I really like that you’re doing this. Bravo. This is a type of approach I struggled to integrate into CFAR in its early days.
(I was a CFAR cofounder, by the way. In case that matters to you and you didn’t know.)
A few notes, along the lines of “I imagine you might find something important to you if you were to look where I’m pointing”:
I think you’re missing something important about egregores. I get why you want to avoid that framing, but there’s totally a way to approach the relevant parts from within reductionist materialism. Namely via evolutionary memetics. See David Deutsch’s chapter on the evolution of culture in his book The Beginning of Infinity for the best public intro I know of. Or my 2020 stuff on “clockwork demons”, though that’s more “egregore” flavored; you’ll probably want to translate that stuff.
You seem to be advocating virtues from the era of modernism. Which is great! That’s core to LW-style rationality, really. Same thing that kicked off the European Enlightenment. But we’re in the postmodern era now. This is important for several reasons:
People today tend to resonate more with postmodern themes than modern ones. Superman just isn’t interesting anymore unless he has inner conflicts or the “villains” he’s fighting actually have a really good point.
The kind of pushback you’re likely to get will often look postmodern. If you don’t really understand postmodernism (because it’s the water the mainstream currently swims in, so it’s a little tricky to spontaneously see), you might miss the real causes of the objections and confuse them for “woo”.
Postmodernism does in fact level some meaningful critiques against modernism. If you don’t understand those flaws, or if you try to address them with more modernism, you’re going to trip over known rocks and possibly get slowly ignored into impotent obscurity — and frankly that would be correct because you wouldn’t be reading the room.
Strangely enough, the best intro I’ve yet found to postmodernism is in a literary analysis of the (original) Harry Potter series — specifically John Granger’s. His book Unlocking Harry Potter does a great job in just one chapter via analyzing the silly Disney film “Sky High” for its postmodern narrative structure, pointing out how that narrative has become the standard story of our times.
…with a caveat: Folk seem to be getting tired of everything getting deconstructed. I think we might be at the tail end of the postmodern era. But it’ll still be important context for whatever comes next, just as modernism is important context for what’s going on today.
Totally get where you’re coming from and we appreciate the feedback. I personally regard memetics as an important concept to factor into a big-picture-accurate epistemic framework. The landscape of ideas is dynamic and adversarial. I personally view postmodernism as a specific application of memetics. Or memetics as a generalization of postmodernism, historically speaking. Memetics avoids the infinite regress of postmodernism by not really having an opinion about “truth.” Egregores are a decent handle on feedback-loop dynamics of the idea landscape, though I think there are risks to reifying egregores as entities.
My high-level take is that CFAR’s approach to rationality training has been epistemics-first and the Guild’s approach has been instrumental-first. (Let me know if this doesn’t reflect reality from your perspective.) In our general approach, you gradually improve your epistemics in the course of improving your immediate objective circumstances, according to each individual’s implicit local wayfinding intuition. In other words, you work on whatever current-you judges to be currently-critical/achievable. This may lead to spending some energy pursuing goals that haven’t been rigorously linked up to an epistemically grounded basis, that future-you won’t endorse, but at least this way folks are getting in the reps, as it were. It’s vastly better than not having a rationality practice at all.
In my role an art critic I have been recently noticing how positively people have reacted to stuff like Top Gun: Maverick, a film which is exactly what it appears to be, aggressively surface-level, just executing skillfully on a concept. This sort of thing causes me to directionally agree that the age of meta and irony may be waning. Hard times push people to choose to focus on concrete measurables, which you could probably call “modernist.”
I personally regard memetics as an important concept to factor into a big-picture-accurate epistemic framework.
Reassuring to hear. At this point I’m personally quite convinced that attempts to deal with epistemics in a way that ignores memetics are just doomed.
I personally view postmodernism as a specific application of memetics. Or memetics as a generalization of postmodernism, historically speaking.
I find this weird, kind of like saying that medicine is a specific application of physics. It’s sort of technically correct, and can be helpful if you’re very careful, but seems like it risks missing the boat entirely.
Postmodernism totally is a memeplex, but it’s a special kind that almost entirely focuses on shaping the evolutionary terrain for all other memes. Many memes try to do that, but… well, for instance, atheism became possible because of modernism. And cancel culture became possible because of postmodernism. Many memes try to do this terrain thing, but the thing defining (post)modernism as interesting is the depth.
I mean, the fear that things might turn into cults comes from postmodernism. And you’re subject to that fear such that you had to address it in your OP.
I get the sense that you’re pretty aware of these dynamics. I just want to emphasize that while (post)modernism is indeed something like a special case of memetics, I think it deserves some special attention since it’s affecting the context in which you’re trying to do memetics.
My high-level take is that CFAR’s approach to rationality training has been epistemics-first and the Guild’s approach has been instrumental-first. (Let me know if this doesn’t reflect reality from your perspective.)
Well… mmm… it doesn’t quite. It’s an… okay-ish first approximation though.
CFAR wanted to focus on epistemic rationality, but no one was interested in practice. We kind of had to sneak our best guesses about epistemic rationality in the back via what amounted to self-help techniques.
“Oh, you have trouble motivating yourself to do extra work? Rather than just jumping in with a hack, let’s see if we can explore why you’re having trouble. Oh, oops, looks like we just dissolved your whole reason for doing the task in the first place.”
Our measures of success weren’t really things like whether people started and kept to exercise programs. We were way more interested in whether they were getting clear insights and rearranging their lives in ways that make deep sense. We could never clearly define this but we had the illusion of a shared-ish intuition here.
So in terms of our target, I guess it was kind of epistemics-first?
But I think if we had been really serious about getting epistemics right, we would have done something quite a bit different. A lot of what we did was based on us fitting to the constraints of being (a) entertaining and (b) at least seemingly effective.
In retrospect I think CFAR dramatically failed to take Goodhart nearly seriously enough.
(That, by the way, would be my one main pithy warning to anyone trying to do a CFAR adjacent thing: Nothing you do will matter in the long run if you don’t sort out Goodhart drift. Really, truly, I advise taking that super seriously, and not becoming complacent by focusing on your confidence that you’ve solved it well enough.)
Postmodernism’s most useful critiques on Modernism is that there is a single objective morality, when that’s almost certainly not the case. It comes with a cultural relativism claim that a morality of a culture isn’t wrong, just conflicting to your morals. And this is also probably right. What that means is that cultural norms and morality, as well as individuals have no objective standard of right and wrong, just their own choices and consequences.
It’s also nice that they remind people that your opposition probably does have a point. It can be taken too far, but it is a good guideline given how much we demonize our enemies.
I have serious criticisms to make of postmodern thought, especially in philosophy where they took it fully unflitered, but it does make some good criticisms of modernism.
I have serious criticisms to make of postmodern thought, especially in philosophy where they took it fully unflitered, but it does make some good criticisms of modernism.
Oh, I have plentiful criticism to level on postmodernism too. The main one being how it’s self-referentially inconsistent and uses that in a motte-and-bailey fashion.
I mean, if all truths are relative, is that only true in some contexts? Or is it absolutely true? That has the same logical structure as “This sentence is false.”
Likewise with being utterly intolerant of intolerance. So which intolerance shall we allow? Absolutely none? Oops. But surely we can just be smart about it and pick and choose which forms of intolerance are really only directed at intolerance, right? That can’t possibly be weaponized in a way that creates division in society! :-/
Postmodernism adds a twist of self-mockery as though to acknowledge this. But that gets taken as a sign of being Truly Humble which frees them of scrutiny of their Grand Narrative that all Grand Narratives are relative and that all evil comes from believing that one of them is absolutely true.
It comes with a cultural relativism claim that a morality of a culture isn’t wrong, just conflicting to your morals. And this is also probably right.
How can this work? Cultures change. So which is morally right, the culture before the change, or the culture after the change?
I guess a reply could be “Before the change, the culture before the change is right. After the change, the culture after the change is right.” But in this view, “being morally right” carries no information. We cannot assess whether a culture deserves to be changed based on this view.
Probably one of the core infohazards of postmodernism is that “moral rightness” doesn’t really exist outside of some framework. Asking about “rightness” of change is kind of a null pointer in the same way self-modifying your own reward centers can’t be straightforwardly phrased in terms of how your reward centers “should” feel about such rewiring.
I really like that you’re doing this. Bravo. This is a type of approach I struggled to integrate into CFAR in its early days.
(I was a CFAR cofounder, by the way. In case that matters to you and you didn’t know.)
A few notes, along the lines of “I imagine you might find something important to you if you were to look where I’m pointing”:
I think you’re missing something important about egregores. I get why you want to avoid that framing, but there’s totally a way to approach the relevant parts from within reductionist materialism. Namely via evolutionary memetics. See David Deutsch’s chapter on the evolution of culture in his book The Beginning of Infinity for the best public intro I know of. Or my 2020 stuff on “clockwork demons”, though that’s more “egregore” flavored; you’ll probably want to translate that stuff.
You seem to be advocating virtues from the era of modernism. Which is great! That’s core to LW-style rationality, really. Same thing that kicked off the European Enlightenment. But we’re in the postmodern era now. This is important for several reasons:
People today tend to resonate more with postmodern themes than modern ones. Superman just isn’t interesting anymore unless he has inner conflicts or the “villains” he’s fighting actually have a really good point.
The kind of pushback you’re likely to get will often look postmodern. If you don’t really understand postmodernism (because it’s the water the mainstream currently swims in, so it’s a little tricky to spontaneously see), you might miss the real causes of the objections and confuse them for “woo”.
Postmodernism does in fact level some meaningful critiques against modernism. If you don’t understand those flaws, or if you try to address them with more modernism, you’re going to trip over known rocks and possibly get slowly ignored into impotent obscurity — and frankly that would be correct because you wouldn’t be reading the room.
Strangely enough, the best intro I’ve yet found to postmodernism is in a literary analysis of the (original) Harry Potter series — specifically John Granger’s. His book Unlocking Harry Potter does a great job in just one chapter via analyzing the silly Disney film “Sky High” for its postmodern narrative structure, pointing out how that narrative has become the standard story of our times.
…with a caveat: Folk seem to be getting tired of everything getting deconstructed. I think we might be at the tail end of the postmodern era. But it’ll still be important context for whatever comes next, just as modernism is important context for what’s going on today.
Totally get where you’re coming from and we appreciate the feedback. I personally regard memetics as an important concept to factor into a big-picture-accurate epistemic framework. The landscape of ideas is dynamic and adversarial. I personally view postmodernism as a specific application of memetics. Or memetics as a generalization of postmodernism, historically speaking. Memetics avoids the infinite regress of postmodernism by not really having an opinion about “truth.” Egregores are a decent handle on feedback-loop dynamics of the idea landscape, though I think there are risks to reifying egregores as entities.
My high-level take is that CFAR’s approach to rationality training has been epistemics-first and the Guild’s approach has been instrumental-first. (Let me know if this doesn’t reflect reality from your perspective.) In our general approach, you gradually improve your epistemics in the course of improving your immediate objective circumstances, according to each individual’s implicit local wayfinding intuition. In other words, you work on whatever current-you judges to be currently-critical/achievable. This may lead to spending some energy pursuing goals that haven’t been rigorously linked up to an epistemically grounded basis, that future-you won’t endorse, but at least this way folks are getting in the reps, as it were. It’s vastly better than not having a rationality practice at all.
In my role an art critic I have been recently noticing how positively people have reacted to stuff like Top Gun: Maverick, a film which is exactly what it appears to be, aggressively surface-level, just executing skillfully on a concept. This sort of thing causes me to directionally agree that the age of meta and irony may be waning. Hard times push people to choose to focus on concrete measurables, which you could probably call “modernist.”
Great, glad you appreciate it.
Reassuring to hear. At this point I’m personally quite convinced that attempts to deal with epistemics in a way that ignores memetics are just doomed.
I find this weird, kind of like saying that medicine is a specific application of physics. It’s sort of technically correct, and can be helpful if you’re very careful, but seems like it risks missing the boat entirely.
Postmodernism totally is a memeplex, but it’s a special kind that almost entirely focuses on shaping the evolutionary terrain for all other memes. Many memes try to do that, but… well, for instance, atheism became possible because of modernism. And cancel culture became possible because of postmodernism. Many memes try to do this terrain thing, but the thing defining (post)modernism as interesting is the depth.
I mean, the fear that things might turn into cults comes from postmodernism. And you’re subject to that fear such that you had to address it in your OP.
I get the sense that you’re pretty aware of these dynamics. I just want to emphasize that while (post)modernism is indeed something like a special case of memetics, I think it deserves some special attention since it’s affecting the context in which you’re trying to do memetics.
Well… mmm… it doesn’t quite. It’s an… okay-ish first approximation though.
CFAR wanted to focus on epistemic rationality, but no one was interested in practice. We kind of had to sneak our best guesses about epistemic rationality in the back via what amounted to self-help techniques.
“Oh, you have trouble motivating yourself to do extra work? Rather than just jumping in with a hack, let’s see if we can explore why you’re having trouble. Oh, oops, looks like we just dissolved your whole reason for doing the task in the first place.”
Our measures of success weren’t really things like whether people started and kept to exercise programs. We were way more interested in whether they were getting clear insights and rearranging their lives in ways that make deep sense. We could never clearly define this but we had the illusion of a shared-ish intuition here.
So in terms of our target, I guess it was kind of epistemics-first?
But I think if we had been really serious about getting epistemics right, we would have done something quite a bit different. A lot of what we did was based on us fitting to the constraints of being (a) entertaining and (b) at least seemingly effective.
In retrospect I think CFAR dramatically failed to take Goodhart nearly seriously enough.
(That, by the way, would be my one main pithy warning to anyone trying to do a CFAR adjacent thing: Nothing you do will matter in the long run if you don’t sort out Goodhart drift. Really, truly, I advise taking that super seriously, and not becoming complacent by focusing on your confidence that you’ve solved it well enough.)
Postmodernism’s most useful critiques on Modernism is that there is a single objective morality, when that’s almost certainly not the case. It comes with a cultural relativism claim that a morality of a culture isn’t wrong, just conflicting to your morals. And this is also probably right. What that means is that cultural norms and morality, as well as individuals have no objective standard of right and wrong, just their own choices and consequences.
It’s also nice that they remind people that your opposition probably does have a point. It can be taken too far, but it is a good guideline given how much we demonize our enemies.
I have serious criticisms to make of postmodern thought, especially in philosophy where they took it fully unflitered, but it does make some good criticisms of modernism.
Oh, I have plentiful criticism to level on postmodernism too. The main one being how it’s self-referentially inconsistent and uses that in a motte-and-bailey fashion.
I mean, if all truths are relative, is that only true in some contexts? Or is it absolutely true? That has the same logical structure as “This sentence is false.”
Likewise with being utterly intolerant of intolerance. So which intolerance shall we allow? Absolutely none? Oops. But surely we can just be smart about it and pick and choose which forms of intolerance are really only directed at intolerance, right? That can’t possibly be weaponized in a way that creates division in society! :-/
Postmodernism adds a twist of self-mockery as though to acknowledge this. But that gets taken as a sign of being Truly Humble which frees them of scrutiny of their Grand Narrative that all Grand Narratives are relative and that all evil comes from believing that one of them is absolutely true.
But ha ha don’t take this too seriously.
But also Cancel Culture.
:-/
How can this work? Cultures change. So which is morally right, the culture before the change, or the culture after the change?
I guess a reply could be “Before the change, the culture before the change is right. After the change, the culture after the change is right.” But in this view, “being morally right” carries no information. We cannot assess whether a culture deserves to be changed based on this view.
Probably one of the core infohazards of postmodernism is that “moral rightness” doesn’t really exist outside of some framework. Asking about “rightness” of change is kind of a null pointer in the same way self-modifying your own reward centers can’t be straightforwardly phrased in terms of how your reward centers “should” feel about such rewiring.