Johannes C. Mayer
I have now been taking bupropion for a little bit over two weeks. I’m unsure if it will continue to work as well as it does now. But if it does, I think starting to take bupropion will be in the top five most important things I have ever done, in terms of increasing my overall well-being and productivity. So thank you very much for writing this article. Without it, I likely would never have tried it.
Hagakure is, I think, a useful concept and technique to know. Thank you for telling me about it. I think it is different from what I was describing in this article, but it seems like a technique that you could layer on top. I haven’t really done it a lot yet, though I guess there is a good chance that it will work.
I’m not sure if what you say is correct. Maybe. I think there is one difficulty that needs to be taken into account, which is that I i think it is hard to elicit the appropriate reaction. When I see people arguing angrily, I am normally biased against what they say is correct. So I need to make an effort to take them more seriously than I would otherwise do. So it is unclear to me which percentage of people moral outrage would even affect in the way that we want it to affect them.
There’s also another issue. Maybe when you are emotionally outraged, it will induce moral outrage in other people. Would it be a good thing to create lots of people who don’t really understand the underlying arguments but are really outraged and vocal about the position of AGI being an existential risk? i expect most of these people will not be very good at arguing correctly for AGI being an existential risk. They will make the position look bad and will make other people less likely to take it seriously in the future. Or at least this is one of many hypothetical risks I see.
I can definitely see that being outraged can be useful on the individual and the societal level. However, I think the major challenge is to steer the outrage correctly. As you say, epidemics can easily go under. I encourage everybody who draws motivation from outrage, to still think carefully through the reasoning for why they are outraged. These should be reasons such that if you would tell them to a neutral curious observer, the reasons alone would be enough to convince them of the thing (without the communication being optimized to convince).
I only saw this now. I am usually on LessWrong. Here is the list:
General Nutrition
Sleep hygiene
Regular Sport
Meditation
Tulpamancy
Now I would probably also take methylphenidate. It’s even more useful than bupropion.