Nate Soares

The Replacing Guilt Series

Gavin

pinch yourself, and remember what you are. What do you see?

I see bundles of proteins and lipids arranged in a giant colony of cells, lives given over to the implementation of a wet protein computer that thinks it's a person... Look at us, the first species among the animals that can figure out what the stars are, still tightly bound to impulse and social pressure. (Notice how silly it is, monkeys acting all serious and wise as they try to affect the course of history.)... [but still] see the lost monkey who's trying to steer an entire universe...


Consequentialism for humans. Important because it is rare for discussions of "demandingness" or "scrupulosity" to speak about specific behavioural patterns or phenomenology. (It also has the most important part of self-help, an awareness that positive advice is never universal: "remember the law of equal and opposite advice. For every piece of advice useful to one person, there is some other person who needs exactly the opposite advice.") 

(I put off reading this for a whole year, and felt bad about it. So.)

He'd have you move from external motivation to intrinsic motivation because it's more sustainable, and so more effective. He's quite radical about this, ditching normal moral psychology:

  the way that most people use the word "should," most of the time, is harmful. People seem to use it to put themselves in direct and unnecessary conflict with themselves... imagine the person who wakes up feeling a bit sick. They say to themselves, "ugh, I should go to the pharmacy and pick up medication before work." Now picking up meds feels like an obligation: if they don't get meds, then that's a little bit of evidence that they're incompetent, or akrasiatic, or bad... this disconnects the reason from the task, it abolishes the "why". The person feeling sick now feels like they have an obligation to pick up medication, and so if they do it, they do it grudgingly, resenting the situation... Now imagine they say this, instead: "ugh, if I went to the pharmacy to pick up medication, I'd feel better at work today."
 

  Your true shoulds, if I could show them to you, would not look like a list of obligations. Your true shoulds would look like a recipe for building a utopia.


  Many treat their moral impulses as a burden. But I say, find all the parts that feel like a burden, and drop them. Keep only the things that fill you with resolve, the things you would risk life and limb to defend.


  I find it amusing that "we need lies because we can't bear the truth" is such a common refrain, given how much of my drive stems from my response to attempting to bear the truth.


  "Badness" is not a fundamental property that a person can have. At best, "they're bad" can be shorthand for either "I don't want their goals achieved" or "they are untrained in a number of skills which would be relevant to the present situation"; but in all cases, "they are bad" must be either shorthand or nonsense.


Wouldn't Nietzsche in his better moods (or Laozi at any time) smile?

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The strategy is roughly:

1. Find something to care about. (Obstacles: hiding in bed, defensive relativism or nihilism, hiding in routine.)
2. Drop all obligations and see what you still care about.
3. Build intrinsic drive (change environment, train willpower and habit)
4. Draw on the fact that the world is broken as fuel 
5. See guilt as an alien concept, unnecessary for the higher goals.

An important distinction:

* Listless guilt: feeling bad because you feel you should do something with your life, but not really thinking about what.
* Specific guilt: feeling bad because of unmet obligations to a particular goal.
* Akrasia guilt: feeling bad because you're not following the endorsed plan.

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One startling bit: some people report that following his advice has "broken" them, in the sense that guilt was indeed propping up their lives. His response is, "good":

  Some people, when they stop forcing themselves to do things because they "should," will do a bit less to improve the world. They'll bow a bit less to social pressure, and insofar as the social pressure was pushing them to do what you think is good, you might count that as a loss. Some people don't care about things larger than themselves, and that's perfectly fine, and making them more resilient to social pressure might lose the world some charity.

I expect that far more charity is lost from people convincing themselves that their altruistic desires are external obligations and resenting them. I expect that most people who feel obligated to improve the world and only do it because they "should" will become much more effective if they stop forcing themselves...

You can recover from breaking a few parts of yourself, so long as you're modular rather than fragile. 


(This attitude is strongly reminiscent of the person Scott Alexander is incredulous about at the end of this great, great piece, though with instrumental harm.)

I'd probably be more cautious, and advise you not to read this if you don't have lots of slack, support, and stomach for horrible facts. (Soares finds intrinsic motivation in attending to how awful the world is, how much it needs fixing.)

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It's short but dense with interesting ideas. (e.g. the nice concise rebuttal of naive internalist egoism.)

Each post repeats its point at least three times, which I suppose is intentional pedagogy, but it made me skim a lot. Soares also often links forward to posts you haven't read yet, confusingly.

I'm not particularly guilt-ridden or scrupulous, on the scale of things, but I still found this good. Not sure I buy everything in it, but the rough method (move from vague to specific guilt, and then view the specific guilt as an external and unhelpful force in the light of your specific goal) seems sensible.

If the following worldview or prose doesn't appeal to you, it's not for you:

   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 things you couldn't possibly have prevented were the things that went wrong.

You will be measured only by what actually happens... this is the driver that takes the place of guilt... All we need to do, in any given moment, is look upon the actions available to us and take whichever one seems most likely to lead to a future full of light.


Why should we listen to self-help, unless the author has done something impressive? I don't know if you find these things impressive, but they serve.

The Replacing Guilt Series

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