Normal Human Heroes

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.

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.)

March 8th, 2010
Foreign Policy has an interesting photo essay up on their website, covering all 33 of the world’s ongoing conflicts.

This blog has a lot of focus on existential risk and FAI, but that’s a straightforward outcome of being concerned with stepping up and doing the greatest good. It would be naive to say that one person can change everything, but even just a few lives saved would be worth the effort. Happily, it looks like we can do a lot better than that, if you factor in probability to calculate the expected-lives-saved/improved. If you’re looking to actually help as many as possible and not (just) receive warm fuzzies, that’s the thing to do.
Unfortunately many efforts – such as exisential risk reduction –  result in a potentially huge payoff many years down the line, but little direct payoff until then. I find it helpful to try and spread out the expected reward: quite truthfully, each moment that’s honestly spent towards saving or improving lives moves the expected outcome to a slightly better place. Each such moment, even if it’s on a necessary amount of R&R, is a moment well spent, a moment of accomplishment and a benefit to others.

January 12th, 2010
I’ve built up a strong habit of daydreaming, something that I’m working to reduce. I often find myself daydreaming about extremely unlikely situations. Sometimes they’re unlikely but common on a larger scale, for example being burglarized while you’re in the house. Sometimes they are patently ridiculous, such as being caught with a loved one in a sheep stampede (do they even do that?) while holding on to an old wooden fence which is slowly falling over, or resting inside a pile of sharp metal shavings while being attacked by someone with a sledgehammer. Sometimes they’re at least common in movies, along the lines of Jason Bourne or James Bond.
In these daydreams, the general train of thought is “How could I survive that?”, often paired with the objective of protecting friends and family. Being burglarized my chances are good, if I don’t try to be a hero. In an action movie situation my chances are moderate, if I already have the skills of a hero. For the ridiculous ones, it varies wildly. Underlying all this though, are movie expectations. In a movie the hero goes along, is hit with varied obstacles, and manages to pull through by being the best and keeping their head. But is this really how the world tends to work?
I’m increasingly aware that it is not, even if you have a lot of time to plan out your response under conditions of minimal stress. For one thing, your underlying proficiencies, automatic responses and reflexes may not do what you want. Perhaps it’s a good idea to fire a gun, but how many times have you fired a gun before? You’re highly unlikely to be a good shot at first. Maybe a fancy maneuver would be nice, but have you trained as an acrobat, gymnast, or martial artist? If not, pulling it off even in a safe environment is a dubious proposition. And even if you’ve got all those skills, who’s to say that’s enough? If you’re on an open field, walking along unsuspecting while a sniper has you in the sights of a high powered rifle, there is no stunning victory, no champaign room. You just die. In war, not every one who is smart and skilled survives, luck plays a huge factor. Nobody is good at surviving a mortar. In nature, if something like a cold snap or simple misfortune has resulted in malnourishment, and some predator that’s faster than you got close enough without you detecting it, it’s over already. “Nature” would say ’sorry’ if it cared, which it doesn’t.
The real world has no proclivity to providing you only with obstacles you can survive, even in a hypothetical sense. The real world plays by no rules but the rules of physics, and those are as brutal and unforgiving as landing on the solid granite rocks they make up. If we reach the point at which we’re able to create artificial general intelligence and haven’t put in the work to understand how to make it friendly, too bad. It’s lights out, with no excuses and no second chances.
The lesson of all this is to start acting now. If you care about the survival of your loved ones, if you have any desire to see 80 or 8,000, then don’t wait until the situation has grown impossible to break out your best self! The world yet allows you free time, so use it! Do all you can to ensure that we avoid the “no-possible-win” scenarios, and give ourselves at least a moderate chance of surviving the ones we can’t avoid. If you go to take the final for a class in a new subject and you’ve never studied, you’re going to fail, no ifs, ands, or buts. The test is coming, so get studying now and change those odds!
(Note: it is possible to take this too far. From my own experience, I’ve found that I require social contact to stay productive, and I might also require some occasions to kick back and stop optimizing my time for a few hours. In addition, fun is important long term, and a highly productive presingularity life can be a fun one. But be honest with yourself, which in this sort of affair is usually a nontrivial task. If you’re anywhere close to average, it’s very unlikely that you’re already optimizing your productivity, or the density of your fun and relaxation. I’m still working at it myself. )

December 18th, 2009
Two months ago I experienced some burnout and had to scale back my efforts at existential risk reduction. I was optimizing every single bit of my time towards that end, and for a possible variety of reasons I couldn’t sustain it. That was acceptable, as long as I knew I couldn’t do it. When it comes to saving billions of lives – as well as both our future and our past – I can’t accept applying anything other than my best effort. If that meant taking some more time for relaxation, so it was.
Even so, this went again my grain in a little. We are entering the single most pivotal time in the history of our civilization, species, and Earth, and as long as I can do something about it, it seems a little silly to sit around playing video games. In addition I’ve never been good at balancing really entertaining games and work, beyond getting homework in on time. Months ago I made a policy against playing any new video games, and I came back to decide that again; these days I’m most satisfied if I keep myself grounded in this world. In addition, any sort of role model I have would be fighting tooth and nail to protect the beauty of our present and the potential of our future. I could accept doing less if I had to, but it felt very off.
For about a month now I’ve been back at spending more and more time and effort on “saving the world”. I’m happier because of it, and I think I’ve got things figured out this time, I’m a little surprised I didn’t see it before. When I was going through that burnout, all the things I most wanted to do were social things. As I pointed out even then, I was doing fine until I got into a situation where my optimizations didn’t take  me on their own into proximity with others. Now I’m back to optimizing all my time towards existential risk reduction, with the one exception of occasional social events. I think I actually had tried this earlier, but by that point I was already coming down and didn’t have the time to see it work.
What’s more, I’m now an aspiring rationalist, and despite some fair assumptions by others, I did not really consider myself one before. A few readers may not fully realize what I’m talking about, which is kind of a pity. I’d suggest reading LessWrong, but even doing that I didn’t “get it” for months. Reading some good sci-fi also helped. For about a year I had been working at being maximally productive with my actions, but only recently am I working to be maximally productive with my thoughts. This is where the very significant gains lie.
If there ever was a time for us to become heroes, it is now, and it’s satisfying for me to be more directly back on that path.

October 17th, 2009
I noticed that I was often coming up with thoughts that were to me motivational and somewhat novel, and most of the reason for this blog is presenting those thoughts in case anyone else can get some use out of them. This post isn’t really one of those, it’s a personal account but something that might also be helpful. On a side note, looking back on some earlier work, my writing here isn’t quite at the standard I’d envisioned; I think I’m aiming for the emotional climaxes without the necessary development. Hopefully my future posts will improve as I remain mindful of this. Though my earlier work was also a lot longer and I’m trying to keep these posts on the short side. Which, BTW, is something this post probably can’t be.
In the past couple weeks my extreme drive to save the world started to falter, was partially repaired several times, and eventually ground to a halt. It didn’t die; saving the world and working to extend my lifespan by thousands or millions of years are way too important. But I let it sit there on the ground while I’ve been gathering my strength and regaining my original motivations. The reasons for this breakdown/burnout aren’t entirely clear, maybe it was a “perfect storm” of events. Maybe it wasn’t, and there’s a chance that earlier factors sent me into states where I was bothered by things I otherwise wouldn’t have been, and those things aren’t part of the main problem at all. Possible causes include: a general drifting from my original/developed motivations, being back at school where I have many associations of living “normally”, and meeting and becoming involved with other singularitarians. As I think back to the beginnings of this, that theory about a dominating early factor seems well supported. While those other things probably contributed, I do recall an initial, really big issue being lack of relaxation.
I have slightly unusual (inhuman) heroes, and one frequent trait is extreme single-mindedness. I love characters that figure out what has to be done, in the long or short-term, and then set about doing it with unwavering determination. I’d strived for that for awhile, and I was pleased as I got closer and closer. Recently, and certainly affected by the pressure of studying for and then applying to consulting firms (something I was genuinely interested in), I’d basically succeeded in doing this, and I think this was my undoing. I was able to spend all my waking hours on work with no breaks  just for fun for its own sake, which I’d previously been taking occasionally through “failure of will”/akrasia, or not being fully honest about what was most helpful.
Without having the expectation or experience of just kicking back and relaxing, ever, I felt like a huge ship, straining and groaning at the seams. I knew my seams were strong enough to hold, this was too important for me to ever really give up on, but I was starting to quake with the strain. It’s like in Star Trek, when Kirk takes the ship to warp factor 6 and Scotty exclaims “The ship canna take that much cap’n!” Why do they even put that kind of drive in there anyway? I’m admittedly not very familiar with the lore.
I wrote a post sometime around this period, which I kept as a draft. Here’s a paragraph from it:
“I just can’t seem to find a good way to justify relaxing or doing nothing like I used to, each moment of time is one in which I could be helping to save 6.7 billion lives. I can realize of course that I start to go a little crazy when I don’t do anything fun, and can slot my time to include some fun things, but the pressure is still there, making me choose how much time to spend where, where the greater marginal value is. A little voice tells me to just fuck it, drop off the grid, forsake these world saving efforts and basically all my ideals, turn my back on every great hope I ever had for myself, of doing the right thing when it was required of me. I don’t think that’s a sustainable choice, but there’s a voice suggesting it. It doesn’t help that I’m not smart enough to be exceptional, compared to a lot of people I’m not really that much to speak of.”
I’d always believed that you can’t try to save the world through willpower, not when it may takes years of dedicated work. It has to be done with habit and lifestyle changes. Maybe my gradual progression brought me too far in one direction, and I couldn’t bring myself to pull back without first really failing to sustain that extreme of a lifestyle, and that brought me to sustain myself there – momentarily – with willpower. I could allow myself to do less as long as I knew I couldn’t do more, but I really had to know I couldn’t do more. I still can’t be sure, but at least now I’ve got much better reason to think that I can’t.
Huh, a new but related theory that just came to me is that while things were working out, my work just naturally brought me into fun relationships with people. Since school started again I’ve mostly just interacted with my parents, and though they are nice (and incredibly cheap) people to live with, it’s not as rewarding as conversing with peers. Alas, too many theories, and not enough time or reason to test them rigorously. They do however tend to make roughly coherent recommendations.
There are a fantastic number of  reasons to work towards saving the world, and one of them is that it can be a lot of fun doing it. Thinking way back, that’s what got me started on all this. There are many reasons I should work on this, but there are also reasons I just simply want to. I believe that element of fun and immediate desire is important: even if it’s not necessary for all people it sure is helpful as hell. I’ll explain about some reasons I find this fun in a future post.

August 29th, 2009
I finally did that numerical analysis on whether and by how much it makes sense to focus on combating existential risk, posted here.