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Anger, Anxiety and Agency

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Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#41

Post by 9x39 »

Andrew Huberman has this idea about Duration, Path, and Outcome.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CHLavYHn-BG/?hl=en

Duration - how long will things take?

Path - how will we get there?

Outcome - what's at the end, or how I think of it, what does done look like or where do I want to be?

Things like anger and anxiety are IMO, when our brains take an unfortunate offramp instead of solving for these. I've used this as a analytical framework to calm myself and make a plan to get out of a jam many times: physical pain, pressure-cooker work stress, interpersonal conflicts.

I have also had significant success using it as mini-framework to help break down problems people have come to me with. There's a lot to emotions in general far beyond "psychologists HATE this one trick" - don't let me oversell it, but it immediately came to mind reading the article.

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#42

Post by grebc »

tolerance wrote: post #34
jjulius wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it doesn't come naturally for others and is therefore a bit of a struggle to shift into, but I love being unsure. It's great. It's a thing that's totally okay to be . The reality of life is that we're all unsure about a great deal, and it's quite a nice feeling to acknowledge uncertainty, sit within it and feel okay.

People typically do not approach existential uncertainties with such intrepidness. I think this is the case for most people who hate AI. This article glosses over that.

There’s absolutely nothing existential about a program that guesses the next word based on the last.

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#43

Post by tptacek »

jjulius wrote: post #29
tptacek wrote: post #18

The record scratch for me here was the idea that people can choose to be unsure instead of angry. People hate being unsure. Neurochemistry prefers anger to uncertainty. People get angry about being unsure. We feel anger in large part as our brain's natural salve for the discomfort of uncertainty. The suggestion he's making sort of defines away human nature. (There's a lot of practical benefit to be gained from unders…

Perhaps it doesn't come naturally for others and is therefore a bit of a struggle to shift into, but I love being unsure. It's great. It's a thing that's totally okay to be . The reality of life is that we're all unsure about a great deal, and it's quite a nice feeling to acknowledge uncertainty, sit within it and feel okay.

The observation here is basically a corollary to the idea that people experience loss outcomes differently than gain outcomes. It's not complicated or fuzzy.

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#44

Post by dgellow »

neom wrote: post #33
IHLayman wrote: post #16

Wait wait wait. I don’t accept this premise: “But anger is different from anxiety because anger needs to be directed somewhere.” Citation needed; where did this come from? I think it is very possible to be angry without a source or obvious target of that anger; IANAP but my 10-minute googles could not find any authority in the field that would claim this statement. From the perspective of the article, it seems that n…

Anger is strongly associated with certainty and perceived control, whereas anxiety/fear is much more associated with uncertainty and low control - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7059206/

I would be very careful using psychometric papers for colloquial discussion about emotions. Definitions in the world of psychometric are generally very specific and tailored for research use cases, that doesn’t map well to the more casual use of the same terms. Intelligence and IQ being the most obvious examples but you have the same for emotions and personality traits

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#45

Post by tptacek »

grebc wrote: post #42
tolerance wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People typically do not approach existential uncertainties with such intrepidness. I think this is the case for most people who hate AI. This article glosses over that.

There’s absolutely nothing existential about a program that guesses the next word based on the last.

There is if you're a software developer!

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#46

Post by arjie »

All the communities that have high-anxiety seem to have universal high-anxiety. It's not that they have high-anxiety about AI but low-anxiety about dating. Or high-anxiety about loneliness but low-anxiety about AI. So realistically it seems to me that this lack of discrimination in the communities means that the communities are high-anxiety or low-anxiety. I just block everyone (using a Chrome extension) who has this kind of pathological behaviour and that removes this kind of repetitive whining from my social feeds. Raises SNR substantially for online comments.

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#47

Post by bluefirebrand »

burningChrome wrote: post #36
bluefirebrand wrote: post #5

> Even if you don’t find what’s happening right now exciting, you can at least find it interesting I can't get myself to stop finding it terrifying When I think about my future I am scared . Not uncertain. Not merely anxious. Definitely not excited. I'm quite frightened. In fairness, I think I'm a bit of an outlier. I already felt my place in society was fairly tenuous. I struggle to make friends. I don't feel I fit…

>> In fairness, I think I'm a bit of an outlier. Not at all. I'm in the same boat. The first ten year of being a developer you could see things happening miles away. There was a predictable process. Someone builds a new framework. You do some tutorials, kick the tires. Then it eventually starts showing up in small corp projects, then bigger projects or its dropped in favor of a newer framework, app, platform. Now? It…

Thanks for the encouragement. I appreciate it

> I would recommend the same thing I'm doing. Branch out, network like crazy

I have been very bad at making friends and networking throughout my life, but it's something I'm working on. Appreciate the clarity that I am probably doing the right thing

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#49

Post by arjie »

grebc wrote: post #42
tolerance wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People typically do not approach existential uncertainties with such intrepidness. I think this is the case for most people who hate AI. This article glosses over that.

There’s absolutely nothing existential about a program that guesses the next word based on the last.

Truly such a first-order Markov chain would not be a threat but it turns out that they have built a program that guesses the next word based on the last few hundred thousand and it turns out that it works pretty well for writing software.

Re: Anger, Anxiety and Agency

#50

Post by the_great_talke »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #32

I was taught that anger isn't an emotion. It's a reaction -a defensive surge of adrenaline, binary thinking, and motivation to fight. It can feel empowering and energizing. We aren't just sitting here. We're gonna do something . The emotion is fear. Anger is just a reaction to fear. Basically, if we are angry, we are also scared; whether or not we want to admit it. It's a long topic, and one I know well (I agree with…

Serenity Now! (Seinfeld reference where the guru of George's father who specializes in anger suppression goes insane.)
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