Request for Community: Constructive Autism

Being more Effective at Altruism requires building a better version of me

I’m writing this in hopes of finding a community that already exists. If that community doesn’t already exist, then this is me trying to start that community.

Please, tell me I’m not alone.

I’m looking for people who want to use the tools of rationality to build better versions of themselves, so they can do more good in the world.

I’m looking for fellow travelers who want to use the idea of predictive processing, so they can better control their own behavior, in order to add more love to the world. If this appeals to you, then join me. I don’t care whether you’re already great at this and want to share what works for you, or whether you’re terrible at it and just looking for a community to support you in your own personal growth. As long as you want to better yourself, and thus the world, while making the map match the territory, I want to hear from you and share with you.

I’m tired of ‘the news’. I’m tired of looking at the world outside of me, far beyond my control, with the simultaneous knowledge that I can’t change anything out there, and there are better versions of me that I could become.

I’d rather spend my time investigating what diet works best for me, than learn about the details of policies I have zero ability to enact. I’d rather read other people tell me what strategies have brought them more peace, more calm, than to read other people propose good-sounding ideas for systems that none of us have any ability to influence. I’d love to hear from other parents, how are you balancing work and home life?

I don’t care about increasing the accuracy with which I estimate the probability I’ll yell at my kids tomorrow. I want ways of reducing that probability. If the conjunctive fallacy can help me there, well, I’ll use it as a tool by visualizing the day going very well, and adding in so many details that I trick the probabilistic models in my brain into imagining the probability of me yelling is unreasonable low given the priors.

If fudging my map changes the territory by altering the the probability distribution of my actions, then I will fudge my map so that the territory will converge with how I want to act, rather than how I have in the past.

I’m tired of trying to persuade people to see things my way, out of some ridiculous belief that the world would be better if only people would just listen to me. I’m disenchanted with the delusion that I could fix problems in the world with enough of a ‘platform’.

Instead,

I want to keep developing myself…

Consider the difference between:

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. ”

―Archimedes

and

“Give me a big enough audience, and I shall move the world. ”

―Every would-be influencer

Sure, of course a platform can help. But you still need that fulcrum. Think of the load that thing has to bear in order to move the world.

From what I can tell, the fulcrum I have for moving the world is me, and that’s the thing I can do the most work on. So instead of asking what I can do to grow my platform, of trying to think about what right words would help others, Instead, I would rather hear from others who are also trying to improve themselves: about what works for them, and why.

Do your attempts to improve yourself relate to one or more world religions, as well as your own understanding of neurophysiology? Do you, like me, see ‘love God and serve God’ as being a hand-wavy way of saying something like, ‘balance serotonin-based appreciation and gratitude for what you have now, with dopamine-driven pursuit of worthy external goals?’ Do you, like me, see a parallel between the prayer of St Ignatius and Andrew Huberman’s descriptions of turning effort itself into a reward?

Yes, there may be many communities like this out there - but I want one that’s focused on ideas like making the map match the territory, while embracing the ambiguity of what happens when the territory is ‘the contents of your own mind.’ I want to hear from anyone else who sits in meditation and then tries to map their experiences into a predictive processing model with the instrumental goal of regularly being more at peace, to advance their primary outer goal of doing more good in the world.

…In pursuit of Good

I want to talk with people who think the word ‘good’ means something and yet aren’t sure quite what precisely is. I want to hear from people who are trying to make their map of what ‘good’ is converge with whatever they think the territory is. I want to hear from people who agree with the majority of our wisest ancestors that knowing what ‘good’ means is the most important question there is. I want to hear from people who are trying on answers, but are more committed to the search than to any one conclusion.

I want to hear from people who are willing to pick up, play with, and drop beliefs that others hold sacred, not out of disrespect or mockery, but because we want to do more good in the world. I want a community of people who see ourselves as storytelling apes with the ability to alter our own source code by telling ourselves just the right stories about the relationship between our thoughts, our behavior, and the external world around us.

I want to learn from other people who understand and believe in the value of beliefs constraining anticipation, but are more interested in expanding their anticipation of progress and growth than they are in reducing anticipation of pain and suffering. I want to share with people who are instrumentally adopting some beliefs with probability 1 because our rationality is always in service of something more important than a converged map, namely a well-lived life that contributes to the world.

It’s easy to constrain your anticipation to excessively by just not trying new things, and I want a subcommunity that simultaneously interfaces well with the SSC/LessWrong/EA movement, that adopts the virtues of rationality, but is much more concerned with personal development than changing the outside world - not because changing the outside world isn’t good or necessary, but because I believe the constraints on my ability to do more altruism are all internal.

I want a group of persons who are trying to do more in the world, for the world while struggling to resolve their own concerns around the alignment problem. I want people who are more worried about whether, ‘If I make more money, will it change me in ways that will make me less kind?’, than they are about whether some external machine they can’t control will follow a similar process.

I want fellow barbarians for knowledge who will ransack faiths and religions around the world like I have, with the goal of figuring out what works. I want people who are happy to blaspheme in service of God. I want people who think like I do that if God does exist, and he doesn’t want me to be willing to take risks and make mistakes as I try and pursue the truth, well then he’s not really God. I want people who’d rather serve a nonexistent God which is the Union of all that is Good, then confidently predict future misery without doing as much as they can to make the world come more alive.

If you’re interested in trying to make sacred ideas have sex with each other, and swap memetic components instead of genes, if you think it makes sense to study major world religions as feats of psychological engineering, in an attempt to understand different pathways to peace, reverse engineer them and build one that works for you, then let’s talk.

If this community already exists, please point me to it. Consider this my introduction letter.

Otherwise, I'm going to start using the phrase ‘constructive autism’, because I am the only tool I really have the ability to control.

The man that I am now is heavily influenced by years of writing, thinking, and reasoning about these concepts. This person that I am is much more constructed than grown or evolved, because predictive processing tells me that my perception of reality is mediated by beliefs, and I have consciously chosen to adopt beliefs which have increased my control over internal processes. The process of personal growth described by alchemists as ‘turning lead into gold’ is, I think, better described as something like ‘recursively improving the twisted loop by which you perceive your own consciousness.’

I am trying to use the tools of rationality to a better job controlling myself, both in the moment and over decades long timespans, for the goal of promoting the still-nebulous but obviously meaningful concept of Good. If this interests you, let me know here. If the community already exists, great, this is my welcome letter, nice to meet you.

But if not: well, I guess this is us.