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.)
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.)