Mr Tetlock divides people into two categories: hedgehogs, whose understanding of the world depends on one or two big ideas, and foxes, who think the world is too complicated to boil down... superforecasters have a healthy appetite for information, a willingness to revisit their predictions in light of new data, and the ability to synthesise material from sources with very different outlooks on the world.
This is just intellectual maturity. The good news is that anyone can learn it. The bad news is that hardly anyone has.
Related, from Aeon magazine, The dangerous idea that life is a story, and from the LessWrong blog, Tyler Cowen on Stories. These are both more about personal stories than stories about the world, but the basic idea is the same: it's foolish to filter our perception of reality to make it seem more appealing or meaningful.
Gabriel sent me that Cowen link in August, and it partly inspired my August 31 post about hedonic technology, but I didn't link to it then because I disagree with Cowen that life is merely a random mess. Through decades of observation I can sense the influence of storytelling forces whose motives and literary standards are far beyond my understanding. Rather than look at reality the way a child would look at clouds, ignoring and emphasizing certain things to see faces or castles, I try to look at reality the way a scientist would look at clouds, to begin to understand an alien order.
Through no fault of their own, kids these days are weak as fuck. They're allergic to every fucking thing, they fall the fuck apart if they think you're criticizing them, damn near zero recess, damn near zero self-advocacy skills... I'm a teacher and I love kids, but God damn...
Also, apparently my generation is only one that's good with computers, because boomers were set in their ways when computers appeared, and millennials have no experience getting under the hood since Steve Jobs took that power for himself.
Anyway, if this trend of treating young people like delicate museum pieces is temporary, then all we have is a lost generation. If it goes far enough, then we have a really pathetic extinction.
What keeps me on target is seeing the positive changes in my life. I think it would be nearly impossible if I were trying to do something where I could not see or feel improvement in some way.
Now I'm thinking you can hack your motivational system by learning to notice smaller and smaller improvements. But also, there has to be a context in which the improvements are valuable. Two winters ago I worked out for a few months, but it wasn't worth the trouble. Doing squats enabled me to climb hills better on my bike, but I was already climbing hills well enough, I was already thin and healthy, and the main practical difference was my bigger thighs ripped out a pair of expensive jeans. Being able to do more pull-ups would be great if I was climbing trees every day to pick fruit.
If we are all guaranteed basic survival (which I support) then there's less room for improvements to have practical value, and what counts as an improvement is mostly a function of personality and culture. If you like listening to music, and your friends are musicians, getting better at playing music will have high value. What if you like killing and your friends are killers? Destruction is easier than creation, and I think most of the tragedies of history happened because whole cultures discovered that they could feel good by telling themselves that something easy was an improvement. If ancient civilizations had video games there would be more forests left. And even in modern society, how much meaningful activity is really just people motivating themselves at the expense of others?
Finally, a comment from Aaron:
]]>It's been a while since I read the Continuum Concept but I remember Jean Liedloff describing the elders of the community and how their focus on life was achieving bliss. From what I understood they were aiming to have a perfectly still mind and to just let bliss wash over them. I know that western eyes see a stone age people as living in a state of extreme deprivation but as far as the Yequana people were concerned they had everything they needed - which is why the elders could indulge themselves by aiming to live in a perpetual state of bliss.