This post is great and much needed, and makes me feel much better about the goings-on at CFAR.
It is easy to get the impression that the concerns raised in this post are not being seen, or are being seen from inside the framework of people making those same mistakes. Sometimes these mistakes are disorientation that people know are disruptive and need to be dealt with, but other times I’ve encountered many who view such things as right and proper, and view not having such a perspective as blameworthy. I even frequently find an undertone of ‘if you don’t have this orientation something went wrong.’
It’s clear from this post that this is not what is happening for Anna/CFAR, which is great news.
This now provides, to me, two distinct things.
One, a clear anchor from which to make it clear that failure to engage with regular life, and failure to continue to have regular moral values and desires and cares and hobbies and so on, is a failure mode of some sort of phase transition that we have been causing. That it is damaging, and it is to be avoided slash the damage contained and people helped to move on as smoothly and quickly as possible.
Two, the framework of reality-revealing versus reality-masking, which has universal application. If this resonates with people it might be a big step forward in being able to put words to key things, including things I’m trying to get at in the Mazes sequence.
It is easy to get the impression that the concerns raised in this post are not being seen, or are being seen from inside the framework of people making those same mistakes.
I don’t have a strong opinion about the CFAR case in particular, but in general, I think this is impression is pretty much what happens by default in organizations, even when people running them are smart and competent and well-meaning and want to earn the community’s trust. Transparency is really hard, harder than I think anyone expects until they try to do it, and to do it well you have to allocate a lot of skill points to it, which means allocating them away from the organization’s core competencies. I’ve reached the point where I no longer find even gross failures of this kind surprising.
(I think you already appreciate this but it seemed worth saying explicitly in public anyway.)
This post is great and much needed, and makes me feel much better about the goings-on at CFAR.
It is easy to get the impression that the concerns raised in this post are not being seen, or are being seen from inside the framework of people making those same mistakes. Sometimes these mistakes are disorientation that people know are disruptive and need to be dealt with, but other times I’ve encountered many who view such things as right and proper, and view not having such a perspective as blameworthy. I even frequently find an undertone of ‘if you don’t have this orientation something went wrong.’
It’s clear from this post that this is not what is happening for Anna/CFAR, which is great news.
This now provides, to me, two distinct things.
One, a clear anchor from which to make it clear that failure to engage with regular life, and failure to continue to have regular moral values and desires and cares and hobbies and so on, is a failure mode of some sort of phase transition that we have been causing. That it is damaging, and it is to be avoided slash the damage contained and people helped to move on as smoothly and quickly as possible.
Two, the framework of reality-revealing versus reality-masking, which has universal application. If this resonates with people it might be a big step forward in being able to put words to key things, including things I’m trying to get at in the Mazes sequence.
I don’t have a strong opinion about the CFAR case in particular, but in general, I think this is impression is pretty much what happens by default in organizations, even when people running them are smart and competent and well-meaning and want to earn the community’s trust. Transparency is really hard, harder than I think anyone expects until they try to do it, and to do it well you have to allocate a lot of skill points to it, which means allocating them away from the organization’s core competencies. I’ve reached the point where I no longer find even gross failures of this kind surprising.
(I think you already appreciate this but it seemed worth saying explicitly in public anyway.)