Published on September 16, 2025 10:56 PM GMT
A friend asked me how I passed from a dark and suicidal face to someone who cares so much about me, positive, exercise, meditation and etc. And how do I define my expectation on myself, my personal resources for mys goals? Trying to avoid personal goodhart
How to decipher the labyrinth of my expectations?
Context:
Well taking advantage of gwern's request and the fact that I already showed my ass on Lesswrong, and it seem to have been well received. I'll continue from there.
And I'll summarize it here, no more:
My bet was simple: I'd excel as a military firefighter, become an educator in this context. It wasn't easy, but I get it. But after a while, I couldn't align their ethics with mine. (Uy! I told four stories about it here)
It was a very high bet, a very high price, a huge investment. And for me, in my own biases, maybe from a goodhart mostly, I had lost everything. So I became a bum for a while.
Until, with some help, I came up with a question: But what else did I bet on besides the possibility of saving lives? Hidden factors were:
To be empathetic?
To be altruistic?
Those factors are difficult to bet on, aren't they? Will I succeed?
So, how can I simplify something as complex as my personal expectations of my self? How do I map the labyrinth of my mind? Or clutering?
First bet: Where do I want to go in that maze?
Well, I've seen several models for defining needs, qualities, and virtues, such as Elieser's 12 virtues of rationality. They're very motivating; they seem to fit with my prejudices. But they didn't work for me, or they seemed like definitions on a very mythological level. How can I bet that Gaia, the mother goddess, will help me more than Uranus, the father goddess?
I really enjoyed Eliezer's Fun theory; I find it interesting, a good starting point for mapping my expectations, what motivates me, and what fills me with satisfaction.
Or, more precisely, I'm going to organize the thousands of expectations I have for myself, which both disappoint and delight me.
The initial idea I use consists of comparing the potential cost benefit in motivation and satisfaction. I compare them one by one, looking for which expectations would give me more moments of greater satisfaction and motivation, and which would be more difficult and costly. Then, I obtain a table organized by cost and benefit:
In backend, I compare them and choose the most likely, looking for evidence for and against, which would give you more or less satisfaction. Each goal is given a value from the smallest part up to 100. For example, if I have 8 goals, I divide 8 by 100, and I have my initial hierarchy of benefit, cost, and cost-benefit.
Benefit table:
Cost table:
Cost/benefit table:
Conclusion:
I don't know how many people make that kind of binary comparison heuristic and give arbitrary values to establish a hierarchy. But, the journey itself helped me define expectations and navigate the labyrinth of my mind. Here was my first step.
From everything I read and researched, this idea gave me, at least, a confidence level of 5% in my goals. Maybe for a long time it was enough, but later I had to look for ways to have more confidence in my expectativos of myself. If there aren't many negatives, I'll keep publishing all the way through.
What other first step could have been better and why?
Discuss
