couldn’t have done better, and you can’t learn to do better next time.

We can resolve instead to not excuse our failures, which removes the incentive for this kind of behavior. This leaves us to focus on achievement, instead. Introspect to interrogate and understand your failures, but root those explanations in why “I wasn’t good enough”, and don’t confuse them with excuses that absolve the failure.

Play to win, not to ensure your actions were acceptable even if you failed.

I suggest cultivating your mental habits such that it feels bad to check whether or not your failure will have an excuse. Refuse to have excuses. Refuse to cover your failures. Only then, without expected social protection, do you really start trying to figure out how to win.

What about bad luck? Examine and own your choices in the face of bad luck; don’t blame luck. (Owning the choice sounds like “I’d make the same bet again”.) Otherwise, you’ll never learn to be better at weighing and making risk-and-reward-based choices.

What about truly unforeseen circumstances, such as falling ill? Account for these in your plans! You know there is always an outside chance that external forces will derail your plans, so make contingency plans to give yourself the best chance to succeed in spite of them. Do all that you can to control for not failing because of them. And if you fail because of them anyway, that’s no excuse; your plans to mitigate them were not good enough. (Owning this can sound like “I messed up” Also, only if this is true: “I’ll do better next time with what I learned”.) Otherwise, you can’t expect to beat these external circumstances.

I have found that it’s usually in the moment when I refuse to make excuses even if I do fail, that I start really trying to win in advance.

What about social pressures to excuse failure? Well, sometimes people really do want some explanation. [ALWAYS with failures, in client service-oriented work.] But be aware that excuses function socially to keep you from losing face, at great cost to your agency. And be aware of well-intentioned people trying provide excuses for you, to make you feel better. This is toxic; it denies you power. Seeing your failures without excuses, with an explanation of what you could have done differently within your power, to avoid failure, is good: It allows you to do better.

Refusing to give excuses can have social costs: If others are participating in an implicit conspiracy of mediocrity and you refuse, that calls them out (even if subtly). Facing your own shortcoming pressures others who may be reluctant to do the same. (You can view these as opportunities to practice and prove your resolve to reject excuses.)

(There is also an inverse corollary: There are others who highly value those who live up to their failures.)

This advice requires a certain kind of strength to not be self-harmful: It requires you to have internalized previous posts in this series, to live without guilt, to judge yourself as a flawed mortal not as perfect like a god, to buckle down when things get hard, to not see yourself as good or bad, and to be comfortable seeing the dark world.

Playing to win is a motivation tool to replace guilt motivation.

You don’t need to win every time — but you do need to learn every time.

Don’t confuse explanations as separate from excuses. Deconstructing and understanding a failure is important for learning, but focus not on whatever facts contributed to your failure, but what you could’ve done to mitigate those facts, that you did not do. And avoid fatalism and destructive conclusions such as “I’ve learned never to trust.” You’ll recognize excuses and harmful conclusions because they degrade your power instead of building it for the future.

This post is part of the thread: Replacing Guilt Cliffs Notes – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

Bad doesn’t parse

My cliff notes from “There are no ‘bad people’”:

It is possible to judge someone objectively for being bad at achieving their goals, or for being poor with some skill, or for procrastination, or for hurting others. One can judge also another for the goals they choose to pursue.

But for someone to be “a bad person” is either nonsense, or shorthand for some shortcoming like those above. An objective standard for a “bad person” is elusive. Fundamental good or badness is not a quality of a person in our deterministic reality, where our being, thoughts, and choices are implemented by the laws of physics.

[This post — as with the entire series — takes a scientific view of our reality, and doesn’t consider religious perspectives for one moment. This is self-justifying, and the statements about “good” or “badness” are self-evidently logical from this perspective.]

We aren’t here to alter the color of the fundamental “goodness” stone buried within us; we’re here to make the path through time be a good one.

Look not to whether you are good or bad. Look to where you are, and what you can do from there.

Rather than fundamental judgements of us, our mistakes and wrongdoings are lessons from the past — encapsulated information about how we work in the world, that inform how we can control ourselves to bring about more good in the future.

At times we are akratic, and these moments inform where we have power, not our goodness or badness. [Here is where I believe Danny Reeves from Beeminder has something valid to criticize about this series, about the utility of channeling our guilt with personal economic commitment devices to shape our behavior in better directions, as an alternative to assuaging guilt as Nate Soares — although I suspect that Nate would actually agree. More on this in a future post, after concluding the cliff notes.]

This is freeing: We are judged only by the path of the future [and only by ourselves].

When interrogating your motivations:

  • If you discovery you are trying to avoid being bad, press on further to a more coherent answer. Treat “bad” as shorthand for some greater unconscious value.
  • If you find you’re in conflict with another, and you’re motivated to not be “bad” (because one of you must be) — liberate yourself of that good/bad frame, and investigate further.
  • If you unpack “bad” to different values or desires in conflict, that are difficult to reconcile, that is progress — it is truer than “bad” (and devoid of guilt besides).
  • If you have a hard time seeing past “bad”, then pretend someone asks you “I don’t understand ‘bad’ — can you elaborate?” — and answer.

Sometimes the answers to these interrogations present as senseless, which disarms them. There is no shame in realizing you are irrational; you are human and humans are irrational; you’re more monkey than god. Work with, not against yourself.

Rather than aim for being “good”, aim for who you want to be, what you want to work in the world, and bending towards a future you want.

This post is part of the thread: Replacing Guilt Cliffs Notes – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

Not because you “should”

My cliff notes from Not because you “should”:

Stop doing things because you “should”. Should can easily lead to feelings of guilt, obligation which you resent, and/or inadequacy.

Using the example of someone who stops thinking they should clean their room:

[E]ither (a) you stop forcing yourself to clean the room, and you realize you don’t actually care about having a clean room, and then your room stays messy and that’s fine because you don’t care; or (b) you stop forcing yourself to clean the room, and then you get a bit worried, because some part of you actually wants the room cleaned, so you listen to that part of yourself, and you work with it, and you find a time to clean the room because you want to.

You’re likely to do more good if you want than because you “should”.

A thought experiment to underscore how negative “should” can be as a motivator:

Imagine promising yourself that you’re never going to do something just because you “should,” ever again. How does that make you feel?

Do you feel relieved? If so, then you were probably putting your “should” labels on the wrong things and forcing yourself to do things that weren’t actually best.

This post is part of the thread: Replacing Guilt Cliffs Notes – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

You don’t get to know what you’re fighting for

My cliff notes from You don’t get to know what you’re fighting for:

Knowing what specifically you are working towards is hard.

It is easy to specify what you want negatively — what outcomes don’t you want — but that only tells you want you don’t want, not what you do want. It’s much harder to positively state what you want.

Then, it’s often true that when pursuing a specific goal, our goals shift. For example “help the poor” can turn into “get rich to donate a lot”.

With our current understanding of philosophy, it is highly likely if not inevitable that even simple altruistic goals will shift as we progress toward them or as we investigate our philosophies that underpin them.

[This shakiness of philosophies Nate points at to question several example goals is why I’ve limited the time I spend investing in philosophical understanding. It’s always seemed to be the further down philosophical trails I go, the less it helps with anything.]

Even when you think you know what you’re fighting for, there’s no guarantee you are right, and since there’s no clearly established objective morality, there’s likely to be an argument against your stance.

There is no objective morality writ on a tablet between the galaxies. There are no objective facts about what “actually matters.” But that’s because “mattering” isn’t a property of the universe. It’s a property of a person.

There are facts about what we care about, but they aren’t facts about the stars. They are facts about us.

Then it is also possible that our brains are lying to us about our intentions. We don’t have enough introspective capability to truly understand our motivations, which are often grounded in hidden and arbitrary rules of natural selection.

My values were built by dumb processes smashing time and a savannah into a bunch of monkey generations, and I don’t entirely approve of all of the result, but the result is also where my approver comes from. My appreciation of beauty, my sense of wonder, and my capacity to love, all came from this process.

I’m not saying my values are dumb; I’m saying you shouldn’t expect them to be simple.

We’re a thousand shards of desire forged of coincidence and circumstance and death and time. It would be really surprising if there were some short, simple description of our values. […]

Don’t get me wrong, our values are not inscruitable [sic]. They are not inherently unknowable. If we survive long enough, it seems likely that we’ll eventually map them out.

We don’t need to know what motivates us or what we want exactly; “The world’s in bad enough shape that you don’t need to.” We can have something to fight for without knowing exactly what it is. We have a good enough idea of which direction to go. Depending on what we are pretty sure of is good enough for us to decide what to do next.

This post is part of the thread: Replacing Guilt Cliffs Notes – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.