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.
“Is the MMA guy actually getting his arm/tibia bent in fights in ways that they wouldn’t if he mixed in some Aikido?”
I don’t have enough MMA experience to know with much confidence. But from what little bit of BJJ rolling I’ve done, my impression is yes, folk who don’t know the unbendable arm trick end up struggling sometimes in ways they don’t have to.
It’s reflected on both sides, really. If BJJ folk really understood this unbendable joint thing, they wouldn’t keep trying to bend my arm to get through the grip I have (e.g. holding their lapel on either side with each hand). They pointlessly exhaust themselves. Usually more experienced folk will switch strategies at that point. But the fact that so many of them even try suggests to me that they’re used to most people they roll with not being able to do this thing.
But I don’t know. Maybe I’m just unfamiliar with those arts and this tool isn’t useful in those situations.
The third is that he gives clear objective rules, I do a bad job on positioning/activation on my own accord, and then he shows me how to not do that. This is the only case where The Unbendable Arm is worth anything, and it’s not because the technique itself is so great but because I was so dumb to start with.
I don’t know about “dumb”. Maybe “ignorant”, the way an infant is ignorant of how to stand, or someone unpracticed will fall over if standing on one leg with their eyes closed. It takes a while of using the body in a way it hasn’t been used before in order for the new skill to click into place.
Otherwise yeah, what you’re saying makes sense to me.
And it’s true, I don’t know whether the unbendable arm is at all novel or useful to you. It’s clearly novel for most people IME. Including very practiced martial artists who haven’t otherwise worked with it. But I don’t know, maybe you already do something equivalent. Or maybe it’s irrelevant to the things you care about.
I assume you’re still up in the bay area? I’m not likely to be up there anytime soon, but if you’re ever back down in socal and want to play with this stuff let me know. It sounds fun.
I bet we’d come out of it with a force vector diagram and a good way to clearly demonstrate what’s going on.
Yep, still in the Bay Area. Sounds good. And yep, I agree RE force diagram etc.
“This is supposed to stay standing” seems to be implied…
Maybe by others, but I don’t need it. I can do it on my back. Or mid leap (though that’s harder to demo :P ). Or upside down. I think I can do it with my arm stretched behind my back, but I’m less confident of that one; I’d have to try it.
But if my upper arm is pinned in a way that keeps me from moving my elbow, then yeah, I think that breaks the technique. Although in practice most people can’t pin my upper arm in the way that matters. Even if they’re trying to pin my arm to the ground. They’d have to try really really hard to fix my upper arm to the ground to get the unbendable thing to falter. At least in the ways I’ve encountered so far.
Similarly, what are the rules on footwork?
I’m not sure what you’re asking. I can do it seated. Or while doing a shoulder stand. Or while lifted off the ground in a bearhug. I don’t think there are implicit rules about footwork.
Do you have a preferred video demonstration? Or can you draw the force vector diagrams? I don’t doubt that you’re observing something real here, but from looking through YouTube I’m not seeing what you’re describing.
Boy do I relate. For whatever reason, the demos on YouTube are almost universally weirdly bad. I’m guessing Ivan found the one he linked to because I linked to it; it’s the clearest short demo I’d found.
I’ll see about making one sometime. It’s a little tricky for me in particular to convey over video because I’m so visibly strong. But I’ll give it some thought. Maybe I can ask for help from some of the bodybuilders at one of the local gyms.
Sadly I can’t draw a force diagram because I honestly don’t know how it works. I can almost make sense of it. The technique works perfectly well if I put my wrist on an unyielding inanimate object like a table, so I think I’m somehow transferring the downward force near the elbow into the upward force on the wrist. But I’m not at all sure how that “somehow” works. I just… do it. By “extending ki”. :-P
“I want him to tense up as physically hard as possible”—and then he has to admonish his volunteer for “losing focus” when his unbendable arm bends
This one is just awful. Just utterly dumb. It’s correct that losing focus when you’re learning the technique causes it to fail. But at no point in the video does he demonstrate the actual thing. They’re treating it like mysterious magic — which makes sense! It’s hard to do without treating it like a bit of magic at first.
I can do the unbendable arm while distracted now. It’s something my body just does when I choose for it to.
“the only purpose of this is for me to experience relaxation completely on this muscle”—with emphasis that the arm is gonna bend at least a little bit and maybe more.
Yeah, I’m with you, this isn’t impressive. It’s kind of sort of right ish. But his understanding of how to do it is sloppy IMO. That slop shows up in how he stumbles around.
Complete relaxation is not necessary for doing this technique. But if you’re doing the technique right, tremendous relaxation is possible. So if you want to check if you’re doing it right, you can try relaxing more than you would be relaxed if you were fighting to keep your arm straight.
He’s right that the arm might bend a little. It’s an adjustment thing. Kind of like how your knees might bend a little if you catch a falling heavy object: it’s just a spring action as your body adjusts to the new incoming force. But if you’re doing unbendable arm right, you can actually let the arm completely fold up and then straighten it out again while they’re applying force. It’s quite easy.
But my guess is that he’s not referring to adjustment. I think he’s making excuses for poor technique.
This one shows something closer to what you’re talking about, but it’s pretty clear that he’s cheating the starting position by giving himself a more advantageous position the second time and having the other guy start in a less advantageous position. Which I guess kinda raises the question of what exactly is it supposed to demonstrate? Is that “cheating” or is that the entire thing being conveyed?
At a glance, it looks to me like this guy really is doing the thing I’m talking about. There might be extra stuff going on, but my impression is that if you vary that extra stuff it won’t affect the power of the unbendable arm. I really don’t think it’s a matter of “advantageous position”.
I’m not going to die on the hill of “This guy is authentic.” It’s just a passing impression from watching the video. That said, I might start linking to this demo instead honestly! :-D Although I do like the original guy’s looseness better.
I’d be happy to do this demo with you with the “advantageous positioning” mostly however you want it to be. I say “mostly” because there are some things that’ll break the technique’s ability to work, and I can nearly always tell you ahead of time what those will be. (E.g., if you rigidly pin my upper arm to a stationary object like a countertop, the technique won’t work.) But it’s really not about the level of advantage I think you’re talking about. I can do the unbendable arm on my knees with my arm pointing straight over my head. I can do it with two people, one pushing up on my wrist and the other pushing down on my elbow. I hold totally inanimate objects using this technique, like sacks of groceries, by placing a wrist on a surface like a wall or a railing. I’m pretty darn sure it’s a physics trick having to do with redirecting forces somehow. It’s just a little tricky to learn how to do it.
My wife’s first reaction to “don’t let me bend your arm” was actually to swat my hand away from her wrist, which playfully points out that we’re implicitly holding back in unspecified ways for sake of the demonstration, and if we were actually trying to not let someone bend our arm we would be doing something quite different. So what are the rules, anyway? As long as the rules are kept hidden it’s really easy to move the goalposts around without anyone noticing.
I’m very, very confident it doesn’t work via moving goalposts.
I don’t know how to delineate all the “rules”. If you change the context such that you’re not testing the arm’s unbendability, then you won’t get to experience the thing I’m talking about. There are some ways of testing unbendability that will, in fact, get even my arm to bend in defiance of my trying to use this technique. There’s an amount of force that should, in theory, cause tendons/ligaments/bones to start snapping, at which point of course the arm will fold.
Maybe there are other things for me to name there. I don’t know.
But if you’re concerned about any hidden rules here, feel free to ask me about them. If you give me a scenario, I can tell you whether (a) it’s testing the thing I’m talking about and (b) how it’d do.
E.g., if you vice grip my upper arm and use a car jack against my wrist to force my arm to bend, it absolutely will. I have no power against that setup.
E.g., if you stare really hard at my arm to try to get it to bend but you don’t touch it, you won’t be testing the thing I’m talking about.
E.g., if you are trying to bend my arm like in many of these demos but you surprise me by smashing my foot really hard, I might stop doing the technique and you might successfully bend my arm — not because it failed but because I stopped doing it. (Although even here, if it were somehow really dire that I demo it, I might flinch and it might falter for a moment, but I’d be able to recover it and re-extend my arm against your force.)
And as I said up above, within some sensible limits I’m very happy to demo this technique in person. I’d ask that you not smash my foot or otherwise be mean about it! And there are some tests you might want to do that I can just flat-out tell you would cause the technique to stop working, so I don’t think there’s much point in running those. But if you want me to, say, do it blindfolded while lying on the ground and singing the national anthem, I’d be totally happy to do that. It’ll work just fine.
I think this is related to how interfaces are selected for by functionality, not accuracy. Accuracy is one thing that can make them functional sometimes. But not always!
I like Donald Hoffman’s example of computer GUI desktops. Those aren’t meant to reflect the actual state of anything at the hardware level. A given “file” on your “desktop” might be scattered across your hard drive for instance. The point of the desktop is to create a kind of semi-fictional interface that humans can use. It’s not totally disconnected from what’s going on in the computer; otherwise it wouldn’t work. But in many ways it’d get worse as a usable interface if you made it more accurate.
Likewise, motivational inner speech (“I can do it! I can do it!”) isn’t meant to be an epistemically justified conclusion. It’s a way of drumming up resources to try something. Refusing to use it because its literal denotations aren’t justified is a kind of confusion.
Another example is the common thing about fixing posture by imagining a string attached to the top of your head that’s suspended from far up in the sky. Obviously there’s no such string. But somehow visualizing and “feeling” the string and kind of “hanging” from it can often help people rearrange their spine in a helpful way. It’s much harder to give specific instructions about what shifts to make in the spine: that’s just not the natural interface for making the right adjustments.
A maybe stranger example is learning to balance on one foot with your eyes closed. A lot of that is just your body getting used to using the vestibular and proprioceptive senses, and lots of quick micro adjustments, to stay upright. But AFAICT it’s completely irrelevant whether you understand that. You just… try. And you keep trying. And eventually something hidden happens, and you get better at it (probably — some don’t!). The interface there is this magic “trying” thing. More accurate detail about what you’re trying is just noise (AFAIK)!
It’s unclear to me where the boundaries of this effect are. If I don a frame of faith in Christ, does this create a world interface that makes some things available that are harder to access in some other way? How would I tell? If it affects how pleasant life feels to me, and by it how open-hearted I’m able to be with those I love, and those who don’t hold that faith don’t seem to be as free to open their hearts… well, it kind of looks like the faithless are the confused ones, aren’t they? Kind of like a person who won’t use a GUI interface because it’s deceptive.
(I’m not claiming that specifically faith in Christ does this, by the way! I’m giving a hypothetical example. I also think some people in fact do have a subjective experience as though this hypothetical example is real — but that involves a lot of social complexities such as that they’re supposed to experience it as true. So please take it as a purely theoretical example. Or feel free to debate whether it’s accurate of course! But please don’t frame it as though you’re debating with me about its accuracy.)
As the author, I want to note that I’m way more skeptical of my earlier explanation.
(Accordingly, I’m less confident of my current explanation too!)
I’m pretty sure the movement cannot work if you vice grip my upper arm such that it can’t move relative to my body (or to the ground). The elbow must be free to rise a bit.
Sometimes I’ll demo the trick by letting people fold my arm, asking them to continue applying as much pressure as they like, warn them that I’m about to start straightening my arm, and then just do so. It’s close to effortless for me. But when I do it, my whole arm goes up first. I then lower my arm again once it’s straight.
The lats might be closely involved, but I don’t think that’s the main issue. I haven’t noticed any effect whatsoever in terms of unbendable arm strength based on lat strength.
Also, once someone who’s vastly weaker than me gets the “click”, they’re able to (sometimes) defy me regardless of how much muscular strength I put into it.
So I’m pretty sure it’s some kind of leverage trick.
My best guess right now is somethingsomething redirecting force between the incoming hands into each other somethingsomething.
I use the same feeling to hold very heavy objects when I put my hand on a table. Like hanging a heavy grocery bag on my elbow with my arm straight and my palm up. I keep it suspended by letting the bag press the back of my hand into the table. IME I’m not so much fighting the bag’s bending my arm as I am just… reaching. If you make the bag heavier, it presses my hand harder into the table. That’s it. It’s not relevantly harder for me to keep the bag suspended.
Again, no lats.
If heaven doesn’t exist, believing in it, and even acting as though you want to go there, won’t get you there.
I’m not so sure. My impression is that while dying, perception of time and reality can break down. It might be kind of like falling into a dream state or dropping into an intense psychedelic trip. As the subjective experience of time breaks down, each moment can stretch out until it’s subjectively eternal. If at that point you have a well-developed belief in Heaven, that could very well be what opens up for you, and you could reside there “forever”.
Given that it’s going to feel like something as you die, it sure seems preferable that it be something utterly wonderful. Rather than (say) something horrifying as your animal terror around dying defines the thoughts and anticipations that shape the psychedelic dreamscape you “eternally” fall into. Shaping the dying experience sure seems to me like it’d require some kind of prep work.
Obviously I agree that if Heaven isn’t a place that your eternal soul literally goes to, then what you believe won’t get you there. Because there’s no “there” to get to.
I just want to suggest that maybe that’s a strawman. Depending on your disposition, you might really wish you’d developed faith in Christ or whatever as you watch your death take you. At that point “salvation” won’t be theoretical, I’m guessing. It won’t matter that Heaven/Hell/whatever is “just” a dying brain experience; that’s not much consolation in the middle of it IME.
(This thought inspired by both strange meditative states and some horrific psychedelic experiences. Hence “IME”, not “IMO”. Both are a bit deceptive though: I don’t mean to say that my experiences are for sure equivalent to the dying experience.)
Kudos on doing the test!
FWIW, the key thing in unbendable arm isn’t about tensing only the relevant opposing muscles. It’s more about redirecting incoming forces at each other instead of fighting them directly.
The real test is in dealing with someone who’s way stronger than you. If you have no hope of keeping your arm straight via tricep strength.
I’m guessing that either (a) you’re not much stronger than your wife or (b) she didn’t click into the thing the visualization is meant to help people click into.
Seriously, the thing I mean when I point at this technique isn’t a vague “energy” trick that fails upon encountering an MMA fighter or whatever. And it definitely doesn’t rely on subtly deceiving people into tensing the wrong muscles. Unbendable arm is immensely demonstrable. As weird as the following might sound, I use it every day. It’s easily in the top ten most useful things I learned from aikido and might be in the top three.
Oh cool! In aikido we’d call that “extending ki” (in contrast to “cutting ki”, where your “mind” stops at the point of contact and your “ki” (here roughly “followthrough”) abruptly halts).
Huh, I’m not aware of having deleted that post! I wonder where it went.
FWIW, after teaching a bunch of folk the unbendable arm, I’ve had to revise my impression in that original comment. Telling people the physics helps in a few cases, and seemed to help pretty dramatically in the first few (hence my original comment), but the variance was just way wider than I thought.
(Aside: wanting to acknowledge that the strength of my earlier comment wasn’t in epistemic integrity. It’s part of a communication pattern of mine that I’ve been examining lately.)
My impression is that people actually get to the full unbendable arm more reliably from the firehose imagery. In most cases, describing the physics does not help them find the surprising ease. They might succeed in keeping their arm straight, but it tends to be a struggle.
The firehose thing is not how I do it though! It’s more like, there’s an extension feeling in my limbs. When someone tries to bend my arm, if I’m already focusing on the extension feeling, they just can’t bend it. If it starts to bend a little bit, I reach a little more. No effort against the force. It’s more like I’m trying to reach the far wall — but just a little.
But telling people to reach doesn’t seem to help as much. IME folk tend to reach by bending their spine, which seems to destabilize the whole thing. (Doesn’t have to, but in practice it does.) They also switch from reaching to fighting once the pressure is on.
Things like Alexander Technique seem to help a lot more. Getting them to focus on the horizon and being peripherally aware of the pressure, instead of collapsing their awareness on the struggle at their arm.
Maybe more detail specifically about unbendable arm PCK than most need! But since my earlier comment now looks deceptive to me, I wanted to offer a correction.
I’ve been reflecting on this since it was posted. Coming back to it from time to time.
I just wanted to make a note saying: received. I believe I see your point, and I’ve been taking it in.
(I also disagree with some of the narrativemancy you employ here about me. It’s difficult for me to publicly agree with anything in your comment here because of a similar mechanism that you’re objecting to in the OP. I wish I didn’t need to add this note. I’d rather just say “I’m hearing something meaningful in what you’re saying and have been taking it in.” That’s the part that matters. But I can do so only if I also register that I very much disagree with your model of what I was trying to do, and in some cases I strongly disagree with your analysis of what I was in fact doing. Thankfully I can still learn from your message anyway. I just wanted to say — more to LW than to you, really — that I’ve heard your objection and have been taking the truth I can find in it seriously.)
It seems to me that there are arguments to be made in both directions.[1] It’s not clear to me just yet which stance is correct. Maybe yours is! I don’t know.
My point is that it’s understandable for intelligent people to suspect that there isn’t enough data available yet to produce ASI on the current approach. You might disagree, and maybe your disagreement is even correct, but I don’t think the situation is so vividly clear that it’s incomprehensible why many people wouldn’t be persuaded.
As a quick gesture at the point: as far as I know, all the data LLMs are processing has already gone through a processing filter, namely humans. We produced all the tokens they took in as training data. A newborn, even blind, doesn’t have this limitation — and I’d expect a newborn that was given this limitation somehow very much could have stunted intelligence! I think the analog would be less like a blind newborn and more like a numb one, without tactile or proprioceptive senses.
I think the issue is that the form of the data matters a lot. ChatGPT basically just works with symbols as far as I know. How many symbols are there for it to eat? Are there enough to give the same depth of understanding that a human gets from processing spatial info for instance?
I don’t think this is a hard limit for AI in general. But I can totally understand why there’s skepticism about there being enough digital data right now to produce ASI on the current approach. I’d expect the AIs would need to develop different kinds of data collection, like using robots as sense organs for instance.
Nah. I could have been more precise while spitballing. (For some definition of “could”. I don’t know how to be freeform playful/creative while carefully scrutinizing each detail of what I say for precision and accuracy.) But I meant all that more in the spirit of “Huh, I wonder if evolution did something like this and we’ve been assuming it didn’t. That’d make some sense of why some of our social reform efforts go wonky in these particular ways.”
I don’t know what would be good for us to collectively do. I aspire to have good questions. Good answers would be nice, but I think those mostly fall out of seeking and pondering good questions.
It’s very disconcerting to read “I notice my brain does extra work when I talk with women… wouldn’t it be easier if society were radically altered so that I didn’t have to talk with women?” Like, what? And there’s no way you or anyone else can become more rational about this? This barrier to ideal communication with 50% of people is insurmountable? It’s worth giving up on this one? Hello?
I was not proposing that.
This was fun to look back on a year later.
I like how thoroughly I owned it. How it’s clearly wild speculation that tries to weave together some questionable observations. I also like the questions it raises. I remember how the basic hypothesis — that sexual signaling maybe evolved largely to aim at one’s own sex in the human social context — helped me to notice some interesting questions I hadn’t picked up on before. (E.g., why does slut-shaming seem to more target women who doll up for the male gaze instead of women who are actually pretty openly DTF when there’s a difference? Is my perception off, or is this really a trend, and if so then why?)
I notice that a year later I’m simply unconvinced of the basic idea. I don’t know why. It might be that there’s something true that (some part of me thinks) works best if it goes unrecognized, so I need to blind myself to it. Or, maybe it’s just malarky. I don’t know!
The main thing, I think, is that on the whole the framework doesn’t feel wholesome. It’s not totally icky to me. Just… off? Like, sure, respecting people and accounting for sexual dynamics is important. There are probably built-in tendencies along these lines. Those tendencies seem interesting to examine and explore. But despite my attempt to be descriptive rather than normative in this post, there’s a kind of implication that trying to be attractive to the opposite sex is defecting on culture. That implication seems kind of weird to me now.
To the extent that there’s a glitchiness in trying to be attractive to others, I now suspect it’s more to do with Goodhart drift. A guy who’s just living his life and thus ends up attractive is less likely to be creating a hollow illusion than some other guy who chooses what to do based on what he thinks will get him a girl. As just one example type! It’s a very general point about trying to affect how people see you, instead of just doing stuff and letting people see the truth: the former tends to invoke Goodhart, and thus people are often distrustful of it. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work sometimes anyway! Or even that it’s bad.
The bonobo analogy was unfortunate. It was a good illustration, except that it was confusing. I mention the problem in one of the comments. The fact that bonobos specifically use sex is irrelevant to why I named them. The point was that when there’s a potentially scarce resource introduced, the tribe starts by affirming their within-tribe bonds instead of leaping into competition for the resource. (Or at least so I’m told!) The fact that they do so with sex wasn’t relevant to the analogy. Since the rest of the post was about sexual dynamics, I think that particular choice of analogy was unnecessarily confusing.
All that said: I like the kind of wild-yet-owned speculation this post is made of. It’s fun and thought-provoking. I find it stimulating just to reread!
I’d love to see something that massages the various observations here into a better explanation. In particular, there’s nothing meaty here that really tackles why there’s an asymmetry between men and women in terms of intrasex popularity. (Women swoon over men who are (a) beloved and trusted by other men and/or (b) highly desired by other women. Men don’t seem to care whether a woman has lots of girlfriends who love her and are all over the place when it comes to lots of other men wanting her.) The loose model doesn’t predict it and can’t even neatly explain it. Or at least I don’t see how!
I honestly don’t know how much, if any, further thinking or insight or experimentation arose from this post. It might have just amounted to a passing entertainment. It affected some of my thinking and actions in the first half of this year, but I don’t think the ideas have meaningfully come to mind since roughly the summer.
I’ve changed how I want to talk about all this stuff quite a bit since 2018. I don’t talk about “Looking” for the most part anymore. Not for carefully thought-out reasons. I just don’t like the feel of trying to describe this stuff that way anymore. It feels over-reified and too… prideful. Not just about me, but as in, the framework seems to imply a skill or capacity a person has or doesn’t have, and that it’s better if they have it. I no longer think that’s how grace works.
With that caveat: yes probably? I’m guessing Focusing can help. I’m not sure though!
My impression these days is that the kenshō “insight” is basically what you recognize when you stop restricting your perceptions with your cognitive frames. The tricky part is that what I just said is a cognitive frame, so the conceptual mind can take what I just said and claim to have some kind of understanding of the kenshō thing. But it can’t. It literally cannot understand it. It’s like an LLM with a pure text interface talking about truly appreciating visual art: it might give some amazing and even helpful analysis, but it doesn’t have the right type of input or processing to see a painting at all.
Focusing might help by giving the system a way of orienting to things in a non-conceptual way. The conceptual mind can still create frames during and after, but they’re only kind of helpful to the Focusing process, so the conceptual mind can’t lead the Focusing effort.
“You are not the king of your brain. You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going, ‘A most judicious choice, sire’.”
(Here I’m hinting at viewing “you” as the identity structure that lives within the conceptual mind — what some spiritual/mystical places sometimes mean when they say “ego”.)
So, that’s my guess. In short, I’d guess yes? But I really don’t know.
You ask a good question. I have a lot of thoughts about it. Different answers at different levels. Like, what should a civilization do vs. what should a parent do vs. what should a teacher do? Different answers.
The overall theme, though, is to remove coercion and appeal to native fascination instead. If you have something of value to the student to offer, then in practice there’s a way to either (a) show the student that value or (b) earn the student’s trust that you’re tracking what they care about such that when you say “Trust me” they know there’s something good there even if they can’t see it for themselves just yet.
If you’re aiming to be a teacher… well, it’s tricky because last I checked, the systems you’re embedded in impose mandatory coercion. You have to cover certain topics, often in a certain order, within a certain window of time, etc. Especially since “No Child Left Behind” tied funding to test scores. And parents get mad and start rattling sabres if their kids come back from math class with a bunch of weird stuff the parents don’t recognize. Although maybe that was just the Boomers.
But that said! There are clever ways of working within these social constraints. If you can do that, the overall thrust for a teacher is to prioritize being curious about how the students are thinking rather than on getting them to understand certain concepts.
The lion’s share of work for a really good math teacher is in identifying zinger questions. You have to see how a student is thinking about a problem, and follow their contours of reasoning, and notice where it’s going to run them into trouble. You could just tell them about the trouble, but it’s far more effective to ask them to explain something or figure out something that will lead them right to the paradox spot.
After a while you’ll probably develop a really rich repertoire of such questions. And maybe more preciously, you’ll be familiar with a vast library of thinking styles that students actually use in the parts of math that you teach. This is what the education literature refers to as “pedagogical content knowledge” or “PCK” (which is where the CFAR class on “Seeking PCK” came from).
That’s my main answer. Two other points worth mentioning:
By the time they’re in high school, the basis of their math trauma will probably have already formed. You’re not likely to be the tipping point into horror for them.
Math trauma is way more reversible than most people realize.
So don’t worry about that part too much. Just zoom in on what you love about the subject, stay in contact with the kids’ wonder, and aim to be a guide facilitating their exploration of what fascinates them. I think good things follow pretty naturally from that.
Would you say the same of most other class subjects?
I was homeschooled and then studied math education, so I’m not sure. But my passing impression is (a) yes, it applies to most methods of teaching in schools regardless of subject; but (b) math taught this way is particularly damaging.
I want to emphasize that this is my impression. I’m also not entirely sure why math seems to be more damaging. I have guesses. I just observe that e.g. literature hatred or music phobia aren’t nearly as prevalent as math trauma is. Best as I can tell.
I ask because, with the exceptions of reading and persuasive writing, I don’t think that any conventional school subject is more applicable to the average person’s life than grade-school math.
Yes, people can get through life with an astonishing ignorance of mathematics, but they can get through life with an even more astonishing ignorance of social studies, literature, and the sciences.
Well, sure. But people will also pick up the math they need as they need it for the most part. That’s true of most subjects really.
I didn’t learn to read in school. I went to kindergarten before being homeschooled, and they were teaching us the alphabet and some basic words, but I could already read books by then. I learned to read because I wanted to read.
There’s something very weird in our cultural groundwater around what teaching is. It’s like we start with a prescription of subjects and then default to coercion to get students to “know” those subjects. Why? If it’s relevant to their lives, we could learn to point out the connection in a way that feels alive to them. If we can’t do that, then what makes us so sure that it’s relevant for them?
Do you have a different philosophy of education, a different ranking of subjects’ importance, or something else?
Yeah I do. I think the most imporant function of widespread education is to make good citizens. Which is to say, children put through an education system need to come out of it better able to engage with the system that runs their civilization, including the education process for the next generation.
In the United States, I think that puts civics as the most important subject. It’s really key that citizens understand how their government works, what the checks and balances are, how jury nullification works, what forms of corruption actually do arise even within the current system, etc. Otherwise they don’t know how to participate in the government that’s supposedly “by the people, for the people”. This is vastly more important than learning math they don’t naturally pick up in their day-to-day lives.
I think the two things you named are really good though. I wish public education had those as real goals! That’d be nice. I think (1) happens sort of despite the education methods, and (2) happens more through other cultural channels than it does through formal public education. Just my impression.
To me this is exciting. I deduced that the mental architecture you’re describing should be possible. It’s extremely cool to hear someone just name it as a lived experience. Like, what would a mind that’s actually systematically free of Newcomblike self-deception have to be like, assuming the hostile telepaths problem is real? This is one possible solution. Assuming I haven’t misunderstood what you’re describing!
Ah yeah, I think “gaining independence” is a better descriptor of (what I meant by) that solution type.
I think I’ve been unwaveringly lifeist the whole time. My main shift has been that I think I see some value in deathist sentiment that’s absent from most lifeist rhetoric I’m familiar with. I want a perspective that honors why both arise.
I did dabble with ideas around whether death is an illusion. And I still think there might be something to it. But having done so, it looks like a moving goalposts thing to me. I still don’t want to die, and I don’t want my loved ones to die, and I think that means something that matters.