Oh man, what an interesting time to be writing this review!
I’ve now written second drafts of an entire sequence that more or less begins with an abridged (or re-written?) version of “Catching the Spark”. The provisional title of the sequence is “Nuts and Bolts Of Naturalism”. (I’m still at least a month and probably more from beginning to publish the sequence, though.) This is the post in the sequence that’s given me the most trouble; I’ve spent a lot of the past week trying to figure out where I stand with it.
I think if I just had to answer “yes” or “no” to “do I endorse the post at this point”, I’d say “yes”. I continue to think it lays out a valuable process that can result in a person being much more in tune with what they actually care about, and able to see much more clearly how they’re relating to a topic that they might want to investigate.
As I re-write the post for my new sequence, though, I have two main categories of objections to it, both of which seem to be results of my having rushed to publish it as a somewhat stand-alone piece so I could get funding for the rest of my work.
One category of objection I have is that it tries to do too much at once. It tries to give instructions for the procedure itself, demonstrate the procedure, and provide a grounding in the underlying philosophy/worldview. It’s perhaps a noble goal to do all of that in one post, but I don’t think I personally am actually capable of that, and I think I ended up falling short of my standards on all three points. If you’ve read my sequence Intro To Naturalism, you might possibly share my feeling that the philosophy parts of Catching the Spark are some kind of desperate and muddled. Additionally, I think the demonstration parts are insufficiently real and insufficiently diverse. When I wrote the post, I mostly looked back at my memories to find illustrative examples, rather than catching my examples in real time. A version of this with demonstrations that meet my standards would have real-time notes, both from myself and from other people who have used the procedure.
The second category of objection I have is that the post relies heavily on a framing that I think is about 50% inaccurate. I think the posts makes it *sound* like this is a procedure that I designed for the purpose of curiosity cultivation. But it really isn’t. The curiosity stuff is more like a side effect, or perhaps an undercurrent of the way I do things-in-general. I think the way this procedure *really* came about is that I guided some people through the larger naturalism process, and kept being annoyed by how many weeds I kept having to pull well over a month in. The procedure is largely meant to pull those weeds at the very beginning. It’s really more about creating space for original seeing than it is about catching a spark of curiosity, but I’m also not sure there’s any one coherent thing that it’s about. It’s just “some stuff it turns out is a really good idea to do before you go investigating something in the particular way I’m calling ‘naturalism’”.
But I do still think the procedure itself is pretty good.
I’m skipping over the “claims” questions, ’cause I think the post is pretty light on claims. It’s mainly an instructional post, not an argumentative one. But feel free to follow up if you want to poke me about particular claims.
Follow-up work: All the naturalism stuff. I did the worldview sequence already (that was Intro To Naturalism). Now I’m doing the Nuts and Bolts sequence, which is more or less the “how-to”. Most of my hopes and dreams for this and related posts, though, come in the sequence after that: I want a collection of case studies and demonstrations. Basically there will be a whole series of instructional posts similar to this one, and I want several people (not just myself) to follow those instructions while focusing on stuff in the original Sequences; so like people demonstrating what it is like, in detail, to learn to actually change your mind, or to make your beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences, and I want this kind of resource to accompany many key posts on Lesswrong along with a handful of chapters from books like Scout Mindset and How To Measure Anything.
This was all very rambly and chaotic because that is in fact the state of my thoughts right now with respect to this post. Apologies. I welcome attempts to direct me with further questions.
Oh man, what an interesting time to be writing this review!
I’ve now written second drafts of an entire sequence that more or less begins with an abridged (or re-written?) version of “Catching the Spark”. The provisional title of the sequence is “Nuts and Bolts Of Naturalism”. (I’m still at least a month and probably more from beginning to publish the sequence, though.) This is the post in the sequence that’s given me the most trouble; I’ve spent a lot of the past week trying to figure out where I stand with it.
I think if I just had to answer “yes” or “no” to “do I endorse the post at this point”, I’d say “yes”. I continue to think it lays out a valuable process that can result in a person being much more in tune with what they actually care about, and able to see much more clearly how they’re relating to a topic that they might want to investigate.
As I re-write the post for my new sequence, though, I have two main categories of objections to it, both of which seem to be results of my having rushed to publish it as a somewhat stand-alone piece so I could get funding for the rest of my work.
One category of objection I have is that it tries to do too much at once. It tries to give instructions for the procedure itself, demonstrate the procedure, and provide a grounding in the underlying philosophy/worldview. It’s perhaps a noble goal to do all of that in one post, but I don’t think I personally am actually capable of that, and I think I ended up falling short of my standards on all three points. If you’ve read my sequence Intro To Naturalism, you might possibly share my feeling that the philosophy parts of Catching the Spark are some kind of desperate and muddled. Additionally, I think the demonstration parts are insufficiently real and insufficiently diverse. When I wrote the post, I mostly looked back at my memories to find illustrative examples, rather than catching my examples in real time. A version of this with demonstrations that meet my standards would have real-time notes, both from myself and from other people who have used the procedure.
The second category of objection I have is that the post relies heavily on a framing that I think is about 50% inaccurate. I think the posts makes it *sound* like this is a procedure that I designed for the purpose of curiosity cultivation. But it really isn’t. The curiosity stuff is more like a side effect, or perhaps an undercurrent of the way I do things-in-general. I think the way this procedure *really* came about is that I guided some people through the larger naturalism process, and kept being annoyed by how many weeds I kept having to pull well over a month in. The procedure is largely meant to pull those weeds at the very beginning. It’s really more about creating space for original seeing than it is about catching a spark of curiosity, but I’m also not sure there’s any one coherent thing that it’s about. It’s just “some stuff it turns out is a really good idea to do before you go investigating something in the particular way I’m calling ‘naturalism’”.
But I do still think the procedure itself is pretty good.
I’m skipping over the “claims” questions, ’cause I think the post is pretty light on claims. It’s mainly an instructional post, not an argumentative one. But feel free to follow up if you want to poke me about particular claims.
Follow-up work: All the naturalism stuff. I did the worldview sequence already (that was Intro To Naturalism). Now I’m doing the Nuts and Bolts sequence, which is more or less the “how-to”. Most of my hopes and dreams for this and related posts, though, come in the sequence after that: I want a collection of case studies and demonstrations. Basically there will be a whole series of instructional posts similar to this one, and I want several people (not just myself) to follow those instructions while focusing on stuff in the original Sequences; so like people demonstrating what it is like, in detail, to learn to actually change your mind, or to make your beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences, and I want this kind of resource to accompany many key posts on Lesswrong along with a handful of chapters from books like Scout Mindset and How To Measure Anything.
This was all very rambly and chaotic because that is in fact the state of my thoughts right now with respect to this post. Apologies. I welcome attempts to direct me with further questions.