I’m sympathetic to the point you’re making—practice is a very different thing from reading. But, how you wrote it reads as overly harsh.
EDIT: to be more specific, calling that lumping “ridiculous” and saying nothing at all could be concluded from the poll were both far harsher than warranted IMO
I mean, that was one of the points I was making… I guess. But… just, in general, these two activities do not much resemble one another; they are different along many dimensions (and important ones!). Isn’t that obvious? It seems like quite a straightforward point, to me.
Maybe my point got “rounded to the nearest cliche” or something, and that cliche perceived as harsh, I don’t know. I am quite taken aback by the downvotes; I’ve certainly made many comments here that I expected to be controversial, but this was not one of them.
I mean, a lot of the CFAR curriculum is based on content in the sequences, the handbook covers a lot of the same declarative content, and they are setting out with highly related goals (with Eliezer helping with early curriculum development, though much less so in recent years). The beginning of R:A-Z even explicitly highlights how he thinks CFAR is filling in many of the gaps he left in the sequences, clearly implying that they are part of the same aim.
Sure, there are differences, but overall they are highly related and I think can meaningfully be judged to be in a natural category. Similar to how a textbook and a university-class or workshop on the same subject are obviously related, even though they will differ on many relevant dimensions.
The CFAR staff frequently makes the point that they don’t want to give their handbook to outsiders, because attending a CFAR workshop is radically different then reading the handbook and they don’t want idea inoculation and people to think that the workshop is similar to just reading the handbook.
Yes, yes, they (EDIT: that is, the CFAR curriculum and the Sequences) may clearly be grouped into the same broad category in terms of content, but that is hardly the point! The activities of “reading the Sequences” and “attending a CFAR workshop” are what’s being compared… and those things are very, very different.
I honestly don’t see how they could sensibly be aggregated into anything at all resembling a natural category
I interpreted that as saying “there is no resemblance between attending a CFAR workshop and reading the sequences”, which seems to me to include the natural categories of “they both include reading/listening to largely overlapping concepts” and “their creators largely shared the same aim in the effects it tried to produce in people”.
I think there is a valuable and useful argument to be made here that in the context of trying to analyze the impact of these interventions, you want to be careful to account for the important differences between reading a many-book length set of explanations and going to an in-person workshop with in-person instructors, but that doesn’t seem to me what you said in the your original comment. You just said that there is no sensible way to put these things into the same category, which just seems obviously wrong to me, since there clearly is a lot of shared structure to analyze between these interventions.
You just said that there is no sensible way to put these things into the same category, which just seems obviously wrong to me, since there clearly is a lot of shared structure to analyze between these interventions.
I still think this, to be clear. I don’t think “there are similarities between X and Y” and “X and Y cannot be sensibly aggregated into a natural category” are at odds (except if you’re being pedantic).
To take a somewhat extreme example, an apple and a hurricane are similar in that they are both phenomena that exist in physical reality, both are things you may encounter on the planet Earth, both are things that we have words for in English, etc., etc. If, however, you create a category “foozles; for example, apples, hurricanes, etc.”, then I should think that something is wrong with your reasoning.
But in any case, it wasn’t my intent to make a particularly big deal out of this point; it’s not important enough to warrant a comment thread of even this size, so I am quite willing to let it go. Certainly other aspects of the OP are more interesting to discuss.
I’d say, it is very strange how different people understand same words differently. Originally I thought that those 2 activities are in same category, but now that I read your explanations, shouldn’t I adjust my “categorization” heuristics? Who’s wrong here?
This issue seems small compared to original topic, but how can we improve anything, if we don’t speak same language and don’t know what’s right and who’s wrong?
For the record, I didn’t actually downvote you—just wanted to share why I suspect others did. I agree with your full reasoning and didn’t mean to imply you thought that was the only significant difference. I mostly agree with what habryka is saying, though.
I’m sympathetic to the point you’re making—practice is a very different thing from reading. But, how you wrote it reads as overly harsh.
EDIT: to be more specific, calling that lumping “ridiculous” and saying nothing at all could be concluded from the poll were both far harsher than warranted IMO
I mean, that was one of the points I was making… I guess. But… just, in general, these two activities do not much resemble one another; they are different along many dimensions (and important ones!). Isn’t that obvious? It seems like quite a straightforward point, to me.
Maybe my point got “rounded to the nearest cliche” or something, and that cliche perceived as harsh, I don’t know. I am quite taken aback by the downvotes; I’ve certainly made many comments here that I expected to be controversial, but this was not one of them.
I mean, a lot of the CFAR curriculum is based on content in the sequences, the handbook covers a lot of the same declarative content, and they are setting out with highly related goals (with Eliezer helping with early curriculum development, though much less so in recent years). The beginning of R:A-Z even explicitly highlights how he thinks CFAR is filling in many of the gaps he left in the sequences, clearly implying that they are part of the same aim.
Sure, there are differences, but overall they are highly related and I think can meaningfully be judged to be in a natural category. Similar to how a textbook and a university-class or workshop on the same subject are obviously related, even though they will differ on many relevant dimensions.
The CFAR staff frequently makes the point that they don’t want to give their handbook to outsiders, because attending a CFAR workshop is radically different then reading the handbook and they don’t want idea inoculation and people to think that the workshop is similar to just reading the handbook.
Yes, yes, they (EDIT: that is, the CFAR curriculum and the Sequences) may clearly be grouped into the same broad category in terms of content, but that is hardly the point! The activities of “reading the Sequences” and “attending a CFAR workshop” are what’s being compared… and those things are very, very different.
nods You did say the following:
I interpreted that as saying “there is no resemblance between attending a CFAR workshop and reading the sequences”, which seems to me to include the natural categories of “they both include reading/listening to largely overlapping concepts” and “their creators largely shared the same aim in the effects it tried to produce in people”.
I think there is a valuable and useful argument to be made here that in the context of trying to analyze the impact of these interventions, you want to be careful to account for the important differences between reading a many-book length set of explanations and going to an in-person workshop with in-person instructors, but that doesn’t seem to me what you said in the your original comment. You just said that there is no sensible way to put these things into the same category, which just seems obviously wrong to me, since there clearly is a lot of shared structure to analyze between these interventions.
I still think this, to be clear. I don’t think “there are similarities between X and Y” and “X and Y cannot be sensibly aggregated into a natural category” are at odds (except if you’re being pedantic).
To take a somewhat extreme example, an apple and a hurricane are similar in that they are both phenomena that exist in physical reality, both are things you may encounter on the planet Earth, both are things that we have words for in English, etc., etc. If, however, you create a category “foozles; for example, apples, hurricanes, etc.”, then I should think that something is wrong with your reasoning.
But in any case, it wasn’t my intent to make a particularly big deal out of this point; it’s not important enough to warrant a comment thread of even this size, so I am quite willing to let it go. Certainly other aspects of the OP are more interesting to discuss.
I’d say, it is very strange how different people understand same words differently. Originally I thought that those 2 activities are in same category, but now that I read your explanations, shouldn’t I adjust my “categorization” heuristics? Who’s wrong here?
This issue seems small compared to original topic, but how can we improve anything, if we don’t speak same language and don’t know what’s right and who’s wrong?
nods Seems good. I agree that there are much more interesting things to discuss.
For the record, I didn’t actually downvote you—just wanted to share why I suspect others did. I agree with your full reasoning and didn’t mean to imply you thought that was the only significant difference. I mostly agree with what habryka is saying, though.