LesserWrong is dead to me. Trust nothing here; it is not truth-tracking.
PDV
Karma: 149
I’m not sure I buy that emotional leaps are crucially important. Lowering barriers is, but I am not at all convinced that taking leaps is a good way to go about that.
Producing a strong emotional attachment to the activity and thinking it’s really great, is itself a significant, negative effect.
If sex almost always happened in groups of 4-12, it would be unwise for most people to ever have sex, since it is highly unlikely that they would have 3-11 people they reasonably trusted enough to have sex with.
If sex was praised as a way to be a better person and done in deliberate ritualized circumstances, it would be boundary-violating basically every single time.
If it was both, then anyone who suggested you have sex would be so obviously wrong they could not be said to be anything but evil.
Not by default and no, respectively.
Most people are unknown to me and do not share my values. They are trustworthy to the extent of my ability to model them and my confidence that they are not manipulating me.
I was systematically subtly pulled down by ostensible friends in middle school and early high school, but I don’t consider that I was ever betrayed in any stronger sense, or by anyone I trusted to any high degree.
They both are situations of enforced sharing, ostensibly optional but socially mandated. They establish rules within which you must operate, which can and inevitably will be used against anyone less skilled in them. They can be good, but mostly for people who are already socially secure and powerful, and the downside risk is very large risk of totally losing self-image and identity, destroying load-bearing coping mechanisms, and generally taking someone with very few tools to deal with the world and breaking those tools in the name of giving them better ones.
Based on recent experience in the community around the subject, I think Circling is both toxic and a feedback-loop trap.
To paraphrase two friends who had similar strong negative reactions:
This is one of those “this thing is intensely intimate, but it is going to be pushed on me as if it isn’t” things, where people will look down on me for not doing it because it is Therapeutic.
I am fairly sure this would be bad for me, in the same way meditation is bad for me, and I have a terror that because of the social aspect people I want to be friends with will come to decide it is essential to being friends.
This is something I would not do with anyone I did not trust absolutely. No matter what it ostensibly holds about how it should not “force you to open up or try to get you to be vulnerable”, I am quite sure that, as practiced by humans, it will, and participants will be blinded to this obvious truth by the benefits and feeling of purity they have gained from it. Like NVC, I consider anyone engaging in this while in interaction with me a hostile actor.
EDIT:
I notice I feel trepidation and fear as I prepare to discuss this. I’m afraid I won’t be able to give you what you want, that you’ll become bored or start judging me.
[^This is a Circling move I just made: revealing what I’m feeling and what I’m imagining will happen.]
If this were an actual circle, I could ask you and check if it’s true—are you feeling bored? [I invite you to check.]
My instinctive reaction to this entire chunk is “ENEMY, HOSTILE, GET GONE, YOU ARE NO FRIEND OF MINE.” And I endorse that reaction. Anyone who uses this kind of frame is someone who is unsafe to know.
I don’t think the barrier to scaling is the practice, but the people. Large group experiences can’t be narrowly custom-tailored because their aren’t enough people in the target audience; small groups can. People who don’t chafe at experiences that aren’t narrowly custom-tailored are unlikely to become pagans.
Huh. I don’t share the intuition that it can’t scale. As long as the improvising ringleaders are on the same page, why would it fail?
I was about to link my blog post on the same book from early last year, but apparently I never published or finished it. I still haven’t finished it, but here’s my post published anyway, some of it still in outline/note form. I latched onto several of the same insights, so thank you for writing them up properly.
Points and consequences of them I found interesting and compelling in my reading of it which are not already mentioned above:
The map, or at least the parts of the map known to be a shared map, are as important or more important than the territory in multiparty negotiations.
A great deal of how we conduct negotiations is subtly but heavily dependent on us being humans who think in human ways, our shared context. Consequence: negotiating with an uplifted cat would frazzle a skilled negotiator because of the amount of their experience that would be rendered unproductive or counterproductive.
Schelling cared far more about Schelling Fences (term only coined by Scott Alexander) than Schelling Points (term coined shortly after Schelling wrote).
Brinksmanship and the balance of terror never rationally incites an attack until the chance of someone’s finger slipping and starting an attack by accident would incite an attack on its own.
Specifically being narratives about things outside the world rather than inside it is deliberately disconnecting yourself from correction.
An ideology that may pass for an honest model of the world can be corrected by treating it as an honest model of the world and seeing whether it fails in that regard. If it is honest, this provides chances for it to be exposed as a self-sustaining ideology. If it is dishonest, deliberate work must be done to restrict it to the space of things that can withstand that inspection, scaling with the degree or scrutiny it may receive.
An ideology which has its grounding outside the world (all Abrahamic religions, Hinduism, every folk religious tradition I’m familiar with, debatably Buddhism, etc.), has neither of those good properties.
Or in short: Non-religious cultish ideologies are constrained to mimic the form of honesty to be considered honest, while religious ones are not.
I think I would have created this post even if there was a feedback form, specifically because it is public. A feedback form response goes only to the organizers (if that), and is unlikely to get to the ears of anyone else planning anything in the future.
Pretty much all of it.
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To prove when two words are closely connected enough that it’s impossible to define one without the other? I don’t agree.
You basically asked me to define “good” while tabooing morality.
Uh, replace ‘system 1’ with ‘instinct-harnessing’? It’s pretty integral.
Also, you keep using words in really weird ways, which has made this discussion extremely frustrating. I still don’t know what you have meant by most of your statements. So I’m disengaging now.
You can do a values affirmation entirely with system 2. As much as possible, if you want to avoid being epistemically toxic, you should. The Unitarian hypothetical probably does; the personality cult certainly does not.
I think Bryan Caplan has succeeded.
As a short argument: Good is to Evil as Atheist is to Religious. It’s as weird to say that an atheist ceremony is religious as to say that an evil person is good.
Could you elaborate on what the hell “being seen” means? My experience with the term is somewhere between meaninglessness and “a distraction mentioned while someone’s covertly socially attacking”.