I thought you quite likely didn’t intend it so. I’m not sure my preferences are what matters—but for what it’s worth I would prefer either (1) just saying what your opinion is, and letting others ask where the opinion comes from if they want, or (2) saying where it comes from in a way that actually shares evidence with others, or at least is explicit about what evidence you’re intending to claim. (So e.g. you could maybe say something about what circling experiences led you to that opinion; or maybe those experiences led you to introspect in an informative way on your own experience of being triggered and/or mindkilled; or maybe they led you to talk with other people in those states about what was happening to them; or, for that matter, maybe it would be more like “While circling, I experienced a sudden rush of conviction that triggering and mindkilling are really the same thing, and now they look just the same to me, though I can’t put my finger on just why”.)
All the options in #2 are substantially more effort than just saying “Based on my experiences circling”, of course. But I think that extra effort may be what it takes to actually provide more information than just stating your opinion would.
While circling, I experienced a sudden rush of conviction
Wanted to respond more fully to this. This is really not how I learn things from circling (not new beliefs, anyway). In the LW frame, circling is an unusually good opportunity to collect training data about how humans respond to other humans in real time; you get to see interactions and probe people’s reactions to those interactions in a way you mostly don’t get to do otherwise.
The repeated experience of seeing a person react in a certain way, then having the circle dive into that reaction and reveal the layers and layers of motivations underneath it (e.g. “I reacted angrily because I was afraid you were attacking me because I hate myself and think I have no redeeming qualities because...”), can teach you a lot (about, among other things, metacognitive blindspots) if you’re open to it, especially if that person is you, in much the same way that you’d learn a lot about businesses by just spending a lot of time watching people run a business, or learn a lot about carpentry by spending a lot of time watching carpenters carp. The learning process I run in circles is the same one I run for learning about anything else from direct experience (and watching experts), it’s just that the substrate on which the learning process acts is unusual levels of detail regarding other humans’ internal experience (so there’s some interesting messing around with meta levels that spices things up, but LW isn’t a stranger to such things).
There’s some stuff that’s hard to communicate verbally about what you can pick up using body language in a circle, but in the same way that it’d be hard to communicate what you learned about dancing by spending a lot of time watching dancers dance. (But, to give an idea of the sort of thing I mean: you can learn to pick up from body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, etc. how deep in the stack of a person’s motivations they’re aware of and talking from. There’s a huge difference between being near the top of the stack and being near the bottom.)
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.)
I thought you quite likely didn’t intend it so. I’m not sure my preferences are what matters—but for what it’s worth I would prefer either (1) just saying what your opinion is, and letting others ask where the opinion comes from if they want, or (2) saying where it comes from in a way that actually shares evidence with others, or at least is explicit about what evidence you’re intending to claim. (So e.g. you could maybe say something about what circling experiences led you to that opinion; or maybe those experiences led you to introspect in an informative way on your own experience of being triggered and/or mindkilled; or maybe they led you to talk with other people in those states about what was happening to them; or, for that matter, maybe it would be more like “While circling, I experienced a sudden rush of conviction that triggering and mindkilling are really the same thing, and now they look just the same to me, though I can’t put my finger on just why”.)
All the options in #2 are substantially more effort than just saying “Based on my experiences circling”, of course. But I think that extra effort may be what it takes to actually provide more information than just stating your opinion would.
Wanted to respond more fully to this. This is really not how I learn things from circling (not new beliefs, anyway). In the LW frame, circling is an unusually good opportunity to collect training data about how humans respond to other humans in real time; you get to see interactions and probe people’s reactions to those interactions in a way you mostly don’t get to do otherwise.
The repeated experience of seeing a person react in a certain way, then having the circle dive into that reaction and reveal the layers and layers of motivations underneath it (e.g. “I reacted angrily because I was afraid you were attacking me because I hate myself and think I have no redeeming qualities because...”), can teach you a lot (about, among other things, metacognitive blindspots) if you’re open to it, especially if that person is you, in much the same way that you’d learn a lot about businesses by just spending a lot of time watching people run a business, or learn a lot about carpentry by spending a lot of time watching carpenters carp. The learning process I run in circles is the same one I run for learning about anything else from direct experience (and watching experts), it’s just that the substrate on which the learning process acts is unusual levels of detail regarding other humans’ internal experience (so there’s some interesting messing around with meta levels that spices things up, but LW isn’t a stranger to such things).
There’s some stuff that’s hard to communicate verbally about what you can pick up using body language in a circle, but in the same way that it’d be hard to communicate what you learned about dancing by spending a lot of time watching dancers dance. (But, to give an idea of the sort of thing I mean: you can learn to pick up from body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, etc. how deep in the stack of a person’s motivations they’re aware of and talking from. There’s a huge difference between being near the top of the stack and being near the bottom.)
Yup, your other reply made it clear that that guess was a long way off. Thanks for the further clarification.
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.)