I haven’t read this post super deeply yet, but obviously this is one of those excellent posts that’s going to become a Schelling point for various semi-related gripes after a mere token skim, even though most of them have been anticipated already in the post!
Some of those gripes are: - Near enemies: Once a term for a phenomenon is entrenched in a community, it’s a lot a lot a lot of work to name anything that’s close to it but not quite it. (See, for example, “goodhart” for what is IMO a very diverse and subtle cluster of clumsiness in holding onto intentionality.) Escaping near enemies is difficult in any community, but especially difficult in this community because there tend to be mathematical/formalist intuitions of “well I have Abstraction that captures The Other Thing as a special case”, which is often true. But it is also often “false” in the sense of... - Sneaking in Connotations: I’m sad ADBOC hasn’t become as CK as it could, especially for checking the unconscious tools that receive salience. Usually, if you don’t believe in “vibes” and the relevance of connotations, you tend to only do some denotational pattern-matching to check whether a concept applies. But then it sneaks in burdensome frames and stances to bring to bear anyway. Sure, basketball ultimately, technically, happens in physics. I’m not sure that looking for the relevant differential equations (which is what you often do in physics) is the best frame to bring to improve your shot! Further, connotations also very often carry information that just don’t make it into your cleaned up abstraction... - Stickiness: …and then it sticks. This is a feature, of course, as you name in point five: reification. You’ve made plenty of remarks about how the kata is useful even though it is not The Thing. That’s great. But the fact of stickiness also implies that the underlying frame needs to be the relevant one for contexts where it is cued in people’s minds, because it’s now in some kind of vaguely zero-sum game with other frames. Now there’s some transaction costs in switching to the other frame, taxing other perspectives. This is not even beginning to touch though, the real taxing involved in... - Reification bias: There’s a spectrum of errors from taking “you only understand it if you can program it” too literally, forcefully narrowing all the kinds of clarity available to human brains and bodies. It’s a short step from there to “it’s only real if you can formalize it” and “it’s only real if it can be made explicit” and “it’s only real if it can be reified/sustained in some way”, which last thing a lot of non-dual practices attempt to disabuse humans of. It’s not like this is extremely difficult to recognize (although it can be for certain dispositions), but it is especially immune to being noticed if you believe in... - Solving everything with more explicitness: I love how a lot of double binds are dissolved in this community by kind and skillful naming of things. This is greatly underpumped nearly everywhere else. But I think it’s silly to automatically assume it is a safe defense for any issue. It isn’t impossible that certain situations might benefit from limiting explicitness rather than unboundedly including ever more meta accounting.
In sum: Detailed models that frames and handles come with are great, but burdensome. It’s probably an oversight to not account for transaction costs in switching to (or even instantiating to, if you think your handle is general) other frames when you camp around one frame though, roughly multiplied with how burdensome the current frame might be.
I haven’t read this post super deeply yet, but obviously this is one of those excellent posts that’s going to become a Schelling point for various semi-related gripes after a mere token skim, even though most of them have been anticipated already in the post!
Some of those gripes are:
- Near enemies: Once a term for a phenomenon is entrenched in a community, it’s a lot a lot a lot of work to name anything that’s close to it but not quite it. (See, for example, “goodhart” for what is IMO a very diverse and subtle cluster of clumsiness in holding onto intentionality.) Escaping near enemies is difficult in any community, but especially difficult in this community because there tend to be mathematical/formalist intuitions of “well I have Abstraction that captures The Other Thing as a special case”, which is often true. But it is also often “false” in the sense of...
- Sneaking in Connotations: I’m sad ADBOC hasn’t become as CK as it could, especially for checking the unconscious tools that receive salience. Usually, if you don’t believe in “vibes” and the relevance of connotations, you tend to only do some denotational pattern-matching to check whether a concept applies. But then it sneaks in burdensome frames and stances to bring to bear anyway. Sure, basketball ultimately, technically, happens in physics. I’m not sure that looking for the relevant differential equations (which is what you often do in physics) is the best frame to bring to improve your shot! Further, connotations also very often carry information that just don’t make it into your cleaned up abstraction...
- Stickiness: …and then it sticks. This is a feature, of course, as you name in point five: reification. You’ve made plenty of remarks about how the kata is useful even though it is not The Thing. That’s great. But the fact of stickiness also implies that the underlying frame needs to be the relevant one for contexts where it is cued in people’s minds, because it’s now in some kind of vaguely zero-sum game with other frames. Now there’s some transaction costs in switching to the other frame, taxing other perspectives. This is not even beginning to touch though, the real taxing involved in...
- Reification bias: There’s a spectrum of errors from taking “you only understand it if you can program it” too literally, forcefully narrowing all the kinds of clarity available to human brains and bodies. It’s a short step from there to “it’s only real if you can formalize it” and “it’s only real if it can be made explicit” and “it’s only real if it can be reified/sustained in some way”, which last thing a lot of non-dual practices attempt to disabuse humans of. It’s not like this is extremely difficult to recognize (although it can be for certain dispositions), but it is especially immune to being noticed if you believe in...
- Solving everything with more explicitness: I love how a lot of double binds are dissolved in this community by kind and skillful naming of things. This is greatly underpumped nearly everywhere else. But I think it’s silly to automatically assume it is a safe defense for any issue. It isn’t impossible that certain situations might benefit from limiting explicitness rather than unboundedly including ever more meta accounting.
In sum: Detailed models that frames and handles come with are great, but burdensome. It’s probably an oversight to not account for transaction costs in switching to (or even instantiating to, if you think your handle is general) other frames when you camp around one frame though, roughly multiplied with how burdensome the current frame might be.