Notes on Replacing Guilt

Replacing Guilt is a book by Nate Soares, a collection of blog posts about replacing guilt-based motivation with something stronger. From the book's website: "In Replacing Guilt, Nate Soares articulates a framework for seeing the world as it is and taking effective action—without putting half your work into beating yourself up."

• You may want to reverse the advice in this book.
• Soares warns readers that the posts about the dark world aren't "for the faint of heart".

• You may find yourself doing things that don't actually matter to you, that are just a way to pass the time, then wishing you had done something different. (This is sometimes the case for me.)
• If you're a moral anti-realist, you might feel like your ethical commitments to people outside your close circle of family and friends aren't real. But your commitments to your close circle also aren't real.
• Instead, first decide that you can indeed fight for something, then find that thing.
• You can use your intellect to choose what to care about. Soares uses "care" to talk about actions to support others, not the emotions that accompany caring actions.
  • It does seem easier to care about something if you feel caring emotions towards it, though. Later sections talk more about emotions to cultivate.
• Nate has "a quiet sense of aesthetics and fairness" that leads him towards caring about everyone equally and away from not caring about people who annoy him.
• You may not fully understand what you care about, but the world is in bad enough shape that it should still be pretty easy to figure out some good actions to take under that uncertainty. No need to wait until you've fully morally reflected to start acting. But because of this your goals may change as you learn more information.

• Replacing "should"s
  • E.g. "I should spend more time on this assignment instead of going to this party". Instead, figure out the actual consequences of each action, weigh them explicitly.
  • "Should"s often mask your impression of other people's expectations of you
  • "Should" as a way to assign negative infinity utility to any other outcome
• Many people either slack off and do poorly on a task, or are perfectionists and spend lots of time doing as well as possible. Both are failure modes. The goal is always to reach some quality bar with minimum effort.
  • You can find intrinsic motivation in optimizing to waste no effort while accomplishing a task
• Maybe you force yourself to do some action because you're worried you wouldn't do it otherwise. Instead, tell yourself that you're not going to force yourself. Listen to the part of you that objects and negotiate with it to do at least part of what it wants to do.

I found this frame particularly helpful!

• Your life contains many streams of tasks (work, family, friends, hobbies, self-care, rest)
• The goal is not to complete all the tasks and enter a state of inaction. This will not happen and would be boring if it did
• Instead, the goal is to move through the streams at sustainable paces, always increasing the pace you can move at, and making sure you prioritize the right streams
• Self-improvement is another, infinite stream to move through

My thought: Utopia might not look like all problems being solved for everyone. Instead, maybe it looks like everyone having many good streams of tasks to move through and find flow in.

• Feeling guilt for behaving badly is not going to help you behave better next time. Instead, you need to dedicate effort to fixing the pattern of behaviour.
• Consider pretending you have no willpower. Instead, you have to design your life around your limitations. Sixty seconds or five minutes before you made a bad decision, what could you have done differently to prevent yourself from reaching that choice point?
  • Soares says that it's hard for him to tear himself away from a book once he's started. Rather than feeling guilty, he knows about himself that reading a book is a monolithic action that will take five to twenty hours and plans around that
• Try to feel compassion for the fragile monkey that is you, without pitying yourself, making excuses, or avoiding accountability
  • The book has an exercise you could go through, to help you feel this feeling

• Let the full extent of the badness of the world sink in. As you go about your daily life, notice all the things that are bad. Instead of deflecting or blaming your outgroup for them, just sit with that fact. Realize that there is so much triage to do every day, that there are many bad things in the world that you can't fix because you're trying to fix something more important
• Refuse to tolerify, that is, perform mental moves to make bad situations seem more tolerable than they actually are. Instead, see things for how they are, which may be bad. This may give you intrinsic motivation to improve them
• We are no longer playing for a perfect game. E.g. in human history, 100 billion people have died. The goal is to minimize further losses. So, if you're in a situation where no option is perfect, don't feel guilty there isn't a better one, just pick the best option you can find.
• Similarly, you will never have enough information to make a perfect decision. Unfortunately, that's the game we're playing. All you can do is take the best possible action you can find at the time
• Refuse to acknowledge excuses for your failures. If you believe your failures are excusable, you may be tempted to fail in excusable ways in the future, rather than actually trying to succeed. You may feel internal pressure to find an excuse, but you can channel this pressure into learning and adapting for next time.
• As a friend, maybe try not to excuse your friends' failures (with consent)

• Consider not using the word "try". Instead, break down your plans to "try to accomplish XYZ" into more concrete steps. This can help you determine if your plan actually has a chance of success. It may be that your plan is to sit there and "try" until you feel like you can say you've "tried enough", which will probably not work.
  • E.g. at work yesterday I was basically sitting in front of a blank page "trying" to make ideas come to my mind. I realized this was not a good plan and switched to brainstorming on a whiteboard, which helped a lot.
• If you notice that the plan you're executing is bad for some reason, stop! Don't execute it! Stop and find something better

Do all the obvious things in pursuit of your plan!

This one is big enough to deserve a heading. Soares says something like, "I wonder how powerful of a rationalist someone could become just by doing all the obvious things in service of their goals."

• Make a list of the obvious things, then actually do them
• Obvious things include: talking to people with experience, talking to people who might have ideas for other obvious things, thinking hard or brainstorming about the topic for five actual minutes, making a list of techniques that have worked on similar situations in the past and applying them

• If you can't imagine a situation, even an implausible made-up one where you would go all out, dedicate your entire self to making the situation better: What are you holding out for? Consider that you may be holding part of yourself back for a day that will never come. Effectively wasting part of yourself.
  • E.g. if your loved ones were in danger and you were literally the only person who could save them, but at great personal cost: Would you do it? If not, what are you holding out for?
• Cultivating recklessness. This is about taking even actions with low odds of success to achieve your goals, if you can't find something better. If the stakes are high, the low odds don't have to sap your motivation.
• Cultivating defiance. "Resisting the default state of affairs without hesitation." Instinctively rebelling against / refusing to accept bad situations
  • Like a child who defies her parents' will, you may choose to acquiesce in the moment while still defying on the inside and plotting your next opportunity to defy with your actions