On rereading, I really liked the second portion of Abrams post, but I strongly second this comment, and think it does not go far enough—on two fronts.
First, my understanding is there is a disagreement in the literature, and that dreams aren’t things that get recalled, but it’s unclear exactly how much is post-facto confabulation, and how much is your brain inferring details that weren’t imagine at the time. Given that, I think that recalling dreams is a misleading example, and regardless of which interpretation is correct, would be a worrying model for recall.
Second, I agree with the personal epistemic issue, since I am largely aphantasic, and rarely “remember” dreams. That said, the reason I reacted strongly against the opening passage is a combination of my personal inside-view inability to relate, and my understanding that the example is misleading, especially compared to how useful the remainder of the post is. That means that I was turned off from the post early on, and had to reread the second half to reevaluate whether I was unfairly dismissive. I decided that I was, but it was a high bar, and if I hadn’t known that the author was usually really insightful, I wouldn’t have done so.
It sounds like both of you are people who don’t have experience with remembering dreams, so an opening which for me seemed very relatable didn’t land. Raemon flags his comment as ‘pedagogical note’ and David calls recalling dreams a ‘misleading example’.
But is there more to it than a starting example that didn’t connect? David brings up research which ambiguously suggests there’s a lot of confabulation around dreams. (I’m interested in references.) I had an in-person conversation with someone who read my post and thought the confabulation problem was more broadly damning.
My inside view is that if this were a very serious problem, I’d kind of be screwed. I’m having difficulty taking the position very seriously, because this is such a basic mental move. Of course at some level I’m saying “try doing more of this” and the question is “does doing more of this make things worse?”—in the world where that’s the case, we don’t want to practice this mental motion or encourage it.
Objectively, dreams are kind of a worst-case scenario, since it isn’t possible to check the reality. Subjectively, though, dreams seem to me like a really good case: I don’t always know what I made up later vs what really occurred in the dream, but I (subjectively) know when I don’t know. I often catch myself adding details, and can either tease out what was made up vs what was really there, or conclude that I can’t do so.
I initially wrote this post with the idea of starting a sequence on “rationality as a practice”, IE, trying to dig into things like this which are moment-to-moment habits of thought which one can work to improve no matter one’s current level of skill. Now my feeling is that this sort of thing is bottlenecked on empirical evidence. I would like to know whether the stuff I propose actually increases or decreases confabulation.
I had a lot of uncertainty about whether this ranged from “broadly damning” to “confusing and didn’t land.” I hadn’t thought about it very much. I have enough uncertainty about whether it might be actively misleading and epistemically harmful that I wouldn’t endorse this as an intro-to-truth-post until someone I trusted had looked at / thought about it more carefully. (I think it’s fine as a “random ideas from Abram in 2020” post, but my impression is you had aspirations towards it serving as a good self-contained-intro-to-rationality)
I don’t really know how to actually test if the dream thing works. It seems like it could work fine, or could be pure confabulation. But because it’s a domain that I think is particularly illegible, I currently think that yeah, it’s pretty important to either figure out how to actually check if it works, or remove the dream thing and rework the post pretty significantly. (i.e., that’s the sort of thing I’d expect to want before voting highly on it in the 2020 Review)
(I think it’s fine as a “random ideas from Abram in 2020” post, but my impression is you had aspirations towards it serving as a good self-contained-intro-to-rationality)
Ah. Yeah, I guess I conceived of this as pretty solidly somewhere between those extremes, but the title could be misleading towards the second.
I don’t think of it as a collection of random ideas interesting to me right now. I do think of it as a coherent thing. But I certainly don’t intend it to be an introduction to rationality or even the subtopic of truth-orientedness in rationality.
FWIW, when I have done similar practice on real-life memories rather than dreams, I have sometimes checked my recollection of past events with other people who were there, and they have agreed with my account. Of course they could be influenced by my recollection, but I have sometimes recalled details which I have reason to believe that they would otherwise remember much better than me. For example, a friend showed me an episode of a TV series that she had seen several times before, but which I had not. The next day I used this kind of a technique to bring up details about the plot which I didn’t remember initially, and she confirmed that I remembered them correctly.
So if the technique seems to provide accurate recall rather than confabulation in a non-dream context, it would seem like a reasonable default guess that it would provide accurate recall in a dream context as well.
I like the idea of such a sequence, I’m just less sure that the first half of this post belongs, because of the uncertainty about whether it’s training yourself to invent rather than recall details. As you said, they are a worst-case scenario.
On the other hand, while I think it would be valuable to answer the empirical question, here there is significant uncertainty about the impact, and I suspect it would require reasonably large-N, properly conducted randomized trials rather than personal insight.
The way I currently see it, the second half of the post is more like an assortment of things, which are all tied together by the fact that they elaborate the basic mental movement in the first half of the post. So a post which was just the second half doesn’t seem especially coherent to me.
Could you just take the description of the technique and discuss it in the context of recalling non-dream-related memories? As you note yourself, exactly the same steps seem to work for e.g. recalling events from the previous day.
That’s fine as an issue about writing this as just the second half, but my point was that the ideas in the second half do seem useful, and worth figuring out a good way to present these ideas as a “`rationality as a practice” sequence.
That is, most of them AREN’T ambiguous or bottle-necked by evidence in the same way. There is an argument that they can help, and little reason I see to worry that they are harmful, so they are worth having more people try. Once that is done, and they report their subjective impressions to see what works for people, others can consider if and how it can be validated with more rigorous evidence.
I should have phrased my previous comment as a question—what do you see as valuable about the second half without the first half?
Maybe I can mostly answer that question for myself, though.
“Developing Ideas” is related to the first half, but it’s in an inventive frame—so confabulation is much less of a concern. (But we might similarly doubt it and ask for empirical support.)
“Inner Sim” has separate validation presumably (although I haven’t looked into this).
The motivated cognition section?
“Correcting Yourself” has a pretty obvious story about why it should be useful.
Explaining things to others is very generally observed to be useful, and the connection I make to the first half could be seen as spurious or at least not particularly important.
The question of how to do gears thinking more and better is just pretty important all around. But I think my particular remarks are not any more empirically validated than the memory stuff I mentioned.
Understanding others—same as gears. Important, but not a lot to back up my remarks.
I think what I’m going to do is post a question about what could/should go into such a sequence.
On rereading, I really liked the second portion of Abrams post, but I strongly second this comment, and think it does not go far enough—on two fronts.
First, my understanding is there is a disagreement in the literature, and that dreams aren’t things that get recalled, but it’s unclear exactly how much is post-facto confabulation, and how much is your brain inferring details that weren’t imagine at the time. Given that, I think that recalling dreams is a misleading example, and regardless of which interpretation is correct, would be a worrying model for recall.
Second, I agree with the personal epistemic issue, since I am largely aphantasic, and rarely “remember” dreams. That said, the reason I reacted strongly against the opening passage is a combination of my personal inside-view inability to relate, and my understanding that the example is misleading, especially compared to how useful the remainder of the post is. That means that I was turned off from the post early on, and had to reread the second half to reevaluate whether I was unfairly dismissive. I decided that I was, but it was a high bar, and if I hadn’t known that the author was usually really insightful, I wouldn’t have done so.
It sounds like both of you are people who don’t have experience with remembering dreams, so an opening which for me seemed very relatable didn’t land. Raemon flags his comment as ‘pedagogical note’ and David calls recalling dreams a ‘misleading example’.
But is there more to it than a starting example that didn’t connect? David brings up research which ambiguously suggests there’s a lot of confabulation around dreams. (I’m interested in references.) I had an in-person conversation with someone who read my post and thought the confabulation problem was more broadly damning.
My inside view is that if this were a very serious problem, I’d kind of be screwed. I’m having difficulty taking the position very seriously, because this is such a basic mental move. Of course at some level I’m saying “try doing more of this” and the question is “does doing more of this make things worse?”—in the world where that’s the case, we don’t want to practice this mental motion or encourage it.
Objectively, dreams are kind of a worst-case scenario, since it isn’t possible to check the reality. Subjectively, though, dreams seem to me like a really good case: I don’t always know what I made up later vs what really occurred in the dream, but I (subjectively) know when I don’t know. I often catch myself adding details, and can either tease out what was made up vs what was really there, or conclude that I can’t do so.
I initially wrote this post with the idea of starting a sequence on “rationality as a practice”, IE, trying to dig into things like this which are moment-to-moment habits of thought which one can work to improve no matter one’s current level of skill. Now my feeling is that this sort of thing is bottlenecked on empirical evidence. I would like to know whether the stuff I propose actually increases or decreases confabulation.
I had a lot of uncertainty about whether this ranged from “broadly damning” to “confusing and didn’t land.” I hadn’t thought about it very much. I have enough uncertainty about whether it might be actively misleading and epistemically harmful that I wouldn’t endorse this as an intro-to-truth-post until someone I trusted had looked at / thought about it more carefully. (I think it’s fine as a “random ideas from Abram in 2020” post, but my impression is you had aspirations towards it serving as a good self-contained-intro-to-rationality)
I don’t really know how to actually test if the dream thing works. It seems like it could work fine, or could be pure confabulation. But because it’s a domain that I think is particularly illegible, I currently think that yeah, it’s pretty important to either figure out how to actually check if it works, or remove the dream thing and rework the post pretty significantly. (i.e., that’s the sort of thing I’d expect to want before voting highly on it in the 2020 Review)
Ah. Yeah, I guess I conceived of this as pretty solidly somewhere between those extremes, but the title could be misleading towards the second.
I don’t think of it as a collection of random ideas interesting to me right now. I do think of it as a coherent thing. But I certainly don’t intend it to be an introduction to rationality or even the subtopic of truth-orientedness in rationality.
FWIW, when I have done similar practice on real-life memories rather than dreams, I have sometimes checked my recollection of past events with other people who were there, and they have agreed with my account. Of course they could be influenced by my recollection, but I have sometimes recalled details which I have reason to believe that they would otherwise remember much better than me. For example, a friend showed me an episode of a TV series that she had seen several times before, but which I had not. The next day I used this kind of a technique to bring up details about the plot which I didn’t remember initially, and she confirmed that I remembered them correctly.
So if the technique seems to provide accurate recall rather than confabulation in a non-dream context, it would seem like a reasonable default guess that it would provide accurate recall in a dream context as well.
I like the idea of such a sequence, I’m just less sure that the first half of this post belongs, because of the uncertainty about whether it’s training yourself to invent rather than recall details. As you said, they are a worst-case scenario.
On the other hand, while I think it would be valuable to answer the empirical question, here there is significant uncertainty about the impact, and I suspect it would require reasonably large-N, properly conducted randomized trials rather than personal insight.
The way I currently see it, the second half of the post is more like an assortment of things, which are all tied together by the fact that they elaborate the basic mental movement in the first half of the post. So a post which was just the second half doesn’t seem especially coherent to me.
Could you just take the description of the technique and discuss it in the context of recalling non-dream-related memories? As you note yourself, exactly the same steps seem to work for e.g. recalling events from the previous day.
That’s fine as an issue about writing this as just the second half, but my point was that the ideas in the second half do seem useful, and worth figuring out a good way to present these ideas as a “`rationality as a practice” sequence.
That is, most of them AREN’T ambiguous or bottle-necked by evidence in the same way. There is an argument that they can help, and little reason I see to worry that they are harmful, so they are worth having more people try. Once that is done, and they report their subjective impressions to see what works for people, others can consider if and how it can be validated with more rigorous evidence.
I should have phrased my previous comment as a question—what do you see as valuable about the second half without the first half?
Maybe I can mostly answer that question for myself, though.
“Developing Ideas” is related to the first half, but it’s in an inventive frame—so confabulation is much less of a concern. (But we might similarly doubt it and ask for empirical support.)
“Inner Sim” has separate validation presumably (although I haven’t looked into this).
The motivated cognition section?
“Correcting Yourself” has a pretty obvious story about why it should be useful.
Explaining things to others is very generally observed to be useful, and the connection I make to the first half could be seen as spurious or at least not particularly important.
The question of how to do gears thinking more and better is just pretty important all around. But I think my particular remarks are not any more empirically validated than the memory stuff I mentioned.
Understanding others—same as gears. Important, but not a lot to back up my remarks.
I think what I’m going to do is post a question about what could/should go into such a sequence.