Tying shoelaces is just a less interesting example, when the goal is to point out that some people have unique or idiosyncratic cup-stacking skills. Becoming explicitly aware of simple habits that nearly everyone has will tend to be less useful, I think.
> plenty of people who can’t just do Focusing and aquire the skill in five minutes.
I think you misunderstood the claim—in five minutes, people can do a version of TAPs or Focusing or crux-mapping that’s equivalent to Logan’s first cup-stacking attempt. Slow, faltering, effortful—it is actually happening, but not with anything like fluency, and it’s not the complete skill (e.g. Logan moving their hands symmetrically). I made a slight edit to the piece to (hopefully) clarify, adding the word “core.”
This has been my experience over the course of teaching such skills to a couple thousand people (thirty or forty CFAR workshops, plus a dozen or so lectures at universities and conferences and so forth).
Note that the right five minutes of instruction goes a long way, here. My claim is not “anyone can do it after any five-minute intro.”
(I’ve always felt grumpy about the Mythbusters teaching people that “because we couldn’t recreate this, we’ve proved it didn’t happen in the first place.”)
Let’s focus here on Focusing given that’s the skill of the three that’s very accessible to me and that I can easily productively use.
(I’ve always felt grumpy about the Mythbusters teaching people that “because we couldn’t recreate this, we’ve proved it didn’t happen in the first place.”)
My model has more gears then that. I think I have 4-5 workshops of teaching focusing. That’s not as much as you but it’s a decent amount.
To do steps 2 and 3 as Gendlin describes them you need a certain amount of body perception. If the person doesn’t have the necessary body perception it seems to me like teaching a blind man to read. I have one friend who did take a CFAR workshop and whom I did try to teach Focusing a few times. Three years ago, if there wasn’t a very strong emotion, there was nothing for him to perceive. Now, he has the emotional awareness that makes Focusing easy through generally opening up and thinks that he couldn’t have done anything different back then to make it work.
Do you currently think you are able to teach anyone to do Focusing in a five-minute intro with the success criteria that they do feel a felt shift?
You may have a professional disagreement with that, which would be a reasonable cause for saying “no way” to me. The thing you’re envisioning is probably genuinely more delicate and complicated than the thing I’m imagining—you might be e.g. thinking that I’m making a claim to be able to put people solidly on the path to a 540 spinning hook kick in five minutes, when in fact I’m saying I can put people solidly on the path to a hop-step roundhouse kick in five minutes.
I think if I try to teach Focusing in a five-minute session to 100 different people, I will get 80+ percent of them to catch a felt sense and notice that the felt sense is changing some. Not a full shift in the sense of “I have found its true name and the feeling has now released or resolved, and I can move on to the next layer” but “this thing that has been tickling at me lives in a place in my body and has something to say and it’s detectably responding to me as I start to learn how to actually listen.”
Which I think is a solid analogue to Logan’s cup stacking, especially as compared to my cup stacking (which would be the analogue of your skill at Focusing) or that of the world record holder (an AWC type).
I think this due to having basically already run this experiment, and it being about that successful. I’ve also taught Focusing in a 45-60 minute session to some 200-or-so people, in batches of 10 to 20, and it worked to a level that surprised multiple half-trained Focusing coaches who were all (reasonably!) betting on failure.
I really really really really really don’t know how to make this general point without sounding like I’m making a specific claim about the quality of your teaching, but: it’s just a sad truth, in my experiment, that even filtering for trained and motivated teachers, most people are just shockingly bad at teaching. Like, the overall bar is set so low that you can be 95th percentile skilled, as a teacher, and in an absolute and objective sense just mostly fail at doing the thing.
I have a hard time making claims about what-is-possible-for-others-to-convey, for this reason. I don’t find your surprise surprising, and I don’t find your skepticism unjustified.
But I stand by the claim, as written, which I will elaborate on to make sure I leave no misunderstanding:
People-in-general (i.e. more than 75 out of 100 and probably more than 90 out of 100) can indeed pick up the core concepts of things such as TAPs or goal factoring or Gendlin’s Focusing (or, to add a few more examples, Leverage’s belief reporting, or CFAR’s double crux, or Circling, or NVC) with the right five-minute lecture, and make enough progress on those skills in a five-minute trying-it-out session to notice that they’re working, in the way that they were promised to work, to a degree that roughly matches [Logan’s cup-stacking] as compared to [Chang Keng Ian’s].
I stand by this claim because it’s just straightforwardly true in my experience, and any number of my colleagues or attendees at the workshops and conferences can attest to it. I do not claim that it generalizes to non-99th-percentile attempts at generating the five-minute lecture. I’m claiming something about the capacity of the humans to absorb the info and adopt the practice, not something about the ability of humans to present the info.
I believe Duncan that he got incredible success rates on his courses. I believe him not because I have seen him do it—I haven’t even watched any of the linked videos. I believe him because he believes it, because it fits with what I have read from him, and—crucially—because I have seen it quite often in many other domains e.g. with teachers or influencers (providing base rates for reference classes; it may also have helped to have had a thousand-year-old vampire father-in-law). But also because I recognize that the things that Duncan teaches are constructed and selected to be teachable. Just take the Shoulder Advisor: He engineered it simple, useful, engaging, and safe. And he is good at teaching. It is more than that. Something that I have learned to recognize over time: Call it a social choreography. Steering the world into desirable states. That’s why things that might prevent acceptance of the great thing get diminished, and things that benefit it get strengthened from multiple sides.
I also believe Christian because I have met him and trust him. I have seen him teach complex things and judge him to be well-calibrated in this. I have tried the focusing he taught and Duncan’s true names and things in between. From successfully teaching sequence-level stuff to my kids, I know what ends you have to go to and what sometimes cannot be (efficiently) taught. That inferential distance sometimes can be bridged and sometimes not. There are trade-offs that create bright places in teachability-space—but it may make reaching other parts harder. With focusing in particular, I have been at the true names place for a very long time. Happily. But I know that there is more complexity, and with patience, luck, talent, or good teachers—other types of teachers maybe—more mental tools could get unlocked.
(Strong approval for pointing out the existence of an overlap where we’re both right; I was clumsily attempting to do that by pointing out in the opener that Christian may just straightforwardly be envisioning a more mature and complex skill than the one I was claiming is quickly transmissible.)
Okay, then we likely disagree on that. One personal example of mine was for example having a tense neck for a week. Then I did focusing on the bodily sensation, an emotion word matched and after listening to what the emotion had to say, the tense neck released.
Separately, I got some new qualia through Focusing that are useful for both perceiving my own emotions and those of other people.
you might be e.g. thinking that I’m making a claim to be able to put people solidly on the path to a 540 spinning hook kick in five minutes, when in fact I’m saying I can put people solidly on the path to a hop-step roundhouse kick in five minutes.
If we take the hop-step roundhouse kick as a metaphor I would say that there are some people who lack the bodily flexibility to make a kick that high. For them to be able to do the skill that requires loosing a bunch of fascia and maybe letting muscles grow longer. Concretely, I think that the AcroYoga basic position is likely be able to executed by 90% of the people. My legs however don’t have the flexibility and there’s nothing that can be done about that in the timespan of 5 minutes. The hop-step roundhouse kick needs that kind of flexibility, so you won’t be able to teach it to me in 5 minutes.
Attempts at teaching focusing that worked reasonably well at the LWCW weekend or our local dojo did not work the same way with the audience that comes to a normal open LessWrong meetup.
It’s similar for belief reporting. In the LWCW setting saying “Set the intention not to pick up the pen. Then pick up the pen” seems to be enough to get people to experience the distinction. At an open LessWrong meetup most people couldn’t do that and one person who could didn’t seem to be able to release the resulting uncomfort for the next ten minutes so there was also no basis for doing more for belief reporting.
Even when 90% of the general population can do that, I have the impression that the average nerd that comes to a LessWrong meetup just doesn’t have the required basics in the same way I don’t have the necessary flexibility to do the basic AcroYoga thing as a base.
When it comes to doing this in the CFAR setting, I would expect that there’s a lot that happens before you hold your 5-minute explanation of Focusing that does make it easier for the people to feel their bodies.
Maybe the thing I’m missing for the belief reporting pen intention is to do a trance induction beforehand or there’s some other thing that’s required to teach it that I didn’t get. In any case it’s qualitatively different then the example of Logan doing cup-stacking. There’s no exteremly strong teaching skill required to get most people to be able to move the cups if they are able to move both of their hands.
Tying shoelaces is just a less interesting example, when the goal is to point out that some people have unique or idiosyncratic cup-stacking skills. Becoming explicitly aware of simple habits that nearly everyone has will tend to be less useful, I think.
> plenty of people who can’t just do Focusing and aquire the skill in five minutes.
I think you misunderstood the claim—in five minutes, people can do a version of TAPs or Focusing or crux-mapping that’s equivalent to Logan’s first cup-stacking attempt. Slow, faltering, effortful—it is actually happening, but not with anything like fluency, and it’s not the complete skill (e.g. Logan moving their hands symmetrically). I made a slight edit to the piece to (hopefully) clarify, adding the word “core.”
This has been my experience over the course of teaching such skills to a couple thousand people (thirty or forty CFAR workshops, plus a dozen or so lectures at universities and conferences and so forth).
Note that the right five minutes of instruction goes a long way, here. My claim is not “anyone can do it after any five-minute intro.”
(I’ve always felt grumpy about the Mythbusters teaching people that “because we couldn’t recreate this, we’ve proved it didn’t happen in the first place.”)
Let’s focus here on Focusing given that’s the skill of the three that’s very accessible to me and that I can easily productively use.
My model has more gears then that. I think I have 4-5 workshops of teaching focusing. That’s not as much as you but it’s a decent amount.
To do steps 2 and 3 as Gendlin describes them you need a certain amount of body perception. If the person doesn’t have the necessary body perception it seems to me like teaching a blind man to read. I have one friend who did take a CFAR workshop and whom I did try to teach Focusing a few times. Three years ago, if there wasn’t a very strong emotion, there was nothing for him to perceive. Now, he has the emotional awareness that makes Focusing easy through generally opening up and thinks that he couldn’t have done anything different back then to make it work.
Do you currently think you are able to teach anyone to do Focusing in a five-minute intro with the success criteria that they do feel a felt shift?
A relatively important note, if we’re zeroing in on Focusing in particular, is that I don’t fully buy that there’s much to Focusing outside of the part listed in this essay. That seems to me to be, not just the 80⁄20, but something like the 93⁄35.
You may have a professional disagreement with that, which would be a reasonable cause for saying “no way” to me. The thing you’re envisioning is probably genuinely more delicate and complicated than the thing I’m imagining—you might be e.g. thinking that I’m making a claim to be able to put people solidly on the path to a 540 spinning hook kick in five minutes, when in fact I’m saying I can put people solidly on the path to a hop-step roundhouse kick in five minutes.
I think if I try to teach Focusing in a five-minute session to 100 different people, I will get 80+ percent of them to catch a felt sense and notice that the felt sense is changing some. Not a full shift in the sense of “I have found its true name and the feeling has now released or resolved, and I can move on to the next layer” but “this thing that has been tickling at me lives in a place in my body and has something to say and it’s detectably responding to me as I start to learn how to actually listen.”
Which I think is a solid analogue to Logan’s cup stacking, especially as compared to my cup stacking (which would be the analogue of your skill at Focusing) or that of the world record holder (an AWC type).
I think this due to having basically already run this experiment, and it being about that successful. I’ve also taught Focusing in a 45-60 minute session to some 200-or-so people, in batches of 10 to 20, and it worked to a level that surprised multiple half-trained Focusing coaches who were all (reasonably!) betting on failure.
I really really really really really don’t know how to make this general point without sounding like I’m making a specific claim about the quality of your teaching, but: it’s just a sad truth, in my experiment, that even filtering for trained and motivated teachers, most people are just shockingly bad at teaching. Like, the overall bar is set so low that you can be 95th percentile skilled, as a teacher, and in an absolute and objective sense just mostly fail at doing the thing.
I have a hard time making claims about what-is-possible-for-others-to-convey, for this reason. I don’t find your surprise surprising, and I don’t find your skepticism unjustified.
But I stand by the claim, as written, which I will elaborate on to make sure I leave no misunderstanding:
People-in-general (i.e. more than 75 out of 100 and probably more than 90 out of 100) can indeed pick up the core concepts of things such as TAPs or goal factoring or Gendlin’s Focusing (or, to add a few more examples, Leverage’s belief reporting, or CFAR’s double crux, or Circling, or NVC) with the right five-minute lecture, and make enough progress on those skills in a five-minute trying-it-out session to notice that they’re working, in the way that they were promised to work, to a degree that roughly matches [Logan’s cup-stacking] as compared to [Chang Keng Ian’s].
I stand by this claim because it’s just straightforwardly true in my experience, and any number of my colleagues or attendees at the workshops and conferences can attest to it. I do not claim that it generalizes to non-99th-percentile attempts at generating the five-minute lecture. I’m claiming something about the capacity of the humans to absorb the info and adopt the practice, not something about the ability of humans to present the info.
You are both right.
Of course.
I believe Duncan that he got incredible success rates on his courses. I believe him not because I have seen him do it—I haven’t even watched any of the linked videos. I believe him because he believes it, because it fits with what I have read from him, and—crucially—because I have seen it quite often in many other domains e.g. with teachers or influencers (providing base rates for reference classes; it may also have helped to have had a thousand-year-old vampire father-in-law). But also because I recognize that the things that Duncan teaches are constructed and selected to be teachable. Just take the Shoulder Advisor: He engineered it simple, useful, engaging, and safe. And he is good at teaching. It is more than that. Something that I have learned to recognize over time: Call it a social choreography. Steering the world into desirable states. That’s why things that might prevent acceptance of the great thing get diminished, and things that benefit it get strengthened from multiple sides.
I also believe Christian because I have met him and trust him. I have seen him teach complex things and judge him to be well-calibrated in this. I have tried the focusing he taught and Duncan’s true names and things in between. From successfully teaching sequence-level stuff to my kids, I know what ends you have to go to and what sometimes cannot be (efficiently) taught. That inferential distance sometimes can be bridged and sometimes not. There are trade-offs that create bright places in teachability-space—but it may make reaching other parts harder. With focusing in particular, I have been at the true names place for a very long time. Happily. But I know that there is more complexity, and with patience, luck, talent, or good teachers—other types of teachers maybe—more mental tools could get unlocked.
(Strong approval for pointing out the existence of an overlap where we’re both right; I was clumsily attempting to do that by pointing out in the opener that Christian may just straightforwardly be envisioning a more mature and complex skill than the one I was claiming is quickly transmissible.)
Okay, then we likely disagree on that. One personal example of mine was for example having a tense neck for a week. Then I did focusing on the bodily sensation, an emotion word matched and after listening to what the emotion had to say, the tense neck released.
Separately, I got some new qualia through Focusing that are useful for both perceiving my own emotions and those of other people.
If we take the hop-step roundhouse kick as a metaphor I would say that there are some people who lack the bodily flexibility to make a kick that high. For them to be able to do the skill that requires loosing a bunch of fascia and maybe letting muscles grow longer. Concretely, I think that the AcroYoga basic position is likely be able to executed by 90% of the people. My legs however don’t have the flexibility and there’s nothing that can be done about that in the timespan of 5 minutes. The hop-step roundhouse kick needs that kind of flexibility, so you won’t be able to teach it to me in 5 minutes.
Attempts at teaching focusing that worked reasonably well at the LWCW weekend or our local dojo did not work the same way with the audience that comes to a normal open LessWrong meetup.
It’s similar for belief reporting. In the LWCW setting saying “Set the intention not to pick up the pen. Then pick up the pen” seems to be enough to get people to experience the distinction. At an open LessWrong meetup most people couldn’t do that and one person who could didn’t seem to be able to release the resulting uncomfort for the next ten minutes so there was also no basis for doing more for belief reporting.
Even when 90% of the general population can do that, I have the impression that the average nerd that comes to a LessWrong meetup just doesn’t have the required basics in the same way I don’t have the necessary flexibility to do the basic AcroYoga thing as a base.
When it comes to doing this in the CFAR setting, I would expect that there’s a lot that happens before you hold your 5-minute explanation of Focusing that does make it easier for the people to feel their bodies.
Maybe the thing I’m missing for the belief reporting pen intention is to do a trance induction beforehand or there’s some other thing that’s required to teach it that I didn’t get. In any case it’s qualitatively different then the example of Logan doing cup-stacking. There’s no exteremly strong teaching skill required to get most people to be able to move the cups if they are able to move both of their hands.