(disclaimer: I’ve done a fair bit of circling and “authentic relating,” probably dozens of hours, but am by no means an expert.)
Thanks for the post! I have had a lot of fun circling and in some cases I have seen it lead to interpersonal breakthroughs. Further, I perceive at least some applications to rationality. However, my sense is that circling falls into the same category as lucid dreaming, memory palaces, or various other interesting techniques—fun, but not really in alignment with the core spirit of rationality. Lucid dreaming can be used to train noticing confusion; circling can be used to train relevant skills as well. However, that doesn’t make either a core part of the program.
I would recommend circling to many people as a fun and interesting exercise; I would not recommend it as the forefront of rationality development. I also notice that I feel a sense of apprehension around these communities becoming too intertwined, in part because many people in the circling community are, as you say, New Age hippie self-help guru types. As a result, I’ve intentionally shied away from exploring this area more despite quite appreciating it—I’m not sure the epistemics are there and I’m very worried about these sorts of ideas having an undue influence on the rationality development project.
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”.
I’ve done less circling than Davis, and only really in the context of the rationality community, so I am even less of an expert here, but this basically sums up my perspective on circling as well. It seems pretty good in a narrow set of contexts, doesn’t seem to have super much to do with the core art of rationality, and falls in the category of things that seem to make people overconfident about the positive effects they produce (similar to memory palaces or lucid dreaming).
I do think it can help with a bunch of pretty important rationality skills, and might be covering some bases that are particularly deficient in the people who are currently part of this community (i.e. something like access to your felt senses and nuanced models of social reality).
Agree. I suspect ‘Circling’ per se is missing the forest for the trees (disclaimer, have only circled 10ish times), though they are adjacent to/accidentally facilitate something that actually works which I would be more likely to point to with the moniker ‘group mindfulness.’
The reason I think the actual thing is a rationality tool is that it, like meditation, is a lens polisher (the lens that sees its own flaws). You can use them as fora for noticing and then messing with your perceptual apertures as well as having other people point out cracks in your lens that you thought were in the territory. Strongly agree with the people saying that you don’t get the core thing if you don’t have a facilitator who knows enought to give detailed instructions and feedback. In the same way that if you get a poor meditation instructor you will just have a nice relaxing time without ever actually doing the thing, poor circlling will lead to the emotional benefits mentioned and if some people are starved for that it will get mistaken for the thing. It also requires very high trust to do the real thing, which random groups of 4-12 will not generally pull off.
Appreciate you bringing this perspective. I think it’s true for the majority of Circling I’ve seen, in most places. But there are some brands(?) of Circling that seem more directly rationality-aligned and ultimately focused on truth-seeking. That said, I think you’re still mostly right.
This blog post from the Integral Center offers a reasonable comparison as far as I can tell. (Most of my circling experience is with facilitators who were trained in the Circling Europe style; I’ve had one or two Circling Institute circles and one or two Integral Center circles.)
I would compare circling to meditation, rather than lucid dreaming. It’s not quite the same thing as rationality, and it has a lot of built up culture and tradition, some of which we disagree with, but it’s a demostrably powerful tool that we would be impoverished if we ignored.
(disclaimer: I’ve done a fair bit of circling and “authentic relating,” probably dozens of hours, but am by no means an expert.)
Thanks for the post! I have had a lot of fun circling and in some cases I have seen it lead to interpersonal breakthroughs. Further, I perceive at least some applications to rationality. However, my sense is that circling falls into the same category as lucid dreaming, memory palaces, or various other interesting techniques—fun, but not really in alignment with the core spirit of rationality. Lucid dreaming can be used to train noticing confusion; circling can be used to train relevant skills as well. However, that doesn’t make either a core part of the program.
I would recommend circling to many people as a fun and interesting exercise; I would not recommend it as the forefront of rationality development. I also notice that I feel a sense of apprehension around these communities becoming too intertwined, in part because many people in the circling community are, as you say, New Age hippie self-help guru types. As a result, I’ve intentionally shied away from exploring this area more despite quite appreciating it—I’m not sure the epistemics are there and I’m very worried about these sorts of ideas having an undue influence on the rationality development project.
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”.
I’ve done less circling than Davis, and only really in the context of the rationality community, so I am even less of an expert here, but this basically sums up my perspective on circling as well. It seems pretty good in a narrow set of contexts, doesn’t seem to have super much to do with the core art of rationality, and falls in the category of things that seem to make people overconfident about the positive effects they produce (similar to memory palaces or lucid dreaming).
I do think it can help with a bunch of pretty important rationality skills, and might be covering some bases that are particularly deficient in the people who are currently part of this community (i.e. something like access to your felt senses and nuanced models of social reality).
Agree. I suspect ‘Circling’ per se is missing the forest for the trees (disclaimer, have only circled 10ish times), though they are adjacent to/accidentally facilitate something that actually works which I would be more likely to point to with the moniker ‘group mindfulness.’
The reason I think the actual thing is a rationality tool is that it, like meditation, is a lens polisher (the lens that sees its own flaws). You can use them as fora for noticing and then messing with your perceptual apertures as well as having other people point out cracks in your lens that you thought were in the territory. Strongly agree with the people saying that you don’t get the core thing if you don’t have a facilitator who knows enought to give detailed instructions and feedback. In the same way that if you get a poor meditation instructor you will just have a nice relaxing time without ever actually doing the thing, poor circlling will lead to the emotional benefits mentioned and if some people are starved for that it will get mistaken for the thing. It also requires very high trust to do the real thing, which random groups of 4-12 will not generally pull off.
Appreciate you bringing this perspective. I think it’s true for the majority of Circling I’ve seen, in most places. But there are some brands(?) of Circling that seem more directly rationality-aligned and ultimately focused on truth-seeking. That said, I think you’re still mostly right.
Given that you seem to have a deeper experience in multiple styles of cirling I would be interested in a post exploring the differences.
I learned circling mostly in the Circling Europe style and I would love to know how the thing in the Bay Area differs.
This blog post from the Integral Center offers a reasonable comparison as far as I can tell. (Most of my circling experience is with facilitators who were trained in the Circling Europe style; I’ve had one or two Circling Institute circles and one or two Integral Center circles.)
I would compare circling to meditation, rather than lucid dreaming. It’s not quite the same thing as rationality, and it has a lot of built up culture and tradition, some of which we disagree with, but it’s a demostrably powerful tool that we would be impoverished if we ignored.