Cognitive Trope Therapy

jadagul:
wirehead-wannabe:
yudkowsky:
“I’m not saying TV Tropes is right about everything,” I typed into the chat window, “but right now it understands your life better than you do.”
I have invented a new form of psychotherapy
I call it Cognitive Trope Therapy
the way it works is that when you have a thought, you write it down
like, say
“You are different from the others. You will never know their innocence… and that is why you should hate your own existence. Die. Die. Die.”
then you figure out whether, if your life were a fantasy novel, these words would be spoken by figures wearing black robes, and speaking in a dry, whispering voice, and they are actually withered beings who touched the Stone of Evil
and if so then you don’t listen
I would write this up as a pop psych bestseller but it would be only two pages long
now
I know what you are thinking
you are thinking “but what if the whispering voice seems like it might have a point”

Keep reading
I get that this isn’t meant to be rigorous, but “it’s okay to focus on yourself, hurting yourself in the name of effective altruism is bad, why not sit down and rest for a while?” sounds exactly like the sort of think a dark-robed figure would hiss at a protagonist.
You obviously don’t read the same books I do. :P
Wait, am I missing something?
Eliezer on LW: “We should become supremely rational, moving faster than the comparatively timid procedures of Old Science. We must conquer death itself and win immortality, the faster the better, dismissing those who would urge restraint in this effort as hidebound and inferior thinkers. We shall build unspeakably powerful artificial intelligences to rule over us, transform us from weak creatures of flesh into beings of pure information. Then we’ll build giant structures that blot out the stars, and finally realize our destiny of taking over the galaxy.”
Eliezer on Tumblr: “Avoid things that sound too much like what a fictional villain would say.”