The whole thing just reeks of valium. I’m sure you’d say theres a lot of emotionality in circling and that you felt some sort of deep connection or something. This is quite possibly true, but it seems theres an important part of it thats missing.
Would this feel different if people screamed when they wanted to scream, during Circling?
I intended something more like control. My anger is mine, its form is mine, and its destruction is mine. Restricting my expression of it is prima facie bad, if sometimes necessary. Restricting its form in my head, under the guise of intimacy no less, is the work of the devil.
What I’m hearing here (and am repeating back to see if I got it right) is the suggestion is heard as being about how you should organize your internal experience, in a way that doesn’t allow for the way that you are organized, and so can’t possibly allow for intimacy with the you that actually exists.
I think I see another drawback of these kinds of techniques: when someone criticizes your thing, your first thought is “let’s analyze why the person said that”, rather than “wait, is my thing bad?” It’s worrying that the thing you’re defending happens to teach that kind of mental move.
Aren’t those kind of the same thing, though? In that before you can ask yourself whether your thing is bad, you need to understand the criticism in question, and that requires verifying that your interpretation of the criticism is correct before you proceed.
It’s true that these sometimes come apart: e.g. maybe I have an irrational fear of AI, but that irrational motive can still drive me to formulate correct arguments for AI risk. But in that case there exists a clean separation between the motive and the object-level argument. Whereas in this case, Bunthut seemed to be articulating reasons behind their emotional discomfort.
If you are trying to check that you correctly understood what someone is saying about their emotional discomfort, then that doesn’t seem like a case where you can isolate an object-level argument that would be separate from “why the person said that”. They are trying to express discomfort about something, and the specific reason why the thing is making them uncomfortable is the object-level issue.
your first thought is “let’s analyze why the person said that”, rather than “wait, is my thing bad?”
It definitely makes sense to be worried about Bulverism, where my attention becomes solely about how it lands for the other person (and figuring out what mistake of theirs prevents it from landing the way I want).
I think you often want to figure out all of 1) what the causal history of their statement is, 2) whether your thing was bad according to you, 3) whether your sense of goodness/badness is bad according to you, in contact with their statement and its causal history. What order you do those in will depend on what the situation is.
Like, suppose I write a post and someone comments with a claim that I made a typo. Presumably my attention jumps to the second point, of “oh, did I type incorrectly?”, and only later (if ever) do I ask the questions of “why do they care about this?” and “am I caring the right amount about spelling errors?”
If instead I make a claim and someone says “that claim misses my experience,” presumably my attention should jump to the first point, of what their experience was so that I can then determine whether or not I was missing their experience when I said it, or expressed myself poorly, or was misheard, or whatever.
---
I note that I am personally only minimally worried about specific Circlers that I know falling into Bulverism, and I feel like if I knew the theory / practice of it more I would be able to point to the policies and principles they’re using that mean that error is unlikely for them. Like, for me personally, one of the protective forces is something like “selfish growth,” where there’s a drive to interpret information in a way that leads to me getting better at what I want to get better at, and so it would be surprising to see me ‘write off’ criticism after analyzing it, because the thing I want is the growth, not the defense-from-attack.
---
I think there are definitely developmental stages that people can pass through that make them more annoying when they advance a step. Like, I can imagine someone who mostly cares about defending themselves from attacks, and basically doesn’t have a theory of mind, and you introduce them to the idea that they can figure out why other people say things, and so then they go around projecting at everyone else. I think so long as they’re still accepting input / doing empiricism / able to self-reflect, this will be a temporary phase as their initial random model gradient-descents through feedback to something that more accurately reflects reality. If they aren’t, well, knowing about biases can hurt people, and they might project why other people dislike their projections in a way that’s self-reinforcing and get stuck in a trap.
Would this feel different if people screamed when they wanted to scream, during Circling?
It could mean that the problem is gone, but it propably means you’re setting the cut later. This might make people marginally more accepting or it might not, I’m not sure on the distribution in individual psychology. For me I‘d just feel like a clown in addition to the other stuff.
What I’m hearing here (and am repeating back to see if I got it right) is the suggestion is heard as being about how you should organize your internal experience, in a way that doesn’t allow for the way that you are organized, and so can’t possibly allow for intimacy with the you that actually exists.
Partially, but I also think that you believe that [something] can be changed independently of the internal experience, and I don‘t. I‘m not sure what [something] is yet, but it lives somewhere in „social action and expression“. That might mean that I have a different mental makeup than you, or it might mean that the concept of „emotion“ I consider important is different from yours.
It could mean that the problem is gone, but it propably means you’re setting the cut later.
I asked because it is considered appropriate in Circling to bring emotions in the forms they want to be expressed in, including things like screams. Also the sorts of emotions people express in Circles run basically the whole emotional range, from pleasant to challenging.
I had the hypothesis that you were imagining a version where emotions had to pass through some external filter, like “politeness,” and so rather than ending up with an accurate picture of where people are at, Circlers would end up with a systematically biased or censored picture. I don’t think that happens with an external filter based on valence. That is, I think there are internal filters and people self-censor a lot (as part of being authentic to the complicated thing that they are), and I think there might be some external procedural filters.
I am somewhat worried about those procedural filters. Like, if I have a desire to be understood on a narrow technical point, the more Circling move is to go into what it’s like to want to convey the point, but the thing the emotion wants is to just explain the thing already; if it could pick its expression it would pick a lecture.
[Worried because of the “can’t allow for intimacy” point, and what to make of that is pretty complicated because it touches on lots of stuff that I haven’t written about yet.]
I remain sceptical of how you use internal/external. To give an example: Lets say a higher-up does something that makes me angry. Then I might want to scream at him but find myself unable to. If however he sensed this and offered me to scream without sanction (and lets say this is credible), I wouldn’t want that. Thats because what I wanted was never about more decibel per se, but the significance this has under normal circumstances, and he has altered the significance. Now is the remaining barrier to “really expressing” myself internal or external? Keep in mind that we could repeat the above for any behaviour that doesn’t directly harm anyone (the harm is not here because it is specifically anger we are talking about. Declarations of love could similarly be robbed of their meaning).
Like, if I have a desire to be understood on a narrow technical point, the more Circling move is to go into what it’s like to want to convey the point, but the thing the emotion wants is to just explain the thing already; if it could pick its expression it would pick a lecture.
This is going in the right direction.
Also, after leaving this in the back of my head for the last few days, I think I have an inroad to explaining the problem in a less emotion-focused way. To start off: What effects can and should circling have on the social reality while not circling?
If I’m inferring correctly, the thing that’s going on here is your frustration is at both how the thing went down and that the person who did it is superior to you. If he ‘lets you’ scream, it’s not a fight or a remonstration, it’s him humoring you, which isn’t the real thing.
To start off: What effects can and should circling have on the social reality while not circling?
Yeah, this is a really tricky question. I think the answer to both is “lots of effects.”
Sometimes there are confidentiality agreements (where people get into a high-trust state and share info and then by default that info isn’t widely propagated, so that you don’t have to be think as much about “I trust Alice, but do I trust Alice’s trust?”) but there aren’t any sort of “forgetting agreements” (where I share something shocking about me and you don’t want to be friends anymore and then I can say “well, can you just forget the shocking thing?”).
Given that it can have lots of effects on the social reality outside of Circling, the question of “are those expected effects good or bad?” is quite important, as is the question of “what standard should you use to measure goodness or badness of those effects?”.
A section of my draft for this post that I decided to move to a comment, and then later decided should be its own post, is about the “will Circling with people I know be good for my social goals?” question, which I answered with “quite probably not on the meta-level I think you’re thinking on, but I think it will on a different meta-level, and I think you might want to hop to the other meta-level.”
To the extent it’s possible, I think it’s good for people to have the option of Circling with strangers, in order to minimize worries in this vein; I think this is one of the other things that makes the possibility of Circling online neat.
To the extent it’s possible, I think it’s good for people to have the option of Circling with strangers, in order to minimize worries in this vein; I think this is one of the other things that makes the possibility of Circling online neat.
I think doing it with strangers you never see again dissolves the worries I’m talking about for many people, though not quite for me (and it raises new problems about being intimate with strangers).
The stuff above is too vague to really do much with, so I’m looking forward to that post of yours. I will say though that I didn’t imagine literal forgetting agreements—even if it were possible to keep them (and while we’re at it, how do you imagine keeping a confidentiality agreement without keeping a forgetting agreement? Clearly your reaction can give a lot of information about what went on, even if you never Tell anyone) because that would sort of defeat the point, no? But clearly there is some expectation that people react differently then they normally would, or else how the hell is it a good idea for you to act differently?
Thanks for the detailed reply!
Would this feel different if people screamed when they wanted to scream, during Circling?
What I’m hearing here (and am repeating back to see if I got it right) is the suggestion is heard as being about how you should organize your internal experience, in a way that doesn’t allow for the way that you are organized, and so can’t possibly allow for intimacy with the you that actually exists.
I think I see another drawback of these kinds of techniques: when someone criticizes your thing, your first thought is “let’s analyze why the person said that”, rather than “wait, is my thing bad?” It’s worrying that the thing you’re defending happens to teach that kind of mental move.
Aren’t those kind of the same thing, though? In that before you can ask yourself whether your thing is bad, you need to understand the criticism in question, and that requires verifying that your interpretation of the criticism is correct before you proceed.
It’s true that these sometimes come apart: e.g. maybe I have an irrational fear of AI, but that irrational motive can still drive me to formulate correct arguments for AI risk. But in that case there exists a clean separation between the motive and the object-level argument. Whereas in this case, Bunthut seemed to be articulating reasons behind their emotional discomfort.
If you are trying to check that you correctly understood what someone is saying about their emotional discomfort, then that doesn’t seem like a case where you can isolate an object-level argument that would be separate from “why the person said that”. They are trying to express discomfort about something, and the specific reason why the thing is making them uncomfortable is the object-level issue.
It definitely makes sense to be worried about Bulverism, where my attention becomes solely about how it lands for the other person (and figuring out what mistake of theirs prevents it from landing the way I want).
I think you often want to figure out all of 1) what the causal history of their statement is, 2) whether your thing was bad according to you, 3) whether your sense of goodness/badness is bad according to you, in contact with their statement and its causal history. What order you do those in will depend on what the situation is.
Like, suppose I write a post and someone comments with a claim that I made a typo. Presumably my attention jumps to the second point, of “oh, did I type incorrectly?”, and only later (if ever) do I ask the questions of “why do they care about this?” and “am I caring the right amount about spelling errors?”
If instead I make a claim and someone says “that claim misses my experience,” presumably my attention should jump to the first point, of what their experience was so that I can then determine whether or not I was missing their experience when I said it, or expressed myself poorly, or was misheard, or whatever.
---
I note that I am personally only minimally worried about specific Circlers that I know falling into Bulverism, and I feel like if I knew the theory / practice of it more I would be able to point to the policies and principles they’re using that mean that error is unlikely for them. Like, for me personally, one of the protective forces is something like “selfish growth,” where there’s a drive to interpret information in a way that leads to me getting better at what I want to get better at, and so it would be surprising to see me ‘write off’ criticism after analyzing it, because the thing I want is the growth, not the defense-from-attack.
---
I think there are definitely developmental stages that people can pass through that make them more annoying when they advance a step. Like, I can imagine someone who mostly cares about defending themselves from attacks, and basically doesn’t have a theory of mind, and you introduce them to the idea that they can figure out why other people say things, and so then they go around projecting at everyone else. I think so long as they’re still accepting input / doing empiricism / able to self-reflect, this will be a temporary phase as their initial random model gradient-descents through feedback to something that more accurately reflects reality. If they aren’t, well, knowing about biases can hurt people, and they might project why other people dislike their projections in a way that’s self-reinforcing and get stuck in a trap.
It could mean that the problem is gone, but it propably means you’re setting the cut later. This might make people marginally more accepting or it might not, I’m not sure on the distribution in individual psychology. For me I‘d just feel like a clown in addition to the other stuff.
Partially, but I also think that you believe that [something] can be changed independently of the internal experience, and I don‘t. I‘m not sure what [something] is yet, but it lives somewhere in „social action and expression“. That might mean that I have a different mental makeup than you, or it might mean that the concept of „emotion“ I consider important is different from yours.
I asked because it is considered appropriate in Circling to bring emotions in the forms they want to be expressed in, including things like screams. Also the sorts of emotions people express in Circles run basically the whole emotional range, from pleasant to challenging.
I had the hypothesis that you were imagining a version where emotions had to pass through some external filter, like “politeness,” and so rather than ending up with an accurate picture of where people are at, Circlers would end up with a systematically biased or censored picture. I don’t think that happens with an external filter based on valence. That is, I think there are internal filters and people self-censor a lot (as part of being authentic to the complicated thing that they are), and I think there might be some external procedural filters.
I am somewhat worried about those procedural filters. Like, if I have a desire to be understood on a narrow technical point, the more Circling move is to go into what it’s like to want to convey the point, but the thing the emotion wants is to just explain the thing already; if it could pick its expression it would pick a lecture.
[Worried because of the “can’t allow for intimacy” point, and what to make of that is pretty complicated because it touches on lots of stuff that I haven’t written about yet.]
I remain sceptical of how you use internal/external. To give an example: Lets say a higher-up does something that makes me angry. Then I might want to scream at him but find myself unable to. If however he sensed this and offered me to scream without sanction (and lets say this is credible), I wouldn’t want that. Thats because what I wanted was never about more decibel per se, but the significance this has under normal circumstances, and he has altered the significance. Now is the remaining barrier to “really expressing” myself internal or external? Keep in mind that we could repeat the above for any behaviour that doesn’t directly harm anyone (the harm is not here because it is specifically anger we are talking about. Declarations of love could similarly be robbed of their meaning).
This is going in the right direction.
Also, after leaving this in the back of my head for the last few days, I think I have an inroad to explaining the problem in a less emotion-focused way. To start off: What effects can and should circling have on the social reality while not circling?
If I’m inferring correctly, the thing that’s going on here is your frustration is at both how the thing went down and that the person who did it is superior to you. If he ‘lets you’ scream, it’s not a fight or a remonstration, it’s him humoring you, which isn’t the real thing.
Yeah, this is a really tricky question. I think the answer to both is “lots of effects.”
Sometimes there are confidentiality agreements (where people get into a high-trust state and share info and then by default that info isn’t widely propagated, so that you don’t have to be think as much about “I trust Alice, but do I trust Alice’s trust?”) but there aren’t any sort of “forgetting agreements” (where I share something shocking about me and you don’t want to be friends anymore and then I can say “well, can you just forget the shocking thing?”).
Given that it can have lots of effects on the social reality outside of Circling, the question of “are those expected effects good or bad?” is quite important, as is the question of “what standard should you use to measure goodness or badness of those effects?”.
A section of my draft for this post that I decided to move to a comment, and then later decided should be its own post, is about the “will Circling with people I know be good for my social goals?” question, which I answered with “quite probably not on the meta-level I think you’re thinking on, but I think it will on a different meta-level, and I think you might want to hop to the other meta-level.”
To the extent it’s possible, I think it’s good for people to have the option of Circling with strangers, in order to minimize worries in this vein; I think this is one of the other things that makes the possibility of Circling online neat.
That seems mostly correct.
I think doing it with strangers you never see again dissolves the worries I’m talking about for many people, though not quite for me (and it raises new problems about being intimate with strangers).
The stuff above is too vague to really do much with, so I’m looking forward to that post of yours. I will say though that I didn’t imagine literal forgetting agreements—even if it were possible to keep them (and while we’re at it, how do you imagine keeping a confidentiality agreement without keeping a forgetting agreement? Clearly your reaction can give a lot of information about what went on, even if you never Tell anyone) because that would sort of defeat the point, no? But clearly there is some expectation that people react differently then they normally would, or else how the hell is it a good idea for you to act differently?