This is good to know; I’ve seen some people recommend it with “if you get through two lectures and you don’t like it, it’s not for you.” So I’m not sure how strongly you should take my recommendation.
In particular, I think one of the things I liked most about it was seeing a thing I’m already deeply familiar with / interested in (rationality / how to orient one’s life) from a new angle. The “history of philosophy as seen by a cognitive scientist” sounds way more interesting to me than “history of philosophy as seen by a philosopher”, or something similar; it might or might not sound interesting to you.
That said, I think there’s a thing going on with ‘underdelivery’, where the lecture is much more “these are the problems meditation is trying to solve, and this is why you might expect meditation to solve them” (with an ecosystem of practices, rather than just meditation), but listening to the lecture doesn’t make you a skilled meditator; you have to actually meditate if you want to solve the problems that meditation solves. [You could imagine a similar lecture on physiology, wherein you end up with a knowledge of the history of movement and exercise and a sense of what you need to do—but also, you won’t actually get fit without moving.]
As well, a lot of his points are something like “here’s a phrase that we’ve trivialized, but which you should take seriously”, but maybe you do take the phrase seriously already, or him pointing at this still leads to you seeing the trivialized thing, since he hasn’t actually helped you realize its meaning.
I’ve just watched two episodes now, and while it’s interesting, it’s also… throwing up a lot of epistemic red flags for me.
He goes off on all these interesting tangents, but it feels more like “just so stories”. Like he can throw all this information at me to get me to nod along and follow where he’s going, without ever actually proving anything, and because there’s all these tangents I feel like he can slip stuff in without me noticing.
I’ve been listening to him for two hours now, and I still don’t quite get what his thesis is, except “There’s a meaning crisis.” I feel like he’s trying to push me towards a solution without being upfront from the beginning about what that solution is.… “Traditionalism”, maybe?
Or like maybe he’s saying something simple in a very complex and long-winded way in order to feel deep? But maybe that is the required method of saying it to get it deeper into your brain.
Here’s a single concrete thing he does that drives me nuts. I wonder if it may be a part of what is setting you off, too?
He overuses the term “unifying.” He uses it three times an episode, to mean a different thing than I would usually mean by it. I really wish he’d cut it out.
I usually see “unifying” as signifying that there is an overarching model that takes some of the complexity of several models, and collapses them down together. Something that reduces “special casing.”
He almost never means that. It’s always adding more, or tying together, or connecting bits without simplifying. It comes off to me like a string of broken promises.
In my notes, it means that I produce a ton of pre-emptive “Summary Here Headers” (for theory unifications that seem to never come), that I had to delete in the end. Because usually, there isn’t a deep shared root to summarize. When I come back to fill them in, all I find is a tangential binding that’s thin as a thread. Which is just not enough to cohesively summarize the next 3 things he talked about as if they were a single object.
I think his “big theory” is actually something more like… spoilers… which I wouldn’t have guessed at accurately from the first 2 episodes.
(I can’t get spoilers to work on markdown, ugh. Stop reading if you want to avoid them.)
Maybe “attention as a terrain,” or maybe something about aligning high-abstraction frames with embodied ones? The former feels basic to me at this point, but the later’s actually a pretty decent line of thought.
I can’t recall any specific examples of him using “Unifying” that way, but what you describe does ring familiar. I think he tends to use verbose language where unnecessary. I’d love to get the Paul-Graham-edited-for-simplicity version of these lectures.
He isn’t offering traditionalism, he recognizes that’s infeasible. He’s looking for something that’s compatible with science and rationality, but also achieves the same thing traditional systems achieved (like creating meaning, purpose, fulfillment, community, etc.) His solution is to create an “ecosystem of practices” (such as meditation, journaling, circling and such) that are practiced communally. Sometimes he also calls it “The religion that isn’t a religion”.
On the one hand, I think there’s still place for him to be clearer about his solution, on the other hand, he’s clear that he’s not actually sure yet how a solution would look like, and the purpose of this series is to define and understand the problem really well, and understand a bunch of background materiel that he expects will be relevant for finding a solution.
And yes, I think there’s room for simplifying. If not the thesis, then at least the presentation. He uses very complex vocabulary that I’m not sure is really necessary. To me it feels like it detracts rather than add.
His solution is to create an “ecosystem of practices” (such as meditation, journaling, circling and such) that are practiced communally. Sometimes he also calls it “The religion that isn’t a religion”
Two episodes / two hours in and he hasn’t mentioned any of this that I recall. I feel like the introductory session should at least vaguely mention where he’s going to be steering BEFORE you’ve invested many hours.
I am pretty sympathetic to his reason for not doing this, which is something like “yes, at the end of the lecture you can say two sentences that feel to you like they capture the spirit. But do those two sentences have the power to transmit the spirit?” I think most summaries (mine included!) are papering over some of the inferential distance.
I do also think he’s much more tentative about proposed solutions than the problem. This isn’t a “I have a great new exercise plan which will solve the obesity crisis”, it’s closer to “we’re in an obesity crisis, this is the history of it and how I think the underlying physiological mechanisms work, and here’s what might be a sketch of a solution.” At which point foregrounding the sketch of the solution seems like it’s putting the emphasis in the wrong place.
He goes off on all these interesting tangents, but it feels more like “just so stories”.
Consider doing some epistemic spot checks, where you randomly select some claims and try to figure out if his story checks out. One of the benefits of something like this lecture club is with enough eyes, we can actually get decent coverage on all of the bits of the lecture, and figure out where he’s made mistakes or been misleading or so on, or if the number of mistakes is actually pretty low, end up confident in the remainder.
[I’m doing a more involved version of this that’s going to pay off for some of the later lectures, which is he references a bunch of works by more recent philosophers, and so I’m reading some of those books to try to better situate what he says / see how much his take and my take agree.]
The issue here is that the easy, straightforward facts are all legit to the best of my knowledge (e.g. the basic history of the Bronze Age collapse and such), but the points that his thesis is more strongly built upon are not just straightforward fact checks (e.g. Pretending to be a deer helps you hunt deer, and tribes with shamans outperformed tribes without, etc)
It’s like you list a bunch of real facts and real knowledge in order to make your point sound legit, and then put a bunch of wild speculation on top of it. (I’m not saying that’s what he’s doing, but that it’s a really easy thing to do, and really hard to tell apart).
I got somewhat of a similar feeling skipped into episode title that seemed more interesting. Now having myself “spoiled” ona couple of things it is more clear what he is doing with the presentation. He is using sophisticated opinion in choosing a partiuclar path/story and wants the path to be followable step-by-step to the one that is walking it.
It is a the difference between coming up with a proof vs explaining a proof.
In doing the reverse ordering I can make connections on what the talkpoints are later connected to. Presented here itis “shamans do wonky stuff and it somehow works” but in reference to later how it might be plausible that the wierd stuff has tangilble (understandable by me here now) advantages makes it a more dynamic landscape to think in. Part fo the point might be that the shamans might be able to pick up on the advantages and thus a reason to repeat the behaviour/technique but they might not have a good gear-level understanding what it is doing or why it is working (or they or some of them could but can’t neccesarily chare the insight to the uninitiated).
This is good to know; I’ve seen some people recommend it with “if you get through two lectures and you don’t like it, it’s not for you.” So I’m not sure how strongly you should take my recommendation.
In particular, I think one of the things I liked most about it was seeing a thing I’m already deeply familiar with / interested in (rationality / how to orient one’s life) from a new angle. The “history of philosophy as seen by a cognitive scientist” sounds way more interesting to me than “history of philosophy as seen by a philosopher”, or something similar; it might or might not sound interesting to you.
That said, I think there’s a thing going on with ‘underdelivery’, where the lecture is much more “these are the problems meditation is trying to solve, and this is why you might expect meditation to solve them” (with an ecosystem of practices, rather than just meditation), but listening to the lecture doesn’t make you a skilled meditator; you have to actually meditate if you want to solve the problems that meditation solves. [You could imagine a similar lecture on physiology, wherein you end up with a knowledge of the history of movement and exercise and a sense of what you need to do—but also, you won’t actually get fit without moving.]
As well, a lot of his points are something like “here’s a phrase that we’ve trivialized, but which you should take seriously”, but maybe you do take the phrase seriously already, or him pointing at this still leads to you seeing the trivialized thing, since he hasn’t actually helped you realize its meaning.
I’ve just watched two episodes now, and while it’s interesting, it’s also… throwing up a lot of epistemic red flags for me.
He goes off on all these interesting tangents, but it feels more like “just so stories”. Like he can throw all this information at me to get me to nod along and follow where he’s going, without ever actually proving anything, and because there’s all these tangents I feel like he can slip stuff in without me noticing.
I’ve been listening to him for two hours now, and I still don’t quite get what his thesis is, except “There’s a meaning crisis.” I feel like he’s trying to push me towards a solution without being upfront from the beginning about what that solution is.… “Traditionalism”, maybe?
Or like maybe he’s saying something simple in a very complex and long-winded way in order to feel deep? But maybe that is the required method of saying it to get it deeper into your brain.
Here’s a single concrete thing he does that drives me nuts. I wonder if it may be a part of what is setting you off, too?
He overuses the term “unifying.” He uses it three times an episode, to mean a different thing than I would usually mean by it. I really wish he’d cut it out.
I usually see “unifying” as signifying that there is an overarching model that takes some of the complexity of several models, and collapses them down together. Something that reduces “special casing.”
He almost never means that. It’s always adding more, or tying together, or connecting bits without simplifying. It comes off to me like a string of broken promises.
In my notes, it means that I produce a ton of pre-emptive “Summary Here Headers” (for theory unifications that seem to never come), that I had to delete in the end. Because usually, there isn’t a deep shared root to summarize. When I come back to fill them in, all I find is a tangential binding that’s thin as a thread. Which is just not enough to cohesively summarize the next 3 things he talked about as if they were a single object.
I think his “big theory” is actually something more like… spoilers… which I wouldn’t have guessed at accurately from the first 2 episodes.
(I can’t get spoilers to work on markdown, ugh. Stop reading if you want to avoid them.)
Maybe “attention as a terrain,” or maybe something about aligning high-abstraction frames with embodied ones? The former feels basic to me at this point, but the later’s actually a pretty decent line of thought.
I can’t recall any specific examples of him using “Unifying” that way, but what you describe does ring familiar. I think he tends to use verbose language where unnecessary. I’d love to get the Paul-Graham-edited-for-simplicity version of these lectures.
He isn’t offering traditionalism, he recognizes that’s infeasible. He’s looking for something that’s compatible with science and rationality, but also achieves the same thing traditional systems achieved (like creating meaning, purpose, fulfillment, community, etc.) His solution is to create an “ecosystem of practices” (such as meditation, journaling, circling and such) that are practiced communally. Sometimes he also calls it “The religion that isn’t a religion”.
On the one hand, I think there’s still place for him to be clearer about his solution, on the other hand, he’s clear that he’s not actually sure yet how a solution would look like, and the purpose of this series is to define and understand the problem really well, and understand a bunch of background materiel that he expects will be relevant for finding a solution.
And yes, I think there’s room for simplifying. If not the thesis, then at least the presentation. He uses very complex vocabulary that I’m not sure is really necessary. To me it feels like it detracts rather than add.
Two episodes / two hours in and he hasn’t mentioned any of this that I recall. I feel like the introductory session should at least vaguely mention where he’s going to be steering BEFORE you’ve invested many hours.
I am pretty sympathetic to his reason for not doing this, which is something like “yes, at the end of the lecture you can say two sentences that feel to you like they capture the spirit. But do those two sentences have the power to transmit the spirit?” I think most summaries (mine included!) are papering over some of the inferential distance.
I do also think he’s much more tentative about proposed solutions than the problem. This isn’t a “I have a great new exercise plan which will solve the obesity crisis”, it’s closer to “we’re in an obesity crisis, this is the history of it and how I think the underlying physiological mechanisms work, and here’s what might be a sketch of a solution.” At which point foregrounding the sketch of the solution seems like it’s putting the emphasis in the wrong place.
Yoav’s reply seems right to me. Also:
Consider doing some epistemic spot checks, where you randomly select some claims and try to figure out if his story checks out. One of the benefits of something like this lecture club is with enough eyes, we can actually get decent coverage on all of the bits of the lecture, and figure out where he’s made mistakes or been misleading or so on, or if the number of mistakes is actually pretty low, end up confident in the remainder.
[I’m doing a more involved version of this that’s going to pay off for some of the later lectures, which is he references a bunch of works by more recent philosophers, and so I’m reading some of those books to try to better situate what he says / see how much his take and my take agree.]
The issue here is that the easy, straightforward facts are all legit to the best of my knowledge (e.g. the basic history of the Bronze Age collapse and such), but the points that his thesis is more strongly built upon are not just straightforward fact checks (e.g. Pretending to be a deer helps you hunt deer, and tribes with shamans outperformed tribes without, etc)
It’s like you list a bunch of real facts and real knowledge in order to make your point sound legit, and then put a bunch of wild speculation on top of it. (I’m not saying that’s what he’s doing, but that it’s a really easy thing to do, and really hard to tell apart).
I got somewhat of a similar feeling skipped into episode title that seemed more interesting. Now having myself “spoiled” ona couple of things it is more clear what he is doing with the presentation. He is using sophisticated opinion in choosing a partiuclar path/story and wants the path to be followable step-by-step to the one that is walking it.
It is a the difference between coming up with a proof vs explaining a proof.
In doing the reverse ordering I can make connections on what the talkpoints are later connected to. Presented here itis “shamans do wonky stuff and it somehow works” but in reference to later how it might be plausible that the wierd stuff has tangilble (understandable by me here now) advantages makes it a more dynamic landscape to think in. Part fo the point might be that the shamans might be able to pick up on the advantages and thus a reason to repeat the behaviour/technique but they might not have a good gear-level understanding what it is doing or why it is working (or they or some of them could but can’t neccesarily chare the insight to the uninitiated).