I like this essay and overall I agree with it. I especially like the parts about discourse norms, and the importance of phrasing distinctions like “X” vs. “I suspect that X”.
Next, I will talk about something other than the parts I like, using disproportionately many words.
When I ran into the subheadding “The Obvious Objection: Get Out Of My Head”, I expected to encounter a description of my own usual objection to your essays that introduce new words, which I think is pretty well captured by the phrase “get out of my head”. But I did not encounter my own usual objection!
According to my reading, the main objection you discuss seems to suppose that the objector is concerned about running out of space in which to store distinctions and words. The main problem in this case is that many distinctions and concept handles are “useless”.
I personally am concerned about a different limited capacity, which is (something like) my ability to perceive different distinctions whose corresponding swaths of territory overlap with the ones your distinctions track.
Suppose you say, “‘Doobockle’ is this thing that’s going on with how some people are wrong about their own preferences.” I hear and understand you, and now I have the word “doobockle”, and I also effortlessly perceive doobockle in the social landscape.
However, if I have never thought deeply before about how people relate to their own preferences, then at least in my case, I will now find it much, much harder to do so in a way that does not structurally presuppose “doobockle”. I may be able to ask “yes doobockle, or no doobockle?” of my observations, pretty easily; but original seeing will be much harder: Forming an entirely new distinction out of my own assessment of my direct observations will cost me a lot more than it would have without “doobockle”.
Overall, I think it is much better for people to be saying “Doobockle is X” when it seems useful to them, than to avoid using short words and phrases as handles for the distinctions they perceive. But I think there are probably some tools for sharing new concepts that invite relatively more original seeing from the reader (indeed, I think some of them are central to my own way of writing); and as someone whose cognitive architecture is particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon (or at least unusually sensitive to it), I would like to figure out what those approaches are, and I would like for the most conceptually generative among us (such as yourself) to use them.
I do not mean to say that protecting a reader’s capacity for original seeing is solely the responsibility of an author. Not even close. Outside of spaces with names like “Less Wrong”, it’s probably not all that important, from a “what is good writing” standpoint, and in fact writing that prioritizes this tends to be a bit less effective along some other important axes, such as stickiness and brevity. And even within spaces with names like “Less Wrong”, preserving my capacity for original seeing is mostly my job, as a reader, just as it’s mostly my job not to adopt useless terms even if all the cool kids are doing it.
Still, I think this is a reasonable objection to some presentations of new terms. When I get mad at your essays, it is usually because I want them to be better on this axis, so that I feel like I’m primarily cooperating with you as a reader, rather than primarily defending my own ability to think.
These have been disproportionately many words in critical response to something that I primarily like and agree with.
To bring up a specific instance of this kind of problem: that lw post on open/active curiosity absolutely devastated my ability to think about curiosity for no less than a month. Every time I’d prompt myself to think about curiosity, my thoughts would flow toward the “open/active” concept shapes; I didn’t know how to stop it (and I very much wanted to stop it. I was frustrated, found the shapes of to be misconfigured, a poor fit. I couldn’t access my previous thought configurations on the topic, as they were temporarily overwritten).
The only defense I found in the end was to stop prompting myself on the topic; it took about a month for the shapes to fade, for the forgetting to naturally occur. (I’ve long thought of Forgetting as an important skill in research; the ability to let wrong shapes fade away.)
While we’re on the topic, I’ll note that Logan-concepts, rare as they are, are WAY more likely (than Duncan-concepts, for example) to transfigure or hijack my thinking shapes. I’m not sure what’s up with that yet.
(Something something, the compression level at which Duncan talks about things is not really the compression level at which I like to think, and so the concepts can’t really make a home there and stick? Something to do with a scope mismatch? Not feeling confident on these guesses, though.)
I think I have historically probably written essays in a similar style to Duncan that I presume would cause a similar problem. I’ve updated more on this viewpoint of “invite more original seeing” being pretty valuable.
I do find it not-costless (i.e. ignoring how much extra time it takes to write, something feels missing when I explicitly focus on it). But I’m keeping it in mind more in my writing.
If you can put your finger on it, I’d love to hear what thing(s) feel like they’re missing when you explicitly focus on inviting original seeing. Not because I’m surprised that something ends up missing (I’m not!), but because understanding this may help the rest of us to do it better. I’d also love to hear what exactly you do when you attempt to invite original seeing.
Not speaking for Ray, of course, but some of the things that occur to me:
Some people are desperately seeking guidance/help/something to cling to; they’ve been trying to make sense of things and failing, and when someone is already struggling, being like “here’s an opportunity for you to make it all up yourself!” can be extremely demoralizing. Especially when there really actually is a simple conceptual leap that they could’ve just been given, or when the process of helping them see for themselves is not well-formed/well-scaffolded (so it amounts to being invited to flail around and then also blamed for not having put the pieces together).
There are a million different dog breeds, and dog breeds themselves aren’t clear-cut categories but fuzzy borders around continuous variation; inviting people to all squint at dogs and see for themselves can break something pretty important.
There’s the social aspect of being able to communicate with each other, which is worsened by everyone having their own slightly different categories for all of the dogs.
There’s the information-overwhelm aspect of not being able to abstract away similarities and see that “dog” or (e.g.) “husky” is actually a valid and useful cluster, because you’re trying to process all the axes of variation simultaneously with no starting point.
There’s something important about usage; when I try to reify a new term it’s usually related to usage and if I asked someone to do their own original dog categorization I am sort of robbing them of useful predictive information about, like, “people will try to breed this one with that one” that will be hard for them to independently derive.
Oh, also, in some cases there’s much more convergence than others/much less in the way of cool and interesting and useful stuff to be found in the original seeing; there are some places where original seeing is 100x less payoff-y? Like, my shoulder Logan says something like “the vast majority of humans are extremely atrophied in their ability to see things originally; they should seize every possible opportunity to get in some practice” and I agree but nevertheless I don’t think every opportunity is equally good.
It takes so, so, so much longer, not just to write but also to consume, and I do indeed think that some forms of information learned this way are more deeply grokked and better integrated and better self-motivated but I think that one of the primary benefits of being part of a species that communicates with language is not having to reinvent every single wheel. I think I genuinely believe that the ideal point for most people is something like “fifteen percent of the way Loganwards from where Duncan is” and not “living in the region I conceive of as occupied by Logan/Robin/Anna/Benya.” Like, I think that the individualized education plan for Pokémon of your type is something our culture should absolutely have but that if everybody was taught in that way this would be actually worse?
Something like confirmation. The ever-fretful lovechild of Neville and Hermione does not, at the end of a guided self-investigation, know that they know something? Or at least, not a clumsily done one; I believe that at the end of your naturalism course people ACTUALLY know, and know that they know, something new they have seen and understood. But like, the failure mode of an attempt to cause people to originally see seems much less graceful than the failure mode of providing someone with a new conceptual template, even given that people in general are really bad about conceptual templates and confuse themselves into thinking they’re real.
I think it’s mostly on major thing is the difference between “hey guys, this concept is ready to use, with an implication of ‘Let’s Take Some Actions relating to it’” vs “hey guys, here’s some ideas, are they the right ideas i dunno maybe let’s think some more?”. Usually when I’m forming an idea (in particular relating to social interactions), it’s because I think something is going wrong that warranted thinking about to figure out how to make it go right.
When I shift towards “enable more original seeing on the margin”, I’m mostly giving up (either partly or in-entirety) on using the post as a coordination-rallying-point.
I think it’s basically always the case that a) my conception of a problem isn’t actually fully accurate, b) even if it is, it’s healthy for people to original-see it for themselves. But, also, I think actually solving coordination problems requires taking incremental steps that somewhat simplify things even if you or everyone else is still a bit confused in some way.
My model of you is mostly not trying to do the “rally people in a direction” much at all.
I do think there’s lots of room for improvement at “provoke some kind of action while inviting more-original-seeing-on-the-margin.”
If I were starting from “primarily be teasing out an idea and inviting others to do so”, I might try “write some an intro and final paragraph that distills out my best guesses about what to make of the situation” (while leaving most of the post in exploratory mode). If I were starting from “primarily be rallying people”, ask myself if I’m actually deconfused myself enough for rallying to be reasonable, and regardless phrase the essay with some original-seeing-of-my-own, trying to think through concrete examples without my frame.
I think Noticing Frame Differences leans somewhat in the “teasing out idea” direction, and Recursive Middle Manager Hell leans in the “rally people” direction (Recursive Middle Manager Hell was itself a distillation of Zvi’s Mazes sequence that I think pushed much harder against original seeing and instead just pushing a frame to rally people around).
>My model of you is mostly not trying to do the “rally people in a direction” much at all.
Perhaps a bit off topic, but: I think actual me in fact is trying to “rally people in a direction” to a substantial degree!
Except that “rally” is perhaps not a very good word for my strategy. I’m not sure what to call it, but I think that I am very frequently trying to go, “LOOK AT THIS THING. Think about this thing. If I just tell you about it and argue for it you will not have looked at it, and I want you to look at it. I have looked at it and thought about it and I think it’s important, and I think it’s important that all of us look at it and think about it, because understanding it correctly may be critical to our collective success.” And my overarching project is perhaps something like “Cause people to be able to look at things.”
Nod, makes sense. But your project is fundamentally about the looking-at-things, whereas main is more like “let’s look at things when that’s useful” but it’s not the primary goal.
Harumph, I also say “let’s look at things when that’s useful” and I do not consider looking at things to be the primary goal. “Being able to look at things” is an instrumental goal toward “looking at things that it’s useful to look at”, and “figuring out which things it’s useful to look at” is a really big part of “being good at looking at things” [see forthcoming essay “Locating Fulcrum Experiences”]. (My harumph is frustration at my own failure to communicate, not at you.)
Like on various occasions I’ve [something other than rallied] people to look at groundedness, at courage, at dreams, at memory, at learning, at defensiveness, at boredom, at each particular CFAR unit, and at a bunch of other things besides looking itself. Looking itself is only central to my overarching project, because I think it’s a really really important piece of rationality that’s poorly developed in the communal art.
Yeah I agree you have done something-other-than-rallied that results in people looking at the things.
And yeah makes sense that my phrasing didn’t feel like an accurate description of what you said. (I think there is something-my-phrasing-was-meaning-to-point at that is probably a true distinction, but, not sure I can get any closer to it easily)
I also claim that I’ve been fairly successful thus far, at “[something other than rally] people in a direction”, in many cases. Perhaps what I am attempting to communicate in my partial-criticism of this essay is “boo rallying, find better ways to [something] people in directions”.
Note: I did almost no original seeing while writing the previous comment. If I had wanted to, I’d have started with “hmm, what things have I written, what did they actually appear to do? What was it like to write them?” (which I find more effortful than “write my cached headline I remember and then write some stuff to expound on the details”, which is what I actually did. I am more aware of the difference thanks to you, fwiw)
I like this essay and overall I agree with it. I especially like the parts about discourse norms, and the importance of phrasing distinctions like “X” vs. “I suspect that X”.
Next, I will talk about something other than the parts I like, using disproportionately many words.
When I ran into the subheadding “The Obvious Objection: Get Out Of My Head”, I expected to encounter a description of my own usual objection to your essays that introduce new words, which I think is pretty well captured by the phrase “get out of my head”. But I did not encounter my own usual objection!
According to my reading, the main objection you discuss seems to suppose that the objector is concerned about running out of space in which to store distinctions and words. The main problem in this case is that many distinctions and concept handles are “useless”.
I personally am concerned about a different limited capacity, which is (something like) my ability to perceive different distinctions whose corresponding swaths of territory overlap with the ones your distinctions track.
Suppose you say, “‘Doobockle’ is this thing that’s going on with how some people are wrong about their own preferences.” I hear and understand you, and now I have the word “doobockle”, and I also effortlessly perceive doobockle in the social landscape.
However, if I have never thought deeply before about how people relate to their own preferences, then at least in my case, I will now find it much, much harder to do so in a way that does not structurally presuppose “doobockle”. I may be able to ask “yes doobockle, or no doobockle?” of my observations, pretty easily; but original seeing will be much harder: Forming an entirely new distinction out of my own assessment of my direct observations will cost me a lot more than it would have without “doobockle”.
Overall, I think it is much better for people to be saying “Doobockle is X” when it seems useful to them, than to avoid using short words and phrases as handles for the distinctions they perceive. But I think there are probably some tools for sharing new concepts that invite relatively more original seeing from the reader (indeed, I think some of them are central to my own way of writing); and as someone whose cognitive architecture is particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon (or at least unusually sensitive to it), I would like to figure out what those approaches are, and I would like for the most conceptually generative among us (such as yourself) to use them.
I do not mean to say that protecting a reader’s capacity for original seeing is solely the responsibility of an author. Not even close. Outside of spaces with names like “Less Wrong”, it’s probably not all that important, from a “what is good writing” standpoint, and in fact writing that prioritizes this tends to be a bit less effective along some other important axes, such as stickiness and brevity. And even within spaces with names like “Less Wrong”, preserving my capacity for original seeing is mostly my job, as a reader, just as it’s mostly my job not to adopt useless terms even if all the cool kids are doing it.
Still, I think this is a reasonable objection to some presentations of new terms. When I get mad at your essays, it is usually because I want them to be better on this axis, so that I feel like I’m primarily cooperating with you as a reader, rather than primarily defending my own ability to think.
These have been disproportionately many words in critical response to something that I primarily like and agree with.
To bring up a specific instance of this kind of problem: that lw post on open/active curiosity absolutely devastated my ability to think about curiosity for no less than a month. Every time I’d prompt myself to think about curiosity, my thoughts would flow toward the “open/active” concept shapes; I didn’t know how to stop it (and I very much wanted to stop it. I was frustrated, found the shapes of to be misconfigured, a poor fit. I couldn’t access my previous thought configurations on the topic, as they were temporarily overwritten).
The only defense I found in the end was to stop prompting myself on the topic; it took about a month for the shapes to fade, for the forgetting to naturally occur. (I’ve long thought of Forgetting as an important skill in research; the ability to let wrong shapes fade away.)
While we’re on the topic, I’ll note that Logan-concepts, rare as they are, are WAY more likely (than Duncan-concepts, for example) to transfigure or hijack my thinking shapes. I’m not sure what’s up with that yet.
(Something something, the compression level at which Duncan talks about things is not really the compression level at which I like to think, and so the concepts can’t really make a home there and stick? Something to do with a scope mismatch? Not feeling confident on these guesses, though.)
I think I have historically probably written essays in a similar style to Duncan that I presume would cause a similar problem. I’ve updated more on this viewpoint of “invite more original seeing” being pretty valuable.
I do find it not-costless (i.e. ignoring how much extra time it takes to write, something feels missing when I explicitly focus on it). But I’m keeping it in mind more in my writing.
If you can put your finger on it, I’d love to hear what thing(s) feel like they’re missing when you explicitly focus on inviting original seeing. Not because I’m surprised that something ends up missing (I’m not!), but because understanding this may help the rest of us to do it better. I’d also love to hear what exactly you do when you attempt to invite original seeing.
Not speaking for Ray, of course, but some of the things that occur to me:
Some people are desperately seeking guidance/help/something to cling to; they’ve been trying to make sense of things and failing, and when someone is already struggling, being like “here’s an opportunity for you to make it all up yourself!” can be extremely demoralizing. Especially when there really actually is a simple conceptual leap that they could’ve just been given, or when the process of helping them see for themselves is not well-formed/well-scaffolded (so it amounts to being invited to flail around and then also blamed for not having put the pieces together).
There are a million different dog breeds, and dog breeds themselves aren’t clear-cut categories but fuzzy borders around continuous variation; inviting people to all squint at dogs and see for themselves can break something pretty important.
There’s the social aspect of being able to communicate with each other, which is worsened by everyone having their own slightly different categories for all of the dogs.
There’s the information-overwhelm aspect of not being able to abstract away similarities and see that “dog” or (e.g.) “husky” is actually a valid and useful cluster, because you’re trying to process all the axes of variation simultaneously with no starting point.
There’s something important about usage; when I try to reify a new term it’s usually related to usage and if I asked someone to do their own original dog categorization I am sort of robbing them of useful predictive information about, like, “people will try to breed this one with that one” that will be hard for them to independently derive.
Oh, also, in some cases there’s much more convergence than others/much less in the way of cool and interesting and useful stuff to be found in the original seeing; there are some places where original seeing is 100x less payoff-y? Like, my shoulder Logan says something like “the vast majority of humans are extremely atrophied in their ability to see things originally; they should seize every possible opportunity to get in some practice” and I agree but nevertheless I don’t think every opportunity is equally good.
It takes so, so, so much longer, not just to write but also to consume, and I do indeed think that some forms of information learned this way are more deeply grokked and better integrated and better self-motivated but I think that one of the primary benefits of being part of a species that communicates with language is not having to reinvent every single wheel. I think I genuinely believe that the ideal point for most people is something like “fifteen percent of the way Loganwards from where Duncan is” and not “living in the region I conceive of as occupied by Logan/Robin/Anna/Benya.” Like, I think that the individualized education plan for Pokémon of your type is something our culture should absolutely have but that if everybody was taught in that way this would be actually worse?
Something like confirmation. The ever-fretful lovechild of Neville and Hermione does not, at the end of a guided self-investigation, know that they know something? Or at least, not a clumsily done one; I believe that at the end of your naturalism course people ACTUALLY know, and know that they know, something new they have seen and understood. But like, the failure mode of an attempt to cause people to originally see seems much less graceful than the failure mode of providing someone with a new conceptual template, even given that people in general are really bad about conceptual templates and confuse themselves into thinking they’re real.
This is great. Thank you.
(I also endorse all these)
I think
it’s mostlyon major thing is the difference between “hey guys, this concept is ready to use, with an implication of ‘Let’s Take Some Actions relating to it’” vs “hey guys, here’s some ideas, are they the right ideas i dunno maybe let’s think some more?”. Usually when I’m forming an idea (in particular relating to social interactions), it’s because I think something is going wrong that warranted thinking about to figure out how to make it go right.When I shift towards “enable more original seeing on the margin”, I’m mostly giving up (either partly or in-entirety) on using the post as a coordination-rallying-point.
I think it’s basically always the case that a) my conception of a problem isn’t actually fully accurate, b) even if it is, it’s healthy for people to original-see it for themselves. But, also, I think actually solving coordination problems requires taking incremental steps that somewhat simplify things even if you or everyone else is still a bit confused in some way.
My model of you is mostly not trying to do the “rally people in a direction” much at all.
I do think there’s lots of room for improvement at “provoke some kind of action while inviting more-original-seeing-on-the-margin.”
If I were starting from “primarily be teasing out an idea and inviting others to do so”, I might try “write some an intro and final paragraph that distills out my best guesses about what to make of the situation” (while leaving most of the post in exploratory mode). If I were starting from “primarily be rallying people”, ask myself if I’m actually deconfused myself enough for rallying to be reasonable, and regardless phrase the essay with some original-seeing-of-my-own, trying to think through concrete examples without my frame.
I think Noticing Frame Differences leans somewhat in the “teasing out idea” direction, and Recursive Middle Manager Hell leans in the “rally people” direction (Recursive Middle Manager Hell was itself a distillation of Zvi’s Mazes sequence that I think pushed much harder against original seeing and instead just pushing a frame to rally people around).
>My model of you is mostly not trying to do the “rally people in a direction” much at all.
Perhaps a bit off topic, but: I think actual me in fact is trying to “rally people in a direction” to a substantial degree!
Except that “rally” is perhaps not a very good word for my strategy. I’m not sure what to call it, but I think that I am very frequently trying to go, “LOOK AT THIS THING. Think about this thing. If I just tell you about it and argue for it you will not have looked at it, and I want you to look at it. I have looked at it and thought about it and I think it’s important, and I think it’s important that all of us look at it and think about it, because understanding it correctly may be critical to our collective success.” And my overarching project is perhaps something like “Cause people to be able to look at things.”
Nod, makes sense. But your project is fundamentally about the looking-at-things, whereas main is more like “let’s look at things when that’s useful” but it’s not the primary goal.
Harumph, I also say “let’s look at things when that’s useful” and I do not consider looking at things to be the primary goal. “Being able to look at things” is an instrumental goal toward “looking at things that it’s useful to look at”, and “figuring out which things it’s useful to look at” is a really big part of “being good at looking at things” [see forthcoming essay “Locating Fulcrum Experiences”]. (My harumph is frustration at my own failure to communicate, not at you.)
Like on various occasions I’ve [something other than rallied] people to look at groundedness, at courage, at dreams, at memory, at learning, at defensiveness, at boredom, at each particular CFAR unit, and at a bunch of other things besides looking itself. Looking itself is only central to my overarching project, because I think it’s a really really important piece of rationality that’s poorly developed in the communal art.
Yeah I agree you have done something-other-than-rallied that results in people looking at the things.
And yeah makes sense that my phrasing didn’t feel like an accurate description of what you said. (I think there is something-my-phrasing-was-meaning-to-point at that is probably a true distinction, but, not sure I can get any closer to it easily)
I also claim that I’ve been fairly successful thus far, at “[something other than rally] people in a direction”, in many cases. Perhaps what I am attempting to communicate in my partial-criticism of this essay is “boo rallying, find better ways to [something] people in directions”.
But maybe not. I can’t actually belief report “boo rallying”.
Note: I did almost no original seeing while writing the previous comment. If I had wanted to, I’d have started with “hmm, what things have I written, what did they actually appear to do? What was it like to write them?” (which I find more effortful than “write my cached headline I remember and then write some stuff to expound on the details”, which is what I actually did. I am more aware of the difference thanks to you, fwiw)