Fluff and Fiction: Blood for the Art God! Fun over fact.
I think I object to this description of the island for several reasons, assuming it’s the same island I have in mind (probably you’re being tongue in cheek here but even so). The goal for me is not to have fun, although fun is a nice side effect and explicitly stifling the fun would make the thing work worse; the goal for me is to change people’s behavior (in ways they would endorse) by dealing with emotional blocks.
The target audience I have in mind is roughly people like me 2-4 years ago: interested in things like AI safety in some abstract sense, but with substantial motivational / emotional problems getting in the way of doing anything about it. It’s hard to meaningfully contribute to AI safety research if, for example, you have a fear of stating opinions that haven’t been vetted by an authority (this isn’t the problem I was running into, I made it up, but I think things like this are reasonably common), ultimately stemming from a sense of feeling generally unsafe socially. Fears like that can go really deep and be really resistant to even being noticed, let alone debugged (by which I mean, it took me over a year to notice that I had something like this and several years of trying out all sorts of things to make noticeable progress on it, and I don’t expect this to be particularly unusual).
I think it’s important for us to be open, individually and collectively, to trying pretty weirdshit in the name of tackling bugs like this, and accordingly the norms I want on this island are some combination of 1) being pretty open to people writing things in the emotional / poetic / illegible direction, or in general being experimental and trying things out in writing, and 2) being pretty intolerant of people who try to shut down 1).
I think the island you’re describing (“Fuzzy System 1 Stuff”?) slightly overlaps with but is significantly different from the one I had in mind. Probably only a small subset of rationalist fiction/poetry will be specifically designed to solve these motivational/emotional blocks.
The island I’m referring to is motivated by the idea that humor and truth-detection are closely linked (see the word “wit”). There’s something really curious and right about bursting into laughter when you prove a theorem, and about the mythological narrative that the Fool is the only one who can speak the truth (Jordan Peterson says the Fool is the precursor to the Savior). This is why the state of comedy and satire is supposed to be a good metric of intellectual freedom.
I’m pretty excited about your island too. One similar piece of weird shit I’m currently exploring is lucid dreaming, which may have the same effect as circling/mythology for a different subset of people. E.g. I noticed that I have had two dreams in the last month about leading groups of friends through secret passageways at Harvard. I can only interpret this dream as about being extremely motivated by status signalling with elite privileges. Of course this is obvious in hindsight but was sobering and surprising at the time.
I think a number of the things I’ve written on Jung, for example, fit better into your island than the comedy one.
I think I object to this description of the island for several reasons, assuming it’s the same island I have in mind (probably you’re being tongue in cheek here but even so). The goal for me is not to have fun, although fun is a nice side effect and explicitly stifling the fun would make the thing work worse; the goal for me is to change people’s behavior (in ways they would endorse) by dealing with emotional blocks.
The target audience I have in mind is roughly people like me 2-4 years ago: interested in things like AI safety in some abstract sense, but with substantial motivational / emotional problems getting in the way of doing anything about it. It’s hard to meaningfully contribute to AI safety research if, for example, you have a fear of stating opinions that haven’t been vetted by an authority (this isn’t the problem I was running into, I made it up, but I think things like this are reasonably common), ultimately stemming from a sense of feeling generally unsafe socially. Fears like that can go really deep and be really resistant to even being noticed, let alone debugged (by which I mean, it took me over a year to notice that I had something like this and several years of trying out all sorts of things to make noticeable progress on it, and I don’t expect this to be particularly unusual).
I think it’s important for us to be open, individually and collectively, to trying pretty weird shit in the name of tackling bugs like this, and accordingly the norms I want on this island are some combination of 1) being pretty open to people writing things in the emotional / poetic / illegible direction, or in general being experimental and trying things out in writing, and 2) being pretty intolerant of people who try to shut down 1).
I think the island you’re describing (“Fuzzy System 1 Stuff”?) slightly overlaps with but is significantly different from the one I had in mind. Probably only a small subset of rationalist fiction/poetry will be specifically designed to solve these motivational/emotional blocks.
The island I’m referring to is motivated by the idea that humor and truth-detection are closely linked (see the word “wit”). There’s something really curious and right about bursting into laughter when you prove a theorem, and about the mythological narrative that the Fool is the only one who can speak the truth (Jordan Peterson says the Fool is the precursor to the Savior). This is why the state of comedy and satire is supposed to be a good metric of intellectual freedom.
I’m pretty excited about your island too. One similar piece of weird shit I’m currently exploring is lucid dreaming, which may have the same effect as circling/mythology for a different subset of people. E.g. I noticed that I have had two dreams in the last month about leading groups of friends through secret passageways at Harvard. I can only interpret this dream as about being extremely motivated by status signalling with elite privileges. Of course this is obvious in hindsight but was sobering and surprising at the time.
I think a number of the things I’ve written on Jung, for example, fit better into your island than the comedy one.
What have you written on Jung? Can you link to your top one or two posts?
I’ve really only touched on tiny pieces motivated by Jung, say Circumambulation and Solitaire Principle.