Thank you for articulating this clearly and without being aggressive. This is remarkable and I’ve started to pay more attention to this recently, seeing how the discussion culture on LW could use some niceness (which is not to say, losing the openness about pointing out mistakes etc. - just not being a jerk about it).
Unfortunately I can’t give you what you want just yet, or at least not in satisfying quality and quantity. Writing about serious rationality stuff is hard, and I’m in the process of experimenting to figure it out. (As a temporary and poor stand-in, I can point to this post which contains some claims about dual process theory based on literature I never knew existed, but it overlaps very closely with what I generated independently—as indicated in my comment).
Apparently, many people reading my post wanted to know the same thing as you. It is slightly strange to me, because my intention was specifically to write only about the “impressions” side of this, which seemed to be neglected and as far I have seen, no one has ever pointed it out clearly.
So I’m not sure why everyone has this approach—I would be grateful if you could give me your thoughts on why do you think it is useful to know what excactly I thought I was being more rational about. Does it change something about how you interpret my description, if you assume I was wrong about object-level stuff, or if you assume I was right about it?
If you say “Here is how it feels to me when I get more rational” and it turns out that what you’re actually describing is how it feels to you when you get less rational but fool yourself, other people may want to use the signs you describe as warnings that they may be going astray.
If you say “Here is how it feels to me when I get more rational” and it turns out that you’re right, other people may want to use the signs you describe as indications that they’re doing something right.
(Of course neither of those will work well for people whose minds are too different from yours.)
Ugh. Thing is, I strongly discourage people from using those signs (from my main post) as indications that they’re doing something right.
I wouldn’t want myself to use those signs in that way.
I predict it would harm my attempts to be more rational if I did that.
In all of this I just wanted to share my subjective experience, because um, it’s fun to share subjective experiences? Or is it something people that are not me do not typically like?′
Edit: also see this reply to NancyLebovitz’s comment. It’s more clear to me now what has happened here.
As I said, at this point, all I know is that you think you’re becoming more rational. I can’t begin to tell whether yourfeelings are about becoming more rational unless I know in more detail about how your thinking has changed.
As for me, the most obvious change is that I’m less likely to go “Cool new thing that fits with my preconceptions! It must be true!” and more likely to think “Check on whether it actually makes sense and has sufficient evidence”.
I can’t begin to tell whether yourfeelings are about becoming more rational
This extremely interesting!
It means your own feelings are so different from mine you can’t just be like “check, mostly check, check, not check, check” (see e.g. Villiam’s comment).
I didn’t anticipate a large part of the readers to feel so differently from me, that they literally can’t tell if what I’m saying correlates positively with rationality or not.
Progressing from specific to abstract is the recommended way to teach. Ignoring this typically leads to “memorizing passwords” (the student memorizes that “X is Y” and can repeat it successfully, but has actually no idea which parts of the territory correspond to X or Y) or “double illusions of transparency” (the teacher tries to say X, the student thinks the teacher said Y, the teacher believes the student understood X, both leave satisfied without noticing that the transfer of knowledge failed).
Also, stories are easier to remember for human brains.
If I tried to rewrite your article… frankly, I would remove most (not all) of the text before and after the bullet points; and then add a few specific examples, preferably from real life but modified to protect anonymity, illustrating the individual points. (Here is an example of the technique that got upvoted despite being unnecessarily long and violating a local taboo. It doesn’t have the bullet points because the whole article has only one point.)
Thanks a lot for this. When I’m explaining something hard, I do tend to start with examples but this time it didn’t trigger for me, because it felt like I’m sharing some experiences, so there’s nothing to “understand” about them.
In retrospect, I was horribly wrong.
From now on, whenever I feel like I want to share an experience, I will start with stories.
Thank you for articulating this clearly and without being aggressive. This is remarkable and I’ve started to pay more attention to this recently, seeing how the discussion culture on LW could use some niceness (which is not to say, losing the openness about pointing out mistakes etc. - just not being a jerk about it).
Unfortunately I can’t give you what you want just yet, or at least not in satisfying quality and quantity. Writing about serious rationality stuff is hard, and I’m in the process of experimenting to figure it out. (As a temporary and poor stand-in, I can point to this post which contains some claims about dual process theory based on literature I never knew existed, but it overlaps very closely with what I generated independently—as indicated in my comment).
Apparently, many people reading my post wanted to know the same thing as you. It is slightly strange to me, because my intention was specifically to write only about the “impressions” side of this, which seemed to be neglected and as far I have seen, no one has ever pointed it out clearly.
So I’m not sure why everyone has this approach—I would be grateful if you could give me your thoughts on why do you think it is useful to know what excactly I thought I was being more rational about. Does it change something about how you interpret my description, if you assume I was wrong about object-level stuff, or if you assume I was right about it?
If you say “Here is how it feels to me when I get more rational” and it turns out that what you’re actually describing is how it feels to you when you get less rational but fool yourself, other people may want to use the signs you describe as warnings that they may be going astray.
If you say “Here is how it feels to me when I get more rational” and it turns out that you’re right, other people may want to use the signs you describe as indications that they’re doing something right.
(Of course neither of those will work well for people whose minds are too different from yours.)
Ugh. Thing is, I strongly discourage people from using those signs (from my main post) as indications that they’re doing something right.
I wouldn’t want myself to use those signs in that way.
I predict it would harm my attempts to be more rational if I did that.
In all of this I just wanted to share my subjective experience, because um, it’s fun to share subjective experiences? Or is it something people that are not me do not typically like?′
Edit: also see this reply to NancyLebovitz’s comment. It’s more clear to me now what has happened here.
As I said, at this point, all I know is that you think you’re becoming more rational. I can’t begin to tell whether yourfeelings are about becoming more rational unless I know in more detail about how your thinking has changed.
As for me, the most obvious change is that I’m less likely to go “Cool new thing that fits with my preconceptions! It must be true!” and more likely to think “Check on whether it actually makes sense and has sufficient evidence”.
This extremely interesting!
It means your own feelings are so different from mine you can’t just be like “check, mostly check, check, not check, check” (see e.g. Villiam’s comment).
I didn’t anticipate a large part of the readers to feel so differently from me, that they literally can’t tell if what I’m saying correlates positively with rationality or not.
This was the source of my confusion, I guess.
Fun!
Learning stuff!
Progressing from specific to abstract is the recommended way to teach. Ignoring this typically leads to “memorizing passwords” (the student memorizes that “X is Y” and can repeat it successfully, but has actually no idea which parts of the territory correspond to X or Y) or “double illusions of transparency” (the teacher tries to say X, the student thinks the teacher said Y, the teacher believes the student understood X, both leave satisfied without noticing that the transfer of knowledge failed).
Also, stories are easier to remember for human brains.
If I tried to rewrite your article… frankly, I would remove most (not all) of the text before and after the bullet points; and then add a few specific examples, preferably from real life but modified to protect anonymity, illustrating the individual points. (Here is an example of the technique that got upvoted despite being unnecessarily long and violating a local taboo. It doesn’t have the bullet points because the whole article has only one point.)
Thanks a lot for this. When I’m explaining something hard, I do tend to start with examples but this time it didn’t trigger for me, because it felt like I’m sharing some experiences, so there’s nothing to “understand” about them.
In retrospect, I was horribly wrong.
From now on, whenever I feel like I want to share an experience, I will start with stories.