The Sense Of Physical Necessity: A Naturalism Demo (Introduction)

Note on genre: This sequence is a demonstration of a complete naturalist study, as described in Intro to Naturalism and The Nuts and Bolts Of Naturalism. I think of naturalism demos as reference material. I’ve tried to make it readable, but like a dictionary or a user manual, I only expect it to be of interest to people who already have a reason to consult it.

Epistemic status: The explicit concepts I’m building around what I’ve learned are still under construction. I think the framing emphasized in this demo is askew, or incomplete, or some-other-how flawed. Perhaps I will come back in a future year to describe how my concepts have evolved. However, I stand pretty firmly behind the broad strokes of the process-level stuff.

Goals

“Hug the Query” is an essay by Eliezer Yudkowsky advocating a certain discipline of rationality that he calls closeness to the issue: “trying to observe evidence that is as near to the original question as possible, so that it screens off as many other arguments as possible.”

I set out to study this discipline, and to perform a naturalism demo along the way.

In this sequence, I will try to tell you what I learned, and also how I learned it. By the end, if I’ve accomplished my goals, readers who would like to reproduce my results with “Hug the Query” in particular will be well prepared to do so; and readers in the midst of some other naturalist study on an entirely different topic will find supportive illustrations.

If you haven’t read the original essay lately, I recommend pausing to do that before you read this one. It’s about a two minute read.

Motivation

Why “Hug the Query”? Why was that worth so much of my time? (And might it be worth yours?)

The simple straightforward tool-type skill discussed in “Hug the Query” is maybe not all that profound or important to me. “Remember that less central evidence is a distraction when you have ready access to more direct means of evaluation.” Yes, fine.

But the generator of that skill really matters. What is it that causes someone to “hug the query”, when they have never been told to?

When I encounter a creek, I might leap from stone to stone to make my way across. It’s not that I’ve been instructed in stone leaping, and thus execute the skill reliably when faced with a series of stones; it’s just that facing the creek, and intending to cross, this method is immediately obvious to me. What disposition inclines someone to stay “close to the issue” just because it feels obvious and natural to do so? With what creeks is such a person so familiar that they do not need to be taught how to cross?

Whatever the answer, I think it probably cuts right to the heart of Yudkowskian rationality.

Sometimes when an essay (or book, or lecture) seems to have an important point, I have gone, “Oh, that’s really important!” and then changed basically nothing about how I think or behave in practice. I think this is pretty common for humans in general. In fact, it might be the default human response to insightful essays.

One way to remedy this mistake (supposing it is a mistake) is to generate at least one TAP whenever something in an essay seems “important”. This is akin to reading about creek crossing, and then declaring, “If I encounter a series of stones spanning a creek, then I will consider leaping from stone to stone.”

But the TAP extraction technique strikes me as pretty superficial. When an essay contains something deeply important, it may be worth more than quickly tossing a new tool into your toolbox, to rattle around with all the other insightful tidbits you’ve gathered over the years. It might be worth seeking mastery. It might be worth becoming the source of the thought, so that if you hit your head and the codified intention were erased, you’d take the same actions anyway—more fluidly, more quickly, and more gracefully than any plan could allow.

“Strive to make yourself the source of every thought worth thinking. If the thought originally came from outside, make sure it comes from inside as well.”

(Another way I think about generators and mastery: If the external thought were somehow incorrect, or ill-fitted to your personal context, then in your quest to become its source, you would correct its flaw. TAP extraction usually cannot accomplish that on its own.)

I think this is one of the primary use cases for naturalism. It’s almost impossible to complete a well-executed naturalist study without the things you learn becoming “truly part of you”.

When I started, I didn’t quite understand why “Hug the Query” mattered. But I did feel the weight of it. I strongly suspected there was something in there worth making a part of myself.

Maybe Yudkowskian rationality is worth your time, or maybe it’s not; that’s a bigger discussion than I want to embark on here. Regardless, I suspect it’s hard to get very far in it without becoming the source of this particular discipline. Whatever it is that makes a person naturally tend to stay close to the issue—whatever inclines a person to cognitively navigate by their apparent location in the causal web—that property may be indispensable to a rationalist.

From the other end of my study, I’m still in the process of sense-making, of building new concepts and piecing them together into something I can talk about coherently. I think I can only tell partial stories at this point, and I do not think the stories I tell can be both accurate and especially legible at the same time. I’m just not there yet. But I will take my best shot anyway at articulating what seems important to me about the generator of this skill.

(It will be too abstract. It will be a sazen. But I’ll go ahead and say it anyway.)

There is a way that cruxes feel, and a way that inevitability feels. If you are able to feel both of these at once, as a distinct sensation; and if you are further able to recognize that sensation of crucial inevitability when produced by nascent proto-thoughts, and to direct your cognitive resources toward those proto-thoughts; then you can guide your reasoning processes as they happen toward the topics you expect to bear on the outcomes that matter to you. Without this ability, it is far more difficult to think usefully.

When I type it out that way, I notice that I feel a little embarrassed. It seems awfully… 101. Surely I understood that before I began? Didn’t I specialize in logic at school? Isn’t it a thread running all through the Sequences, and didn’t I read those a decade ago? Didn’t I work for CFAR, an organization that (at least in theory, according to my own story of CFAR) tries to teach people to apply almost exactly this principle by a variety of methods?

Well, yes, I think that I did already understand this to some degree. I even had some amount of practical facility with it. Much more than the average person, probably.

But I was a long way from mastery. I was a long way from navigating by this sense as easily as I keep my balance when I climb the stairs. To leave the local optimum and approach that, I had to forget what I already knew. I had to see it all again, this time entirely for myself.

Structure

The bulk of this essay will be an account of my study of “Hug the Query”.

The account will play out like this: Toward the beginning, I looped through the first parts of the naturalist progression a few times on a few topics. Once I found the right experience to focus on, I settled in and studied it in depth, until I could easily recognize its phenomenology, and was eventually able to notice when the experience was about to happen. At the end, I experimented with alternative actions I could take when I felt the experience coming.

It’s essentially a chronology: This happened, then this, then this. My main goal is to convey the details of what it felt like to move through each stage.

The stages of naturalism, progressing from left to right.

I’ll tell the story of this study through a few different mechanisms: summary and ordinary discussion, log excerpts, and methodological notes.

The “main text” will look like this. Most of it will be a summary of my thoughts and actions. I’ve tried to write the main text in such a way that if you skip all the other stuff, my account will still make about as much sense as it would have otherwise.

Excerpts from my log, sometimes edited for clarity or privacy, will appear like this, as quote blocks. They’re written to me and for me, so they’ll be a lot less legible than the other sections. Still, I think they might be valuable examples for people who are trying to perform naturalist studies themselves.

Methodological notes will be set off in gray boxes.

My account of this study is meant to demonstrate naturalist methodology, so interspersed throughout the narrative, I will discuss that methodology: Why did I take the actions that I did? From what perspective did they make sense? What parts of the method described in The Nuts and Bolts Of Naturalism do they illustrate? Where did my actions differ from that description, and why?

If you’re interested in naturalism but not in this particular study, it might be worth skimming through just the methodological notes, then backtracking for context as needed.

Toward the end, there will be a discussion of what I learned about the discipline underlying “Hug the Query”: What it is, how it relates to the original essay, and what I would say to my past self to help him learn faster.

Is this for you?

A final clarifying note, before we get started: I want to reiterate that this is a demonstration of naturalism.

If you are here because you want a philosophical or practical discussion of “Hug the Query”… well, there will certainly be some of that, especially toward the end. But that’s not what the sequence is designed to feature.

This is about the production line, not the end product. If you’re only interested in Hug the Query, you’ll have to wade through a lot of tedious detail to find what you’re looking for. I’d like you to be aware of that in advance, rather than being set up for frustration or disappointment.

However, if you are here because you want to see exactly how a particular naturalist study played out, and why it played out as it did, then you are in the right place!

This is Brahp, an American bullfrog. Brahp will hop across the lily pads during this sequence, to keep track of where we are in the naturalist progression.