There was an atmosphere of psycho-spiritual development, often involving Kegan stages.
I am confused, because I assumed that Kegan stages are typically used by people who believe they are superior to LW-style rationalists. You know, “the rationalists believe in objective reality, so they are at Kegan level 4, while I am a post-rationalist who respects deep wisdom and religion, so I am at Kegan level 5.”
Though I can’t find an example of him posting on LessWrong, Ethan Dickinson is in the Berkeley rationality community and is mentioned here as introducing people to Kegan stages. There are multiple others, these are just the people who it was easy to find Internet evidence about.
There’s a lot of overlap in people posting about “rationalism” and “postrationalism”, it’s often a matter of self-identification rather than actual use of different methods to think, e.g. lots of “rationalists” are into meditation, lots of “postrationalists” use approximately Bayesian analysis when thinking about e.g. COVID. I have noticed that “rationalists” tend to think the “rationalist/postrationalist” distinction is more important than the “postrationalists” do; “postrationalists” are now on Twitter using vaguer terms like “ingroup” or “TCOT” (this corner of Twitter) for themselves.
I also mentioned a high amount of interaction between CFAR and Monastic Academic in the post.
To speak a little bit on the interaction between CFAR and MAPLE:
My understanding is that none of Anna, Val, Pete, Tim, Elizabeth, Jack, etc. (current or historic higher-ups at CFAR) had any substantial engagement with MAPLE. My sense is that Anna has spoken with MAPLE people a good bit in terms of total hours, but not at all a lot when compared with how many hours Anna spends speaking to all sorts of people all the time—much much less, for instance, than Anna has spoken to Leverage folks or CEA folks or LW folks.
I believe that Renshin Lee (née Lauren) began substantially engaging with MAPLE only after leaving their employment at CFAR, and drew no particular link between the two (i.e. was not saying “MAPLE is the obvious next step after CFAR” or anything like that, but rather was doing what was personally good for them).
I think mmmmaybe a couple other CFAR alumni or people-near-CFAR went to MAPLE for a meditation retreat or two? And wrote favorably about that, from the perspective of individuals? These (I think but do not know for sure) include people like Abram Demski and Qiaochu Yuan, and a small number of people from CFAR’s hundreds of workshop alumni, some of whom went on to engage with MAPLE more fully (Alex Flint, Herschel Schwartz).
But there was also strong pushback from CFAR staff alumni (me, Davis Kingsley) against MAPLE’s attempted marketing toward rationalists, and its claims of being an effective charity or genuine world-saving group. And there was never AFAIK a thing which fifty-or-more-out-of-a-hundred-people would describe as “a high amount of interaction” between the two orgs (no co-run events, no shared advertisements, no endorsements, no long ongoing back and forth conversations between members acting in their role as members, no trend of either group leaking members to the other group, no substantial exchange of models or perspectives, etc). I think it was much more “nodding respectfully to each other as we pass in the hallway” than “sitting down together at the lunch table.”
I could be wrong about this. I was sort of removed-from-the-loop of CFAR in late 2018/early 2019. It’s possible there was substantial memetic exchange and cooperation after that point.
But up until that point, there were definitely no substantive interactions, and nothing ever made its way to my ears in 2019 or 2020 that made me think that had changed.
I’m definitely open to people showing me I’m wrong, here, but given my current state of knowledge the claim of “high interaction between CFAR and Monastic Academy” is just false.
(Where it would feel true to claim high interaction between CFAR and MIRI, or CFAR and LW, or CFAR and CEA, or CFAR and SPARC, or even CFAR and Leverage. The least of these is, as far as I can tell, an order of magnitude more substantial than the interaction between CFAR and MAPLE.)
This is Ren, and I was like ”?!?” by the sentence in the post: “There is a significant degree of overlap between people who worked with or at CFAR and people at the Monastic Academy.”
I am having trouble engaging with LW comments in general so thankfully Duncan is here with #somefacts. I pretty much agree with his list of informative facts.
More facts:
Adom / Quincy did a two-month apprenticeship at MAPLE, a couple years after being employed by CFAR. He and I are the only CFAR employees who’ve trained at MAPLE.
CFAR-adjacent people visit MAPLE sometimes, maybe for about a week in length.
Some CFAR workshop alums have trained at MAPLE or Oak as apprentices or residents, but I would largely not call them “people who worked with or at CFAR.” There are a lot of CFAR alums, and there are also a lot of MAPLE alums.
MAPLE and Oak have applied for EA grants in the past, which have resulted in them communicating with some CFAR-y type people like Anna Salamon, but this does not feel like a central example of “interaction” of the kind implied.
The inferential gap between the MAPLE and rationalist worldview is pretty large. There’s definitely an interesting “thing” about ex-CFAR staff turning to trad religion that you might want to squint at (I am one example, out of, I believe, three total), but I don’t like the way the OP tacks this sentence onto a section as though it were some kind of argument or evidence for some vague something something. And I think that’s why my reaction was ”?!?” and not just “hmm.”
But also, I cannot deny that the intuition jessicata has about MAPLE is not entirely off either. It gives off the same smells. But I still don’t like the placement of the sentence in the OP because I think it assumes too much.
FWIW I wouldn’t necessarily say that Kegan stages are important—they seem like an interesting model in part because they feel like they map quite well to some of the ways in which my own thought has changed over time. But I still only consider them to be at the level of “this is an interesting and intuitively plausible model”; there hasn’t been enough research on them to convincingly show that they’d be valid in the general population as well.
There was a period in something like 2016-2017 some rationalists were playing around with Kegan stages in the Bay Area. Most people I knew weren’t a huge fan of them, though the then-ED of CFAR (Pete Michaud) did have a tendency of bringing them up from time to time in a way I found quite annoying. It was a model a few people used from time to time, though my sense is that it never got much traction in the community. The “often” in the above quoted sentence definitely feels surprising to me, though I don’t know how many people at MIRI were using them at the time, and maybe it was more than in the rest of my social circle at time. I still hear them brought up sometimes, but usually in a pretty subdued way, more referencing the general idea of people being able to place themselves in a broader context, but in a much less concrete and less totalizing way than the way I saw them being used in 2016-2017.
I was very peripheral to the Bay Area rationality at that time and I heard about Kegan levels enough to rub me the wrong way. Seemed bizarre to me that one man’s idiosyncratic theory of development would be taken so seriously by a community I generally thought was more discerning. That’s why I remember so clearly that it came up many times.
It was a model a few people used from time to time, though my sense is that it never got much traction in the community.
FWIW I think this understates the influence of Kegan levels. I don’t know how much people did differently because of it, which is maybe what you’re pointing at, but it was definitely a thing people had heard of and expected other people to have heard of and some people targeted directly.
Huh, some chance I am just wrong here, but to me it didn’t feel like Kegan levels had more prominence or expectation of being understood than e.g. land value taxes, which is also a topic some people are really into, but doesn’t feel to me like it’s very core to the community.
Okay, here goes the nitpicking...
I am confused, because I assumed that Kegan stages are typically used by people who believe they are superior to LW-style rationalists. You know, “the rationalists believe in objective reality, so they are at Kegan level 4, while I am a post-rationalist who respects deep wisdom and religion, so I am at Kegan level 5.”
Here are some examples of long-time LW posters who think Kegan stages are important:
Kaj Satala
G. Gordon Worley III
Malcolm Ocean
Though I can’t find an example of him posting on LessWrong, Ethan Dickinson is in the Berkeley rationality community and is mentioned here as introducing people to Kegan stages. There are multiple others, these are just the people who it was easy to find Internet evidence about.
There’s a lot of overlap in people posting about “rationalism” and “postrationalism”, it’s often a matter of self-identification rather than actual use of different methods to think, e.g. lots of “rationalists” are into meditation, lots of “postrationalists” use approximately Bayesian analysis when thinking about e.g. COVID. I have noticed that “rationalists” tend to think the “rationalist/postrationalist” distinction is more important than the “postrationalists” do; “postrationalists” are now on Twitter using vaguer terms like “ingroup” or “TCOT” (this corner of Twitter) for themselves.
I also mentioned a high amount of interaction between CFAR and Monastic Academic in the post.
To speak a little bit on the interaction between CFAR and MAPLE:
My understanding is that none of Anna, Val, Pete, Tim, Elizabeth, Jack, etc. (current or historic higher-ups at CFAR) had any substantial engagement with MAPLE. My sense is that Anna has spoken with MAPLE people a good bit in terms of total hours, but not at all a lot when compared with how many hours Anna spends speaking to all sorts of people all the time—much much less, for instance, than Anna has spoken to Leverage folks or CEA folks or LW folks.
I believe that Renshin Lee (née Lauren) began substantially engaging with MAPLE only after leaving their employment at CFAR, and drew no particular link between the two (i.e. was not saying “MAPLE is the obvious next step after CFAR” or anything like that, but rather was doing what was personally good for them).
I think mmmmaybe a couple other CFAR alumni or people-near-CFAR went to MAPLE for a meditation retreat or two? And wrote favorably about that, from the perspective of individuals? These (I think but do not know for sure) include people like Abram Demski and Qiaochu Yuan, and a small number of people from CFAR’s hundreds of workshop alumni, some of whom went on to engage with MAPLE more fully (Alex Flint, Herschel Schwartz).
But there was also strong pushback from CFAR staff alumni (me, Davis Kingsley) against MAPLE’s attempted marketing toward rationalists, and its claims of being an effective charity or genuine world-saving group. And there was never AFAIK a thing which fifty-or-more-out-of-a-hundred-people would describe as “a high amount of interaction” between the two orgs (no co-run events, no shared advertisements, no endorsements, no long ongoing back and forth conversations between members acting in their role as members, no trend of either group leaking members to the other group, no substantial exchange of models or perspectives, etc). I think it was much more “nodding respectfully to each other as we pass in the hallway” than “sitting down together at the lunch table.”
I could be wrong about this. I was sort of removed-from-the-loop of CFAR in late 2018/early 2019. It’s possible there was substantial memetic exchange and cooperation after that point.
But up until that point, there were definitely no substantive interactions, and nothing ever made its way to my ears in 2019 or 2020 that made me think that had changed.
I’m definitely open to people showing me I’m wrong, here, but given my current state of knowledge the claim of “high interaction between CFAR and Monastic Academy” is just false.
(Where it would feel true to claim high interaction between CFAR and MIRI, or CFAR and LW, or CFAR and CEA, or CFAR and SPARC, or even CFAR and Leverage. The least of these is, as far as I can tell, an order of magnitude more substantial than the interaction between CFAR and MAPLE.)
This is Ren, and I was like ”?!?” by the sentence in the post: “There is a significant degree of overlap between people who worked with or at CFAR and people at the Monastic Academy.”
I am having trouble engaging with LW comments in general so thankfully Duncan is here with #somefacts. I pretty much agree with his list of informative facts.
More facts:
Adom / Quincy did a two-month apprenticeship at MAPLE, a couple years after being employed by CFAR. He and I are the only CFAR employees who’ve trained at MAPLE.
CFAR-adjacent people visit MAPLE sometimes, maybe for about a week in length.
Some CFAR workshop alums have trained at MAPLE or Oak as apprentices or residents, but I would largely not call them “people who worked with or at CFAR.” There are a lot of CFAR alums, and there are also a lot of MAPLE alums.
MAPLE and Oak have applied for EA grants in the past, which have resulted in them communicating with some CFAR-y type people like Anna Salamon, but this does not feel like a central example of “interaction” of the kind implied.
The inferential gap between the MAPLE and rationalist worldview is pretty large. There’s definitely an interesting “thing” about ex-CFAR staff turning to trad religion that you might want to squint at (I am one example, out of, I believe, three total), but I don’t like the way the OP tacks this sentence onto a section as though it were some kind of argument or evidence for some vague something something. And I think that’s why my reaction was ”?!?” and not just “hmm.”
But also, I cannot deny that the intuition jessicata has about MAPLE is not entirely off either. It gives off the same smells. But I still don’t like the placement of the sentence in the OP because I think it assumes too much.
Thanks, this adds helpful details. I’ve linked this comment in the OP.
As someone who was more involved with CFAR than Duncan was from in 2019 on, all this sounds correct to me.
I was also planning to leave a comment with a similar take.
FWIW I wouldn’t necessarily say that Kegan stages are important—they seem like an interesting model in part because they feel like they map quite well to some of the ways in which my own thought has changed over time. But I still only consider them to be at the level of “this is an interesting and intuitively plausible model”; there hasn’t been enough research on them to convincingly show that they’d be valid in the general population as well.
There was a period in something like 2016-2017 some rationalists were playing around with Kegan stages in the Bay Area. Most people I knew weren’t a huge fan of them, though the then-ED of CFAR (Pete Michaud) did have a tendency of bringing them up from time to time in a way I found quite annoying. It was a model a few people used from time to time, though my sense is that it never got much traction in the community. The “often” in the above quoted sentence definitely feels surprising to me, though I don’t know how many people at MIRI were using them at the time, and maybe it was more than in the rest of my social circle at time. I still hear them brought up sometimes, but usually in a pretty subdued way, more referencing the general idea of people being able to place themselves in a broader context, but in a much less concrete and less totalizing way than the way I saw them being used in 2016-2017.
I was very peripheral to the Bay Area rationality at that time and I heard about Kegan levels enough to rub me the wrong way. Seemed bizarre to me that one man’s idiosyncratic theory of development would be taken so seriously by a community I generally thought was more discerning. That’s why I remember so clearly that it came up many times.
+1, except I was more physically and maybe socially close.
FWIW I think this understates the influence of Kegan levels. I don’t know how much people did differently because of it, which is maybe what you’re pointing at, but it was definitely a thing people had heard of and expected other people to have heard of and some people targeted directly.
Huh, some chance I am just wrong here, but to me it didn’t feel like Kegan levels had more prominence or expectation of being understood than e.g. land value taxes, which is also a topic some people are really into, but doesn’t feel to me like it’s very core to the community.
Datapoint: I understand neither Kegan levels nor land value taxes.