Yeah, I’m familiar with Chapman and loosely follow him. His latest post was especially interesting to me, because it was unusually concrete about what people actually get wrong in practice. It’s one thing to say “There’s water in an eggplant” to which, “Yes, and?”, and quite another to show someone’s life falling apart because of things they’re systematically not seeing. To which it’s much more “Could that happen to me? And if not, what exactly is stopping it?”
I’m probably not your intended audience because I’m already familiar with Chapman’s work and mostly agree with your position in the quoted statement, but that’s the kind of writing I personally would be most interested in reading from you, for whatever that’s worth. I’ll read some more of your stuff though and see what jumps out at me.
Thanks for the feedback. I tend to be an abstractor, as I think of it: gathering data and building abstractions that structure it. This means my output tends to be to tell you about cool abstractions I figured out.
I’m less excited about performing the opposite task, which is presenting raw data for others to build abstractions on. I mostly only do it when I feel like, rhetorically, I’m going to lose the reader if I don’t. I freely admit this is a weakness on my part and I’m trying to get better about providing data in posts, but I admit I’m not excited about it.
If you want something more like Chapman’s most recent post, Kegan’s In Over Our Heads is really good: it tells a stylized story of a person going through the struggle of the stage 3 to 4 transition and is based on an amalgamation of real stories (aggregated and anonymized for privacy). Or, alternatively, I’ve gotten a lot of milage out of both slice-of-life type stories that follow realistic characters and reading memoirs and other true stories from people. I have to do the work of applying whatever theory I’m trying to work out to the story, but learning more about the experiences of many people is the raw data necessary for making sense of a great many theories (and for formulating your own!).
Oh geez, looking back at my comment I was extremely unclear. Sorry about that.
Probably not useful as feedback, but the specific things I’m most interested in here are your conclusions. Like, “Not gonna justify this yet, but I think rationalists are susceptible to getting seduced by witches in ways that will turn their lives upside down. The abstractions that predict this are after the fold, and you gotta apply it to your own raw data”. I’m mostly curious about this because I’m trying to figure out how similar our perspectives are. The more similar our conclusions, the more it seems like “Water in the eggplant” type stuff is true and important just not for me. The more dissimilar, the more I have to wonder “Wait, what do you actually mean by that. I must be missing some patterns he’s matching while thinking I get it”.
Separately from that, and what may or may not be useful, is that in general I find it helpful to have more concrete applications spelled out. Not raw data necessarily as the point isn’t to fuel independent abstraction, but a minimal set of simulated/curated data to highlight the connection between your abstractions and concrete use cases. Sounds like you’re mostly on board with this though, at least in theory.
I’m with you on the “I just wanna tell you about the cool abstractions I figured out!” thing by the way, hehe. It’s a lot easier, and more fun, and genuinely worth doing first I think… just also a lot harder to get through to people IME because grounding the abstractions is much harder than holding them in the abstract.
Yeah, I’m familiar with Chapman and loosely follow him. His latest post was especially interesting to me, because it was unusually concrete about what people actually get wrong in practice. It’s one thing to say “There’s water in an eggplant” to which, “Yes, and?”, and quite another to show someone’s life falling apart because of things they’re systematically not seeing. To which it’s much more “Could that happen to me? And if not, what exactly is stopping it?”
I’m probably not your intended audience because I’m already familiar with Chapman’s work and mostly agree with your position in the quoted statement, but that’s the kind of writing I personally would be most interested in reading from you, for whatever that’s worth. I’ll read some more of your stuff though and see what jumps out at me.
Thanks for the feedback. I tend to be an abstractor, as I think of it: gathering data and building abstractions that structure it. This means my output tends to be to tell you about cool abstractions I figured out.
I’m less excited about performing the opposite task, which is presenting raw data for others to build abstractions on. I mostly only do it when I feel like, rhetorically, I’m going to lose the reader if I don’t. I freely admit this is a weakness on my part and I’m trying to get better about providing data in posts, but I admit I’m not excited about it.
If you want something more like Chapman’s most recent post, Kegan’s In Over Our Heads is really good: it tells a stylized story of a person going through the struggle of the stage 3 to 4 transition and is based on an amalgamation of real stories (aggregated and anonymized for privacy). Or, alternatively, I’ve gotten a lot of milage out of both slice-of-life type stories that follow realistic characters and reading memoirs and other true stories from people. I have to do the work of applying whatever theory I’m trying to work out to the story, but learning more about the experiences of many people is the raw data necessary for making sense of a great many theories (and for formulating your own!).
Oh geez, looking back at my comment I was extremely unclear. Sorry about that.
Probably not useful as feedback, but the specific things I’m most interested in here are your conclusions. Like, “Not gonna justify this yet, but I think rationalists are susceptible to getting seduced by witches in ways that will turn their lives upside down. The abstractions that predict this are after the fold, and you gotta apply it to your own raw data”. I’m mostly curious about this because I’m trying to figure out how similar our perspectives are. The more similar our conclusions, the more it seems like “Water in the eggplant” type stuff is true and important just not for me. The more dissimilar, the more I have to wonder “Wait, what do you actually mean by that. I must be missing some patterns he’s matching while thinking I get it”.
Separately from that, and what may or may not be useful, is that in general I find it helpful to have more concrete applications spelled out. Not raw data necessarily as the point isn’t to fuel independent abstraction, but a minimal set of simulated/curated data to highlight the connection between your abstractions and concrete use cases. Sounds like you’re mostly on board with this though, at least in theory.
I’m with you on the “I just wanna tell you about the cool abstractions I figured out!” thing by the way, hehe. It’s a lot easier, and more fun, and genuinely worth doing first I think… just also a lot harder to get through to people IME because grounding the abstractions is much harder than holding them in the abstract.