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naraburns  nihil supernum  11mo ago (text post)   3995 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 30, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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If you were able to meet your past selves with perfect recall of yourself at the time, how far back (what age) could you go without feeling cringe at and still be satisfied with your character/intellect/overall decision making?

I'll let you know on the day I start feeling satisfied with my character/intellect/overall decision making.

To be honest I feel blessed that I figured out my moral calculus and wasn't an asshole pretty early on. The backbreakingly cringe moves stopped almost completely by 15, and I think I was decently cool from then onward. The only exception was taking one particular breakup really hard and is the only major change I'd make about what I've done since then.

Since you asked the question I think you should get an opportunity to answer it as well.

It's actually tough to answer for me. I had a very undeveloped sense of self, and vividly remember looking in the mirror when I was 8 and thinking I had no discernible features. It was only around the age of 10, I "woke up" and started taking agentic action and doing well in school (the academic part apparently mirrors my mom's development). I had multiple personality shifts over puberty and always thought past me to be naive, but current me doesn't consider that cringe, just slow learning, and to be fair I always craved for a mentor. If I could transchronal converse like @cae_jones imagines, past me would be highly impressionable and malleable until age 20, which is when I experienced depression and stopped thinking past me was strictly inferior.

I decided to ask here for largely unrelated reasons; someone I know is close to college age and I was wondering if he'd ever regret his cavalier attitude to everything, but then I started suspecting the age other people would respond with would be all over the place.

0 years old, baby!

For real though, my autistic ass hasn't changed at all, I just know more stuff now than I did then.

You say this as though my life isn't a series of realizations that what I've been doing is stupid. I've basically spent the past 15ish years contemplating just about every combination of time-travel + past self conversation imaginable, and my conclusion is something like "Maybe I could explain what past-me is doing wrong in a way that past-me will understand and improve upon?" but with a big questionmark.

Like, I cringe at decisions I made yesterday. I can, at least, look to age 12 as when I started reflecting enough to realize things needed fixing, but that still takes time and I'm really not sure I could establish a divider between what passes for current wis levels and then. And I remember a few decision-making processes from when I was 2-5 that were clearly wrong in hindsight, for specific reasons I couldn't intuitively understand but might somewhat be able to simulate understanding if someone who gets my pre-school psychology well enough can communicate it well enough.

Like, maximum cringe is ages 5-13, with a peak at 10-11. But I think I've cringed at my memories and recordings enough that, at this point, I'd just wind up cringing after a transchronal conversation for all the important things I chickened out of trying to teach past-me. Maybe cringe/hour is a better comparison, but it would take a lot of time and revision to chart that over time.

About 12, but that's just the earliest that I can say for sure. Character hasn't changed (attempts to manually force it in another direction mostly fail- something I tend to refuse to learn for whatever reason). Decision making abilities were about what they are now- might have been a bit simpler, but not meaningfully so; still emphasize and de-emphasize the same things to the same benefit and detriment.

World outlook established at that time proven mostly correct now.

Slightly dumber now than then. More tired now than then.

Much older, not much wiser; still confused by people who claim prior actions can be "cringey".

Knew what I was doing, not embarrassed by that. Maybe it's a memory thing, because I don't really understand why anyone would be.

Social strategies largely unchanged, more successful now that most people I know are adults. Lonelier then than now.

Younger me would have been more unsatisfied with older me than the opposite.

Much older, not much wiser; still confused by people who claim prior actions can be "cringey".

I'm surprised you find that confusing. There's nothing that you've ever done that you feel embarrassed by in hindsight? Here's a decent example from my own life. When I was about 7 years old or so, my parents used to watch Cheers. And at the time they had a story going where Frasier divorced his wife because she was cheating on him. I had to ask for an explanation of what that meant, and while I don't recall the exact explanation I got a brief explanation. Fast forward to a month or two later, my family was eating dinner and my mom mentioned something in passing about a guy she lived with at one point. I connected that with the story from Cheers and just blurted out "were you cheating on Dad!?". To which she gave me a look and said no, this was in college before she met my dad and it was her roommate.

I don't lose sleep over this memory. I was a child, and I had a child's understanding of the world. It's not a character flaw on my part. But it is embarrassing that I said something that dumb, even though it isn't the end of the world. It was cringey that I accused my mom of being unfaithful to my dad without any evidence. I've read that such moments are how we learn how to be social creatures - we cross some boundary, get reprimanded for it, and we feel shame. The shame teaches us to not do the same thing again. It seems to me like this is a pretty universal human experience, so I'm surprised you say you can't even empathize with the feeling.

I don't buy stories of personal growth, people are the same assholes they always were.

"I was so stupid. I'm so much wiser now, If only I‘d done these wonderful things at the time, it would have paid off for sure"

"Why don‘t you do this and that now?"

"The things I could be doing now are totally different, I see nothing but obstacles, and the payoff is uncertain."

„Right, because nothing stood in the way then, it was the obvious move, yet for some reason it failed to present itself. Well, at least you‘re this amazing thinker and doer now, I can‘t wait to see what brave wise actions you‘ll undertake next"

"Oh no, it‘s not like that, my point was I really missed my chance"

I cringe for the past-them who have to listen to this shit.

25 now. I would say 22 is the least I won't want to slap the shit out of. It's not even that I was particularly stupid, I made the right decisions given the information/knowledge at the time, but hindsight is a hell of a thing.

Facetiously: Last Friday night. I am not a smart man when plastered.

Being a bit more serious, pretty much exactly 19 years old. I have a pretty extensive online footprint on various forums (civfanatics, criticalsecurity, various IRC servers... good times), so I can pretty accurately pinpoint when I stopped being super cringey and more or less myself.

(Tangentially around there I can also pinpoint when I discovered and consumed the Sequences, which purged me of a whole bunch of blatantly flawed thinking that I'd never have today)

What are the sequences? A book series?

Less Wrong sequences, by Great Yud himself, the original scriptures of the rationalist movement.

disclaimer: reading may give you various super powers, proceed at your own risk

https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/original-sequences

Nowhere? I like to think I'm still getting better, so any past version of me is a dumber, less mature and refined one.

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