36. On Removing Fishhooks From Your Heart

Other people have written about the necessity of grieving losses - everything from dead relatives to missed opportunities, from ruined years to sharply ended relationships. Here's a mental motion I have found to help keep the process moving when the grief might otherwise uselessly paralyze you.

First, notice the feeling of grief as it arises, likely by chance - this is a technique best suited to those times when grief for the loss arises spontaneously, as it often does. (There is a model of grieving where there is a ball bouncing inside a box, and a button within it of shrinking size, and when the ball hits the button, you feel grief. This is a false but useful model: this technique is for when the ball hits the button.) Locate where in your body you feel the grief. Maybe it's in your chest, or your heart - it sure is for me. Maybe it's in your neck, or your guts. Wherever it lives in you, feel the pain and loss sharply; concentrate on it. This will likely bring you to tears - this is expected.

As you do this, do two things simultaneously as best you can: both A) concentrate hard on what it is you will not get to have or do at all, or at least any time soon - envision the thing vividly, getting to do the thing or have the thing or achieve the thing, and B) visualize the pain of the grief as a fishhook embedded in (e.g.) your heart, which is attached to a fishing line under tension.

Let yourself feel the pain for a bit, and then visualize working the fishhook free - pushing it in a little deeper first, feeling it cut you on its way out, poking your fingertips as you handle it. Let the vision of the future you wanted dearly fade, and with one last sigh, let the hook go. With any luck, you'll now feel that pain less and have come a little closer to making peace with the universe you find yourself in, bleeding but ready to move a little further forward.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

20. A Sketch of Helpfulness Theory With Equivocal Principals

You may rightly wonder what else I’m up to, if it’s not just blogging and the occasional adventure. The short answer is that I spend most of my time and mental energy taking part in a summer research fellowship in AI safety called PIBBSS, where my research direction has to do with questions like “how does an agent help a principal, even if the agent doesn’t know what the principal wants?” and “how much harder is it for the principal to teach the agent what they want, and how much worse are the outcomes, if the principal doesn’t know for sure what they want?”. The long(ish) answer is this post. I’ll avoid jargon, mathematical notation, and recommendations to read other long papers, but some amount of that will be unavoidable. Here’s the basic setup - called a “Markov decision process”, sometimes with adjectives like “decentralized” or “partially observable” - which forms the ground assumption for the entire subfield my research direction lies in, called “inverse reinforcement learning”:...
Read more

4. Seven-ish Words from My Thought-Language

Seven entries from a dictionary that will never exist, even though it should. The words in [brackets] show up with some frequency in my thoughts, and I struggle with English’s semantic poverty. Some of them show up in other languages, like Korean or Lojban. Others among them, people I’ve spoken to share in wishing were wider-used words. [untranslatable 1: word-clogged/interference-silent] (adj): Of a person or their state of mind. Descriptive of the phenomenon where a person has multiple different things to say about a specific topic, or multiple different responses or reactions to a remark an interlocutor has made, only one of which can be taken. To be tongue-tied not out of a lack of things to say, but out of an overabundance of mutually exclusive things to say, all of equal priority, especially when each thing to say would result in following importantly different conversational paths. Often used instead in its natural verb form, which means “to be silent as a result of [word-clog]”...
Read more

11. Why the First “High Dimension” is Six or Maybe Five

Image
(Epistemic status: morally correct, in the mathematician’s sense; here to give flavor and intuition without too much rigor.) People toss around the concept of “high-dimensional space” a lot without having a good idea of where that starts. Interpretability researchers staring at vectors in hundreds of dimensions are clearly contemplating a high-dimensional space - loss landscapes packed full of saddle points and spheres where any given pair of vectors is almost certainly nearly orthogonal - but do they know what it means to be a high-dimensional space? Surely we can do better for ourselves than Justice Stewart’s infamous maxim - “I know it when I see it”! What do we care about, when we want to tell how many orthogonal axes we need in a space to start calling it high-dimensional? I claim that we should care about looking at unit-radius disks - like, literal filled-in two-dimensional circles - and in particular, checking when, whether, and how pairs of those unit-radius disks overlap when...
Read more