I strongly agree about the circling/kensho discussions. Nothing in them looked to me as if anyone was saying it’s not OK to talk about fuzzy system-1 intuitions in rational discourse. My impression of the most-negative comments was that they could be caricatured not as “auggh, get this fuzzy stuff out of my rational discourse” but as “yikes, cultists and mind-manipulators incoming, run away”. Less-caricaturedly: some of that discussion makes me uneasy because it seems as if there is a smallish but influential group of people around here who have adopted a particular set of rather peculiar practices and thought-patterns and want to spread the word about how great they are, but are curiously reluctant to be specific about them to those who haven’t experienced them already—and all that stuff pattern-matches to things I would rather keep a long way away from.
For the avoidance of doubt, the above is not an accusation, pattern-matching is not identity, etc., etc., etc. I mention it mostly because I suspect that uneasiness like mine is a likely source for a lot of the negative reactions, and because it’s a very different thing from thinking that the topic in question should somehow be off-limits in rational discourse.
FYI, I’ve definitely updated that the “fuzzy-system-1 intuitions” not being the concern for most (or at least many) of the critics in Kensho and Circling.
(I do think there’s a related thing, though, which is that every time a post that touches upon fuzzy-system-1 stuff spawns a huge thread of intense argumentation, the sort of person who’d like to post that sort of thread ends up experience a chilling effect that isn’t quite what the critics intended. In a similar although not quite analogous way that simply having the Reign of Terror option can produce a chilling effect on critics)
I strongly agree about the circling/kensho discussions. Nothing in them looked to me as if anyone was saying it’s not OK to talk about fuzzy system-1 intuitions in rational discourse. My impression of the most-negative comments was that they could be caricatured not as “auggh, get this fuzzy stuff out of my rational discourse” but as “yikes, cultists and mind-manipulators incoming, run away”. Less-caricaturedly: some of that discussion makes me uneasy because it seems as if there is a smallish but influential group of people around here who have adopted a particular set of rather peculiar practices and thought-patterns and want to spread the word about how great they are, but are curiously reluctant to be specific about them to those who haven’t experienced them already—and all that stuff pattern-matches to things I would rather keep a long way away from.
For the avoidance of doubt, the above is not an accusation, pattern-matching is not identity, etc., etc., etc. I mention it mostly because I suspect that uneasiness like mine is a likely source for a lot of the negative reactions, and because it’s a very different thing from thinking that the topic in question should somehow be off-limits in rational discourse.
FYI, I’ve definitely updated that the “fuzzy-system-1 intuitions” not being the concern for most (or at least many) of the critics in Kensho and Circling.
(I do think there’s a related thing, though, which is that every time a post that touches upon fuzzy-system-1 stuff spawns a huge thread of intense argumentation, the sort of person who’d like to post that sort of thread ends up experience a chilling effect that isn’t quite what the critics intended. In a similar although not quite analogous way that simply having the Reign of Terror option can produce a chilling effect on critics)