This is a version of How We Will Be Measured, abridged for speech and delivered at the Bay Area 2019 winter solstice by request of the event organizers. Happy solstice!

When all is said and done, and Nature passes her final judgement, you will not be measured by the number of moments in which you worked as hard as you could. You will not be judged by someone rooting around in your mind to see whether or not you were good. You will not be awarded extra points for the persuasiveness of the reasons that there was nothing more you could have done.

You will be measured only by what actually happens, as will we all.

That is not to say that we’re all aiming for the same outcomes. But whatever we’re shooting for — personal happiness, a thriving family, a flourishing future — the type of thing we’re doing is striving to make the completed history of our universe, from start to finish, good.

Is there a way you want the story of our universe to go? Are some completed histories better than others? If so, then your task is simple: act to make our story as good as you can.

While this observation carries little content, I, for one, find it freeing: Perhaps the path forward is long and difficult. Or perhaps I can only improve our history in small and personal ways that put barely a dent in the underlying problems. And no matter what I do, people will suffer and die tomorrow, and that hurts. But I don’t need to feel guilty about it. I don’t need to regret my past missteps. I don’t need to begrudge my personal failings. Because those aren’t useful moves in the game we’re playing. The game we’re playing is simple: make our story bright. And all I have to do is take my next step in whatever direction seems to make our story brightest.

It’s easy to forget this, and focus completely on building relationships, acquiring skills, or addressing personal shortcomings. These activities are all well and good, but it’s important to remember that they are only a means to an end. The real game is not to tick all the boxes we’ve drawn for ourselves, the real game is to make the future bright.

This game is horribly imbalanced. People start with wildly different resources and skills. Chance plays far too large a role. The game is occasionally heartwarming, but regularly cruel. It tries to convince us that it’s a player versus player game, and the moment it does, it pits strangers against strangers, neighbors against neighbors, and friends against friends. But it’s not a player-vs-player game. This game is everyone versus the environment, and the stakes are cosmic.

So find allies, find friends, find everything you need to improve your ability to make our universe-history tell a story you like. And then fill our future with light.

Context: Multiple friends of mine have recently (independently) reported to me that they feel like they’re under conversational attack. Multiple friends have also independently told me that they are starting to doubt that their conversation partners are well-intentioned. I’m not particularly concerned about the specific conflicts that sparked this, as I generally expect tensions like these to come and go in waves. However, it has caused me to do some thinking about discourse norms. This post is nominally addressed to those friends, though I believe it also contains ideas that are useful in general.

In I can tolerate anything except the outgroup, Scott Alexander writes about how rivalry and feuding is much more likely to be found between people who agree on almost everything, as opposed to between people who agree on almost nothing. The same observation is made in a joke written by Emo Phillips, and separately by Sigmund Freud and Ernest Crawley.

I think that I might be starting to see how the outgroup-your-neighbor behavior gets a toehold in modern groups of people. I think it often stems from people losing the ability to believe that their conversation partners are acting in good faith.

First, a few words on what I mean by “good faith”. Imagine you’re having a conversation with someone. Sometimes, your conversation partner is acting with virtuous conversational motives: maybe they’re curious, maybe they’re trying really hard to understand your arguments, maybe they think you’re wrong about something important and they’re struggling to get you to understand what they’re saying. Other times, your conversation partner may be acting with malicious conversational motives: they might be explicitly focused on embarrassing you in front of people whose favor they are trying to win, or they might be trying explicitly to cause other listeners to associate you with something distasteful (a la the worst argument in the world), or they might be explicitly attempting to manipulate your actions. We can characterize your conversation partner along this axis, which ranges roughly from “well-intentioned” to “ill-intentioned”.

This is of course a messy category, and there are many conversations where this categorization doesn’t apply. Please note that I’m not trying to talk about how heated the discussion is. There’s a separate axis from “heatedness” which is about how much you feel like you’re in an adversarial context, versus feeling like your conversation partner is fundamentally on your side, (even if they’re currently frustrated and raising their voice). It’s that feeling of “adversarial” vs “on the same side” thing that I’m pointing at when I talk about “intention”.

What sorts of thing cause people to model their conversation partners as ill-intentioned? Well, this probably happens frequently in scenarios where their conversation partner is in fact ill-intentioned. However, my hypothesis is that one way that the outgroup-your-neighbor phenomenon takes hold is that well-intentioned people start believing wrongly that their conversation partners are ill-intentioned.

How could that happen? Here are a couple ways that I could see it happening to me:

• When I was younger, I'd regularly see people taking actions that I would never take unless I was acting maliciously. I would automatically, on a gut level, assume that the other person must be malicious. Only later did my models of other people become sufficiently diverse to allow me to imagine well-intentioned people taking actions that I would only take if I were being malicious, via differences in ways of modeling the world, choosing actions, or coping with feelings of defensiveness / insecurity / frustration / etc. that stem from benign motives. I’m probably still prone to occasionally believing someone is malicious when they’re merely different than me, especially in cases where they act similarly to me most of the time (thereby fooling my gut-level person-modeler into modeling them too much like I model myself). I suspect that this failure mode is related to the typical mind fallacy and therefore difficult to beat in general.
• Related: I care a lot about having accurate beliefs. In pursuit of those, I often develop in myself an allergic reaction to mental motions that I want to avoid (such as searching for ways to draw the conclusion I want to draw, or flinching away from seeing which direction the evidence points). I have definitely encountered situations where I observe someone taking actions which, if I took them, would require making a mental motion that I'm allergic to; this commonly triggers defensiveness or frustration in me, in a manner that's not unlike gaining a visceral sense that the other person is "bad".
• I’m trying to do big things. I think the stakes are high. I often value resources in a very subtle way (simplified example: I want to prevent person X from getting exposed to distractions, but this is high priority only in certain narrow and specific situations, so if you occasionally drop by the MIRI offices and interrupt X, you might have a hard time figuring out which sort of interruptions will bother me). In cases where I place very high value on a delicate resource with a subtle boundary, it’s very easy for other people to inadvertently trample all over it and incur strong reflexive feelings that the person is acting adversarially. (This is doubly true if they appear to be gaining status, prestige, or power by stomping on things that I think are important.)
• If I ever feel intellectually under siege — especially if the conversation is moving so fast that it runs away from me, and especially especially when my words are regularly misinterpreted and my beliefs regularly mischaracterized — it becomes very difficult for me to believe (on a gut level) that my conversation partners are acting with good intent, even if I know intellectually that they’re just getting excited (or something). This is doubly true if I’m feeling stressed out or defensive, or if I’m under time pressure.

This list is not exhaustive, and I expect that there are reasonable mechanisms that I don't understand by which one might begin to doubt the intentions of their conversation partner even if everyone’s intentions are good.

It’s often reasonable and understandable to reflexively start doubting the intentions of your conversation partner. I don’t intend to shame that response. However, I make two notes. First, while I believe that the above responses are reasonable, I also believe that, for modal readers of this blog (myself included), just about all of our conversation partners are in fact well-intentioned just about all of the time. For example, given almost any specific conflict between effective altruists and/or rationalists, I expect that I can converse with any given individual in the conflict, understand their intentions, and summarize them in a way that that individual endorses, and that an impartial observer would agree that these are likely the individual's intentions, and that the intentions are laudable. I am willing to bet on this, though the stakes and the bid-ask spread will need to be fairly high in order for it to be worth my effort.

Second, I believe that the ability to expect that conversation partners are well-intentioned by default is a public good. An extremely valuable public good. When criticism turns to attacking the intentions of others, I perceive that to be burning the commons. Communities often have to deal with actors that in fact have ill intentions, and in that case it's often worth the damage to prevent an even greater exploitation by malicious actors. But damage is damage in either case, and I suspect that young communities are prone to destroying this particular commons based on false premises.

To be clear, I am not claiming that well-intentioned actions tend to have good consequences. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Whether or not someone's actions have good consequences is an entirely separate issue. I am only claiming that, in the particular case of small high-trust communities, I believe almost everyone is almost always attempting to do good by their own lights. I believe that propagating doubt about that fact is nearly always a bad idea.

I also want to explicitly disclaim arguments of the form "person X is gaining [status|power|prestige] through their actions, therefore they are untrustworthy and have bad intentions". My models of human psychology allow for people to possess good intentions while executing adaptations that increase their status, influence, or popularity. My models also don’t deem people poor allies merely on account of their having instinctual motivations to achieve status, power, or prestige, any more than I deem people poor allies if they care about things like money, art, or good food. If your models predict that people who find any of those things motivating are ipso facto untrustworthy, or ipso facto unable to effectively pursue genuinely altruistic aims, then we have a factual dispute, and I'd appreciate you discussing with me (or people who share my view, since my time is pretty limited these days) before doing something that I think burns down a valuable public good.

One more clarification: some of my friends have insinuated (but not said outright as far as I know) that the execution of actions with bad consequences is just as bad as having ill intentions, and we should treat the two similarly. I think this is very wrong: eroding trust in the judgement or discernment of an individual is very different from eroding trust in whether or not they are pursuing the common good. If I believe your reasoning is mistaken is some particular domain, we can have a reasonable discussion in which we search for the source of our disagreement and attempt to mutually move closer to the truth. But if one of us starts believing that the other is acting adversarially, the whole framework of discourse breaks down, and we frequently can't get anywhere. In my experience, that sort of trust breakdown is often irreparable. Again, if you disagree, we have a factual dispute, and I'd appreciate you discussing with neutral parties before doing something that I believe burns down the commons.

With regards to the recent tensions that have cropped up between some of my rationalist/EA friends, if you share my worries in this domain, or if I’ve earned enough intellectual respect from you that you're willing to humor me on these matters for a time, then I recommend the following:

1. If you notice yourself doubting that someone in the EA or rationality sphere has good intentions, second-guess those doubts. My models of the people involved strongly predict that they are all well-intentioned. Indeed, my models strongly predict that good intentions are nearly universal across the relevant demographics. (In my experience, ill-intentioned people often blatantly admit ill intent, or at least selfish intent, when asked. In fact, in my experience, many people who admit selfish intent turn out to actually have good intent, but that's a separate issue.)
2. In particular, if you're doubting someone's intentions, I recommend getting curious, and asking your conversation partner to describe the world in which their actions seem justified. If you're still in doubt, you're welcome to contact me, relate your observations, and ask me for my model of your conversation partner's intentions. (Again, if you think you’d be good at offering this service too, I encourage you to offer your friends the same service.) Public accusations of ill intent are expensive and, according to my models, usually false; I recommend putting in way more effort than you might naively think is necessary to understand why the other person thinks their actions are justified and reasonable before making that sort of accusation. (This advice applies only to criticisms of intent, not to criticisms of judgement, belief, or action.)
3. Develop a model of what causes people to start believing that you have ill intent. (Parts of my models are listed above; you could start there if any of those points rang true to you.) Then, work to telegraph your intentions and avoid (e.g.) making other people feel like their basic goodness as a human being is under attack. Be particularly sensitive to whether you've caused someone to doubt your sincerity, and if you have, see whether you can figure out what triggered the loss-of-faith. (I don't recommend attempting to fix it immediately -- in my experience, that often comes across as defensive and can make the problem worse. Instead, I again recommend getting curious and soliciting a better understanding of the other person's world-model.)

I think it is extremely easy for humans to forget everything they have in common, and start bitter feuds over minor differences. If you and I ever have a disagreement, no matter how bitter, then I want you to know that I regularly remind myself of all the things we do agree on, in attempts to put our differences into perspective.

Above all, I think it's important to remember that, no matter our differences in belief or method, we're on the same team. I know I’ve said the following things before, but this seems like a fine opportunity to repeat them:

If you're actively working hard to make the world a better place, then we're on the same team. If you're committed to letting evidence and reason guide your actions, then I consider you friends, comrades in arms, and kin. No matter how much we disagree about how to make the world a better place or what exactly that looks like; no matter how different are our beliefs about the world we live in; if you're putting substantial effort or resources towards making this universe an awesome place, then I am thankful for your presence and hold you in high esteem.

Thanks to Rob Bensinger for helping me edit this post.

I often bump into people who want to do something big, interesting, or important, but who utterly lack the ability to commit themselves to a particular action (often because they lack the ability to convince themselves that something is worth doing).

My suggested remedy comes in three parts. First, become able to feel conviction even in the face of high uncertainty. Second, learn how to weigh your options so hard that by the time you've picked the best available action, no part of you has an urge to go back into "deliberation mode" until you encounter new evidence or ideas that would have changed the result of your deliberation. Third, come to realize that you find good things to do by getting your hands dirty, not by sitting on the sidelines and bemoaning how no task seems worthy of your conviction.

Imagine two high school students, Alice and Bob, both of whom want to make a big impact on the world. Alice says (in an excited, breathless voice) "I'm going to change the world by starting to work for company X, which will give me skill Y, which will make me attractive to company Z, and in company Z I'll be able to work my way up the ranks until I have the clout to get onto a committee at the United Nations, and then I'll work my way up to president of the United Nations, and from there I'll be able to make a real difference!"

Bob says, "That plan sounds stupid and will never work. Also, even if it did, the UN has no real power. I also want to change the world, but I'm not going to do it via a long convoluted hopeless plan. I'm just going to generally improve my ability to change the world and wait for a better plan to appear."

Bob is correct, in that Alice's plan is in fact hopeless. But I still have my money on Alice doing more good than Bob, in the long run.

Yes, her plan is bad. It's complicated, it has too many steps, and it's built on a poor model of how to change the world. But I'd still place my money on Alice.

Why? Because Alice is going to be out there bumping into the world, and Bob's going to be staying inside wishing he had actions he could commit to. Alice is going to have dozens of opportunities to realize that her plan is bad as she struggles to work her way up the ranks with her eyes set on the presidency of the United Nations. If she's sufficiently good at updating in response to evidence and truly changing her mind, then she'll realize that her original plan was silly, and she'll find better plans. And because she'll have been out there in the wild, bumping into social constraints, running into other enthusiastic people, and stumbling upon new opportunities, she'll have more chances than Bob to put herself on a good course of action.

Bob won't get that feedback loop when he sits at home waiting for better plans to appear.

The only way to get a good model of the world inside your head is to bump into the world, to let the light and sound impinge upon your eyes and ears, and let the world carve the details into your world-model. Similarly, the only method I know of for finding actual good plans is to take a bad plan and slam it into the world, to let evidence and the feedback impinge upon your strategy, and let the world tell you where the better ideas are.

As an example, consider Elie Hassenfeld and Holden Karnofsky, co-founders of GiveWell in 2007. GiveWell originally focused on evaluating short-term interventions on global poverty and global health. Nowadays, those two are also heading up the Open Philanthropy Project looking at riskier and (I think) much higher impact interventions. In 2006, when Elie and Holden were considering staring a charity evaluator that focused specifically on evaluating global poverty/health charities, you could have gone to them and said "Actually, I'm not sure that's literally the best thing you could be doing. There are better ways to do good than just helping people out of poverty, we have animal suffering and existential risks and other such things to worry about." And you may well have been right. But it wouldn't have been helpful (and, knowing those two, you wouldn't have gotten very far). The way that Elie and Holden got to where they are is not by agonizing over whether a global poverty charity evaluation was literally the best possible thing he could be doing. They got to where they are by jumping directly into the fray and doing something. They saw that charity evaluations were crap, and jumped into the space head-first. Because of this, over the years, it was Elie and Holden — and not the person who said "hey wait this might not be literally the best available choice" — who learned the ins and outs of the charity landscape, made important connections, gained visible credibility, built a team of brilliant people around them, repeatedly encountered new evidence and changed his beliefs, and ended up at the helm of a massive collaborative project with Good Ventures. By now they've had a huge positive impact on the world, and are poised to continue that streak.

In my experience, the way you end up doing good in the world has very little to do with how good your initial plan was. Most of your outcome will depend on luck, timing, and your ability to actually get out of your own way and start somewhere. The way to end up with a good plan is not to start with a good plan, it's to start with some plan, and then slam that plan against reality until reality hands you a better plan.

It's important to possess a minimal level of ability to update in the face of evidence, and to actually change your mind. But by far the most important thing is to just dive in.

How, then, do you dive in? Which fray should you leap into, and how? Unfortunately, I don't have a great answer to this question. I attempted to leap into many different frays many different times, and most of the time, I bounced off. One day I'll figure out how to transmit more of the lessons I learned, but for now, the best I can say is this: It helps to have a concrete plan (even if that plan is crazy).

Maybe the plan is "I'm going to befriend my senator, and become an aide, and work my way up the ranks, and eventually become a senator myself, and then I'll have a shot at becoming the president." Maybe the plan is "I'm going to get a biology PhD so that I can start my own CRISPR lab so that I can be on the forefront of human intelligence enhancement." Maybe the plan is "I'm going to become a project manager at DARPA, and put in a lot of effort into figuring out who the real decision-makers are and where the real power comes from, and then I'm going to follow that trail." Maybe the plan is "I'm going to read the AI papers from all the separate subfields, and have a better picture of the field than everybody else, and figure out how to ensure that the first AGI humanity builds is aligned using my own bare hands."

The idea doesn't have to be good, and it doesn't have to be feasible, it just needs to be the best incredibly concrete plan that you can come up with at the moment. Don't worry, it will change rapidly when you start slamming it into reality. The important thing is to come up with a concrete plan, and then start executing it as hard as you can — while retaining a reflective state of mind updating in the face of evidence.

If it becomes clear that power within DARPA is nepotistic or otherwise well-defended, maybe you'll switch tactics, and maybe you'll have a much better idea of where you could actually make a difference, now that you have more connections inside DARPA and a better understanding of the landscape. If you realize that you won't be able to understand what all the disparate AI subfields are doing just by reading their papers, maybe you'll decide to shift tactics and apprentice under as many people as possible. Your second plan doesn't need to be good or feasible either, of course — the important thing is that you (1) start with a plan; (2) get out there and start operating; and (3) get better plans as you get more information.

You're still going to need a lot of luck, and you need to be prepared for many of your plans not working. Also, don't get me wrong, it helps to start with a good/feasible plan. But "quality of the initial plan" is much less important than many people expect.

(If you want help putting your initial plan together (or building your initial network), I suggest applying to a Center for Applied Rationality workshop, they're good at that sort of thing.)

The important thing is to stop waiting on the sidelines for better options to appear, and to start leaping in there. Make a crazy detailed plan, and dive into the fray.

Here's a question I get asked pretty regularly:

OK, I'm sold on this whole "do the best you can" thing, but how do you actually commit? When I look at my available options, none of them look great. I can take the one that seems best (despite its flaws), but then I keep doubting myself the whole time, and wondering whether there isn't something better I could be doing. For example, I'm currently [doing a PhD|running a startup|earning to give|working at an EA org], and I keep wondering whether I should instead be [switching majors|running a startup|earning to give|working at a different org], and I can't access conviction or resolve. How is it that you actually commit to what you're doing?

My solution is fairly simple: Deliberate once, and then don't deliberate again until you get new information that would have changed the result of your deliberation.

If you have a big decision to make, set aside some time to do some serious thinking. Ask people you trust for the obvious advice, and then actually do it. Set some five-minute timers, spend time describing the problem before you spend time describing possible solutions, brainstorm a wide variety of solutions. Figure out where you're highly uncertain, find the places where your decision turns on a critical piece of information you're missing, and add actions like "run thus-and-such an experiment" to your set of available actions. Build models. Make your best guesses about the probabilities of various outcomes in response to your actions, make your best guesses about how good those outcomes are, multiply out an expected value calculation, throw the numbers out, and consult your updated intuitions. And so on.

Whatever your "think seriously" process is, run it, and then pick the best action available to you (given the information you currently have, having taken into account the incompleteness of your situation). Then do that. Then don't go back into deliberation mode until you encounter information that would have actually changed your answer.

If you do it right, there's no need to go back to worrying about which thing you should be doing unless you encounter new evidence or information. When you do, deliberate again — or, better, plug the new evidence into the model you built when you deliberated the first time, instead of re-doing all that work. Half the reason for really deliberating hard the first time is to build a versatile model, anyway. (Though of course, evidence and experience will also cause you to update that model as you go.)

Many people seem plagued by "am I doing the right thing?" thoughts which get in the way of them committing themselves to any action. I think there are at least three different types of "am I doing the right thing?" thoughts, each worth treating differently.

First are the "but I am uncertain!" thoughts, which I refer to as "commitment-aversion thoughts". They appear when someone isn't confident in what they're doing in an absolute sense, regardless of whether they see any good alternatives, and the above advice is more or less advice geared towards shifting you into a mode where you aren't getting pinged with "but I am still uncertain!" thoughts all the time. However, it's important to distinguish the commitment-aversion thoughts (which I think are often in error) from two other similar-sounding thoughts which are quite important.

Next are the "I just got new evidence that we're doing the wrong thing!" thoughts, which I refer to as "abort notices." Perhaps you decided to complete your econ PhD, and, three months in, you observe that you've been demotivated the whole time and that you've made almost no progress (which comes as a surprise to you). Or perhaps your friend from silicon valley tells you how high programmer salaries are these days, and that information would have changed your decision if you had know it six months ago, and you think "maybe it should also change my decision now." Or perhaps you read a blog post on the internet about a cognitive bias that you notice was distorting your decisions, and you are pretty sure that, without the bias, you'd be doing something else instead. Dealing with these sorts of abort notices is easy, so long as you don't quash them: Simply change your action, or (if you need to) go back into "heavy deliberation" mode. In these cases, be especially wary of the sunk cost fallacy and consider taking measures to avoid it.

Third are the "I have a vague sense that I deliberated incorrectly but I can't articulate it yet" thoughts, which I refer to as "confusion pings." These thoughts are very important, and they can be pretty hard to distinguish from commitment-aversion thoughts. Make sure that you don't steamroll your confusions in an attempt to squash commitment-aversion thoughts. Noticing and respecting confusion pings is a core rationalist skill, and if some part of you feels an ineffable hard-to-articulate concern with what you're doing, then the solution is not to shove it under the rug, the solution is to pay very close attention to it. Leave yourself a line of retreat, ask yourself what thoughts you're not allowing yourself to think and what actions you're not allowing yourself to consider, and ask yourself questions like "If I changed the course of my life and looked back on this moment in two years, what would I think I was missing?" Human deliberation is a flawed and fallible process, and confusion pings are sometimes the only hint you ever get of a giant gaping blind spot in your deliberation process. In my experience, handling confusion pings (and learning to articulate your inarticulable concerns) is a skill that requires practice, and it's a skill that I have found very valuable.

On my current best model of where the "am I doing the right thing?" thoughts come from, they tend to come from one of two places. Either (a) some part of you is concerned that your deliberation was dangerously biased, flawed, or otherwise invalid; or (b) some part of you is not yet comfortable in the face of uncertainty. On this model, I suggest a two-pronged method for dealing with commitment-aversion thoughts. First, treat them as if they might be confusion pings: Learn to inspect them and extract content from them, especially content of the form "I think I have been ignoring factor X" or "I think I have been under-weighing concern Y." Second, learn to be comfortable in the face of high uncertainty, and develop a deliberation procedure of your own that deserves appropriate meta-confidence.

Operating under uncertainty is the norm, not the exception. No matter how hard you deliberate, your deliberation procedure is going to be flawed and biased, and there are going to be considerations you're missing and evidence you failed to take into account. It is very hard to predict the consequences of your actions, and you aren't going to get a perfect answer. However, some answers are still better than others, and you can construct a process for choosing between actions that leaves you comfortable that you're doing the best you can do with the information and time available.

When you've committed yourself to a new action, and you start wondering whether you're really doing the right thing, the relevant question is not "were my thoughts when I chose this action perfectly unbiased?" Nor is it "did I find literally the best available action?" No, the relevant question is, "am I in a better position now to pick a good action than I was then?", or alternatively, "could I do a significantly better job picking an action this time around than I did last time around, enough so to make up for the opportunity cost of deliberating again?"

The only information that affects your actions is information that changes which action you would think is better after deliberating. This is true regardless of how much uncertainty you have. Think hard, pick the best action, and then don't worry about what action you're doing until you see something that would have changed the result of the hard thinking. If you understand this on a gut level, and if you're one of the people who has found my advice helpful in the past, then I predict that this mindset is one where you won't experience constant doubt about whether you're doing the right thing. Deliberate well once, and then don't deliberate again until you come across new information that would have changed your answer.

"Believe in yourself" is perhaps the most common trope to be found in self-help books and motivational texts. It appears in fiction (especially children's books), film (especially sports films), and motivational posters. Coaches of sports teams labor to inspire. Low morale is the bane of teams.

The model, I think, goes something like this. Imagine two people who are about to swim in a 10-person race. They're both standing on the diving platform. The first one knows how their performance compares to the performance of their opponents, and knows that they have (statistically) a 17% chance of winning. The second one ignores all the odds, and has psyched themselves up, and is certain that they're going to win. They can feel the conviction in their body; their mind shuts down any hint of a thought to the contrary; they are pumped, excited, and filled with that sense of certainty.

Common wisdom says that the second person is going to push themselves harder (and, thus, increase their relative chances of winning). The first person seems less able to tap into their reserves, and more liable to despair when they fall behind. The second person seems more likely to give the race everything they've got.

What gives? Is epistemic virtue (in the form of acknowledging a mere 17% chance of victory) harming the first swimmer? Is their respect for truth causing them to be worse at swimming?

The fledgeling rationalist might say "Yes, and this is why rationality is not for everyone: Rationality is only for people who care more about knowing true things than about succeeding at physical tasks like swim races."

The intermediate rationalist might say "No, that's wrong; rationality is not about having true beliefs, it is about winning. Having true beliefs is regularly useful, but when it stops being useful, stop doing it. If you race better by becoming certain you're going to win, then throw epistemics out the window, and become certain you're going to win the race."

This is a better sentiment, but still, I think, misguided.

What I say is: stop conflating feelings with beliefs.

The conviction that the second swimmer feels is not a belief. It's a feeling. It's a mental stance; a way of thinking. Maybe they're feeling excited. Maybe their heart rate is higher. Maybe they have a tingling feeling throughout their body. Maybe their thoughts are more focused and singular. But none of those things are beliefs; they are not statements about the world. I say, learn to detach the conviction from the statistics: You can still enter the mental state we refer to as "certainty that you're going to win", without in fact predicting victory with high credence.

Our language and our culture and our poorly designed brains make it very easy to conflate feelings with beliefs. For instance, there's this feeling that correlates with extreme confidence that we call "certainty," and thus, it's easy to imagine that that state is only accessible to people with extremely high confidence in some relevant proposition. But the feeling and the credence don't have to come in lockstep — the two can be disentangled.

How? I find that the answer is very different for different feelings (that common wisdom says are linked to strange epistemic states), and also very different for different people. I personally get pretty far by simply "getting out of my own way": Where a straw rationalist might feel the beginning glimmers of conviction or excitement or hope, and then squash it with a thought such as "but statistically this is very likely to fail", I simply... don't squash the glimmer. Because "statistically this is likely to fail" just doesn't bear on the feeling, from my perspective. I'm allowed to feel hopeful about a thing even while being well-calibrated on its chances of success. I'm allowed to feel conviction before a race, even if I'm well-calibrated about my odds. I don't need to lose the useful mental stances, simply because I'm better-calibrated.

When I was a kid, I got into a number of arguments with my brother. I remember various distinct feelings that I had in different types of arguments. Sometimes, I'd be uncertain, but pretty sure he was reasoning poorly. In those situations I'd feel a sense of caution, an impulse to deflect, and that impulse that has you wanting to raise your hands and say "look, I'm not sure myself, but...". Other times, I'd know that I was wrong, but I'd be unwilling to lose face. In those situations, I'd feel defiant or trapped, and I'd have impulses to escape or lash out. Other times, I'd have very high confidence in my own beliefs, and I'd feel a strong sense of certainty and conviction, which gave rise to feelings of frustration, or righteousness, or solidity.

Nowadays, through various methods, I've done some rewiring on which feelings correspond to which epistemic states. Throughout that rewiring, I've endeavored not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I don't know if you associate "certainty" with a feeling, but I still can — I associate it quite strongly with that feeling that I'd have in particular arguments as a kid, and with parts of what I imagine the second swimmer feeling when they're "certain they're going to win."

I suspect that many rationalists, upon learning that one can never be certain, simultaneously lose access to both the epistemic state of certainty, and to the feeling. They say, "well, I can never be certain of anything," and they start managing their beliefs differently, and they become less prone to overconfidence, and they become more amenable to evidence, which is all great. But simultaneously, I suspect many start finding the feeling that we label "certainty" to be repulsive.

The feeling is not the belief! For me, that feeling was strongly correlated with cognitive flaws in my youth (let's just say that I was not a very well-calibrated 8-year-old), and therefore I definitely treat it with some suspicion in similar contexts. But the feeling can still be useful in other contexts.

For example, it is useful to the swimmer.

I think it's important to tease apart feelings from beliefs. If you're standing on that diving platform, I think it's important to simultaneously know you have a 17% chance of victory, and fill yourself with the excitement, focus, and confidence of the second swimmer. Become able to tap into conviction, without any need for the self-deception.

One of the most common objections to truth-seeking that I have found is "if I believed the truth, then I wouldn't be able to feel [X] anymore, and my life would get worse," for values of [X] including "hope," "happiness," and "conviction." So I say: disentangle the feelings from the beliefs. Detatch the grim-o-meter. Be a little reckless. Just because we call the feeling "certainty" doesn't mean that you're only allowed to feel it when your confidence is unreasonably high.

I often see friends run into a failure mode I call "false consistency," especially in the Effective Altruism and Rationality circles, where consistency is an important virtue.

The False Consistency error is committed when someone has conflicting desires, thoughts, or beliefs, and bludgeons all but one of them into silence, in the name of "consistency." This has the effect of robbing that person of the ability to use inarticulable intuition and gut-level analysis, and I suspect that it leads to the accumulation of resentment and frustration.

For example, imagine that Alice is pressuring Bob to help her with her homework. Bob doesn't want to, but can't quite articulate why not. Bob reflects, and decides that he doesn't endorse this difficult-to-articulate feeling, and he doesn't feel he has the social affordance to say "no" if he can't provide clear reasoning as to why. He agrees to help Alice with her homework. That difficult-to-articulate feeling remains, festering and causing Bob frustration.

As another example, imagine that Carol is asked "What should the punishment be if a homeless person steals $10,000 from a middle-class family?" and answers "5 years." Immediately thereafter, she's asked "What should the punishment be for an upper-class banker stealing $10,000,000?" Her initial impulse is to say something in the range of "10 years," but, remembering her answer to the previous question, she feels a strong pressure to be consistent, and so answers "he should get a life sentence." If she did this in the name of consistency alone, without probing the conflicting parts, she might be a victim of false consistency.

Now, I'm all for internal consistency. Consistency is a virtue. When you identify an inconsistency in yourself — a case where you would have answered the question differently if you had been asked in a different context, or a case where one part of you thinks one thing and another part thinks another, or a case where you believe two facts that appear contradictory — then I encourage you to treat it as a red flag, and investigate, and eventually update yourself.

It's fine to be uncomfortable in the face of inconsistency. The trouble occurs when you respond to that discomfort with internal violence, by bludgeoning part of yourself into submission.

Contrast the scenario where Bob can't put words to his objection and so squelches it, with the world where Bob says "Hmm, one part of me wants to help you with your homework; another part doesn't. Let me dialog with myself a bit, and see if I can figure out what the latter part is worried about."

In fact, in situations like this, I recommend literally acting as a facilitator in a dialog between your opposing viewpoints. Imagine yourself at a negotiating table, with one part who wants to help Alice with her homework and another that feels inarticulable unease. Assume that both are there for good reasons, with positive intent, even if the strategies they would reflexively recommend are not great. Facilitate a negotiation between the two of them. What would the uneasy part like to say? With what coin would it bargain? What would seem a satisfactory outcome?

If encountering a certain decision raises half a dozen different thoughts and emotions in you, then having all of those parts of you feel comfortable with the decision is what "resolving an inconsistency" feels like; steamrolling over half your concerns in the name of being able to defend your action (even if only to yourself) is not.

Let's say you realize that you're currently facing a decision that leaves you very vulnerable to scope insensitivity. I claim that there's a big difference between bludgeoning the part of yourself that doesn't understand big numbers into submission and shutting up and multiplying; versus training your gut to understand that "big" means "big" well enough that you reflexively pass decision control over to cold math whenever scope insensitivity looms. The first is False Consistency, the latter is a laudable goal.

If you haven't stared at large numbers long enough to be able to shut up and multiply reflexively (with no part of you screaming out that it's cold and inhumane), then by all means, shut up and multiply anyway. Doing the Right Thing is priority number one. But then afterwards, go dialog with that part of yourself and get it on board with the general project of Doing the Right Thing. Sometimes you have to resort to internal violence in the moment, but I recommend always treating those instances as red flags.

The more you practice negotiating and dialoging between internal conflicts, the less you'll need to resort to squelching little voices of doubt. With practice, it's also possible to become better at articulating the inarticulable concerns.

In the interim, you're allowed to be inconsistent. You don't need to ignore concerns that you have just because you can't articulate them. If your actions today are inconsistent with your actions yesterday, and you know how to dialog between the conflicting parts of yourself but you haven't had the time to do that yet, then you don't need to be consistent at the moment.

We're not yet gods, remember? We're still monkeys. If you force yourself to be consistent all the time, it's pretty likely that you're steamrolling important objections, and ignoring important whispers of confusion.

I encourage everybody to treat inconsistencies as bugs, but shoving the bugs under the carpet or pretending really hard that they don't exist is another bug. We're messy creatures, and inconsistencies often require quite a bit of work to resolve. In the interim, you're allowed to be inconsistent.

Today marks the end of my series on replacing guilt (table of contents).

I began the series by discussing the "restless guilt," that people feel when some part of them thinks they aren't doing what's important. I argued that it's possible to care about things outside yourself, and things larger than yourself, no matter what a nihilist tells you.

In the second arc of the series I implored readers to drop their obligations and ask themselves where they would put their efforts if there was nothing they felt they "should" be doing. If you can drop your sense of obligation and still care hard for something larger than yourself, you are well on your way to dispensing with guilt-based motivation.

In the third arc, I described techniques for building and maintaining a powerful intrinsic drive without the need to spur yourself with guilt. I point out that working yourself ragged is not a virtue, and that the "work too hard then rest a long time" narrative is a dangerous narrative. We can't always act as we wish we could: We're not yet gods, and it's often easier to change our behavior by exploring obstacles with experimentation and creativity instead of attempting to berate and guilt ourselves into submission. I plea for self compassion and argue that there are no "bad people".

In the fourth arc, I describe ways to draw on the fact that the world around you is broken as fuel for your intrinsic drive. If, when given the choice between "bad" and "worse" you can choose "bad" without suffering; if you can be content in your gambles while having no excuses and coming to terms with the fact that you may fail, then it becomes easy to transmute your guilt into resolve and struggle hard to make the future as bright as you can make it.

In the fifth and final arc, I describe mindsets and mental stances from which guilt seems an alien concept. Primary among them are "confidence all the way up", the skill of believing in your capabilities while not being overly sure of anything; and desperate recklessness defiance, the three dubious virtues of those with strong intrinsic drive.

I conclude with a few words on how we will be measured: When all is said and done, Nature will not judge us by our actions; we will be measured only by what actually happens. Our goal, in the end, is to ensure that the timeless history of our universe is one that is filled with whatever it is we're fighting for. For me, at least, this is the underlying driver that takes the place of guilt: Once we have learned our lessons from the past, there is no reason to wrack ourselves with guilt. All we need to do, in any given moment, is look upon the actions available to us, consider, and take whichever one seems most likely to lead to a future full of light.

After nearly a year of writing, my "replacing guilt" sequence is coming to a close. I have just one more thing to say on the subject, by pointing out a running theme throughout the series.

When all is said and done, and Nature passes her final judgement, you will not be measured by the number of moments in which you worked as hard as you could. You will not be judged by someone rooting around in your mind to see whether you were good or bad. You will not be evaluated according to how unassailable your explanations are, for why the things that you couldn't possibly have prevented the things that went wrong.

You will be measured only by what actually happens, as will we all.

That doesn't mean all of us are using the same measuring stick: Some people are working to ensure that our universe-history is one in which they in particular have a happy and fulfilled life; others are working to ensure that our universe-history is one in which their children never have to debase themselves to survive. Still others look wide, and see poverty and destitution and suffering, and work to ensure that those blemishes fade from our universe-history, in the places they can reach, near the time of their lives. Others look far forward, working to ensure that our universe-history is full of flourishing sentient civilizations and other nice things.

All it means is that the type of thing we're all trying to do, one way or another, is ensure that the actual history of our universe, the actual timeless structure of the place we're embedded, is as desirable as possible. That's the type of game we're playing: We manipulate universe-histories, for the sake of the future.

Some people have a listless guilt, thinking that nothing matters but feeling vaguely restless as they watch themselves spend their lives on things they think are pointless. Other people have a pointed guilt, thinking that everything matters, and berating themselves whenever they fall short of perfection. For me, the framing that we act to determine the shape of our actual universe-history is a framing that avoids both these pitfalls. Is there a way you want the completed, timeless story of our universe to go? Then act to ensure that the future is as good as you can make it. Are you wracked with guilt about your inability to act as you wish, or regret for the things you did in the past? Then act to ensure that the future is as good as you can make it. That's the sort of game we're playing: At all times, act to ensure that our future is bright.

I think many people get a bit mixed up about what type of game we're playing. They get stuck playing a social game, measuring their accomplishments by comparison to the accomplishments of their neighbors; or they mistake someone else's expectations for their preferences and get stuck chasing lost purposes; or someone slights them and their vision narrows as their sole objective becomes retaliation.

I'm not saying social goals are intrinsically bad. Wealth and status are useful aids when it comes to determining the future; the accomplishments and expectations of your peers can provide useful measurements of your abilities. But there's a difference between pursuing social goals for the sake of determining the course of our universe-history, and forgetting entirely that success is measured in terms of what actually happens throughout the course of history.

I alluded to this when I described defiance as "choosing self-reliance." At the end of the day, each and every one of us is engaged in a personal struggle to determine the future. We are not alone; there are many around us who can be friends and allies and support us in our struggle. But the goal, in the end, is to use what resources we have at our disposal to ensure that the universe-history is filled with light, whatever our light may be. I hope yours includes friends and family and loved ones, but making it happen — that is your personal task. You are encouraged to draw on the support of friends and allies where possible; and ensuring that you have close connections may be one of the properties you're putting into the timeless history of our universe: But even then, the task of ensuring our universe-history is one in which you have close connections is your personal task.

What we are doing, on this earth, is acting in such a way that our future is filled with light. From this framing, "guilt-based motivation" is a foreign concept: If you start to feel guilty, simply look at your situation with fresh eyes, and then act such that the future is filled with light. Our lives are not status competitions; the world is not a proving ground. We are participating in a gambit for the future (or, more likely, a gambit for the shape of the multiverse), and that is all.

When there are people who oppose us out of nothing save for petty spite; when there are obstacles that stand between us and something important to us which seem all but insurmountable; when we encounter personal limitations that prevent us from acting as we wish to; it is easy to confuse retaliation, overcoming adversity, and growing stronger, with our actual goals. But crossing those hurdles is not the final objective: those hurdles are only parameters in our calculations about how to affect the future; they are nothing but the state of the game board in a game with cosmic states.

In that game, some people have stronger positions than others, and more leverage with which to determine the timeless story of our universe. Life isn't fair. But all of us, one way or another, are here to make sure that our universe history is filled with light — whatever 'light' may be to each of us.

So find allies, find friends, find everything you need to improve your ability to ensure that our universe-history tells a story you like. Move towards whatever levers on our future you can find. And then fill it with light.

The third dubious virtue is defiance. As with the other dubious virtues, it can get you into trouble. Remember the law of equal and opposite advice. Used correctly, it can play a key role in a healthy guilt-free motivation system.

I used to tell people that I'm roughly 90% defiance-fueled. The most common response was "ha ha I guess you can be manipulated by reverse psychology, then"; which led me to realize that I didn't yet know how to convey what I meant by "defiance fuel," so I stopped saying it. Today, we see whether I can convey what I mean by "defiance fuel" yet.

Most people I talk to about defiance think of it as a mental stance adopted against some authority figure. Perhaps they imagine a parental figure saying "finish your broccoli," and a child who hates broccoli with their jaw set and smolder in their eyes, who proceeds to eat with as much petulance as they can muster, plotting their revenge. The feeling we imagine in that child is perhaps the standard central example of "defiance."

I claim that that child does possess defiance-the-virtue, but not in their petulance, and not in their opposition to an authority figure. Defiance-the-action is in the child chewing with their mouth open in an open refusal to submit; defiance-the-virtue is in the mental actions they make before they start chewing with their mouth open. It's in the internal steeling they do when deciding not to be ordered around. It's in their decision to be self-reliant, it's in their refusal to take orders lying down. If these automatic and subconscious mental motions were verbalized, they might be written "I am my own person; and not beholden to your whims," or "if you push me, I push back." But they aren't verbalized, because they aren't conscious. They're reflexive.

Defiance-the-virtue is about encountering a badness that's brewing in the world, and reflexively doing everything you can to throw a wrench in the works, to twist things in your favor. Defiance-the-virtue is about taking nothing lying down, and refusing to let badnesses in the universe slide.

Defiance isn't about acting petulantly without hesitation: A defiant child might bide their time, knowing that if they act rashly there will be harsh consequences. Defiance is about resisting the default state of affairs without hesitation: A defiant child might weigh their options and bide their time, but at no point do they wonder whether they should defy. They simply dislike the situation, and so rebel against it.

Defiance-the-virtue is about having that reaction, to something that's wrong in the world.

Of course, there's an art to defying the right things. I do recommend defying death; I don't recommend having the "defiance" reaction against people who tell you to do things in a stern and authoritative voice. People who order you around can either be ignored or obeyed according to the social context, but they aren't usually worth defying, except perhaps in situations where you legitimately need to demonstrate that you're not beholden to them, and where gentler reminders have failed.

As a rule of thumb, I suggest that it's usually healthy to have a defiance reaction towards states of the world, and usually unhealthy to have a defiance reaction towards people.

To illustrate the difference, imagine you're Neo, twenty years after the first matrix movie. The sequels never happened; instead you got trapped in the matrix while one by one, all your connections to the outside world died or disappeared. One day, you lost your grasp on your ability to control the matrix, your abilities slipping through your grasp like lucidity slipping away in a dream. Now you stand atop a skyscraper, looking across the gap at its twin, unable to quite recall what it was like to fly.

You stand there frozen, desperate to recall what you once knew, finding it evasive. Behind you, someone else enters the rooftop and shouts at you over the wind.

"What the hell are you doing, you idiot?" they cry. "Get back from there! Now!"

Defiance-against-a-person would be to feel a burning need to show this person up, show them that you're not beholden to their demands, and possibly do something rash.

Defiance-against-the-world would be to hear this person cry out, and use the impetus to remember what it was you used to know. You would say, "Oh, right. I'm in the matrix." You would remember that the rules and customs of this place do not have dominion over you, no matter what illusions the people around you are taken in by. Your mind would snap back into focus. You would grab what you had forgotten how to grasp, and leap.

(And those with defiance-the-virtue deeply instilled in them don't need the impetus provided by another person to access the mental state — defiance is a property of the relationship between them and the state of the world that they can recall at will, not a property of the relationships between them and others.)

This is the defiance I mean to talk about. It's related to level hopping and skepticism about your limitations. It's related to the skill of measuring your progress not against others, but against what actually happens.

I've been writing a long sequence of posts on how to replace guilt-based motivation with something else. Many people have remarked to me that my writings on averting guilt seem inspired by Taoism. And: maybe. There are some parallels. But not here, not with defiance.

Defiance is not about coming to terms with the world. It's about looking looking at the world and having the same mental reflexes as the defiant child. It's about the reflexive impulse to say "screw this" and choose self-reliance over hopelessness in the face of problems that are crushingly large. It's about a deep-seated inability to go gently into that good night. It's about being able to look at the terrible social equilibria we're all trapped in and get pissed off — not because any individual is evil, but because almost nobody is evil and everything is broken anyway.

Above all, it's about seeing that the wold is broken, and feeling something akin to "fuck these mortal constraints, I'm fixing things."

When the defiant child eats their vegetables with as much spite as is humanly possible, there was never a thought that crossed their mind about capitulating to their parents. Petulance was an automatic response. They weren't carefully weighing a decision about whether to spite their parents — at best, they may have carefully weighed a decision about whether to get their payback now, overtly; or later, subtly. The defiance was a reflex; the fact that they weren't going to submit quietly to authority was never in question.

Defiance-the-virtue is about having the same reflexive response, not towards an authority figure, but towards the state of a broken world. It's about making the fact that you struggle to fix broken worlds automatic and unspoken — you might weigh your options and bide your time, but you spare no thought for whether you will struggle.

I don't know how to teach defiance, but it's one of the keystones of my motivation system. If you want to build yourself a motivation system akin to mine, defiance is an important component.

So this is how I suggest motivating yourself in place of guilt: Let the wrongness of the world trigger something deep inside of you, such that the question stops being whether you will capitulate or lose hope, and becomes how you will wrest the course of the future onto a different path. See the current state of affairs as your adversary; see the future as the prize that hangs in the balance. Shake off the illusory constraints, set your jaw, and rebel. Defy.

Allow yourself to be a little reckless. Get a little desperate. Let defiance of the way things are burn in you. Then act.

The second dubious virtue is recklessness. As with desperation, there are many bad ways to be reckless. There is a nihilistic recklessness, in those with a muted ability to feel and care, that is self-destructive. There is a social recklessness, when peers push each other towards doing something dangerous that none of them would do alone, in a demonstration of commitment that can become needlessly dangerous. And there is a fiery, destructive recklessness in those too quick to anger, which can lead people to actions they will regret for a lifetime. I caution against all these types of recklessness.

Nevertheless, there is a type of recklessness that is a virtue. This is recklessness in the pursuit of an external goal, and I have found it to be rather rare.

I get a lot of questions from people about how cautious they should be as they make changes in their lives. If they remove their guilt motivation, will they be able to do anything at all? If they really try to understand how screwed up the world is, on a gut level, will they break? If they devote their efforts to the pursuit of something larger than them, will they lose touch with their humanity, and with their ability to connect to other human beings?

And I tend to answer: You are not made of glass.

Dive in. Change things. Fix problems. If more problems crop up, fix those too.

Imagine that you look upon yourself, detect harmful guilt-based motivation, tear it out, and then notice that this leaves you with a Zen-like lack of drive, such that most of yourself is now happy to let days slip by but some small part of you is crying out that something is wrong. Recklessness-the-virtue is about being in that state and deciding to push forward rather than retreating; deciding to make a desperate effort to acquire a new drive, rather than panicking and retreating back towards guilt.

Recklessness is about ripping off the blinders that prevent you from seeing the dark world on a gut level, and knowing that if this happens to be debilitating then you'll find some new way to handle it, rather than being forced to retreat.

Always forward, never back. Be unable to despair. Have confidence all the way up. Think of all the people you know who are too stagnant, too cautious about breaking something important, to ever change at all.

You can recover from breaking a few parts of yourself, so long as you're modular rather than fragile. You can become able to roll with a few punches.

(This seems like a good time to insert a heavy-handed reminder about the law of equal and opposite advice! Many people would do well to gain a little recklessness, but many others need less recklessness and more caution. If you're in a particularly fragile mental state, consider disregarding this post entirely.)

During my undergraduate education, I was the president of an entrepreneurship club. The first most common type of person who would drop by asking for advice was that young wannabe founder all full of naïve excitement about some half-formed notion that they're about to make the next facebook. The second most common person was that competent programmer with an idea that wasn't half-bad — maybe they had some idea for an app that would let couples communicate in a way they couldn't yet easily do, six years ago — but, being tempered and level-headed and well aware of the naïvety of the first folks, were entirely unable to commit to their idea.

Both sets of prospective entrepreneurs were doomed to failure. The first set, for all the obvious reasons — they'd focus too narrowly on writing code that no one would ever buy, or fail to find their first users, or fail to make a minimum testable product, or they'd dramatically misunderstand and underestimate the difficulty of the technical challenges, or whatever.

The second set would fail because they didn't really expect themselves to succeed. They could make themselves work on their idea, while reciting to themselves some story about being risk-loving, but they couldn't get their head into the idea, to the point where they were spending fourteen hours a day working feverishly while plans and paths and strategies dominated their waking thoughts.

There's a fugue state that successful entrepreneurs report entering, which the second set of people had rendered themselves unable to enter. Somehow, their realistic understating of their odds destroyed their ability to commit.

In one fashion, this makes some sense: they, knowing that great success is likely a lie, cannot fool their innermost self into believing in their own vision, which precludes them from entering the fugue state.

But in another fashion, is silly. What do the odds have to do with your ability to commit? Why is their epistemic state preventing them from entering the emotional state that would most help them succeed?

I think there are a few different skills it takes to be able to ender the fugue state even while knowing that your odds of success are low. One of them, I think, is the virtue of recklessness.

Recklessness is in the ability to say "screw the odds, I'm going to push forward on this path as hard as I can until a better path appears." If the odds are low, a better path is more likely to appear sooner rather than later — but the reckless let that be a fact about the paths, and they don't further allow low odds to prevent them from pushing forward on the best path they can currently see, as fast as possible.

If you want to become a successful entrepreneur, or if you want to succeed at other very difficult tasks, it helps to be able to take the best from both types of hopeless entrepreneurs. Become the sort of person who can enter the fugue state and give an idea your all, while also being able to see and avoid all the common failure modes. The fact that you are unlikely to succeed is an epistemic fact, you do not need to give it dominion over your motivation. Be a little reckless.

Recklessness, as a virtue, is about being able to throw caution to the wind. It's about being able to commit yourself fully to the best path before you, and then change your entire life at the drop of a pin as soon as a better path appears. It's about being free to act without worrying too much about what happens if you disrupt the status quo — too many people are already too stagnant, and we need to move faster.

So if you find yourself knowing what it is that you need to do next, but worried that doing so will break something else important…

then I say, do it.

Act.

Try not to break anything vital, but if you do, fix it and keep moving.

Always forward, never back.

Be a little reckless.

The next three posts will discuss what I dub the three dubious virtues: desperation, recklessness, and defiance. I call them dubious, because each can easily turn into a vice if used incorrectly or excessively. As you read these posts, keep in mind the law of equal and opposite advice. Though these virtues are dubious, I have found each of them to be a crucial component of a strong and healthy intrinsic motivation system.

The first of the three dubious virtues is desperation. There are bad ways to be desperate: visible desperation towards people can put you in a bad social position, strain your relationships, or otherwise harm you. Desperation towards a goal, on the other hand, is vital for a guilt-free intrinsic drive.

By "desperation towards a goal" I mean the possession of a goal so important to you that you can commit yourself to it fully, without hesitation, without some part of you wondering whether it's really worth all your effort. I mean a goal that you pursue with both reckless abandon and cautious deliberation in fair portions. I mean a goal so important that it does not occur to you to spare time wondering whether you can achieve it, but only whether this path to achieving it is better or worse than that path.

In my experience, the really powerful intrinsic motivations require that you're able to struggle as if something of incredible value is on the line. That's much easier if, on a gut level, you believe that's true.

Desperate people have a power that others lack: they have the ability to go all out, to put all their effort towards a task without reservation. Most people I have met don't have the ability to go all out for anything, not even in their imagination.

Ask yourself: is there anything you would go all out for? Is there anything some antagonist could put in danger, such that you would pull out all your stops? Is there any threat so dire that you would hold nothing back, in your struggle to make things right?

I have met many people who cannot honestly answer "yes" to this question, not even under imaginary circumstances. If I ask them to imagine their family being kidnapped, they say they would call the police and wait anxiously. If I ask them to imagine the world threatened by an asteroid, they say they would do their best to enjoy their remaining time. These are fine and prudent answers. Yet, even if I ask them to imagine strange scenarios where they and they alone can save the Earth at great personal cost, they often say they would do it only grudgingly.

For example, imagine that aliens that want to toy with you in particular have put a black hole on a collision course with Earth. Imagine that the only way to redirect it is using alien tech on an alien space ship that has been left on Earth and which can be piloted only by you and you alone — and that, to destroy the black hole, you must cross the event horizon, never to return. Would you save the world then? And if so, would you do it only grudgingly?

Would you do it if the spacecraft was sequestered atop Mt. Everest? How hard would you struggle to get to the ship, if it was at the bottom of the ocean? What if it could only be operated if you spoke fluent Mandarin, and you only had one year to learn?

Would you go all out to save the world, or would you put in a token "best effort", a token "at least I tried", and then go back to enjoying your remaining time?

And if you can't go all out even in incredible imaginary scenarios where everything depends on you, what are you holding out for?

A common protest here goes "I don't want to lose my friendships, my close connections, my comfort. That is too high a price to pay. If the struggle would be too brutal, then I would prefer to enjoy my remaining time instead." But if that were the case, then why couldn't someone get you to go all out by putting your friendships, connections, and comfort on the line? Would you fight with everything you have for those? And if not, what are you holding out for?

Why are you stopping yourself from putting in a full effort, if there is no situation even in principle which could compel you to pull out all the stops? Why are you holding part of yourself back, if there is nothing even in imagination for which you would unbar all the holds? If there is nothing anyone could put on the line such that you'd struggle with all of your being, then what are you holding out for?

I'm not saying you need to be willing to go all out for something real. It may be that the only scenarios where you'd really struggle for all you're worth are fanciful or ridiculous. I'm saying that you need to be able to go all out in principle.

There's a certain type of vulnerability that comes with committing your whole self to something. Our culture has strong social stigmas against people who really unabashedly care about something.

I remember a classmate in gradeschool who really really cared about Pokemon, to the point that others felt embarrassed just to associate with him. The stereotypical stigma against "nerds" seems rooted at least partially in a stigma against caring too much. Derision among the intellectual elites towards people who get really interested in sports seems to draw at least partially on the same stigma.

Notice the negative connotations attached to words like "cultist", "zealot", and "idealist". Notice all the people who distance themselves from whatever social movement they're in; those people who loosely identify as "effective altruists" or "rationalist" or "skeptics" or "atheists" but feel a deep compulsion to make sure you know that they think the other EAs/rationalists/skeptics/atheists are naive, Doing It Wrong, and blinded by their lack of nuanced views. I think that this is, in part, an attempt to defend against the curse of Caring Too Much.

Caring hard is uncool. The stereotypical intellectual is a detached moral non-realist who understands that nothing really matters, and looks upon all those "caring" folk with cynical bemusement.

Caring hard is vulnerable. If you care hard about something, then it becomes possible to lose something very important to you. Worse, everyone around you might think that you're putting your caring into the wrong thing, and see you as one of the naive blind idealist sheeple, and curl their lips at you.

Desperation is about none of that mattering. It's about having a goal so important that the social concerns drop away, except exactly insofar as they're relevant to the achievement of your goal. It's about being willing to let yourself care more about the task at hand than about what everyone thinks about you, no matter how much they would deride you for fully committing.

A common barrier to desperation is that it can be difficult to admit that you really, really care about something, because then that means you are vulnerable to the loss of something that's very, very important to you. If your desperation is visible in a hostile social environment, desperation can destroy your ability to bargain and put you at a social disadvantage. Being social creatures, I suspect that many of us have mental architectures that prevent us from feeling desperation, because if we felt it, we'd show it, and that would undermine our social standing. (In my experience, confidence all the way up helps alleviate this effect.)

Thus, if you want to make desperation part of your intrinsic drive, you may need to practice becoming able to admit, to yourself, on a gut level, that you might lose something so terribly important that it's worth gaining a little desperation. You must first allow yourself to become desperate. (This is why I wrote about seeing the dark world and coming to your terms before writing about desperation.)

There is a common failure mode among those who succeed at becoming desperate, which is that they burn their resources too quickly, in their desperation. If you have to get yourself into an alien spacecraft at the bottom of the ocean, and it's going to take many months of training, social and political maneuvering, and monotonous searching, then you would be unwise to spend your first week all wound up at maximum stress levels simply because you think that that's what it means to "go all out" and "hold nothing back." If you're going to pull out all the stops and unbar all the holds, you need to understand how to carry on a slow burn as well as a fast burn. (This is why I wrote about how to avoid working yourself ragged and rest in motion before writing about desperation.)

With these tools in hand, I suggest finding a way to become able to become desperate. Perform whatever thought experiments and meditations you have to to be able to imagine a situation where you would do everything in your power to achieve some outcome, without regard for the consequences (beyond their affect on the outcome). Figure out the circumstances under which you'd pull out all the stops and unbar all the holds and put everything you have into the struggle.

(If there is no situation, even in theory, where you would give everything you have into your efforts, then consider that there may be a part of yourself that you're holding back for nothing, a part of yourself that you're wasting.)

I'm not saying you need to become desperate now. That may be unnecessary. Maybe your life is going well enough, and your goals are well enough achieved, that the best way to continue achieving them is to strengthen your friendships and your connections and enjoy your comforts. If your family is kidnapped, you probably would do best to call the police and then wait anxiously. If Earth is threatened by an asteroid, most people would do best to leave it to the experts and enjoy what time they have. So be it not upon me to force desperation upon you if you're leading a comfortable life. Make sure you don't suffer from the listless guilt, and make sure you can in principle become desperate, so as to ensure that you're not holding a part of yourself back for nothing, but save the actual desperation for times of need.

If, on the other hand, you are in a time of need, if you're the sort who sees every death as a tragedy, if you're otherwise fighting for something larger than yourself, then get desperate now.

The first step is allowing yourself to become desperate in principle. It's allowing there to be at least one imaginary scenario where you'd let yourself commit fully to a task without hesitation. Once you are able to do this, imagine the feeling that would come over you when you first committed yourself to that crucial undertaking, come whatever may. Is there a sense of desperation you would feel, a grasping need to change the future? Sit with it, become familiar with the sensation of desperation and any other feelings associated with the imaginary commitment.

Once you've gained some familiarity with those feelings, look with fresh eyes at what you're fighting for, at what you have to protect, at what you value, and see if any of it is worthy of a little desperation.

I apparently possess some sort of aura of competence. Some say I'm confident, others say I'm arrogant, others remark on how I seem very certain of myself (which I have been told both as compliment and critique).

I was surprised, at first, by these remarks from friends and family — from my perspective, I'm usually the first person in the conversation to express uncertainty in the form of probability estimates and error bars. I'm often quick to brainstorm alternative explanations of the data I use to support my claims. And, of course, I'm certain of nothing.

In fact, I had a conversation with a friend about this phenomenon once, which went something like this:

Me: Hey, have you noticed how everyone thinks I have an aura of confidence and certainty, sometimes arrogance? I don't know how to shake it, nor how it works. What's up with that?

Him: Well, you always seem to have a solid grasp on every situation. When you're explaining things, you answer questions quickly, deftly, and with precision.

Me: I don't think that's it, though. I'm rarely confident in the claims I'm making, and I tend to highlight that fact. Earlier, when we were talking with [other friend] about tools society can use to break monopolies, I was very explicit about where my uncertainty lies, and what assumptions my models relied upon, and where they might be flawed.

Him: Yeah, but even then you were confident in what you were saying — maybe not confident in any particular claim you made, but confident in your overall analysis.

Me: I don't think that's it either. I'll be the first to admit that the probabilities I put on my propositions are pulled out of thin air, and I'll also be the first to admit that my hypothesis space is decrepit and that I'd be able to find better models if I could think better. In fact, I'm aware of a bunch of flaws in the ways I think, and I dedicate a decent amount of effort to improving my own reasoning methods.

Him: …

Me: … I'm doing the thing right now, aren't I?

Him: Yes, yes you are.

There definitely is something of "confidence" to this pattern of speech and thinking, but it's not an empirical confidence. The confidence people notice in me isn't in the content of my claims, for I'm quick to couch my claims with probability estimates and error bars. Most of the confidence isn't in my analysis, either; I'm quick to note the ways my analyses could be flawed.

Some of the confidence does reside in the ways I reason; I do admit that I am much better equipped to answer questions of the form "but why are you so much more confident in your own reasoning than their reasoning, when they actually have more credentials?" than most. But even there, I can note plausible biases and judgement errors in my own reasoning processes with alacrity.

Why, then, do I come off as so confident? Why do I seem so self-assured while listing the ways I know my brain is flawed?

On reflection, I've concluded that (at least part of) the answer is something I call "confidence all the way up". Insofar as I'm uncertain of my content, I'm confident in my analysis — except, I'm not fully confident in my analysis. But insofar as I'm uncertain of my analysis, I'm confident in my reasoning procedures — except, I don't put faith there, either. But insofar as I'm uncertain of my reasoning procedures, I'm confident in my friends and failsafe mechanisms that will eventually force me to take notice and to update. Except, that's not quite right either — it's more like, every lack of confidence is covered by confidence one meta-level higher in the cognitive chain.

The result is something that reads socially as confidence regardless of how much empirical uncertainty I'm under.

Where does it bottom out? Well, insofar as my friends and failsafe mechanisms aren't sufficient to raise errors to my attention, I expect to reason poorly in an irredeemable fashion and then fail to achieve my goals. It bottoms out at the point where I say "yeah, if I'm that far gone, then I fail and die."

(And somehow, I'm able to say even this while maintaining my aura of self-assuredness and confidence).

I have encountered many people who seem paralyzed by their uncertainties. They hit a question (such as "what methods can a society use to break up monopolies?") and they are pretty sure that they won't be able to generate the right answers, and so they generate no answers.

And this may be a better failure mode than the failure mode of someone who has too much confidence and self-assuredness, who makes up a bunch of bad answers and then believes them with all their heart.

Someone with Confidence All The Way Up, though, can achieve the third alternative: generate a bunch of bad answers, understand why they're bad and where their limitations are, and use that information as best they can.

I have found this mindset to be very useful throughout my life. Confidence all the way up is what has me dive into the fray to try new things, while others stand on the sidelines bemoaning a high degree of uncertainty. It's part of the technique of treat recurring failures as data and training, rather than as a signal that it's time to feel guilty. It's part of the technique of knowing you're deeply limited without letting that interfere with your progress towards the goal. Of the top ten most competent people I've met in person (by my estimation), eight of them seem to have some variant of confidence all the way up running. If the mindset seems foreign to you, I suggest finding a way to practice it for a while.

Confidence all the way up is about working with what you have. It's about knowing your limitations. It's about knowing that you don't have perfect models of "what you have" nor "your limitations", and proceeding anyway, with an even stride.

It's about knowing that there are going to be curveballs, and trusting your ability to handle curveballs, but not all the time; and trusting your ability to get back up when you're knocked down by a curveball you couldn't handle, but not all the time; and coming to terms with the fact that you might be hurt so badly you can't get up.

Yes, we're limited. All humans are limited. There are important, decision-relevant facts that we don't know. Our reasoning processes run on compromised hardware. But the correct response to uncertainty is not to proceed at half speed!

No matter how hard you try to justify your beliefs, if you're being honest with yourself, they won't ground out into "and therefore, no matter what I do, everything is going to be OK." No matter how hard you try to justify your reasoning, the meta-reasoning tower does not terminate at "and thus, eventually you will become capable of success." They terminate at "I may be so wrong that I can never be corrected; I may fail and all value may be lost." You will find no objectively stable perch from which to launch your reasoning.

But you were created already in motion. You don't need to ground out all your beliefs and justify all your reasoning steps before you can start moving. You don't need to have plans for every contingency before you can act. You don't need to be highly confident in your analyses before you present a model. If you sit around awaiting certainty, you will be waiting a long while.

Better, I say, to cover each lack of confidence on one level with confidence on the next level, and to come to terms with the fact that if you're so irredeemable that even your best meta-reasoning cannot save you, then you've already lost.

Imagine two different software engineers in job interviews. Both are asked for an algorithm that solves some programming puzzle, such as "identify all palindromes in a string of characters."

The first candidate, Alice, reflexively enters problem-solving mode upon hearing the problem. She pauses for a few seconds as she internalizes the problem, and then quickly thinks up a very inefficient algorithm that finds the answer by brute force. She decides to sketch this algorithm first (as a warm up) and then turn her mind to finding a more efficient path to the answer.

The second candidate, Bob, responds very differently to the same problem. He reflexively predicts that he won't be able to solve the problem. He struggles to quiet that voice in his head while he waits for a solution to present itself, but no solution is forthcoming. He struggles to focus as the seconds pass, until a part of his brain points out that he's been quiet for an uncomfortably long time, and the interviewer probably already thinks he's stupid. From then on, his thoughts are stuck on the situation, despite his attempts to wrest them back to the task at hand.

Part of what makes the difference between Alice and Bob might be skill: Alice might have more experience that lets her solve programming puzzles with less concerted effort, which helps her get to a solution before self-doubt creeps in. Self-confidence may also be a factor: perhaps Alice is simply less prone to self-doubt, and therefore less prone to this type of self-sabotage.

A third difference between Alice and Bob is their response pattern. Bob begins by waiting blankly for a solution to present itself; Alice begins by checking whether she can solve a simple version of the problem ("can I solve it by brute force?"). Bob is more liable to panic when no answer comes ("I have been quiet for too long"), Alice is more liable to break the problem down further if no solution presents itself ("Can I divide and conquer?").

This difference is also explained in part by experience: a more seasoned software engineer is more likely to reflexively notice that a problem can be solved with a simple recursion, and know which data structures to apply where. I don't think it's only experience, though. Imagine Alice and Bob both faced with a second problem, outside their usual comfort zone — say, a friend asks them for advice about how to handle a major life-changing event. It's easy to imagine Alice attempting to understand the situation better and asking clarifying questions that help her understand how her friend is thinking about the question. It's similarly easy to imagine Bob feeling profoundly uncomfortable, while he tries to give neutral advice and worries about the fact that he might give bad advice that ruins his friend's life.

One might call what Alice is doing "confidence," but that doesn't tell us how it's working. And 'confidence' also comes with connotations that may not apply to Alice — she may well decide that she isn't in a position to give good advice, she may be working from a shaky understanding and thus doubt her own conclusions, even as she turns her thoughts to understanding the obstacle before her.

One of the big differences, as I see it, is the difference in the response pattern between Alice and Bob. Alice justs gets down to addressing the obstacle before her, Bob spends mental cycles floundering. Managing response patterns is something of an art: when confronted with an obstacle, does your brain switch into problem-solving gear or do you start to flail?

Note that the art of response is not about immediately solving any problem placed before you. Sometimes, the best automatic response is to find some way to disengage or dodge. You aren't obligated to solve every problem placed before you. The goal of having appropriate response patterns is to avoid flailing and avoid staring blankly. The goal is to have your mind shift into the problem-solving gear.

Having effective responses prepared isn't necessarily a general skill. I'm a computer programmer at heart, and a few years ago I switched paths to math research. If I'm faced with a programming problem that I want to solve, I quickly and easily slip into effective-response-mode; I can often find solutions to problems reflexively, and when I can't, I reflexively examine the problem from many different viewpoints and start breaking it down. Yet, if you confront me with a math problem I want solved, there are still times when my reflexive response is to sit back and wait for someone else to solve it for me. (It doesn't help that I'm surrounded by brilliant mathematicians who can do so successfully.) That reflexive response — the one of blanking my mind, curious while I wait for someone else to find the answer — is not a very effective response.

Effective responses aren't about answering quickly, either. When paired with expertise and familiarity an effective response to an obstacle will often lead to a fast answer, but oftentimes the most effective response is to pause and think. Plenty of people have very ineffective response patterns that involve opening their mouths the moment you ask them to help you confront an obstacle. Some people reflexively start solving the wrong problem, others reflexively start making excuses for themselves, still others reflexively share personal anecdotes that paint them in a positive light. Effective response patterns are not about answering fast, they're about answering well.

The most competent people that I know are, almost universally, people who have very effective response patterns to obstacles in their areas of expertise. The good programmers I meet reflexively start breaking a problem down the moment they decide to solve it. The stellar mathematicians I know reflexively start prodding at problems with various techniques, or reflexively identify parts of the problem that they don't yet understand. The best businesspeople among my advisors are people who listen to me describe the choice before me, and reflexively describe the costs, constraints, and opportunities they observe. Each has acquired a highly effective response pattern to problems that fall within their area of expertise. This response pattern allows them to hit an obstacle and start taking it apart, with an Alice-like mindset, rather than flailing and doubting themselves as per Bob.

Confidence, practice, and talent all help develop these specific response patterns quite a bit. That said, you can often learn someone's response patterns with much less effort than it takes to learn their skills: you can start thinking in terms of incentives, opportunity costs, and markets long before you become a master economist (though reading a microeconomics textbook surely doesn't hurt). Competence isn't just about believing in your capabilities; it's also about having a pattern prepared that takes you directly to the "break down the problem and gnaw on the parts" stage without ever dumping you into the "worry about how you've been silent for a long time and reflect on the fact that the interviewer probably thinks you're dumb" zone.

Having an explicit pattern, such as a checklist, can help you switch from one pattern to the other. For example, imagine Bob in the example above had a checklist which read as follows:

If I start dwelling on how likely I am to fail, I will do the following. (1) Say "hmm, let me think for a few minutes" aloud. (2) Verify that I understand the problem, and ask clarifying questions if I don't. (3) Check whether I could easily solve the problem by brute force. (3) Come up with a few simplifications of the problem. (4) Find a way to break off only one part of the problem or one of its simplified variants.

then he may well be able to manually switch from a flailing response pattern to an effective one. This sort of manual switching is a good way to instill a new response pattern. The ultimate goal, though, is for efficient response patterns to become reflexive.

In fact, I think many people could benefit from developing efficient "fallback" response patterns, to handle new or surprising situations. Response patterns like "verify that your observations were correct" or "find more data" or "generate more than one plausible explanation for the surprise" and so on. As far as I can tell, there is a general skill of being able to smoothly handle surprising new situations and think on your feet, and I suspect this can be attained by developing good response patterns designed for surprising new situations.

This advice is not new, of course. Lots of self-help advice will tell you to break down the problems before you into smaller parts, and to infuse your actions with intentionality, and to reflexively do the obvious things, and so on. So I won't say much more on how to attain the Alice-like mindstate as opposed to the Bob-like mindstate. The important takeaway is that sometimes people respond to obstacles by breaking them down and other times they respond by flailing, and one way or another, it's useful to develop reflexive responses that put you into the former mindstate.

The way that I do it is by monitoring the ways that I respond to new obstacles placed before me. I watch myself facing various situations and observe which ones lead be to reflexively get defensive, or to reflexively blank my mind and wait for someone else to answer, or to reflexively freeze in shock and act dumbfounded. Then I practice building better response patterns for those situations, by figuring out what the checklists to run are, and I do my best to replace those patterns with reflexive inquiry, curiosity, requests for clarification, and impulses to take initiative. Polished response patterns have proven useful to me, and I attribute much of my skill at math, programming, and running nonprofits to having sane responses to new obstacles.

Regardless of where you get your response patterns from, I suspect that honing them will do you well.

As far as I'm concerned, there are two seasons — summer and winter. Each one begins on an equinox (when daylight and darkness are balanced), and then waxes to a height (at the solstice) and then wanes into the next equinox.

The foliage gets particularly interesting when passing from one season to the next — flowers bloom in the passage from winter to summer, and leaves change color in the passage from summer to winter — but that doesn't make spring and autumn full seasons. It seems silly, to me, to distinguish "waxing summer" and "waning summer" as separate seasons. If you do that, then the longest day of the year is the first day of summer (rather than being midsummer), and "summer" is categorized by days that grow uniformly shorter. Clearly, the longest day of the year is midsummer! Calling it the first day of summer is strange.

Look at this graph. How many thingies does the curve trace?

Two. It's a two-lump curve. When it comes to the periodic movement of the sun through the sky, I call the entire period a "year", and I call the lumps "seasons."

Besides, "Summer" as the days-that-are-long-but-shortening doesn't match up with the usual summer associations. Summer is associated with sun and beaches and relaxation and good times. June is much more characteristic of summer than September. "Summer" as days-longer-than-nights is a better match for our associations with summer. Similarly, times-that-are-dark matches the "Winter" concept better than days-that-are-short-but-lengthening.

Also, I'm much happier placing the "springtime" label on the few weeks in early summer where everything is blooming, and the "autumn" label on the few weeks in early winter where the foliage is colorful, rather than trying to promote those short spans into full "seasons." You're still welcome to refer to "waxing summer" and "waxing winter" and so on if you need words for the old concepts.

There are two only seasons, and each has a solstice at the center.

Happy midwinter!

Yesterday, scores of people came together for the Bay Area Secular Solstice. The secular solstice is a winter holiday for the non-religious. It's an opportunity for people to come together and remember the times when every winter was a harsh trial, to appreciate everything that our ancestors built, and to reflect on the trials that are to come.

Below is a speech I wrote and delivered as part of the ceremony. It followed a reading of 500 Million, But Not a Single One More. To get into the solstice mood, I also recommend an abridged version of Yudkowsky's Beyond the Reach of God.

Many people don't think our civilization is worth defending. When they reflect upon humanity, they see violence and war and suffering. They say, "humanity is not a light shining in the darkness, it is the darkness; if we survive, we will become like a stain spreading ever outwards through the stars."

When I reflect upon humanity, I see something else. I see a civilization in its infancy, trapped in a deadly labyrinth. We are young and inexperienced: many billions have had their lives cut short, and those who survive inflict pain upon each other each and every day. We are subject to the whim of a machine we created unwittingly, and hurtling towards a precipice. But we are growing stronger, and we are turning the labyrinth into a garden. Smallpox has been eradicated. Malaria is on deck. We understand the universe better now than ever before, and as technology makes the world flatter, we are improving our ability to communicate and coordinate.

So I see a species that could spread like a stain through the stars above, but also a species that could become something beautiful.

And it is we who will make that choice; not the birds or the bees or the pervasive bacteria, but the fumbling monkeys. Whether this empty universe is filled with dismay, with joy, or with nothingness, is up to us.

It is up to us as a species; and it is also up to us as individuals. Most people I have met act, implicitly, as if the world's largest problems have already been solved. As if progress is creeping along at the appropriate pace, and we mere mortals are just along for the ride. As if the most we can do is make things a little nicer in our immediate vicinity while humanity sorts itself out. In this community of rationalists, transhumanists, and altruists, though, you'll find people searching for the levers that move the world. You'll find people who see the grand story of humanity as a story that is still being written — a story that is getting more interesting by the day, now more than ever.

And it's up to us as a community, too. For if our species is going to fill the universe with something beautiful, it's going to need to coordinate in face of the challenges that lie ahead, and we monkeys are not yet known for our ability to coordinate in the presence of adverse incentives and tribal tensions.

I joined this community a year and a half ago, and I'm proud of what I've seen. In this past year, I saw a conference full of people hyper-passionate about wildly different causes, all respecting and supporting each other despite fundamentally different worldviews. I witnessed Scott Alexander rising up in support Scott Aaronson, when he was lambasted and shamed for sharing a vulnerable experience in a public setting. I saw Rob Bensinger stand up for the ideals of social justice and feminism when tensions rose between tribes. I saw many other people in this room stand up for their fellow sentient creatures in one way or another throughout the year, regardless of species, race, creed, or affiliation.
These examples give me hope, in a world where dissent and distrust may well be our downfall.

Humans are biased to care more about the people closest to us. We often extend more empathy to dogs than men. Impulses to lash out against outsiders are baked into our genes. We put forth shibboleths and talk with scorn about outsiders when they are not present, as if this is harmless, as if this does not turn us a little more against our fellow sentient creatures.

Whenever I see this behavior — in other communities, in this community, or in myself — I want to cry, "wait; do not belittle them; for those are my people too." This is a virtue I hope we cultivate.

I hope we observe other communities, and adopt their very best ideas. What have the skeptics learned? The latter-day saints? The environmentalists?

When we encounter new subcultures, and find them unwelcoming when we fail to signal inclusion, I hope we don't say "they're strange and aloof and egotistical" and abandon them, but instead notice the impulse to otherize, and compensate. Let's learn how to pass for natives, that we may hear what others have to teach us.

And when we notice our fellows belittling someone, caricaturing them and exaggerating their flaws, let's put forth an impassioned plea for respect and compassion. Let us say, "wait; those are my people too."

Refusing to outgroup and otherize in our small community is not going to change the course of history. Not alone. There are many other things we'll have to do as well. But the course of history is changeable. For we are a community of humans, more powerful than most, and between us we can shift the world. If we can help our species coordinate better and cooperate more at the critical junctures, then there is more hope.

More hope that we will one day outgrow our shortcomings. More hope that we will pare away the parts of our nature which cause so many people to reflect upon humanity and despair, while preserving the aspects we cherish.

There is a lot of darkness in us, yes, but it doesn't have to be our downfall. There's an asymmetry between the darkness in us and the light: we want to shed the darkness, and preserve the light.

That is why, when I reflect upon humanity, I see hope and promise. I see the potential to spread through the stars above and fill the universe with love, curiosity, wonder, and everything else we value.

As to whether that promise will ever be realized; well, that's up to us.