The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I dunno. I can't speak for every other human alive, but I think I go through my days with a negligible amount of fooling myself involved.
When I do, it's more of a "just one more turn of Civ before I go to bed" thing rather than true self-delusion. I knew I wasn't particularly likely to stick with going to the gym, but it was still positive expected value to try.
I eat fast-food despite knowing it's bad for me. I am not lying to myself at all, if I choose to interrogate that impulse, I recognize it's because I like some fast food on occasion, and I can handle the downsides. Which is all true, at least for me. I'm not crying while pigging out and then telling myself it won't happen again.
Is that really so hard to go through life without lying to yourself? I don't think so. If there is some kind of lie that's load-bearing for me to lead my life, it's not at all obvious to me. I have meaning, I have hobbies and friends. I might not always say the truth, but that's not the same as not being aware of the truth.
Acting against one's idealized self-interest is not lying. Having moral failures and being a flawed human being is not lying. Being ignorant is not lying. To lie requires you to know the truth and then deny it.
How much research did you do on the downsides before you ate that meal? Did you spend a considerable time to be sure you know all of them, assign proper probabilities and weights to every single one, and properly value each and every single one of them according to the best of current scientific knowledge, and then also assign a proper probability and weight to the fact that the current scientific knowledge may be imperfect or plain out false, and add that risk to the calculation too? Or did you just think "yolo, one burger won't kill me, here I properly evaluated the risk and step into this with my eyes fully open now!"? If you did the latter, you are like about 100% of other people and you are fooling yourself. If you did the former, you are like about, within any reasonable rounding, 0% of other people and all other people would call you "weird" if they knew. And that's just a puny burger which, yes, most likely won't kill you (unless the luck selected you to be the random victim of the Burger Serial Killer, which is also a possibility - did you account for it in your evaluation of risks?)
Of course it isn't obvious to you. That's the whole point.
Do you think that you are actually aware of The Truth? I mean, that all statements you believe in are objectively true, and for every statement you can determine (if it's logically possible, let's not get into paradoxes here) whether it is true or not, and that determination would be the objective Truth? If you think so, you are either an avatar of God, or have a giant ego and are fooling yourself. If not, then there must be statements that aren't true and yet you think they are true. But you probably don't spend each available moment of time to find out which those are and correct them. You are fine with it being, more or less, as it is. For some people, one of such statements may be "What is written in the book of Mormon is a literal description of events that actually happened". For you, it may be a completely different statement.
I think you're conflating two very different things here: "lying to yourself" versus "being a computationally bounded agent operating under uncertainty."
Nothing you've described about the burger scenario is a lie. Seriously, none of it. The only way it might be is if I had a strong suspicion burgers were far more unhealthy than I was acknowledging, but refused to do the research because I was afraid of the results. That would be lying. Not doing exhaustive research isn't.
Information comes at a cost. You also have to spend the opportunity cost of time spent processing that information. Taken to its limit: are you sure that opening your eyes isn't bad for you? With arbitrary confidence? What if rolling out of bed gives you a stroke? Did you read the literature on the link between sedentary lifestyles and DVT risk? If you did, did you run a replication? Did you pre-register your claims?
We are, unfortunately, computationally bounded entities. We have to prioritize. You recognize that, which makes it all the more absurd that you even raise it in the first place. The topic we were debating was lying, which is not the same as failure to instantiate the idealized form of perfect rationality.
This is profoundly unhelpful. If you're postulating that there must be some kind of lie lurking in my worldview that I'm willfully or accidentally blind to, and that it's effectively unfalsifiable from both of our perspectives, why bother asking? You can't trust my answer either way.
But fine, I actually did something about this, even before I swe your comment. I fed several hundred of my comments into two LLMs and asked them to carefully review them for evidence of lies I'm blind to. The best candidate they found was that I hadn't signed up for cryonics without doing my own cost-benefit analysis, just reading other people's. Fair enough, though I'd call that laziness rather than self-deception, and I'll probably fix it at some point. Nothing else stood out. If you have a better method for interrogating myself for falsehood, I'm all ears.
When have I ever claimed to be a universal Truth detector? I'm a goddamn Bayesian (or trying to be), so of course I'm aware of the importance of accounting for uncertainty. It's entirely possible that I hold false beliefs. In fact, it's practically guaranteed.
The thing is, if I knew where I was wrong, I would just correct myself. And spending "each available moment of time" self-scrutinizing is daft and counterproductive for agents that want to do other things with their time. I'm such an entity. But I do spend a ridiculous amount of time intentionally trying to learn things and examining my understanding. I'm the kind of person who enjoys learning for the sake of learning, and appreciates having my errors shown to me. Why else do you think I'm hanging out on this forum?
What I do is consider the value of truth, accounting for the unavoidable tradeoff between accuracy and relevance. Does it matter if the 12th digit of Pi is odd or even? Not in the least to me. Even five post-decimal digits are enough to calculate the circumference of the universe down to a hydrogen atom.
Does it matter what the risk of AI extinction is? Or the evidence for HBD? On the most appropriate antipsychotic for the obese? Believe it or not, I try to do my due diligence on things that actually matter.
Those people are engaging in far more motivated reasoning than I am (assuming I am). The difference between having unknown blind spots and knowingly adopting a belief system you privately reject is not one of degree, it's one of kind.
Hoffmeister explicitly stated he doesn't believe the Book of Mormon is historically true, then got baptized into a church whose central truth-claim is that it is historically true. That's not computational boundedness. That's not rational resource allocation. That's not honest uncertainty. That's adopting a belief system you privately reject for instrumental benefits, or at least acknowledging that the process might turn you into a person who cares less about the truth. That's what I'm calling lying to oneself, and it's genuinely different from the everyday epistemic compromises we all make.
Everyone has some motivated reasoning, sure. I believe I do much less of it than most, and when I do, it's by accident. But there's a difference between "I round off my exercise benefits slightly because I want to feel good about myself" and "I'm joining a high-demand religion whose foundational claims I think are false because I want community and a trad wife." The magnitude and stakes matter.
Do you think there's any belief system someone could join that you'd consider epistemically irresponsible? If Hoffmeister had said 'I don't believe the earth is flat, but I'm joining a Flat Earth society because they seem nice and I want friends,' would you defend that the same way? If not, what's the relevant difference?
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