Briefly on MAPLE, and the broader community
I’d been working on a very long piece of writing to try to contextualize my views here but it seems like now’s the time to try to talk about this stuff online directly.
(I was a resident at Maple for two years from 2019-2021, and then later for six months as a “villager” in 2022, and worked for them remotely for all of 2023.)
I’ve been frustrated by the criticism that’s been made of Maple in public[1], which has seemed mostly unhelpful, and not a productive contribution to the discourse.[2] One person, who I mostly do respect, did a lot of angry and perhaps manipulative finagling behind the scenes about this stuff, but broadly didn’t write about it etc., I’m not sure why.
One story I might tell for that person, and part of why I myself haven’t written about Maple publicly yet, is that it’s very difficult to do so in a way that doesn’t just smear individuals, most of whom are still my friends. Worse is that the discourse will almost invariably take a nuanced and sensitive take, and turn it into mud to sling. It’s surprising and unusual that eg. MIRI and CFAR were able to say “our research project has failed” and “we fucked up, and also our stuff doesn’t really work that well” respectively, without a complete loss of face. That spoke very strongly to the virtue of the rat scene, because this kind of move is more or less a non-starter everywhere else, that I’m aware of.
Lots of ex Maplers I’ve talked to are variously angry, some (newly) traumatized, confused, etc., but the vibe has generally been “gosh it’s fucking complicated,” maybe with some part of “this isn’t my problem to adjudicate.” For myself, I would add “I don’t want to harm people due to my anger, and I don’t trust the discourse here.”
Similarly even the ex Black Lotus people I’ve talked to, where Black Lotus was vastly more cut-and-dry in being insane and harmful, felt that the discourse (even in this case being basically just comprised of rats, since no one cared about Black Lotus outside of our scene) basically threw them under the bus, and misunderstood what happened, what was good about BL, and maybe even what went wrong.
I think that criticism of Maple can’t be made by sneering appeals to Western secular culture.
I think Maple is trying to do something pretty fundamentally weird and illegible, and whatever appropriate critique there might be of it would have to address the broader tradeoffs in which their strategies are being applied. Furthermore their strategies also need to be contextualized in broader historical spiritual culture, etc etc. I don’t think that’s happened yet, partially because it’s too deep and too hard, and because potentially the world is literally at stake. More specifically:
Sleep deprivation, uh, “brainwashing” (intensive indoctrination), and intense social demands from peers and an abbot are standard techniques in monastic traditions from East to West.
Note that these are not the main techniques of these traditions, but still very common features.
It’s interesting that humans seem to have independently invented monasticism, complete with robes and chanting and vows of poverty, at least 3 times, so, well, something is “working” about it one way or the other.
The product of monasteries is saints, at least in small quantities. What identifies a saint is maybe less about the success conditions defined by their tradition (some don’t quite have any, tbc), but more a kind of “perfection of virtue” which is identifiable from outside of the lineage.
To some extent, we might say that laypeople in whatever culture are also just indoctrinated into venerating the defined “saints” and saint-producing institutions of their culture. But, what’s distinctive about these traditions is that they create people (not every monk, certainly, but a relatively consistent minority, in institutions that sometimes last millennia) capable of outstanding displays of virtue as understood by the broader culture, not just their monastic order, and still recognizable for what they are by us, today, in a foreign culture.
It looks like, the way things are going, the most likely outcome of the current AI race is the end of our species. No one wants this, and yet no one seems to be capable of making choices otherwise.
(Fine yes, some people think this is just false, but their arguments insofar as they have them smell like cope. I haven’t seen anti-safetyist arguments that actually address the technical claims made by Eliezer etc.)
Maple’s thesis is that they’re trying to produce saints that can apprehend x-risk, given that extant monastic traditions are all basically conservative and premodern.
The claim here might be something like “the existing incentives just point towards doom, and it will take some very unusual kind of virtue and skill to be able to escape that, and build a way out for others”
Part of the crux here is that under steep tradeoffs, we should be more willing to accept the costs of harming people, especially for modest amounts of harm. Special forces operatives just are traumatized, and no one reasonable says “this is unacceptable under any circumstances.”
However, I don’t think what Maple is doing is working or will work.
AFAICT, Maple traumatizes ~all of its members at least a little bit, and sometimes a fair bit. Note, though, most come in already traumatized, and leave probably on net about as badly off as they were before, maybe a bit better. But this is par for the course for monastic traditions in general, and especially for Rinzai Zen in particular.[3] In some ways this is impossible, and keeping in mind that Maple is doing some memetically problematic stuff as well, but Maple is pretty careful about getting informed consent from people who join.
Re memetic harms in particular, I think that yes, Maple is doing some obviously sketchy stuff re how people are indoctrinated and make spiritual commitments to the cause. I think Maple makes dissenting ideas very difficult to hold within the org, and often has a vibe of “indeed, we all already agree that x, because x is obviously the case and virtuous people would clearly agree,” rather than respecting people’s discernment and autonomy etc.
From my vantage point, Maple is producing few enough micro-saints, and their advanced students seem lopsided enough that I don’t trust their ability to train up a meaningful vanguard. Furthermore I think that probably with the exception of the one actual AI researcher there, people at Maple basically don’t understand what AI is, or maybe even the non-technical incentives that create it, to be able to take any productive actions within the research community or in the broader politics.
More broadly I’m skeptical of attempts at cultural change like this. To some extent this is just an ingrained pessimism on my part, but I would point to countless religious revivals and cultural movements in the last two centuries, that seem to have mostly achieved a few decades of fervor and devotion among their members, and not much else. Maple likes to cite the impact of Quakers on abolitionism, though I’m skeptical. But fine, let’s say abolitionism worked, (first and second wave) feminism somewhat worked, civil rights somewhat worked—though I have a sort of pseudo-marxist view here, that these each have more to do with economic incentives than “cultural progress” per se—but I don’t see any plausible bull case for Maple in the time we have.
Maple is correct about the modern disease, in a very important way.
There’s a couple claims here:
The culture feels something like “confused,” or that it’s forgotten, or at least is quickly forgetting, what all this (being, joy, love, etc.) was for. I don’t have narrow claims about the nature of value in principle, but when I look at what we’re all doing with our time and attention and care, it usually feels monstrous and insane.
There’s a common hippy fantasy that rounds to ~”noble savage” which I think is mostly wrong, and maybe similarly of cottagecore, etc. etc. Things were pretty bad before, in many ways, but the current thing feels much more confused.
On value in principle, the abstractions that are en vogue (usually assuming that value will be
straightforwardly[edit: trivially] tractable to reductionism, or even that we’re almost there, etc.) seem just transparently wrong to me, yes, on the basis of my “”“meditation practice.”””Furthermore, the apprehensions of value that I encounter seem basically cartoonish and grotesque, and I take the fact that people find these compelling or resonant as yet more evidence that something has gone very wrong.
No, I don’t think I’ve just gotten memed into Buddhism, I think Buddhism is probably wrong.
That said, I both don’t trust that Maple as an organization or more importantly as a spiritual community has its head screwed on straight to be able to apprehend the truth, in a way I would recognize or agree with. They also seem tied in knots, with their own packet of institutional and lineage trauma, and I don’t really want to see their schtick diffused into my communities and the broader culture.
One common feature of critiques of Maple which is especially frustrating to me, especially from ex Maplers, is that they can only be made by recourse to some secular liberal scientism, and refuse to meet Maple and Soryu, as they say, “where they’re at.” To be clear, I haven’t done that here either, and maybe doing so could be a life’s work, and probably not mine.
I’ll add that I think rats are largely already doing their job here, and I don’t really think that “direct apprehension of goodness” or whatever is going to solve alignment. Nonetheless I’m still deeply sympathetic to something at least adjacent to Maple’s perspective, which is a large part of why I’ve stuck around all this hippy bs for so long.
- ^
I have three in mind, whom I won’t name, but just to be explicit I’m not counting @habryka here.
- ^
Also just to note, the Aella post from 2021 was probably fine, though her post was actually just “maybe this is bad? I’m not sure” (with a followup a month later of “actually I think it’s probably fine”).
- ^
Maple isn’t technically “in the lineage” of Rinzai, and doesn’t have any Zen lineage-holders, but is imo certainly practicing Rinzai in spirit, though they’re careful not to use the language or branding of Zen.
[Caveat: Apart from reading roughly five posts and discussion threads about Maple over the years recently, I have no further context and so am one of the least informed people commenting here. But I think that’s okay because my comment will be about how I think your post comes across to onlookers.]
Even though you’re overall critical of Maple, I still get the impression that the closeness to them has negatively affected your judgment about some things. But maybe I misread the point of the post. To me, it sounds like you’re saying that, while, your impression of Maple is that they traumatize a bit too many people and they don’t seem to produce sufficiently many “saints” (or, as early indicators of success: “micro saints”) for these methods to be worth it, you think it’s important (so I infer?) that critics should engage with Maple on the object level of the strategy/path to impact that they’re pursing, because that strategy (of producing saints to help save the world) was possibly worth trying ex ante? In other words, critics shouldn’t sneer at the strategy itself but rather have to at least consider (problems with) its execution?
Assuming the above is an accurate paraphrase, my reply would be that, no, that sort of strategy never made much sense in the first place, and obviously so. You don’t save the world by doing inward-looking stuff at a monastery, and “path to impact through producing saints” seems doubtful because:
(1), people who greatly inspire others almost never started out as followers in a school for how to become inspiring (this is similar to the issues with CFAR, although I’d say it was less outlandish to assume that rationality is teachable rather than sainthood).
(2), even if you could create a bunch of particularly virtuous and x-risk-concerned individuals, the path to impact would remain non-obvious from there, since they’d neither be famous nor powerful nor particularly smart or rational or skilled, so how are they going to have an outsized impact later?
Overall, this strategy does not warrant the “under steep tradeoffs, we should be more willing to accept the costs of harming people” outlook.
I feel like if the recruitment and selling point was less about “come here to have tons of impact,” and more about “have you always thought about joining a monastery, but you’re also into rationality and x-risks reduction?,” then this would be more okay and safer? A group oriented that way would maybe also be more generally relaxed and “have Slack,” and would be more alarmed if they were causing harm rather than trying to justify it via the potential of having impact. So, I feel like the points you raise sort-of-in-defense of Maple make things worse because all these attempts of explaining how the mission is important for world-saving are what adds pressure to the Maple environment.
My model of MAPLE is that this is exactly the crux. The theory of impact that they have is based on developing a potent enough ideology (a “meme”) that then spreads among powerful actors in the real world affecting their actions.
Currently they are in the design phase and are not looking to scale but eventually this “design a trustworthy religion” will become “offer the religion to cyborgs around the world”. Cyborgs are those humans who closely integrate AI, tech into their workflows, building a sort of exocortex.
If we don’t live in the FOOM world, then imagine how gradual disempowerment will play out. We will see increasing inequality in competence, productivity, capability as these models get more powerful. Also these cyborgs will be even more isolated, confused, lonely and due to suffering be keen to explore alternative religions to make sense of the world and decide on what motivations to pursue as meaningful, moral, etc.
It is these cyborgs that will first see consensus reality break down and traditional frameworks of meaning making will fail to help them properly orient to the world. Already we are seeing this with chatbots that are able to provide us “intimacy”, making us feel seen better than our friends. When algorithms can optimise our quantified self better than our own intuition, won’t more people abdicate their power to these systems?
The future of our species will depend on how empathetic, kind, compassionate, wise these cyborgs are. So I believe MAPLE is trying to design a lens to see the world, a perspective that resonates with them, that is true and ensures we continue to believe in truth being more than just predictive power, the ability to manipulate and control the external world, rather it is about living in harmony with other sentient beings.
They have an online course here which is likely more accurate than my interpretation. But during my stay with them as an AI fellow I got to interact with the students there and ask questions about why they believed the key was to cultivate the mind, how mind was chief.
Religions or ideologies are powerful because they form the framework by which we coordinate at scale. The current AI Alignment problem is not just a technical problem but a socio-technical problem, we are dealing with actors taking selfish actions, falling into race dynamics and feeling helpless due to the incentive structures around us.
In this video Soryu talks about how impactful religions have been in determining the flow of history. Towards the end he emphasises how people who deem themselves secular are in fact religious themselves. We have humanistic religions that hold human connection to be sacred and fundamental to meaning, scientific religions that hold reductionist, materialistic perspectives to be an axiomatic truth.
These systems make factual claims about what Is true about the world and then try to act innocent when normative claims (Ought) emerge (interdependently) as a consequence of believing in the factual claims. This relates to what herschel was saying about the culture being confused. If we believe that the basic ontology of reality is matter then concepts like love, joy, friendship will be reduced to transactional details, we can have allies that we cooperate with but we stop believing in anything valuable which cannot be reified. We seem to confused the map with the territory and believe that the representation can fully capture the referent.
I find all this very interesting and uncorrelated with other approaches to solve the alignment problem. I’d love to see more empirical falsifiable tests that could be designed to investigate the sort of moral realism adjacent (maybe?) implications of the claim that there is no hume’s gap.
Thanks for an object level response!
Yup, that’s an accurate enough paraphrase.
I’ll say first, I… don’t actually endorse their model, maybe at all, but this post was to contextualize what the model even is, and that it’s maybe in principle plausible, and that their choices are made with respect to that, rather than just random-spiritual-community-is-bad-just-because-they’re-bad.
I think this is kind of wrong, lots of religious leaders trained within standard institutions within established traditions, lots of musicians get extensive training/coaching in all the aspects of performance besides their instrument etc. This also isn’t really a crux, because:
So Maple’s theory of change is not necessarily “get people enlightened, and then make sure they’re as agentic as possible”, but more like, get people enlightened, and then some combination of:
use whatever wisdom they gain to solve technical alignment
(this seems mostly just silly to me)
have them diffuse that wisdom into eg. tech culture, “purifying it from the inside-out’”
(again, I don’t think this is likely at all, like I said, but maybe more plausible)
resolve the incentives of the AI race domestically and internationally… somehow
I think this falls under the general concept of Pascal’s abuser: “Hey, I am doing something obviously harmful, but under my reasoning it has a microscopic chance of saving the world, therefore it’s okay.”
Which is precisely what Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults? is about.
This feels somehow like a straw, but reflecting on it briefly it also feels like a hole in my explanation, and maybe that I’m just wrong here.
Maybe a different story I could tell would be that it’s more like “if you want, you can join us in trying to do something really hard, which has power law returns, knowing that the modal outcome is burnout and some psychological damage”, so comparable to competitive bodybuilding, or maybe classical musical training, or doing a startup. (Edit: note, Maple doesn’t include the “modal outcome is moderate psychological damage” part, though neither do the examples really.)
I don’t know enough about Maple to have an opinion on it. Here I am operating on feelings, and they remind me of Leverage Research. A project separate enough, so it’s not my business what they are doing… except when they fuck up, and then it becomes an “abuse in the rationalist community”. Also, they recruit a lot in the rationalist community.
These projects are justified by potential benefits, but I also see some potential negative externalities. (And by the same Pascalian logic, we should be extra careful about bad things happening to people who want to save the world?)
After reading this post, I’m confused. What is wrong with the criticism of Maple in the public?
Your own post seems to argue that Maple is using dangerous religious techniques in a way that traumatizes people in a misguided attempted to prevent AI-caused extinction in a way that obviously wouldn’t work even if their technique was successful (which it’s not).
(I don’t know anything about Maple outside of this post)
Has Maple done this? It seems important to mention if this was a failure that they learned from or if they’re still doing it.
I thought this commentary on MAPLE by a former resident was interesting:
Thank you for posting this!
I’ve not been to MAPLE, but have met Soryu several times and have spoken to many people who have been.
In addition to everything you mention, I think outsiders to Zen and Buddhism in general may not appreciate how weird it is that Soryu is not a lineage holder.
Zen, like many religions, claims its teachers have authority because they have been trained in an unbroken chain of transmission traced back to the founder, in this case the Buddha. The first millennium of dharma transmission claims are arguably based in fact but the specific record is mythical, but they’re probably accurate after the 8th century. This is somewhat similar to the situation in Catholicism, where the first 200 years or so of apostolic transmission claims are suspect, but get more reliably after, apparently firmed up to defeat the Gnostic heresy.
Traditionally, it’s pretty common that anyone leading anything in Zen has dharma transmission. In Japan, even the lowliest temple priest has received transmission, though not permission to teach. Soryu, to the best of my knowledge, is in the opposite situation: he received some limited permission to teach (though the bounds of that permission are unclear to me), but did not receive transmission, so he cannot be said to be fully initiated into the lineage in which he trained and thus can’t pass it on.
What this effectively means is that he teaches based on charismatic authority. This is not unheard of in religions, though it is unusual within Zen. A great many religions rely on charismatic authority in some form, though the strongest version of it I’m familiar with is in Evangelical Christianity. Some forms of Buddhism even rely heavily on charismatic authority, although it is usually made verified by other teachers granting assent that someone has, say, uncovered a dharma treasure that was transmitted directly to their mind.
I bring all this up just to make it clear that Soryu is a very non-traditional “Zen” teacher, though as noted, MAPLE is careful to avoid making any untrue claims about their lineage (though I expect outsiders to get confused!). I’m not sure if it’s good or bad that he doesn’t have transmission. For me, it put me off personal interest in getting too involved with MAPLE because it made it harder for me to trust that he knew what he was doing. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t, just that I can’t fall back on transmission as evidence that he should be trusted even when things seem like they are going sideways (not that teachers with transmission have never done anything wrong, but it means he doesn’t get to start from a place of trust granted to him by another teacher).
Could you clarify, please—what exactly is “transmission”? Transmission of what? (Or is this a case where the word “transmission” means something other than what it usually means?)
Likewise, this:
What is this to be contrasted with? If he had “received transmission”, then he would be teaching based on …? (And what is the practical difference between these two states of affairs?)
Enlightenment as recognized by someone who was themselves enlightened, with a base case of the Buddha.
In the Christian tradition, ordination (transforming someone from a layperson to a clergymember) typically requires laying on hands. A priest was touched by someone who was touched by someone who—all the way back to Jesus. (And, like, not just “they shook hands”, but “they were acknowledged as clergy by the existing clergy.” Jesus acknowledged his apostles, who then acknowledged others, and so on.)
The more decentralized traditions forego this; everyone can read the Bible, after all, and so anyone can teach the Bible to others. Charismatic authority is the concept that ‘you lead because others are willing to follow you’. With a Catholic priest, you don’t just have “people are still deciding to come to his church” as evidence, you also have “the bishop decided this guy was worthy of being a priest” as well. It’s social proof.
In Buddhism, dharma transmission is similar ‘social acknowledgement’ but the subject matter is different. The Buddha gave a lesson, one of his disciples looked like they got it, and the Buddha says “that guy gets it”, and he became the first ‘Buddhist patriarch’. Later some of his disciples got it, and he recognized them as getting it, and so on down the line. (As Gordon says, the early parts of this were probably mythical / backfilled to make sense, but eventually this became rigorous.)
That is, if I told you my ideas about Buddhism or enlightenment, I’m just some guy, and maybe my ideas are correct and maybe they aren’t, and probably you should ask the Buddhists what Buddhism is. If someone has dharma transmission, they count as one of the Buddhists (though they don’t all agree with each other, as you might imagine).
I see, thanks.
This page about Soryu says “As a teenager, he entered a Rinzai monastery, where he was ordained under the renowned Zen Master Shodo Harada Roshi.” Is this a straightforward lie, or is there some nuance of meaning here that makes it a technical truth but misleading, or…?
In this case neither misleading nor a lie. Ordination in Zen is generally a much lower threshold, and sometimes orthogonal from Dharma Transmission, and just requires a commitment to the tradition, not some demonstrated understanding.
Yeah, see, that still seems misleading to me. I mean, I read @Vaniver’s explanation, it made sense to me, and if you asked me to summarize it, I would’ve said “dharma transmission is basically ordination”. So when I read on that page that Soryu was “ordained”, that matched up perfectly with the aforementioned understanding, and I assumed that the description was referring to this “dharma transmission” stuff. I would never have even suspected that the truth was that “ordination” is “a much lower threshold, and sometimes orthogonal” relative to “dharma transmission”!
No mostly that was Vaniver having been confusing in context. Like, if you just leave out the Catholic part of the explanation it’s just “(mythologized) transmission of authority from the Buddha”, which Soryu doesn’t have and isn’t being misleading about. Even within Catholicism, monastic ordination != priestly ordination, IIRC you can’t have both, but in Orthodoxy you can, but they’re still orthogonal etc.
While I have no reason to think Soryu intends to mislead anyone, I do think he’s at times represented his credentials in a way that would be confusing for people outside Zen.
A lot of the problem is that in English we use fewer words than in Japanese to describe distinct concepts. So it may help to walk you all through how it works, at least in the Soto tradition (my understanding is that it’s approximately the same in Rinzai, which is Soryu’s tradition, but with some differences because of different teaching styles and a notably different step at the end).
The first step is jukai. This is when one avows the 16 Boddhisattva precepts and receives robes (in the form of a rakusu) and an outer dharma name (the new name one takes when “leaving home” to join the sangha).
If one trains to become a priest, the next step is tokudo, or “crossing over (to the other shore)”. At this point one may receives an inner dharma name (that replaces one’s personal name, just as the outer dharma name traditionally replaces one’s family name) and an okesa (a more traditional robe that is worn in addition to the rakusu). It’s also at this point that one receives “transmission” of a kind because priests are lineage holders. They are not permitted to pass on the lineage to others, though. They generally have permission to teach zen in addition to permission to perform general religious ceremonies, but cannot perform jukai or any other acts of ordination.
A priest may later receive denkai, which is a kind of formal permission to teach because it allows the priest to give jukai and thereby transmit the precepts. This does not give them the power to offer tokudo, though, and generally just means that they can either give the precepts to send novices to a monastery or, in more recent times, give jukai to lay people (generally considered a type of lay ordination). In the West, some lay practitioners have also gone through denkai and are a type of lay teacher who you might think of as roughly equivalent to a pastor.
When someone says that have received “dharma transmission” or “full transmission” this generally refers to shiho, which literally means the person has inherited the dharma. This is what traditional teachers who run monasteries have. In the West, most teachers also have this kind of transmission, including lay teachers who did not ordain as priests (thus at shiho they receive an inner dharma name, an okesa, and enter the lineage at the same time they receive their kotsu (a short wooden stick that signifies their authority in ceremonies, although they may use any of several other implements in place of the kotsu for special occasions) and denkai). Shiho gives the teacher the additional authority to give shiho to another. A lay teacher who was not ordained as a priest would only have permission to pass on a lay lineage, though, as they obviously cannot offer priest training, though could in theory give shiho to a student who was ordained as a priest by another teacher.
Now to be clear, the story on shiho is complicated. In Japan, it serves two purposes. One is to pass down abbotships from father to son, where both may have little actual realization and may not have practiced much, since shiho is required to be the abbot of some temples, which are often run like a family business. The other purpose is the one it serves in the West: to transmit authority to those who are deemed qualified to teach. So just be aware that dharma transmission can mean something different in Japan compared to in the West.
Okay, so the last type of transmission I’ll mention is inka shomei, which is the certification or “seal of approval” Rinzai teachers receive when they complete the koan curriculum. The Rinzai school is a bit more complicated than Soto because lots of stuff is tied to passing koans, and in Japan, Rinzai teachers receive inka shomei in place of shiho, while in the West it’s more muddled and depends on the lineage. I’m more removed from Rinzai, so I can’t speak to much detail on the specifics (though note I practice in a lineage where the root teacher, Maezumi, received Soto shiho and later Rinzai inka shomei from a different teacher, causing a lot of confusion for everyone by mixing the two schools and mixing in Western elements).
So, with all this context, what’s up with Soryu? I don’t know. He’s definitely received jukai, which is why he’s named “Soryu”. I’m unclear if when he says “ordained” he means he was ordained as a priest. It sounds like he’s received some kind of teaching permission from one or more teachers, which maybe counts as denkai, but it could have been a less formal teaching permission (e.g. I have a degree informal teaching authority: I have permission to teach zazen and basic zen concepts, but have not gone through any formal ceremonies for this after jukai, and I’m expected to be fairly conservative in my approach because my limited permission exists under the supervision of my teacher and could be revoked at any time if I’m not teaching well).
This seems like something we could just ask him about to clarify. Unless I’ve misunderstood, folks at MAPLE generally receive the precepts and go through jukai or something like it, receiving robes and a dharma name, though interestingly not a rakusu.
And as Herschel says, maybe this just doesn’t matter. There are plenty of good teachers who have only charismatic authority. I personally think it matters a lot because Zen students put a lot of trust in their teachers to guide them through the difficult process of awakening, and I think it’s safer to have a teacher who is fully and legibly trusted by their teacher to be their teacher’s peer. But that’s a reflection of my risk appetite from knowing how harrowing the process was for me and how much harm I’ve seen happen to some people who get too far along the path without adequate guidance. Other people should feel free to take the risks they are willing to take, even if I would not take them.
My understanding as a guy who… watches a bunch of YouTube videos and promises he’s right:
Within Catholicism, becoming a monk is not normally described as “ordination”
Within Catholicism, you can definitely be a monk who’s ordained to the priesthood
But you’re right that there are different change-of-status ceremonies that denote different kinds of entrance into intense official religious life.
FWIW there’s a large number of lay Buddhist teachers in the West, many of them formerly ordained, without lineage transmission. The thing that’s weird in Soryu’s case is that he’s teaching outside of his lineage, without having disrobed. My understanding is that his permission to teach was through Shinzen Young, and I’m not aware of that having been revoked. I expect rats don’t really care about lineage, but eg. Shinzen also gave permission to teach to Michael Taft, who teaches meditation in the Bay, and no one seems to be bothered by.
This is very in the weeds but I think the transmission thing mostly hardly matters, if you’re not already pilled on the tradition in its own (again, mythologized) framework here, then mostly each teacher has to independently demonstrate their reliability and authority, etc.
Speaking only for myself, I consider it a minor red flag, in the sense of “not only is this guy in my outgroup, but even the outgroup thinks that he is weird”.
I am aware that this kinda goes against the conservation of expected evidence, in that if my outgroup said “this guy is perfectly legit”, it probably wouldn’t make a good impression on me. So why should it make a bad impression if they question whether he is legit?
I guess the answer is that even if I deeply disagree with the outgroup, there is still some positive correlation in our values; after all, we are all humans, we care about generally human things. I don’t care about the spiritual consequences of “teaching outside a lineage”, but I care about a more generalized version of “this guy draws his authority from being associated with X, but X say that from their perspective he is associated incorrectly”. I don’t care about X per se, but I care about using some kinds of status moves.
(Sorry, this is mostly off topic.)
“Something is working” in the sense that this is at least a somewhat naturally-occurring strategy that’s a successful enough meme as to not die out immediately. Not in the sense that this is good for the participants involved, or for the broader community it’s a part of to tolerate.
Extractive and oppressive institutions and stationary bandits have also been independently invented hundreds of times by people. They surely “work” well for those elites reaping the benefits of others’ labor and resources. They surely work poorly for the vast majority of the population.
How quaint. The product of extractive and oppressive institutions is renaissance princes, at least in small quantities. How small? Basically irrelevant in the grand scheme of things compared to everything negative that results from them.[1]
The analogy is left to the reader.
Likely nothing more than a collider effect caused by religion impacting both the creation of these cults and the cultural perception of what being virtuous means.
A monk that self-immolates or spends his whole life separated from civilization is “virtuous” because we are told by culture he’s virtuous. Not because his actions bring about goodness for others. It’s almost the quintessential example of broad indoctrination.
Ah yes, never seen arguments that actually address the claims. Except for this, this, this, this, this, this, etc.
Oh wait, those don’t count, you say? They don’t address the real arguments? I’ll leave you this classic 1a3orn post to chew on.
This is abstract vagueposting that’s not sufficiently concrete to be thought of as true or false.
What “culture”? Who doesn’t know what positive emotions are for? AI researchers? Alignment researchers? Rationalists? The outside world? All of these groups seem to have a pretty high desire for enjoyment.
Same here. There are words, and they individually make sense. But when put together, the whole doesn’t, at least without having already been exposed to a lot more of your verbiage and thinking. There’s some other ontology you have that needs to be explained before outsiders can make sense of what you’re saying.
Meeting bad and dumb things “where they’re at” is bad and dumb. Meeting good and smart things “where they’re at” is good and smart. If Maple can’t tell its story without immediately coming into conflict with secular liberal science, then that’s Maple’s problem.
Science and secularism and focusing on the cake are good, actually. Just about the best things a community can possibly embrace. To the extent Maple disagrees with this, it should be criticized and ostracized and everyone should stay as far away from it as possible.
Also, many of those renaissance princes are actually horrible people… oh, wait, many of the supposed “saints” are horrible people too!
I think this link is supposed to go to a different URL? (It’s a repeat of the previous link in your comment, which is about something else, so I suspect a simple copy-paste error.)
Indeed it was. Thanks for pointing it out!
I watched a couple of Soryu’s videos, and I came away deeply unimpressed with him as a philosopher (though I don’t rule out that he might be masterful along other axes).
One thing that I found kind of shocking is that he attributes a huge amount of power and influence to the secular humanist ideology (the “religion that rules the world”) but then gives completely un-ITT passing not-even-straw-man account of what that ideology is, or what it’s proponents would say about specific topics, or why anyone would find it compelling.
Without rewatching it, I believe he states explicitly that “it doesn’t make any sense” (because of some circular dependency?) without (apparently) any curiosity about why this ideology rules the world despite not making any sense, or where it’s power came from. He seems to just brush past it.
It looked to me like he doesn’t understand the ideology that he’s critiquing, at least on it’s own terms, very well. Which doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have some good points, but sure makes me less interested.
(There were also some other signs that his philosophy wasn’t very good / he wasn’t very interested in bridging to people outside his bubble.)
Is this an example of my failing to meet him where he’s at?
I’m also pretty displeased with him as a philosopher and sociologist or whatever. I think when he says things like what you’re referring to, it’s both rhetorical abuse, and he’s trying to do something like evoke the “functional core” or “revealed affective posture” or maybe just “vibe”, regardless of whatever the explicit arguments are that some ideology uses. I think this is definitely the right move sometimes but I agree that Soryu kind of sucks at it, or is using mostly inappropriately.
Fair, no, obviously giving people a normal kind of fair shot is fine, though this wasn’t really what I meant. The thing that I was criticizing in that line would be more like “criticizing the output of his views without addressing the generators” (which is sorta what you’ve done here, but I’m not bothered by in context), vs “addressing the conception of value in which his claims are made.” So specifically, eg. that awakening is more valuable than ~all kinds of material wealth, that species extinction and also just killing of animals generically are a kind of extreme moral injury, etc. Those are fine to disagree with, and I disagree with them, but ignoring those kinds of cruxes makes the critiques mostly sort of useless/irrelevant.
This general sort of claim has never made sense to me. Is there an accessible to outsiders attempt to justify it in a way not obviously contradictory with the materialist scientific understanding of the world? In particular, I’m confused about why we would evolve with a capacity for extremely valuable “awakening”, when presumably not a single of our distant enough ancestors had ever “awoke”, and very few contemporaries ostensibly do.
This post is not organized well.
Explain what MAPLE is first?
Undefined vocabulary often means the post is aimed at people who are already familiar.
Link to MAPLE’s website
This is not at all central to the topic of the post, but:
I’m familiar with MIRI’s public “our research project has failed” commentary. However, I can’t recall any public “we fucked up, and also our stuff doesn’t really work that well” comments from CFAR. Does anyone have any links they can provide for this?
Comment reply: my low-quality thoughts on why CFAR didn’t get farther with a “real/efficacious art of rationality”
Thanks!
Quoting the provided summary, for convenience of anyone reading this:
I’m not sure that I’d characterize the position taken in the linked post as “we fucked up, and also our stuff doesn’t really work that well”, frankly… but I agree that it’s plausible that it’s what OP had in mind.
I had that in mind, and some things people wrote after the Brent Dill stuff.
I also, was surpised at that. (Also I worked at CFAR for 5 years).
(I might just be wrong here. I had some memory that after the Brent Dill affair there were some “we bungled the whole thing, actually, and people were harmed as a result” type posts on facebook.)
Sure that definitely happened. But that didn’t have any comment at all on CFAR’s “stuff”. (Though of course, one might reason “wow, those guys don’t seem that good at decision making.”)
Er, well, it was that plus stuff like this post that Ray linked above (I didn’t necessarily remember this exactly, maybe there was just this one post.) If my gloss landed wrong I’m mostly glad to defer to you there.
I definitely don’t think that CFAR ever made any kind of public “actually we think our stuff doesn’t work” statement, though many individuals who were involved with CFAR (such as myself) do have various complaints and disappointments, which we sometimes talk publicly or privately about.
I am sympathetic to the revolutionary vanguard approach. But MAPLE seems to have even less success in the approach than the SRs of the russian revolution. At least the SRs tried going to the people first—telling them “peasants, you are being exploited and you could change your condition!”.
From the outside, I don’t see any saintly accomplishments that look like “trying to apprehend alignment” at a robust mechanical level.