Thanks, I appreciate you writing this, and I appreciate you sharing about this in public. I’m somewhat excited to see how this conversation might develop more centrally in rat discourse. I think there’s currently some major incommunicable cruxes surrounding these questions, and I’ve had a lot of conversations about this domain with people who are squarely rats, but mostly auxiliary to rat discourse in a way that’s frustrating.
I have some critiques:
I think this is a plausible contour of how things might go for people who started out relatively healthy, who experience a substantial disturbance and then work to return to something about as stable as their previous configuration. I don’tthink this is a good point of reference for people who began this process quite disturbed and have been so for quite a while.
Indeed, you refer to people trying to address a morass of confusing and illegible motivational/emotional/etc issues, whose situations I don’t think are described well by this sort of story. I currently have the most weight on Mark Lippmann’s work in this domain, over any other framework, traditional or modern. (Warning: I don’t actually recommend his writing to almost anyone, unfortunately.)
There’s some very important questions around how or why people are apparently getting stuck on this emotions/trauma stuff, and whether they should actually be regarded as stuck. This also trades off sharply depending on whether they’re doing vital work otherwise: I hold people working on x-risk in an almost unique category in this respect, where to me even if they might seem to have tons of un-worked-out stuff, I lean towards preferring they continue their work rather than investing hard in healing.
My impression, from <20 conversations with you ever, is that you have obvious-to-me stuff, that probably remains largely untouched by the emotional work you describe having done. To be clear, this is completely blameless, and should not be a source of shame. However, from my perspective this mostly negates your judgements about what is right or advisable in this domain.
Lastly, and I think you’re not much to blame for this either:
It’s not clear to me how we should be having these conversations in public. I’m pretty frustrated by a bunch of “Works On My Machine™” posts about this topic all over the internet (and just as well in print), and I’m pretty confused how these conversations should even work, especially in our discourse.
There’s some problematic epistemological questions relating to claims about phenomenology and psychology, and I don’t think that the existing literatures (modern western psychology, or any of the traditional contemplative schools) have resolved them. For that matter, the techniques and models from the existing literatures mostly aren’t great either, so I’m hardly saying something like “there are established models, please go read these textbooks and stop posting quack physics.”
My impression, from <20 conversations with you ever, is that you have obvious-to-me stuff, that probably remains largely untouched by the emotional work you describe having done. To be clear, this is completely blameless, and should not be a source of shame. However, from my perspective this mostly negates your judgements about what is right or advisable in this domain.
FYI I’m happy to have this kind of comment on this sort of post, I think it’s useful context to have. (It seems probably good for us to actually chat about it at some point, and that probably would be more fruitful as a private convo)
Thanks, I appreciate you writing this, and I appreciate you sharing about this in public. I’m somewhat excited to see how this conversation might develop more centrally in rat discourse. I think there’s currently some major incommunicable cruxes surrounding these questions, and I’ve had a lot of conversations about this domain with people who are squarely rats, but mostly auxiliary to rat discourse in a way that’s frustrating.
I have some critiques:
I think this is a plausible contour of how things might go for people who started out relatively healthy, who experience a substantial disturbance and then work to return to something about as stable as their previous configuration. I don’t think this is a good point of reference for people who began this process quite disturbed and have been so for quite a while.
Indeed, you refer to people trying to address a morass of confusing and illegible motivational/emotional/etc issues, whose situations I don’t think are described well by this sort of story. I currently have the most weight on Mark Lippmann’s work in this domain, over any other framework, traditional or modern. (Warning: I don’t actually recommend his writing to almost anyone, unfortunately.)
There’s some very important questions around how or why people are apparently getting stuck on this emotions/trauma stuff, and whether they should actually be regarded as stuck. This also trades off sharply depending on whether they’re doing vital work otherwise: I hold people working on x-risk in an almost unique category in this respect, where to me even if they might seem to have tons of un-worked-out stuff, I lean towards preferring they continue their work rather than investing hard in healing.
My impression, from <20 conversations with you ever, is that you have obvious-to-me stuff, that probably remains largely untouched by the emotional work you describe having done. To be clear, this is completely blameless, and should not be a source of shame. However, from my perspective this mostly negates your judgements about what is right or advisable in this domain.
Lastly, and I think you’re not much to blame for this either:
It’s not clear to me how we should be having these conversations in public. I’m pretty frustrated by a bunch of “Works On My Machine™” posts about this topic all over the internet (and just as well in print), and I’m pretty confused how these conversations should even work, especially in our discourse.
There’s some problematic epistemological questions relating to claims about phenomenology and psychology, and I don’t think that the existing literatures (modern western psychology, or any of the traditional contemplative schools) have resolved them. For that matter, the techniques and models from the existing literatures mostly aren’t great either, so I’m hardly saying something like “there are established models, please go read these textbooks and stop posting quack physics.”
FYI I’m happy to have this kind of comment on this sort of post, I think it’s useful context to have. (It seems probably good for us to actually chat about it at some point, and that probably would be more fruitful as a private convo)