I’m Michael “Valentine” Smith. Cofounder & senior instructor at CFAR back in the day. I’ve been in the rationalist scene since 2011 but mostly left in late 2018. To the extent that “post-rationalist” means anything, the term should probably apply to me.
You can find my non-LW writing on my Substack. You can also find my social media profiles via my Linktree.
I don’t know if it does. It’s not that kind of shift AFAICT. It strikes me as more like the shift from epicycles to heliocentrism. If I recall right, at the time the point wasn’t that heliocentrism made better predictions. I think it might have made exactly the same predictions at first IIRC. The real impact was something more like the mythic reframe on humanity’s role in the cosmos. It just turned out to generalize better too.
Post-reductionism (as I understand it) is an invitation to not be locked in the paradigm of reductionism. To view reductionism as a tool instead of as a truth. This invites wider perceptions which might, in turn, result in different predictions. Hard to say. But the mythic impact on humanity is still potentially quite large: the current reductionist model lends itself to nihilism, but reality might turn out to be vastly larger than strict reductionism (or maybe any fixed paradigm) can fully handle.
Post-reductionist: …well, I don’t know what to write here to pass the ITT.
I can’t speak for the post-reductionist view in general. But I can name one angle:
Atoms aren’t any more real than apples. What you’re observing is that in theory the map using atoms can derive apples, but not the other way around. Which is to say, the world you build out of atoms (plus other stuff) is a strictly richer ontology — in theory.
But in a subtle way, even that claim about richer ontology is false.
In an important way, atoms are made of apples (plus other stuff). We use metaphors to extend our intuitions about everyday objects in order to think about… something. It’s not that atoms are really there. It’s that we use this abstraction of “atom” in order to orient to a quirky thing reality does. And we build that abstraction out of our embodied interactions with things like apples.
Said more simply: infants & toddlers don’t encounter atoms. They encounter apples. That’s the kind of thing they use to build maps of atoms later on.
This is why quantum mechanics comes across as “weird”. Reality doesn’t actually behave like objects that are interacting when you look closely at it. That’s more like an interface human minds construct. The interface breaks down upon inspection, kind of like how icons on a screen dissolve if you look at them through a microscope.
(This confusion is embedded in our language so it’s hard to say this point about mental interfaces accurately. E.g., what are “human minds” if objects aren’t actually in the territory? It’s a fake question but I’ve never found a way to dispel it with accurate language. Language assumes thing-ness in order to grammar. It’s like we can only ever talk about maps, where “territory” is a map of… something.)
So really, we already have examples of constructing atoms out of apples (and other things). That’s how we’re able to talk about atoms in the first place! It’s actually the inverse that’s maybe impossible in practice.
(…as you point out! “…a hypothetical superintelligent being with an insane computing capacity (probably would need to exist in a different universe) might be able to describe the apple in the terms of atoms….”)
I think the core issue here is that the standard reductionist view is that maps can be accurate. Whereas my understanding of post-reductionism basically says that “accurate” is a type error arising from a faulty assumption. You can compare two maps and notice if they’re consistent. And you can tell whether using a map helps you navigate. But things get very confusing at a basic philosophical level when you start talking about whether a map accurately describes the territory.
In fact, as we get better sensors, the UFOs move out to the edge of our new sensor ranges.
That’s actually just false, just FYI. By reports, fairly often they show up specifically as though they’re trying to be seen.
There’s also a whole set of incidences where UFOs showed up to fuck with nuclear machinery, demonstrating that (a) they knew exactly where the “hidden” bases were and (b) they could control the launch process better than the people at the control panels. Understandably, this isn’t something that gets advertised very much and can be explained away. It’s pretty important to make such incidences as plausibly deniable as possible given the game theory of MAD.
But in terms of “better sensors make the UFOs seem to vanish”, that’s just flat-out false. That’s not what the reports suggest basically at all.
Assuming, just for the sake of argument, that these entities were “real”. How could these events happen?
One possibility:
Suppose that our 3D-ish reality is actually a tiny part of something much, much larger.
And when I say “larger”, I don’t mean just “more dimensions” or “parallel universes”. It’s worth remembering that our impressions of space, time, object, etc. are basically bits of software interface that let us interact with… something… in ways that seem to be relevant to our survival. That doesn’t mean they represent reality as it actually is, any more than the folder icons on your computer desktop represent the state of your computer as it actually is.
If there’s something we’d interpret as entity-like when it interacts with our tiny corner of existence, but whatever that something is operates mostly in the bigger context, we’d find its behavior immensely baffling. Kind of like ants trying to make sense of an anteater, or of a storm.
Or a kid fucking with the ants out of passing curiosity.
The kinds of things we think of as resources only make sense in the context of our survival. What if “survival” as we think of it looks about as meaningful to mega-”entities” with a larger perspective as our watching a rock finish rolling downhill? Oh no, it stopped moving. The horror. And how callous of us not to care about the rock-in-motion’s possible desire to keep existing!
And I mean this much, much more vastly than with UFO-type stuff. We don’t know where the laws of physics come from for instance. We notice beautiful symmetries and fascinating correspondences between different parts. But what that shows is a kind of consistency. A river is relatively consistent too. It still makes sense to ask where the river comes from, even though you can fully explain the river’s local behavior based on the shape of the terrain and the presence of already-moving water. It’s awfully strange to pretend we know everything about the river because we can give these explanations. Those explanations miss almost everything about almost everything.
So I think there’s a lot of room for reality to be pretty immensely vast. Far more vast than even this already mind-bogglingly overwhelmingly huge physical universe.
Mostly we just talk about the tiny thing humans are used to talking about.
In which case their behavior makes absolutely no sense to me, either completely hiding themselves, or full outright reveal would make sense to me, but this weird “let humans have sneak-peaks but never any actual proof” is just weird.
For whatever it’s worth: Jacques Vallée highlighted how the baffling & seemingly nonsensical nature of these encounters is one of the few constants. One I recall (off the top of my head — I was told this one, I have no idea how to offer references here) was a report of some ship landing in a farmer’s field and then perfectly normal-looking people coming out to offer the baffled farmer… pancakes. Just pancakes. Upon close inspection it became clear that they were perfectly normal pancakes with the single exception of having absolutely no salt.
There are other oddities like MLB encounters where the MLBs were driving absolutely brand-new cars from half a century prior. If these are to be taken at face-value, one has to wonder what kind of being goes through the effort of looking human and trying to blend in but constructs a car that’s several decades out of style and basically cannot be acquired that new anymore. It smacks of the way Rowling’s wizards are strangely clueless about how to pass as muggles.
Vallée’s point, though, was that these phenomena seem to adapt to what’s expected of them, but always with a twist. It’s almost as though they’re trying to keep us off-balance as to what they are, confirming our suspicions whatever they may be 90% of the way and then tossing in something bizarre that doesn’t fit the picture at all.
A number of people have noticed the strange similarity to DMT entities, and to legends of faeries.
Of course, I’m sure there’s nothing to these. Just statistical anomalies plus quirks of human cognition. That seems to clearly explain 90% of the phenomena. There’s just this little bit off to the side that we haven’t quite figured out how it fits…
Is anything uniformly praised in the rationalist community? IME having over half the community think something is between “awesome” and “probably correct” is about as uniform as it gets.
That… makes a lot of sense actually. A lot. PT Barnum style advertising. I had not considered that. Thank you.
What would be a form of right-messaging that would be less alienating to the public than left-messaging?
How about pride in America? An expression of the nobility of the country we built, our resilience, the Pax Americana, the fact that we ended WWII, etc.
It doesn’t strike me as too strange or difficult to do this.
But that’s after about 20 seconds of thought. I’m sure I’m missing something important here.
What tendencies specifically would you classify as “woke”? Having an intentionally diverse cast? Progressive messaging? Other things? And which of these tendencies do you think would alienate a significant portion of the consumer base, and why?
By “woke” I’m referring to a pretty specific memeplex. I don’t know how to name memeplexes with precision, but I can gesture at some of its key features:
Intersectionalist social justice theory. There’s systemic oppression, and there are beneficiaries of systemic oppression. This is folded in a basic way into the functioning of society. It can be changed, and there’s a moral obligation to change it, but only the beneficiaries (people with “privilege”) can actually do it. Therefore having privilege is a moral responsibility — which the privileged are systemically encouraged not to notice. There’s lots of disagreement about who’s where in the privilege hierarchy (e.g., do cis women or trans women have more privilege?), but there’s a pretty general agreement that cis hetero white men have the most privilege.
Shame tactics. It’s necessary and appropriate and good to pressure privileged people to accept their responsibility. Any privileged person who hasn’t done so is part of the problem and is therefore a bad person. It’s forgivable if they simply do not know the evil they’re perpetuating, but if they’ve been exposed to this truth and they resist then they are willful beneficiaries at the expense of others and deserve condemnation.
Cancel culture. People who voice disagreement with this message are encouraging systemic oppression and need to be deplatformed. We deplatform them by refusing to listen to them and by shaming and deplatforming people who continue to listen to them. (A common extension: People who object to this canceling tactic are also supporting systemic oppression and must, in turn, be shamed and/or canceled.)
Western culture must repent. The West took over the world through colonialism, which is the origin for a lot of / most of / all of the systemic oppression. In order to purge ourselves of this systemic oppression, we need to uproot all the elements that descend from Western colonization and replace them with something better. It’s also necessary for Western cultures and people to apologize and make material amends for this past so as to heal the damage done. Education of history should focus on the West’s atrocities and avoid mentioning its virtues, since those virtues are usually just ways of justifying privilege and the atrocities aren’t emphasized enough for us to collectively notice the need to repent.
[No clear vision.] This is a meaning-making framework, not a vision for the future. It’s about what to destroy, not what to create. It’s a memetic mutation blending postmodernism, Calvinism, and a watered-down version of Marxism. It’s not clear what a world free of systemic oppression looks like, but it’s counted as victory if those who aren’t on board with the fight get alienated or destroyed, or if more people start loudly using these tear-down tactics and repeating the message. It also comes with a total disregard for the potential downsides of tearing down culture this way (since concern for the downsides is just an argument for perpetuating systemic oppression).
The main problem with this memeplex is that it’s a war machine, not an idea. One is not allowed to debate with it. You either agree and align, or get attacked. There’s no room for “Hey, I think you might really have a good point about systemic oppression being a thing, but these approaches for creating change seem like they’ll create more problems than they solve. Maybe we could think of what else to do instead?” The usual refrain is some version of “Get with the program!” or “You’re just trying to protect your privilege” (or “You’ve internalized white supremacy” when speaking to someone from an obviously oppressed category).
It even comes with a ban on being named, which is curiously demonic. The term “woke” actually came from its early origins. It was a reference to waking up to the reality of systemic oppression, instead of continuing to sleepwalk as a kind of accomplice. In recent years it seems to have evolved a demand that it be viewed as totally normal, that disagreement is a sign of moral corruption, that trying to name this thing means you’re resisting and thereby choosing to align with evil. I hadn’t realized how strong that particular mutation had become when I first posted this question.
You’re right, I could have been clearer about what structure was confusing me.
I keep encountering these detailed claims & explanations about how the movement toward “woke” (for lack of a better word — apparently the left has tagged what was once their word as now strongly right-coded) is having negative effects on viewership and profit. Not overwhelmingly like a lot of the right insists (“Get woke, go broke”), but still pretty significantly.
Like apparently in the Disney+ show where the Falcon became the new Captain America, there was a pretty dramatic drop-off in viewership right at the scene depicting police profiling the main character for being black. As far as I know, there was never a corresponding upswing from people who were excited about this material being depicted in the MCU.
A lot of these companies seem to have decided to send strongly left-coded messages like this and then tag audiences who object “toxic fandom”. Electoral evidence gives me the sense that left vs. right is pretty evenly split in the population. The usual move in the past has been to be as unoffensive as possible so as to appeal to a wide audience base. So this swing seems like a pretty wide-spanning decision that profit lies so overwhelmingly with left-leaning audiences that alienating right-leaning folk is absolutely worth it, even if it doesn’t create a correspondingly large number of strong left-leaning folk to start watching.
But since profit in media companies tends to be attached to raw viewership numbers, I get confused. Something doesn’t add up.
Even saying it’s ideological (like right-leaning folk often assert) doesn’t stack up. Why would all of them suddenly become ideological in the same direction? Wouldn’t those who are just profit-focused benefit from not going ideological?
So it really does seem like a profit motive, but the profit mechanism isn’t at all clear to me.
Whenever I talk to people clearly aligned with the left in this front of the culture wars, I get the clear sense that they think they’ve simply won. That the right is a fringe thing or something, that these leftist ideas are just normal, that the few people who object to the messaging are just a few leftover bigots who need to get with the times or be deservedly alienated, etc. But that’s not the impression I get at all when interacting with folk outside left info bubbles. (Strangely, I often get the opposite impression: lots of right-leaning folk think “wokism” is a fringe movement of just a few screaming people who have the ears and brains of Hollywood, that the reality of viewership will come home to roost eventually, etc. The info bubbling goes both ways on this.)
So I’m looking around and wondering: Gosh, did these companies solve the problem of the polluted information commons and actually determined that profit lies so, so much with the left that alienating the right is worth it? How did they do that? What do they know?
If someone feels resonance with what I’m pointing out but needs more, they’re welcome to comment and/or PM me to ask for more.
Glad you liked it!
No, I hadn’t encountered these folk. Thanks for the referral!
You might like Perri Chase’s breakdown of what’s wrong with modern business and how to do business differently. (That’s a Facebook Live replay link.) That video was what gave me the missing piece of the puzzle to work out how to build actually effective training spaces.
(I then went on to take her courses in “Magic Led Business” — but (a) I don’t advise most LWers to go that route and (b) I don’t think a Beisutsu dojo needs to be a business to work really well.)
This strikes me as a core application of rationality. Learning to notice implicit “should”s and tabooing them. The example set is great.
Some of the richness is in the comments. Raemon’s in particular highlights an element that strikes me as missing: The point is to notice the feeling of judging part of the territory as inherently good or bad, as opposed to recognizing the judgment as about your assessment of how you and/or others relate to the territory.
But it’s an awful lot to ask of a rationality technique to cover all cases related to its domain.
If all that people did as a result of reading this post was notice the word “should” in their thoughts and start tabooing it, that would be a huge boon IMO.
I just really like the clarity of this example. Noticing concrete lived experience at this level of detail. It highlights the feeling in my own experience and makes me more likely to notice it in real time when it’s happening in my own life.
As a 2021 “best of” post, the call for people to share their experiences doesn’t make as much sense, particularly should this post end up included in book form. I’m not sure how that fits with the overall process though. I don’t wish Anna hadn’t asked for more examples!
I really, really liked this idea. In some sense it’s just reframing the idea of trade-offs. But it’s a really helpful (for me) reframe that makes it feel concrete and real to me.
I’d long been familiar with “the expert blind spot” — the issue where experts will forget what it’s like to see like a non-expert and will try to teach from there. Like when aikido teachers would tell me to “just relax, act natural, and let the technique just happen on its own.” That makes sense if you’ve been practicing that technique for a decade! But it’s awful advice to give a beginner.
This post extended my thinking about the expert blind spot. I hadn’t noticed that this would apply to things like the tradeoffs involved in an academic career. I remember encountering these pitfalls and getting weird advice about how to navigate them.
Thinking in terms of the gravity turn helped a lot of this click together for me.
It’s such a simple, clear metaphor.
I also found it an engaging read. Perhaps because I related to it so well from my own academic background. But as style goes, I think it’s solid.
My only criticism is that as a visual piece, the meat of this post comes across as a wall of text. It might have been nice for the author to find ways of breaking it up a little more. Modern online audiences aren’t used to reading books anymore!
But that’s pretty minor in the scope of things. I think it’s basically great as is.
Partly I just want to signal-boost this kind of message.
But I also just really like the way this post covers the topic. I didn’t have words for some of these effects before, like how your goals and strategies might change even if your values stay the same.
The whole post feels like a great invitation to the topic IMO.
I didn’t reread it in detail just now. I might have more thoughts were I to do so. I just want this to have a shot at inclusion in final voting. Getting unconfused about self-love is, IMO, way more important than most models people discuss on this site.
I suppose, with one day left to review 2021 posts, I can add my 2¢ to my own here.
Overall I still like this post. I still think it points at true things and says them pretty well.
I had intended it as a kind of guide or instruction manual for anyone who felt inspired to create a truly potent rationality dojo. I’m a bit saddened that, to the best of my knowledge, no one seems to have taken what I named here and made it their own enough to build a Beisutsu dojo. I would really have liked to see that.
But this post wasn’t meant to persuade anyone to do it. It was more of an offering of tools and a path in case it already fit someone’s desire.
And who knows, maybe someone secretly is working on this, or even has constructed something of a “Bayesian Conspiracy” secret society that I just don’t know about!
If someone has taken up the path this post lays out, I’d enjoy hearing about it.
I also would have liked clarification questions about how to do the things I talked about. And I still welcome those, for whatever that’s worth.
———
I would write this post very slightly differently today. In rereading it this morning I have no regrets. I quite like it. But my style has refined a bit and I’ve learned a few things.
The main difference is that I see how I could have clarified the whole thing with examples. I’ve built things, and seen things built, according to most of these principles. Even though they’re not rationality dojos, and some of them are in service to woo, I think it would have conveyed the overall idea a lot more vividly if readers could have felt the kind of embodied aesthetic clarity I’m talking about. That might have made it easier to extrapolate what to do for a Beisutsu dojo.
Here are a few other, more minor, differences that stand out for me:
I’ve come to learn that most people can’t consciously orient to the Void until they’ve learned how to operate within their embodied range. I get the impression that it can come across like some kind of mindfulness magic that might be woo. It’s really quite simple — arguably the simplest thing in all of existence — but that doesn’t make it accessible. So I’d be inclined to emphasize self-regulation a bit more (instead of relegating that to a single section on soothing one’s body) and then hint at the contrast between being calm and listening to the Void.
Speaking of body regulation, today I’d point folk here toward Irene Lyon in addition to, and maybe instead of, Luis Mojica. I love Luis’s stuff, but he can meander into political frames and gives off a woo vibe. I think he navigates both of those very skillfully, but Irene just nails the basics very cleanly and has an overwhelming abundance of free info on her YouTube channel.
The strategy of teaching by embodiment is solid, but it’s a strategy. Today I have a better sense now of exactly what the constraints are. I think it’s okay to teach because you’re trying to teach. But you still need to orient to the Goodhart puzzle somehow. Teaching so as to practice the Art is one way to keep motives pure. I think it’s great as an example strategy. Today I’d frame it that way.
I would describe the “devotion to truth” dimension with more softness today. There’s a tone of forcing in how I wrote about it in this post, which I now see would incur adaptive entropy. The point is more that there are things we avoid admitting to ourselves, and ways that we prefer fantasies and familiarity over looking at what’s real. The core of devotion to truth is about choosing to walk a path where we come to prefer seeing what’s real over any and all illusions. I now think that’s better done by unraveling the reasons we don’t automatically do this, instead of somehow forcing ourselves to look at the truth despite inner protestations.
I have a similar criticism of the guess I made about pressure-testing the Art. The general idea seems great, but all the examples are based on high-intensity effort. I now see the challenge I issued (about 80⁄20 boosting the vitality of dojo participants over one hour) as highly adaptive-entropic: If that were doable, why didn’t it happen on its own without the challenge? Not to say it was an inherently bad idea, but things like it seem to ignore an awful lot of context and practice goal-fixation. I’m honestly not sure how to fix this though. I think “How to pressure-test one’s rationality” is a mostly unsolved problem.
———
As something of an aside, regarding the comments section:
I’m a little saddened that the whole of the comments section became kind of scattered and unintelligible due to deleting one user’s profile.
There were just a few threads involving that person, but when they were removed all the replies to them in those threads became top-level comments to the OP.
I think that meaningfully damaged the ability to follow discussion of this post thereafter.
I don’t know if conversation would have been any different without that effect.
But it seems worth noting for the sake of the review, since it (maybe) affects the ability to follow what points people had discussed about this post before.
I’m just not familiar with snare traps. A quick search doesn’t give me the sense that it’s a better analogy than entropy or technical debt. But maybe I’m just not gleaning its nature.
In any case, not an intentional omission.
The thing that this post doesn’t really do, which I do think is important, is actually work some (metaphorical) math on “does this actually add up to ‘stop trying to directly accomplish things’?” in aggregate?
I like your inquiry.
A nitpick: I’m not saying to stop trying to directly accomplish things (in highly adaptive-entropic domains). I’m saying that trying to directly accomplish things instead of orienting to adaptive entropy is a fool’s errand. It’ll at best leave the net problem-ness unaffected.
I have very little idea how someone would orient to system-wide adaptive entropy without doing things.
My suggestion is more like, back off on trying to accomplish things directly, and instead focus on what pathway increases slack. It’s about removing the “instead of” via prioritizing slack over any predetermined outcome.
But that aside:
I like your point. I don’t know how someone would even begin to answer it, honestly. It seems so… overwhelming to me? Like it’s crushingly overdetermined. Kind of like asking whether heterosexual interest is actually widespread rather than just a cultural meme: I haven’t gone and done the empirical work, but it sure seems absurd to need to before taking it as a premise.
And my mind draws a blank when I ask how to “count” it up vs. some alternative pathway. The scale of counterfactual that seems to ask for looks computational insurmountable to me.
But those are descriptions of my limitations here. If someone can figure out how to do the “math” here, I’d be interested to see what they do.
I could definitely see this being the case. But, also, I could (metaphorically and literally) build a kludgy inefficient steam engine with tons of waste heat and tons of hacky solutions to pump that waste heat around and dump pollution into the air… and this might still, in fact, gets people faster from one city to the next, which enables tons of global trade, which eventually gives us the surplus resources to build more efficient trains and find less polluting solutions and engines that work without hacky workaround.
Yep. And there’s an analog in adaptive entropy: it’s sometimes possible to apply a lot of force in a predetermined direction that gives you the leverage needed to end up net lower-entropic.
Signing up for monastic meditative training can be an example.
But that “can” is pretty important. In a highly adaptive-entropic system, the thinking process that justifies the application of force is usually part of the entropy. I think we see this with folk who try to get “really serious” about meditation and end up doing a mix of (a) failing to keep up with the habit and kicking themselves and (b) incorporating their meditative accomplishments into what they were entropically doing before.
I suspect the world is in practice too highly entropic for just about any force-based move to get us to a better slack equilibrium. I think this is why Eliezer and some others keep painting pictures of doom: If your only available moves all feel made of force, and you’re in a highly entropic system, then nothing you can see to do can solve the problem-ness.
But yes, this is an empirical claim. Maybe there’s some heroic push somewhere that’d make a difference. And maybe being aware of adaptive entropy will make a difference in terms of what heroic moves to make!
But… well, it sure looks obvious to me that the roots of all this problem-ness are the same ones that bias people toward wanting heroic action to happen. The actions aren’t a problem, but the bias will keep sneaking in and nibbling the slack.
So I’m standing for the voice of “Sure, we can look. And maybe it’ll be worthwhile in some sense. Just notice where in you the drive to look is coming from. I think that matters more in the long run.”
Yep. The trouble is that all maps are in the territory. Even “territory” in “map vs. territory” is actually a map embedded in… something. (“The referent of ‘territory’”, although saying it this way just recurses the problem. Like reference itself is a more fundamental reality than either maps or the referent of “territory”.)
So solving this by clearing up the map/territory distinction is about creating a map within which you can have “map” separate from a “territory”. The true territory (whatever that is) doesn’t seem to me to make such a distinction.
The issue is, how do maps arise in the first place? It’s not like “map” is a natural thing-like cluster in reality independent of human minds.
I think another way of asking this is, how does reference arise?