Game view vs. Player view

Difficult to legibilize: a distinction I notice many miss. Statement soup (skippable):

“Some information is info-hazardous to some people but not to others"; “the map looks different depending on your location within the territory”; “sufficiently powerful epistemics edit the world"; “do not ‘regret’ rationality”; “self-modification is insanely powerful"; “some information allows you to predict others but not yourself”; “paying attention to a problem frequently can make it worse"; “beware what you explicitly call a problem, or it might stick to your identity"; “the only way to keep a promise is often to make it in the first place”; “it can take a radical binary flip to fix some problems, and sometimes you need to make that leap”; “it can't all be green, you do need some black"; “do not be afraid to snap the neck of some darlings: change is reversible, and anyway good is [statistically speaking] achieved through change”; “you almost always know which path is wisest… can you just pick it?”; “if something works for you, it doesn't have to work for other people—you can still do it even though nobody else does or can or claims they can"; “the American Dream/you-can-just-do-things ethos is more of a ‘what-you🫵-yes-you🫵-can-do’ thing than a 'what-the-landscape-looks-like’ thing”; “is/ought are different concepts with different optimal epistemic norms!”; “difficulty disentangling when information-gathering ends and decision-making begins"; “it's not lying to yourself to have an ideal you're targeting, even if others predict you'll fail”; “you cannot treat yourself like it's a part of the nature like any other”; “do not go more than like, 3 meta levels of recursion, or probably you are making a mistake and will go insane"; “do not fall for galaxy-brain"; “there are more true anthropic situations than you think"; “it means something to be yourself rather than something else"; “some advice only works on a subset of the population, and it's still worth it to let the whole population know they might want to try"; “the fourth wall is always there: pay attention to it!”; “different goals, when you're under stress and must triage, do in fact lead to different world-models [and this is good]"; “the smallest minority is the individual"; “hyperstition [the belief that by believing something, especially about yourself, it can become true] seems at least moderately likely”; “nihil supernum”; “the virtue of silence is real, now stop talking about it!”…

It's frustrating! To see humans not understand the concept I'm gesturing at with that statement soup!

Some people demean their ability to change themselves on purpose. They’ll say things like “I always procrastinate, I never get work done, I'm a miserable wreck".

Is this a good thing to say out loud? Emotions do exist for a reason. Other humans are inscrutable black boxes to me (so my being confused by this behavior doesn’t mean I'm right).

And so perhaps there's catharsis to be gained; or eventually the right person will swoop in and save them after hearing their nth cry for help; or it's just a factually true statement, and they think they'd be lying if they said anything else than “I'm terrible at this"; or they've begun so strongly associating with the problem that it's a sticky part of their identity, and they wouldn't have it any other way [and it would be cruel to pull it away from them?].

But… —and this is NOT advice, I do NOT claim this will work for you—I think this person would be making a mistake here which is modeling themselves as if they were part of the environment, and not something which they can… edit.

Like, nature is not YOU. You are not nature. The laws which apply to observing/studying/affecting nature do not apply to you. You don't have to worry so much about epistemics concerning you, given that no matter what you're making stuff it all up as you go. Who are you to say which path is more “authentic” to you? Just pick what makes you healthiest, happiest, most comfortable with yourself!

By “merely” noticing you procrastinate a lot, and then “merely” telling it to friends, you're attaching this stuff to your personality. You're more likely to mention it the next time. You're more likely to make everyone treat you like you're the procrastinates-constantly person. And eventually this means you're more likely to treat yourself as that person. All the time. Forever.

Your social web starts working against your happiness by making you the procrastination guy; your dumb social-monkey-brain whispers vizierly into your ear every night that since your social web tells you you procrastinate, then it must be true; and then you're back in public and you must admit to being the procrastination guy again.

In this case, if I were giving advice—which I am not because if I do people will get angry at me and say that THEIR problem is truly entrenched and an immutable part of them, that it's genetic or trauma-borne and thus “real” in such a strong sense that they could never even think to change it, gasp—I would say “well maybe you should feel allowed to edit yourself".¹

Game view, when you're observing something from the outside, is best done when you’re editing the subject as little as possible: try not contaminating your petri dish by spitting in it; don't go star-gazing in the middle of a bright city; ask people questions without suggesting to them what you think the answer is.

But player-view? When you're figuring out how to model yourself? You don't have to be so tentative about making what may feel, in the moment, like false claims.

If you read the above paragraph and then through a series of decisions you’re more anxious a month from now than you are now, you've made a mistake, and crucially it's not because of the paragraph above: it's something specific that happened to you within that series of decisions.

So, if you start telling everyone you're really smart, in the hopes that everyone would treat you like the smart guy and then your brain would whisper to you vizierly that you're the smart guy, and a month later you take an IQ test again and realize it hasn't budged, that's because “tell everyone you're really smart” wasn't an effective tool to editing yourself.

If you take drugs, and that goes badly; meditate a ton, and that goes badly; start believing you're the messiah, and that goes badly; then all of these were false paths and you should've had the common sense to see that they would be.

“Editing yourself” is a very subtle thing, and it works in the “don't say bad things about yourself, especially not on paper or in public" direction and [I expect] NOT in the “say grandiose things about yourself, especially on paper and in public” direction.

I'm not suggesting you forget Green, and go do something stupid. In fact, I'm not suggesting anything, because you're🫵 responsible for yourself, not me. Just… remember you're a player, and if you treat yourself exactly like you'd treat the game, I would bet money that's going to bite you in the shin sometime.

Similar links: Don’t Mock Yourself, You Don't Get to Have Cool Flaws