I came across her web site a few years ago, but I didn’t pay it much attention, because it failed my rule of thumb for deciding whether someone’s thoughts are worth studying: what is she for? It’s fairly clear what she’s against, but (this is my rule of thumb) I am not interested in what someone is against until I have seen what they are for. (I must add that to the recent “maxims” thread.)
Having just glanced over The Human Evasion again, my view of it is unchanged.
Mitchell, can you briefly summarise her “description of an alternative outlook, and an examination of various topics from that new perspective”? She herself at the end of that book says she can’t unless you go and visit her in Oxford.
I don’t have any particular list, this is just a touchstone for evaluating anyone’s writing. It isn’t even about agreeing with what they are for, but there must be something, or they are just an empty vessel.
Just to take the obvious example anyway, Eliezer’s writings are overwhelmingly focussed on what he is for. Even when he makes a negative critique (e.g of conventional concepts of scientific method) it is always in the service of saying what he would put in its place (Bayesian practice).
Perhaps her psychological ideal can be conveyed by asking you to imagine yourself as a seed A.I. programmer in a world on the threshold of singularity but which might just be a simulation. You have to decide, not just how to act, but how seriously to take your apparent circumstances. It’s up to you to figure out reality, and to do the best possible, most important thing you can do. She writes about this in Advice, from chapter 24 onwards.
Well, I tried. I read forwards from chapter 24, but when I got to chapter 32 and she writes: “I do not know if I am making much progress in elucidating the application of the existential criterion to psychology” I decided that she wasn’t. It was like reading the more vacuous sort of church sermon or new-agey book: many words, circling around and around, but never saying anything of substance. And the whole suffused with her anger and resentment against everyone else.
You compared her writing to Eliezer’s, but this is more like a version of Eliezer that never said anything beyond generalities like “the world abounds with possibilities, explodes with possibilities that most people never see”, “someone who could truly update would surpass any Nobel Prize winner”, and “the world is crazy, people are mad.”
in effect she has asked herself, if I were that person, how could I possibly lead the life I see them living, and say the things I hear them saying, unless I were that twisted up inside?
Did Eliezer ever explain what causes people to be “mad”? These books propose an explanation: human beings try to restrict their attention to other human beings, and they especially want to regard as bad only those bads which are caused by other human beings, because other people can at least be attacked and punished, whereas there is no analogous method of psychological relief available if the cause of the bad thing is just nature or the universe.
That is why Green says (in the final chapter of Advice) that the other way of thinking starts with an interest in the universe, driven by the reaction to one’s limitations. Life contains impersonally caused badness. You will react to it when you begin to encounter it. The usual reaction is to resign oneself to it; one tries to take the sting from it by accepting it. The “centralized” way of reacting to it is instead to not accept it, to remain engaged with it—to fight it—and this is what the total uncertainty counsels, or at least it does not license the view that nothing can be done, which is implicit in resignation.
So far as I know, these psychological reflections are unique to Green’s work, and they are just the beginning of her interpretation of numerous social and historical phenomena. They have a normative dimension as well as purely explanatory value, and they also ought to have some practical value for, say, people who want to cure aging or end death and who can’t understand why society treats such aspirations as talkshow curiosities rather than central priorities.
Russell wrote of Schopenhauer that pessimists can be of value by bringing forward facts and considerations which optimists would prefer to overlook, thereby helping to create a more accurate picture of reality; even if their work appears biased when considered in isolation, on account of its being produced in opposition to a prevailing bias. I suggest approaching Green’s account of human nature in this spirit. It’s not scripture, but it is drawing attention to a very underremarked aspect of psychology.
As for what she has accomplished in life, her works are certainly full of ideas which individually might have served as the basis of a whole career, and in the case of lucid dreams it does seem that her work helped to create career opportunities for other people, by pioneering the subject in which they went on to specialize. I can only speculate as to exactly why it is that she has received so little attention and support over the years.
Did Eliezer ever explain what causes people to be “mad”?
Yes. We’re semi-evolved monkeys created by a blind idiot god that has fortuitously created something with intellectual escape velocity. Everything we achieve as a result, we are by definition only just rational enough to achieve it, or it would have happened earlier.
They have a normative dimension as well as purely explanatory value, and they also ought to have some practical value for, say, people who want to cure aging or end death and who can’t understand why society treats such aspirations as talkshow curiosities rather than central priorities.
And yet, society does not treat modern life-saving medicine as a talkshow curiosity, nor the urge to rally to support the victims of disasters, including the “impersonally caused badness” of natural disasters. So her diagnosis seems wide of the mark.
Has she expressed any view about the people who actually are going for the big ones, trying to cure aging and end death? SENS, cryonics, uploading, AGI? I don’t get the impression these ideas have impinged upon her.
So far as I know, these psychological reflections are unique to Green’s work
In science, that’s generally not a good sign, except in the initial stages of someone discovering a new thing.
As for what she has accomplished in life, her works are certainly full of ideas which individually might have served as the basis of a whole career
Alas for the flower that is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air. Has her fanbase, as you call it, done anything new with these ideas?
I’ve never seen the significance of lucid dreaming, btw. I mean, “Hey, I can be conscious while dreaming, how cool is that?!?!” But, so what? Being conscious while waking seems more important to me.
We’re semi-evolved monkeys created by a blind idiot god that has fortuitously created something with intellectual escape velocity. Everything we achieve as a result, we are by definition only just rational enough to achieve it, or it would have happened earlier.
That is a generic explanation; rather like saying that a bridge collapsed because the inspectors didn’t do their job. It doesn’t tell us whether people fall short of rationality because of purely intellectual shortcomings (e.g. innumeracy), or whether there are also emotional and willful elements at work. Green’s psychological ideas can even be expressed in the language of biases and heuristics: sane psychology results from an “evasion bias”, and existential psychology corrects for that using an “uncertainty heuristic”.
And yet, society does not treat modern life-saving medicine as a talkshow curiosity, nor the urge to rally to support the victims of disasters, including the “impersonally caused badness” of natural disasters. So her diagnosis seems wide of the mark.
How often do people talk about preventing earthquakes or tsunamis? Maybe you could lubricate the tectonic plates so they roll more smoothly, or dissipate the tidal wave before it reaches the shore… Now, doesn’t that sound like a child’s response to a disaster? Not just helping the survivors, but naively wanting to stop it from ever happening again.
Adults are in general far more resigned to the idea that life will always be a string of disasters. But it’s usually only a few young adults who then draw the logical conclusion that life is a mistake and we should all stop reproducing and commit suicide. It’s the willingness to go on living in a gloomy world, without fixing it or fleeing it, that really typifies “sanity”, I think. (By this criterion, LW is certainly not a sane site, since it has an apocalyptic eschatology whose outcome people hope to affect.)
I actually agree that Celia Green’s explanation for this state of affairs, in its pure form, doesn’t quite add up. It must derive from the experience of having her own proposals repeatedly shot down; she must have eventually concluded that people just don’t want truth or transhumanity. In reality, there would be other factors at work as well, such as a simple feeling of helplessness, as well as the cognitive inefficiencies at all levels that were inherited from the idiot god. But resentment of other people’s freedom, and a taste for sabotage and suffering, are also part of human psychology, and one should consider to what extent such morbid factors are responsible for the resistance to one’s favorite futurist schemes (along with legitimate criticisms).
Has she expressed any view about the people who actually are going for the big ones
Not to my knowledge. She has an aphorism, “If the human race took death seriously, there would be no more of it”, but it could be construed as support for transhumanism (no more death) or as support for antinatalism (no more human race).
Has her fanbase, as you call it, done anything new with these ideas?
Again, not to my knowledge.
Earlier, I likened Green to Schopenhauer, and there is another similarity in that Schopenhauer had many decades of sporadic contact with academia before his ideas began to achieve genuine currency. Green has had associations with a number of academics (H.H. Price, Hans Eysenck, Michael Lockwood), but her thought remains unknown and unremarked within the system.
That is a generic explanation; rather like saying that a bridge collapsed because the inspectors didn’t do their job.
For specifics, I could say “read the Sequences”, but I’m sure you have done already.
How often do people talk about preventing earthquakes or tsunamis?
It seems to me that people talk about it to the extent that they have ideas for what we could actually do about it—which is not a large extent. Earthquakes and tsunamis are huge, and we, even with our technology, are tiny. People have in fact considered what might be done to relieve stresses in earthquake zones, but haven’t come up with much. It’s easy to say that if they weren’t in such denial about death they find a way. Too easy.
Maybe you could lubricate the tectonic plates so they roll more smoothly, or dissipate the tidal wave before it reaches the shore… Now, doesn’t that sound like a child’s response to a disaster? Not just helping the survivors, but naively wanting to stop it from ever happening again.
Wanting, with nothing more, is indeed the response of a child, a child that has no idea what would be involved or how to seriously set about finding out, and expects the big folk to take care of it.
I came across her web site a few years ago, but I didn’t pay it much attention, because it failed my rule of thumb for deciding whether someone’s thoughts are worth studying: what is she for? It’s fairly clear what she’s against, but (this is my rule of thumb) I am not interested in what someone is against until I have seen what they are for. (I must add that to the recent “maxims” thread.)
Having just glanced over The Human Evasion again, my view of it is unchanged.
Mitchell, can you briefly summarise her “description of an alternative outlook, and an examination of various topics from that new perspective”? She herself at the end of that book says she can’t unless you go and visit her in Oxford.
Aside from what would be obvious to LessWrongers, who else would you recommend as having something worthwhile that they’re for?
I don’t have any particular list, this is just a touchstone for evaluating anyone’s writing. It isn’t even about agreeing with what they are for, but there must be something, or they are just an empty vessel.
Just to take the obvious example anyway, Eliezer’s writings are overwhelmingly focussed on what he is for. Even when he makes a negative critique (e.g of conventional concepts of scientific method) it is always in the service of saying what he would put in its place (Bayesian practice).
Perhaps her psychological ideal can be conveyed by asking you to imagine yourself as a seed A.I. programmer in a world on the threshold of singularity but which might just be a simulation. You have to decide, not just how to act, but how seriously to take your apparent circumstances. It’s up to you to figure out reality, and to do the best possible, most important thing you can do. She writes about this in Advice, from chapter 24 onwards.
Well, I tried. I read forwards from chapter 24, but when I got to chapter 32 and she writes: “I do not know if I am making much progress in elucidating the application of the existential criterion to psychology” I decided that she wasn’t. It was like reading the more vacuous sort of church sermon or new-agey book: many words, circling around and around, but never saying anything of substance. And the whole suffused with her anger and resentment against everyone else.
You compared her writing to Eliezer’s, but this is more like a version of Eliezer that never said anything beyond generalities like “the world abounds with possibilities, explodes with possibilities that most people never see”, “someone who could truly update would surpass any Nobel Prize winner”, and “the world is crazy, people are mad.”
Reminds me of this xkcd.
What has she, or any acolyte of hers, actually done?
Did Eliezer ever explain what causes people to be “mad”? These books propose an explanation: human beings try to restrict their attention to other human beings, and they especially want to regard as bad only those bads which are caused by other human beings, because other people can at least be attacked and punished, whereas there is no analogous method of psychological relief available if the cause of the bad thing is just nature or the universe.
That is why Green says (in the final chapter of Advice) that the other way of thinking starts with an interest in the universe, driven by the reaction to one’s limitations. Life contains impersonally caused badness. You will react to it when you begin to encounter it. The usual reaction is to resign oneself to it; one tries to take the sting from it by accepting it. The “centralized” way of reacting to it is instead to not accept it, to remain engaged with it—to fight it—and this is what the total uncertainty counsels, or at least it does not license the view that nothing can be done, which is implicit in resignation.
So far as I know, these psychological reflections are unique to Green’s work, and they are just the beginning of her interpretation of numerous social and historical phenomena. They have a normative dimension as well as purely explanatory value, and they also ought to have some practical value for, say, people who want to cure aging or end death and who can’t understand why society treats such aspirations as talkshow curiosities rather than central priorities.
Russell wrote of Schopenhauer that pessimists can be of value by bringing forward facts and considerations which optimists would prefer to overlook, thereby helping to create a more accurate picture of reality; even if their work appears biased when considered in isolation, on account of its being produced in opposition to a prevailing bias. I suggest approaching Green’s account of human nature in this spirit. It’s not scripture, but it is drawing attention to a very underremarked aspect of psychology.
As for what she has accomplished in life, her works are certainly full of ideas which individually might have served as the basis of a whole career, and in the case of lucid dreams it does seem that her work helped to create career opportunities for other people, by pioneering the subject in which they went on to specialize. I can only speculate as to exactly why it is that she has received so little attention and support over the years.
Yes. We’re semi-evolved monkeys created by a blind idiot god that has fortuitously created something with intellectual escape velocity. Everything we achieve as a result, we are by definition only just rational enough to achieve it, or it would have happened earlier.
And yet, society does not treat modern life-saving medicine as a talkshow curiosity, nor the urge to rally to support the victims of disasters, including the “impersonally caused badness” of natural disasters. So her diagnosis seems wide of the mark.
Has she expressed any view about the people who actually are going for the big ones, trying to cure aging and end death? SENS, cryonics, uploading, AGI? I don’t get the impression these ideas have impinged upon her.
In science, that’s generally not a good sign, except in the initial stages of someone discovering a new thing.
Alas for the flower that is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air. Has her fanbase, as you call it, done anything new with these ideas?
I’ve never seen the significance of lucid dreaming, btw. I mean, “Hey, I can be conscious while dreaming, how cool is that?!?!” But, so what? Being conscious while waking seems more important to me.
That is a generic explanation; rather like saying that a bridge collapsed because the inspectors didn’t do their job. It doesn’t tell us whether people fall short of rationality because of purely intellectual shortcomings (e.g. innumeracy), or whether there are also emotional and willful elements at work. Green’s psychological ideas can even be expressed in the language of biases and heuristics: sane psychology results from an “evasion bias”, and existential psychology corrects for that using an “uncertainty heuristic”.
How often do people talk about preventing earthquakes or tsunamis? Maybe you could lubricate the tectonic plates so they roll more smoothly, or dissipate the tidal wave before it reaches the shore… Now, doesn’t that sound like a child’s response to a disaster? Not just helping the survivors, but naively wanting to stop it from ever happening again.
Adults are in general far more resigned to the idea that life will always be a string of disasters. But it’s usually only a few young adults who then draw the logical conclusion that life is a mistake and we should all stop reproducing and commit suicide. It’s the willingness to go on living in a gloomy world, without fixing it or fleeing it, that really typifies “sanity”, I think. (By this criterion, LW is certainly not a sane site, since it has an apocalyptic eschatology whose outcome people hope to affect.)
I actually agree that Celia Green’s explanation for this state of affairs, in its pure form, doesn’t quite add up. It must derive from the experience of having her own proposals repeatedly shot down; she must have eventually concluded that people just don’t want truth or transhumanity. In reality, there would be other factors at work as well, such as a simple feeling of helplessness, as well as the cognitive inefficiencies at all levels that were inherited from the idiot god. But resentment of other people’s freedom, and a taste for sabotage and suffering, are also part of human psychology, and one should consider to what extent such morbid factors are responsible for the resistance to one’s favorite futurist schemes (along with legitimate criticisms).
Not to my knowledge. She has an aphorism, “If the human race took death seriously, there would be no more of it”, but it could be construed as support for transhumanism (no more death) or as support for antinatalism (no more human race).
Again, not to my knowledge.
Earlier, I likened Green to Schopenhauer, and there is another similarity in that Schopenhauer had many decades of sporadic contact with academia before his ideas began to achieve genuine currency. Green has had associations with a number of academics (H.H. Price, Hans Eysenck, Michael Lockwood), but her thought remains unknown and unremarked within the system.
For specifics, I could say “read the Sequences”, but I’m sure you have done already.
It seems to me that people talk about it to the extent that they have ideas for what we could actually do about it—which is not a large extent. Earthquakes and tsunamis are huge, and we, even with our technology, are tiny. People have in fact considered what might be done to relieve stresses in earthquake zones, but haven’t come up with much. It’s easy to say that if they weren’t in such denial about death they find a way. Too easy.
Wanting, with nothing more, is indeed the response of a child, a child that has no idea what would be involved or how to seriously set about finding out, and expects the big folk to take care of it.