So: Here goes. I’m dipping my toe into this gigantic and somewhat scary pool/lake(/ocean?).
Here’s the deal: I’m a recovering irrationalic. Not an irrationalist; I’ve never believed in anything but rationalism (in the sense it’s used here, but that’s another discussion), formally. But my behaviors and attitudes have been stuck in an irrational quagmire for years. Perhaps decades, depending on exactly how you’re measuring. So I use “irrationalic” in the sense of “alcoholic”; someone who self-identifies as “alcoholic” is very unlikely to extol the virtues of alcohol, but nonetheless has a hard time staying away from the stuff.
And, like many alcoholics, I have a gut feeling that going “cold turkey” is a very bad idea. Not, in this case, in the sense that I want to continue being specifically irrational to some degree or another, but in that I am extremely wary of diving into the list of readings and immersing myself in rationalist literature and ideology (if that is the correct word) at this point. I have a feeling that I need to work some things out slowly, and I have learned from long and painful experience that my gut is always right on this particular kind of issue.
This does not mean that linking to suggested resources is in any way not okay, just that I’m going to take my time about reading them, and I suppose I’m making a weak (in a technical sense) request to be gentle at first. Yes, in principle, all of my premises are questionable; that’s what rationalism means (in part). But...think about it as if you had a new, half-developed idea. If you tell it to people who tear it apart, that can kill it. That’s kind of how I feel now. I’m feeling out this new(ish) way of being, and I don’t feel like being pushed just yet (which people who know me might find quite rich; I’m a champion arguer).
Yes, this is personal, more personal than I am at all comfortable being in public. But if this community is anything like I imagine it to be (not that I don’t have experience with foiled expectations!), I figure I’ll probably end up divulging a lot more personal stuff anyway.
I honestly feel as if I’m walking into church for the first time in decades.
So why am I here then? Well, I was updating my long-dormant blog by fixing dead links &c, and in doing so, discovered to my joy that Memepool was no longer dead. There, I found a link to HPMOR. Reading this over the next several days contributed to my reawakening, along with other, more personal happenings. This is a journey of recovery I’ve been on for, depending on how you count, three to six years, but HPMOR certainly gave a significant boost to the process, and today (also for personal reasons) I feel that I’ve crossed a threshold, and feel comfortable “walking into church” again.
Alright, I’ll anticipate the first question: “What are you talking about? Irrationality is an extremely broad label.” Well, I’m not going to go into to too terribly much detail just now, but let’s say that the revelation or step forward that occurred today was realizing that the extremely common belief that other people can make you morally wrong by their judgement is unequivocally false. This (that this premise is false) is what I strongly believed growing up, but...well, perhaps “strongly” is the wrong word. I had been raised in an environment that very much held that the opposite was true, that other people’s opinion of you was crucial to your rightness, morality and worth as a human being. Nobody ever said it that way, of course, and would probably deny it if put that way, but that is nonetheless how most people believe. However, in my case it was so blatant that it was fairly easy to see how ridiculous it was. Nonetheless, as reasonable as my rational constructions seemed to me, there was really no way I could be certain that I was right and others were wrong, so I held a back-of-my-head belief, borne of the experience of being repeatedly mistaken that every inquisitive child experiences, that I would someday mature and come to realize I had been wrong all along.
Well, that happened. Sort of. Events in my life picked at that point of uncertainty, and I gave up my visceral devotion to rationality and personal responsibility, which led slowly down into an awful abyss that I’m not going to describe at just this moment, that I have (hopefully) at last managed to climb out of, and am now standing at the edge, blinking at the sunlight, trying to figure out precisely where to go from here, but wary of being blinded by the newfound brilliance and wishing to take my time to figure out the next step.
So again, then, why am I here? If I don’t want to be bombarded with advice on how to think more rationally, why did I walk in here? I’m not sure. It seemed time, time to connect with people who, perhaps, could support me in this journey, and possibly shorten it somewhat.
I also notice that this thread has gone waaay beyond 500 comments; perhaps someone with more Karma than I can make a new Welcome thread?
So since I wrote this five minutes ago, I’ve gotten some insights (through looking at one of the links on the welcome page above) into why I’m so wary of being bombarded with arguments explaining how to be rational. Hopefully commenting on my own comment won’t discourage others from doing so.
I’m not wary because I’m afraid my newfound insight is going to be damaged somehow; quite the contrary. I’m wary because I strongly fear that all these rationalist arguments will be very seductive. However, I’ve tried very hard my whole life (with varying degrees of success) to make sure my thoughts and ideas were my own, and, having so recently stepped back into the light, I fear I might be very susceptible to rationalist arguments. “But that’s a good thing,” you might say, “because it’s rationalism!” (or rather, some more complicated and convincing formulation). Well, sure, but that doesn’t make any specific rationalist argument certain to be right, and I’m not sure I feel competent to evaluate the truth of claims that sound very good and I really want to believe right now.
So since I wrote this five minutes ago, I’ve gotten some insights (through looking at one of the links on the welcome page above) into why I’m so wary of being bombarded with arguments explaining how to be rational.
You might like a couple of pieces that take a similarly positive-but-tempered view of LW-style rationality (both written by the person — Yvain — who wrote the piece at your link, as it happens): “Extreme Rationality: It’s Not That Great” and “Epistemic learned helplessness”. You might also like Yvain’s other LW posts, most of which work as standalone pieces and are worth reading.
Wow. Thank you. I just finished “Epistemic Learned Helplessness,” and I feel much better now. Those two articles have successfully inoculated me against being sucked in too easily into the “x-rationalist” view.
I actually disagree with what he says in “Epistemic Learned Helplessness”; or rather, I don’t believe that that helplessness is actually necessary, that I can—or if I can’t, it is possible to with sufficient training—tell when a case has been reasonably proven and when I should suspend judgement. Or maybe he’s more right than I like to admit; I have to concede that I was taken in by much of Graham Hancock’s work until I tried to write a short story based on one of his ideas and it completely fell apart after some research and analysis. But regardless of whether the dilemma he poses is avoidable or not, he makes some excellent, indeed critical, points, and I can now proceed with a healthy dose of skepticism of rationalism, a phrase I would likely have been ashamed to utter before reading that article.
Okay, I’ve read the first article you linked, and I’m discovering that I was naive about what this site was about (this should not be surprising after all the times similar things have happened to me, but it apparently still is). I’ve read HPMOR, of course, but I didn’t catch on that this site would be specifically geared to using specific, formal, scientifically-derived techniques to improve thinking. The article mentioned Scientology; this kind of sounds a little like Scientology (well, Dianetics) to me, though I’m sure it makes much more formal sense. This makes me still more wary than before; I like my own “organic” rationalist methods, and am skittish of adopting some formal “system” of thought. This is more grousing than complaint; I do not have enough information to intelligently critique at this point, although the thing that bothered me most about Harry was his overuse of formal techniques instead of just trying to grok the whole situation in a more organic fashion; that just seems like a good way to miss something. This does not mean that reading about common errors in thinking couldn’t be useful.
I’m disappointed that my post didn’t receive more response (poor me! I want attention! Well, alright, I was hoping for something analogous to a support group), but I appreciate yours. I’ll definitely keep reading.
the thing that bothered me most about Harry was his overuse of formal techniques instead of just trying to grok the whole situation in a more organic fashion; that just seems like a good way to miss something.
I can’t speak to how well this works out for Harry (I haven’t read HPMoR) but I think I can guess why this bites people in real life.
The methods that work for someone tend to be the ones they’re already familiar with. Why? At least two reasons. The boring one is that people are less likely to stick with methods that obviously don’t work, so obviously bad methods get forgotten about and become unfamiliar again. The more interesting reason is that using a method makes it “better”: practice allows you to apply it more quickly when it’s relevant, you learn to recognize more quickly the situations where the method’s relevant, and you get better at integrating what you learn from that method with your other thoughts.
This is why it can be safer to organically accrete a system of thinking piece by piece than to install a fully-fledged system in one go; you only have to keep one piece in your head at a time, and you can focus on that one piece for a while until you’re used to it and can apply it without much conscious effort. By contrast, trying to take on a complete system in one go means you’re constantly having to think hard about which parts of it are relevant to each problem you confront. It’s the difference between seeing a loose screw sticking out of something and knowing you need a screwdriver to tighten it, and seeing a loose screw sticking out of something and emptying your toolbox on the floor so you can try each tool one-by-one.
The important distinction isn’t so much between formal methods and organic methods, but between methods you’ve fully internalized and methods you haven’t. A formal method that’s permanently imprinted into your mind through practice is likely to be quicker to use, easier to use, and more effective than an informal method you’ve only just heard about. Eventually, if you practice a technique enough, formal or not, there’s a good chance your brain will automatically reach out and apply it in the normal course of grokking a whole situation organically. (For example, if I need to predict or reason about some recurrent event in my life, I often automatically apply reference class forecasting without much thought, and I readily integrate that information with any other information I can glean about the event.)
So I think it makes sense to take this stuff at whatever pace feels comfortable. Certainly, when I first landed on LW, I didn’t shoot off and read all of the sequences of core posts in one go. I just clicked around, read recent discussions, and when people referred to individual posts in the sequences while discussing other things, I’d click through and read the post they linked to. (And then if I felt like reading more, I’d look at the other posts linked by that post!)
So: Here goes. I’m dipping my toe into this gigantic and somewhat scary pool/lake(/ocean?).
Here’s the deal: I’m a recovering irrationalic. Not an irrationalist; I’ve never believed in anything but rationalism (in the sense it’s used here, but that’s another discussion), formally. But my behaviors and attitudes have been stuck in an irrational quagmire for years. Perhaps decades, depending on exactly how you’re measuring. So I use “irrationalic” in the sense of “alcoholic”; someone who self-identifies as “alcoholic” is very unlikely to extol the virtues of alcohol, but nonetheless has a hard time staying away from the stuff.
And, like many alcoholics, I have a gut feeling that going “cold turkey” is a very bad idea. Not, in this case, in the sense that I want to continue being specifically irrational to some degree or another, but in that I am extremely wary of diving into the list of readings and immersing myself in rationalist literature and ideology (if that is the correct word) at this point. I have a feeling that I need to work some things out slowly, and I have learned from long and painful experience that my gut is always right on this particular kind of issue.
This does not mean that linking to suggested resources is in any way not okay, just that I’m going to take my time about reading them, and I suppose I’m making a weak (in a technical sense) request to be gentle at first. Yes, in principle, all of my premises are questionable; that’s what rationalism means (in part). But...think about it as if you had a new, half-developed idea. If you tell it to people who tear it apart, that can kill it. That’s kind of how I feel now. I’m feeling out this new(ish) way of being, and I don’t feel like being pushed just yet (which people who know me might find quite rich; I’m a champion arguer).
Yes, this is personal, more personal than I am at all comfortable being in public. But if this community is anything like I imagine it to be (not that I don’t have experience with foiled expectations!), I figure I’ll probably end up divulging a lot more personal stuff anyway.
I honestly feel as if I’m walking into church for the first time in decades.
So why am I here then? Well, I was updating my long-dormant blog by fixing dead links &c, and in doing so, discovered to my joy that Memepool was no longer dead. There, I found a link to HPMOR. Reading this over the next several days contributed to my reawakening, along with other, more personal happenings. This is a journey of recovery I’ve been on for, depending on how you count, three to six years, but HPMOR certainly gave a significant boost to the process, and today (also for personal reasons) I feel that I’ve crossed a threshold, and feel comfortable “walking into church” again.
Alright, I’ll anticipate the first question: “What are you talking about? Irrationality is an extremely broad label.” Well, I’m not going to go into to too terribly much detail just now, but let’s say that the revelation or step forward that occurred today was realizing that the extremely common belief that other people can make you morally wrong by their judgement is unequivocally false. This (that this premise is false) is what I strongly believed growing up, but...well, perhaps “strongly” is the wrong word. I had been raised in an environment that very much held that the opposite was true, that other people’s opinion of you was crucial to your rightness, morality and worth as a human being. Nobody ever said it that way, of course, and would probably deny it if put that way, but that is nonetheless how most people believe. However, in my case it was so blatant that it was fairly easy to see how ridiculous it was. Nonetheless, as reasonable as my rational constructions seemed to me, there was really no way I could be certain that I was right and others were wrong, so I held a back-of-my-head belief, borne of the experience of being repeatedly mistaken that every inquisitive child experiences, that I would someday mature and come to realize I had been wrong all along.
Well, that happened. Sort of. Events in my life picked at that point of uncertainty, and I gave up my visceral devotion to rationality and personal responsibility, which led slowly down into an awful abyss that I’m not going to describe at just this moment, that I have (hopefully) at last managed to climb out of, and am now standing at the edge, blinking at the sunlight, trying to figure out precisely where to go from here, but wary of being blinded by the newfound brilliance and wishing to take my time to figure out the next step.
So again, then, why am I here? If I don’t want to be bombarded with advice on how to think more rationally, why did I walk in here? I’m not sure. It seemed time, time to connect with people who, perhaps, could support me in this journey, and possibly shorten it somewhat.
I also notice that this thread has gone waaay beyond 500 comments; perhaps someone with more Karma than I can make a new Welcome thread?
So since I wrote this five minutes ago, I’ve gotten some insights (through looking at one of the links on the welcome page above) into why I’m so wary of being bombarded with arguments explaining how to be rational. Hopefully commenting on my own comment won’t discourage others from doing so.
I’m not wary because I’m afraid my newfound insight is going to be damaged somehow; quite the contrary. I’m wary because I strongly fear that all these rationalist arguments will be very seductive. However, I’ve tried very hard my whole life (with varying degrees of success) to make sure my thoughts and ideas were my own, and, having so recently stepped back into the light, I fear I might be very susceptible to rationalist arguments. “But that’s a good thing,” you might say, “because it’s rationalism!” (or rather, some more complicated and convincing formulation). Well, sure, but that doesn’t make any specific rationalist argument certain to be right, and I’m not sure I feel competent to evaluate the truth of claims that sound very good and I really want to believe right now.
You might like a couple of pieces that take a similarly positive-but-tempered view of LW-style rationality (both written by the person — Yvain — who wrote the piece at your link, as it happens): “Extreme Rationality: It’s Not That Great” and “Epistemic learned helplessness”. You might also like Yvain’s other LW posts, most of which work as standalone pieces and are worth reading.
Wow. Thank you. I just finished “Epistemic Learned Helplessness,” and I feel much better now. Those two articles have successfully inoculated me against being sucked in too easily into the “x-rationalist” view.
I actually disagree with what he says in “Epistemic Learned Helplessness”; or rather, I don’t believe that that helplessness is actually necessary, that I can—or if I can’t, it is possible to with sufficient training—tell when a case has been reasonably proven and when I should suspend judgement. Or maybe he’s more right than I like to admit; I have to concede that I was taken in by much of Graham Hancock’s work until I tried to write a short story based on one of his ideas and it completely fell apart after some research and analysis. But regardless of whether the dilemma he poses is avoidable or not, he makes some excellent, indeed critical, points, and I can now proceed with a healthy dose of skepticism of rationalism, a phrase I would likely have been ashamed to utter before reading that article.
Okay, I’ve read the first article you linked, and I’m discovering that I was naive about what this site was about (this should not be surprising after all the times similar things have happened to me, but it apparently still is). I’ve read HPMOR, of course, but I didn’t catch on that this site would be specifically geared to using specific, formal, scientifically-derived techniques to improve thinking. The article mentioned Scientology; this kind of sounds a little like Scientology (well, Dianetics) to me, though I’m sure it makes much more formal sense. This makes me still more wary than before; I like my own “organic” rationalist methods, and am skittish of adopting some formal “system” of thought. This is more grousing than complaint; I do not have enough information to intelligently critique at this point, although the thing that bothered me most about Harry was his overuse of formal techniques instead of just trying to grok the whole situation in a more organic fashion; that just seems like a good way to miss something. This does not mean that reading about common errors in thinking couldn’t be useful.
I’m disappointed that my post didn’t receive more response (poor me! I want attention! Well, alright, I was hoping for something analogous to a support group), but I appreciate yours. I’ll definitely keep reading.
I can’t speak to how well this works out for Harry (I haven’t read HPMoR) but I think I can guess why this bites people in real life.
The methods that work for someone tend to be the ones they’re already familiar with. Why? At least two reasons. The boring one is that people are less likely to stick with methods that obviously don’t work, so obviously bad methods get forgotten about and become unfamiliar again. The more interesting reason is that using a method makes it “better”: practice allows you to apply it more quickly when it’s relevant, you learn to recognize more quickly the situations where the method’s relevant, and you get better at integrating what you learn from that method with your other thoughts.
This is why it can be safer to organically accrete a system of thinking piece by piece than to install a fully-fledged system in one go; you only have to keep one piece in your head at a time, and you can focus on that one piece for a while until you’re used to it and can apply it without much conscious effort. By contrast, trying to take on a complete system in one go means you’re constantly having to think hard about which parts of it are relevant to each problem you confront. It’s the difference between seeing a loose screw sticking out of something and knowing you need a screwdriver to tighten it, and seeing a loose screw sticking out of something and emptying your toolbox on the floor so you can try each tool one-by-one.
The important distinction isn’t so much between formal methods and organic methods, but between methods you’ve fully internalized and methods you haven’t. A formal method that’s permanently imprinted into your mind through practice is likely to be quicker to use, easier to use, and more effective than an informal method you’ve only just heard about. Eventually, if you practice a technique enough, formal or not, there’s a good chance your brain will automatically reach out and apply it in the normal course of grokking a whole situation organically. (For example, if I need to predict or reason about some recurrent event in my life, I often automatically apply reference class forecasting without much thought, and I readily integrate that information with any other information I can glean about the event.)
So I think it makes sense to take this stuff at whatever pace feels comfortable. Certainly, when I first landed on LW, I didn’t shoot off and read all of the sequences of core posts in one go. I just clicked around, read recent discussions, and when people referred to individual posts in the sequences while discussing other things, I’d click through and read the post they linked to. (And then if I felt like reading more, I’d look at the other posts linked by that post!)
Enjoy the site!