It has been six months since I wrote this, and I want to note an update: I now grok what Valentine is trying to say and what he is pointing at in Here’s the Exit and We’re already in AI takeoff. That is, I have a detailed enough model of Valentine’s model of the things he talks about, such that I understand the things he is saying.
The fundamental issue is that we are communicating in language, the medium of ideas, so it is easy to get stuck in ideas. The only way to get someone to start looking, insofar as that is possible, is to point at things using words, and to get them to do things. This is why I tell you to do things like wave your arms about or attack someone with your personal bubble or try to initiate the action of touching a hot stove element.
Most of that isn’t grounded in reality, but that fact is hard to miss because the thinker isn’t distinguishing between thoughts and reality.
Looking is just the skill of looking at reality prior to thought. It’s really not complicated. It’s just very, very easy to misunderstand if you fixate on mentally understanding it instead of doing it. Which sadly seems to be the default response to the idea of Looking.
I am unsure if this differs from mundane metacognitive skills like “notice the inchoate cognitions that arise in your mind-body, that aren’t necessarily verbal”. I assume that Valentine is pointing at a certain class of cognition, one that is essentially entirely free of interpretation. Or perhaps before ‘value-ness’ is attached to an experience—such as “this experience is good because <elaborate strategic chain>” or “this experience is bad because it hurts!”
I understand how a better metacognitive skillset would lead to the benefits Valentine mentioned, but I don’t think it requires you to only stay at the level of “direct embodied perception prior to thought”.
I may have a better answer for the concrete thing that it allows you to do: it’s fully generalizing the move of un-goodharting. Buddhism seems to be about doing this for happiness/inverse-suffering, though in principle you could pick a different navigational target (maybe).
Concretely, this should show up as being able to decondition induced reward loops and thus not be caught up in any negative compulsive behaviors.
I think that “fully generalized un-goodharting” is a pretty vague phrase and I could probably come up with a better one, but it is an acceptable pointer term for now. So I assume it is something like ‘anti-myopia’? Hard to know at this point. I’d need more experience and experimentation and thought to get a better idea of this.
I believe that Here’s the Exit, We’re already in AI Takeoff, and Slack matters more than any outcome all were pointing at the same cluster of skills and thought—about realizing the existence of psyops, systematic vulnerabilities or issues that leads you (whatever ‘you’ means) to forgetting the ‘bigger picture’, and that the resulting myopia causes significantly bad outcomes from the perspective of the ‘whole’ individual/society/whatever.
In general, Lexicogenesis seems like a really important sub-skill for deconfusion.
It has been six months since I wrote this, and I want to note an update: I now grok what Valentine is trying to say and what he is pointing at in Here’s the Exit and We’re already in AI takeoff. That is, I have a detailed enough model of Valentine’s model of the things he talks about, such that I understand the things he is saying.
I still don’t feel like I understand Kensho. I get the pattern of the epistemic puzzle he is demonstrating, but I don’t know if I get the object-level thing he points at. Based on a reread of the comments, maybe what Valentine means by Looking is essentially gnosis, as opposed to doxa. An understanding grounded in your experience rather than an ungrounded one you absorbed from someone else’s claims. See this comment by someone else who is not Valentine in that post:
Alternately, Valentine describes the process of Looking as “Direct embodied perception prior to thought.”:
I am unsure if this differs from mundane metacognitive skills like “notice the inchoate cognitions that arise in your mind-body, that aren’t necessarily verbal”. I assume that Valentine is pointing at a certain class of cognition, one that is essentially entirely free of interpretation. Or perhaps before ‘value-ness’ is attached to an experience—such as “this experience is good because <elaborate strategic chain>” or “this experience is bad because it hurts!”
I understand how a better metacognitive skillset would lead to the benefits Valentine mentioned, but I don’t think it requires you to only stay at the level of “direct embodied perception prior to thought”.
As for kensho, it seems to be a term for some skill that leads you to be able to do what romeostevensit calls ‘fully generalized un-goodharting’:
I think that “fully generalized un-goodharting” is a pretty vague phrase and I could probably come up with a better one, but it is an acceptable pointer term for now. So I assume it is something like ‘anti-myopia’? Hard to know at this point. I’d need more experience and experimentation and thought to get a better idea of this.
I believe that Here’s the Exit, We’re already in AI Takeoff, and Slack matters more than any outcome all were pointing at the same cluster of skills and thought—about realizing the existence of psyops, systematic vulnerabilities or issues that leads you (whatever ‘you’ means) to forgetting the ‘bigger picture’, and that the resulting myopia causes significantly bad outcomes from the perspective of the ‘whole’ individual/society/whatever.
In general, Lexicogenesis seems like a really important sub-skill for deconfusion.