I think that perhaps what bothers a lot of rationalists about your (or Valentine’s) assertions is down to three factors:
You don’t tend to make specific claims or predictions. I think you would come off better—certainly to me and I suspect to others—if you were to preregister hypotheses more, like you did in the above comment. I believe that you could and should be more specific, perhaps stating that over a six month period you expect to work n more hours without burning out or that a consensus of reports from outsiders about your mental well-being will show a marked positive change during a particular time period that the evaluators did not know was special. While these would obviously not constitute strong evidence, a willingness to informally test your ideas would at least signal honest belief.
You seem to make little to no attempt to actually communicate your ideas in words, or even define your concepts in words. Frankly, it continues to strike me as suspicious that you claim difficulty in even analogizing or approximating your ideas verbally. Even something as weak as the rubber-sheet analogy for General Relativity would—once again—signal an honest attempt.
There doesn’t seem to be consistency on the strength of claims surrounding frameworks. As mentioned elsewhere in thread, Valentine seems to claim that mythic mode generated favorable coincidences like he was bribing the DM. Yet other times Valentine seems to stay acknowledge that the narrative description of reality is at best of metaphorical use.
I think that given recent rationalist interest in meditation, fake frameworks, etc., and in light of what seems to be a case of miscommunication and/or under-communication, there should be some attempt to establish a common basis of understanding, so that if someone asks, “Are you saying x?” they can be instantly redirected to a page that gives the relevant definitions and claims. If you view this is as impossible, do you think that that is a fact of your map or of the relevant territory?
Anyway, I really hope everyone can reach a point of mutual intelligibility, if nothing else.
You don’t tend to make specific claims or predictions. I think you would come off better—certainly to me and I suspect to others—if you were to preregister hypotheses more, like you did in the above comment. I believe that you could and should be more specific, perhaps stating that over a six month period you expect to work n more hours without burning out or that a consensus of reports from outsiders about your mental well-being will show a marked positive change during a particular time period that the evaluators did not know was special.
I have several different responses to this which I guess I’ll also number.
Sure, fine, I’m willing to claim this. Everyone who has interacted with me both in the last month and, say, a year ago will tell you that I am visibly happier and doing more of what I actually want (“productive” can be a loaded term). People can ask Anna, Duncan, Lauren, etc. if they really want. I can also self-report that I’ve engaged in much less escapism (TV, movies, video games, etc.) this month than in most months of the last 5 years, and what little I have engaged in was mostly social.
I would love to be having this conversation; if the responses I’ve been getting had been of the form “hey, you seem to be making these interesting and non-obvious claims, what evidence do you have / what are your models / what are predictions you’re willing to make?” then I would’ve been happy to answer, but instead the responses were of the form “hey, have you considered the possibility that you’re evil?” I have a limited budget of time and attention I’m willing to spend on LW and my subjective experience is that I’ve been spending it putting out fires that other people have been starting. Please, I would love to have the nice conversation where we share evidence and models and predictions while maintaining principle of charity, but right now I mostly don’t have enough trust that I won’t be defected on to do this.
You’ll notice I haven’t written a top-level post about any of these topics. That’s precisely because I’m not yet willing to put in the time and effort necessary to get it up to epistemic snuff. I didn’t want to start this conversation yet; it was started by others and I felt a duty to participate in order to prevent people from idea inoculating against this whole circle of ideas.
You seem to make little to no attempt to actually communicate your ideas in words, or even define your concepts in words.
This seems like an unfair conflation of what happened in the Kensho post and everything else. The Circling post was entirely an attempt to communicate in words! All of these comments are attempts to communicate in words!
Frankly, it continues to strike me as suspicious that you claim difficulty in even analogizing or approximating your ideas verbally. Even something as weak as the rubber-sheet analogy for General Relativity would—once again—signal an honest attempt.
This is exactly what the cell phone analogy in the Kensho post was for, although I also don’t want people to bucket me and Val too closely here; I’m willing to make weaker claims that I think I can explain more clearly, but haven’t done so yet for the reasons described above.
There doesn’t seem to be consistency on the strength of claims surrounding frameworks. As mentioned elsewhere in thread, Valentine seems to claim that mythic mode generated favorable coincidences like he was bribing the DM. Yet other times Valentine seems to stay acknowledge that the narrative description of reality is at best of metaphorical use.
I warned Val that people would be unhappy about this. Here is one story I currently find plausible for explaining at least one form of synchronicity: operating in mythic mode is visible to other humans on some level, and causes them to want to participate in the myth that it looks like you’re in. So humans can sometimes collaboratively generate coincidences as if they were playing out an improv scene, or something. (Weak belief weakly held.)
As for consistency, it’s partly a matter of what level of claim I or anyone else is willing to defend in a given conversation. It may be that my true belief is strong belief A but that I expect it will be too difficult to produce a satisfying case for why I believe A (and/or that I believe that attempting to state A in words will cause it to be misinterpreted badly, or other things like that), so in the interest of signaling willingness to cooperate in the LW epistemic game, I mostly talk about weaker belief A’, which I can defend more easily, but maybe in another comment I instead talk about slightly weaker or slightly stronger belief A″ because that’s what I feel like I can defend that day. Do you really want to punish me for not consistently sticking to a particular level of weakening of my true belief?
If you view this is as impossible, do you think that that is a fact of your map or of the relevant territory?
I think it’s very difficult because of long experiential distances. This is to some extent a fact about my lack of skill and to some extent what I see as a fact about how far away some parts of the territory are from the experience of many rationalists.
Overall, from my point of view there’s a thing that’s happening here roughly analogous to the Hero Licensing dialogue; if I spent all my time defending myself on LW like this instead of just using what I believe my skills to be to do cool stuff, then I won’t ever get around to doing the cool stuff. So at some point I am just going to stop engaging in this conversation, especially if people continue to assume bad faith on the part of people like me and Val, in order to focus my energy and attention on doing the cool stuff.
(This is my second comment on this site, so it is probable that the formatting will come out gross. I am operating on the assumption that it is similar to Reddit, given Markdown)
To be as succinct as possible, fair enough.
I want to have this conversation too! I was trying to express what I believe to be the origins of people’s frustrations with you, not to try to discourage you. Although I can understand how I failed to communicate that.
I am going to wrap this up with the part of your reply that concerns experiential distance and respond to both. I suspect that a lot of fear of epistemic contamination comes from the emphasis on personal experience. Personal (meatspace) experiences, especially in groups, can trigger floods of emotions and feelings of insights without those first being fed through rational processing. Therefore it seems reasonable to be suspicious of anyone who claims to teach through personal experience. That being said, the experimental spirit suggests the following course of action: get a small group and try to close their experiential gap gradually, while having them extensively document anything they encounter on the way, then publish that for peer analysis and digestion. Of course that relies on more energy and time than you might have.
This seems like an unfair conflation of what happened in the Kensho post and everything else. The Circling post was entirely an attempt to communicate in words! All of these comments are attempts to communicate in words!
On a general level, I totally concede that I am operating from relatively weak ground. It has been a while—or at least felt like a while—since I read any of the posts I mentioned (tacitly or otherwise) with the exception of Kensho, so that is definitely coloring my vision.
If I spent all my time defending myself on LW like this instead of just using what I believe my skills to be to do cool stuff, then I won’t ever get around to doing the cool stuff. So at some point I am just going to stop engaging in this conversation, especially if people continue to assume bad faith on the part of people like me and Val, in order to focus my energy and attention on doing the cool stuff.
I acknowledge that many people are responding to your ideas with unwarranted hostility and forcing you onto the defensive in a way that I know must be draining. So I apologize for essentially doing that in my original reply to you. I think that I, personally, am unacceptably biased against a lot of ideas due to their “flavor” so to speak, rather than their actual strength.
Do you really want to punish me for not consistently sticking to a particular level of weakening of my true belief?
As to consistency, I actually do want to hold you to some standard of strength with respect to beliefs, because otherwise you could very easily make your beliefs unassuming enough to pass through arbitrary filters. I find ideas interesting; I want to know A, not any of its more easily defensible variants. But I don’t want to punish you or do anything that could even be construed as such.
I suspect that a lot of fear of epistemic contamination comes from the emphasis on personal experience. Personal (meatspace) experiences, especially in groups, can trigger floods of emotions and feelings of insights without those first being fed through rational processing.
I recognize the concern here, but you can just have the System 1 experience and then do the System 2 processing afterwards (which could be seconds afterwards). It’s really not that hard. I believe that most rationalists can handle it, and I certainly believe that I can handle it. I’m also willing to respect the boundaries of people who don’t think they can handle it. What I don’t want is for those people to typical mind themselves into assuming that because they can’t handle it, no one else can either, and so the only people willing to try must be being epistemically reckless.
Therefore it seems reasonable to be suspicious of anyone who claims to teach through personal experience.
There are plenty of completely mundane skills that can basically only be taught in this way. Imagine trying to teach someone how to play basketball using only text, etc. There’s no substitute for personal experience in many skills, especially those involving the body, and in fact I think this should be your prior. It may not feel like this is the prior but I think this is straight up a mistake; I’d guess that people’s experiences with learning skills here are skewed by 1) school, which heavily skews towards skills that can be learned through text, and 2) the selection effect of being LWers, liking the Sequences, etc. There’s a reason CFAR focuses on in-person workshops instead of e.g. blog posts or online videos.
I acknowledge that many people are responding to your ideas with unwarranted hostility and forcing you onto the defensive in a way that I know must be draining. So I apologize for essentially doing that in my original reply to you. I think that I, personally, am unacceptably biased against a lot of ideas due to their “flavor” so to speak, rather than their actual strength.
Thank you.
As to consistency, I actually do want to hold you to some standard of strength with respect to beliefs, because otherwise you could very easily make your beliefs unassuming enough to pass through arbitrary filters. I find ideas interesting; I want to know A, not any of its more easily defensible variants. But I don’t want to punish you or do anything that could even be construed as such.
Unfortunately my sense is strongly that other people will absolutely punish me for expressing A instead of any of its weaker variants—this is basically my story about what happened to Val in the Kensho post, where Val could have made a weaker and more defensible point (for example, by not using the word “enlightenment”) and chose not to—precisely because my inability to provide a satisfying case for believing A signals a lack of willingness to play the LW epistemic game, which is what you were talking about earlier.
(Umeshism: if you only have beliefs that you can provide a satisfying case for believing on LW, then your beliefs are optimized too strongly for defensibility-on-LW as opposed to truth.)
So I’m just not going to talk about A at all, in the interest of maintaining my cooperation signals. And given that, the least painful way for me to maintain consistency is to not talk about any of the weaker variants either.
you can just have the System 1 experience and then do the System 2 processing afterwards (which could be seconds afterwards). It’s really not that hard. I believe that most rationalists can handle it, and I certainly believe that I can handle it.
It is probably true that most rationalists could handle it. It is also probably true, however, that people who can’t handle it could end up profoundly worse for the experience. I am not sure we should endorse potential epistemic hazards with so little certainty about both costs and benefits. I also grant that anything is a potential epistemic hazard and that reasoning under uncertainty is kind of why we bother with this site in the first place. This is all to say that I would like to see more evidence of this calculation being done at all, and that if I was not so geographically separated from the LWsphere, I would like to try these experiences myself.
There’s no substitute for personal experience in many skills, especially those involving the body, and in fact I think this should be your prior. It may not feel like this is the prior but I think this is straight up a mistake; I’d guess that people’s experiences with learning skills here are skewed by 1) school, which heavily skews towards skills that can be learned through text, and 2) the selection effect of being LWers, liking the Sequences, etc.
I am not sure that it should be the prior for mental skills however. As you pointed out, scholastic skills are almost exclusively (and almost definitionally) attainable through text. I know that I can and have learned math, history, languages, etc., through reading, and it seems like that is the correct category for Looking, etc., as well (unless I am mistaken about the basic nature of Looking, which is certainly possible).
So I’m just not going to talk about A. And given that, the least painful way for me to maintain consistency is to not talk about any of the weaker variants either.
This is a sad circumstance, I wish it were otherwise, and I understand why you have made the choice you have considering the (rather ironically) immediate and visceral response you are used to receiving.
I am not sure we should endorse potential epistemic hazards with so little certainty about both costs and benefits.
I’m not sure what “endorse” means here. My position is certainly not “everyone should definitely do [circling, meditation, etc.]”; mostly what I have been arguing for is “we should not punish people who try or say good things about [circling, meditation, etc.] for being epistemically reckless, or allege that they’re evil and manipulative solely on that basis, because I think there are important potential benefits worth the potential risks for some people.”
I am not sure that it should be the prior for mental skills however. As you pointed out, scholastic skills are almost exclusively (and almost definitionally) attainable through text. I know that I can and have learned math, history, languages, etc., through reading, and it seems like that is the correct category for Looking, etc., as well (unless I am mistaken about the basic nature of Looking, which is certainly possible).
I still think you’re over-updating on school. For example, why do graduate students have advisors? At least in fields like pure mathematics that don’t involve lab work, it’s plausibly because being a researcher in these fields requires important mental skills that can’t just be learned through reading, but need to be absorbed through periodic contact with the advisor. Great advisors often have great students; clearly something important is being transmitted even if it’s hard to write down what.
My understanding of CFAR’s position is also that whatever mental skills it tries to teach, those skills are much harder to teach via text or even video than via an in-person workshop, and that this is why we focus so heavily on workshops instead of methods of teaching that scale better.
and I understand why you have made the choice you have considering the (rather ironically) immediate and visceral response you are used to receiving.
I know, right? Also ironically, learning how to not be subject to my triggers (at least, not as much as I was before) is another skill I got from circling.
I think that perhaps what bothers a lot of rationalists about your (or Valentine’s) assertions is down to three factors:
You don’t tend to make specific claims or predictions. I think you would come off better—certainly to me and I suspect to others—if you were to preregister hypotheses more, like you did in the above comment. I believe that you could and should be more specific, perhaps stating that over a six month period you expect to work n more hours without burning out or that a consensus of reports from outsiders about your mental well-being will show a marked positive change during a particular time period that the evaluators did not know was special. While these would obviously not constitute strong evidence, a willingness to informally test your ideas would at least signal honest belief.
You seem to make little to no attempt to actually communicate your ideas in words, or even define your concepts in words. Frankly, it continues to strike me as suspicious that you claim difficulty in even analogizing or approximating your ideas verbally. Even something as weak as the rubber-sheet analogy for General Relativity would—once again—signal an honest attempt.
There doesn’t seem to be consistency on the strength of claims surrounding frameworks. As mentioned elsewhere in thread, Valentine seems to claim that mythic mode generated favorable coincidences like he was bribing the DM. Yet other times Valentine seems to stay acknowledge that the narrative description of reality is at best of metaphorical use.
I think that given recent rationalist interest in meditation, fake frameworks, etc., and in light of what seems to be a case of miscommunication and/or under-communication, there should be some attempt to establish a common basis of understanding, so that if someone asks, “Are you saying x?” they can be instantly redirected to a page that gives the relevant definitions and claims. If you view this is as impossible, do you think that that is a fact of your map or of the relevant territory?
Anyway, I really hope everyone can reach a point of mutual intelligibility, if nothing else.
I have several different responses to this which I guess I’ll also number.
Sure, fine, I’m willing to claim this. Everyone who has interacted with me both in the last month and, say, a year ago will tell you that I am visibly happier and doing more of what I actually want (“productive” can be a loaded term). People can ask Anna, Duncan, Lauren, etc. if they really want. I can also self-report that I’ve engaged in much less escapism (TV, movies, video games, etc.) this month than in most months of the last 5 years, and what little I have engaged in was mostly social.
I would love to be having this conversation; if the responses I’ve been getting had been of the form “hey, you seem to be making these interesting and non-obvious claims, what evidence do you have / what are your models / what are predictions you’re willing to make?” then I would’ve been happy to answer, but instead the responses were of the form “hey, have you considered the possibility that you’re evil?” I have a limited budget of time and attention I’m willing to spend on LW and my subjective experience is that I’ve been spending it putting out fires that other people have been starting. Please, I would love to have the nice conversation where we share evidence and models and predictions while maintaining principle of charity, but right now I mostly don’t have enough trust that I won’t be defected on to do this.
You’ll notice I haven’t written a top-level post about any of these topics. That’s precisely because I’m not yet willing to put in the time and effort necessary to get it up to epistemic snuff. I didn’t want to start this conversation yet; it was started by others and I felt a duty to participate in order to prevent people from idea inoculating against this whole circle of ideas.
This seems like an unfair conflation of what happened in the Kensho post and everything else. The Circling post was entirely an attempt to communicate in words! All of these comments are attempts to communicate in words!
This is exactly what the cell phone analogy in the Kensho post was for, although I also don’t want people to bucket me and Val too closely here; I’m willing to make weaker claims that I think I can explain more clearly, but haven’t done so yet for the reasons described above.
I warned Val that people would be unhappy about this. Here is one story I currently find plausible for explaining at least one form of synchronicity: operating in mythic mode is visible to other humans on some level, and causes them to want to participate in the myth that it looks like you’re in. So humans can sometimes collaboratively generate coincidences as if they were playing out an improv scene, or something. (Weak belief weakly held.)
As for consistency, it’s partly a matter of what level of claim I or anyone else is willing to defend in a given conversation. It may be that my true belief is strong belief A but that I expect it will be too difficult to produce a satisfying case for why I believe A (and/or that I believe that attempting to state A in words will cause it to be misinterpreted badly, or other things like that), so in the interest of signaling willingness to cooperate in the LW epistemic game, I mostly talk about weaker belief A’, which I can defend more easily, but maybe in another comment I instead talk about slightly weaker or slightly stronger belief A″ because that’s what I feel like I can defend that day. Do you really want to punish me for not consistently sticking to a particular level of weakening of my true belief?
I think it’s very difficult because of long experiential distances. This is to some extent a fact about my lack of skill and to some extent what I see as a fact about how far away some parts of the territory are from the experience of many rationalists.
Overall, from my point of view there’s a thing that’s happening here roughly analogous to the Hero Licensing dialogue; if I spent all my time defending myself on LW like this instead of just using what I believe my skills to be to do cool stuff, then I won’t ever get around to doing the cool stuff. So at some point I am just going to stop engaging in this conversation, especially if people continue to assume bad faith on the part of people like me and Val, in order to focus my energy and attention on doing the cool stuff.
(This is my second comment on this site, so it is probable that the formatting will come out gross. I am operating on the assumption that it is similar to Reddit, given Markdown)
To be as succinct as possible, fair enough.
I want to have this conversation too! I was trying to express what I believe to be the origins of people’s frustrations with you, not to try to discourage you. Although I can understand how I failed to communicate that.
I am going to wrap this up with the part of your reply that concerns experiential distance and respond to both. I suspect that a lot of fear of epistemic contamination comes from the emphasis on personal experience. Personal (meatspace) experiences, especially in groups, can trigger floods of emotions and feelings of insights without those first being fed through rational processing. Therefore it seems reasonable to be suspicious of anyone who claims to teach through personal experience. That being said, the experimental spirit suggests the following course of action: get a small group and try to close their experiential gap gradually, while having them extensively document anything they encounter on the way, then publish that for peer analysis and digestion. Of course that relies on more energy and time than you might have.
On a general level, I totally concede that I am operating from relatively weak ground. It has been a while—or at least felt like a while—since I read any of the posts I mentioned (tacitly or otherwise) with the exception of Kensho, so that is definitely coloring my vision.
I acknowledge that many people are responding to your ideas with unwarranted hostility and forcing you onto the defensive in a way that I know must be draining. So I apologize for essentially doing that in my original reply to you. I think that I, personally, am unacceptably biased against a lot of ideas due to their “flavor” so to speak, rather than their actual strength.
As to consistency, I actually do want to hold you to some standard of strength with respect to beliefs, because otherwise you could very easily make your beliefs unassuming enough to pass through arbitrary filters. I find ideas interesting; I want to know A, not any of its more easily defensible variants. But I don’t want to punish you or do anything that could even be construed as such.
In summary, I am sorry that I came off as harsh.
EDIT: Fixed terrible (and accidental) bolding.
I recognize the concern here, but you can just have the System 1 experience and then do the System 2 processing afterwards (which could be seconds afterwards). It’s really not that hard. I believe that most rationalists can handle it, and I certainly believe that I can handle it. I’m also willing to respect the boundaries of people who don’t think they can handle it. What I don’t want is for those people to typical mind themselves into assuming that because they can’t handle it, no one else can either, and so the only people willing to try must be being epistemically reckless.
There are plenty of completely mundane skills that can basically only be taught in this way. Imagine trying to teach someone how to play basketball using only text, etc. There’s no substitute for personal experience in many skills, especially those involving the body, and in fact I think this should be your prior. It may not feel like this is the prior but I think this is straight up a mistake; I’d guess that people’s experiences with learning skills here are skewed by 1) school, which heavily skews towards skills that can be learned through text, and 2) the selection effect of being LWers, liking the Sequences, etc. There’s a reason CFAR focuses on in-person workshops instead of e.g. blog posts or online videos.
Thank you.
Unfortunately my sense is strongly that other people will absolutely punish me for expressing A instead of any of its weaker variants—this is basically my story about what happened to Val in the Kensho post, where Val could have made a weaker and more defensible point (for example, by not using the word “enlightenment”) and chose not to—precisely because my inability to provide a satisfying case for believing A signals a lack of willingness to play the LW epistemic game, which is what you were talking about earlier.
(Umeshism: if you only have beliefs that you can provide a satisfying case for believing on LW, then your beliefs are optimized too strongly for defensibility-on-LW as opposed to truth.)
So I’m just not going to talk about A at all, in the interest of maintaining my cooperation signals. And given that, the least painful way for me to maintain consistency is to not talk about any of the weaker variants either.
It is probably true that most rationalists could handle it. It is also probably true, however, that people who can’t handle it could end up profoundly worse for the experience. I am not sure we should endorse potential epistemic hazards with so little certainty about both costs and benefits. I also grant that anything is a potential epistemic hazard and that reasoning under uncertainty is kind of why we bother with this site in the first place. This is all to say that I would like to see more evidence of this calculation being done at all, and that if I was not so geographically separated from the LWsphere, I would like to try these experiences myself.
I am not sure that it should be the prior for mental skills however. As you pointed out, scholastic skills are almost exclusively (and almost definitionally) attainable through text. I know that I can and have learned math, history, languages, etc., through reading, and it seems like that is the correct category for Looking, etc., as well (unless I am mistaken about the basic nature of Looking, which is certainly possible).
This is a sad circumstance, I wish it were otherwise, and I understand why you have made the choice you have considering the (rather ironically) immediate and visceral response you are used to receiving.
I’m not sure what “endorse” means here. My position is certainly not “everyone should definitely do [circling, meditation, etc.]”; mostly what I have been arguing for is “we should not punish people who try or say good things about [circling, meditation, etc.] for being epistemically reckless, or allege that they’re evil and manipulative solely on that basis, because I think there are important potential benefits worth the potential risks for some people.”
I still think you’re over-updating on school. For example, why do graduate students have advisors? At least in fields like pure mathematics that don’t involve lab work, it’s plausibly because being a researcher in these fields requires important mental skills that can’t just be learned through reading, but need to be absorbed through periodic contact with the advisor. Great advisors often have great students; clearly something important is being transmitted even if it’s hard to write down what.
My understanding of CFAR’s position is also that whatever mental skills it tries to teach, those skills are much harder to teach via text or even video than via an in-person workshop, and that this is why we focus so heavily on workshops instead of methods of teaching that scale better.
I know, right? Also ironically, learning how to not be subject to my triggers (at least, not as much as I was before) is another skill I got from circling.