Some (likely insufficient) instrumental benefits of feeling bad about yourself:
When I play saxophone I often feel frustration at not sounding like Coltrane or Parker; but when I sing I feel joy at just being able to make noise. I’m not sure which mindset has led to better skill growth. : Evaluations can compare up (to a superior reference class) or compare down. I try to do plenty of both. e.g. “Relative to the human average I’ve done a lot and know a lot.” Comparing up is more natural to me, so I have an emotional-support Anki deck of achievements and baselines.
Impostor syndrome is always painful and occasionally useful. Most people can’t / won’t pay attention to what they’re bad at, and people with impostor syndrome sometimes do, and so at least have a chance to improve. If I had the chance to completely “cure” mine I might not, instead halving the intensity. (Soares’ Replacing Guilt is an example of a productive mindset which dispenses with this emotional cost though, and it might be learnable, I don’t know.)
It’s really important for EAs to be modest, if only to balance out the arrogant-seeming claim in the word “Effective”.
My adult life was tense and confusing until I blundered into two-level utilitarianism, so endorsing doing most actions intuitively, not scoring my private life. (I was always going to do most things intuitively, because it’s impossible not to, but I managed to stop feeling bad about it.) Full explicit optimisation is so expensive and fraught that it only makes sense for large or rare decisions, e.g. career, consumption habits, ideology.
Some (likely insufficient) instrumental benefits of feeling bad about yourself:
When I play saxophone I often feel frustration at not sounding like Coltrane or Parker; but when I sing I feel joy at just being able to make noise. I’m not sure which mindset has led to better skill growth. : Evaluations can compare up (to a superior reference class) or compare down. I try to do plenty of both. e.g. “Relative to the human average I’ve done a lot and know a lot.” Comparing up is more natural to me, so I have an emotional-support Anki deck of achievements and baselines.
Impostor syndrome is always painful and occasionally useful. Most people can’t / won’t pay attention to what they’re bad at, and people with impostor syndrome sometimes do, and so at least have a chance to improve. If I had the chance to completely “cure” mine I might not, instead halving the intensity. (Soares’ Replacing Guilt is an example of a productive mindset which dispenses with this emotional cost though, and it might be learnable, I don’t know.)
It’s really important for EAs to be modest, if only to balance out the arrogant-seeming claim in the word “Effective”.
My adult life was tense and confusing until I blundered into two-level utilitarianism, so endorsing doing most actions intuitively, not scoring my private life. (I was always going to do most things intuitively, because it’s impossible not to, but I managed to stop feeling bad about it.) Full explicit optimisation is so expensive and fraught that it only makes sense for large or rare decisions, e.g. career, consumption habits, ideology.
A recent book discusses the evolutionary causes of “bad feelings”, and to what extent they have instrumental benefits: Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry.