I’m interested in a couple of things from people who have read the Sequences (or AI to Zombies) and have thought a lot about applied rationality.
1) I would like to hear what you think it might be especially valuable to study in this way. Which Sequence posts (or other existing resources) seem really important, but also lack crucial info about what exactly the concrete skill is or how to gain it? Also, what parts of rationality seem important to you but just do not seem to have been explored much from an application perspective? What do you think are some open problems in applied rationality?
2) Do you want to form an adventuring party? In what area/around what question or topic?
LoganStrohl
Karma: 6,460
[Question] Which rationality posts are begging for further practical development?
I’ve recently written up an overview of my naturalism project, including where it’s been and where it’s headed. I’ve tried this a few times, but this is the first time I’m actually pretty happy with the result. So I thought I’d share it.
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In the upcoming year, I intend to execute Part Three of my naturalism publication project.(Briefly: What is naturalism?
Naturalism is an investigative method that focuses attention on the points in daily life where subjective experience intersects with crucial information. It brings reflective awareness to experiences that were always available, but that our preconceptions inclined us to discard; it thereby grants us the opportunity to fold those observations into our stories about the world. It is a gradual process of original seeing, clarification, and deconfusion. At its best, naturalism results in a greater ability to interact agentically with the world as it is, rather than fumbling haphazardly through a facade of misapprehensions.)
Part Zero of the project was developing the basic methodology of naturalism, on my own and in collaboration with others. If you start counting at my first essays on “tortoise skills” and “noticing”, it took about six years.
In Part One, I tried to communicate the worldview of naturalism. In a LessWrong sequence called “Intro to Naturalism”, I picked out the concepts that seem foundational to my approach, named them, and elaborated on each. The summary sentence is, “Knowing the territory takes patient and direct observation.” Creating the sequence wasn’t just a matter of writing; in search of an accurate and concise description, I continued running and revising the curriculum, worked things out with other developers, and ran an experimental month-long course online. Part One took one year.
In Part Two, I tried to communicate the methodology of naturalism, in the relatively linear and self-contained form of a curriculum. (The actual practice is messier than that.) After a lot of testing and revising, I published a second sequence called “The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism”.
Part Three will demonstrate the method. I will choose a topic to be the subject of a naturalist study (probably something from the Sequences or the CFAR handbook, to start), learn what I can about it over the course of one week to three months while taking many notes, and compose an account of the process and my findings. I expect that each piece will be similar to my post “Investigating Fabrication”, but better.
Then, I will choose a new subject, and do it again. I’ll continue until I’ve covered a range of topics and shown several ways of wrestling with relevant challenges, then I’ll tie everything into another LessWrong sequence on naturalism. In addition to generating some real-life, detailed, concrete examples of every part of the naturalist methodology, I hope that this part of the project will provide a few valuable companion pieces to existing writings on applied rationality.
(I also have a bit of a hope that I’ll get others to join me for some of these studies and to publish their own accounts.)
Although I hope that the direct products of Parts One through Three are worthwhile in themselves, I do not consider any of them to be complete. I think that the philosophy, methodology, and demonstration are all essential to mastering naturalism, so my ultimate goal with this project is Part Four: A comprehensive manual of naturalism that weaves together the previous parts. I may attempt to publish Part Four in print, and not just as a LessWrong sequence.
The grinding inevitability is not a pressure on you from the outside, but a pressure from you, towards the world. This type of determination is the feeling of being an agent with desires and preferences. You are the unstoppable force, moving towards the things you care about, not because you have to but simply because that’s what it means to care.
Word.
I had a baby on June 20th. I wrote a whole bunch of stuff about what it was like for me to give birth at home without pain medication. I’ve just published it all to my website, along with photos and videos.
CN: If you click on “words”, you won’t see anybody naked. If you click on “photos” or “videos”, you will see me very extra naked.
The “words” section includes a birth story, followed by a Q&A section with things like “What do contractions feel like?”, “How did you handle the pain?”, and “How did you think about labor, going into it?”. There’s also a bit at the very bottom of the page where you can submit more questions, though of course you’re also welcome to ask me stuff here.
thanks! fixed
More on the moth:
Members of this particular species can be either nocturnal or diurnal. I noticed my confusion when I saw one pollinating a lilac in bright moonlight, because I’d never seen a hummingbird at night before. That’s what prompted me to take a closer look; up close it was clearly not a bird at all, but a bug!
For many years, I thought, “The first time I saw a sphinx moth, I thought it was a hummingbird.” I’ve only recently realized that I have no idea how many moths I mistook for hummingbirds before that point. I may have seen them dozens of times during the day and never thought twice about it.
Look At What’s In Front Of You (Conclusion to The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism)
Investigating Fabrication
Support Structures for Naturalist Study
Three Iterative Processes
As someone who’s about to become a father, I find this highly relevant. I will be studying and practicing several bits of this advice, especially the Productivity Purge and the Decide10 system, before the baby arrives. Thanks a bunch for writing this up.
Yeah, makes sense. I’m pretty bad at this kind of thing I think, but I’ll think about it and if I come up with something I’ll let you know.
I am curious whether reading or skimming the Wikipedia articles on “naturalistic observation” and “natural history” helps at all with getting where I’m coming from.
I certainly don’t claim it was the best possible term to choose, but to me it seems extremely precise and accurate (though ambiguous, and i recognize that ppl round these parts are more familiar with philosophical naturalism qua ontological claim). In ecology, entomology, etc., the connotations go way beyond liking natural stuff, and suggest an orientation toward research topics and a corresponding set of methodologies. It’s the thing Jane Goodall did, and also James Audubon. My stuff is like “What if the naturalist paradigm, but for stuff that includes rationality and not just for finches? What would that look like?”
[edit: on phone, might add links and mb further reply later]
Oh perhaps some of the confusion with this post in particular is coming from the fact that I tried to contrast three different frameworks for experimentation. Sometimes when people contrast different frameworks, they are doing that because they want to convince the reader that one of them is better than the others. I’m definitely not trying to do that here! I contrasted three experimental frameworks because in order to take the actions that are part of the overall naturalist investigative method, it’s important to deliberately avoid falling into either of the other two near-by frames. I was trying to describe the mindset that the actions comprising naturalist experimentation come from.
Thanks @Raemon. I agree with all of that.
>I don’t know anyone who recommends “don’t put much effort into understanding, just try stuff and see if it works”, so I didn’t expect that was the baseline that this sequence is arguing against.
@Dagon, I caution you that if you read this sequence (or the intro one) with the assumption that it’s primarily trying to argue something, you’ll probably be at risk of badly misinterpreting me.
I have a story that you’re looking for and evaluating arguments here because you don’t know what naturalism is or why it might be worth learning, so you hope to find motivating claims and arguments for paying attention to any of this in the first place. If this is a true story about you, I think that’s pretty reasonable! I think it would be ridiculous of me to be like, “Here’s a huge amount of work I suggest that you take on without having any particular reason for doing so,” and I’m not very surprised if this sequence comes off that way to lots of people. But its actual intended audience is people who already want to learn something like this, for some reason, and are ready to do so.
This sequence is somewhere between a syllabus outline and a how-to guide. If you read a book about “how to design and tend a vegetable patch” through an argumentative lens, I expect you’re going to find a lot of completely unsupported or incoherent arguments everywhere, it’ll be pretty frustrating, and you probably won’t learn nearly as much about how to design and tend a vegetable patch as you otherwise might. “How To Garden” is a completely different book from “Raised Bed Organic Gardening Is Better Than All of the Other Kinds of Gardening, and Here Is Why.” I have tried to write the former type of book so far, not the latter.
I realize this is only a response to one small thing in your comment and perhaps I will come back to the rest later, but I want to point out that according to me, I am definitely not arguing against anything at all.
Naturalist Experimentation
a) I do remember that. b) It it still seems like a pretty good pointer to a (the?) main way I think of and experience myself, but I want to be clear that I was being at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and I would not in full honesty claim that I “identify as a tiger”, or any sort of otherkin.
>and people were still confused, and then I gave up and just identified as a woman
D: i know those feels. that’s kinda where i am lately. (except man instead of woman)