Gotcha. I’m not sure if you already did and I missed it, but it might be helpful to spell that out somewhat in the intro. (I think it might even make sense for the sequence to have a somewhat more specific name if that’s the goal)
Hm. Well, the very first sentence of the sequence is, “Naturalism is a general-purpose procedure for advancing one’s art of rationality.” Which is true but incomplete, like most statements I know how to make, but it does seem to me to frame this sequence appropriately. But apparently I was wrong in your case, at minimum!
I think I can make some small edits to that essay under “What is this sequence?” that will help.
I think one thing is that I’m currently thinking a lot in terms of “a good art of rationality should involve contact with the territory [of things other than your mind and the rationality-or-lack-thereof-that-lives-inside it]” (which I think is a thing you also believe?)
I was expecting the sequence to primarily (or at least have a significant focus) on studying something-other-than-your-mind, while also having good self-awareness in the process.
Hm, perhaps you imagine that I’m about to spend a whole sequence advocating for studying your mind without engaging with the world?
I suspect you’re employing a distinction that I do not honor.
I mean, to use the example in the essay, when are these fulcrum experiences of eg “puppeteering myself” going to show up? Not when I’m sitting in a lounge chair introspecting. Most of what I am actually doing with myself lately is 1) writing, editing, and publishing essays (and making paintings for them), 2) navigating the third trimester of pregnancy (dealing with a ton of stuff about how my body works, learning about birth, learning about tiny children, working with midwives and doulas and so forth), and 3) setting up my environment so that it will support me and my family when we have very little attention to spare (building garden boxes, getting the wild-bird-feeding arrangement just right so I don’t have to fix it later, setting up my recovery space, improving systems around food and other maintenance activities, other stuff). So when I notice “puppeteering myself” (if I choose to study that), it will happen when I realize that someone more skilled at construction than me is watching me secure hardware cloth with fence staples. It will happen when a commenter points out a possible flaw in my attempt to navigate the tricky balance between fidelity and brevity in written examples. It will happen when my bush strokes do not accomplish the visual effect I believe I have imagined, because I was in fact imagining a social role rather than any particular physical shape or hue. It will happen when I have a disagreement with my primary care doctor about the risks and benefits of taking a certain medication at this point in pregnancy. It will happen when I try to figure out why the Stellar’s Jay near my feeder keeps making sounds that imitate a red-tailed hawk.
The entire time, no matter whether you topic seems more stereotypically “internal” or “external”, naturalism it is really about your internal experience in contact with the external world. There’s not really such a thing as an internal topic or an external topic. The methodology focuses on the interface.
hmm, this way this convo is going feels… maybe more fighty than I intended (or at least wanted in retrospect)
I do think “I’m holding a distinction that you don’t hold” is probably relevant, and I am interested in talking about it more. But maybe what I want to do next is go reread the previous post and actually think about the sort of things I might want to study.
>I think one thing is that I’m currently thinking a lot in terms of “a good art of rationality should involve contact with the territory [of things other than your mind and the rationality-or-lack-thereof-that-lives-inside it]” (which I think is a thing you also believe?)
Yes, I do indeed think that a good art of rationality should involve contact with mind-independent territory. Constantly. Relentlessly. I… I think that’s a thesis of the naturalist program? It is why I’m all “and you will observe these things in daily life: as you engage with your projects at work (which may involve coding, or math, or cooking, or whatever it is you do), as you read bedtime stories to your children, as you learn underwater basket weaving, whatever.” Like, do not just sit here and read and think until you think you have things figured out inside of your head. Go do stuff, go try to understand how the world works in practice. Not in the context of this essay, not in the context of a one hour class or a four day workshop, but in the context of how you actually navigate the world on a daily basis.
Claim: this sequence is almost one hundred percent about studying something other than your mind, and what’s happening is a confusion between tools and purposes.
At a very coarse/gross level of understanding, the way that we gather information about objects is by hurling other objects at them, and watching the interaction. This is one way to think about light—we throw trillions of tiny photons at an object, and the way they bounce off gives us information about the object (its location, shape, surface properties, etc).
Ditto sound waves, now that I think of it (the photon analogy is from Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe).
The key point is that we never quite interact directly with the object. We do on human scales; there’s a thing we call “direct interaction” that makes sense to talk about. But actually what’s going on is that we’re perceiving photons that are out there hurtling through the void, and constructing understanding via extrapolation about what those photons interacted with a fraction of a second earlier.
We don’t talk about “studying the photons” when we describe looking at an object, though. We gloss over that step, handwave it away.
This sequence is, I think, about looking at things other than your brain.
But it focuses on the analogue of the photons themselves. It’s looking through your own phenomenology, to understand what’s really going on out there. It’s saying (roughly) “notice how these photons bounce off this way, and these other photons bounce off that way, and these other photons get absorbed, and see what you can reasonably conclude about the object, given those facts.”
So there’s a heavy focus on your own perceptions, and your emotional reactions, and so forth, but it’s in service of understanding the object that is upstream of [your brain reacting in such a way].
Honestly, I was somewhat surprised to hear @Raemon ’s complaint, and at first bewildered/taken aback, because it hadn’t even occurred to me that this sequence might be mistaken for being about minds/brains. But of course it does talk a lot about the internals of one’s experience, so I understand the confusion! Ray’s complaint isn’t coming out of nowhere!
But to tack on yet another analogy, I feel sort of like just … reassuring the complaint away? In the same way that, if I were teaching a parkour class and a student was like, wait, why are we doing pushups and stretches, I thought we were here to do vaults, I would be like yes, yes, don’t worry, we are absolutely getting to the vaults, but this is important preparation for the vaults, and will help you build up the strength and physical vocabulary necessary to be non-lost once we start working on the vaults, which is coming right up, actually.
I don’t know that a response here is specifically needed. I thought about adding a line “to be clear, I think there’s clearly enough content to warrant a course/practice/sequence focused on the thing I now-understand-this-sequence-to-be-about, so, like, I’m not saying you should have written a different thing or whatever.”
I meant my second paragraph to just be “here’s what I was expecting, fwiw” (without claiming that was, like, an appropriate thing to expect) and the first paragraph to be “here’s some model I have on my mind that I’d interested in talking about, as part of a longer term conversation about how to push the art of rationality forward”, but, not necessarily super relevant to this sequence.
Gotcha. I’m not sure if you already did and I missed it, but it might be helpful to spell that out somewhat in the intro. (I think it might even make sense for the sequence to have a somewhat more specific name if that’s the goal)
Hm. Well, the very first sentence of the sequence is, “Naturalism is a general-purpose procedure for advancing one’s art of rationality.” Which is true but incomplete, like most statements I know how to make, but it does seem to me to frame this sequence appropriately. But apparently I was wrong in your case, at minimum!
I think I can make some small edits to that essay under “What is this sequence?” that will help.
I think one thing is that I’m currently thinking a lot in terms of “a good art of rationality should involve contact with the territory [of things other than your mind and the rationality-or-lack-thereof-that-lives-inside it]” (which I think is a thing you also believe?)
I was expecting the sequence to primarily (or at least have a significant focus) on studying something-other-than-your-mind, while also having good self-awareness in the process.
Hm, perhaps you imagine that I’m about to spend a whole sequence advocating for studying your mind without engaging with the world?
I suspect you’re employing a distinction that I do not honor.
I mean, to use the example in the essay, when are these fulcrum experiences of eg “puppeteering myself” going to show up? Not when I’m sitting in a lounge chair introspecting. Most of what I am actually doing with myself lately is 1) writing, editing, and publishing essays (and making paintings for them), 2) navigating the third trimester of pregnancy (dealing with a ton of stuff about how my body works, learning about birth, learning about tiny children, working with midwives and doulas and so forth), and 3) setting up my environment so that it will support me and my family when we have very little attention to spare (building garden boxes, getting the wild-bird-feeding arrangement just right so I don’t have to fix it later, setting up my recovery space, improving systems around food and other maintenance activities, other stuff). So when I notice “puppeteering myself” (if I choose to study that), it will happen when I realize that someone more skilled at construction than me is watching me secure hardware cloth with fence staples. It will happen when a commenter points out a possible flaw in my attempt to navigate the tricky balance between fidelity and brevity in written examples. It will happen when my bush strokes do not accomplish the visual effect I believe I have imagined, because I was in fact imagining a social role rather than any particular physical shape or hue. It will happen when I have a disagreement with my primary care doctor about the risks and benefits of taking a certain medication at this point in pregnancy. It will happen when I try to figure out why the Stellar’s Jay near my feeder keeps making sounds that imitate a red-tailed hawk.
The entire time, no matter whether you topic seems more stereotypically “internal” or “external”, naturalism it is really about your internal experience in contact with the external world. There’s not really such a thing as an internal topic or an external topic. The methodology focuses on the interface.
hmm, this way this convo is going feels… maybe more fighty than I intended (or at least wanted in retrospect)
I do think “I’m holding a distinction that you don’t hold” is probably relevant, and I am interested in talking about it more. But maybe what I want to do next is go reread the previous post and actually think about the sort of things I might want to study.
>I think one thing is that I’m currently thinking a lot in terms of “a good art of rationality should involve contact with the territory [of things other than your mind and the rationality-or-lack-thereof-that-lives-inside it]” (which I think is a thing you also believe?)
Yes, I do indeed think that a good art of rationality should involve contact with mind-independent territory. Constantly. Relentlessly. I… I think that’s a thesis of the naturalist program? It is why I’m all “and you will observe these things in daily life: as you engage with your projects at work (which may involve coding, or math, or cooking, or whatever it is you do), as you read bedtime stories to your children, as you learn underwater basket weaving, whatever.” Like, do not just sit here and read and think until you think you have things figured out inside of your head. Go do stuff, go try to understand how the world works in practice. Not in the context of this essay, not in the context of a one hour class or a four day workshop, but in the context of how you actually navigate the world on a daily basis.
I’m not sure how to respond to this, and for some reason I want to know if @Duncan_Sabien has anything to say.
Claim: this sequence is almost one hundred percent about studying something other than your mind, and what’s happening is a confusion between tools and purposes.
At a very coarse/gross level of understanding, the way that we gather information about objects is by hurling other objects at them, and watching the interaction. This is one way to think about light—we throw trillions of tiny photons at an object, and the way they bounce off gives us information about the object (its location, shape, surface properties, etc).
Ditto sound waves, now that I think of it (the photon analogy is from Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe).
The key point is that we never quite interact directly with the object. We do on human scales; there’s a thing we call “direct interaction” that makes sense to talk about. But actually what’s going on is that we’re perceiving photons that are out there hurtling through the void, and constructing understanding via extrapolation about what those photons interacted with a fraction of a second earlier.
We don’t talk about “studying the photons” when we describe looking at an object, though. We gloss over that step, handwave it away.
This sequence is, I think, about looking at things other than your brain.
But it focuses on the analogue of the photons themselves. It’s looking through your own phenomenology, to understand what’s really going on out there. It’s saying (roughly) “notice how these photons bounce off this way, and these other photons bounce off that way, and these other photons get absorbed, and see what you can reasonably conclude about the object, given those facts.”
So there’s a heavy focus on your own perceptions, and your emotional reactions, and so forth, but it’s in service of understanding the object that is upstream of [your brain reacting in such a way].
Honestly, I was somewhat surprised to hear @Raemon ’s complaint, and at first bewildered/taken aback, because it hadn’t even occurred to me that this sequence might be mistaken for being about minds/brains. But of course it does talk a lot about the internals of one’s experience, so I understand the confusion! Ray’s complaint isn’t coming out of nowhere!
But to tack on yet another analogy, I feel sort of like just … reassuring the complaint away? In the same way that, if I were teaching a parkour class and a student was like, wait, why are we doing pushups and stretches, I thought we were here to do vaults, I would be like yes, yes, don’t worry, we are absolutely getting to the vaults, but this is important preparation for the vaults, and will help you build up the strength and physical vocabulary necessary to be non-lost once we start working on the vaults, which is coming right up, actually.
@Raemon FYI there isn’t internet at our place since ~26h ago so Logan probably hasn’t looked at this or any other responses yet.
I don’t know that a response here is specifically needed. I thought about adding a line “to be clear, I think there’s clearly enough content to warrant a course/practice/sequence focused on the thing I now-understand-this-sequence-to-be-about, so, like, I’m not saying you should have written a different thing or whatever.”
I meant my second paragraph to just be “here’s what I was expecting, fwiw” (without claiming that was, like, an appropriate thing to expect) and the first paragraph to be “here’s some model I have on my mind that I’d interested in talking about, as part of a longer term conversation about how to push the art of rationality forward”, but, not necessarily super relevant to this sequence.