What I’m saying is that as someone whose day job is in large part about designing bleeding edge aerospace motors, I find that the distinction you’re making falls apart pretty quickly in practice when I try to actually design and test a “physics motor”. Even things as supposedly straight forward as “measuring torque” haven’t been as straight forward as you’d expect. A few years ago we took one of our motors to a major aerospace company to test on their dyno and they measured 105% efficiency. The problem was in their torque measurements. We had to get clever in order to come up with better measurements.
Coincidentally, I have also put in a ton of work into figuring out how to engineer discourse, so I also have experience in figuring out what needs to be measured, how it can be measured, and how you can know how far to trust your measurements to validate your theories. Without getting too far into it, you want to start out by calibrating against relatively concrete things like “Can I get this person, who has been saying they want to climb up this wall but are too afraid, to actually climb up the rock wall—yes or no?”. If you can do this reliably where others fail, you know you’re doing something that’s more effective than the baseline (even though that alone doesn’t validate your specific explanation uniquely). It’d take a book to explain how to build from there, but at the end of the day if you can do concrete things that others cannot and you can teach it so that the people you teach can demonstrate the same things, then you’re probably doing something with some validity to it. Probably.
I’m not saying that there’s “no difference” between the process of optimizing discourse and the process of optimizing motors, but it is not nearly as black and white as you think. It’s possible to lead yourself astray with confirmation bias in “discourse” related things, but you should see some of the shit engineers can convince themselves of without a shred of valid evidence. The cognitive skills, nebulosity of metric, and ease of coming up with trustable feedback are all very similar in my experience. More like “a darkish shade of gray” vs “a somewhat darker shade of gray”.
Part of the confusion probably comes from the fact that what we see these days aren’t “physics motors”; they’re “engineering motors”. An engineering motor is when someone who understands physics designs a motor and then engineers populate the world with surface level variations of this blueprint. By and large, my experience in both academic and professional engineering is that engineers struggle to understand and apply first principles and optimize anything outside of the context that was covered in their textbooks. It’s true that within the confines of the textbook, things do get more “cut and dry”, but it’s an illusion that goes away when you look past industry practice to physics itself.
It’s true that our “discourse engineering” department is in a sorry state of being and that the industry guidelines are not to be trusted, but it’s not that we have literally nothing, and our relative lack is not because the subject is “too soft” to get a grip on. Motor design is hard to get a grip on too, when you’re trying to tread even slightly new ground. The problem is that the principles based minds go into physics and sometimes engineering, but rarely psychology. In the few instances where I’ve seen bright minds approach “discourse” with an eye to verifiable feedback, they’ve found things to measure, been able to falsify their own predictions, and have ended up (mostly independently) coming to similar conclusions with demonstrably increased discourse abilities to show for it.
In the few instances where I’ve seen bright minds approach “discourse” with an eye to verifiable feedback, they’ve found things to measure, been able to falsify their own predictions, and have ended up (mostly independently) coming to similar conclusions with demonstrably increased discourse abilities to show for it.
Yes, but it’s worth pointing out what you can actually expect to get from it, and how easily. Most of what I’m talking about is from personal interactions, and the stuff that’s online isn’t like “Oh, the science is unanimous, unarguable and unambiguous”—because we’re talking about the equivalent of “physics motors” not “engineering motors”. Even if our aerospace lab dyno results were publicly available you’d be right not to trust them at face value. If you have a physics degree then saying “Here’s the reasoning, here are the computer simulations and their assumptions, and here’s what our tests have shown so far” is easy. If you can’t distinguish valid physics from “free energy” kookiness, then even though it’s demonstrable and has been demonstrated to those with a good understanding of motor testing validity who have been following this stuff, it’s not necessarily trivial to set up a sufficiently legible demonstration for someone who hasn’t. It’s real, we can get into how I know, but it might not be as easy as you’d like.
The thing that proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that there exist bright feedback oriented minds that have developed demonstrable abilities involved talking to one over and over and witnessing the demonstrations first hand as well as the feedback cycles. This guy used to take paying clients for some specific issue they wanted resolved (e.g. “fear of heights”), set concrete testable goals (e.g. “If I climb this specific wall, I will consider our work to have been successful”), and then track his success rate over time and as he changed his methods. He used to rack his brain about what could be causing the behavior he’d see in his failures, come up with an insight that helps to explain, play with it in “role play” until he could anticipate what the likely reactions would be and how to deal with them, and then go test it out with actual clients. And then iterate.
On the “natural discourse, not obviously connected to deliberate cultivation of skill” side, the overarching trajectory of our interactions is itself pretty exceptional. I started out kinda talking shit and dismissing his ideas in a way that would have pissed off pretty much anyone, and he was able to turn that around and end up becoming someone I respect more than just about anyone. On the “clearly the result of iterated feedback, but diverging from natural discourse” side there’s quite a bit, but perhaps the best example is when I tried out his simple protocol for dealing with internal conflicts on physical pain, and it completely changed how I relate to pain to this day. I couldn’t imagine how it could possibly work “because the pain would still be there” so I just did it to see what would happen, and it took about two minutes to go from “I can’t focus at all because this shit hurts” to “It literally does not bother me at all, despite feeling the exact same”. Having that shift of experience, and not even noticing the change as it happened.… was weird.
From there, it was mostly just recognizing the patterns, knowing where to look, and knowing what isn’t actually an extraordinary claim.
This guy does have some stuff online including a description of that protocol and some transcripts, but again, my first reaction to his writings was to be openly dismissive of him so I’m not sure how much it’ll help. And the transcripts are from quite early in his process of figuring things out so it’s a better example of watching the mind work than getting to look at well supported and broadly applicable conclusions. Anyway, the first of his blog posts explaining that protocol is here, and other stuff can be found on the same site.
Another example that stands out to me as exceptionally clear concise and concrete (but pretty far from “natural discourse” towards “mind hack fuckery”) is this demonstration by Steve Andreas of helping a woman get rid of her phobia. In particular, look at the woman’s response and Steve’s response to these responses at 0:39,5:47,6:12,6:22,6:26, and 7:44. The 25 year follow up is neat too.
I hear what you’re saying.
What I’m saying is that as someone whose day job is in large part about designing bleeding edge aerospace motors, I find that the distinction you’re making falls apart pretty quickly in practice when I try to actually design and test a “physics motor”. Even things as supposedly straight forward as “measuring torque” haven’t been as straight forward as you’d expect. A few years ago we took one of our motors to a major aerospace company to test on their dyno and they measured 105% efficiency. The problem was in their torque measurements. We had to get clever in order to come up with better measurements.
Coincidentally, I have also put in a ton of work into figuring out how to engineer discourse, so I also have experience in figuring out what needs to be measured, how it can be measured, and how you can know how far to trust your measurements to validate your theories. Without getting too far into it, you want to start out by calibrating against relatively concrete things like “Can I get this person, who has been saying they want to climb up this wall but are too afraid, to actually climb up the rock wall—yes or no?”. If you can do this reliably where others fail, you know you’re doing something that’s more effective than the baseline (even though that alone doesn’t validate your specific explanation uniquely). It’d take a book to explain how to build from there, but at the end of the day if you can do concrete things that others cannot and you can teach it so that the people you teach can demonstrate the same things, then you’re probably doing something with some validity to it. Probably.
I’m not saying that there’s “no difference” between the process of optimizing discourse and the process of optimizing motors, but it is not nearly as black and white as you think. It’s possible to lead yourself astray with confirmation bias in “discourse” related things, but you should see some of the shit engineers can convince themselves of without a shred of valid evidence. The cognitive skills, nebulosity of metric, and ease of coming up with trustable feedback are all very similar in my experience. More like “a darkish shade of gray” vs “a somewhat darker shade of gray”.
Part of the confusion probably comes from the fact that what we see these days aren’t “physics motors”; they’re “engineering motors”. An engineering motor is when someone who understands physics designs a motor and then engineers populate the world with surface level variations of this blueprint. By and large, my experience in both academic and professional engineering is that engineers struggle to understand and apply first principles and optimize anything outside of the context that was covered in their textbooks. It’s true that within the confines of the textbook, things do get more “cut and dry”, but it’s an illusion that goes away when you look past industry practice to physics itself.
It’s true that our “discourse engineering” department is in a sorry state of being and that the industry guidelines are not to be trusted, but it’s not that we have literally nothing, and our relative lack is not because the subject is “too soft” to get a grip on. Motor design is hard to get a grip on too, when you’re trying to tread even slightly new ground. The problem is that the principles based minds go into physics and sometimes engineering, but rarely psychology. In the few instances where I’ve seen bright minds approach “discourse” with an eye to verifiable feedback, they’ve found things to measure, been able to falsify their own predictions, and have ended up (mostly independently) coming to similar conclusions with demonstrably increased discourse abilities to show for it.
Can you link to some examples?
Yes, but it’s worth pointing out what you can actually expect to get from it, and how easily. Most of what I’m talking about is from personal interactions, and the stuff that’s online isn’t like “Oh, the science is unanimous, unarguable and unambiguous”—because we’re talking about the equivalent of “physics motors” not “engineering motors”. Even if our aerospace lab dyno results were publicly available you’d be right not to trust them at face value. If you have a physics degree then saying “Here’s the reasoning, here are the computer simulations and their assumptions, and here’s what our tests have shown so far” is easy. If you can’t distinguish valid physics from “free energy” kookiness, then even though it’s demonstrable and has been demonstrated to those with a good understanding of motor testing validity who have been following this stuff, it’s not necessarily trivial to set up a sufficiently legible demonstration for someone who hasn’t. It’s real, we can get into how I know, but it might not be as easy as you’d like.
The thing that proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that there exist bright feedback oriented minds that have developed demonstrable abilities involved talking to one over and over and witnessing the demonstrations first hand as well as the feedback cycles. This guy used to take paying clients for some specific issue they wanted resolved (e.g. “fear of heights”), set concrete testable goals (e.g. “If I climb this specific wall, I will consider our work to have been successful”), and then track his success rate over time and as he changed his methods. He used to rack his brain about what could be causing the behavior he’d see in his failures, come up with an insight that helps to explain, play with it in “role play” until he could anticipate what the likely reactions would be and how to deal with them, and then go test it out with actual clients. And then iterate.
On the “natural discourse, not obviously connected to deliberate cultivation of skill” side, the overarching trajectory of our interactions is itself pretty exceptional. I started out kinda talking shit and dismissing his ideas in a way that would have pissed off pretty much anyone, and he was able to turn that around and end up becoming someone I respect more than just about anyone. On the “clearly the result of iterated feedback, but diverging from natural discourse” side there’s quite a bit, but perhaps the best example is when I tried out his simple protocol for dealing with internal conflicts on physical pain, and it completely changed how I relate to pain to this day. I couldn’t imagine how it could possibly work “because the pain would still be there” so I just did it to see what would happen, and it took about two minutes to go from “I can’t focus at all because this shit hurts” to “It literally does not bother me at all, despite feeling the exact same”. Having that shift of experience, and not even noticing the change as it happened.… was weird.
From there, it was mostly just recognizing the patterns, knowing where to look, and knowing what isn’t actually an extraordinary claim.
This guy does have some stuff online including a description of that protocol and some transcripts, but again, my first reaction to his writings was to be openly dismissive of him so I’m not sure how much it’ll help. And the transcripts are from quite early in his process of figuring things out so it’s a better example of watching the mind work than getting to look at well supported and broadly applicable conclusions. Anyway, the first of his blog posts explaining that protocol is here, and other stuff can be found on the same site.
Another example that stands out to me as exceptionally clear concise and concrete (but pretty far from “natural discourse” towards “mind hack fuckery”) is this demonstration by Steve Andreas of helping a woman get rid of her phobia. In particular, look at the woman’s response and Steve’s response to these responses at 0:39,5:47,6:12,6:22,6:26, and 7:44. The 25 year follow up is neat too.