Created: July 11, 2021
Modified: January 25, 2022
Modified: January 25, 2022
things are deeply wrong
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- See also: the system is bad
- I find it hard to be okay with a 'normal' life, because that would imply some level of acceptance of the world and my place in it.
- It might be helpful to articulate how things are wrong, and what I could do about it.
- How are things wrong?
- Most things are done by people without ownership, so the people don't care how well they get done. Your fast food worker isn't particularly delighted when they cook you the best possible burger. The customer service rep on the other end of your call doesn't really, deeply, want to solve your problem. Teachers don't control their own curricula and so aren't incentivized to get excited about making it better.
- People are captured by instrumental goals. They often forget the motivating final goals, and use resources doing work that's unproductive or even counterproductive from the standpoint of final goals.
- depression is a huge deal and under-discussed. It's true that nothing matters, and the fact that we pretend it's not true is alienating and confusing. The goals that we're taught to shoot for are actually almost orthogonal to fulfillment
- Many people just never learn how to connect with other humans. They are unwanted romantically and become incels, or they're socially inept, or traumatized. There's no guarantee that kids will just figure out all the stuff we want them to figure out. Society has no real guardrails: at lot can go wrong before people eventually end up in mental healthcare or the criminal justice system, and many just live sad bitter lives with no help or even much sympathy from other people (since being good is a privilege).
- People who feel like there's something fundamentally wrong with them often do have something wrong. Sometimes you really are an imposter. I've spent most of my life feeling like any advice that involved talking or working with other people was just inherently not applicable to me, because I couldn't relate with other people. And that has been a real, fundamental deficit.
- Now, a couple of other things are true: first, everybody has serious deficits and yet the world is so vast and high-dimensional that almost any of them can be worked around. Second, with a growth mindset even very core brokenness can be fixed. A bicycle with square wheels is fundamentally broken, in a way, but it can be fixed just by replacing the wheels. Same for you. It won't happen automatically. You will need time and money, and some broken bicycles never get fixed. But they're almost all fixable.
- Sex and sexuality are fraught subjects. Scott Aaronson's post about nerds and feminism gets at this (see privilege).
- Many people are stuck doing work that doesn't satisfy them or use their full potential. But society makes it very hard for them to change.
- Society is just wrong about big, important things, like slavery or gay marriage. (these are obvious now, but how many similar things have we not figured out yet? and of course the legacies of racism etc still remain)
- I didn't fit in as a kid, or even in college. Lots of other smart kids had similar experiences. Many hated school. It's almost axiomatic that if you think independently and perceptively, you'll grow up feeling alienated and frustrated.
- Whenever you make friends, circumstances intervene so that you grow apart.
- The world is built around networks and knowing people. It doesn't matter how smart or capable you are if you don't have the right connections. I now see how this is in some ways unavoidable, but it's deeply distressing.
- People put so much time and energy into stuff that clearly doesn't matter: college football, reality TV, fashion.
- Even among supposed 'experts', people don't really take seriously the obvious facts. Most AI researchers don't believe that AGI is worth discussing or working towards, and this view is rewarded in the research community. People don't believe that we're in the most important century.