I just replied to a chunk of this. To respond to a couple other chunks:
that the point of a lot of neo-hippie techniques is to get people out of their “mechanistic reasoning” frame, e.g. to get them to start saying things that they feel without first checking whether those things are true. And more generally to let more aspects of one’s psyche “bubble up”,
IMO, it’s indeed good (and part of the art of rationality) to notice what you’re perceiving without first “checking whether [your perception] is true.” And then it’s good to check afterward. Terry Pratchett has some solid basic rationality in his delightful novel “The Wee Free Men,” in which his protagonist succeeds using “first sight, and second thought”—“first sight” to see what her eyes are actually reporting, without rounding to what she was expecting to see, and “second thought” to double check her thinking.
So I believe the neo-hippies are inline with traditional rationality on this point. (IMO, traditional rationality doesn’t want “mechanistic reasoning,” authority, peer review, your priors, or anything else gating full conscious access to your perceptions, nor the ability to discuss your perceptions.)
I realize you said “saying things they feel”, whereas I said “notice what you perceive”. But “feel” in neohippy circles usually refers to a perception or belief (e.g., “I feel this is risky”). If we discuss only cases where it refers to an emotion (“I feel scared”), well, for those too I’d like to allow them into full consciousness.
man, I really want someone to actually try to “solve psychology” by combining insights from neo-hippies with systematizing thinking.
It makes sense to me that you want that! But it’s not what I want to do, nor what I want aCFAR to do. Maybe try Chris Lakin? I believe he’s trying for something like this, and I cheer for his efforts.
I don’t desire to try this myself, because… my current angle is not [seeing people as things to solve or help, using techniques and models]. It’s more [seeing people as wise self-authored creatures to befriend and build things with, who admittedly have a bunch of ~trauma and parasitic memes and stuff, but who even so mostly need listening and support in their ~autonomous process of making sense of the world and doing things they care about].
In other words, I want something more “I-and-thou” with the people we’re interacting with, compared to “solving psychology” which is more I-it.
Past-me thinks that’s an odd thing for me to trust in, in light of [phenomenon: sometimes I or others thought we handed someone a tool, but actually we handed it to some not-so-aligned-meme that’s squatting in them, and that now uses this tool to get more control.] My current take, though, is that while [accidentally up-powering parasitic memes, to ill effect] definitely happens, this can be mostly avoided by a culture of assisting a central self, who is also a point of pride/authorship, to come more fully online and to notice where they do and don’t have distaste for what’s up. (This is why I like Focusing but don’t like IDC—only Self should be dialog with parts.) (It’s different from pastCFAR!agentiness, which aimed to empower a system 2 virtual self, rather than the Self Gendlin and IFS talk about).
Somehow this is bouncing off me. We should probably talk more directly about it. I’ll quickly give two pointers to what feels like it’s bouncing off:
So I believe the neo-hippies are inline with traditional rationality on this point.
This is enough of a stretch in my ontology that I think we’re probably talking past each other.
I don’t desire to try this myself, because… my current angle is not [seeing people as things to solve or help, using techniques and models]. It’s more [seeing people as wise self-authored creatures to befriend and build things with...]
Yeah, I very much got the latter vibe from LARC. But the former vibe does seem pretty hard to avoid in context where there are designated teachers, and they’re teaching students, and it’s a time-limited container with no expectation of future interaction, and so on.
I also notice that things like meditation traditions are super into a kind of “everyone’s a wise self-authored creature” vibe while also being super into a “here is the tradition of knowledge I’m in, which y’all have come to learn from and be helped by” vibe, and don’t think of them as in conflict.
Hence there’s something here where isn’t quite clicking for me. But you shouldn’t feel pressure to try to explain it in this format.
I agree this conversational format may not work, but I’m finding it helpful for now. I’m gonna keep saying piecemeal bits I care about. (In a more proper conversation, I’d take more care to try to paraphrase you first etc. But I’m liking you sharing the bits you’re sharing.)
I agree one can participate in a tradition of deep know-how (even as a teacher) without being I-it about it. Good cultures are typically like this IMO. I was complaining about “solving psychology,” not about “drawing on a tradition.” Chapter three of CS Lewis’s “The Abolition of Man” points to the difference, if you’ve read it or feel like reading it. A passage:
In older systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him were prescribed by the Tao—a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to depart. They did not cut men to some pattern they had chosen.… They initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which overarched him and them alike. It was but old birds teaching new birds to fly. This will be changed. Values are now mere natural phenomena.… It is one more part of Nature which they have conquered.
(If you somehow feel like investing time in this subpoint, the place I’m coming from here will likely make more sense if you read “The abolition of man”; also happy to try by talking here.)
I would ideally like a tradition where pieces can be individually tested and thrown out, but where it’s still a tradition, not an I-it.
...
I agree there are many known psychological interventions out there of large effect-size and unclear sign, most clearly recreational drugs, but also including e.g. AoA and bodywork. It is at this point a clearly bad idea to go “I’ll go hunting for things with large effects on psychology of unknown sorts, try lots of them, gather people who can try lots of them in dialog, and call this good.”
What’s needed instead is way to tell what’s good.
The rationality community’s traditional answer to “is X psychological intervention good?” is “does it help you form more accurate beliefs” (epistemic rationality) and “does it help you hit your stated / verbally endorsed goals” (instrumental rationality). I still think this notion of “good” helped build stuff that was, in fact, good mostly. (But limited in e.g. not helping the person you mention who doesn’t know how to cry, and in setting people up for burnout, and many similar gaps).
Our new stuff at aCFAR is mostly a small but significant dif from the traditional rationality definition. We keep “form true beliefs” as a goal. But in place of the “instrumental rationality” part: instead of working to aid “agency” and verbally endorsed goals (and the ego who verbally endorses those goals), we’re working with:
pride (with what elicits small sparks/flashes of “I like this,” “this makes me feel warm and empowered and like I like what I stand for,” “this is part of the lineage that made me possible, and that I choose to tend”)
the sources of morale or energy to do stuff
the Self that Eugene Gendlin discusses in Focusing (which is the same as the Self of IFS).
These are all attempts to empower something like “be a cohesive self, who doesn’t glide past tiny notes of discord but instead tunes into all the data coming in, and is in full contact with the outside world, including all known science.”
(I expect to be more articulately coherent on this in about six months.)
ETA: I want one self encountering the outside world full-on. My objection to “solve psychology” as an angle on things, is that it divides me in two: a “psychologist” part, and a “have psychology done to me” part.
(I imagine you, Richard, agree that the goal is like this, but then think the route to this goal is more like “do psychology” / “have psychology done to you”?)
Do you want to try a LessWrong dialog? Are those still a thing?
ETA: Or, if they’re not (or even if they are), maybe a quickly-written coauthored post where we try to exposit where we’re each coming from, what we agree about already, where we seem to have different inclinations, etc?
I just replied to a chunk of this. To respond to a couple other chunks:
IMO, it’s indeed good (and part of the art of rationality) to notice what you’re perceiving without first “checking whether [your perception] is true.” And then it’s good to check afterward. Terry Pratchett has some solid basic rationality in his delightful novel “The Wee Free Men,” in which his protagonist succeeds using “first sight, and second thought”—“first sight” to see what her eyes are actually reporting, without rounding to what she was expecting to see, and “second thought” to double check her thinking.
So I believe the neo-hippies are inline with traditional rationality on this point. (IMO, traditional rationality doesn’t want “mechanistic reasoning,” authority, peer review, your priors, or anything else gating full conscious access to your perceptions, nor the ability to discuss your perceptions.)
I realize you said “saying things they feel”, whereas I said “notice what you perceive”. But “feel” in neohippy circles usually refers to a perception or belief (e.g., “I feel this is risky”). If we discuss only cases where it refers to an emotion (“I feel scared”), well, for those too I’d like to allow them into full consciousness.
It makes sense to me that you want that! But it’s not what I want to do, nor what I want aCFAR to do. Maybe try Chris Lakin? I believe he’s trying for something like this, and I cheer for his efforts.
I don’t desire to try this myself, because… my current angle is not [seeing people as things to solve or help, using techniques and models]. It’s more [seeing people as wise self-authored creatures to befriend and build things with, who admittedly have a bunch of ~trauma and parasitic memes and stuff, but who even so mostly need listening and support in their ~autonomous process of making sense of the world and doing things they care about].
In other words, I want something more “I-and-thou” with the people we’re interacting with, compared to “solving psychology” which is more I-it.
Past-me thinks that’s an odd thing for me to trust in, in light of [phenomenon: sometimes I or others thought we handed someone a tool, but actually we handed it to some not-so-aligned-meme that’s squatting in them, and that now uses this tool to get more control.] My current take, though, is that while [accidentally up-powering parasitic memes, to ill effect] definitely happens, this can be mostly avoided by a culture of assisting a central self, who is also a point of pride/authorship, to come more fully online and to notice where they do and don’t have distaste for what’s up. (This is why I like Focusing but don’t like IDC—only Self should be dialog with parts.) (It’s different from pastCFAR!agentiness, which aimed to empower a system 2 virtual self, rather than the Self Gendlin and IFS talk about).
Somehow this is bouncing off me. We should probably talk more directly about it. I’ll quickly give two pointers to what feels like it’s bouncing off:
This is enough of a stretch in my ontology that I think we’re probably talking past each other.
Yeah, I very much got the latter vibe from LARC. But the former vibe does seem pretty hard to avoid in context where there are designated teachers, and they’re teaching students, and it’s a time-limited container with no expectation of future interaction, and so on.
I also notice that things like meditation traditions are super into a kind of “everyone’s a wise self-authored creature” vibe while also being super into a “here is the tradition of knowledge I’m in, which y’all have come to learn from and be helped by” vibe, and don’t think of them as in conflict.
Hence there’s something here where isn’t quite clicking for me. But you shouldn’t feel pressure to try to explain it in this format.
I agree this conversational format may not work, but I’m finding it helpful for now. I’m gonna keep saying piecemeal bits I care about. (In a more proper conversation, I’d take more care to try to paraphrase you first etc. But I’m liking you sharing the bits you’re sharing.)
I agree one can participate in a tradition of deep know-how (even as a teacher) without being I-it about it. Good cultures are typically like this IMO. I was complaining about “solving psychology,” not about “drawing on a tradition.” Chapter three of CS Lewis’s “The Abolition of Man” points to the difference, if you’ve read it or feel like reading it. A passage:
(If you somehow feel like investing time in this subpoint, the place I’m coming from here will likely make more sense if you read “The abolition of man”; also happy to try by talking here.)
I would ideally like a tradition where pieces can be individually tested and thrown out, but where it’s still a tradition, not an I-it.
...
I agree there are many known psychological interventions out there of large effect-size and unclear sign, most clearly recreational drugs, but also including e.g. AoA and bodywork. It is at this point a clearly bad idea to go “I’ll go hunting for things with large effects on psychology of unknown sorts, try lots of them, gather people who can try lots of them in dialog, and call this good.”
What’s needed instead is way to tell what’s good.
The rationality community’s traditional answer to “is X psychological intervention good?” is “does it help you form more accurate beliefs” (epistemic rationality) and “does it help you hit your stated / verbally endorsed goals” (instrumental rationality). I still think this notion of “good” helped build stuff that was, in fact, good mostly. (But limited in e.g. not helping the person you mention who doesn’t know how to cry, and in setting people up for burnout, and many similar gaps).
Our new stuff at aCFAR is mostly a small but significant dif from the traditional rationality definition. We keep “form true beliefs” as a goal. But in place of the “instrumental rationality” part: instead of working to aid “agency” and verbally endorsed goals (and the ego who verbally endorses those goals), we’re working with:
pride (with what elicits small sparks/flashes of “I like this,” “this makes me feel warm and empowered and like I like what I stand for,” “this is part of the lineage that made me possible, and that I choose to tend”)
the sources of morale or energy to do stuff
the Self that Eugene Gendlin discusses in Focusing (which is the same as the Self of IFS).
These are all attempts to empower something like “be a cohesive self, who doesn’t glide past tiny notes of discord but instead tunes into all the data coming in, and is in full contact with the outside world, including all known science.”
(I expect to be more articulately coherent on this in about six months.)
ETA: I want one self encountering the outside world full-on. My objection to “solve psychology” as an angle on things, is that it divides me in two: a “psychologist” part, and a “have psychology done to me” part.
(I imagine you, Richard, agree that the goal is like this, but then think the route to this goal is more like “do psychology” / “have psychology done to you”?)
Do you want to try a LessWrong dialog? Are those still a thing?
ETA: Or, if they’re not (or even if they are), maybe a quickly-written coauthored post where we try to exposit where we’re each coming from, what we agree about already, where we seem to have different inclinations, etc?