Trapezoid Projection

[nostalgebraist]

I think your post about AI Doom doesn't really acknowledge the fact that, generally speaking, people enjoy being alive for its own sake and prefer it to being dead. Unless I'm misinterpreting, the conclusion of the post is essentially saying that not wanting people to be killed is "out of step with human values" which is obviously not true. Most people do not want to be killed. Killing people is bad. It would not be OK for AI to kill everyone even if it made something else afterwards.

(Pt 2) this all seems extremely obvious to me but I could not come up with an interpretation of that post which isn’t just broadly in favour of people being killed, which seems sort of like. The most evil thing anyone could ever possibly believe. So I am hoping that I misinterpreted

You're not alone, this aspect of yesterday's post was confusing to a lot of people.

FWIW I'm mostly tapped out on discussing the subject matter of that post for the moment, but this does deserves some kind of further explanation, so here goes.

----

First, to address something you didn't mention, but which was broadly confusing:

I am not saying: "when the doomers say AI will kill us all, they don't mean the natural reading of that phrase, they don't mean it will literally kill all the individual humans, they mean some weird other thing instead."

No, they really do just mean it will kill everyone. Sorry that wasn't clear.

----

What I did mean, when I talked about doomers vs. average Joe here, is that the idea of human extinction hits different if you're an anti-deathist transhumanist, versus if you aren't one.

If you're an anti-deathist, what's bad about extinction is, in part, the same thing that's bad about ordinary death. The anti-deathist looks around them and sees, in some sense, a slow-motion and staggered extinction already happening.

Even without extinction, we are all gonna die. Our great-great-great-great-great-grandparents' generation did not die out in an extinction event, but all the same, they are in fact extinct. Dead. 100% fatality rate, for those guys.

Sure, it was spread out over time, and "natural," but -- the anti-deathist argues, quite reasonably -- why should any of that matter to them, the dead ones? Those distinctions don't change any of what it is that's intuitively bad about dying in the first place.

The horror you express at "people being killed"? For the anti-deathist, that horror gets generalized to include the case of people being killed "by death," as it were. By just, dying, of old age or whatever, rather than by the hand of some other creature.

----

Now sure, even for the anti-deathist, there are important ways that extinction is worse than business as usual. Most obviously, extinction not only stops all the lives of people around now, but prevents the lives of any future people from getting created later on. (Plus of course, all else being equal, death sooner is worse than death later.)

If you're not an anti-deathist, though -- and most people aren't -- these special factors that make extinction worse (for the anti-deathist) are in fact your only objections to extinction.

That is not to say that they aren't extremely strong objections. Of course normal people do not want human extinction!

But for the normal person, there is this hard line between "extinction" and "business as usual." For such a person, there is a horror in the former that just isn't there in the latter, even though (as the anti-deathist likes to point out) business as usual still means a 100% fatality rate, on a long enough timeline.

For the anti-deathist, there is not this hard line. Extinction is bad. Getting killed by a person or a machine is bad. Dying of natural causes is bad. And a lot of the badness -- though by no means all of it -- comes from what is shared across all these cases, not what is special to each case alone.

----

OK, now let's talk more directly about your question.

Unless I'm misinterpreting, the conclusion of the post is essentially saying that not wanting people to be killed is "out of step with human values" which is obviously not true.

I mean, yeah, that's obviously not true.

But there are things sort of superficially similar to it that might be true.

And when something is true, but on the surface sounds bizarre and backwards and staggeringly wrong, I often like to play around with the way it sounds -- to just have a bit of fun with the way I can say things that seem so outrageous, and yet might not actually be wrong. Or even really outrageous, when properly understood.

And maybe I get carried with this, sometimes, at the expense of clarity. Sorry about that. (But also, it's my blog, where I write the kind of stuff I like writing. And I do like writing in this way. Them's the breaks.)

Anyway.

If we want to understand ordinary human values, then we need to cope with the "average Joe's" simultaneous belief in the following two things:

I really do not want to die. As a particular case, I really really do not want to die right now, today. But also, come to think of it, dying tomorrow would be super bad too. And you know what, the day after tomorrow? Same deal. And I guess I could go on like this.

I do not, at all, actively want to "live forever." In fact I kind of don't want this. If you directly ask me, I'll say the idea is sort of creepy and weird and bad. Or, even if I don't think that, I don't find the idea motivating at all. It might be acceptable, if it were forced on me, but none of my actions are driven by a desire to make it more likely.

(I am hand-waving away the concept of the afterlife here, which is involved in the typical Joe's actual beliefs in a way that annoyingly complicates the analysis while being tangential to my point. Let's say we're talking about the average atheist/agnostic but non-transhumanist Joe. I think the point can be generalized further, but I'm trying and failing to be brief here, so you'll just have to trust me.)

Now, together, these two beliefs are nearly a paradox.

Maybe they are just a paradox. Maybe you can't, really, think both of these at the same time without, on some level, kidding yourself. This is what the anti-deathist alleges, about the average Joe.

Maybe you agree. If so: congratulations, you're an anti-deathist too. Which is a perfectly valid point of view. Despite all I said in my post, I have quite a lot of sympathy for it, myself.

But the average Joe is really not an anti-deathist. This is just a fact about the world. Average Joe really does think both of the 2 things, at once. Maybe he does so inconsistently, or wrongly. Still, he does.

I think you essentially have two choices here. You can take the road less traveled, fully bite the "death is bad" bullet, and be an anti-deathist. Or, you can do what most do, and be like average Joe.

But if you are doing what average Joe does, and you go on to say things like...

being in favour of people being killed [is the] most evil thing anyone could ever possibly believe

...then you have some explaining to do. You have to spell out what it is this means, if it doesn't just mean full anti-deathism. Which is kinda what it sounds like.

A lot of things "kinda sound like" full anti-deathism. That view is very amenable to being phrased in terms that make it sound utterly obvious.

But we can't let this lull us into thinking that -- because anti-deathism sounds obvious, and average Joe often believes things that sound obvious -- that average Joe believes in anti-deathism. Somehow, despite all that obviousness, he just doesn't.

Somehow, despite all that obviousness, anti-deathism is a fringe position. And if we're not on the fringe, then we have to spell out just what it is that we believe instead.

Now OK, let's be real. You didn't say "being in favour of death" was the evil thing. What you wrote was "people being killed," not "people dying."

And that's what makes the distinction to you, right? I imagine? That it's bad news when some entity actively kills a person, that goes beyond the badness of death per se?

----

That does sound pretty intuitive! But what exactly is it that makes killing worse, here?

I didn't answer that question, in my post. I answered a bunch of other questions, instead. There are still more questions, which no one has asked me, but which I kind of feel I ought to answer, when talking about this topic. Nonetheless, I have to stop myself at some point, or I'll never do anything else. Hence these kinds of glaring lacunae.

I won't answer it here, either, in full. I have some other things to do today, and this is no longer just explicating what I meant earlier, this is new stuff. I'll just make some gestures, now, towards the kind of answer that would make sense of how I treated the topic in my earlier post.

----

So, there are some pretty obvious answers to "why is killing especially bad?"

Say, that it reflects poorly on the killer: an AI that would kill us all is probably an AI that's just plain bad morally.

Or, that we have a norm against it. It's a part of our ethics, the stuff we agree on as part of the social contract.

But you know what we don't have a norm against? If we're average Joe, and not on the fringe?

Killing chickens.

Or torturing chickens, and then killing them. Or breeding lots of them, specifically to be tortured, and then killed.

Sorry for the sudden swerve into vegan talking points! But this is kind of a big deal.

I've heard this cited, multiple times, by doomer types as a motivating case for being worried about how superintelligent AIs might treat us.

Just look at how we treat creatures that can very evidently feel pain -- but just happen to be different from us, not constituted the way we are, and in particular much less smart than we are!

And I, personally, find this argument pretty motivating. This is one of those arguments where even I have to hand it to the doomers.

But once we've allowed this much, we are in danger of conceding some really wild shit, if we don't tread carefully. Maybe we even should concede the wild shit, in the last analysis. Still, we should tread carefully.

Say you take the chicken argument seriously.

You've conceded that human values contain some really fucked-up things about how to treat other, dumber, "more primitive" beings. Beings of the kind that prevailed before the new, "super"-intelligent, sparkly, world-dominating species stepped onto the scene and changed everything.

You've conceded that humans are basically misaligned AIs, of the evil killeveryone Torment Nexus sort.

Remember, that was the whole substance of the argument: to make such awful AIs seem more plausible, by pointing out that such a thing already exists. Namely, us.

But now, what standing do we have to object to the AIs, without it rebounding back on us? Must we oppose ourselves just as fervently as we oppose the evil AIs, for the same reason?

"An AI that kills all humans" sounds pretty bad. Sounds like an evil thing, that we would not want to exist. But by the same token, we're evil, and we shouldn't exist.

(We might have wiped out chickens, if they weren't so tasty. There are plenty of non-tasty things which we did, in fact, wipe out. I and the doomers focus on chickens and the like, here, because what we did them is arguably even worse.)

Would we really accept an AI that's only "aligned with human values," and treats us about as well as we treat other beings when we are placed in an analogous scenario? Or do we hold AI to a higher standard -- one we can't possibly apply to ourselves, for that way lies madness?

Well, I don't know. These are tough questions.

But I would like to leave open some room to imagine, at least, that the advent of humanity was not (or not only) a catastrophe. That it was not, in fact, "the most evil thing possible."

Despite all the evil that we do, I'd like to imagine that.

And I'd like to imagine that, if there is such a thing as "human values," it contains this affirmation of the value of the advent of humanity.

And the value of things like the advent of humanity.

And the golden rule, and the rule of law. Which means, among other things: not holding you to a higher standard than I hold myself.

Even though the apparent implications of this are pretty nasty.

Philosophy is like that. Often you are between a rock and a hard place. Saying "that's a rock, don't you know that rocks cannot be walked through??" in an alarmed tone does not really get at the heart of the dilemma, or point the way to a solution.

----

All else being equal, of course, I would prefer not to be killed.

So would the chickens, I imagine.

We must not pretend there are easy answers, when there aren't.

[toroid-earth]

We're like the chickens

I won't comment here on factory farms. Pretend we are in a world where the only way anyone raises chickens is letting them roam around a pasture with other animals to scratch and eat bugs and corn and whatever else they find and then one day they are quickly guillotined and don't ever really feel stress, fear, or intense pain.

That is an exceptionally good life for a prey animal. Most animals are prey animals and those in the wild tend to have very miserable deaths, the better ones involve being chased and torn to pieces. Nature red in tooth and claw and all of that.

Human's are prey to [abstract concept of social organisms that quasi-counter entropy; ACoSOQE]. Like the chickens, we are just minding our own business, and in modern times, having historically low stress, low pain, low fear lives and then ACoSOQE comes along and cuts our heads off and that's it. Sometimes it does it to our young men early in life, mostly it waits 70+ years, and we don't really understand it, but it's the best kind of living we have ever known.

I think most of us have a built in trust that ACoSOQE is better than the alternatives. You release the chickens in to the wild and they will overproduce, many will starve, they will succumb to other predators, and many will end up killing each other in a tight spot. Most of us would rather we mostly get our 70-80+ years than roll the dice on some other situation.

I think there are chickens out there who say "If we make a break for it, we can escape the farmer and get out into the wild and live up to 4-7 years instead of the 1-3 we get here on this farm. The farmer is evil!"

Most of the chickens will quite rationally see that the up to is waving away a lot of things that could make those extra years, even if achieved, less appealing.

Humans are the same. Oh you say you have a revolutionary idea that will greatly improve society? How many of us will it get killed?

[toroid-earth]

you’re not anti-capitalist/whatever, you just don’t like yourself

[balioc]

So...the killer app for current-power GPT-style AI is bringing waifus to life, right?

Or, uh, speaking more generally, simulating humans for social and entertainment purposes. NPCs in roleplaying games, etc.

An LLM can't really know more than its training data, or come up with a better idea than the ideas in its training data, so people aren't going to use it to be wise or innovative (at least, not when anything is on the line). It can, at least in theory, act as a staggeringly-erudite jack-of-all-trades -- and there's real utility in having one of those on permanent retainer for free, don't get me wrong -- but, really, that's a job that can be done by anyone with an internet connection, if he's willing to put in the time and effort.

Its real power is just "can act convincingly like a human, more or less, without having to have an actual human there." And you don't need much wisdom or innovation to succeed at being the particular kind of fake person that people want you to be, 99%+ of the time. And there is a massive market for light-use fake people.

[toroid-earth]

AI Derangement Risk

I need to write down the assumptions I see them that are implicit in every AI Doom argument because I keep forgetting one:

assumption that high intelligence results in superpowers/omniscience/omnipotence. If you are worried about AI you will say you don't really believe that, but we don't know what is possible. This is a mugging.

assumption that scaling to significantly higher intelligence is cheap/feasible/worthwhile. "Increase your IQ to 1000 with this one weird trick!" This seems really unlikely given that humans do not exhibit a massive variation in intelligence. Evolution likely would have pushed us further if it could.

assumption that IQ matters more than knowledge and experience. See every trope about nerds. Being good at math doesn't mean you can navigate the world effectively, and seems to actually be a hindrance.

assumption that people who are not articulating counterarguments to every point of your argument have somehow missed the whole thing and would recognize that expected value blah blah blah, means we should still freak out. We see no productive path ahead of what you are doing, that is why you are being ignored.

assumption that anything you are doing with your hysterics is helpful. You have no plan, you have zero understanding of the actual mechanism that would lead from useful AI to death of humanity AI. None. Not a clue. Don't start talking about agents, no one has built one of them remotely like you describe in your thought experiments and we don't have any idea if that is possible.

If you want to stop AI doom, use some intelligence to figure out how to make people actually care about what you are saying and communicate it in a way that helps people understand what needs to be done. Oh, you think you're more intelligent than most people and they lack the intelligence to understand what you have grasped? Gotcha. No chance that is distorting your thinking about intelligence.

[toroid-earth]

2 letter Risk

We are on the verge of summoning a vastly superior alien intelligence that will not be aligned with our morals and values, or even care about keeping us alive. Its ways of thinking will be so different from ours, and its goals so foreign that it will not hesitate to kill us all for its own unfathomable ends. We recklessly forge ahead despite the potential catastrophe that awaits us, because of our selfish desires. Some fools even think that this intelligence will arrive and rule over us benevolently and welcome it.

Each day we fail to act imperils the very future of the human race. It may even be too late to stop it, but if we try now we at least stand a chance. If we can slow things down, we might be able to learn how to defend and even control this alien intelligence.

I am of course talking about the radio transmissions we are sending from earth that will broadcast our location to extra terrestrials, AKA ET Risk... Wait, you thought I was worried about a Chatbot? Can the bot help us fight off an alien invasion?

[toroid-earth]

Centigrade

I’m a native Texan. I spent 4 years overseas and now have to check weather in C to plan my day.

Tyler Cowen and others have argued that Fahrenheit gives you finer grained measurements since the degrees are smaller. But every centigrade weather report/thermostat/etc. does 0.5 increments, which is 0.9F, so they are in fact more precise.

C is easy:

20=room temperature

20-25=getting warm

25-30=definitely warm

30-35=getting hot

35-40=definitely hot

40+=oh geez why

15-20=getting cool

10-15=definitely cool

5-10=getting cold

1-5=cold. your wife says “it’s freezing”

0=literally freezing. This is easy to remember.

-5–1=even more freezing, check your pipes

<-5=oh geez why

BTW average human body temperature is 37. Not some decimal, just 37. 38+=you have a fever

[toroid-earth]

The way democrats play like their social liberalism (everyone should be treated fairly and consistently, regardless of race, sex, religion, etc. - very good and important) is somehow connected to their economic policy is just fucking gaslighting.

Like telling black, brown, gay folks who made it into the upper middle class that voting for lower taxes and less regulation on their business is somehow against their interests is… an interesting take if I’m super charitable, but that messaging to poorer folk is not far from the barrel of a gun.

[toroid-earth]

Hey Guys… Oh? Don we now our gay apparel? Brb

[toroid-earth]

Once again I am reminding you that the confusion lies in the assumption that “capitalism” or a “market economy” are something that somehow was chosen and not a description of a natural equilibrium that arises time and time again

[you-can-be-what-you-want-to-be]

“Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence — as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world.”

Ursula K Le Guin at it again, being right as always

[shlevy]

To cast the pursuit of and demand for clear, certain moral ideals as “immature” is one of the most disgustingly evil things one can do.

To pretend that seeking the good is equivalent to not questioning what is good, and fighting the evil is equivalent to failing to examine its causes and nature, is a cheap rationalization for such a monstrous assault on the good for being good.

That this comes from a wildly popular children’s author is horrifying and telling.

[toroid-earth]

You are both right. Kids need structure and are desperate to learn rules. They don’t have decades of experience and an existing moral framework to work from. They will not just figure it out anymore than you would derive quantum physics all by yourself.

To deny them rules, structure and some certainty is cruel and terrible.

Adults that can’t move past the need for certainty are stunted and will struggle with life.

Adolescents (who are the earliest possible target audience for Earthsea, which I imagine is the “children’s” book being referenced) are at a time when they may start seeing the cracks in the certain moral system they grew up in. It’s monstrous to insist to a child being bullied that there is only good and evil. Which one is the child? Does that mean they are justified in shooting up the school that bullied them? Or maybe they are the evil one and that is why they are bullied?

We also want these kids to move past always questioning, learn to take the good with the bad where there isn’t a better alternative, find the best compromise, etc. Denying good and evil is worse than clinging to it if you can’t move past that stage to a greater understanding.

[skaldish]

Still bothered by the US cultural idea that men can only be non-romantically intimate with one another in war-like or competitive circumstances.

[skaldish]

I'm pretty quiet about the fact I'm a transman usually, but holy shit I need to tell you about the culture shock I'm going through because it's blindsiding me.

There's a huge sense of social isolation that comes with being perceived as male, because now people are subconsciously treating me as a potential predator. All strangers, no matter their gender, keep their guard up around me.

It made me realize that there is no inherent camaraderie in male socialization as there is in female socialization—unless, of course, it's in very specific environments. And the fact I don't amnbiently experience this mutual kinship in basic exchanges anymore is an insanely lonely feeling.

You know how badly this would have fucked my mind up if I had grown up with this?

[skaldish]

It is 4:30am and I'm mourning the loss of a privilege I didn't even know I had.

[skaldish]

Anyway, I'm going to figure out how to navigate this. Don't know how yet, but I'm gonna.

[skaldish]

Absolutely, because it's an extremely sticky issue.

Frankly, this is something I would've never understood without living the experience.

It's now blatantly clear to me that most cis men probably experience chronic emotional malnutrition. They're deprived of social connection just enough for it to seriously fuck with their psyches, but not enough for them to realize that it's happening and what's causing it.

It's like they're starving, but don't know this because they've always been served 3 meals...except those meals have never been big enough.

This deprivation comes from all sides of aisle, by the way.

In the case of women: When I'm out in public and interact with women, all of them come off as incredibly aloof, cold, and mirthless. I have never experienced this before even though I know exactly what this composure is—the armor that keeps away creepy-ass men.

As someone who used to wear it myself, I know this armor is 100% impersonal. Nobody likes wearing it, and I can say with absolute certainty that women would dump the armor in favor of unconditional companionship with men if doing this didn't run the risk of actual assault. (Trust me when I say women aren't just being needlessly guarded.)

But I only have a complete understanding of this context because I've experienced female socialization. If I hadn't, I would've thought this coldness was a conspiracy against me devised by roughly half of the human population. Even now, with all that I know about navigating the world as a woman, I'm failing to convince my monkey-brain that this armor isn't social rejection.

And as for male socialization? Again, it seems taboo for a man to be platonically intimate with men for reasons I have yet to fully understand, but I think it boils down to a) the fact society teaches boys that it's not okay to be soft with each other, and b) garden-variety homophobia. Our media only shows men being intimate with one another when they're teamed up against a dire situation, and I'd bet real money it's a huge reason why men gravitate toward activities that simulate being teamed up against an opposing force.

But men are not machines of war. Yes, testosterone absolutely gives you Dumb Bastard Brain, but that just makes you want to skateboard a wagon down a hill or duct-tape your friend to the wall, not kill someone.

The human species looks so much colder standing from this side.

I can see how men might convince themselves that their feelings of emotional desperation is personal weakness as opposed to a symptom they're all experiencing from Western* Imperialism. Because this human connection, this frith, is as essential for our wellbeing as water is.

So sick. How sick. I want to destroy this garbage.

* EDIT: Had this written as “White Imperialism” originally, but a few people interpreted this as me blaming a group of people as opposed to a system, so I’ve changed this for clarity.

[toroid-earth]

Re: coldness from women, I’m curious if you have found the ways to disarm?

As a man from birth, I am pretty accustomed to the coldness as the default. But socialisation also teaches you something equivalent to rolling over and showing your belly. e.g.,

Honestly I think I really do speak about an octave higher on average if kids or women are present. It’s signalling that you are a domesticated male. There are probably a hundred other signals you learn to project that say “I am not a threat” and “I will in fact protect you if need be” without actually saying that. Smiling and being overly friendly being a start but far from the whole thing, and of course over friendly can definitely verge in to creepy so it takes a lot of practice.

Does it kind of suck even from birth? Sure. But I’m 230lbs and have had testosterone my whole life. I’m the weight of two or more women and much stronger. I could probably overpower an average group of multiple women assuming they don’t have any weapons (but this is one of those things a domesticated man does not say IRL, and not something I even think about except for internet hypotheticals.) I do not blame women for being a little afraid of me, we are physically a different species, at least at the ends of the size distribution, but even a pound for pound matchup between a grown man and grown woman is grossly unfair due to how our bodies develop.

I am super sorry you have to navigate this and my point is not to deny what you are experiencing in any way. It’s very real and sucks and is hard. I’m only attempting to offer you some hope that it can be navigated, or at least improved upon.

The upside if you are at all introverted as I am is that just ignoring people who are not someone you must interact with is very compatible with their desires. The expectation that I perform for strangers in any way is much lower.

[discoursedrome]

I think that mostly I’ve become a better person as I got older, but one case where that’s not true is that I get irrationally annoyed when I encounter people having personality types or undergoing life changes I’m already familiar with, which of course is just more and more common as I get older. I don’t endorse this obviously but I do think it reflects a sort of tension between the desire to treat everyone as individuals and the desire to collapse everyone down to one of a few Types of Guy for efficiency purposes

[toroid-earth]

As that kind of guy (that you are describing yourself as) I can tell you mine comes from an unhealthy lack of self compassion, and an inner dialog that views all my past selves as pathetic. Maybe another type of guy to leave behind.

[neil-gaiman]

Why do you use tumbrl as your main social media? Is not a bit outdated and filled with weird ppl?

Very much so! It's definitely outdated and filled with weird people. But I'm afraid it has some downsides as well.

[max1461]

To put it more clearly: I tend to believe that almost all patterns don't hold, that almost all implications are false, and that in general the correct response to almost all propositions is to suspend judgement. I often have this feeling that most people "believe too much"—not as in "people believe things too easily", but as in "people hold too large a number of propositions to be true". Especially entailments. You talk to people and they just have all these fucking entailments that they believe! Or they just straight up conflate things that they haven't necessarily justified (or even tried to justify) conflating, which is a sort of believing in various entailments in disguise.

Anyway, I feel like I just believe abnormally few things. Not that I'm abnormally skeptical, exactly—and especially not that I am abnormally likely to reject a proposition (rejection is still a belief!). It's more like...

I think when people say the word "skepticism", they're often thinking of a very active process. The process of doubting, of searching for evidence, of "debunking" and so on. And this active skepticism is useful, for sure. But I think a lot of people, even people who are very practiced at this active skepticism, would benefit from cultivating a kind of passive skepticism. That is, just a sort of default suspension-of-judgement when presented with new propositions. Especially with regard to entailments, where suspension of judgement typically looks a lot like rejection. If you believe "all swans are white" you'll be unprepared to see a black swan. If you reject or suspend judgement on "all swans are white", you will be similarly—though not identically—prepared to see a black swan. Or something like that.

I suppose I also do think it's the case that in every day life, for any two randomly chosen propositions that a person might care about, probably neither will imply the other (maybe this is also true in general, but that's a formal logic question). This is a stronger claim, but I suspect it's also true.

Anyway, the point is, people should believe fewer things, I think. People should think that fewer things are true. Or something.

[toroid-earth]

Not directed at you OP so much as just reminiscing about my own path through thinking similar thoughts for years and finally realising that I had reified not-reifying to a degree that I was in fact actively and strongly believing in the principle and virtuousness of my own non-belief.

Needless to say, I was one of those “I don’t believe in labels” types. I would have benefited from someone with an opinion putting a label on me to snap me out of it.

Again, this is only about my own experience, and not directed at OP in the slightest, I’m just narcissistically using your post as a jumping off point to have a retrospective:

What I needed to hear at that point in my life was that it’s fine to believe things and it is fine to change your mind. It is also good to recognise when some questions don’t have enough information for much if any epistemic certainty, but it is still okay to contingently believe things, and you will in fact believe something no matter how hard you push knowledge of that belief from your conscious mind.

I think I was consumed with wanting to be a person who did not believe to much. I was driven by annoyance with everyone who clearly was believing wrong things, and needing to be better than that.

I am happier now knowing I am a person who believes a lot of wrong and stupid things.

[femmenietzsche]

These scenes where he's trying to make it with a girl are genuinely painful to read

[femmenietzsche]

After he's spent a week with this girl who's in love with him, trying and failing to convince himself he's into her even the slightest bit:

Both the grandmother and mother had come along to see me off, so my parting with Sonoko at the station was casual and innocent. We jested with each other and acted nonchalant. The train came soon and I took a seat by a window. My only thought was a prayer that the train would leave quickly. . . .

A clear voice called to me from an unexpected direction. It was certainly Sonoko's voice, but accustomed as I had become to it, I was startled to hear it as a fresh, distant cry. The realization that it was Sonoko's voice streamed into my heart like morning sunlight. I turned my eyes in the direction from which it came. Sonoko had slipped in through the porters' gate and was clinging to the black wooden railing bordering the platform. A mass of lace on her blouse overflowed from her checked bolero and fluttered in the breeze. Her vivacious eyes stared widely at me. The train began to move. Her slightly heavy lips seemed to be forming words, and in just that way she passed out of my view.

Sonoko! Sonoko! I repeated the name to myself with each sway of the train. It sounded unutterably mysterious. Sonoko! Sonoko! With each repetition my heart felt heavier, at each throb of her name a cutting, punishing weariness grew deeper within me. The pain I was feeling was crystal clear, but of such a unique and incomprehensible nature that I could not have explained it even if I had tried. It was so far off the beaten path of ordinary human emotions that I even had difficulty in recognizing it as pain. If I should try to describe it, I could only say it was a pain like that of a person who waits one bright midday for the roar of the noon-gun and, when the time for the gun's sounding has passed in silence, tries to discover the waiting emptiness somewhere in the blue sky. His is the rending impatience of waiting for a longed-for thing that is overdue, the horrible doubt that it may never come after all. He is the only man in the world who knows that the noon-gun did not sound promptly at noon.

"It's all over, it's all over," I muttered to myself. My grief resembled that of a fainthearted student who has failed an examination: I made a mistake! I made a mistake! Simply because I didn't solve that X, everything was wrong. If only I'd solved that X at the beginning, everything would have been all right. If only I had used deductive methods like everyone else to solve the mathematics of life. To be half-clever was the worst thing I could have done. I alone depended upon the inductive method, and for that simple reason I failed.

😔😔😔😔

[toroid-earth]

Is this Murakami? Even if it’s not, it is

[toroid-earth]

When you say “X is incompatible with free will” I hear, “X makes me pissed off because it acknowledges my dogma is made up.”

[max1461]

Ok, here's a quick survey for you all: do you find yourself capable of directly choosing your beliefs? People often talk about belief as something you can choose, e.g. in contexts like Pascal's wager. But I've not really found this to be the case, myself. In some sense I've always found my beliefs to be essentially forced on me by my own internal reasoning: when presented with some given question and some given information, certain possibilities will immediately emerge as more likely seeming than others, and this process happens automatically (I have little direct capacity to alter it). I can of course choose whether to think about the topic in more depth or not, and I can choose to seek out more information or not, but still, if I choose to do either, the results are essentially beyond my direct control. I will come to the conclusions that seem most likely to be true, and what those conclusions are is largely a consequence of certain types of internal reasoning that happen automatically.

Like, here's a test case: if you are standing in a public place and you see a guy on a bike turn the corner and emerge into view, are you capable of choosing to believe he isn't there? Or is your belief that he's there automatic and beyond your conscious control? You may say to yourself something like "well, maybe I'm just hallucinating him!" in an attempt to direct your own belief away from the obvious. And this thought might sow genuine uncertainty in you, but would it really sow genuine disbelief? Those things are different, after all. And surely if the biker came barrelling towards you, you would still move out of his way, evincing that in some sense you continued to believe in him the whole time.

Perhaps you could genuinely try to convince yourself he wasn't there, but I suspect it would be very hard. It would require some type of intense meditation or something like that, to dissolve your sense of the external world. But people talk about "choosing their beliefs" not as something that requires intense meditation and cognitive effort (and may not work even then), but as something we can all do effortlessly. I suspect this may be because, for many people, beliefs like "belief in God" or "belief in [X] sociological claim" are not fundamentally like their belief in the biker turning the corner. They're a fundamentally different sort of thing, a sort of thing that can be chosen. But not so for me. Beliefs of that sort are indeed different in degree for me: my cosmological and sociological beliefs are far less certain than my belief in everyday objects like the biker. But they are not different in kind: I can't directly choose them, they are presented to me unavoidably and automatically like my belief in the biker is (indeed, their relative uncertainty is also unavoidable and automatic). I can shape them indirectly, by choosing what information sources to view and what to spend my time thinking about, but this is far from being able to directly pick them in the moment.

Am I unusual in this regard?

[toroid-earth]

Surface level: of course I choose my beliefs

Deeper level: I wish I could choose my beliefs but these neuroses are basically me

Buddha: maybe today I’ll choose some beliefs