Disclaimer: this will only work for a subset of you. Law of Equal and Opposite Advice and all that. It might only even work for me. This definitely feels like a weird psychological trick that might only work with my brain.
I spent my twenties being absolutely devastated by uncertainty. I saw the suffering in the world and I desperately wanted to help, but the more I learned and the more I tried, the wider my confidence intervals got.
Maybe I could promote bednets. But what about the meat eater problem?
Maybe I could promote veganism? But what about the small animal replacement problem?
Even giving out free hugs (the most clearly benign thing I could think of) might cause unexpected trauma for some unknown percentage of the population such that it negates all the positives.
It eventually reached a crescendo in 2020 where I sunk into absolute epistemic hopelessness. An RCT had just been published about the intervention I was doing that didn't even show that the intervention didn't work. It was just ambiguous. If at least it had been obviously zero impact, I could have moved on. But it was ambiguous for goodness sake!
I actually briefly gave up on altruism.
I was going to go be a hippie in the woods and make art and do drugs. After all, if I couldn't know if what I was doing was helping or even hurting, I might as well be happy myself.
But then…. I saw something in the news about the suffering in the world. And I wanted to help.
No, a part of me said. You can't help, remember? Nothing works. Or you can never tell if it's working.
And then another thing showed up in my social media feed….
But no! It wasn’t worth trying because the universe was too complex and I was but a monkey in shoes.
But still. . . . another part of me couldn’t look away. It said “Look at the suffering. You can’t possibly see that and not at least try.”
I realized in that moment that I couldn’t actually be happy if I wasn’t at least trying.
This led to a large breakthrough in how I felt. Before, there was always the possibility of stopping and just having fun. So I was comparing all of the hard work and sacrifice I was doing to this ideal alternative life.
When I realized that even if I had basically no hope, I’d still keep trying, this liberated me. There was no alternative life where I wasn’t trying.
It felt like the equivalent of burning the ships. No way to go but forward. No temptation of retreat.
Many things aren’t bad in and of themselves, but bad compared to something else. If you remove the comparison, then they’re good again.
But it wasn’t over yet. I was still deeply uncertain. I went to Rwanda to try to actually get as close to ground truth as possible, while also reading a ton about meta-ethics, to get at the highest level stuff, then covid hit.
While I was stuck in lockdown, I realized that I should take the simulation hypothesis seriously.
You’d think this would intensify my epistemic nihilism, but it didn’t.
It turned me into an epistemic absurdist.
Which is basically the same thing, but happy.
Even if this is base reality, I’m profoundly uncertain about whether bednets are even net positive.
Now you add that this might all be a simulation?!?
For real?!
(Pun was unintentional but appreciated, so I’m keeping it)
This was a blessing in disguise though, because suddenly it went from:
- “If you make choice A a baby will die and it’s on your hands” to
- “If you make choice A, you’ll never really know if it helps or hurts due to deep massive uncertainty, but hey, might as well try”
The more certain you feel, the more you feel you can control things, and that leads to feeling more stressed out.
As you become more uncertain, it can feel more and more stressful, because there’s an outcome you care about and you’re not sure how to get there.
But if you have only very minimal control, you can either freak out more, because it’s out of your control, or you can relax, because it’s out of your control.
So I became like the Taoist proverb: "A drunkard falls out of a carriage but doesn't get hurt because they go limp."
If somebody walked by a drowning child that would be trivially easy to save, I’d think they were a monster.
If somebody walks by a deeply complex situation where getting involved may or may not help and may even accidentally make it worse, but then tries to help anyway, I think they’re a good person and if it doesn’t work out, well, hey, at least they tried.
I relaxed into the uncertainty. The uncertainty means I don’t have to be so hard on myself, because it’s just too complicated to really know one way or the other.
Nowadays I work in AI safety, and whenever I start feeling anxious about timelines and p(doom), the most reliable way for me to feel better is to remind myself about the deep uncertainty around everything.
“Remember, this might all be a simulation. And even if it isn’t, it’s really hard to figure out what’s net positive, so just do something that seems likely to be good, and make sure it’s something you at least enjoy, so no matter what, you’ll at least have had a good life”
How can other people apply this?
I think this won’t work for most people, but you can try this on and see if it works for you:
- Imagine the worst, and see if you’d still try to help. Imagine you’re maximally uncertain. If you’d still try to help in this situation, you can feel better, knowing that no matter what, you’ll still care and do your best.
- Relax into the uncertainty. Recognize that you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself, because there aren't actually just drowning babies needing a simple lift.
Anyways, while I’m sure this won’t work for most people, hopefully some people who are currently struggling in epistemic nihilism might be able to come out the other side and enjoy epistemic absurdism like me.
But in the end, who knows?