“You pride yourself on freedom of choice. Let me tell you that this very freedom is one of the factors that most confuse and undermine you. It gives you full play for your neuroses, your surface reactions and your aberrations. What you should aim for is freedom from choice! Faced with two possibilities, you spend time and effort to decide which to accept. You review the whole spectrum of political, emotional, social, physical, psychological and physiological conditioning before coming up with the answer which, more often than not, does not even satisfy you then. Do you know, can you comprehend, what freedom it gives you if you have no choice? Do you know what it means to be able to choose so swiftly and surely that to all intents and purposes you have no choice? The choice that you make, your decision, is based on such positive knowledge that the second alternative may as well not exist.”
-- Rafael Lefort, “The Teachers of Gurdjieff”, ch. XIV
This reminds me of something I read in C.S. Lewis which is quite rational: the purpose of curiosity is finding answers. It’s not dithering for the sake of dithering, or debate for the sake of debate. The goal is to find out what the right answer is, as accurately as possible, not to eternally keep all the options open. That’s how I understand the quote.
Of course, real curiosity can look like dithering and endless debate because people are being very careful not to get things wrong.
Reminds me of something Jesus said: “The truth will set you free.” By which I think he actually meant something very Buddhist, and sinister: Stop being attached to people and things.
This is a deep idea and should get more air time on LW.
The crux of the issue is: if you have 4 bits of information, you can only choose between 16 alternatives. The problem is to quantify how much information you really have (it may seem like you have a lot of info, but most of it is probably noisy, so shouldn’t be weighted at full value) and the size of the set of choices from which you need to select a single element. If the choice class is too big, you should randomly shrink it—bite the bullet, tie yourself to the mast and throw away choices for no reason other than that you have too many.
“The choice that you make, your decision, is based on such positive knowledge that the second alternative may as well not exist.”
Dumping information if you’re simply swamped may well be a good strategy, but the quote is about understanding what you’re doing so well that you know what the best choice is.
I don’t see that in the quote. It sounds to me like a justification for imposing religious thought-boundaries.
Wikipedia says: “The Teachers of Gurdjieff (ISBN 0-87728-213-7) is a book by Rafael Lefort that purports to describe a journey to the middle east and central Asia in search of the sources of Gurdjieff’s teaching, and culminates in the author’s own spiritual awakening, by meeting and “opening” to the teachings of the Naqshbandi Sufis.”
As I understand it, Gurdieff and such are claiming it’s possible to have sufficiently reliable knowledge such that basing action on anything else obviously isn’t attractive.
That kind of certainty does exist in some realms—if someone claims to have trisected the angle or built a perpetual motion machine, you can be sure there’s a mistake or fraud somewhere, and you also aren’t going to spend your time trying to achieve those projects yourself.
Whether such knowledge is possible for more complex situations isn’t obvious, but I do think that’s where he’s pointing.
Reading the quote and your explanation, I thought of this:
Through my mind flashed the passage:
“Do nothing because it is righteous, or praiseworthy, or noble, to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do, and which you cannot do in any other way.”
Doing what it seemed good to do, had only led me astray.
So I called a full stop.
And I decided that, from then on, I would follow the strategy that could have saved me if I had followed it years ago: Hold my FAI designs to the higher standard of not doing that which seemed like a good idea, but only that which I understood on a sufficiently deep level to see that I could not do it in any other way.
“Do nothing because it is righteous, or praiseworthy, or noble, to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do, and which you cannot do in any other way.”
If I took that advice literally, I wouldn’t do much of anything at all.
-- Rafael Lefort, “The Teachers of Gurdjieff”, ch. XIV
This reminds me of something I read in C.S. Lewis which is quite rational: the purpose of curiosity is finding answers. It’s not dithering for the sake of dithering, or debate for the sake of debate. The goal is to find out what the right answer is, as accurately as possible, not to eternally keep all the options open. That’s how I understand the quote.
Of course, real curiosity can look like dithering and endless debate because people are being very careful not to get things wrong.
Reminds me of something Jesus said: “The truth will set you free.” By which I think he actually meant something very Buddhist, and sinister: Stop being attached to people and things.
Later amended by David Foster Wallace to ‘The truth will set you free, but not until it’s done with you.’
This is a deep idea and should get more air time on LW.
The crux of the issue is: if you have 4 bits of information, you can only choose between 16 alternatives. The problem is to quantify how much information you really have (it may seem like you have a lot of info, but most of it is probably noisy, so shouldn’t be weighted at full value) and the size of the set of choices from which you need to select a single element. If the choice class is too big, you should randomly shrink it—bite the bullet, tie yourself to the mast and throw away choices for no reason other than that you have too many.
Dumping information if you’re simply swamped may well be a good strategy, but the quote is about understanding what you’re doing so well that you know what the best choice is.
I don’t see that in the quote. It sounds to me like a justification for imposing religious thought-boundaries.
Wikipedia says: “The Teachers of Gurdjieff (ISBN 0-87728-213-7) is a book by Rafael Lefort that purports to describe a journey to the middle east and central Asia in search of the sources of Gurdjieff’s teaching, and culminates in the author’s own spiritual awakening, by meeting and “opening” to the teachings of the Naqshbandi Sufis.”
Do you see that in the quote? Or only in the frame?
I’m not able to interpret the quote without fitting it into some pre-existing frame.
As I understand it, Gurdieff and such are claiming it’s possible to have sufficiently reliable knowledge such that basing action on anything else obviously isn’t attractive.
That kind of certainty does exist in some realms—if someone claims to have trisected the angle or built a perpetual motion machine, you can be sure there’s a mistake or fraud somewhere, and you also aren’t going to spend your time trying to achieve those projects yourself.
Whether such knowledge is possible for more complex situations isn’t obvious, but I do think that’s where he’s pointing.
Reading the quote and your explanation, I thought of this:
-- My Bayesian Enlightenment
If I took that advice literally, I wouldn’t do much of anything at all.
I’m resisting googling this… Ursula K. Le Guin, right? Though it sounds like something out of the Dhammapada.
Yes, the Farthest Shore. here or here