From my very limited (n = 1) circling experience, it felt valuable but before reading this post, it never occurred to me that it might be useful as a direct rationality tool.
What I got out of it was a sense of social connection, being seen, and being accepted as who I am; this made the practice seem valuable because I believe that a lot of people today are absolutely starved for these experiences, and that this could help satisfy their need for them.
Though while I agree that circling doesn’t feel like a core rationality practice, it does feel like it should have an indirect benefit for some people. Namely, if you don’t feel safe and accepted, then I believe that you are much more likely to react emotionally to factual claims, and to e.g. turn any conversation into a status struggle and generally engage in motivated reasoning. Insecurity makes for poor rationality, so if anyone has a serious deficiency on that front, I would expect that practices like circling might actually end up massively boosting their rationality if the practices helped fix the deficiency.
At the same time, if someone was already mostly feeling socially safe and secure, then it wouldn’t have occurred to me to predict that circling would have any further effect on their rationality.
Sense of connection and being seen is definitely one of the most obvious possible benefits of circling, and many people are in fact starved for these things.
But this is one of the layers of Goodharting I mentioned: I think if a circle Goodharts on sense of connection it’s missing the opportunity to do something different and more interesting for rationalists, which I don’t know how to explain in words (part of the reason it’s easy to miss). The situation is roughly analogous to meditating because it helps you feel calmer, as opposed to the mountains of wacky stuff meditation can do instead.
To make an attempt to put it into a few words (but the topic still needs to have it’s own post at another time):
The relationship that people have to themselves matters. Many people don’t have an explicit model of how they relate to themselves. It’s a blindspot for many rationalists and given that the relationship that people have to themselves affects what the believe, feel and do, that has implications for rationality.
It also trains the core skills involved in Focusing and that’s valuable for the reason that make CFAR teach it.
Could you elaborate on what the hell “being seen” means? My experience with the term is somewhere between meaninglessness and “a distraction mentioned while someone’s covertly socially attacking”.
A sense that other people are paying direct attention to you, noticing important and real aspects of you, and not rejecting those aspects.
This is rare in my experience because people mostly don’t actually pay attention to each other, they just notice some vague surface-level details that are easy to remember and not much else.
The experience of being seen often translates into a feeling of safety for me, something like “people saw me for what I am and accepted me; that implies that, at least around some people, I can relax my guards and not worry so much about giving a good impression, because these people are fine with me already”.
From my very limited (n = 1) circling experience, it felt valuable but before reading this post, it never occurred to me that it might be useful as a direct rationality tool.
What I got out of it was a sense of social connection, being seen, and being accepted as who I am; this made the practice seem valuable because I believe that a lot of people today are absolutely starved for these experiences, and that this could help satisfy their need for them.
Though while I agree that circling doesn’t feel like a core rationality practice, it does feel like it should have an indirect benefit for some people. Namely, if you don’t feel safe and accepted, then I believe that you are much more likely to react emotionally to factual claims, and to e.g. turn any conversation into a status struggle and generally engage in motivated reasoning. Insecurity makes for poor rationality, so if anyone has a serious deficiency on that front, I would expect that practices like circling might actually end up massively boosting their rationality if the practices helped fix the deficiency.
At the same time, if someone was already mostly feeling socially safe and secure, then it wouldn’t have occurred to me to predict that circling would have any further effect on their rationality.
Sense of connection and being seen is definitely one of the most obvious possible benefits of circling, and many people are in fact starved for these things.
But this is one of the layers of Goodharting I mentioned: I think if a circle Goodharts on sense of connection it’s missing the opportunity to do something different and more interesting for rationalists, which I don’t know how to explain in words (part of the reason it’s easy to miss). The situation is roughly analogous to meditating because it helps you feel calmer, as opposed to the mountains of wacky stuff meditation can do instead.
To make an attempt to put it into a few words (but the topic still needs to have it’s own post at another time):
The relationship that people have to themselves matters. Many people don’t have an explicit model of how they relate to themselves. It’s a blindspot for many rationalists and given that the relationship that people have to themselves affects what the believe, feel and do, that has implications for rationality.
It also trains the core skills involved in Focusing and that’s valuable for the reason that make CFAR teach it.
Could you elaborate on what the hell “being seen” means? My experience with the term is somewhere between meaninglessness and “a distraction mentioned while someone’s covertly socially attacking”.
A sense that other people are paying direct attention to you, noticing important and real aspects of you, and not rejecting those aspects.
This is rare in my experience because people mostly don’t actually pay attention to each other, they just notice some vague surface-level details that are easy to remember and not much else.
I endorse this summary.
The experience of being seen often translates into a feeling of safety for me, something like “people saw me for what I am and accepted me; that implies that, at least around some people, I can relax my guards and not worry so much about giving a good impression, because these people are fine with me already”.