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At the time in my life when I stopped reading LessWrong I became remarkably happier within a week. I attribute this to two reasons: 1. LessWrong's focus on optimizing your life is so great that whenever I failed at something or didn't uphold something I said I would do I felt bad about it. 2. One thing that makes me happy (and I think most others would agree they're happiest when this occurs as well) is accomplishment. I like the feeling of working on a goal and having that lead to tangible results, whether that means something I've created or something like lifting more weight in the gym.

By actually making a change to how I act and seeing the results of that change in the world I developed a lot of confidence (I was formerly very shy and uncomfortable with myself despite having a lot of things going for me).

I want to come back to the first point briefly as well. At the time I was reading LW it often felt like I was being productive. I'd think to myself "oh I just need to read this article on motivation and acrasia (the LW term for procrastination), and I'll never fail to do what I planned to do again. This caused me to spend my time preparing to do things that I never ended up doing, and it also set me up to feel angry with myself when I inevitably failed.

One thing that helped me a lot was accepting that on top of everything we humans have going for us we're really just animals, and we get upset, or jealous, or sad, or angry, just like any other animal. So rather than try to eliminate these negative emotions from my life I came to accept them as normal and try to structure my life so that they occur as infrequently as possible. I've found a few ways of doing this that work for me, and I can post some of what's worked if anyone's interested. I still have bad days or bad moments, but when I do I accept it as normal and try to see what I can learn from it to lessen the impact next time, rather than trying to over-optimize the life of an unpredictable, fallible human making most of the important decisions in his life based on emotion (hint: that's all of us).

The allure of LW is that we're perfectly rational or that we can at least make ourselves that we through sheer force of will. For better or for worse (I think for better) that's not the case.

7 comments

> One thing that makes me happy is accomplishment.

What you describe sounds suspiciously similar to what Muehlhauser calls creating "success spirals" [1], which is coincidentally in the same sequence "The Science of Winning at Life".

> The allure of LW is that we're perfectly rational or that we can at least make ourselves that we through sheer force of will.

And to be fair, LW: does make a distinction between epistemic (ideal) rationality and instrumental (pragmatic) rationality [2]; is aware of its propensity for insight porn [3]; and has made progress towards bringing things in the stratosphere [4] back down to the object level (e.g. [5][6]).

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/

[2] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Rationality

[3] http://lesswrong.com/lw/9p/extreme_rationality_its_not_that_...

[4] http://lesswrong.com/lw/58g/levels_of_action/

[5] http://lesswrong.com/lw/58m/build_small_skills_in_the_right_...

[6] http://lesswrong.com/lw/k4n/a_brief_summary_of_effective_stu...

I don't think it's fair to blame Less Wrong for over-optimizing. Less Wrong is just a resource and can be used in bits and pieces. Just because it can be overused doesn't mean that it is a bad resource.

Thinking about it some more... perhaps they don't warn you enough against over-optimizing. Like you said, there's a ton of advice about how to optimize a plethora of things. If you're going to do that, perhaps it's your responsibility to sufficiently warn against over-optimizing. But still, despite the fact that it could be overused, I think it's a really useful resource if used appropriately.

> The allure of LW is that we're perfectly rational …

Isn’t this allure extremely irrational then? (Since it’s a known fact that we are controlled by large parts by relicts of our primate ancestry.)

I think another key factor with a lot of modern unhappiness is that, as the article notes, money does not correlate to happiness as long as you are above the poverty line.

We have lost the art of teaching people how to have a philosophy of life. We teach people how to have a craft. We teach basic morals. In religious households you may even be taught a pretty comprehensive "life philosophy", but it is often underpinned by many practices that defy rationality, and I think, lead many to unhappiness.

A few years ago I stumbled on some pretty interesting reading about Stoicism and I have since read much of ancient greek philosophy and a bit of more modern stuff like Kant. It still sort of blows my mind just how insightful the ancient greek philosophers were about human nature. One of the key principles of Stoicism that has an analogue or similar set of features in many other philosophies is that it is essentially not things that happen to us that cause us pain/grief/sadness/unhappiness but our judgement and reaction to those things. It seems a little trite in a short post like this, and I can't sum up something as complex as an entire school of philosophical thought, but it has worked well for me.

I have been in conversations where life philosophies like Stoicism and other related ancient greek philosophies get dismissed out of hand. Only to have a conversation wind over our current empirical approach to happiness. This less wrong article is /exactly/ what I call this empirical approach to happiness. Study all of the correlates, take all the best modern science about which behaviors yield the most happiness and which yield the least happiness and optimize accordingly.

Yet, 1800+ years ago, ancient philosophers identified many of the same principles articles like this are encouraging us to apply to our lives. What is missing from this article, and I think that can often cause many people to fail at sticking with a plan, is a coherent and binding strategy for all of this disparate "strategies for happiness". The ancient philosophies are not perfect, us moderns have learned a thing or two since Socrates and Epictetus, but their insights on the human condition are too keen to ignore. We know a lot more about genetics, and I have witnessed the ravages of deep nearly incurable depression on my family. Even the ancient stoics knew of depression and how it could destroy rationality of the most adept philosophers. Outside of these parameters, I would argue, strongly, that we could all live with a little more Socrates and Epictetus in our life and a little less religious extremism and modern consumerism.

And this brings me to my main point, without a rational, modern, and scientifically palatable life philosophy for how to think and feel about /everything/ it is very easy to put yourself into negative emotional states. I have found with a system to judge and evaluate emotions, and a keen understanding of the basic tendencies of my nature, I don't need a lot of empirical scientific knowledge to stay happy, though it does inform my approach.

When I read your post it made me think of myself and my old strategy of decreasing pain/bad moments and increasing good moments where good feelings are more likely. Now, I proceed in a manner as I see fit and I simply accept that much of my feelings are up to me and that jealously, sadness, and anger are just my judgement or feelings about something. I have also, often found, that when properly analyzed, I am not truly sad about a situation, merely that my judgements were wrong. I have definitely embraced many stoic principles into my life, and when I continue to work at maintaining and improving my understanding and ability to apply the principles I have adopted, I stay very even keeled, neither greatly happy or greatly sad. Content. I try to stick close to my baseline and take joy in every day life (since most of life is every day life) :)

Thank you for writing this. Can you say more about the system you found, this binding strategy for "strategies for happiness"?

My judgements being wrong used to be a source of frustration for me too. Now I take them as a given. Being wrong is part of the process.

The biggest problem I have now is forgetting what strategy I had decided to follow. Mostly because there are too many things to decice. The process of me deciding doesn't ingrain each decision in me hard enough.

How do you deal with that?

Here is the thing. Stoicism as it was taught 2000 years ago was extremely bound up in its "providential" and deity focus. Not as unpalatable as some of the more direct monotheistic religions, but depending on your teacher stoicism was still on a scale of pantheism to direct theism. (Marcus was very pantheistic and deemphasized religion, Epictetus was much more vocal about the theistic elements). As a modern reader a lot of ancient philosophy is like that. It has elements that you have to excise. So ancient philosophies are not really plug in play for a modern rationalist.

Basically, I think you have to start by writing things down and learning about the elements of these ancient, and modern, philosophies to see the sort of systems they put in place to deal with every day life events and exceptional events. How should I think about X? And some very obvious patterns will emerge. Some elements of stoicism may be difficult to employ and Stoicism in general is a hard to follow (fully) philosophy. The key point Epictetus had was that very few of us have the ability to follow Stoicism (or any coherent, but challenging) philosophy to its fullest. However, we should still endeavor down this path of "progress". This is why Epictetus has stayed so popular. He didn't advocate perfection of philosophy, merely that you work at it.

Which brings me to my final thought for you to answer your question directly: write it all down. For example, Stoicism has a lot of great elements that resemble modern psychology CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). So you pull the elements of ancient philosophies that work, you augment it with snippets like this Less Wrong articles various things. And you write your own coherent philosophy of life. And then you work at following it. It is pretty easy to lay down ideals, and pretty hard to stick to them. So you have to work at it, almost every day. You have to work on mindfulness and staying present and ensuring you keep your philosophy in mind in every day situations and exceptional situations. And, and this is where it gets tricky if you have trouble with non-empirical elements, you just have to believe your philosophy works. You have to believe it enough to follow it, even if you can't explain all of it. Science has spent the last 2000+ years catching up to things the ancient greeks found to work.

Much like a running coach can't really tell you WHY, exactly, everything he is having you do is working, it just does. Physiology has slowly been providing more and more detail, in the mean time running coaches have learned through trial and error how to train very efficiently. Some day we will probably have an exact explanation for the mechanisms of physiological improvement. Until then we can use our very good heuristics. I would argue it is the same from psychological perspective. It is close enough. Trust in your system and intuition and work to make it better and progress as a human being. There is no "perfect system" for everyone, but I think we could all agree on some pretty broad ideals that count as forward progress as humans :)

Let's not forget that optimizing only a few variables in a system as complicated as happiness can easily result in a net loss.

If you optimize a race car's engine for power, the engine will explode and you will lose the race. That's because you optimized for only one variable, and did not consider longevity. With complex systems this is an important concept to remember, as you may not even be aware of some of the variables, and inadvertently sacrifice them!

Thank you - been looking for that explanation for a while. It's the same if you substitute "professional" for "happy"

> I've found a few ways of doing this that work for me, and I can post some of what's worked if anyone's interested.

If you have time, please do :)