Spiracular

Karma: 1,608

Spiracular 27 Feb 2023 21:05 UTC
3 points
5
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Some thoughts on the cults LW had
I like something about this formulation? No idea if you have time, but I’d be interested if you expanded on it.

I’m not convinced “high-energy” is the right phrasing, since the attributes (as I seem them) seem to be:
- Diverges from current worldview
- High-confidence
  - Expressed or uptaken, in a way that allows little space for uncertainty/wavering. May take a dark attitude on ensembling it with other worldviews.
  - May have a lot of internal consistency.
    “Unreasonable internal consistency” is (paradoxically) sometimes a marker for reality, and sometimes a tell that something is truly mad and self-reinforcing.
- Pushes a large change in behavior, and pushes it hard
- The change is costly, at least under your original paradigm
- The change may be sticky (& here are some possible mechanisms)
  - Activates morality or tribal-affiliation concerns
    “If you hear X, and don’t believe X and convert X into praxis immediately… then you are our enemy and are infinitely corrupt” or similar attitudes and beliefs
  - Hard to get data that updates you out of the expensive behavior
    ex: Ziz using revenge to try to change the incentive landscape in counterfactual/multiverse-branching universes, which you cannot directly observe? Can’t observe = no clear way to learn if this isn’t working, and update out. (I believe this is how she justifies resisting arrest, too.)
  - The change in behavior comes with an exhortation for you to do lots of things that spread the idea to other people.
    This is sometimes an indicator for highly-contagious memes, that were selected more for virulence than usefulness to the bearer. (Not always, though.)
  - Leaves you with too little slack to re-evaluate what you’ve been doing, or corrupts your re-evaluation metrics.
    ex: It feels like you’d need to argue with someone who is hard to argue with, or else you’ve dismissed it prematurely. That would be really bad. You model that argument as likely to go poorly, and you really don’t want to…
    This sentiment shows up really commonly among people deeply affected by “reality warper” people and their beliefs? It shows up in normal circumstances, too. It seems much, much more intense in “reality warper” cases, though.
I would add that some people seem to have a tendency to take what is usually a low-energy meme in most hands, and turn it into a high-energy form? I think this is an attribute that characterizes some varieties of charisma, and is common among “reality warpers.”

(Awkwardly, I think “mapping high-minded ideas to practical behaviors” is also an incredibly useful attribute of highly-practical highly-effective people? Good leaders are often talented at this subskill, not just bad ones. Discernment in what ideas you take seriously, can make a really big difference in the outcomes, here.)

Some varieties of couching or argumentation will push extreme change in behavior and action, harder than others, for the same idea. Some varieties of receptivity and listening, seem more likely to uptake ideas as high-energy memes.

I feel like Pascal’s Mugging is related, but not the only case. Ex: Under Utilitarianism, you can also justify a costly behavior by arguing from very high certainty of a moderate benefit. However, this is usually not as sticky, and it is more likely to rapidly right itself if future data disputes the benefit.

Spiracular 26 Feb 2023 20:00 UTC
11 points
5
in reply to: hairyfigment’s comment on: [Link] A community alert about Ziz
At the risk of this looking too much like me fighting a strawman...

Cults may have a tendency to interact and pick up adaptations from each other, but it seems wrong to operate on the assumption that they’re all derivatives of one ancestral “proto-cult” or whatever. Cult leaders are not literal vampires, where you only become a cult leader by getting bit by a previous cult leader or whatever.

It’s a cultural attractor, and a cult is a social technology simple enough that it can be spontaneously re-derived. But cults can sometimes pick up or swap beliefs & virulence factors with each other, when they interact. And I do think Ziz picked up a few beliefs from the Vassarite cluster.

I can dig up cases in Ziz’s writing where Ziz has interacted with Vassar before, or may have indirectly learned things from him through Alice.

Doesn’t make Vassar directly responsible for Ziz’s actions. I think Vassar is not directly responsible for Ziz.

I do want to spell this out, because I’m reading a subtle implication here, that I want to push back against.

Spiracular 14 Jul 2022 15:33 UTC
8 points
on: Spiracular’s Shortform Feed
Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.

Cultivate someone with an earnest and heartfelt interest in fishing, until he learns how to grow his own skills and teach himself… and you can probably feed at least 12 people.

Which just might finally allow the other 11 to specialize into something more appealing to them than subsistence fishing.

Spiracular 16 Jun 2022 1:29 UTC
9 points
on: Fighting in various places for a really long time
Okay, a lot of this commentary hit “sideways.” Let me see if I can unpack some of this.

0

A lot of what’s missing is meditation.

TL;DR: It’s a meditation metaphor movie, with some heavily Eastern themes and symbology.

I’m about 99% sure that at its thematic core, it’s an “enlightenment/meditation metaphor” movie. I thought it does a really good job at being that, but that part is understandably not going to hit with everyone.

Did you notice that the damn circle has at least 3 different meanings or references, which all tie in neatly with each other? One of the major ones, that I think some people are likely to miss, is Ensō.

Ensō has a pile of deep associations and meanings in Zen, many of which they also touch on in other places in the movie. I thought they unpacked that symbol pretty masterfully, and that was pretty central to my enjoyment and understanding of the movie. However, it is something I expect a lot of western audiences to miss completely.

(I have not found a good extensive commentary to link, that unpacks this to my satisfaction. But this guy on twitter seems to get it.)

...on the art level, it also struck me as pretty chaotic. It’s a flashy fighting movie, a family comedy, some cringe humor, a bit of an art movie… put it down for “a little of everything,” really?

If I’d missed the theme, or God Forbid, if I had mostly tried to assess its merits in terms of how often she’s making sensible or strategic goal-directed moves? The movie probably would have landed more as loud silly nonsense.

Some people like loud silly nonsense! I don’t think I would have found just the loud silly nonsense all that compelling, though.

This one came with a really strong core theme, that I do think you missed or misunderstood.

1

Everything Else.

“The violence is pointless”: The violence being pointless, is actually part of the point. While it’s used to generate some initial attention and interest (...in people who find that interesting for some reason), the violence is also deliberately pointless, and the protagonist is supposed to slowly realize this and grow out of it.

(...however, the movie did handle grief with less maturity than a 5-year-old, basically by just ignoring it. I have no idea why! Maybe they really didn’t want to slow the movie down? Bleh, even that reason doesn’t feel entirely compelling to me, and it did undercut the movie for me a bit.)

“Weirdly NON-attention-getting”: I’m pretty sure that the late stages of the movie are actively trying to be held in broad/diffuse attention, not single-point laser-attention. I think so, anyway?

This is kinda part of its whole deal as a “meditation metaphor” movie. Also ties in with its commentary on “looking around, even when what’s immediately in front of you seems extremely urgent,” as echoed in stuff like looking up from the circled receipt.

If that diffuse state-of-mind is uncomfortable or somnolent for you? You are not alone in that! It’s a pretty common sentiment, actually. There are a whole lot of people who complain about finding parts of meditation uncomfortable or sleep-inducing, especially when it gets to the “broad/diffuse attention” step.

(...although this doesn’t necessarily rule out that you found the movie boring for unintended reasons, though! To which, shrug it’s cool if you didn’t like it.)

Spiracular 18 Feb 2022 16:03 UTC
7 points
in reply to: LoganStrohl’s comment on: Monks of Magnitude
Just distilling some relevant intuitions:

(This is all me thinking about the problem, and I make no claim that others will align with me on these.)

Grant-making
- Typically, clusters of applications are assessed in 1 rung lower time-frames? Some topics get bumped up to same-tier of 1-tier-higher assessment, if assessors feel it advised.
  - ex: 10E4 is scheduled such that one can submit a grant application, do a 10E3 round, and come back to an answer.
    cont ex: If the grant-making is running late, there are a bunch of 10E2 jobs opened up to help speed finishing it along? (The number of these is tracked, and marked on the 10E3 assessor’s record, but this is generally considered better than running late.)
- Low-order grant-making is mostly fast-turnaround for small amounts of money, and involves a lot of funding-based-on-past-accomplishments. About ¹⁄₂ of it gets funded informally by random friends, drawing from built-up social credit.
  - Involves “rant-branch” and “brief-branch” application rounds (about 10x as many are funded through brief-branch). Rant-branch has higher word limits, and slower turn-around.
    Rant is for “this is a potentially-valuable idea I haven’t distilled yet, is it worth putting in additional time to investigate/summarize/distill it?” It’s reasonably common for it to get funded to 1 tier higher than the original grant-seeker lodged.
- Your first round of 10E1s are funded by the state. There are also periodic “jubilees” where everyone gets a free 10E1 (solving starter problems)
- High-order grant-making is slower in turnaround, and includes a lot of questions about order-of-magnitude and scope-of-problem/scope-of-potential-solution.
  - Writing summary sequences or field-wide Review articles are one potential way higher-order people demonstrate legible competence.
  - Some 1E(x) people spend their lives dedicated to distilling ~1-10 1E(x+1) persons for the sake of 1E(x-1) (sometimes called ghostwriters)
Some even-less-ordered thoughts on this:
- There’s probably some kind of rotating board full of scattered pre-structured 1E1 and 1E2 job listings that people have pre-funded, which fast-turnaround people can pull from if they don’t have a unique 1E1 or 1E2 idea themselves.
  - (1E0 might be too small for this? Hm.)
  - Similarly, 1E2s can pool together the resources to fund a 1E3 on an issue they find relevant. This has somehow been streamlined, method TBD.
- Somebody needs to be able to restructure and break a subset of 1E(x) problems into 1E(x-1) and 1E(x-2) jobs.
  - People who do this successfully, should probably gain a fair amount of prestige for it (especially if they break it into a smaller time-block in total, or have enabled substantial parallelization of something time-sensitive)
- 1E(4)s and higher often develop obnoxiously dense tangles of infralanguages and jargon, as a manner of course. This is treated as normal. 1E(4)s who remain legible to 1E(2)s (especially those who are able to translate other 1E(4)’s work to something similarly legible) are called “bridges,” and are appropriately prized.
  - This overlaps some with ghostwriters, but is also its own distinct sub-category of researchers. (It’s important that bridges aren’t all subordinated into 1E(3) work.)
  - There are occasionally bridge & ghostwriter conferences, which tend to be followed by a tidal wave of applications to write or update various dictionaries and encyclopedias.
  - Similar to the current world: Some fields/jargon-sets/infralanguages that have solved the onboarding problem, are widespread enough to have their own conferences, specialized grant ecosystems, assigned ghostwriters, etc.

Spiracular 21 Dec 2021 10:13 UTC
11 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Quis cancellat ipsos cancellores?
Geoff tweeted about it, I forwarded that to you.

But after thinking a bit more, including hearing a little more background context from Aella? I think the tension here predates that, and that this is predominantly a reaction to the MAPLE post. Please treat this mostly as a side-note.

There’s no recording anymore, but I actually appreciated him on the stream. My overall take on the author is “has a lot of compassion, but I don’t always trust his discernment.”

Spiracular 20 Dec 2021 0:38 UTC
22 points
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Quis cancellat ipsos cancellores?
Yeah, some of this gets the facts wrong, or a bit off. I don’t think this was fact-checked very competently, and in this sort of context, that does matter.

(ex: I can confirm that mittenscautious was not Aella, although Aella was indeed a housemate to Persephone.)

...I hate dishing based on something this speculative, but I do think it’s a potentially relevant piece of context...

Aella and Geoff (Executive Director of Leverage) have a lot of enmity towards each other. This is just straightforwardly true.

If I am identifying the author of this Aella-attacking post, correctly? The author of this post was a special guest on one of Geoff Anders’ Twitch streams.

I’m normally a mistake theorist, but I find it really tempting to interpret this as the end result of talking to a really skewed sample of people.

(And I might be assigning better-than-even odds that Geoff was involved in that process, somehow.)

UPDATE: I’m updating a few steps in the direction of “I may have gotten some of the causality here, backwards.” Tension with Aella predates that. Disliked Aella’s MAPLE post, and this might have been some of why he and Geoff got in touch.

Spiracular 19 Dec 2021 20:18 UTC
25 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: In Defense of Attempting Hard Things, and my story of the Leverage ecosystem
It feels worth pointing out that Universities seem to try to set up this sort of absurdly protective bubble, by design. Uni extracts sometimes-exorbitant rent, while doing so; Leverage was at least usually paying people salaries.

Meanwhile, a lot of US bureaucracy appears almost… tailor-made to make life more complicated, with a special exception to that reserved for “full-time employees of large corporations”? (I think that for historic reasons, some of their bureaucratic complications are consistently outsourced to their company to handle.)

Against this societal backdrop, I find it hard to fault Cathleen or Leverage for trying what they did. While also not being too surprised, that it led to some dependence issues.

(Maybe having a hard “2 years” limit, and accepting a little less “heroic responsibility,” would have downgraded a lot of issues to just “University dorm level.”)

Spiracular 19 Dec 2021 8:02 UTC
22 points
in reply to: Freyja’s comment on: In Defense of Attempting Hard Things, and my story of the Leverage ecosystem
Seconded.

I really appreciate Cathleen being willing to talk about it, even given the reasonable expectation that some people are going to… be jerks about it, misinterpret things, take things out of context, and engage in ways she won’t like. Or even just fail to engage in ways that would be good for her?

I don’t always see eye-to-eye with Cathleen, but she poured a lot into this project. She is not exaggerating when she conveys that she was responsible for a really giant pile of ops and maintenance tasks at Leverage.

(I’m not sure how Leverage handled her sick days, but I would be surprised if it wasn’t a whole thing. That feels like one way to point to just how large an amount she ended up being personally responsible for. One of the most grounded and productive people there.)

I’m sad to hear that this project hurt her, in the ways it did? (ex: overwork, lack of support, high interpersonal conflict environment)

I’m somewhat glad that she hasn’t completely given up on the idea of well-intentioned ambitious projects, and I’m really happy that it sounds like she has a solid bubble of people now.

This is a lot of information, and there was a cost to writing it up, I’m sure. I can’t really weigh in on whether it was worth what she gave up to do so, but I’m grateful that she shared it.

Spiracular 19 Dec 2021 7:09 UTC
8 points
on: In Defense of Attempting Hard Things, and my story of the Leverage ecosystem
What to do when society is wrong about something?

I thought this aside was an extremely good snapshot of class of problem that I have seen come up in other contexts as well.

Briefly: People have a tendency to develop social bubbles that are, in a key way or two, way more comfortable or healthy for them. If you get strongly immersed in one, then “the rest of society” starts looking unpleasant or unhealthy, and what do you do with that when that hapens?

I don’t find it easy to answer! But I’d be curious to hear from other people about variants of this scenario that they’ve run into, how they’ve handled it, and how that has gone.

(It sounds like Leverage had a bit of this dynamic, combined with a feeling that the norms were up for grabs. I had not previously pegged that down about Leverage, but having that context feels helpful for making sense of it.)

Spiracular 1 Dec 2021 13:53 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Spiracular’s comment on: Memetic Hazards in Videogames
Some of the other F-grade feed-ins, for completion’s sake...
- A lot of people went to a bad high school. Some have learned helplessness, and don’t know how to study. Saw the occasional blatant cheating habit, too.
  - Community colleges know this, and offer some courses that are basically “How to study”
  - So much of many middle-class cultures is just hammering “academics matter” and “advice on how to study or network” into your brain. Most middle-class students still manage to miss the memo on 1-2 key study skills or resources, though. Maybe everyone should go to “how to study” class…
    Personally? As a teen, I didn’t know how to ask for help, and I couldn’t stand sounding like an idiot. Might have saved myself some time, if I’d learned how to do that earlier.
- Nobody uses office-hours enough.
  - At worst, it’s free tutoring. At best, it’s socially motivating and now the teacher feels personally invested in your story and success.
  - “High-achievers who turned an early D into an A” are frequently office-hour junkies.
  - Someone with a big family crisis, is probably still screwed even if they go to office hours. Past some threshold, people should just take a W.
- A few people just genuinely can’t do math, in a “it doesn’t fit in their brain” kind of way
  - My mom thinks this exists, but only accounts for <1%

Spiracular 1 Dec 2021 13:45 UTC
2 points
in reply to: sixes_and_sevens’s comment on: Memetic Hazards in Videogames
TL;DR: As people get older, it’s common for people to acquire responsibilities that make it hard to focus on school (ex: kids, elderly parents). Fairly high confidence that this is a big factor in community college grades.

As someone whose parent teaches basic math at community college, and who attended community college for 2 years myself (before transferring)...

I have absolutely seen some people pick up these skills late. The work ethic & directedness of community college high-achievers is often notably better than that of people in their late teens.

They also usually have healthier attitudes around failure (relative to the high-achieving teens), which sometimes makes them better at recovering from an early bad grade. Relatedly, the UCs say their CC transfers have much lower drop-out rates.

One major “weakness” I can think of, is that adults are probably going in fully-cognizant that school feels like an “artificial environment.” Some kids manage to not notice this until grad school.

From my mom’s work, I know that the grading distribution in high-school-remedial math classes is basically bimodal: “A”s and “F”s, split almost 50-50.

The #1 reason my mom cites for this split, is probably a responsibilities and life-phase difference?

A lot of working class adults are incredibly busy. Many are under more stress and strain than they can handle, at least some of the time. (The really unlucky ones, are under more strain than they can really handle basically all of the time, but those are less likely to try to go to community college.)

If someone is holding down a part-time job, doesn’t have a lot in savings, is married, is taking care of a kid, and is caring for their elderly mother? That basically means a high load of ambient stress and triage, and also having 5 different avenues for random high-priority urgent crises (ex: health problems involving any of these) to bump school out of the prioritization matrix.

(Notably, “early achievers” on the child-having front usually also end up a bit crippled academically. I think that’s another point in favor of “life phase” or “ambient responsibility load” theory being a big deal here, in a way that competes with or even cannibalizes academic focus/achievement.)

My take-away is that if you have a bunch in savings, and don’t have a kid, then my bet is that learning a lot of curricula late is likely to not be a problem. Might actually be kinda fun?

But if you’re instead juggling a dozen other life responsibilities, then God help you. If your class has tight deadlines, you may have to conduct a whole lot of triage to make it work.

Spiracular 28 Nov 2021 23:11 UTC
12 points
in reply to: Spiracular’s comment on: Frame Control
There’s actually 1 additional dynamic, that I can’t quite put my finger on, but here’s my attempt.

It’s shaped something like...

If you are a pretty powerful person, and you take a desperate powerless person, and you hand them something that could indiscriminately destroy you? That is very likely to be a horrible mistake that you will one day regret. It’s a bit like handing some rando a version of The One Ring, which is specific to controlling you.

Unless you had really good judgement and the person you handed it to is either Tom Bombdil or a hobbit who manages to spastically fling it into a volcano even despite himself? It is likely to corrupt them, and they are probably going to end up doing terrible things with it.

Never jump someone from 0 to 11 units of power over you, until you’ve seen what they’re like with a 3 or a 5.

Spiracular 28 Nov 2021 22:19 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Henry Prowbell’s comment on: Frame Control
I think I have seen the “sanity-check”/”sanity-guillotine” thing done well. I have also seen it done poorly, in a way that mostly resembles the “finger-trap” targeting any close friends who notice problems.

For actual accountability/protection? “Asking to have it reported publicly/to an outside third party” seems to usually work better than “Report it to me privately.”

(A very competent mass-crowd-controller might have a different dynamic, though; I haven’t met one yet.)

For strong frame-controllers? “Encouraging their students to point out a vague category of issue in private,” has a nasty tendency to speed up evaporative cooling, and burns out the fire of some of the people who might otherwise have reported misbehavior to a more-objective third-person.

It can set up the frame-controller as the counter/arbiter of “how many real complains have been leveled their way about X” (...which they will probably learn to lie about...), frames them as “being careful about X,” and gives the frame-controller one last pre-reporting opportunity to re-frame-control things in the sender.

I think the “private reporting” variant is useful to protect a leader from unpleasant surprises, gives them a quick chance to update out of a bad pattern early on, and is slightly good for that reason. But I think as an “accountability method,” this is simply not a viable protection against an even halfway-competent re-framer.

I think the gold-standard for actual accountability, is closer to the “outside HR firm” model. Having someone outside your circle, who people report serious issues to, and who is not primarily accountable to you.

Not everyone has access to the gold-standard, though.

When I single a person out for my future accountability? I pick people who I view as (high-integrity low-jealousy) peers-or-higher, AND/OR people on a totally different status-ladder. I want things set up such that even a maximally-antagonistic me, probably has no way to easily undermine them.

If I have a specific concern, I give them a very clear sense in advance of: “Here is a concrete threshold condition. If I ever trigger this, please destroy me unless I remove myself from a position of power over others. I am asking you in specific (negates bystander effect). I will thank you later.”

(Probably also hand them something that would make it easier to selectively shut me down, such as “A signed letter from myself.” Concrete thresholds are useful, because it is hard to frame-obscure your way out of hard facts.)

I think this variant requires knowing, and trusting, someone pretty non-petty and non-jealous who has a higher bar of integrity than you do. I do kinda think most people’s judgement around identifying those is terrible, unfortunately?

But I think the drawbacks of this are at least… different. And I generally take that shape of thing, as a strong signal of real vulnerability and accountability.

Spiracular 8 Nov 2021 18:40 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Spiracular’s comment on: Spiracular’s Shortform Feed
Working out how this applies to other fields is left as an exercise to the reader, because I’m lazy and the space of places I use this metaphor is large (and paradoxically, so overbuilt that it’s probably quite warped).

Also: minimally-warped lenses aren’t always the most useful lens! Getting work done requires channeling attention, and doing it disproportionately!

And most heavily-built things are pretty warped; it’s usually a safe default assumption. Doesn’t make heavily-built things pointless, that is not what I’m getting at.

...but stuff that hews close to base-reality has the the important distinction of surviving most cataclysms basically-intact, and robustness is a virtue that works in their favor.

Spiracular 8 Nov 2021 18:37 UTC
2 points
on: Spiracular’s Shortform Feed
I do think some things are actually quite real and grounded? Everything is shoved through a lens as you perceive it, but not all lenses are incredibly warping.

If you’re willing to work pretty close to the lower-levels of perception, and be quite careful while building things up, well and deeply-grounded shit EXISTS.

To give an evocative, and quite literally illustrative, example?

I think learning how to see the world well enough to do realistic painting is an exceptionally unwarping and grounding skill.

Any other method of seeing while drawing, doubles up on your attentional biases and lets you see the warped result*. When you view it, you re-apply your lens to your lens’ results, and see the square any warping you were doing.

It’s no coincidence that most people who try take one look at their first attempt at realistic drawing, will cringe and go “that’s obviously wrong...”

When you can finally produce an illustration that isn’t “obviously wrong,” it stands as a piece of concrete evidence that you’ve learned some ability to engage at-will with your visual-perception, in a way that is relatively non-warping.

Or, to math-phrase it badly...

$\forall (x, y) in R^{2}, f (x_{i}, y_{j}) * b^{2} \approx f (x_{i}, y_{j}) * b$

$∴ f (x_{i}, y_{j}) * b \approx f (x_{i}, y_{j}) and b \approx 1$

* Taking as a totally-unreasonable given, that your “skill at drawing” is good enough to not get in the way.
What links here?
- Spiracular's comment on Transcript for Geoff Anders and Anna Salamon’s Oct. 23 conversation by Rob Bensinger (8 Nov 2021 18:27 UTC; 4 points)

Spiracular 8 Nov 2021 18:27 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Spiracular’s comment on: Transcript for Geoff Anders and Anna Salamon’s Oct. 23 conversation
Now to actually comment...

(Ugh, I think I ended up borderline-incoherent myself. I might revisit and clean it up later.)

I think it’s worth keeping in mind that “common social reality” is itself sometimes one of these unstable/ungrounded top-heavy many-epicycles self-reinforcing collapses-when-reality-hits structures.

I am beyond-sick of the fights about whether something is “erroneous personal reality vs social reality” or “personal reality vs erroneous social reality,” so I’m going to leave simulating that out as an exercise for the reader.

loud sigh

Jumping meta, and skipping to the end.

Almost every elaborate worldview is built on at least some fragile low-level components, and might also have a few robustly-grounded builds in there, if you’re lucky.

“Some generalizable truth can be extracted” is more likely to occur, if there were incentives and pressure to generate robust builds.*

* (...God, I got a sudden wave of sympathy for anyone who views Capitalists and Rationalists as some form of creepy scavengers. There is a hint of truth in that lens. I hope we’re more like vultures than dogs; vultures have a way better “nutrition to parasite” ratio.)

By pure evolutionary logic: whichever thing adhered closer to common properties of base-reality, and/or was better-trained to generalize or self-update, will usually hold up better when some of its circumstances change. This tends to be part of what boils up when worldview conflicts and cataclysms play out.

I do see “better survival of a worldview across a range of circumstances” as somewhat predictive of attributes that I consider good-to-have in a worldview.

I also think surviving worldviews aren’t always the ones that make people the happiest, or allow people to thrive? Sometimes that sucks.

(If anyone wants to get into “everything is all equally-ungrounded social reality?” No. That doesn’t actually follow, even from the true statement that “everything you perceive goes through a lens.” I threw some quick commentary on that side-branch here, but I mostly think it’s off-topic.)

Spiracular 8 Nov 2021 17:47 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Transcript for Geoff Anders and Anna Salamon’s Oct. 23 conversation
On the one hand, I think this is borderline-unintelligible as currently phrased? On the other hand, I think you have a decent point underneath it all.

Let me know if I’m following, while I try to rephrase it.

When insulated from real-world or outer-world incentives, a project can build up a lot of internal-logic and inferential distance by building upon itself repeatedly.

The incentives of insulated projects can be almost artificially-simple? So one can basically Goodhart, or massage data and assessment-metrics, to an incredible degree. This is sometimes done unconsciously.

When such a project finally comes into contact with reality, this can topple things at the very bottom of the structure, which everything else was built upon.

So for some heavily-insulated, heavily-built, and not-very-well-grounded projects, finally coming into exposure with reality can trigger a lot of warping/worldview-collapse/fallout in the immediate term.

Spiracular 8 Nov 2021 5:57 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Zoe Curzi’s Experience with Leverage Research
My impression is that Leverage’s bodywork is something closer to what other people call “energy work,” which probably puts it… closer to Reiki than massage?

But I never had it done to me, and I don’t super understand it myself! Pretty low confidence in even this answer.

Spiracular 7 Nov 2021 3:21 UTC
22 points
in reply to: Spiracular’s comment on: Speaking of Stag Hunts
Hm… I notice I’m maybe feeling some particular pressure to personally address this one?

Because I called out the deliberate concentration of force in the other direction that happened on an earlier copy of the BayAreaHuman thread.

I am not really recanting that? I still think something “off” happened there.

But I could stand up and give a more balanced deposition.

To be clear? I do think BAH’s tone was a tad aggressive. And I think there were other people in the thread, who were more aggressive than that. I think Leverage Basic Facts EA had an even more aggressive comment thread.

I also think each of the concrete factual claims BAH made, did appear to check out with at least one corner of Leverage, according to my own account-collecting (although not always at the same time).

(I also think a few of the LBFEA’s wildest claims, were probably true. Exclusion of the Leverage website from Wayback Machine is definitely true*. The Slack channels characterizing each Pareto attendee as a potential recruit, seems… probably true?)

There were a lot of corners of Leverage, though. Several of them were walled off from the corners BAH talked about, or were not very near to it.

For what it’s worth, I think the positive accounts in the BAH comment thread were also basically honest? I up-voted several of them.

Side-note: As much as I don’t entirely trust Larissa? I do think some of her is at least trying to hold the fact that both good and bad things happened here. I trust her thoughts, more than Geoff’s.

* Delisted from Wayback: The explanation I’ve heard, is that Geoff was sick of people dragging old things up to make fun of the initial planning document, and critiquing the old Connection Theory posts.

I am also dead-certain that nobody was going into the full story, and some of that was systematic. “BAH + commentary” put together, still doesn’t sum to enough of the whole truth, to really make sense of things.

Anna & Geoff’s initial twitch-stream included commentary about how Leverage used to be pretty friendly with EA, and ran the first EAG. Several EA founders felt pretty close after that, and then there was some pretty intense drifting apart (partially over philosophical differences?). There was also some sort of kerfuffle where a lot of people ended up with the frame that “Leverage was poaching donors,” which may have been unfair to Leverage. As time went on, Geoff and other Leveragers were largely blocked from collaborations, and felt pretty shunned. That all was an important missing piece of the puzzle.

((Meta: Noticing I should add this to Timeline and Threads somewhere? Doing that now-ish.))

(I also personally just really liked Anna’s thoughts on “narrative addiction” being something to watch out for? Maybe that’s just me.)

The dissolution & information agreement was another important part. Thank you, Matt Falshaw, for putting some of that in a form that could be viewed by people outside of the ecosystem.

I also haven’t met anybody except Zoe (and now me, I guess?) who seems to have felt able to even breathe a word about the “objects & demons” memetics thing. I think that was another important missing piece.

Some people do report feeling incapable of speaking positively about Leverage in EA circles? I personally didn’t experience a lot of this, but I saw enough surprise when I said good things about Reserve, that it doesn’t surprise me particularly. Leverage’s social network and some of its techniques were clearly quite meaningful to some people, so I can imagine how rough ‘needing to write that out of your personal narrative’ could have been.