I think the evidence for mathematics and formal reasoning being an effective cognitive tool is very strong, and that we should have high priors on the sequences being effective because it tries to teach those tools.
Effective for who? And what are your priors on how easy it is to teach things, in general? There’s a big difference between “tries to teach X” and “successfully teaches X.”
I think meditation and mysticism completely lack this evidence-base.
I’m not sure what you mean by this, mostly because I don’t know what you think my position is on what meditation and/or mysticism can do for people. Most of my comment is arguing against what I take to be a bad argument; the only place where I describe my position is the very end, where I only describe my own experience in vague terms and don’t make any claims about what other people might or might not get out of meditation.
or at least individuals who seem to have performed impressive feats I clearly care about.
I’m about to run an experiment at the CFAR office in a few weeks where I try to teach a bunch of people how to strengthen their ability to acquire trustworthy inside views / gears models through learning mathematics—exactly the sort of thing you think is important.
I would not have been capable of doing this in any of the previous years you’ve known me, because I spent nearly all of those years crippled by social fears that prevented me from doing anything like organizing events on my own. I’ve been working through these fears in all sorts of ways, but mostly through circling and tantra (although at the end improving my diet seems to have been key as well; I still don’t have a great gears model of what’s been happening to me). Some of the parts that sounded like woo were actually important and taught me actual skills that I actually use to resolve my emotional bugs.
and now that that’s much murkier again, it seems very reasonable for me to stop investing resources into trying to understand this.
Yeah, that’s fine, I can’t tell people what tradeoffs to make. The thing that bugs me about cousin_it’s attitude here and in general is the dismissiveness; not just “hey, looks like the outside view evidence isn’t that strong here, so inside view or bust, I guess” but “this thing is stupid and low-status and anyone who likes it is probably also stupid and low-status, after all, a meta-analysis said so.”
Like, I can’t tell people what CoZE experiments to run, but I’m going to continue to object to people doing what feels to me like trying to make particular classes of illegible CoZE experiments low-status to run. I think illegible CoZE experiments are important and that there are large classes of bugs you basically can’t solve any other way.
Some people have the great fortune of being able to do what they want without ever running into such a bug; good for them, but I don’t want those people dismissing the experiences of people who aren’t so lucky.
@Qiaochu: I would be interested in Double Cruxing about this sometime, and then maybe writing down the results from our conversation. If you are up for that.
Ah, yes. Sorry. The motivation for writing this comment was less ”Qiaochu is wrong about something and here is why” and more “I feel something was slightly off with the framing in that two comment exchange, and here is how the trade off looks to me internally”. I should have made that clearer (writing on my phone seems to have some drawbacks I haven’t properly considered).
I basically agree with you that the dismissive framing seems pretty bad, and not super productive for the discussion, but emotionally seems like a fine attitude to have (I just think it starts having externalities when that attitude shapes the discourse significantly, e.g. by labeling things as low-status).
Thanks for sharing the social anxiety thing. I do actually think that that’s pretty good evidence, and I am interested in hearing more about your models of what drove that change.
Effective for who? And what are your priors on how easy it is to teach things, in general? There’s a big difference between “tries to teach X” and “successfully teaches X.”
I’m not sure what you mean by this, mostly because I don’t know what you think my position is on what meditation and/or mysticism can do for people. Most of my comment is arguing against what I take to be a bad argument; the only place where I describe my position is the very end, where I only describe my own experience in vague terms and don’t make any claims about what other people might or might not get out of meditation.
I’m about to run an experiment at the CFAR office in a few weeks where I try to teach a bunch of people how to strengthen their ability to acquire trustworthy inside views / gears models through learning mathematics—exactly the sort of thing you think is important.
I would not have been capable of doing this in any of the previous years you’ve known me, because I spent nearly all of those years crippled by social fears that prevented me from doing anything like organizing events on my own. I’ve been working through these fears in all sorts of ways, but mostly through circling and tantra (although at the end improving my diet seems to have been key as well; I still don’t have a great gears model of what’s been happening to me). Some of the parts that sounded like woo were actually important and taught me actual skills that I actually use to resolve my emotional bugs.
Yeah, that’s fine, I can’t tell people what tradeoffs to make. The thing that bugs me about cousin_it’s attitude here and in general is the dismissiveness; not just “hey, looks like the outside view evidence isn’t that strong here, so inside view or bust, I guess” but “this thing is stupid and low-status and anyone who likes it is probably also stupid and low-status, after all, a meta-analysis said so.”
Like, I can’t tell people what CoZE experiments to run, but I’m going to continue to object to people doing what feels to me like trying to make particular classes of illegible CoZE experiments low-status to run. I think illegible CoZE experiments are important and that there are large classes of bugs you basically can’t solve any other way.
Some people have the great fortune of being able to do what they want without ever running into such a bug; good for them, but I don’t want those people dismissing the experiences of people who aren’t so lucky.
Sure, I’d be interested. Send me an email.
Ah, yes. Sorry. The motivation for writing this comment was less ”Qiaochu is wrong about something and here is why” and more “I feel something was slightly off with the framing in that two comment exchange, and here is how the trade off looks to me internally”. I should have made that clearer (writing on my phone seems to have some drawbacks I haven’t properly considered).
I basically agree with you that the dismissive framing seems pretty bad, and not super productive for the discussion, but emotionally seems like a fine attitude to have (I just think it starts having externalities when that attitude shapes the discourse significantly, e.g. by labeling things as low-status).
Thanks for sharing the social anxiety thing. I do actually think that that’s pretty good evidence, and I am interested in hearing more about your models of what drove that change.