Ok, then that’s the crux of this argument. Personally, I value Eliezer’s writing and Conor Moreton’s writing more than I value a culture of unfettered criticism.
This seems like a good argument for the archipelago concept? You can have your culture of unfettered criticism on some blogs, and I can read my desired authors on their blogs. Would there be negative consequences for you if that model were followed?
Meditations on Moloch is not an argument. It’s a type error to analyze it as if it were.
I like your vision of a perfect should world, but I feel that you’re ignoring the request to deal with the actual world. People do in fact end up disincentivized from posting due to the sorts of criticism you enjoy. Do you believe that this isn’t a problem, or that it is but it’s not worth solving, or that it’s worth solving but there’s a trivial solution?
Remember that Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided.
Appreciate the impolitic question. :) I think I was doing some sort of social move that was trying to reset the burden of proof, rather than actually sharing data, but of course sharing data is better. (I do think people too often assume that their status quo bias is some sort of principled wisdom, so asking “are you sure the burden of proof is on your side?” is moderately useful. But data is better.)
I’m more confident on the independent action side than the independent thought side, so I’ll start with that: I am taking more concrete steps towards achieving my goals, in ways that (inside-view) seem directly related to meditation et. al. For instance, I’m noticing much faster when I’m unhappy with a situation, and taking action more directly to fix it. Some specific examples are quitting my job last spring, and successfully pitching my boss on a change of plan at my current job. (Possible confounder is that I’m generally gaining confidence over time, and am getting more career capital, so maybe I would get better at these things anyway. I’m not immediately sure how to prove that this isn’t true, though it inside-view doesn’t seem to be.)
In terms of independent thought, I’ve been able to do things like e.g. plan out a strategy for a startup that requires some not-yet-fully-achieved innovation, and am making steady progress at chipping away at the remaining unknowns. In the past, I anticipate I would have been overwhelmed by the sense that I wasn’t allowed to do that, or that there were too many unknowns to be able to plan, but meditation and CFAR practices help me to separate that from the work of understanding it better.
None of this directly relates to mythic mode, because I haven’t done much of specifically that. My main instance of using mythic mode was at the CFAR tier II workshop, where we used it to uncover a deeply hidden emotional trait (specifically a fear of my own anger), which has been emotionally and socially helpful to recognize and deal with. It feels like having awareness of that is pretty important for being able to think and act effectively, but I don’t have good external evidence of that.
Hmm, I don’t really see it that way? This post is trying to describe the category of which Meditation on Moloch is an instance. If Meditation on Moloch is good, surely trying to understand the thing that it’s an instance of could also be good.
I’m definitely a bit worried about the milder one, but I’m so inefficient with my use of time currently that I doubt it could hurt too badly.
I don’t really worry about the first two, because we have powerful myths (e.g. Steve Jobs) warning us against those things, so paying attention to myth seems like a good way to avoid them.
This seems right to me, as far as it goes. But for the same reason they’re dangerous, they’re powerful. Why should the forces of evil and ignorance be the only ones who get to have powerful weapons?
I would feel pretty comfortable betting that Meditations on Moloch is one of the top 5 most effective posts produced by the LW-sphere, in terms of leading to people pursuing good in the world. That’s a direct result of it choosing to harness myth in a way selected for usefulness.
I have done a decent amount of “woo” (meditation, a bit of Val-style mythic mode) in the past years, and my ability for independent thought and especially independent action seem to have gone way up.
I’d be interested to hear more about what specifically bothers you. I agree that it “sounds like” The Secret, but just saying it “sounds like it” seems like a version of The Worst Argument in the World.
What are the negative effects you feel will come from doing this?
This seems good. I was definitely getting the sense there were at least two axes, and these seem to capture a lot of it.
Could Abstract/Methodical be something like Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica?
Also, I’m interested that Concrete/Methodical is analysis, given the Corn post. I would have expected it to be Intuitive? (I don’t actually do higher math, so I don’t know from personal experience.)
This almost seems too obvious to say, but one reason to be bothered by the move from “tall” to “leader” is that sometimes you want your group to have a leader with skills that cause the group to succeed, and the most optimal choice for that might not be the tallest person.
That post is hilarious, and fascinating.
I eat corn like an analyst, vastly prefer Lisp to Haskell, use Vim, identify much more strongly with the personality description of the analyst, and while I haven’t done much higher math, have a deep and abiding love for the delta-epsilon definition of a limit.
Very curious to hear other results, either successful or not.
I had an extremely nerdy friend group in college, which led to weird effects since we couldn’t all be “the nerd”. One of my friends still gets annoyed at the fact that she became the “jock” and the “sensible person”, just because she was slightly less helpless at life than the rest of us. Her reaction seems to be something like, “I’m for real actually a nerd, why are you making me play this other role??”
This feels like a really useful framing. It meshes with other fake frameworks I sometimes use, but the emphasis on the web pulling you back in if you don’t break with it hard enough feels true and important.
If anyone remembers the r/place experiment Reddit did, similar dynamics were extremely apparent. (In brief, /r/place was a blank 1000x1000 pixel canvas, where anyone with a Reddit account could place one colored pixel anywhere they wanted every 5 minutes.) It was actually really hard to randomly vandalize anything, because wrong pixels looked out of place and would be fixed pretty fast. The only things that worked were:
1) Building a new pattern in a neutral location (which might eventually grow big enough to challenge existing patterns), or
2) Nudging a pattern into a different nearby attractor.
You didn’t see coherent images dissolving into noise, because bystanders would fix things too fast. But you did see things like adding genitalia to Charizard, or changing the text “PC MASTER RACE” to “PC MASTURBATE”, because those could start as relatively minor changes that bystanders might decide to help with.
The most skillful application of this I saw was when some people working on the powerful “Rainbow Road” pattern didn’t want to overwrite the Where’s Waldo image. They decided to try to send the road through a “portal”. You can see it happen between 0:35 and 0:45 in the timelapse. A small team coordinated on Discord to build an entrance and exit portal, with a little bit of rainbow coming out of each, in exactly the right spot that the “hivemind” would naturally run into it. This worked amazingly well, and the hivemind moved to continuing the rainbow from the other end of the portal pretty much effortlessly.
The lesson I draw is that if you want to break out of a script, you can’t just act illegibly and hope that will work. You need to put in the work to create or appropriate a script of your own.
@Ben, this post has already had a measurable positive impact on my life. I hadn’t heard of these before, and I’ve since purchased and used them to help with important decisions. Thanks!
Isn’t that implicit in all disagreements? You’re implicitly (or actually explicitly, in many cases) claiming social/moral/epistemic superiority over people who think NVC and related concepts are good and useful.
I’m not sure why you assume social awareness and connection requires a lack of consent.
It’s extremely common, in my experience, for someone to request what you’re calling “social manipulation”. For example, the entire industry of therapy is people paying money to receive effective social manipulation that helps them be happier and more effective.
My experience is that the cluster of experiences around “cry and hug and shudder” are what it feels like to become aware of something that’s important to my system 1, and that those moments are intervention points for shifting system 1′s heuristics. Progress on reducing akrasia, unendorsed social anxiety, etc. has often come from moments like that.
I don’t know you well, but I model you as someone with strong willpower and a general “mind over matter” attitude. This may make it less salient what your system 1 is up to?
I would compare circling to meditation, rather than lucid dreaming. It’s not quite the same thing as rationality, and it has a lot of built up culture and tradition, some of which we disagree with, but it’s a demostrably powerful tool that we would be impoverished if we ignored.
I’m not in Val’s head, but I didn’t get the sense that he was claiming this was the best way to meet Shaolin monks. Rather, his aim was to find a way to build on his moment of Kensho in a way that progressed his growth and development.
He could just as easily have missed the monk, and then he would have by chance run into another form of teacher, and that would have been the story instead. Or he would have learned something from his aimless wanderings that he couldn’t have learned by finding a teacher. Or he would have not learned anything and been frustrated, and then the story would be that he was undergoing some sort of trial and the next thing he did would be the payoff.