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.
Yes. This is what I was looking for. It makes way more sense now. I broadly agree with everything said here. Thank you for clarifying.
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.