Normal Human Heroes

This post refers to concepts from the LessWrong posts Something To Protect, and The “Intuitions” Behind “Utilitarianism”. If you haven’t read them, I suggest it (and in that order); they’re very good.

There’s more than one reason to work to reduce extinction risk, but probably one of the most powerful is having something to protect. It seems to be a fact of human psychology that we’re willing to work harder and sacrifice more to protect something external to ourselves, such as loved ones, a “great noble truth”, or a nation/ethnic group/religious group, etc. Not only does working for something-we-want-to-protect bring us to do more, but it seems to also make us more satisfied while we do it.

6 billion people is a lot of people, but few if any of us feel an intuitive emotional kick about 6 billion people. It’s doesn’t mean we’re villains, our brains just aren’t built to multiply like that. Back in the EEA, we had no use for getting very emotional about people we didn’t know, because we knew everyone in our group.

One kind of work-around to this gap in our mental hardware is to take your concern for those close to you and multiply. Chances are that most people are cared for just as much as you care for your loved ones, and care for others in turn. Even if you think that only 1 in 4, or 1 in 100, is worth feeling that much for, that’s still 60,000,000 people. And 60,000,000 multiplied by however much you care for those close to you, is a fucking huge amount. Not that we’re capable of honestly multiplying like that, or physically capable of feeling that much concern if we could do the multiplication, but it can still bring you to feel massive amounts, and lead you to put a more coherent weight on certain outcomes when making conscious decisions.

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I actually wrote this post before the one on positive motivation, but I definitely didn’t want this to be taken the wrong way. I am NOT saying that we have a fantastically huge obligation, a duty to save all human lives. I am NOT saying we’ll be bad people if we don’t do all we can to protect the ones we care about. Personally I’m not really concerned about whether or not I’m a “bad person”, and I’m starting to think this is helpful. The fact of the matter is that I just really want my loved ones to survive, I want to save and help as many as I can. That’s not all I want, I have some technically selfish goals as well, and I endorse them. But I also have a very strong desire to preserve human lives and human value in the universe. And if you’re concerned about existential risk, I’m guessing you do as well.

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There’s a danger with this kind of multiplication, one that I didn’t see coming. With that much concern, a person can really get overzealous in protecting the things they care about. A little over a year ago, I explicitly decided to stop hanging out with my friends, unless I ran into them by chance. I did this in order to get more work done. I knew that I would mind that and so would they, but I’d rather them be unhappy for now and alive later. I’m recovering from the pit I fell into, so I’m starting to be able to emotionally understand why I did that, but for a while that level of concern was practically unimaginable. Anyway, I rapidly found that I couldn’t keep working without recreational social contact, but that didn’t completely end the problem.

I now took time for fun social gatherings, but I grew distant from people. I saw my friends now and then, but I was still on the other side of a divide. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, trying to figure out how to describe it. So far my best description was that they weren’t in my group anymore; I was in a group of me. I still cared about them, but I had a job to do. I didn’t want them to rely on me and me not to be there, if they made plans with me in them. I could get by with less hanging out than they’d want if I were close to them. Also, and this might be the larger part, I no longer took the time for many things I used to do, and enjoyed doing with them. I used to play video games, playing and discussing them with my friends. I used to put together role-playing campaigns with them in it. I used to be much more content to just lay around cuddling with my girlfriend. I used to spend several hours watching shows or movies with others.

I got along on my own, with occasional socializing. I still cared about my friends, but that care slowly became more and more abstract. They weren’t close to me anymore, nobody was. I wasn’t actually lonely or sad, but I was fairly alone. I can’t help but recall some lines from a favorite game:

“… I wish someone could have been there for you.”
“I’m used to being on my own.”
“One can be TOO self-sufficient, I’m coming to believe.”

And that’s how it came to be that I couldn’t even imagine or remember the type of dedication that lead me to separate myself in the first place. That’s how it came to be that I didn’t have much to multiply anymore. Y = 6,400,000,000 * X, and Y was so large that in my zeal I cut down X, and Y sunk with it.

I’m recovering from my mistake now, and I don’t know if anyone is even in danger of trying what I tried, but take my advice: keep close the ones you care about. Don’t put that aside. We’re social creatures, and we draw so much of our power from each other. Your friendships are important: for your happiness, for their happiness, and for all the good things your accomplishments will bring.

This is just going to be a quick coverage of the concept; I don’t have much more explicit knowledge of it than this. Intuitively, the distinction between positive motivation and negative motivation is that of positive emotions versus negative motivations. Positive emotions being things that attract you, like excitement, anticipation, and joy. Negative motivation comes instead from fear, worry, guilt, etc. In a discussion with others two weeks ago, we came up with additional dichotomies between them. Besides the nature of the driving emotions, positive motivation tends to revolve around creating good results, and negative motivation seeks to avoid bad results.

Most central though, is the distinction between doing, and not doing. It’s a working hypothesis, but it seems that negative emotion is superior if there is a specific, concrete action you want to avoid taking. At least, it’s much better at that than avoiding abstract results, like “don’t disappoint others”. Positive emotion seems superior at taking an action, such as exercising. Judging from various reports of successful people and our own experiences, it also seems superior at long-term abstracts, such as getting more fit, impressing others, or completing a project.

Unfortunately, in most cases the language used to describe something can be interpreted through either motivational system, and one system or the other seems to dominate our perspective at different points in our lives. Take the goal of “getting more fit”. If you have this goal, are you doing it to not be overweight, to not look bad? Or are you doing it to feel great and look great? Are you trying to evade the current situation, or are you excited about the future state of affairs? Pointedly, are you trying to avoid the extinction of the human race, or working excitedly towards a brilliant future?

This post is mostly meant to explain the concept and its benefits. For anyone interested in techniques to move from a negative to a positive motivation, one thing that I’ve found helpful is being aware of my framing, and mentally reframe when desired. I can’t change my entire emotional undercurrent on command, but I can work a little change in the perspective I use, and that seems to have significant and cumulative effects. Generally increasing my positive emotions has also helped.

Closing this up, I’d like to point out that not only is positive motivation more productive, but it’s also a hell of a lot more fun.

This song is a favorite.

There are things that I wished I did differently. With the benefit of hindsight, I can look back and note a lot of ways that I could have done better. Some things seem like such superior choices. Sometimes, they would have been clearly impossible to make, as I didn’t know then what I know now. Other times, it’s not so clearly impossible.

So, sometimes I regret. “Ah, if only I’d done that sooner, if only I had started then.” But then, ’sooner’ is relative, of course. Sooner than today, yes.

And sooner than tomorrow? Sooner than a year from now, sooner than a few decades from now? How great would it be to have started years before?

Ah, but I did start sooner than that. I started years before that.

How much would I give then, to be able to start today, for all the progress I could have made?

I’ve found this small exercise helpful a number of times over the past year or so, in helping to move past regret and throwing myself into something, grateful that I’m starting earlier. Just as we can take frustration from the fact that we didn’t start sooner, we can also take satisfaction from the fact that we did.

Beautiful song, from the main menu of the game Civilization IV. (No real relation to the gameplay.)

I had a great conversation with Justin Shovelain recently, and we happened to chat about some advantages SIAI has compared to the average non-profit; everyone involved is on the high end of intelligence, and there are good arguments that the likely impact is exceptionally large, which can appeal to donors who truly care about impact. SIAI has a number of disadvantages, like the many inferential steps required to realize the importance of the work, but we weren’t discussing those just then.

Another strength is that this is not a “niche” concern. Helping impoverished third-world farmers raise capital is a great thing, but it’s relatively easy to stop caring about something so distant. In contrast, it’s somewhat harder to look at everybody around you and know we’ll all be dead if these kinds of efforts don’t succeed, and then decide it’s not really that important.

Obviously, this kind of thing pushes me towards existential risk reduction. There’s something else though, which is my long-standing desire to “be a hero”. Watching movies, playing games, reading books; my heroes were mostly fictional people, rising to great and noble heights when everything was at stake. Like most folks, I’d love to emulate my heroes. Now that everything is at stake, I figured that now is the time.

Though I’m thankful for this desire overall, it’s caused some surprising trouble. One problem is that most of my heroes aren’t real people with real human psychologies, another is that I often wind up needlessly trying to replicate unimportant details.

A week and a half ago I had some useful thoughts about this, which have remained useful past the 3 day period in which many seemingly good ideas sputter and fade. After thinking about how best to convey them, I’ve decided that just copying from my journal is probably most effective. This was written for me – hence the numerous phrasings and points of emphasis – but I don’t think I could say it better for others. I did add a little extra spacing.

I believe that many readers don’t have a strong desire to emulate fictional heroes, but someone may, and perhaps many readers can take something from this regardless.

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While I’ve long known of the danger to our entire world from existential risk, I seem to have perceived this as “the real world is a video game world, for which video game personas are appropriate”. However, I recall thinking back to when I first read about these things, and I recall the perception being slightly different. Hmm….how to say. I believe it is that recently, I have tried to adapt myself into a video game persona. Before, it was more of a realization that we play versions of the video game characters.

That there really is the danger, and here we are in our apartments (suggesting imagery of the ‘Ton), trying to save the world. It wasn’t “Let’s try to be Paul Denton”. It was more “We ARE Paul Denton”. (By the way, Paul wouldn’t be that bad to be, as he’s rather human. He dates, etc.) A realization that the world really is in danger, and WE ARE THE ONES WHO MAY NEED TO STOP IT. Perhaps this: we don’t need to adapt ourselves to become video game characters. We don’t have to gain their style or lifestyle, because we are EQUIVALENTLY heroes, just as much as they. We are the heroes of the real world. Or perhaps, that we don’t have to change ourselves to live like they do in order to feel like our story is just as cool, in order to feel like we are finally being heroes. Rather, we are ALREADY being heroes by the fact of what we are attempting to do. We are ALREADY “them”, and our story is already and immediately as cool. Hah, I keep trying at this. A thought, which I think I may actually have voiced back then: We are not approximations of them, in which case we would never be quite as cool, or quite as heroic. Rather, all those stories were approximations of the heroes we are and will be. Hah, I think that gives it pretty well, but to lay it down with yet another angle: who makes things cool? Who is worth emulating? What is being emulated? Who are the real heroes?? Are THEY the real heroes, and we strive to be heroic by replicating their actions and lifestyle? Or are WE the real heroes, for which all those stories of fictional heroes were merely exaggerated caricatures of the heroes we would become, exciting tales which create the before-bed snack on which real heroes are raised? Specifically to me, will my life be exciting because of how close I will get to approximating Morgan Everett, or Paul Denton, or Dowd, or JC? Or will it be exciting because I live the the story of _____ ______, who may go on to perform real heroism, to make a real difference, and hence be an actual, real hero? Are these exciting fictions the things to which we aspire, or are they mere training and spark, the things which eventually inspire a real human being to step beyond the simple and assumed boundaries of a passive life? Not into a life of austerity, or loneliness, or desolation, but a life of applying the multifold abilities we have and will develop, to accomplish something big and real in the world.

Who are the real heroes? We are.

The fictional heroes are not there for us to emulate, they are there to inspire us to become ourselves.

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(A quick note: by ‘we’ I mean anyone and everyone who steps up to contribute to existential risk reduction, not just the people who have started helping already.)

Thanks for sticking around through the period of inactivity and website downtime. I put up the material from prior posts, though I usually didn’t take the time to restore the formatting to its previous appearance. Unfortunately, all the previous comments were destroyed in the rebuild. For those who might be browsing backwards, I entered the dates that the posts were originally made. To err on the side of safety, the most recent post, which featured the introduction to Fallout 3, has not been restored.

April 11th, 2010

April 6th, 2010
There are currently about 6,800,000,000 people in the world. There were up to 1,800,000 people at Barack Obama’s inauguration. That’s a pretty big number. The picture below probably contains over half of them.
Take a look. (You can click on the picture for a larger version.) Assuming it contained everyone who attended the event, and assuming population growth utterly and suddenly halted, you’d be looking at about 0.026% of the people who would be affected by an existential disaster.

April 2nd, 2010
From the Super Furry Animals

“We can live it large,
cause we’re only old once.
Let’s make a difference.

Turn all the hate in the world,
into a Mockingbird.
Make it fly away…”