I upvoted this post because I think it’s talking about some important stuff in ways (or tone or something) I somehow like better than what some previous posts in the same general area have done.
But also something feels really iffy about the way the word “fun” is used in this post. If I think back to the only time in my life I actually had fun, which was my childhood, I sure did not have fun in the ways described in this post. I had fun by riding bikes (but never once stopping to get curious about how bike gears work), playing Pokemon with my friends (but not actually being very strategic about it—competitive battling/metagame would have been completely alien to my child’s self), making dorodango (but, like, just for the fun of it, not because I wanted to get better at making them over time, and I sure did not ever wonder why different kinds of mud made more stable or shinier dorodango, or what the shine even consists of), etc.
The kind of “fun” that is described in this post is, I think, something I learned from other people when I was in my early teens or so, not something I was born with (as this post seems to imply?). And I learned and developed this skill because I was told (in books like Feynman’s and the Sequences) that this is what actually smart people do.
So personally I feel like I am trying to get back the “original fun” that I experienced as a child, as well as trying to untangle the “useful/technical fun” from its social influences and trying to claim it as my own, or something, in addition to doing the kind of thing suggested by this post.
I agree. It seems awfully convenient that the all of the “fun” described in this post involve the legibly-impressive topics of physics and mathematics. Most people, even highly technically competent people, aren’t intrinsically drawn to play with intellectually prestigious tasks. They find fun in sports, drawing, dancing, etc. Even when they take adopt an attitude of intellectual inquiry to their play, the insights generated from drawing techniques or dance moves are far less obviously applicable to working on alignment than the insights generated from studying physics. My concern is that presenting such a safely “useful” picture of fun undercuts the message to “follow your playful impulses, even if they’re silly”, because the implicit signal is “and btw, this is how smart people like us should be having fun B)”
undercuts the message to “follow your playful impulses, even if they’re silly”
That’s a fine message, but it’s not the message of the post. The concept described in the post is playful thinking, not fun. It does use the word “fun” in a few places where the more specific phrase would arguably have been better, so the miscommunication is probably my fault.
are far less obviously applicable to working on alignment than the insights generated from studying physics
I literally don’t believe this, but even if it were true, the post doesn’t argue to do math because it’s useful for alignment. The reason that alignment is even mentioned, is that the phenomenon of throwing away your mind is so perverse that it should be obviously bad even for someone who only cares about alignment, or at least thinks they want to sacrifice their wellbeing for the sake of alignment; and because people around X-risk have a tendency to throw their mind away anyway. If someone tells me they decided not to take a 2 year surfing vacation because alignment is too urgent, then I might worry a bit about how that sits in them, but the decision makes sense to me and seems sane. If someone tells me they stopped thinking about stuff they’re really curious about because they don’t see how it helps alignment, I’m like “No, what the hell are you doing, who told you that was a good idea??”.
Thank you for clarifying your intended point. I agree with the argument that playful thinking is intrinsically valuable, but still hold that the point would have been better-reinforced by including some non-mathematical examples.
I literally don’t believe this
Here are two personal examples of playful thinking without obvious applications to working on alignment:
A half-remembered quote, originally attributed to the French comics artist Moebius: “There are two ways to impress your audience: do a good drawing, or pack your drawing full of so much detail that they can’t help but be impressed.” Are there cases where less detail is more impressive than more detail? Well, impressive drawings of beautiful girls frequently have the strikingly sparse detail on the face, see drawings by Junji Ito, John Singer Sargent, Studio Kyoto. Why are these drawings appealing? Maybe because the sparse detail, mostly concentrated in the eyes (though Sargent reduces the eyes to simplified block-shadows as well), implies smooth, flawless skin. Maybe because the sparsity allows the viewer to interpret the empty space to contain their own idealized image— the Junji Ito girl’s nasal bridge is left undefined, so you can imagine her having a straight or button nose according to preference. Maybe there’s something inherently appealing to leaving shapes implied— doesn’t that Junji Ito girl’s nasal bridge remind you of the Kanizsa Triangle? Are people intrinsically drawn to having the eye fooled by abstracted drawings?
A number of romantic Beatles songs have sinister undertones: the final verse of Norwegian Wood refers to committing arson, and even the sentimental Something has this bizarre protest “I don’t want to leave her now”— ok dude, then why are you bringing it up? Is this consistent through their discography? Is this something unique to the Beatles, or were sinister love songs a well-established pop genre at the time? Did these sinister implications go over the heads of audiences, or were they key to the masses’ enjoyment of the songs?
If you can think of ways that these lines of thought apply to alignment, please let me know. This isn’t a “gotcha”, if you actually came up with something it’d be pretty dope.
We might have different things in mind with “intellectual inquiry”; depth is important. The first one seems like a seed of something that could be interesting. Phenomenology is the best data we have about real minds.
But mainly I made that comment because I don’t see insights from physics being “obviously applicable to working on alignment”. (This is maybe a controversial take and I haven’t thought about it that much and it could be stupid. I might also do accounting different, labeling more things as being “really math, not physics”.)
You make an important point. Fun in general is a broader thing than playful thinking (and deeper and more sacred in some ways), so playful thinking doesn’t at all encompass all of fun. Fun and playful thinking are related though; playful thinking is supposed to be fun, and at least for me, the issue with playful thinking is that the fun is being stifled. So following on your last paragraph, the deeper thing is fun simpliciter.
Another point, only hinted at by the phrase “serious play”, is that the concept of playful thinking is not supposed to imply unseriousness. Seriousness is not the same as explicit-usefulness-justification, because play can be serious but it’s almost impossible for activity driven by explicit-usefulness-justification to be genuine, fully deep fun. (It can be somewhat fun, and some people are blessed to have explicit-usefulness-justifications that spur them into activity that then becomes genuine, fully deep fun. I can sort of do that but not fully, especially because my explicit-usefulness-justifications are pretty demanding and don’t want me getting confused about what counts as success.) Serious play, in its seriousness, can involve instruction and taste. It could involve a mentor giving you harsh feedback. It could involve, for example, you saying to yourself: the thing I’m learning about right now, in the way I’m learning about it, does it access [what intuitively feels like] the living, underlying, hidden structure of the world? And then modifying how you’re engaging to heighten that sense. It could involve your case of learning a mode of thinking from someone else.
> trying to claim it as my own
My two cents (although I’m worried about intruding on this, and worried about other people retroactively intruding such that the process is distorted): if at some point you realize that you’ve gained a lot on claiming it as your own, it would be very valuable to describe that to others. (If you’ll allow a flight of fancy: We can only send messages backwards in time by a few years, so only messages that are taken seriously as a priority to transmit backwards in time will be relayed fast enough to outpace the forward flow of time, and make it back to primordiality.)
I upvoted this post because I think it’s talking about some important stuff in ways (or tone or something) I somehow like better than what some previous posts in the same general area have done.
But also something feels really iffy about the way the word “fun” is used in this post. If I think back to the only time in my life I actually had fun, which was my childhood, I sure did not have fun in the ways described in this post. I had fun by riding bikes (but never once stopping to get curious about how bike gears work), playing Pokemon with my friends (but not actually being very strategic about it—competitive battling/metagame would have been completely alien to my child’s self), making dorodango (but, like, just for the fun of it, not because I wanted to get better at making them over time, and I sure did not ever wonder why different kinds of mud made more stable or shinier dorodango, or what the shine even consists of), etc.
The kind of “fun” that is described in this post is, I think, something I learned from other people when I was in my early teens or so, not something I was born with (as this post seems to imply?). And I learned and developed this skill because I was told (in books like Feynman’s and the Sequences) that this is what actually smart people do.
So personally I feel like I am trying to get back the “original fun” that I experienced as a child, as well as trying to untangle the “useful/technical fun” from its social influences and trying to claim it as my own, or something, in addition to doing the kind of thing suggested by this post.
I agree. It seems awfully convenient that the all of the “fun” described in this post involve the legibly-impressive topics of physics and mathematics. Most people, even highly technically competent people, aren’t intrinsically drawn to play with intellectually prestigious tasks. They find fun in sports, drawing, dancing, etc. Even when they take adopt an attitude of intellectual inquiry to their play, the insights generated from drawing techniques or dance moves are far less obviously applicable to working on alignment than the insights generated from studying physics. My concern is that presenting such a safely “useful” picture of fun undercuts the message to “follow your playful impulses, even if they’re silly”, because the implicit signal is “and btw, this is how smart people like us should be having fun B)”
See my comment on the parent.
That’s a fine message, but it’s not the message of the post. The concept described in the post is playful thinking, not fun. It does use the word “fun” in a few places where the more specific phrase would arguably have been better, so the miscommunication is probably my fault.
I literally don’t believe this, but even if it were true, the post doesn’t argue to do math because it’s useful for alignment. The reason that alignment is even mentioned, is that the phenomenon of throwing away your mind is so perverse that it should be obviously bad even for someone who only cares about alignment, or at least thinks they want to sacrifice their wellbeing for the sake of alignment; and because people around X-risk have a tendency to throw their mind away anyway. If someone tells me they decided not to take a 2 year surfing vacation because alignment is too urgent, then I might worry a bit about how that sits in them, but the decision makes sense to me and seems sane. If someone tells me they stopped thinking about stuff they’re really curious about because they don’t see how it helps alignment, I’m like “No, what the hell are you doing, who told you that was a good idea??”.
Thank you for clarifying your intended point. I agree with the argument that playful thinking is intrinsically valuable, but still hold that the point would have been better-reinforced by including some non-mathematical examples.
Here are two personal examples of playful thinking without obvious applications to working on alignment:
A half-remembered quote, originally attributed to the French comics artist Moebius: “There are two ways to impress your audience: do a good drawing, or pack your drawing full of so much detail that they can’t help but be impressed.” Are there cases where less detail is more impressive than more detail? Well, impressive drawings of beautiful girls frequently have the strikingly sparse detail on the face, see drawings by Junji Ito, John Singer Sargent, Studio Kyoto. Why are these drawings appealing? Maybe because the sparse detail, mostly concentrated in the eyes (though Sargent reduces the eyes to simplified block-shadows as well), implies smooth, flawless skin. Maybe because the sparsity allows the viewer to interpret the empty space to contain their own idealized image— the Junji Ito girl’s nasal bridge is left undefined, so you can imagine her having a straight or button nose according to preference. Maybe there’s something inherently appealing to leaving shapes implied— doesn’t that Junji Ito girl’s nasal bridge remind you of the Kanizsa Triangle? Are people intrinsically drawn to having the eye fooled by abstracted drawings?
A number of romantic Beatles songs have sinister undertones: the final verse of Norwegian Wood refers to committing arson, and even the sentimental Something has this bizarre protest “I don’t want to leave her now”— ok dude, then why are you bringing it up? Is this consistent through their discography? Is this something unique to the Beatles, or were sinister love songs a well-established pop genre at the time? Did these sinister implications go over the heads of audiences, or were they key to the masses’ enjoyment of the songs?
If you can think of ways that these lines of thought apply to alignment, please let me know. This isn’t a “gotcha”, if you actually came up with something it’d be pretty dope.
We might have different things in mind with “intellectual inquiry”; depth is important. The first one seems like a seed of something that could be interesting. Phenomenology is the best data we have about real minds.
But mainly I made that comment because I don’t see insights from physics being “obviously applicable to working on alignment”. (This is maybe a controversial take and I haven’t thought about it that much and it could be stupid. I might also do accounting different, labeling more things as being “really math, not physics”.)
Thanks.
You make an important point. Fun in general is a broader thing than playful thinking (and deeper and more sacred in some ways), so playful thinking doesn’t at all encompass all of fun. Fun and playful thinking are related though; playful thinking is supposed to be fun, and at least for me, the issue with playful thinking is that the fun is being stifled. So following on your last paragraph, the deeper thing is fun simpliciter.
Another point, only hinted at by the phrase “serious play”, is that the concept of playful thinking is not supposed to imply unseriousness. Seriousness is not the same as explicit-usefulness-justification, because play can be serious but it’s almost impossible for activity driven by explicit-usefulness-justification to be genuine, fully deep fun. (It can be somewhat fun, and some people are blessed to have explicit-usefulness-justifications that spur them into activity that then becomes genuine, fully deep fun. I can sort of do that but not fully, especially because my explicit-usefulness-justifications are pretty demanding and don’t want me getting confused about what counts as success.) Serious play, in its seriousness, can involve instruction and taste. It could involve a mentor giving you harsh feedback. It could involve, for example, you saying to yourself: the thing I’m learning about right now, in the way I’m learning about it, does it access [what intuitively feels like] the living, underlying, hidden structure of the world? And then modifying how you’re engaging to heighten that sense. It could involve your case of learning a mode of thinking from someone else.
My two cents (although I’m worried about intruding on this, and worried about other people retroactively intruding such that the process is distorted): if at some point you realize that you’ve gained a lot on claiming it as your own, it would be very valuable to describe that to others. (If you’ll allow a flight of fancy: We can only send messages backwards in time by a few years, so only messages that are taken seriously as a priority to transmit backwards in time will be relayed fast enough to outpace the forward flow of time, and make it back to primordiality.)