The experiences were generally of the form, person A says a thing, person B responds in a way that sounds like they’re mildly mindkilled / defensive, and the circle dives deeper into that experience until it starts to look more like person B was mildly triggered by what person A said, as the circle gets more clarity about what person B feels like they’re defending themselves from. My sense is that being mindkilled is being mildly triggered without conscious awareness of it, or something.
But back to meta: it feels to me like there’s something weird going on here, like a milder version of what happened in the Kensho and circling threads. Something like the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics, but for epistemics? Like I tried to give an ambiguous partial description of my evidence and that was worse than either no description or a fuller description.
I also don’t feel like I’m trying to get anyone to accept anything. I regard most of what I write on LW about my beliefs as offering hypotheses for people to evaluate however they want, using e.g. the evidence from their own lives. Maybe I’m not signaling this sufficiently well; I’m not sure what to add beyond the “I think” and “my tentative hypothesis” above.
Okay, thinking more, it seems to me like the discomfort has consistently been about explanations that you’re worried that someone else will accord more weight than you think they deserve. Does that sound right?
Edit: also I feel like I (the generic “I,” this is a general observation about the LW epistemic game) am being accorded a weird level of trust. You trust me to accurately report my experiences (as in, I don’t expect you’ll be worried I lied about my description of my circling experiences above) but you don’t trust me to write down accurate partial summaries of why I believe what I believe, or something? I can’t quite pin it down yet.
The description of your circling experiences is much more informative than what you wrote before; thanks very much. I agree that what you describe seems like evidence that in at least some cases mindkilling and triggering share some mechanism, and at least some cases of mindkilling are the result of something very like triggering; again, though, this doesn’t seem like enough reason to treat them as synonyms, not least because what you describe seems perfectly compatible with only some mindkilling being the result of anything triggery.
Meta again: I think the Copenhagen-interpretation thing (slightly related XKCD) is unavoidable: doing a thing makes it possible for people to question or criticize how you did it, whereas not doing a thing is harder to notice. But I think I stand by my opinion that the middle option really is worse than the more extreme ones—of course for different reasons in the two cases. (The “short” option is better because it’s shorter; the “long” option is better because it gives more information; the “middle” option doesn’t get enough benefit for the cost in length, and also has this slightly weird trying-to-advocate-something-controversial vibe about it that may simply be a consequence of the recent Discourse about Circling And All That on LW.)
I don’t think I’m particularly worried that people will give more weight to your opinions than they deserve, no. (If anything, the reverse seems more likely on balance.) And no, I don’t think you’re likely to be lying about why you believe what you do. If I try to unpack my concerns, they’re more like this: It isn’t yet clear (at least to those of us not experienced in such things) to what extent circling produces genuine insight and to what extent it produces pseudo-insight; given that, it’s somehow improper to treat it as if it’s a reliable source of insight; given the general skepticism of the LW readership, treating it as one probably doesn’t make what you say more likely to believed, so that’s not a big concern, but even so it feels like a conversational move that oughtn’t to be be being made; it also has a kinda proselytizing feel to it, a bit like that of a religious convert who insists on telling people that he’s doing whatever-he’s-doing because he knows God wants him to do it. And, finally, if (in this case, or in general) circling really is yielding genuine insights, then you’re missing an opportunity to explain something helpful—an opportunity that in this case you’ve now taken, and as I said above what you say is much more enlightening as a result.
(Perhaps to those more familiar with circling it would have been obvious that that’s the sort of way in which you might have come to the opinion you did: maybe that sort of thing is fairly frequent and other kinds of circling-derived insight—e.g., finding more about one’s own thought processes by introspection in an intense but comfortable context—are much rarer. In which case maybe it’s only for the very ignorant that the more detailed description adds much. But I guess there are quite a lot of the very ignorant among your readers.)
That’s fair.
The experiences were generally of the form, person A says a thing, person B responds in a way that sounds like they’re mildly mindkilled / defensive, and the circle dives deeper into that experience until it starts to look more like person B was mildly triggered by what person A said, as the circle gets more clarity about what person B feels like they’re defending themselves from. My sense is that being mindkilled is being mildly triggered without conscious awareness of it, or something.
But back to meta: it feels to me like there’s something weird going on here, like a milder version of what happened in the Kensho and circling threads. Something like the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics, but for epistemics? Like I tried to give an ambiguous partial description of my evidence and that was worse than either no description or a fuller description.
I also don’t feel like I’m trying to get anyone to accept anything. I regard most of what I write on LW about my beliefs as offering hypotheses for people to evaluate however they want, using e.g. the evidence from their own lives. Maybe I’m not signaling this sufficiently well; I’m not sure what to add beyond the “I think” and “my tentative hypothesis” above.
Okay, thinking more, it seems to me like the discomfort has consistently been about explanations that you’re worried that someone else will accord more weight than you think they deserve. Does that sound right?
Edit: also I feel like I (the generic “I,” this is a general observation about the LW epistemic game) am being accorded a weird level of trust. You trust me to accurately report my experiences (as in, I don’t expect you’ll be worried I lied about my description of my circling experiences above) but you don’t trust me to write down accurate partial summaries of why I believe what I believe, or something? I can’t quite pin it down yet.
The description of your circling experiences is much more informative than what you wrote before; thanks very much. I agree that what you describe seems like evidence that in at least some cases mindkilling and triggering share some mechanism, and at least some cases of mindkilling are the result of something very like triggering; again, though, this doesn’t seem like enough reason to treat them as synonyms, not least because what you describe seems perfectly compatible with only some mindkilling being the result of anything triggery.
Meta again: I think the Copenhagen-interpretation thing (slightly related XKCD) is unavoidable: doing a thing makes it possible for people to question or criticize how you did it, whereas not doing a thing is harder to notice. But I think I stand by my opinion that the middle option really is worse than the more extreme ones—of course for different reasons in the two cases. (The “short” option is better because it’s shorter; the “long” option is better because it gives more information; the “middle” option doesn’t get enough benefit for the cost in length, and also has this slightly weird trying-to-advocate-something-controversial vibe about it that may simply be a consequence of the recent Discourse about Circling And All That on LW.)
I don’t think I’m particularly worried that people will give more weight to your opinions than they deserve, no. (If anything, the reverse seems more likely on balance.) And no, I don’t think you’re likely to be lying about why you believe what you do. If I try to unpack my concerns, they’re more like this: It isn’t yet clear (at least to those of us not experienced in such things) to what extent circling produces genuine insight and to what extent it produces pseudo-insight; given that, it’s somehow improper to treat it as if it’s a reliable source of insight; given the general skepticism of the LW readership, treating it as one probably doesn’t make what you say more likely to believed, so that’s not a big concern, but even so it feels like a conversational move that oughtn’t to be be being made; it also has a kinda proselytizing feel to it, a bit like that of a religious convert who insists on telling people that he’s doing whatever-he’s-doing because he knows God wants him to do it. And, finally, if (in this case, or in general) circling really is yielding genuine insights, then you’re missing an opportunity to explain something helpful—an opportunity that in this case you’ve now taken, and as I said above what you say is much more enlightening as a result.
(Perhaps to those more familiar with circling it would have been obvious that that’s the sort of way in which you might have come to the opinion you did: maybe that sort of thing is fairly frequent and other kinds of circling-derived insight—e.g., finding more about one’s own thought processes by introspection in an intense but comfortable context—are much rarer. In which case maybe it’s only for the very ignorant that the more detailed description adds much. But I guess there are quite a lot of the very ignorant among your readers.)