Thanks for sharing! I found this helpful, though I only skimmed it.
The argument about how mainstream psychology looks a lot like woo too if you squint at it (e.g. IFS says you have multiple people living in your head) interests me. My tentative response is: “Yep, totally, and I think we shouldn’t trust mainstream psychology much either. And if there was an academic psychology department with grad students and professors all living in one big house inventing novel theories and experimenting on each other, serving as each other’s therapists and whatnot… I’d be pretty nervous about that place too.”
[Not really responding to your comment, just saying something sparked while reading it]
I wish that there were more things sort of like Leverage, honestly, given my current info. I’d remove the leader worship and the cosmic-battle stuff and the information suppression and the sleeping with subordinates, but I’d keep the living together, the dogfooding, the intense mental exploration, the jargon, the (non-anti-epistemic aspects of) exceptionalism. I’d add concrete stuff like making physical products, or computer code that does obviously interesting or useful stuff according to other people, or math proofs that academic mathematicians think are correct and interesting, etc. My sense is that these groups don’t include that stuff because it’s too, like, menial or non-abstract or something. Like if you’re trying to save the world, “of course” it’s mostly a waste of time to make a physical product that people want to buy; you should be spending all your time chewing on highly abstract high leverage questions about minds that have effect that radiate out into everything and determine the course of all future wise leadership etc. etc., like OAK/MAPLE or Circlers or Leverage. Which isn’t totally silly, but also yuck. 90% object, 10% meta, maybe 20% if you’re careful.
I also agree that intuitively it seems healthy to mostly be focused on object-level stuff. Maybe it’s something to do with getting more direct feedback from reality.
What was the “feedback from reality” that Leverage folks got on their psychological and self-improvement skills? I mean, those were the areas they considered themselves to be experts at; where they believed their techniques were so superior that publishing them would be a potential x-risk.
Reading Cathleen’s article… despite her admiration for Geoff, trying to sping things in positive light, and even shifting the blame on the rationalist community for not being more supportive… the actual data she provides, they really don’t seem to support Leverage’s self-image.
At least my impression is of a group of kids, most of them incapable of tying their own shoes, despite years of continuous self-improvement using secret techniques developed by their philosopher-king. And their psychological research culminated in “intention research”, which apparently made everyone in the group hostile to everyone else, resulting in the entire group falling apart. Like… if this is the best you can do, then maybe this is time to admit that you are utterly incompetent in everything beyond fundraising.
I think a lot of it might have to do with the non-linear way cleanup needs to scale with the number of people. If you have 10x people living in a space, they are probably creating around 10x as much of a mess. And because there are 10x people there are 10x people experiencing the messes. So with the broken glass example, you probably have 10x broken glasses per time period and 10x people wandering about risking to find a small glass shard you missed. So cleaning up a broken glass in a 40-persons household needs to be way more thorough than in a 4 persons household.
(It’s also why using glassware near your personal pool is fine while using glassware near a public pool tends to be prohibited.)
Thanks for sharing! I found this helpful, though I only skimmed it.
The argument about how mainstream psychology looks a lot like woo too if you squint at it (e.g. IFS says you have multiple people living in your head) interests me. My tentative response is: “Yep, totally, and I think we shouldn’t trust mainstream psychology much either. And if there was an academic psychology department with grad students and professors all living in one big house inventing novel theories and experimenting on each other, serving as each other’s therapists and whatnot… I’d be pretty nervous about that place too.”
[Not really responding to your comment, just saying something sparked while reading it]
I wish that there were more things sort of like Leverage, honestly, given my current info. I’d remove the leader worship and the cosmic-battle stuff and the information suppression and the sleeping with subordinates, but I’d keep the living together, the dogfooding, the intense mental exploration, the jargon, the (non-anti-epistemic aspects of) exceptionalism. I’d add concrete stuff like making physical products, or computer code that does obviously interesting or useful stuff according to other people, or math proofs that academic mathematicians think are correct and interesting, etc. My sense is that these groups don’t include that stuff because it’s too, like, menial or non-abstract or something. Like if you’re trying to save the world, “of course” it’s mostly a waste of time to make a physical product that people want to buy; you should be spending all your time chewing on highly abstract high leverage questions about minds that have effect that radiate out into everything and determine the course of all future wise leadership etc. etc., like OAK/MAPLE or Circlers or Leverage. Which isn’t totally silly, but also yuck. 90% object, 10% meta, maybe 20% if you’re careful.
I also agree that intuitively it seems healthy to mostly be focused on object-level stuff. Maybe it’s something to do with getting more direct feedback from reality.
What was the “feedback from reality” that Leverage folks got on their psychological and self-improvement skills? I mean, those were the areas they considered themselves to be experts at; where they believed their techniques were so superior that publishing them would be a potential x-risk.
Reading Cathleen’s article… despite her admiration for Geoff, trying to sping things in positive light, and even shifting the blame on the rationalist community for not being more supportive… the actual data she provides, they really don’t seem to support Leverage’s self-image.
At least my impression is of a group of kids, most of them incapable of tying their own shoes, despite years of continuous self-improvement using secret techniques developed by their philosopher-king. And their psychological research culminated in “intention research”, which apparently made everyone in the group hostile to everyone else, resulting in the entire group falling apart. Like… if this is the best you can do, then maybe this is time to admit that you are utterly incompetent in everything beyond fundraising.
There’s no reason to make an insult like that.
How about, “incapable of cleaning up after dropping a glass”?
(Not trying to be mean; I was very surprised to read that this was the kind of thing they relied on Cathleen for)
I think a lot of it might have to do with the non-linear way cleanup needs to scale with the number of people. If you have 10x people living in a space, they are probably creating around 10x as much of a mess. And because there are 10x people there are 10x people experiencing the messes. So with the broken glass example, you probably have 10x broken glasses per time period and 10x people wandering about risking to find a small glass shard you missed. So cleaning up a broken glass in a 40-persons household needs to be way more thorough than in a 4 persons household.
(It’s also why using glassware near your personal pool is fine while using glassware near a public pool tends to be prohibited.)