Where does ‘interaction’ fit in all of this anyway?
Logan:
it somehow fits into the heart of deep mastery [from “Knowing”]
Ooh huh hmmm!
I had missed this before, but… I think achieving deep mastery is actually not the goal of {the part of my work I consider most important}. Or, to be more precise, it’s not the job of this part of my work to produce deep mastery. I think.
(The Knowing article describes deep mastery as “extensive familiarity, lots of factual knowledge, rich predictive and explanatory models, and also practical mastery in a wide variety of situations”.)
The job of this part of my work is to make contact at all, and to nurture this contact just enough that it becomes possible to deepen that contact with more ordinary methods, like actual mathematical models. (Which are also an important part of my work, but do not as much seem like the bottleneck.) This part of my work isn’t supposed to produce extensive familiarity, lots of factual knowledge, etc.
Metaphorically, it’s like an expedition that travels deep into a jungle trying to find a viable route for a road, or something. They never see the actual road–once they’ve just marked off where the road may one day go, they move on to the next project. Their work is actually quite different from that of the people coming in after, who cut the trees and build the bridges and pave the road. Those latter people always have the road behind them which connects them to civilization, so they can truck in supplies and it’s basically a normal construction job, if one at the frontier. The expedition people are on their own, and can’t carry enough food to last the whole expedition, so they need to live off the jungle.
i think this sequence is probably meant as a letter to aspiring rationalists in particular. to some extent, it’s like, “look if you’re trying to learn rationality and you’re not using methods that are aimed at deep mastery then you are doing it wrong”.
Ooh huh hmmm!
I had missed this before, but… I think achieving deep mastery is actually not the goal of {the part of my work I consider most important}. Or, to be more precise, it’s not the job of this part of my work to produce deep mastery. I think.
(The Knowing article describes deep mastery as “extensive familiarity, lots of factual knowledge, rich predictive and explanatory models, and also practical mastery in a wide variety of situations”.)
The job of this part of my work is to make contact at all, and to nurture this contact just enough that it becomes possible to deepen that contact with more ordinary methods, like actual mathematical models. (Which are also an important part of my work, but do not as much seem like the bottleneck.) This part of my work isn’t supposed to produce extensive familiarity, lots of factual knowledge, etc.
Metaphorically, it’s like an expedition that travels deep into a jungle trying to find a viable route for a road, or something. They never see the actual road–once they’ve just marked off where the road may one day go, they move on to the next project. Their work is actually quite different from that of the people coming in after, who cut the trees and build the bridges and pave the road. Those latter people always have the road behind them which connects them to civilization, so they can truck in supplies and it’s basically a normal construction job, if one at the frontier. The expedition people are on their own, and can’t carry enough food to last the whole expedition, so they need to live off the jungle.
That… probably explains some of my confusion.
yeah that makes sense.
i think this sequence is probably meant as a letter to aspiring rationalists in particular. to some extent, it’s like, “look if you’re trying to learn rationality and you’re not using methods that are aimed at deep mastery then you are doing it wrong”.