I was a co-founder of CFAR in 2012, same year I got my PhD in math education & left academia. I’d been actively trying to save the world for about a decade at that point. I left CFAR in 2018 due to strong disagreements in approach. I then spent several years focused on a “hippie arc” (meditation, yoga, plant medicine ceremonies, etc.) and “de-mystified” in summer 2024.
Find my non-rationalist writing, social media, and projects at my Linktree.
What part of this do you consider to be having “given me cake”?
I don’t think so. Not in terms that would satisfy you, best as I can tell.
Although… I wonder if we can translate a bit. If you were trying to convey this whole “falling in love” thing to me, while I’m suspicious about whether it exists or that if it exists that it has any value, and I were pressing you for “cake” about “falling in love”, what would you offer?
I mean that sincerely. Those two feel like similar type errors to me. If you can offer a few examples of “cake” for falling in love then I might be able to figure out how to offer you “cake” for kenshō.
(I’m not too particular about “falling in love” per se. It’s just the most fitting example that popped into mind.)
do you have an example of: “getting better at attending to what matters to you, instead of attending to what you think matters to you, when there’s a difference”.
Would a central example be someone focusing on trying to become popular, not realising that it is only instrumental towards feeling positive about themselves?
I wouldn’t say that’s a central example. But I think it’s a good one. Simple, clear, easy to access.
A much bigger and more central example to me is death. Most people don’t seem to have clearly seen their own mortality. They’re thinking about their own deaths like a Cartesian agent (i.e., not embedded — like the Alexei robot in this post). They know death happens to everyone eventually, and that it’ll happen to “them”, but it’s almost like they’re talking about a video game character from the outside. Like “Yep, at some point my little Mario figure there will stop when we turn off the gaming console.”
Something really big shifts when folk get a terminal diagnosis. It’s not just “Oh, I thought I had years, but now I have months/weeks/etc.” There’s a grappling-with that’s hard to convey to non-terminal folk. “The end” becomes subjectively real. Like “Oh shit, I’m going to experience this from behind my eyes, inside this skin.” It can feel very lonely and alienating, both because of the existential horror of the situation, but also because it becomes super clear how others are running strange scripts that just don’t make sense.
I include most immortalists and transhumanists in this. I’m not talking just about “Are you taking practical actions to deal with your mortality?” I mean that there’s a deep existential thing to grapple with. Even true immortals would have to orient to it: If you never ever die, then that means you’re facing eternity. That’s like something from behind your eyes.
(This is something even the literalist Christian mythos doesn’t properly address AFAICT: Great, you go to Heaven. Then what? Do you feel time passing? What’s that like? Goes on literally forever? Or does it… fade away at some point? Or do you leave time when you enter Heaven — in which case what’s the subjective experience of that? This isn’t just abstract philosophy. It’s a damn meaningful question!)
It turns out that most things don’t matter in the face of this. The whole thing with deathbed regrets amounts to “I’m sorry I didn’t see this sooner and take it seriously while I still had time.”
But it’s not something you’re likely to really get just by listening to elders and taking their advice. “Work less, connect with family more.” That’s good, and you’ll be grateful for that in the end! But you won’t understand why until you’ve really truly seen your own death clearly.
To the degree you do, it just won’t be tempting anymore to work instead of connect (for instance).
But that’s a really huge example. Maybe one of the biggest. Maybe maybe the biggest.
I do think the “Oh, I don’t actually care about being popular” thing you suggest is pretty good. It has the right quality of “Now that I’ve seen it, I can’t un-see it, and I’ve been seriously wasting my time on this.”
I just wanted to flesh this out a bit, to hint at the scope.
Hopefully that made some sense.
Why don’t you care for the “looking” framing anymore?
I’m honestly not sure. Something sits wrong about it. Some initial stabs at the intuition are:
It feels too binary. Like you’re either Looking or you’re not. That doesn’t seem right.
I think it might be several skills/senses folded into one. Or maybe something like a sense generator. (Lots of folk have trouble with conscious interoception, and that can be changed over time via a move I might have called “Looking” before.)
In practice, the relevant thing to develop seems to be something like capacity to receive the information rather than forcing oneself to seek it. I think intentionally seeing something beyond the usual ontology (“Looking”) emerges naturally from being both willing and capable, once you know what direction to point your attention in.
But the overall feel is something like… the whole thing makes it sound pompous. Like “Oho! Here’s this special magical skill!”
I mean, it is. It’s quite potent. I’ll sometimes mythically refer to this as “Mage Sight”, or break it down into subtypes of Sight (like Spirit Sight or Prime Sight).
But I think something screwy happens when there’s a social tone along the lines of “I see something you don’t! ’Cause I’m bothering to look at all!”
Even when there’s some truth to that, it’s unkind. It doesn’t honor the reason why the person hasn’t pointed their attention there yet.
Also, in many cases I can just say “You want to see? Okay. Look here, then here, then here.” And something clicks for my listener. Sometimes.
So, no reason to make the act of looking there something special. It’s just perception.
I don’t know how to answer the general query. But I can say something maybe helpful about that Kenshō post and “Looking”:
The insight was too new. I wrote the post just 4 months after the insight. I think I could answer questions like this way, way more clearly today.
(…although my experience with Said in particular has always been very challenging. I don’t know that I could help him any better today than I could in 2018. Maybe? He seems to use a mind type that I’ve never found a bridge for.)
The issue is that the skill needed to convey an insight or skill is often significantly different from the insight/skill itself. And in many cases, getting quite good at something can make you worse at teaching it because you can come to forget what it’s like to be a beginner.
IME it’s necessary to reconstruct (literally “re-member”) various beginners’ minds after gaining expertise. Otherwise you can’t meet beginners where they are. This is the essence of PCK.
I hadn’t done basically any of that when I wrote Kenshō.
So I don’t think the issue is that meditation or whatever borked my ability to talk clearly. It’s more that I had a massive shift and then tried to talk about it right away. This challenge is a pretty general one IMO.
I suspect the issue is that the kind of massive insight that can happen from meditation, psychedelics, & related experiences can result in pretty huge shifts, making this “I’m talking gibberish for a while” thing way more common and enduring than with (say) mathematical insights.
A simple example with Kenshō:
One benefit of learning to Look (though I don’t care for this framing anymore) is getting better at attending to what matters to you, instead of attending to what you think matters to you, when there’s a difference.
Naturally many mind designs will think there’s no difference, or that if there is one it’s pretty small. But it’s often — I daresay usually — massively larger than we tend to notice. The shift can feel a bit like suddenly remembering that you have a beloved child, and realizing you’ve been neglecting them and even forgetting they exist because you were distracted. It’s not pleasant to realize! It might make you “less functional” according to your earlier standards. But you absolutely would not want to reverse the revelation!
One challenge I was grappling with in 2018 is that many minds will insist that (a) there’s no reason to trust that such an insight is valid as opposed to being a delusion and (b) even if it were valid, that maybe it’s better not to have the revelation in the first place since it borks metrics you can tell are useful.
In 2018 I didn’t know how to orient to that while holding my clarity. All I could do is flail my arms and say “Epistemic puzzle!” Very, very poor PCK.
I wouldn’t say my PCK is pristine now. But I could have a much more clear and kind conversation about it today than I could five years ago. It just took a while to develop.
By the way, I think you should consider rewriting the side note re autistic nerd. I am still a bit confused reading that.
FWIW, I found the comment crystal clear.
CFAR’s very first workshops had a section on fashion. LukeProg gave a presentation on why fashion was worth caring about, and then folk were taken to go shopping for upgrades to their wardrobe. Part of the point was to create a visible & tangible upgrade in “awesomeness”.
At some point — maybe in those first workshops, I don’t quite recall — there was a lot of focus on practicing rejection therapy. Folk were taken out to a place with strangers and given the task of getting rejected for something. This later morphed into Comfort Zone Expansion (CoZE) and, finally, into Comfort Zone Exploration. The point here was to help folk cultivate courage.
By the June 2012 workshop I’d introduced Againstness, which amounted to my martial arts derived reinvention of applied polyvagal theory. Part of my intent at the time was to help people get more into their bodies and to notice that yes, your physiological responses actually very much do matter for your thinking.
Each of these interventions, and many many others, were aimed specifically at helping fill in the autistic blindspots that we kept seeing with people in the social scene of rationalists. We weren’t particular about supporting people with autism per se. It was just clear that autistic traits tended to synergize in the community, and that this led to points of systematic incompetence that mattered for thinking about stuff like AI. Things on par with not noticing how “In theory, theory and practice are the same” is a joke.
CFAR was responsible for quite a lot of people moving to the Bay Area. And by around 2016 it was perfectly normal for folk to show up at a CFAR workshop not having read the Sequences. HPMOR was more common — and at the time HPMOR encouraged people toward CFAR more than the Sequences IIRC.
So I think the “smart person self-help” tone ended up defining a lot of rationalist culture at least for Berkeley/SF/etc.
…which in turn I think kind of gave the impression that rationality is smart person self-help.
I think we did meaningfully help a lot of people this way. I got a lot of private feedback on Againstness, for instance, from participants months later saying that it had changed their lives (turning around depression, resolving burnout, etc.). Rejection therapy was a game-changer for some folk. I think these things were mostly net good.
But I’m with Raemon on this: For good rationality, it’s super important to move past that paradigm to something deeper. Living a better life is great. But lots of stuff can do that. Not as many places have the vision of rationality.
My heart aches to read this. I wish you freedom from self-blame. But I do understand.
I grew up in cryonics. My parents signed me up when I was a child. The ache of “If only I’d brought this up sooner, better, the right way” stayed with me a very long time. For every friend and relative who shrugged these things off. Especially for the handful already in graves now. So, so young.
I used to frequently imagine how, some decades or centuries from now, I’d be standing on a colony of the Moon looking up at our ancient cradle, the Earth. Standing there with the friends & family who’d made it. And younger folk too who love us and whom we love, hearing our stories of Ancient Earth when the chances were so slim.
And then we would sing the names. Those who could only continue as whispers on our lips. The beloved who did not make it.
I often find myself reciting Eliezer’s ode to Terry Pratchett:
Even if the stars should die in heaven,
Our sins can never be undone.
No single death will be forgiven
When fades at last the last lit sun.
Then in the cold and silent black
As light and matter end,
We’ll have ourselves a last look back
And toast an absent friend.
I am deeply sorry for your loss.
All the more aching for what might have been, had things been different.
We are all doing the best we can.
Even you, in your failures.
And me, in mine.
And it is heartbreaking, the cost of our learning. That sometimes it comes at the eternal loss of a beloved.
But all we can ever do is our best.
Setting aside our anger and self-blame,
out of deep heartfelt caring
we shall build a kinder world.
Or we shall die trying.
I find this refreshing. It rings true. It feels like the kind of North Star we were groping toward in early CFAR but never landed on.
This in particular feels clarifying:
Rationality is the study (and applied skill) of finding cognitive algorithms that form better beliefs and make better decisions. Sometimes this is the appropriate tool for the job, and sometimes it’s not.
I find myself breathing with relief reading this. It has the flavor of a definition that could use some iterations. But as it stands, it strikes me as (a) honoring the spirit of the discipline while (b) not overblowing what it can do or is for. Like part of the clarity is in what the Art isn’t for.
Thank you for writing this.
…I’m a bit suspicious based on the use of stimulants to treat a broad range of conditions like ADHD…
Just to be clear, I was describing my experience as a case study, and my impression is that I can pretty directly read how caffeine affects my body’s energy reserves. And I don’t have ADHD or anything like that.
The things I observe sure seem to have clear mechanisms behind them, like adenosine sensitization. Between that and what I observe about how people act around caffeine, I get the impression that what I’m seeing in myself is pretty general.
But I don’t know. And I definitely don’t know if ADHD brains are meaningfully different in some relevant way. (Do they not sensitize to adenosine? I don’t get how chronic caffeine use can fix a chemical imbalance unless there’s too little caffeine adaptation!)
Hopefully it’s clear that for the purposes of the example in the OP, it doesn’t matter if ADHD and other conditions happen to be cases where caffeine works differently.
But maybe you mean to suggest that things like ADHD hint at caffeine working meaningfully differently in everyone than I’m suggesting…? Including in myself? In which case you mean this to challenge whether the example of using sapient algorithms is a relevant one?
So, even if the outcome of the sapient algorithm is more unpleasant than the autopilot alternative (like in your caffeine example), perhaps the extra agency gained in the process (and recognition of the value of this agency) is a reward in itself.
Hmm. Maybe? I’m puzzling with you here on this one.
I’d lean toward agency not being intrinsically rewarding enough to override that kind of discomfort. I’m guessing, but my gut says that isn’t how it works.
My impression is, the capacity to be and stay present acts as a kind of anchor that stabilizes consciousness in the storm of painful emotion-memories (“traumas”). Like, when I get behind in emailing people, I tend to get a kind of sinking and scared feeling. If I let that drive, I keep avoiding the email in favor of… watching YouTube. Why? Because YouTube drowns out the sinking/scared sensation from conscious awareness! If I just sit there and feel it… well, the prospect can feel at first boring, then weirdly scary.
But if I’m stably here, in this embodied experience, then those feelings can come and grow and even threaten to overwhelm me and I’m fine. I’m just experiencing overwhelm. It’s okay!
…and then the emotion sort of washes over me, and “digests” (whatever that means). It loses its power. My emotional orientation changes. It’s easier for me to think clearly about the whole topic.
Locally, this is harder than watching YouTube. And slower!
But it also gets me more in touch with the awareness of longer-term benefits. I care more about building my capacity to weather whatever arises in me than I do about being comfortable in most moments.
(Though I might have a different opinion if it were neverending discomfort to be present!)
I’m rambling some related thoughts as I think about this. In short, I think you might be on to something. I just wonder if the nature of the reward is based on perspective rather than on agency being immediately more rewarding to experience as a sensation.
I like your exploration here.
I wondered about the global workspace thing too. I kind of wonder if the auto-generalization thing happens nicely because the “summon sapience” thing puts more of what’s going on into global workspace, meaning it’s integrating more context, so whatever it is that does strategic stuff is accounting for more of what’s relevant.
I’m just making stuff up there. But it’s a fun story. It’s at least consistent with what I’ve noticed of my experience with these algorithms!
I am struck by the juxtaposition between: calling the thing “sapience” (which I currently use to denote the capacity for reason and moral sentiment, and which I think of as fundamentally connected to the ability to negotiate in words) and the story about how you were sleep walking through a conversation (and then woke up during the conversation when asked “Can you speak more plainly?”).
Oh, that’s a neat observation! I hadn’t noticed that.
Minor correction to the story: She asked me if I’d be okay with her speaking frankly. Your read might not change the example but I’m not sure. I don’t think it affects your point!
Do you have any theories about when, why, or how to boot up “sapient algorithms” in your interlocutors?
Gosh. Not really? I can invent some.
My first reaction is “That’s none of my business.” Why do I need them to summon sapience? Am I trying to make them more useful to me somehow? That sure seems rude.
But maybe I want real connection and want them to pop out of autopilot? But that seems rude to sort of inflict on them.
But maybe I can invite them into it…?
This seems way clearer in a long-term relationship (romantic or otherwise) where both people are explicitly aware of this possibility and want each other’s support. I’d love to have kids, and the mother of my children needs to be capable of extraordinary levels of sanity, but neither she nor I are going to be lucid all the times when it’s a good idea. I could imagine us having a kind of escape routine installed between us, kind of like a “time out” sign, that means “Hold up, I call for a pause, there’s some fishy autopilot thing going on here and I need us to reorient.”
That version I have with a few friends. That seems just great.
Some of my clients seem to want me to gently, slowly invite them into implementing more of these sapient algorithms. I don’t usually think of it that way. I also don’t install these algorithms for them. I more point out how they could and why they might want to, and invite them to do it themselves if they wish.
That’s off the top of my head.
No. I’ve become very physically aware of how caffeine borrows from my body’s resources. There’s always a need to recover later. After all, there was a reason my energy wasn’t that high in the first place! So that reason comes home to roost.
I also suspect I adapt to caffeine faster than average. I think I get a little dependent. My body growing a few more adenosine receptors. So the next day or two it has to notice that those aren’t needed.
But I think I’m just super aware of these energy fluctuations. Mostly because I trained my awareness to be this fine-tuned. I doubt I would have noticed the effects I’m talking about five years ago.
It’s quite cool that you’re doing this. Thank you!
It’s a physical law of the universe that you will age.
This, as a summary of one of the book’s points, slams my deathism alarm bells. It causes me to go on alert for where the author is trying to confuse me with their own deathist confusions.
I assume the author is hinting at entropy. How life can be thought of as an entropy pump, keeping internal entropy low even at the cost of increasing net entropy. And yes, on long enough timescales this is guaranteed to eventually fail. Even if nothing external destroys the pump directly, eventually entropy will affect the pump itself, resulting in a downward spiral of its functionality. And sure, we could call that last effect “aging” in some generalized sense.
But this is hugely dramatically different from the claim that our bodies have to break down within about a century. That it’s inevitable that the thing we normally think of as aging absolutely has to happen in roughly the way it currently does.
This conflation is a common deathist refrain. It reminds me of the argument against curing aging that goes “Well, you still might die in a meteor crash or from murder or from any other of a number of things, and the longer you live the higher the probability accumulates to something killing you… so it’s not really immortality.”
As though the fact that curing aging wouldn’t count as “true” immortality makes it irrelevant.
Whenever someone conflates these two elements — the entropic inevitability of death vs. the engineering complexity of dealing with aging as it currently appears — I usually find deathist ideas woven elsewhere in what they have to say. They’ll say a bunch of objective and often informative things… and then slip in something about how “You wouldn’t want to live forever anyway” based on getting tired or bored or watching people you love die or something.
Often it’s more insidious than that. Like a general defeatist tone. “Well, gosh, there’s no real point in honestly trying to cure aging, but given these biochemical facts we might be able to make the decline a little more pleasant in thus-and-such a way.”
I’m still grateful you’re putting this summary together. I don’t mean any of this as a criticism of you or of what you’re doing! I liked reading through the rest of what you’ve written here.
I just mean to issue a memetic caution about the book for anyone who might have missed the signs based on what you’ve summarized here.
(I’m particularly sensitive to these signals. I was raised immortalist. Homeschooled by transhumanist cryonicists. This stuff just really stands out for me.)
This is a really clear breakdown. Thank you for writing it up!
I’m struck by the symmetry between (a) these two Camps and (b) the two hemispheres of the brain as depicted by Iain McGilchrist. Including the way that one side can navigate the relationship between both sides while the other thinks the first is basically just bonkers!
It’s a strong enough analogy that I wonder if it’s causal. E.g., I expect someone from Camp 1 to have a much harder time “vibing”. I associate Camp 1 folk with rejection of ineffable insights, like “The Tao that can be said is not the true Tao” sounding to them like “the Tao” is just incoherent gibberish.
In which case the “What is this ‘qualia’ thing you’re talking about?” has an awful lot in common with the daughter’s arm phenomenon. The whole experience of seeing a rainbow, knowing it’s beautiful, and then witnessing the thought “Wow, what a beautiful rainbow!” would be hard to pin down because the only way to pin it down in Camp 1 is by modeling the experiential stream and then talking about the model. The idea that there could be a direct experience that is itself being modeled and is thus prior to any thoughts about it… just doesn’t make sense to the left hemisphere. It’s like talking about the Tao.
I don’t know how big a factor, if at all, this plays in the two camps thing. It’s just such a striking analogy that it seems worth bringing up.
Ah, cool, this sounds like maybe the right kind of thing. Your step 4 particularly jumps out at me: it highlights the self-reference in the answer, which makes it sound plausible as a path to an answer.
Thank you!
“Realityfluid”—terrible name by the way, lets call it “fundamentals”
I don’t think that quite captures what I was pointing at. I’ll buy there are better words for it, but I don’t just mean “fundamentals”. Or at least that phrasing feels meaningfully inaccurate to me.
I picked up the phrase “magical reality fluid” from a friend who was deep into mathematical physics. He used it the same way rationalists use (or at least used to use?) “magic”: “By some magic cognitive process….” The idea being to name it in a silly & mysterious-sounding way to emphasize that there’s something non-mysterious but that we don’t yet understand.
“Magical reality fluid” is a reference to whatever it is that the Schrödinger wave equation shows is wiggling. There’s probably a technical term for this. It’s a mathematical structure, just like the electromagnetic field. Lots of physicists give up on the philosophical question and just say “We use it to compute probabilities, we don’t ask how it works, maybe ‘how it works’ is a confused question.”
Presumably there’s something in, uh, actual reality (whatever that is) that our Schrödinger-based math is somehow related to. Currently the math makes it look like it’s some kind of fluid or something that has waves in it.
Hence “magical reality fluid”.
Also, my being a cofounder of CFAR doesn’t mean I’m immune to sufficiently complex basic confusions! This might be simple to clear up. But my mind is organized right now such that just saying “map vs. territory” just moves the articulation around. It doesn’t address the core issue whatsoever from what I can tell.
How on Earth is this relevant? I’m really not following you here. What do you hope to gain by having me try to grapple with this weird thing?
Maybe you’re trying to… I don’t know, get even with me for asking something you find absurd? Trying to defeat me in some kind of dual where you think I issued the first challenge? I really don’t know.
In case it’s not clear, the reason I asked you about the “falling in love” thing was to better understand what kind of thing “cake” as you mean it might even look like. It really does land as a type error to me. But if you could say “Oh, for falling in love, thus-and-such would be ‘cake’”, then I could go “Oh! Okay. Cool! So I think the analogy for kenshō might be XYZ. Does that work for you?” Then we could communicate.
The feel — and I could easily be misreading you here — but the feel I get from you here is like intellectual one-upmanship. Mental fencing.
If that’s the case, please understand that I’m just not available for that. I will not engage with you at that level anymore.
If I’ve misread you, then please clarify what you’re doing. I don’t know how to orient to your tone here. If you meant it collaboratively, then please help me see how. I’d very much like to.