Rules for life (v.0,0)
Let's try this out at least once.
Epistemic status: I have not lived very long yet, so whatever life wisdom I have accumulated so far is nothing compared to that of my future 1,000-year-old self. Consider me foolish in comparison. Also, this advice worked for me but obviously adapt it as you see fit. Entirely based on personal experience: n = 1.
The following advice is not aimed at rationalists in particular although you might find it useful or fun.
As a warning, there are plenty of imperatives in here like “you are not allowed to do X”; feel free to ignore those. I’m not trying to enforce this onto anyone.
Skim the post using the bold writing if you want to find advice you haven’t heard yet.
I hope, at the very least, that this will be entertaining to you.
1: Pay very close attention to what goes on in your mind.
Try and figure out what thoughts and emotions, exactly, made you do X or think Y. Nate Soares calls this “noticing subtle things about yourself”. The more you do this, the more you will understand exactly which levers to pull inside yourself to achieve your goals.
Because you don’t know what your genetics look like and because you cannot easily decipher how you’ve been nurtured, you are almost entirely a black box. As such you are absolutely terrible at introspection. There should probably be a figure on your shoulder noticing every emotion and thought you have, which would let you course-correct in response.
2: Control your ambient thought:
you are allowed to stop thinking about things you don’t want to think about. For example, if you notice yourself thinking about disputes, money, or politics in the shower, when that might be a blatant waste of time, you are allowed to shift your thinking toward something more productive. This goes with rule 1: to shift your thinking onto a more useful track, you have to notice you’re on the wrong track first.
Your thoughts are your property; whatever you think about should be the place you most want to optimize. What is that?
3: Remember that at the end of the day, only the results matter.
Your map of the world is only useful relative to its application to the territory. There’s a surface between your mind and the real world, and the more tangible effects you have on reality—the more you reach through that surface—the better. Otherwise, every effect you’ve had on the world of atoms will be consigned to slowly decaying neurons.
The thing is, there are some things out there that are out to get you. You could sit on a mountaintop in Tibet for 5 years meditating but that will not stop humanity from building unaligned superintelligence, or starting a nuclear war, or releasing an airborne super-pathogen. If you don’t affect the world of atoms, the world of atoms will affect you before you can even utter the words “but enlightenment!” Tigers are just an arrangement of atoms, but unfortunately your soul is also an arrangement of atoms.
It really is quite unfortunate: you were plopped in medias res into a cruel universe and now you have to race against the clock, because runaway artificial intelligence, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and entropy are all real things and not myths at all. Some atom packets out there that are very scary.
To apply this locally, think “only the results matter”. If writing blog posts is what you want to do, then thinking about it endlessly won’t help. Try imagining what being on the other side of the mind/real world membrane is like: how much of your writing is actually out there for a stranger to see? How much of a tangible trace do you have in the real world? What are the results of your life so far? How much of you is outside your mind?
You have to willingly jump into the abyss sword in hand, or else whatever is in that abyss will drag itself out of its pit and hunt you down. “Rationalists should win” isn’t exactly the best mantra. The best mantra is just “win”.
4: Step out of the box more often.
Starting to write was really hard. I knew I had to, but my hands hurt from the typing and I felt like a slave to my ideas. I desperately wanted to get back up and walk around again, because I liked generating ideas but not recording them. After a while, I got used to writing; and lo and behold, it became a whole new dimension of tangible action in the world! Writing has more of an effect on the world than mere thinking. The same type of upgrade occurred when it came to publishing my written work: it was very difficult at first, but today it’s getting easier and easier. Finally, I am now wondering to what degree writing abstract ideas and sharing them with others counts as “tangible action in the real world”. To be sure, there are millions of interesting essays left to write: but at the end of the day, they’re only essays. No matter how incredible an essay is, it cannot escape the confines of its own medium. So: can I go one level further up? Can I step out of the box?
The “box” is how high up the meta chain your current tangible impact is. Stepping out of it, or jumping from one matriochka doll to the next, means upping up your entire tangible-impact game. This can happen if you get past the next hard step in your plans, and doing so will be akin to going from a 2D plan to a 3D one. Going from merely curious about biology to studying a textbook; going from merely learning about biology to thinking creatively about it; going from merely thinking about it to writing about it; going from writing to publishing; going from publishing to making friends and building clout in the biotech arena; and finally, achieving your goals in this medium more effectively than if you’d just been merely curious about biology.
To return to the personal example; when I try seeing things from the highest box and take the bird’s-eye-view of everything, essays end up looking kind of redundant and overused. The low hanging fruit of essays look exhausted.1 This is usually a sign that you can jump boxes.
There’s always a way to raise your entire utilon-maximizer machine one dimension higher. And—especially if time is running out—you should step out of the box more often. Like, as often as you can.
I’m not going to stop thinking, or writing, or publishing essays: but what dimension can I add on top of all this? The border between passive thinking and active world-modelling keeps changing: where is it right now?
5: There is a limit to how meta you can think.
Birds cannot fly above the Karman line.2
If you take the ultimate bird’s eye view and keep everything into account—and I do mean everything—you will find yourself in a world that is 1) filled to the brim with infinite variables which are 2) wrapped up in various inscrutable black boxes (like your own mind), and 3) covered in a fog of war which ensures you only have so much time (and RAM) to think things through.
To unpack: infinite variables = all the things you have to think about. Black boxes = all the complex and chaotic systems that make up the world, which you will never understand. Fog of war = because you are human and are dependent on causality, all your decisions will be made under uncertainty.
Concrete, classic example. Say you want to do as much good in the world as you can: great! Now the next step is wondering how you should spend the next 300 seconds of your life. Perhaps you should begin by reading an EA website, because they have thought about this more than you have, and have collected real data. Okay so there’s a lot of suffering in the world; now, so should you focus on developing cheaper vaccines or joining an NGO in Africa? After sifting through mountains of related data, including the state of your personal qualifications, can you establish which, of the bio-engineer or the NGO member, you should become? Once you’ve decided that, what should you study to become better? (…) Oh what’s that, the world is more complicated than this? There are some potential future events which can kill everyone? Future people might have rights? *Spits out coffee* how many future people did you say? Ouch, looks like we have new priorities: if AI has a decent chance of killing us, then everyone, including every single future person, all malaria-infected children, and all your loved ones are on the line. Okay… Now that I know this, what do the next 300 seconds of my life look like?3 Wait what do you mean my brain is flawed and I have to think about my own thinking?
Yeah, thinking all the way up at the meta Karman line is tiring. At some point, you even have to factor in the time you’re using to think as a variable, and wonder whether you are thinking too much and not acting enough.4 And there are so many variables to pay attention to. When you’ve read enough blog posts from people trying to save the world, you learn about a few: money, utilons, fuzzies, hedons, existential risk percentages, cognitive biases, Bayesian calculations, brain cycles, time, mental health, personal altruism-o-meter, political squabbles, etc. etc. etc. are all things you have to plug into your calculations.
Earth is a horridly complicated place. But it’s still your responsibility to fray your way through this mess of variables in order to achieve your goals. This is the meta-Karman line: you can’t think about it too much because that would be a waste, but you have to think about it a little to make sure you haven’t missed anything.
The universe is saying: “Haha! Jokes’s on you! There’s an Optimal Path somewhere, but you will never know how close you are to it. Welcome to a world of horrible estimates, unsure models, and having to be CONSTANTLY VIGILANT. Mwahahaha. Sincerely, the universe.”
Well at least now you know that you can’t possibly think with greater scope. There is no problem, by definition, that is greater in scope than the “find the right path in life” problem, which dictates how you spend the next 24 hours of existence. You’ve reached the Karman line, so at least things don’t get worse. There’s calm above the storm.
6: Don’t fragment your mind.
My mind gets tired when I have 12 blog posts open and each of those posts leads to 12 more, and so on. There are 10,000 things to pay attention to. This is not a novel problem and I’m not offering any original solutions. Just, be aware of over-exertion and limit the amount of things you are thinking about at once. Take breaks. Probably get a hobby—a full-blown hobby—which does not make you think quite as much, or think in quite the same way. When you are taking a quick break though, be very wary of the “low quality but short content” trap, in which you think you are being productive by avoiding starting something big, but actually you are increasing the chance that you will fall into a death spiral of byte-sized-dopamine-fueled akrasia. There is a huge ugh field around Karman line style thinking-about-everything problem solving, but it’s an ugh field you’re going to have to learn to get through.
Notice when you are fragmented, and pull away from that.
7: Responsibility is not comfortable, but you have to take it or you will be lost.
Adults, in the real world, are as rare as unicorns. (Which is to say, non-existent.) If you think about radical life extensions often enough, the phrase “most people in charge of everything are in their 40s and 50s” suddenly becomes not-very-reassuring. (This is not a defense of gerontocracy. Old people aren’t adults either.5)
We live in Gotham: Earth is chaotic, messy, dirty, full of infrastructure failure and death, and also it’s careening towards a cliff. Moloch is lurking in your nearest alleyway armed with a switchblade. Cthulhu is hiding under your bed and will drag you under by the ankles. The insanity waterline is drowning millions. Earth is Gotham; but there is no Batman. We have a plentiful supply of Jokers, to be sure: but there’s no competent, confident, caped crusader watching over us and doing what must be done just because no one else will do it otherwise. We’re alone. It’s up to us.
To be fair: there are plenty of people kind of like Batman—LW is full of them! But Batman is an ideal that cannot be reached.6 Aim for taking responsibility: if you don’t, you’ll get tidal waved by the sheer complexity and chaos of the world. (Infinite variables, remember?) Taking everything into account is an impossible problem but if you don’t shut up and do the impossible, you will die. There should be more wannabe Batmans in the world, because our Gotham is 8 billion people strong.7
The more competent you become, the more adults look like a myth:8 when I first read LW seriously a few months ago I carefully read the few front page posts, took notes, thought about them for a while, and trusted the writers to provide good-for-LW content and references. I am no longer in that phase. I no longer trust the frontpage posts as much as I used to, and I pick and choose more often. I take responsibility for which posts to read now and it certainly doesn’t feel comfortable but I must do it for effectiveness’ sake. LW is like any other: field when you are new to it, adults are everywhere. But the more you mature, the more you see that “adults” are in the same situation as you are in. And what you are is a child.
Everything in human civilisation has been improvised in the span of just 120 centuries.9 Homo Sapiens has only existed for 2,000 centuries.10 So who’s running Gotham? 8 billion children. Take responsibility, because no one else will.
8: Every day is a microcosm of your life.
A day, as defined from when you wake up to when you hit the sack, is a microcosm of your life. Whatever you do in a single day, that is what you will do your whole life. This isn’t exactly true, of course, but it’s a useful truth. If I brush my teeth today thinking that today is my entire life, and if I think the same way tomorrow, I’ll have healthy teeth all my life. If I write today, and interact with friends today, and sleep well today, and read today, and do all the other things I’d like to do today, I’ll have a satisfying life! If every day in the future represents a future self, then I’m engaging in acausal trade with thousands of people by promising to live as if today were my entire life. Life is today, iterated 27,400 times over.
It’s hard to overstate just how useful this idea has been to me. I’ve decided that “Neil” is actually an organism that exists through time and is split between thousands of past selves whose entire lives last just 24 hours. As the Neil from August 10th 2023, I decide to have an impact on the entirety of Neilkind by setting precedent for all future selves, and writing up a post for LW. As the Neil from August 16th, I have decided to finally publish this post that’s been lying around for a week. Lazy past selves.
Plant exceptions on certain days wherever you want them and attribute different weights according to whim; but “today is a microcosmic reflection of my entire life” is a really useful heuristic. Also, the toothbrush example is object-level but the meta-level structure of your day is also likely to imprint itself onto your entire life: if you train every day in staring into the abyss, applying rationality, beating akrasia, doing things that scare you, etc. you will see that that behavior becomes more common in future selves. Enough future selves down the line, and bam, your life will look a lot more like what you want it to look like now.
Funnily enough, anthropic reasoning can also be applied here. The mediocrity principle tells us you are probably your average daily self. This means that whatever failure modes are characteristic of you will probably occur at a normal rate today. One in ten days might have 10% worse failure modes, and one in ten might have 10% better failure modes. That’s important to keep in mind: while cumulative improvement is a real thing, it doesn’t feel like a real thing because you are stuck inside Time. Your goal is to make your failure modes a little better today than they otherwise would have been. But you can’t escape the fact that you are living the average day in your life, right now.
9: You can save yourself an awful lot of thinking by Just Doing The Thing.
Runner-up: whenever you see an abyss, jump into it headfirst. I refer to this as “Raskolnikoving”: a reference to a character from Dostoevsky who spends months coming up with theories for why he should murder someone, and finally ends up getting fed up with himself and murders someone. It’s a dark example. The point is that when a decision seems sound—when your prefrontal cortex, your calculations, common sense advice, and your mentors all tell you in chorus that it’s sound— you can save an awful lot of hesitation time by Just Doing The Thing.
Obviously this is omnipresent advice. And obviously it’s a lot harder to do than to say. You’ve probably encountered this advice (as I have) hundreds of times before without really heeding it.
I would suggest you spend one minute by the clock thinking about this right now. Hopefully this call to action will be the one to tip you over, because there’s usually always a call to action to tip someone over. But whatever, it’s your life. You know exactly what you’re procrastinating on. Do that right now; this post and others can wait.
10: Cut your losses!
You may have understood at this point that I like pointing out how dark the world really is. That’s because it’s a useful thought to me: I don’t want to lie to myself, and I’d like to know what makes the world bad so that I can fix it.
The universe is seriously trying to kill you. It doesn’t do it purposefully; but for it you are simply a statistical anomaly—a tenacious bundle of negentropy it wants to wipe out of existence and spread into 7.8 septillion Joules of waste heat.11 “Are you a Gaussian distribution? Nope. Off with your head!” - Sincerely, the universe.
Fine, so the world is dark. What next? Cut your losses.
As far as mantras go, it’s one of the best. Have you wasted all day procrastinating? Cut your losses: spend the hour you have left doing something useful. Started learning something too late? Made too many mistakes? Lost too much? Thrown your life into disarray? Missed your big chance? Cut your losses.
And then all your future selves will inherit your work; and you’ll be helping yourself selfishly and acausally; and you’ll be building off the shoulders of giants; and you’ll be a giant whose shoulders are stood on; and your timestamp will ring throughout the ages of your life. It will be a small parcel; but when a book will be written about you, your timestamp will be a short chapter, which isn’t nothing. Even a footnote is a pretty good fate, as fates go.
Cut your losses. Literally any improvement over your current condition counts as cutting your losses; you get to give yourself an “I cut my losses” badge no matter how small your last achievement was. Then, you can do it it again. Gain back another parcel of land for yourself, take it from the vast lands occupied by darkness.
Human civilisations cut our losses: humans still feel misery, but less now that they have technology and specialization and society. Capitalism cuts our losses: the markets are not 100% efficient, but ressources are more effectively distributed when there are markets than when there aren’t. Effective altruism is a form of cutting your losses: it’s not denying there’s plenty of evil in the world, including the kind that fills animal shelters; it’s just pointing out that there’s worse evil and we’d be better off cutting off the worst evil before the lesser evil.
And so on. The default of existence, and your own life, is misery. Everything else is a form of cutting your losses. So do that more, and make it daily because the day is a microcosm of your life.
So anyhow. I told myself I had to write out the advice I’ve given myself, opened a doc and did it. I am interested in what others might think about these “rules” and what alternative or further developments you might offer. I called it “v.0.0” out of the hope I have much wisdom to gather still.
Some ideas in particular transmit this sense of exhaustion: Duncan’s sapir-whorf for rationalists made me think, “should I, really, be spending a significant amount of my time locating concepts and then naming them in essays? If I make 200 essays instead of 12, does that even make a meaningful difference to the world?”
[Citation needed]
If this vision of the world seems odd to you, read Bostrom’s astronomical waste.
Adam Zerner’s Losing the Root for the Tree is an excellent example of this. It’s an instance of what I would call an inescapable concept.
Obviously Batman wouldn’t be of much use to the real world. I only mean to point at the figure of Batman as a watchful protector, and someone who kind of curbs the horrors of Gotham. (Let’s just ignore that he hasn’t killed the Joker yet and that a utilitarian would say he has thousands of graves on his hands.) Having just finished Scott Alexander’s Unsong, you could imagine the Comet King instead.
Since this post has veered far past the point into coockoo-poetic-land here’s a screenshot from Neil Gaiman’s Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader which reflects “do the impossible” spirit:
“There are no adults, there is no Easter bunny, there is no tooth fairy and there is no Queen of England.”
Not just civilisation, of course; the blind idiot god doesn’t have a plan either. The universe is a lot more improvised than it looks.
“As per e=mc^2, average human body has 7.8 septillion Joules of energy.” - Quora.
This is really, really good. Thanks for writing this.