I suppose, with one day left to review 2021 posts, I can add my 2¢ to my own here.
Overall I still like this post. I still think it points at true things and says them pretty well.
I had intended it as a kind of guide or instruction manual for anyone who felt inspired to create a truly potent rationality dojo. I’m a bit saddened that, to the best of my knowledge, no one seems to have taken what I named here and made it their own enough to build a Beisutsu dojo. I would really have liked to see that.
But this post wasn’t meant to persuade anyone to do it. It was more of an offering of tools and a path in case it already fit someone’s desire.
And who knows, maybe someone secretly is working on this, or even has constructed something of a “Bayesian Conspiracy” secret society that I just don’t know about!
If someone has taken up the path this post lays out, I’d enjoy hearing about it.
I also would have liked clarification questions about how to do the things I talked about. And I still welcome those, for whatever that’s worth.
———
I would write this post very slightly differently today. In rereading it this morning I have no regrets. I quite like it. But my style has refined a bit and I’ve learned a few things.
The main difference is that I see how I could have clarified the whole thing with examples. I’ve built things, and seen things built, according to most of these principles. Even though they’re not rationality dojos, and some of them are in service to woo, I think it would have conveyed the overall idea a lot more vividly if readers could have felt the kind of embodied aesthetic clarity I’m talking about. That might have made it easier to extrapolate what to do for a Beisutsu dojo.
Here are a few other, more minor, differences that stand out for me:
I’ve come to learn that most people can’t consciously orient to the Void until they’ve learned how to operate within their embodied range. I get the impression that it can come across like some kind of mindfulness magic that might be woo. It’s really quite simple — arguably the simplest thing in all of existence — but that doesn’t make it accessible. So I’d be inclined to emphasize self-regulation a bit more (instead of relegating that to a single section on soothing one’s body) and then hint at the contrast between being calm and listening to the Void.
Speaking of body regulation, today I’d point folk here toward Irene Lyon in addition to, and maybe instead of, Luis Mojica. I love Luis’s stuff, but he can meander into political frames and gives off a woo vibe. I think he navigates both of those very skillfully, but Irene just nails the basics very cleanly and has an overwhelming abundance of free info on her YouTube channel.
The strategy of teaching by embodiment is solid, but it’s a strategy. Today I have a better sense now of exactly what the constraints are. I think it’s okay to teach because you’re trying to teach. But you still need to orient to the Goodhart puzzle somehow. Teaching so as to practice the Art is one way to keep motives pure. I think it’s great as an example strategy. Today I’d frame it that way.
I would describe the “devotion to truth” dimension with more softness today. There’s a tone of forcing in how I wrote about it in this post, which I now see would incur adaptive entropy. The point is more that there are things we avoid admitting to ourselves, and ways that we prefer fantasies and familiarity over looking at what’s real. The core of devotion to truth is about choosing to walk a path where we come to prefer seeing what’s real over any and all illusions. I now think that’s better done by unraveling the reasons we don’t automatically do this, instead of somehow forcing ourselves to look at the truth despite inner protestations.
I have a similar criticism of the guess I made about pressure-testing the Art. The general idea seems great, but all the examples are based on high-intensity effort. I now see the challenge I issued (about 80⁄20 boosting the vitality of dojo participants over one hour) as highly adaptive-entropic: If that were doable, why didn’t it happen on its own without the challenge? Not to say it was an inherently bad idea, but things like it seem to ignore an awful lot of context and practice goal-fixation. I’m honestly not sure how to fix this though. I think “How to pressure-test one’s rationality” is a mostly unsolved problem.
———
As something of an aside, regarding the comments section:
I’m a little saddened that the whole of the comments section became kind of scattered and unintelligible due to deleting one user’s profile.
There were just a few threads involving that person, but when they were removed all the replies to them in those threads became top-level comments to the OP.
I think that meaningfully damaged the ability to follow discussion of this post thereafter.
I don’t know if conversation would have been any different without that effect.
But it seems worth noting for the sake of the review, since it (maybe) affects the ability to follow what points people had discussed about this post before.
I suppose, with one day left to review 2021 posts, I can add my 2¢ to my own here.
Overall I still like this post. I still think it points at true things and says them pretty well.
I had intended it as a kind of guide or instruction manual for anyone who felt inspired to create a truly potent rationality dojo. I’m a bit saddened that, to the best of my knowledge, no one seems to have taken what I named here and made it their own enough to build a Beisutsu dojo. I would really have liked to see that.
But this post wasn’t meant to persuade anyone to do it. It was more of an offering of tools and a path in case it already fit someone’s desire.
And who knows, maybe someone secretly is working on this, or even has constructed something of a “Bayesian Conspiracy” secret society that I just don’t know about!
If someone has taken up the path this post lays out, I’d enjoy hearing about it.
I also would have liked clarification questions about how to do the things I talked about. And I still welcome those, for whatever that’s worth.
———
I would write this post very slightly differently today. In rereading it this morning I have no regrets. I quite like it. But my style has refined a bit and I’ve learned a few things.
The main difference is that I see how I could have clarified the whole thing with examples. I’ve built things, and seen things built, according to most of these principles. Even though they’re not rationality dojos, and some of them are in service to woo, I think it would have conveyed the overall idea a lot more vividly if readers could have felt the kind of embodied aesthetic clarity I’m talking about. That might have made it easier to extrapolate what to do for a Beisutsu dojo.
Here are a few other, more minor, differences that stand out for me:
I’ve come to learn that most people can’t consciously orient to the Void until they’ve learned how to operate within their embodied range. I get the impression that it can come across like some kind of mindfulness magic that might be woo. It’s really quite simple — arguably the simplest thing in all of existence — but that doesn’t make it accessible. So I’d be inclined to emphasize self-regulation a bit more (instead of relegating that to a single section on soothing one’s body) and then hint at the contrast between being calm and listening to the Void.
Speaking of body regulation, today I’d point folk here toward Irene Lyon in addition to, and maybe instead of, Luis Mojica. I love Luis’s stuff, but he can meander into political frames and gives off a woo vibe. I think he navigates both of those very skillfully, but Irene just nails the basics very cleanly and has an overwhelming abundance of free info on her YouTube channel.
The strategy of teaching by embodiment is solid, but it’s a strategy. Today I have a better sense now of exactly what the constraints are. I think it’s okay to teach because you’re trying to teach. But you still need to orient to the Goodhart puzzle somehow. Teaching so as to practice the Art is one way to keep motives pure. I think it’s great as an example strategy. Today I’d frame it that way.
I would describe the “devotion to truth” dimension with more softness today. There’s a tone of forcing in how I wrote about it in this post, which I now see would incur adaptive entropy. The point is more that there are things we avoid admitting to ourselves, and ways that we prefer fantasies and familiarity over looking at what’s real. The core of devotion to truth is about choosing to walk a path where we come to prefer seeing what’s real over any and all illusions. I now think that’s better done by unraveling the reasons we don’t automatically do this, instead of somehow forcing ourselves to look at the truth despite inner protestations.
I have a similar criticism of the guess I made about pressure-testing the Art. The general idea seems great, but all the examples are based on high-intensity effort. I now see the challenge I issued (about 80⁄20 boosting the vitality of dojo participants over one hour) as highly adaptive-entropic: If that were doable, why didn’t it happen on its own without the challenge? Not to say it was an inherently bad idea, but things like it seem to ignore an awful lot of context and practice goal-fixation. I’m honestly not sure how to fix this though. I think “How to pressure-test one’s rationality” is a mostly unsolved problem.
———
As something of an aside, regarding the comments section:
I’m a little saddened that the whole of the comments section became kind of scattered and unintelligible due to deleting one user’s profile.
There were just a few threads involving that person, but when they were removed all the replies to them in those threads became top-level comments to the OP.
I think that meaningfully damaged the ability to follow discussion of this post thereafter.
I don’t know if conversation would have been any different without that effect.
But it seems worth noting for the sake of the review, since it (maybe) affects the ability to follow what points people had discussed about this post before.