In his youth, Steve Jobs went to India to be enlightened. After seeing that the nation claiming to be the source of this great spiritual knowledge was full of hunger, ignorance, squalor, poverty, prejudice, and disease, he came back and said that the East should look to the West for enlightenment.
But then I noticed that you aren’t promoting woo as a means to external success, only solving internal problems (depression, anxiety, akrasia). That’s fine, I guess? Western culture certainly doesn’t have a good track record against anxiety. I’d still want to see rational solutions, but woo is better than no solution at all.
The worrying possibility is that anxiety etc. is part of the price we pay for the nice things we have. Giving up modernity can lead to horrible results that are all too familiar. And modernity hasn’t won yet, the world can slide back any minute. I certainly don’t feel that my ability for independent thought (weak as it is) would survive a switch to woo. What do others think?
I certainly don’t feel that my ability for independent thought (weak as it is) would survive a switch to woo. What do others think?
I don’t feel like my capacity to think has been harmed by dabbling in woo (Tantra, bits and pieces of mythic mode) but I do think a certain level of epistemic strength is necessary to avoid being washed away by the tide, and I’ve met people dabbling in woo (not rationalists) who don’t have it and whose epistemics are compromised accordingly.
(But I think most people have this property, it’s just that their epistemics are usually being compromised in a more broadly socially acceptable direction. If you don’t also take ideas seriously this doesn’t matter much either way. So the only people at risk here are people who both take ideas seriously and worry that they’re epistemically weak.)
Responding to the “western culture isn’t good at dealing with anxiety section”:
I think anxiety is a bit of a special case, and also that internal problems are hard to distinguish from external problems. Take for example lead-poisoning, which seems to have drastically increased violence and impulsiveness in places with leaded gasoline, and I am very skeptical that any internal intervention would have helped people affected by lead poisoning. Similarly we have antidepressants which have a pretty good track record of working for anxiety and depression.
Overall I would say that western culture has a stronger track record of finding scalable solutions to mental problems than any other culture, though competitive pressures certainly have also caused it to adopt a bunch of factors that are now causing people anxiety (though overall western cultures still appear to be the self-reported happiest cultures in the world, as well as the least anxious cultures in the world, based on quick googling).
There is maybe an argument to be made that what you truly mean by non-modernity is a hunter-gatherer society, but what lives those lives and what levels of anxiety they experiences strikes me as a much harder question.
Lifetime rates of clinical depression and anxiety in the West tend to be approximately 4 to 10 times greater than rates in Asia. In this review, we explore one possible reason for this cross-cultural difference...
I certainly don’t feel that my ability for independent thought (weak as it is) would survive a switch to woo. What do others think?
Having done a reasonable bit of role-playing and fiction writing, I feel reasonably confident in my ability to run different ways of thinking in sandboxes, though I obviously need to be careful.
I certainly don’t feel that my ability for independent thought (weak as it is) would survive a switch to woo. What do others think?
If you have enough social contact with rationalists, I don’t think the danger of drifting to deep into woo is big. Social feedback from people who think rigorously is likely to keep you in a good sphere.
I seriously doubt that’ll ever happen. The closest I would expect is if the community schisms on an axis like “Is mythic mode okay to use?” and the mantle of “rationalist” is seen as moving with the “yes” camp. And I think that whole schism would be dumb and would make both groups dumber regardless of what happens to which labels.
I have done a decent amount of “woo” (meditation, a bit of Val-style mythic mode) in the past years, and my ability for independent thought and especially independent action seem to have gone way up.
While my primate political side really likes the alignment and agreement, I want to encourage good epistemic norms here. So, I’ll ask an impolitic question:
What gives you the impression that your ability for independent thought and action has “gone way up”? In particular, how do you know that you aren’t kidding yourself? (Not meaning to claim you are! Just trying to nudge toward sharing the causes of your belief here.)
Appreciate the impolitic question. :) I think I was doing some sort of social move that was trying to reset the burden of proof, rather than actually sharing data, but of course sharing data is better. (I do think people too often assume that their status quo bias is some sort of principled wisdom, so asking “are you sure the burden of proof is on your side?” is moderately useful. But data is better.)
I’m more confident on the independent action side than the independent thought side, so I’ll start with that: I am taking more concrete steps towards achieving my goals, in ways that (inside-view) seem directly related to meditation et. al. For instance, I’m noticing much faster when I’m unhappy with a situation, and taking action more directly to fix it. Some specific examples are quitting my job last spring, and successfully pitching my boss on a change of plan at my current job. (Possible confounder is that I’m generally gaining confidence over time, and am getting more career capital, so maybe I would get better at these things anyway. I’m not immediately sure how to prove that this isn’t true, though it inside-view doesn’t seem to be.)
In terms of independent thought, I’ve been able to do things like e.g. plan out a strategy for a startup that requires some not-yet-fully-achieved innovation, and am making steady progress at chipping away at the remaining unknowns. In the past, I anticipate I would have been overwhelmed by the sense that I wasn’t allowed to do that, or that there were too many unknowns to be able to plan, but meditation and CFAR practices help me to separate that from the work of understanding it better.
None of this directly relates to mythic mode, because I haven’t done much of specifically that. My main instance of using mythic mode was at the CFAR tier II workshop, where we used it to uncover a deeply hidden emotional trait (specifically a fear of my own anger), which has been emotionally and socially helpful to recognize and deal with. It feels like having awareness of that is pretty important for being able to think and act effectively, but I don’t have good external evidence of that.
At first I wanted to react like Phil Goetz did to Scott’s old post Crowley on Religious Experience:
But then I noticed that you aren’t promoting woo as a means to external success, only solving internal problems (depression, anxiety, akrasia). That’s fine, I guess? Western culture certainly doesn’t have a good track record against anxiety. I’d still want to see rational solutions, but woo is better than no solution at all.
The worrying possibility is that anxiety etc. is part of the price we pay for the nice things we have. Giving up modernity can lead to horrible results that are all too familiar. And modernity hasn’t won yet, the world can slide back any minute. I certainly don’t feel that my ability for independent thought (weak as it is) would survive a switch to woo. What do others think?
I don’t feel like my capacity to think has been harmed by dabbling in woo (Tantra, bits and pieces of mythic mode) but I do think a certain level of epistemic strength is necessary to avoid being washed away by the tide, and I’ve met people dabbling in woo (not rationalists) who don’t have it and whose epistemics are compromised accordingly.
(But I think most people have this property, it’s just that their epistemics are usually being compromised in a more broadly socially acceptable direction. If you don’t also take ideas seriously this doesn’t matter much either way. So the only people at risk here are people who both take ideas seriously and worry that they’re epistemically weak.)
Responding to the “western culture isn’t good at dealing with anxiety section”:
I think anxiety is a bit of a special case, and also that internal problems are hard to distinguish from external problems. Take for example lead-poisoning, which seems to have drastically increased violence and impulsiveness in places with leaded gasoline, and I am very skeptical that any internal intervention would have helped people affected by lead poisoning. Similarly we have antidepressants which have a pretty good track record of working for anxiety and depression.
Overall I would say that western culture has a stronger track record of finding scalable solutions to mental problems than any other culture, though competitive pressures certainly have also caused it to adopt a bunch of factors that are now causing people anxiety (though overall western cultures still appear to be the self-reported happiest cultures in the world, as well as the least anxious cultures in the world, based on quick googling).
https://www.fastcompany.com/3016661/what-countries-are-most-anxious-about-around-the-world
There is maybe an argument to be made that what you truly mean by non-modernity is a hunter-gatherer society, but what lives those lives and what levels of anxiety they experiences strikes me as a much harder question.
Weird. Here’s a review article that seems to disagree:
Huh, I would be interested in more evidence on this.
I certainly don’t feel that my ability for independent thought (weak as it is) would survive a switch to woo. What do others think?
Having done a reasonable bit of role-playing and fiction writing, I feel reasonably confident in my ability to run different ways of thinking in sandboxes, though I obviously need to be careful.
If you have enough social contact with rationalists, I don’t think the danger of drifting to deep into woo is big. Social feedback from people who think rigorously is likely to keep you in a good sphere.
Not if all rationalists start taking up woo.
I seriously doubt that’ll ever happen. The closest I would expect is if the community schisms on an axis like “Is mythic mode okay to use?” and the mantle of “rationalist” is seen as moving with the “yes” camp. And I think that whole schism would be dumb and would make both groups dumber regardless of what happens to which labels.
I have done a decent amount of “woo” (meditation, a bit of Val-style mythic mode) in the past years, and my ability for independent thought and especially independent action seem to have gone way up.
While my primate political side really likes the alignment and agreement, I want to encourage good epistemic norms here. So, I’ll ask an impolitic question:
What gives you the impression that your ability for independent thought and action has “gone way up”? In particular, how do you know that you aren’t kidding yourself? (Not meaning to claim you are! Just trying to nudge toward sharing the causes of your belief here.)
Appreciate the impolitic question. :) I think I was doing some sort of social move that was trying to reset the burden of proof, rather than actually sharing data, but of course sharing data is better. (I do think people too often assume that their status quo bias is some sort of principled wisdom, so asking “are you sure the burden of proof is on your side?” is moderately useful. But data is better.)
I’m more confident on the independent action side than the independent thought side, so I’ll start with that: I am taking more concrete steps towards achieving my goals, in ways that (inside-view) seem directly related to meditation et. al. For instance, I’m noticing much faster when I’m unhappy with a situation, and taking action more directly to fix it. Some specific examples are quitting my job last spring, and successfully pitching my boss on a change of plan at my current job. (Possible confounder is that I’m generally gaining confidence over time, and am getting more career capital, so maybe I would get better at these things anyway. I’m not immediately sure how to prove that this isn’t true, though it inside-view doesn’t seem to be.)
In terms of independent thought, I’ve been able to do things like e.g. plan out a strategy for a startup that requires some not-yet-fully-achieved innovation, and am making steady progress at chipping away at the remaining unknowns. In the past, I anticipate I would have been overwhelmed by the sense that I wasn’t allowed to do that, or that there were too many unknowns to be able to plan, but meditation and CFAR practices help me to separate that from the work of understanding it better.
None of this directly relates to mythic mode, because I haven’t done much of specifically that. My main instance of using mythic mode was at the CFAR tier II workshop, where we used it to uncover a deeply hidden emotional trait (specifically a fear of my own anger), which has been emotionally and socially helpful to recognize and deal with. It feels like having awareness of that is pretty important for being able to think and act effectively, but I don’t have good external evidence of that.