I realize you totally did ask me to review a draft copy of this and I didn’t get around to it, but a pedagogical thing I notice here is that it’d probably have been useful to me (and I anticipate to others who follow your work less closely) to have two examples you were working through, which were as different as possible.
The example of “why do I form beliefs?” here is an introspective one. While it’s entangled with the outside world, the active territory you’re studying mostly lives inside you. If the domain you’re studying is more of a concrete thing that lives “out there in the world”, how do you engage with it? (This is similar to a question I previously asked about “okay, but, like, how would I Do Naturalism to learning about neural networks?”. You did have an answer which made sense)
A lot of the examples and mechanisms here feel fairly Logan-flavored, and one side effect of that is I’m not sure which of that flavor is more intrinsic to the technique, and which is just an artifact of “Logan wrote this as opposed to some other naturalist”.
(I think by this point I’ve got enough of a handle on things to answer this sort of question for myself, but it’s something I’d anticipate someone getting confused about, maybe without noticing they were confused).
This passage touched a bit on the thing I’m interested in here:
If I’m interested in what causes some things to float while others sink, crucial data may live near the surface of a pond. Where do the crucial data live when I’m interested in “what leads me to form beliefs, besides attempts to guess the truth”?
and an example of a “parallel example” here might have been “what’s up with buoyancy and/or gravity?”, and following that through the different subsections might have been helpful.
However, I’ve deliberately focused on “training rationality” in this sequence, so I think it makes sense for pretty much all of the examples to be “internal” in this way? This isn’t the only way to use naturalism, but it’s the use case that I’m most personally interested in focusing on, and the one where I have the most PCK.
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.
Something got weird in the way the other thread went, and I’d like to try rebooting from this save-game-point and trying again?
In Catching the Spark, you have two examples – geometry, and courage. I think it was useful to have a) two different examples (generally having multiple examples is useful for triangulating. Three examples is better for the actual “triangulation” part, since readers have fewer degrees of freedom to accidentally misinterpret things in, although each example is kinda costly both from pure writing time and the final post being longer, so, dunno if that’s worth it)
Something that feels particularly helpful about geometry and courage is that one is starting from more of an outward facing direction, and the other a more inward facing direction. In both cases, learning about the thing will include both external stimuli and internal thought processes. But, I expect for me, and I predict for some others, seeing how noticing external-facing and internal-facing stimuli might differ (and how it might be the same) is probably useful for actually learning the lessons you intended to convey.
As previously stated, I think by this point I have some sense of what things you tend-to-mean to be common to both or distinct, so I don’t feel that confused for my own sake, but I think past-me would have been confused.
More generally, whether or not my ontology of inward facing or outward facing is even relevant here, the general principle of “pick two examples that are as different as possible while still being fairly central examples of the concept you’re trying to convey” seems useful, so that people learn the thing at whatever-level-of-generality you were aiming at, rather than either overfitting or assuming it applies to literally everything.
I continue to have a feeling like “I don’t know how to interact with this without either falling into Ray’s ill-fitting framework and thus further confusing both of us, or completely failing to engage with his framework”. On the other hand I’m not sure I have tried, and perhaps I ought to try. Experience suggests that I will only succeed if I first ensure I don’t lose sight of whatever it is I can see from my current perspective, which is probably much of what I was up to in the previous thread, and that is probably why it seemed to you to “get weird”; I was halfway trying to say the relevant truths as I see them, and halfway trying to communicate with you, and I was not doing either of those things well as a result.
I do completely agree with everything @Duncan said in the other thread, and have said very similar things myself in the past, which perhaps I will post below as like supplementary reading or something. But I think it’s missing you because when I imagine you reading it I also imagine you responding with “But there really is a difference between trying to learn about things like ‘updating incrementally’ and trying to learn about things like ‘electromagnetism’.”
And I think I agree with (my imagined version of) you. Even if learning about things like “updating incrementally” requires learning about things like “electromagnetism” (which it does, at least in my own rationality framework and I suspect also in Eliezer’s, for whatever that’s worth), there is something different about setting out to study “updating incrementally” vs setting out to study “electromagnetism”.
What is different, according to me, is that studying electromagnetism by roughly naturalist methodology is way easier. It’s easier because the thing you’re trying to study is far less entangled with the tools you are using to study it. Things outside of the mind stay put in a way that things inside the mind do not. Which is why I made How To Observe Abstract Objects.
And it’s also most of why I made the course I talked about in the previous essay, and why I said that I wish everyone would start there. It’s almost the same set of tools, but it’s aimed at nature instead of at minds. This sequence is that course, but beefed up a bunch to contend with the unique difficulties of turning the cognitive tools on themselves, or something along those lines.
But I feel that I’m wandering away from communicating with you again. I think you approximately think that I should interweave my nature study course with this rationality sequence, because it would help people better understand what “naturalism” is, as a whole, and how to apply it in full generality. (Do you in fact think something like that?)
I think that if I were attempting to meet the goal of teaching people how to apply naturalism in full generality, I would probably agree with that. But in this particular sequence, I am not; I have learned over the years that I am capable of accomplishing at most one or two things at a time. Something about my cognitive and perceptual style, perhaps. And so even my “naturalist rationality sequence” is broken into three separate sequences: Intro to Naturalism, The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism, and whatever I’ll end up calling the demonstration sequence. I do very much like the idea of eventually synthesizing all three sequences into a single concise guidebook, but I think that I simply am not smart enough to write that guidebook without first writing each piece of it. And then, even beyond that not-yet-existant “Naturalist Rationality” guidebook, there are other guidebooks I would love to create, such as something like “Naturalist approaches to finding traction in pre-theoretic fields”, which I expect will require just as much groundwork as I have so far put into “Naturalist approaches to mastering the basics of rationality”.
But I am again only half-talking to you, I see. Perhaps I should shut up for now, see if you have anything for me to listen to, and try again later.
A thing I found a bit confusing was, like, you list ‘what’s up with how things float in water’ as a thing you might study and get in contact with. Which contributed to a sense that, like, central examples of the things this course was meant to be about studying would include both things like ‘courage’ and things like ‘stuff floating on water’. You also listed ‘how to apply comparative advantage’. So I think I’m still confused about what you see the focus area of this sequence as.
I’m still feeling fairly surprised/confused that this conversation has felt so frame-clashy. I keep not being very surprised by most of the words you’re saying, but then somehow it still feels like there’s a stronger disconnect than I expect.
“But there really is a difference between trying to learn about things like ‘updating incrementally’ and trying to learn about things like ‘electromagnetism’.”
I maybe want to clarify, I don’t think there’s (necessarily) a difference between learning about things like ‘updating incrementally’ and learning about things like ‘electromagnetism’. My claim is “the average reader will think there is a difference (whether there is or not), and, if it’s an assumption running through your work that they are the same, or close-to-the-same in many ways, readers may be confused because they aren’t tracking that this is an assumption of yours.
Does that still feel ill-fitting-frame-y?
(I think there were other frame-disagreements at play here, but this was the part where I was feeling most confused about having apparently talked past each other or whatnot)
I just noticed that you have a post called “Noticing Frame Differences”, and I’m gonna go read it (in the next few days) in case that turns out to help.
Honestly I don’t expect it to much, it’s mostly just covering the basics of “frames exist”. (It does cover how, like, even pretty similar frames can be subtly different in ways that are difficult to track, but, like, that’s just enough to make me sadly aware of what’s happening but not necessarily be able to do anything about it)
Here is the “supplementary reading” I mentioned, (which perhaps belongs instead under Duncan’s comment in the other thread).
In an earlier draft, my opening sentence for this essay was, “Once I’ve identified a question that’s crucial to my story, it’s time to start observing the world—not so much to find an answer, as to position myself to ask better questions.” A beta reader highlighted “it’s time to start observing the world”, and said this about it (paraphrased): “I found this to be a confusing first sentence, because it makes it sound like this part of naturalism is about ‘observing the world’; but as I understand it, this part of naturalism is about ‘observing my reactions to the world’.”
To which I replied:
>I think part of what’s going on here is that we have… not quite different ontologies, I think, in the sense that we think different entities exist… but at least different conceptualizations of the world and minds at a pretty fundamental level.
>I don’t know how to talk about this well yet, despite an awful lot of attempts (like the “Intro To Naturalism” sequence), but I’ll take a stab at talking about it anyway.
>There is no such thing as “observing the world as distinct from observing my /reactions/ to the world.” Instead, the real distinction that actually exists is between “learning about the world by observing my reactions to it and knowing that what I’m observing are my reactions” and “learning about the world by observing my reactions to it and not knowing that what I’m observing are my reactions”. There’s no such thing as looking directly at a cup, in the way it’s most natural to imagine. All you can do is point your eyes toward a cup, and be aware of whatever you experience as a result.
>When I take a naturalist approach to cup observation, I “try to look at my experience as I direct my eyes toward cups”. This is not because it is actually possible to observe cups any more directly than that, but because framing it as a study of my own experience is a really powerful strategy mitigating the damage that map/territory conflations ordinarily cause to attempts to learn about things and solve problems.
>So when I’m “observing my experience of a cup”, I am actually doing my very best to observe the outside world. In fact I’m attempting to observe the outside world more accurately and precisely than I ordinarily could while merely “trying to observe cups”, because when I am aware that I’m observing my own experience, I am also aware that what exists in the world is distinct from my experience in various ways, even if I don’t understand what those ways are. My awareness of that distinction grants me much more freedom to hypothesize about other ways the actual world could be, and so whatever conclusions I draw about cups as a result contain less interference from my own reactions to cups. By observing my reactions to cups, I end up forming cup models that have less to do with me, and more to do with cups.
>Like imagine that you see a straw in a glass of water (for the first time). This seems weird to you, since straws are supposed to be straight, so you deicide to study it and try to figure out what’s going on.
>Imagine two different ways of approaching that study.
>The first way, you start with the question, “Why do straws bend when you stick them in water?”
>The second way, you start with the question, “Why do straws look to me as though they bend when you stick them in water?”
>In the second case you’re studying your reactions to straws in water, but you’re more likely to end up more quickly with models that involve how light works, because you recognized from the outset that “the straw itself bends” is not actually what you observed; what you actually observed is “the image of the straw that appears in my mind under these conditions bends”.
>A major thesis of mine is that “everything we cast our attention on is like the staw, to varying degrees”, and I tend to go “oh naturalism is an especially good idea for this person in particular” when I hear about their problem/curiosity/interest and it makes me think “ah yes, that right there sounds especially much like a bent straw”.
(Rationality, I claim, is absolutely chock full of bent straws, much more so than the vast majority of other fields of study.)
My beta reader found this response helpful, but they also were starting with a different set of thoughts than you are, I think. Still, I do wonder whether it does anything to bridge the gap between us.
I realize you totally did ask me to review a draft copy of this and I didn’t get around to it, but a pedagogical thing I notice here is that it’d probably have been useful to me (and I anticipate to others who follow your work less closely) to have two examples you were working through, which were as different as possible.
The example of “why do I form beliefs?” here is an introspective one. While it’s entangled with the outside world, the active territory you’re studying mostly lives inside you. If the domain you’re studying is more of a concrete thing that lives “out there in the world”, how do you engage with it? (This is similar to a question I previously asked about “okay, but, like, how would I Do Naturalism to learning about neural networks?”. You did have an answer which made sense)
A lot of the examples and mechanisms here feel fairly Logan-flavored, and one side effect of that is I’m not sure which of that flavor is more intrinsic to the technique, and which is just an artifact of “Logan wrote this as opposed to some other naturalist”.
(I think by this point I’ve got enough of a handle on things to answer this sort of question for myself, but it’s something I’d anticipate someone getting confused about, maybe without noticing they were confused).
This passage touched a bit on the thing I’m interested in here:
and an example of a “parallel example” here might have been “what’s up with buoyancy and/or gravity?”, and following that through the different subsections might have been helpful.
Yes, that seems right to me.
However, I’ve deliberately focused on “training rationality” in this sequence, so I think it makes sense for pretty much all of the examples to be “internal” in this way? This isn’t the only way to use naturalism, but it’s the use case that I’m most personally interested in focusing on, and the one where I have the most PCK.
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.
Something got weird in the way the other thread went, and I’d like to try rebooting from this save-game-point and trying again?
In Catching the Spark, you have two examples – geometry, and courage. I think it was useful to have a) two different examples (generally having multiple examples is useful for triangulating. Three examples is better for the actual “triangulation” part, since readers have fewer degrees of freedom to accidentally misinterpret things in, although each example is kinda costly both from pure writing time and the final post being longer, so, dunno if that’s worth it)
Something that feels particularly helpful about geometry and courage is that one is starting from more of an outward facing direction, and the other a more inward facing direction. In both cases, learning about the thing will include both external stimuli and internal thought processes. But, I expect for me, and I predict for some others, seeing how noticing external-facing and internal-facing stimuli might differ (and how it might be the same) is probably useful for actually learning the lessons you intended to convey.
As previously stated, I think by this point I have some sense of what things you tend-to-mean to be common to both or distinct, so I don’t feel that confused for my own sake, but I think past-me would have been confused.
More generally, whether or not my ontology of inward facing or outward facing is even relevant here, the general principle of “pick two examples that are as different as possible while still being fairly central examples of the concept you’re trying to convey” seems useful, so that people learn the thing at whatever-level-of-generality you were aiming at, rather than either overfitting or assuming it applies to literally everything.
I continue to have a feeling like “I don’t know how to interact with this without either falling into Ray’s ill-fitting framework and thus further confusing both of us, or completely failing to engage with his framework”. On the other hand I’m not sure I have tried, and perhaps I ought to try. Experience suggests that I will only succeed if I first ensure I don’t lose sight of whatever it is I can see from my current perspective, which is probably much of what I was up to in the previous thread, and that is probably why it seemed to you to “get weird”; I was halfway trying to say the relevant truths as I see them, and halfway trying to communicate with you, and I was not doing either of those things well as a result.
I do completely agree with everything @Duncan said in the other thread, and have said very similar things myself in the past, which perhaps I will post below as like supplementary reading or something. But I think it’s missing you because when I imagine you reading it I also imagine you responding with “But there really is a difference between trying to learn about things like ‘updating incrementally’ and trying to learn about things like ‘electromagnetism’.”
And I think I agree with (my imagined version of) you. Even if learning about things like “updating incrementally” requires learning about things like “electromagnetism” (which it does, at least in my own rationality framework and I suspect also in Eliezer’s, for whatever that’s worth), there is something different about setting out to study “updating incrementally” vs setting out to study “electromagnetism”.
What is different, according to me, is that studying electromagnetism by roughly naturalist methodology is way easier. It’s easier because the thing you’re trying to study is far less entangled with the tools you are using to study it. Things outside of the mind stay put in a way that things inside the mind do not. Which is why I made How To Observe Abstract Objects.
And it’s also most of why I made the course I talked about in the previous essay, and why I said that I wish everyone would start there. It’s almost the same set of tools, but it’s aimed at nature instead of at minds. This sequence is that course, but beefed up a bunch to contend with the unique difficulties of turning the cognitive tools on themselves, or something along those lines.
But I feel that I’m wandering away from communicating with you again. I think you approximately think that I should interweave my nature study course with this rationality sequence, because it would help people better understand what “naturalism” is, as a whole, and how to apply it in full generality. (Do you in fact think something like that?)
I think that if I were attempting to meet the goal of teaching people how to apply naturalism in full generality, I would probably agree with that. But in this particular sequence, I am not; I have learned over the years that I am capable of accomplishing at most one or two things at a time. Something about my cognitive and perceptual style, perhaps. And so even my “naturalist rationality sequence” is broken into three separate sequences: Intro to Naturalism, The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism, and whatever I’ll end up calling the demonstration sequence. I do very much like the idea of eventually synthesizing all three sequences into a single concise guidebook, but I think that I simply am not smart enough to write that guidebook without first writing each piece of it. And then, even beyond that not-yet-existant “Naturalist Rationality” guidebook, there are other guidebooks I would love to create, such as something like “Naturalist approaches to finding traction in pre-theoretic fields”, which I expect will require just as much groundwork as I have so far put into “Naturalist approaches to mastering the basics of rationality”.
But I am again only half-talking to you, I see. Perhaps I should shut up for now, see if you have anything for me to listen to, and try again later.
That all honestly seems pretty reasonable.
A thing I found a bit confusing was, like, you list ‘what’s up with how things float in water’ as a thing you might study and get in contact with. Which contributed to a sense that, like, central examples of the things this course was meant to be about studying would include both things like ‘courage’ and things like ‘stuff floating on water’. You also listed ‘how to apply comparative advantage’. So I think I’m still confused about what you see the focus area of this sequence as.
I’m still feeling fairly surprised/confused that this conversation has felt so frame-clashy. I keep not being very surprised by most of the words you’re saying, but then somehow it still feels like there’s a stronger disconnect than I expect.
I maybe want to clarify, I don’t think there’s (necessarily) a difference between learning about things like ‘updating incrementally’ and learning about things like ‘electromagnetism’. My claim is “the average reader will think there is a difference (whether there is or not), and, if it’s an assumption running through your work that they are the same, or close-to-the-same in many ways, readers may be confused because they aren’t tracking that this is an assumption of yours.
Does that still feel ill-fitting-frame-y?
(I think there were other frame-disagreements at play here, but this was the part where I was feeling most confused about having apparently talked past each other or whatnot)
I just noticed that you have a post called “Noticing Frame Differences”, and I’m gonna go read it (in the next few days) in case that turns out to help.
Honestly I don’t expect it to much, it’s mostly just covering the basics of “frames exist”. (It does cover how, like, even pretty similar frames can be subtly different in ways that are difficult to track, but, like, that’s just enough to make me sadly aware of what’s happening but not necessarily be able to do anything about it)
Here is the “supplementary reading” I mentioned, (which perhaps belongs instead under Duncan’s comment in the other thread).
In an earlier draft, my opening sentence for this essay was, “Once I’ve identified a question that’s crucial to my story, it’s time to start observing the world—not so much to find an answer, as to position myself to ask better questions.” A beta reader highlighted “it’s time to start observing the world”, and said this about it (paraphrased): “I found this to be a confusing first sentence, because it makes it sound like this part of naturalism is about ‘observing the world’; but as I understand it, this part of naturalism is about ‘observing my reactions to the world’.”
To which I replied:
>I think part of what’s going on here is that we have… not quite different ontologies, I think, in the sense that we think different entities exist… but at least different conceptualizations of the world and minds at a pretty fundamental level.
>I don’t know how to talk about this well yet, despite an awful lot of attempts (like the “Intro To Naturalism” sequence), but I’ll take a stab at talking about it anyway.
>There is no such thing as “observing the world as distinct from observing my /reactions/ to the world.” Instead, the real distinction that actually exists is between “learning about the world by observing my reactions to it and knowing that what I’m observing are my reactions” and “learning about the world by observing my reactions to it and not knowing that what I’m observing are my reactions”. There’s no such thing as looking directly at a cup, in the way it’s most natural to imagine. All you can do is point your eyes toward a cup, and be aware of whatever you experience as a result.
>When I take a naturalist approach to cup observation, I “try to look at my experience as I direct my eyes toward cups”. This is not because it is actually possible to observe cups any more directly than that, but because framing it as a study of my own experience is a really powerful strategy mitigating the damage that map/territory conflations ordinarily cause to attempts to learn about things and solve problems.
>So when I’m “observing my experience of a cup”, I am actually doing my very best to observe the outside world. In fact I’m attempting to observe the outside world more accurately and precisely than I ordinarily could while merely “trying to observe cups”, because when I am aware that I’m observing my own experience, I am also aware that what exists in the world is distinct from my experience in various ways, even if I don’t understand what those ways are. My awareness of that distinction grants me much more freedom to hypothesize about other ways the actual world could be, and so whatever conclusions I draw about cups as a result contain less interference from my own reactions to cups. By observing my reactions to cups, I end up forming cup models that have less to do with me, and more to do with cups.
>Like imagine that you see a straw in a glass of water (for the first time). This seems weird to you, since straws are supposed to be straight, so you deicide to study it and try to figure out what’s going on.
>Imagine two different ways of approaching that study.
>The first way, you start with the question, “Why do straws bend when you stick them in water?”
>The second way, you start with the question, “Why do straws look to me as though they bend when you stick them in water?”
>In the second case you’re studying your reactions to straws in water, but you’re more likely to end up more quickly with models that involve how light works, because you recognized from the outset that “the straw itself bends” is not actually what you observed; what you actually observed is “the image of the straw that appears in my mind under these conditions bends”.
>A major thesis of mine is that “everything we cast our attention on is like the staw, to varying degrees”, and I tend to go “oh naturalism is an especially good idea for this person in particular” when I hear about their problem/curiosity/interest and it makes me think “ah yes, that right there sounds especially much like a bent straw”.
(Rationality, I claim, is absolutely chock full of bent straws, much more so than the vast majority of other fields of study.)
My beta reader found this response helpful, but they also were starting with a different set of thoughts than you are, I think. Still, I do wonder whether it does anything to bridge the gap between us.