For example, “base rate neglect” is just an abstract conceptualization, so it’s pretty useless to predict that something will feel like “base rate neglect”. “Base rate neglect” is an external description of a cognitive activity—and worse yet, it’s negatively phrased: a person engaged in base rate neglect is failing to attend to base rates. It’s especially hopeless to try to notice an external description of an activity that you’re not even doing.
A much better prediction would be an imagined sensation of “diving into the fitting-together-ness of characteristics”—which, in my case, I suspect involves a circular-feeling preoccupation with small bursts of pleasure at each accordance I recognize. This is a solid prediction of what base rate neglect might feel like to me, from the inside, as it’s happening.
I’ve talked to a couple people who have bounced off your writing, and been wondering what’s-up-with-that.
One hypothesis I have, which I was reminded of in this section, is that some people may be kinda confused by your phrasing of things.
I think most people are kinda confabulating experiences a lot of the time, and not noticing what those experiences are actually like. And you are tracking more of what stuff is actually going on, and writing down descriptions that match-what’s-actually-going-on, which sometimes doesn’t match the confabulated stories very well, and it’s sort of disorienting to read at first.
Separately, I think people are just different in what their internal experience is like, so there’s a two-step disorientation where first, they don’t realize that their stored expectation was a high-level confabulation that didn’t correspond to their actual experiences, but, then, even when they start trying to pay attention to their experiences they still differ significantly so they still end up confused.
(I notice that I’m mostly making.… something like (uncharitable*?) guesses of what’s going on for other people. I’m trying to try-this-on-for-myself and see if it’s actually true-for-me. Hmm. Well, I did at least have a bit of a reaction just now in the base-rate-neglect example. “Diving into the fitting-togetherness-of-characteristics” is certainly not anything that I’d have described as what base-rate-neglect feels like. I’m noticing now that I don’t really have any idea what base-rate-neglect feels like though)
*not necessarily actually uncharitable, but, it feels like my generator here has a similar flavor to when I make uncharitable guesses about people, whether it turns out to be uncharitable or not.
Yes, I think that’s a good guess about one of the things that goes wrong. It’s also, I think, almost exactly the thing that makes my writing especially valuable and nearly unique for the people who benefit a lot from it. The more of this kind of thing I have in a piece, the more the people who appreciate it really appreciate it, ’cause it’s like I’m actually looking at things and helping their minds get the hang of actually looking at things, and mostly people just don’t do that in writing, outside of maybe some poetry. But I think it’s really super duper important to be able to pay attention to what’s actually going on if you want to do the rationality stuff in the crucial moments when it matters, and not just in the ones where you managed to pattern-match to high level concepts about rationality things! (That’s what this whole program is about.) So one day I’d really like to get good at making bridges or something that reach all the way to the people who are just like “wtf is this weird poetry”. But in the mean time I hope I’m doing useful things for the people who are already pretty close to being able to pay attention to what’s actually going on.
I’ve talked to a couple people who have bounced off your writing, and been wondering what’s-up-with-that.
One hypothesis I have, which I was reminded of in this section, is that some people may be kinda confused by your phrasing of things.
I think most people are kinda confabulating experiences a lot of the time, and not noticing what those experiences are actually like. And you are tracking more of what stuff is actually going on, and writing down descriptions that match-what’s-actually-going-on, which sometimes doesn’t match the confabulated stories very well, and it’s sort of disorienting to read at first.
Separately, I think people are just different in what their internal experience is like, so there’s a two-step disorientation where first, they don’t realize that their stored expectation was a high-level confabulation that didn’t correspond to their actual experiences, but, then, even when they start trying to pay attention to their experiences they still differ significantly so they still end up confused.
(I notice that I’m mostly making.… something like (uncharitable*?) guesses of what’s going on for other people. I’m trying to try-this-on-for-myself and see if it’s actually true-for-me. Hmm. Well, I did at least have a bit of a reaction just now in the base-rate-neglect example. “Diving into the fitting-togetherness-of-characteristics” is certainly not anything that I’d have described as what base-rate-neglect feels like. I’m noticing now that I don’t really have any idea what base-rate-neglect feels like though)
*not necessarily actually uncharitable, but, it feels like my generator here has a similar flavor to when I make uncharitable guesses about people, whether it turns out to be uncharitable or not.
Yes, I think that’s a good guess about one of the things that goes wrong. It’s also, I think, almost exactly the thing that makes my writing especially valuable and nearly unique for the people who benefit a lot from it. The more of this kind of thing I have in a piece, the more the people who appreciate it really appreciate it, ’cause it’s like I’m actually looking at things and helping their minds get the hang of actually looking at things, and mostly people just don’t do that in writing, outside of maybe some poetry. But I think it’s really super duper important to be able to pay attention to what’s actually going on if you want to do the rationality stuff in the crucial moments when it matters, and not just in the ones where you managed to pattern-match to high level concepts about rationality things! (That’s what this whole program is about.) So one day I’d really like to get good at making bridges or something that reach all the way to the people who are just like “wtf is this weird poetry”. But in the mean time I hope I’m doing useful things for the people who are already pretty close to being able to pay attention to what’s actually going on.
Yup, sounds right to me.