(I only recently saw this comment, hence the tardy response to it.)
My guess is that for instrumental rationality the optimal courses are dance, yoga, and above all acting.
What is the relevance that you see in these? I’ve done yoga for a long time, and apart from mens sana in corpore sano no particular connection with rationality has ever occurred to me. Given that dance and acting are mentioned in the same breath, I suspect that your reasons for including them are something other than the social aspect of dancing in nightclubs or using acting skills for deception. How would the practice of these things assist in, say, solving a scientific research problem, negotiating a house purchase, negotiating the possibility of an intimate relationship, or raising public support for cryonics?
By making you more aware of and more able to deal with, compensate for, control and use emotions, healthier, more energetic, less gullible, etc. Also, in the case of yoga, a better materialist who would propose better hypotheses in mind related subjects and some mechanics related subjects and would be more likely to use analysis and experiment in the right cases.
Is there any evidence that merely pursing yoga causes people to have better materialistic theories of mind? I am very skeptical that it leads to experiment!
I think you are saying that these are all good avenues to know thyself, but people compartmentalize so much that I think you really have to say that explicitly.
Why? Do you mean acting is useful for Dark Arts-style deception? It strikes me that acting would be useless without a lot of psychology as well; you need to know what to act as well as how to act.
The Dark Arts only look dark from the outside. Reality is more complicated, predictably less black and white. Also, the main defense against dark arts IS dark arts. Also, there’s little virtue in not using abilities you don’t have on moral grounds. Finally, we all have a lot of psychology here, but acting out behaviors you don’t understand will help you to understand them.
Very seriously, those who relinquish the known dark arts will invent their own path to the abyss, a path without the protective guard-rails and warning signs worked out by billions of predecessors. We’re much better in this crowd at overcoming the surface manifestations of self-deception promoting processes than we are at resisting self-deception. We end up self-deceiving in unusual ways, but predictable ways for someone who has met enough rationalists.
We’re much better in this crowd at overcoming the surface manifestations of self-deception promoting processes than we are at resisting self-deception.
Yet another example of Goodhart’s Law, no? How does one defend against that? If self-deception usually operates below our conscious radar, then you usually have to shine conscious attention on it in order to notice it, and I assume you have to be able to notice it in order to fight it. But if rewarding oneself for successfully focusing conscious attention on self-deception, over time, inevitably makes one aware primarily of only the surface manifestations of self-deception, then attempting to increase one’s focus on self-deception is largely futile. I really don’t know what to suggest, but I urgently want a strategy.
for instrumental rationality the optimal courses are dance, yoga, and above all acting.
Let’s say acting is a useful dark art. What on earth does that have to do with yoga or dancing? Yoga tends to improve my posture and breathing and calm, but those aren’t dark arts; those are purely defensive light arts. They make me less susceptible to stress and panic, but not necessarily better able to mislead or manipulate people. Dancing, on a very, very, very good day makes me more sexually attractive, but surely you’re not suggesting that the key to epistemic rationality is to seduce one’s ideological opponents on the dance floor? I’m more than a bit confused, here.
Great point about Goodhart’s Law. Our eternal and tireless enemy. The best defense, I think, is internal cooperation. Stop self-deceiving by giving elements of yourself reasons that matter to them not to deceive other elements, and by giving them reasons to cooperate.
I almost say just that; the dance floor is only where the most overt type of dancing takes place. Did you really just say that its not a dark art to stretch your neck further than you voluntarily could by using an imaginary hook to pull your head up?
Good heuristic; if pot makes you better at it, its a ‘dark art’ in the sense of drawing on non-deliberate thought but not in the sense of moving you towards less accurate beliefs, and it won’t feel evil but will feel aesthetically right. If pride motivates or empowers it its a dark art in the latter, worse sense of moving you away from truth. If deliberative thought helps the performance, not just the training, it won’t corrupt you but it will feel cunning/tricky/evil even when you are good at it.
Drawing on non-deliberate thought but not in the sense of moving you towards less accurate beliefs, and it won’t feel evil but will feel aesthetically right
I am a fan of Waitzkin, but I don’t think I got this from him. As far as I can tell, things pretty much have to be this way in any plausible psychological theory.
But if rewarding oneself for successfully focusing conscious attention on self-deception, over time, inevitably makes one aware primarily of only the surface manifestations of self-deception, then attempting to increase one’s focus on self-deception is largely futile. I really don’t know what to suggest, but I urgently want a strategy.
Tentative suggestion: Aim for self-reward for increased awareness and checking for truth, not for any particular finding.
Also, there’s little virtue in not using abilities you don’t have on moral grounds
There’s some virtue in not acquiring those abilities if you think there’s no decent use for them.
Very seriously, those who relinquish the known dark arts will invent their own path to the abyss, a path without the protective guard-rails and warning signs worked out by billions of predecessors. We end up self-deceiving in unusual ways, but predictable ways for someone who has met enough rationalists.
Examples for both?
Do you find that all influential people use what rationalists would call Dark Arts? Do you think that there’s such a thing as influence which tends to make people more clear-headed?
The most obvious is that beliefs and values are not that distinctly represented in the human brain. If you can’t tweak your beliefs to be self-aggrandizing the default outcome is for your values to become self-aggrandizing instead. In practice, this also leads to low salience for those virtues where you are deficient so that the successes that come from the possession of virtues other than your own looks like ‘luck’ to you, even when such successes happen repeatedly and even when you know that luck is a synonym for probability favoring someone and probability is in the map not in the territory. This problem is particular severe when the virtues in question are framed by your culture as passive, treated as simply being the absences of vices which your culture pretends people should be able to routinely eliminate and which your culture morally blames people for not eliminating.
Let me give an example to test whether I understand correctly. I am lazy. Laziness belongs to the described category of vices that are expected to be routinely eliminated. Now I can’t value hard work too high and simultaneously be aware of my laziness, since that would violate the self-aggrandising axiom. I am too rational to deceive myself that I am actually not lazy, so I have to adjust my values instead and accept laziness as normal. Perhaps this makes me less virtuous.
Well, if this is what you have meant, I agree that (for me) it actually works like that, but I wouldn’t call it self-deception.
Deceiving yourself about how much you would value hard work in the absence of your laziness leads to predictable mistakes when you then model others with your value of yourself and don’t understand why the others don’t like you (because you are tacitly modeling them as not considering laziness very bad).
These predictable mistakes add up to much worse life performance in aggregate than if they didn’t occur.
I haven’t said that I suppose my values in the absence of laziness would be the same. I also don’t expect others to have the same values as myself. Even if I did, that would be example of the “mind projection fallacy” or “false agreement fallacy” which was discussed here several times. Do you think that the lesswrongers are in tackling these biases substantially worse than they (we) think?
I don’t think that we even think that we are avoiding using ourselves as our default model of other people in many situations, nor that we can do so in principle, but I wasn’t of the impression that people though that they could.
One predictable way I have seen many rationalists (including myself) deceive themselves is by flooding their working memory and confusing themselves. They do this via nitpicking, pursuing arguments and counter-arguments in a rabbit hole depth-first fashion and neglecting other shallower ones, using long and grammatically complex sentences, etc. There are many ways. All you have to do is to ensure that you max out your working memory, which then makes you less able to self-monitor for biases.
How do you counter this? Do note that arguments are not systematically distributed wrt. their complexity. So it’s just best to stick to simple arguments which you can fully comprehend, and with some working memory capacity to spare.
I wouldn’t say dancing, yoga or acting classes qualify for the ‘dark arts’ title. If I want to see the dark arts I’ll study debating, law or PR.
Also, the main defense against dark arts IS dark arts.
What gets even more interesting is that the most powerful counters to dark arts are not dark arts but are what will usually be described as ‘evil’ (things like murder, for example).
Yep. By the way, I should have included improve in particular in that list of things to study, with singing and music as a lower priority but also valuable.
My guess is that for instrumental rationality the optimal courses are dance, yoga, and above all acting. Just don’t try to use them as credentials.
(I only recently saw this comment, hence the tardy response to it.)
What is the relevance that you see in these? I’ve done yoga for a long time, and apart from mens sana in corpore sano no particular connection with rationality has ever occurred to me. Given that dance and acting are mentioned in the same breath, I suspect that your reasons for including them are something other than the social aspect of dancing in nightclubs or using acting skills for deception. How would the practice of these things assist in, say, solving a scientific research problem, negotiating a house purchase, negotiating the possibility of an intimate relationship, or raising public support for cryonics?
By making you more aware of and more able to deal with, compensate for, control and use emotions, healthier, more energetic, less gullible, etc. Also, in the case of yoga, a better materialist who would propose better hypotheses in mind related subjects and some mechanics related subjects and would be more likely to use analysis and experiment in the right cases.
Is there any evidence that merely pursing yoga causes people to have better materialistic theories of mind? I am very skeptical that it leads to experiment!
I think you are saying that these are all good avenues to know thyself, but people compartmentalize so much that I think you really have to say that explicitly.
Why? Do you mean acting is useful for Dark Arts-style deception? It strikes me that acting would be useless without a lot of psychology as well; you need to know what to act as well as how to act.
The Dark Arts only look dark from the outside. Reality is more complicated, predictably less black and white. Also, the main defense against dark arts IS dark arts. Also, there’s little virtue in not using abilities you don’t have on moral grounds. Finally, we all have a lot of psychology here, but acting out behaviors you don’t understand will help you to understand them.
Very seriously, those who relinquish the known dark arts will invent their own path to the abyss, a path without the protective guard-rails and warning signs worked out by billions of predecessors. We’re much better in this crowd at overcoming the surface manifestations of self-deception promoting processes than we are at resisting self-deception. We end up self-deceiving in unusual ways, but predictable ways for someone who has met enough rationalists.
Yet another example of Goodhart’s Law, no? How does one defend against that? If self-deception usually operates below our conscious radar, then you usually have to shine conscious attention on it in order to notice it, and I assume you have to be able to notice it in order to fight it. But if rewarding oneself for successfully focusing conscious attention on self-deception, over time, inevitably makes one aware primarily of only the surface manifestations of self-deception, then attempting to increase one’s focus on self-deception is largely futile. I really don’t know what to suggest, but I urgently want a strategy.
Let’s say acting is a useful dark art. What on earth does that have to do with yoga or dancing? Yoga tends to improve my posture and breathing and calm, but those aren’t dark arts; those are purely defensive light arts. They make me less susceptible to stress and panic, but not necessarily better able to mislead or manipulate people. Dancing, on a very, very, very good day makes me more sexually attractive, but surely you’re not suggesting that the key to epistemic rationality is to seduce one’s ideological opponents on the dance floor? I’m more than a bit confused, here.
Great point about Goodhart’s Law. Our eternal and tireless enemy. The best defense, I think, is internal cooperation. Stop self-deceiving by giving elements of yourself reasons that matter to them not to deceive other elements, and by giving them reasons to cooperate.
I almost say just that; the dance floor is only where the most overt type of dancing takes place. Did you really just say that its not a dark art to stretch your neck further than you voluntarily could by using an imaginary hook to pull your head up?
Good heuristic; if pot makes you better at it, its a ‘dark art’ in the sense of drawing on non-deliberate thought but not in the sense of moving you towards less accurate beliefs, and it won’t feel evil but will feel aesthetically right. If pride motivates or empowers it its a dark art in the latter, worse sense of moving you away from truth. If deliberative thought helps the performance, not just the training, it won’t corrupt you but it will feel cunning/tricky/evil even when you are good at it.
Something sounds like Waitzkin.
I am a fan of Waitzkin, but I don’t think I got this from him. As far as I can tell, things pretty much have to be this way in any plausible psychological theory.
Tentative suggestion: Aim for self-reward for increased awareness and checking for truth, not for any particular finding.
Hell yeah.
And if you can fully pull That One off, you are now non-attached… a Bodhisattva.
Fortunately, even partial success is very useful.
I suppose that what I offered was a meta-strategy, and getting it down to strategy and tactics is the hard part.
And “self-reward” has its own problems, of course.
‘Hell yeah’ as Michael would put it. Did you have any concrete strategies of self-rewarding that worked at all?
There’s some virtue in not acquiring those abilities if you think there’s no decent use for them.
Examples for both?
Do you find that all influential people use what rationalists would call Dark Arts? Do you think that there’s such a thing as influence which tends to make people more clear-headed?
I second the question. If the unusual deception patterns are predictable, there are certainly lot of examples.
If there are actual examples, some overview thereof would be great topic for a top level post.
The most obvious is that beliefs and values are not that distinctly represented in the human brain. If you can’t tweak your beliefs to be self-aggrandizing the default outcome is for your values to become self-aggrandizing instead. In practice, this also leads to low salience for those virtues where you are deficient so that the successes that come from the possession of virtues other than your own looks like ‘luck’ to you, even when such successes happen repeatedly and even when you know that luck is a synonym for probability favoring someone and probability is in the map not in the territory. This problem is particular severe when the virtues in question are framed by your culture as passive, treated as simply being the absences of vices which your culture pretends people should be able to routinely eliminate and which your culture morally blames people for not eliminating.
Let me give an example to test whether I understand correctly. I am lazy. Laziness belongs to the described category of vices that are expected to be routinely eliminated. Now I can’t value hard work too high and simultaneously be aware of my laziness, since that would violate the self-aggrandising axiom. I am too rational to deceive myself that I am actually not lazy, so I have to adjust my values instead and accept laziness as normal. Perhaps this makes me less virtuous.
Well, if this is what you have meant, I agree that (for me) it actually works like that, but I wouldn’t call it self-deception.
Deceiving yourself about how much you would value hard work in the absence of your laziness leads to predictable mistakes when you then model others with your value of yourself and don’t understand why the others don’t like you (because you are tacitly modeling them as not considering laziness very bad).
These predictable mistakes add up to much worse life performance in aggregate than if they didn’t occur.
I haven’t said that I suppose my values in the absence of laziness would be the same. I also don’t expect others to have the same values as myself. Even if I did, that would be example of the “mind projection fallacy” or “false agreement fallacy” which was discussed here several times. Do you think that the lesswrongers are in tackling these biases substantially worse than they (we) think?
I don’t think that we even think that we are avoiding using ourselves as our default model of other people in many situations, nor that we can do so in principle, but I wasn’t of the impression that people though that they could.
One predictable way I have seen many rationalists (including myself) deceive themselves is by flooding their working memory and confusing themselves. They do this via nitpicking, pursuing arguments and counter-arguments in a rabbit hole depth-first fashion and neglecting other shallower ones, using long and grammatically complex sentences, etc. There are many ways. All you have to do is to ensure that you max out your working memory, which then makes you less able to self-monitor for biases.
How do you counter this? Do note that arguments are not systematically distributed wrt. their complexity. So it’s just best to stick to simple arguments which you can fully comprehend, and with some working memory capacity to spare.
I wouldn’t say dancing, yoga or acting classes qualify for the ‘dark arts’ title. If I want to see the dark arts I’ll study debating, law or PR.
What gets even more interesting is that the most powerful counters to dark arts are not dark arts but are what will usually be described as ‘evil’ (things like murder, for example).
And let’s not forget that the Dark Arts were originally just “Battle Magic,” a lot more practical and less ominous-sounding...
Yep.
By the way, I should have included improve in particular in that list of things to study, with singing and music as a lower priority but also valuable.
There is something to that guess. I take the first two of those classes.