Thank you for an interesting post. I noticed some confusion while reading it and thought it might be worthwhile to share. When I think of “noticing”, I think of meditation and cultivating awareness. One of the key aspects in those traditions is that they advocate for the value of avoiding automated reactions to experience by “simply” noticing it. Your approach to noticing seems to advocate the opposite of this, training automated reactions triggered by noticing. How do you think about the relationship between these different perspectives? Can it inform us about potential failure modes that your approach might hold?
First, I totally think it’s worth learning to notice things without having any particular response.
I think some people find that intuitively or intrinsically valuable. For people who don’t find “judgmentless/reactionless noticing” valuable, I would say:
“The reason to do that is to develop a rich understanding of your mind. A problem you would run into if you have reactions/judgments is that doing so changes your mind while you’re looking at it, you can only get sort of distorted data if you immediately jump into changing things. You may want this raw data from your mind a) because it helps you diagnose confusing problems in your psychology, b) because you might just intrinsically value getting to know your own mind with as close contact as possible – it’s where you live, and in some sense, it’s all the reality you have to interact with.”
I think all of that is pretty important for becoming a poweruser-rationalist. Now that you’ve drawn my attention to it, I probably will update the essay to include it somehow.
But, I think all of that takes quite awhile to pay off, and if it’s not intuitively appealing, I don’t think it’s really worth trying until you’ve gotten some fluency with Noticing in the first place.
...
And, that all said: I think the buddhists-and-such are ultimately trying to achieve a different goal than I’m trying to achieve, so even though the methods are pretty similar in many places, they are just optimized pretty differently.
The goal I’m trying to achieve is “solve confusing problems at the edge of my ability that feel impossible, but are nonetheless incredibly important.” This post is exploring Noticing in that particular context, and furthermore, in the context of “what skills can you train that will quickly pay off, such that you’ll get some indication they are valuable at all”, either in a dedicated workshop I’m designing, or, on your own without any personalized guidance.
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It does seem like there will be other types of workshops (even ones that are focused on solving confusing problems), in which it makes sense to notice-without-reaction, perhaps because the workshop is oriented around diagnosing psychological hangups or confusions. I think such a workshop would need very different mentorship and support structure than the format I’m currently optimizing, but it does also seem like something that’ll ultimately be part of the artform I’m trying to pursue in some fashion.
Thanks for the reply. I wanted to get at something slightly different, though.
I think that a key insight of traditions that work with “judgmentless/reactionless noticing” is that we humans tend to be “obsessive” problem solvers that are prone to getting tangled up in their own attempts at problem solving. Sometimes trying to solve problems can actually become the problem. On some level, I appreciate that your techniques may actually help to guard against this but on another level I wonder if this may be bought at the price of becoming boxed into a restrictive problem solving mindset that is unable to notice its own limitations.
Just throwing this out there and wondering what reactions this turns up.
Yeah I do concretely think one needs to guard against being an obsessive problem solver… but, also, there are some big problems that gotta get solved and while there are downsides and risks I mostly think “yep, I’m basically here to ~obsessive problem solve.” (even if I’ll try to be reasonable about it and encourage others to as well)
(To be clear, psychologically unhealthy or counterproductive obsessions with problem solving are bad. But if I have to choose between accidentally veering towards that too much or too little, I’m choosing too much)
Thank you for an interesting post. I noticed some confusion while reading it and thought it might be worthwhile to share. When I think of “noticing”, I think of meditation and cultivating awareness. One of the key aspects in those traditions is that they advocate for the value of avoiding automated reactions to experience by “simply” noticing it. Your approach to noticing seems to advocate the opposite of this, training automated reactions triggered by noticing. How do you think about the relationship between these different perspectives? Can it inform us about potential failure modes that your approach might hold?
First, I totally think it’s worth learning to notice things without having any particular response.
I think some people find that intuitively or intrinsically valuable. For people who don’t find “judgmentless/reactionless noticing” valuable, I would say:
“The reason to do that is to develop a rich understanding of your mind. A problem you would run into if you have reactions/judgments is that doing so changes your mind while you’re looking at it, you can only get sort of distorted data if you immediately jump into changing things. You may want this raw data from your mind a) because it helps you diagnose confusing problems in your psychology, b) because you might just intrinsically value getting to know your own mind with as close contact as possible – it’s where you live, and in some sense, it’s all the reality you have to interact with.”
I think all of that is pretty important for becoming a poweruser-rationalist. Now that you’ve drawn my attention to it, I probably will update the essay to include it somehow.
But, I think all of that takes quite awhile to pay off, and if it’s not intuitively appealing, I don’t think it’s really worth trying until you’ve gotten some fluency with Noticing in the first place.
...
And, that all said: I think the buddhists-and-such are ultimately trying to achieve a different goal than I’m trying to achieve, so even though the methods are pretty similar in many places, they are just optimized pretty differently.
The goal I’m trying to achieve is “solve confusing problems at the edge of my ability that feel impossible, but are nonetheless incredibly important.” This post is exploring Noticing in that particular context, and furthermore, in the context of “what skills can you train that will quickly pay off, such that you’ll get some indication they are valuable at all”, either in a dedicated workshop I’m designing, or, on your own without any personalized guidance.
...
It does seem like there will be other types of workshops (even ones that are focused on solving confusing problems), in which it makes sense to notice-without-reaction, perhaps because the workshop is oriented around diagnosing psychological hangups or confusions. I think such a workshop would need very different mentorship and support structure than the format I’m currently optimizing, but it does also seem like something that’ll ultimately be part of the artform I’m trying to pursue in some fashion.
Thanks for the reply. I wanted to get at something slightly different, though.
I think that a key insight of traditions that work with “judgmentless/reactionless noticing” is that we humans tend to be “obsessive” problem solvers that are prone to getting tangled up in their own attempts at problem solving. Sometimes trying to solve problems can actually become the problem. On some level, I appreciate that your techniques may actually help to guard against this but on another level I wonder if this may be bought at the price of becoming boxed into a restrictive problem solving mindset that is unable to notice its own limitations.
Just throwing this out there and wondering what reactions this turns up.
Yeah I do concretely think one needs to guard against being an obsessive problem solver… but, also, there are some big problems that gotta get solved and while there are downsides and risks I mostly think “yep, I’m basically here to ~obsessive problem solve.” (even if I’ll try to be reasonable about it and encourage others to as well)
(To be clear, psychologically unhealthy or counterproductive obsessions with problem solving are bad. But if I have to choose between accidentally veering towards that too much or too little, I’m choosing too much)