According to the yoga traditions I am familiar with, uninvestigated/impure/mixed motives are quite a big deal and a primary predictor of success in self transformation. Glad to see it in the hypothesis space. A central example of this is that if you’re in the self help space for a while you’ll notice that many people are coming to you with the surface story of wanting change, but behaviors consistent with wanting fancy indirect excuses to not change, including things like being able to protest that you went to expensive workshops and everything and this proves that X really is intractable. Kegan refers to this as immunity to change, I like calling it the homeostatic prior, and relatedly at some point I got a doomy sense about CFAR after inquiring with various people and not being able to get a sense of a theory of change or a process that could converge to a theory of change for being able to diagnose this and other obstacles.
and relatedly at some point I got a doomy sense about CFAR after inquiring with various people and not being able to get a sense of a theory of change or a process that could converge to a theory of change for being able to diagnose this and other obstacles.
Can you say a bit more about what kind of a “theory of change” you’d want to see at CFAR, and why/how? I still don’t quite follow this point.
Weirdly, we encountered “behaviors consistent with wanting fancy indirect excuses to not change” less than I might’ve expected, though still some. This might’ve been because a lot of the “bugs” people tackled at the workshop were more like “technical barriers,” and less like what Kenzi used to call “load-bearing bugs.” Or maybe I missed a lot of it, or maybe … not sure.
Every org has a tacit theory of change implied by what they are doing, some also have an explicit one (eg poor to middling examples: business consulting orgs). Sometimes the tacit one lines up with the explicit one, sometimes not. I think having an explicit one is what allows you to reason about and iterate towards one that is functional. I don’t know the specific theory of change that would be a good fit for what CFAR was trying to do, I was, at the time, bouncing off the lack of any explicit one and some felt sense of resistance towards moving in the direction of having one in 1 on 1 conversations. I think I was expecting clearer thoughts since I believed that CFAR was in the business of investigating effect sizes of various theories of change related to diagnosing and then unblocking people who could work on x-risk.
Weirdly, we encountered “behaviors consistent with wanting fancy indirect excuses to not change” less than I might’ve expected, though still some.
This gets much stronger once you get big effect sizes that touch on core ways of navigating the world someone holds.
According to the yoga traditions I am familiar with, uninvestigated/impure/mixed motives are quite a big deal and a primary predictor of success in self transformation. Glad to see it in the hypothesis space. A central example of this is that if you’re in the self help space for a while you’ll notice that many people are coming to you with the surface story of wanting change, but behaviors consistent with wanting fancy indirect excuses to not change, including things like being able to protest that you went to expensive workshops and everything and this proves that X really is intractable. Kegan refers to this as immunity to change, I like calling it the homeostatic prior, and relatedly at some point I got a doomy sense about CFAR after inquiring with various people and not being able to get a sense of a theory of change or a process that could converge to a theory of change for being able to diagnose this and other obstacles.
Can you say a bit more about what kind of a “theory of change” you’d want to see at CFAR, and why/how? I still don’t quite follow this point.
Weirdly, we encountered “behaviors consistent with wanting fancy indirect excuses to not change” less than I might’ve expected, though still some. This might’ve been because a lot of the “bugs” people tackled at the workshop were more like “technical barriers,” and less like what Kenzi used to call “load-bearing bugs.” Or maybe I missed a lot of it, or maybe … not sure.
Every org has a tacit theory of change implied by what they are doing, some also have an explicit one (eg poor to middling examples: business consulting orgs). Sometimes the tacit one lines up with the explicit one, sometimes not. I think having an explicit one is what allows you to reason about and iterate towards one that is functional. I don’t know the specific theory of change that would be a good fit for what CFAR was trying to do, I was, at the time, bouncing off the lack of any explicit one and some felt sense of resistance towards moving in the direction of having one in 1 on 1 conversations. I think I was expecting clearer thoughts since I believed that CFAR was in the business of investigating effect sizes of various theories of change related to diagnosing and then unblocking people who could work on x-risk.
This gets much stronger once you get big effect sizes that touch on core ways of navigating the world someone holds.