Trialing for the machine learning living library position at MIRI and occasional volunteer instructor and mentor at CFAR.
Qiaochu_Yuan
Karma: 15,897
FWIW, I don’t feel this way about timelines anymore. Lot more pessimistic about estimates being mostly just noise.
The only part of these processes that actually requires real-time interaction is getting people over what I call their “meta-issue”—the schema they have that gets in the way of being able to reflect on their issues.
For example, I’ve had clients who had what you might call a “be a good student” schema that keeps them from accurately reporting their emotions, responses, or progress in applying a reconsolidation technique. Others who would deflect and deny ever having any negative experiences or even any problems, despite having just asked me for help with same. These kinds of meta-issues are the hardest and most time-consuming part of getting someone ready to change.
Oof, yeah, this resonates a lot with experiences I’ve been having with myself and others the last few months, since coming out of a workshop on the bio-emotive framework. There are towers of meta-issues, meta-issues that prevent themselves from being looked at… what a mess.
In retrospect this illuminates something for me about the CFAR workshop and its techniques—a pattern I ran into for years was that I gradually became averse to every single CFAR technique I tried, so I never used them on my own, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think—and this is deeply ironic—that the CFAR techniques as a whole never went meta enough to catch “meta-issues,” not in any really systematic way.
Wow, thank you for writing this. This really clarified something for me that I’m in the process of digesting.
I just got around to reading this; thank you for writing it!
I hadn’t thought much about the role of memory in trauma and emotional stuff until pretty recently, possibly based on some kind of present-moment-experience-focused thing I inherited from circling culture. But my experiences using the bio-emotive framework were memory-based in a really important way, and reading this helped something click into place for me about integration being literally integration of memory networks, parts as memory networks, etc.
Using bio-emotive to examine the relationship between an emotional reaction I’m having now and a related memory has given the phrase “being present” a meaning it didn’t have for me before; often when we aren’t present it’s because we’re in a real sense in the past, possibly way back in the past depending on what memories are being activated.
Google Activity History is sort of terrifying but also great. I used it when someone stole my laptop to learn that the thief had googled pawn shops in the area; I contacted one of the pawn shops they looked up and a bit later they called me telling me someone had brought in a laptop matching my description. They lied to her and told her they needed to process the laptop for a few hours and she needed to come back, and in that time the police were called, she was arrested, and I got my laptop back the same day it was stolen.
I’ve been getting a fair number of requests on Facebook for the doc (esp. from community organizers, which I appreciate), and response has been pretty positive. That plus a few other things have me more inclined to write a public draft, but still a little wary of making promises yet.
Here is my brain dump: I have mostly given up on the Berkeley rationality community as a possible village. I think the people who showed up here were mostly selected for being bad at villaging, and that the awful shit that’s been happening around here lately is downstream of that. I think there is something toxic / dysfunctional woven deep into the community fabric (which has something to do with the ways in which the Mission interacts poorly with people’s psychologies) and I don’t feel very hopeful about even being able to show it clearly to half of the community, let alone doing anything about it.
In February I wrote a 20-page Google Doc describing what I think is wrong with Berkeley in more detail, which I’ve shared with some of you but don’t plan to make public. (Message me on Facebook if you’d like to request access to a PDF of it; I might not say yes, though.) I’d like to get around to writing a second public draft but again, I’ve been feeling less hopeful, so… we’ll see.
I upvoted this because it gave me some concepts to use to look at some experiences I’ve had. The speculations at the level of physical mechanism aren’t really cruxes for me so I mostly don’t care about them, and same with facts of the matter about what any particular Pali text actually says. What’s interesting to me is what Romeo gets out of a combination of reading them and reflecting on his own experience, that might be relevant to me reflecting on my own experience.
Why should I believe any of this?
Gut reaction to this question is that it’s the wrong question. I don’t view this post as telling you anything you’re supposed to believe on Romeo’s word.
It’s goodharting from the point of view of natural selection’s values but it doesn’t have to be goodharting from the point of view of your values. We can enjoy art even if art is in some sense goodharting on e.g. being in beautiful places or whatever.
This is fantastic and absolutely the conversation I want to be having. Resonates quite a lot with my experience, especially as a description of what it is exactly that I got out of circling.
In your language circling naturally stirs up sankharas because relational shit is happening (e.g. people are paying attention to you or ignoring you, liking or disliking what you say, etc) and then hopefully, if the circle is being well-facilitated, you sometimes get coached into a state where you can notice and work with your “causal links in the perceptual system between physical sensations, feelings, and mental reactions,” e.g. by the facilitator remaining very calm and holding space, then gently pointing out their observations about your causal links, that kind of thing. Unfortunately with less skilled facilitation this doesn’t happen and shit just gets stirred up and not resolved; worst case people get retraumatized.
Very excited to talk to you more about this.
Yeah, I agree that at the earlier stages it’s not clear that ambition is a thing to aim for, and I would also advise people to prioritize health broadly.
I agree that encouragement and guidance is good, and more generally think that mentorship is really, really deeply important. I am not about this “individual rationality” life anymore. It’s group rationality or nothing.
Right, this is the kind of thing I had in mind with the phrase “pathological need to do something.” Cf. people who are obsessed with making way more money than they could ever possibly spend.
He says that “Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers”. I’d update this to say that “ONE WAY OF THINKING ABOUT politics is AS IF IT IS an extension of war by other means. Arguments CAN BE THOUGHT OF AS soldiers”.
This is a good shift for you to have made and I’m glad you can make it. Now you can just do this mentally to everyone’s writing (and speaking, for that matter) all the time.
But asking writers to do it themselves is crippling. The new sentence you propose is obviously technically more accurate but it’s also clunky, anemic prose.
Someone ages ago (maybe Viliam_Bur?) said that people thought they were drawn to LW by the good ideas but they were equally if not more drawn to LW by the quality of Eliezer’s writing, and a key quality of Eliezer’s writing is that he knew how to be punchy when he needed to be.
“Arguments are soldiers” is, and was always, poetry, not a mathematical identity. The point was to shock you into a frame shift in how you look at arguments (away from e.g. an implicit frame of “arguments are neutral tools we use to search for truth”), not tell you a Platonic Truth that you Believe Forever. And punchy writing is key to provoking these kinds of frame shifts; clunky writing just doesn’t actually get through to any part of you that matters.
Terence Tao is great; I haven’t read that book but I like his writing a lot in general. I am a big fan of the Princeton Lectures in Analysis by Stein and Shakarchi; clear writing, good exercises, great diagrams, focus on examples and applications.
(Edit: also, fun fact, Stein was Tao’s advisor.)
Epistemic status: ex-math grad student
I think you’re equivocating between two possible meanings of “choose” here. There’s “choose” as in you start telling people “I want to write a book” and then there’s “choose” as in you actually decide to actually write the book, which is quite different. I think Ray is asking about something like how to cultivate the capacity to do the latter. It is not at all trivially easy. Most goals are fake; making them real is a genuine skill.
Tongue-in-cheek: “when their pathological need to do something outweighs their pathological need to do nothing.”
In more detail: there are several different kinds of deep-rooted psychological needs that ambition might be powered by, and I think the resulting different kinds of ambition are different enough to discuss as distinct entities (in particular, they vary in how prosocial they are). Some possibilities off the top of my head, not mutually exclusive, inspired by Enneagram types:
1. Reinforce a particular identity / self-narrative (e.g. “I’m special” → strive to become a celebrity or w/e, see Instagram influencers); Enneagram 4
2. Get people to like you (again see Instagram influencers); Enneagram 3
3. Have power over people (some politicians, maybe); Enneagram 8
4. Have fun to avoid feeling bad; Enneagram 7
(One way to probe this in a given ambitious person is to look at what coping mechanisms they turn to when they fail. E.g. if it’s about reinforcing a given identity through some ambitious project, when that project fails do they start reinforcing that identity in other ways?)
Then there’s genuine compassion, which is the cleanest power source for ambition I’ve found so far, and arguably the most prosocial (there might be others, e.g. childlike joy and wonder). I am quite concerned that most of the ambition in the rationality / EA space is not being powered by genuine compassion; personally, most of the time I’ve been here I’ve been powered by a combination of #1 and #2.
There are also several different kinds of deep-rooted psychological needs that lack of ambition might be powered by. Again, some possibilities off the top of my head, inspired by Enneagram types:
1. Not drawing criticism / pissing people off; Enneagram 2, Enneagram 3, or Enneagram 9
2. Avoiding the feeling of not knowing what to do; Enneagram 5, Enneagram 6
3. Sense that ambition is morally wrong / corrupting; Enneagram 1
4. Sense that ambition is not your place / not the sort of thing people like you are allowed to do; Enneagram 2, Enneagram 3, Enneagram 4
Historically I think a lot of my lack of ambition was powered by a combination of #1, #2, and #4, although it’s hard to disentangle. There were also less psychological obstacles, e.g. I was tired all the time because I was eating, sleeping, and exercising poorly, and had an awful social life; real hard to be ambitious or agentic in that state.
To summarize, I mostly relate to ambition as a relatively surface-level psychological phenomenon that’s being powered by deeper dynamics, and I think at least as much in terms of obstacles to ambition as in terms of ways to cultivate ambition.
Epistemic status: based on lots of personal development work and looking at other people’s psychology and personal development, e.g. via circling; especially, noticing my own level of ambition increase drastically the more work I do on myself, and looking at what seem to be the gears of that.
I also don’t have much of this skill and made it through life without needing to have it; I was able to coast on raw intelligence for quite a long time, up through my 2nd year of grad school or so. Welp.
Except in romantic relationships; I’ve historically consistently found it easy to have commitment, follow-through, reliability, focused attention, etc. in that context (although it was kinda being fueled by neediness so there were other things going on there).
It feels like I have not yet found e.g. a job that I deeply value enough to commit to in the same way that I valued my relationships enough to commit to them, and that I can take my lack of commitment to various things I’ve attempted to do so far as evidence that at least some part of me didn’t find them worth committing to. I think I’m okay with having high standards for what I commit to in this way, although I might be out of practice committing as a result.
Yes, I strongly agree that this is missing and it sucks. I have a lot to say about why I think this is happening, which hopefully will be converted from a Google Doc into a series of blog posts soonish.
There’s an interesting thing authentic relating people do at workshops that they call “setting intentions,” and I think it works in a different way than either of these. The difference seems to me to be that the intention is being “held by the group.” I’m not sure how to explain what I mean by this. There are at least two visible signs of it:
1) people remind each other about the intention, and
2) people reward each other for following through on the intention.
If everyone knows the intention is being held by the group in this way, it both comes to mind more easily and feels more socially acceptable to follow through on (the latter might be causing the former). In my experience group intentions also require almost no willpower, but they also don’t feel quite like policies to me (that would be “agreements”) - they’re more like especially salient affordances.
The key ritual is that at some point someone asks “so, do we all agree to hold this intention?” and we raise our hands if so—and we look around the room so we can see each other’s hands. That way the collective holding of the intention can enter common knowledge.
Said another way, it’s something like trying to define the values of the group-mind we’re attempting to come together to form.
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I relate to your resistance to willpower-based intentions. It’s something like, a lot of people have an “inner authoritarian” or “inner tyrant” that is the internalized avatar of other people making them do stuff when they were younger (parents, teachers, etc.), whose job it is to suppress the parts of them that are unacceptable according to outer tyrants. You can live under your inner tyrant’s reign of terror, which works as long as submitting to the inner tyrant keeps your life running smoothly, e.g. it placates your outer tyrants and they feed you and stuff.
At some point this strategy can stop working, and then other parts of you might engage in an internal rebellion against your inner tyrant; I think I was in a state like this for most of 2017 and 2018, and probably still am now to some extent. At this stage using willpower can feel like giving in to the inner tyrant.
Then I think there’s some further stage of development that involves developing “internal leadership,” whatever that is.
There’s a bit in the Guru Papers about this. One quote, I think in the context of submitting to renunciate morality (e.g. Christian morality):
Maintaining denial actually requires constant surveillance of the thing you are pretending isn’t there. This deepens the internal splits that renunciation promises to heal. It requires the construction of a covert inner authoritarian to keep control over the “bad” stuff you reject. This inner tyrant is probably not strong enough to do the job on its own, so you submit to an external authority whose job is to strengthen the internal tyrant.
I’m personally quite worried about disruptions to the food supply chain severe enough to cause food shortages in e.g. the Bay Area in the next few months but not sure what to do with that worry other than to stock up more on non-perishables. Would very much appreciate seeing more people thinking and researching about this.