So last time we were beginning our historical examination of the origin of this capacity for meaning making to try to get a clearer picture of what it is. Today I’d like to continue on with what we were talking about: the connections between meaning-making, enhancing cognition, altered states of consciousness, wisdom.
We were talking about that in connection with the upper Paleolithic transition, in which human beings seem to have gone through this radical change which was not so much a biological change but a change in how they were using their cognition. We talked about important ideas such as cognitive exaption and psychotechnology and we talked about how the upper paleolithic transition was probably driven by the way shamanism was a set of psychotechnologies for altering states of consciousness to cognitively exapt the enhanced abilities that trade rituals and initiation rituals and healing rituals had already been creating.
We talked about the way the shaman engaged in various disruptive strategies to try and alter their framing of reality, because how we frame reality is both the source of our adaptability / our ability to find patterns but it as how we can get locked in / how we misframe reality and how we are in need of insight. When we talked about that in connection to the nine dot problem, that led us to realize that there’s kinds of knowing that are independent from the knowing that we capture in our statements of our beliefs. There’s knowings about knowing how to do something, what it’s like to have a particular perspective, and what it’s like to know something by identifying with it and participating in it.
I was starting to show you how the shaman’s altered state of consciousness was also enhancing and altering meaning-making, affording insight, and improving the ability of the shaman to help in hunting and health case, two things that would radically improve survival.
There’s a great SSC post, Read History of Philosophy Backwards, which seems relevant to framing the first half of the series. That is, the point of talking about shamans isn’t that it’s better than what we’re doing today, or a direct response to the meaning crisis; the point of looking at shamans is in part to figure out how they worked (both what problems they were solving, and how they were solving them) and in part to figure out what life / society was like before there were any shamans.
I was a bit bugged by the ‘placebo effect’ discussion, mostly because I think he worded things wrong; ‘placebo effect is 30-40% as effective as full medicine’ is different from ‘you do 30-40% better with placebo than nothing’.
What is the difference of the placebo wordings? Are you not including the placebo half into the full medice and consider anythign not part of the chemical medice to not be medicine?
I think the denominators of them are different. The first wording is “(medicine—placebo) / (medicine—no treatment) = 0.65”, whereas the second wording is “(placebo—no treatment) / (no treatment) = 1.35″.
I am still a bit confused. I would read the first as “(treatment-chemical)/treatment = 0.35” and I guess the overall point was. I don’t think the case of secretly injecting peope with chemical was ever referred to or is it a typical experimental setting.
I see the meaning crisis as a function of increased neoteny. Parents provide meaning for children, elders provide meaning for adults. We don’t have village elders and everyone is getting more child-like as they get wealthier.
Huh, I think I agree with lots of components of this, but somehow they’re linked together in a way that seems shaky to me, or like it’s jumping too far too quickly.
Like, yes there’s increased neoteny, and yes there’s increased wealth, but it’s another leap to say that wealth makes people more neotenous. [More likely, from my models, there’s another thing that is causing both, like the increased size and specialization of society. People have to learn longer / have more subservient roles to fit into larger, more complicated organizations, and those larger, more complicated organizations are better at producing goods and services / serving as ‘parents’ for much longer. More peace leads to less trauma which leads to less ‘growing up fast.’]
I appreciated the Foolishness vs Ignorance distinction he drew up in Episode 1.
“Foolishness is lack of wisdom, Ignorance is lack of knowledge” sounds initially trite. But when he drills a little further into it, it became clear that his use of “Foolishness” is trying to gesture at premature pattern-identification and pattern-fixation, with a failure to notice alternative patterns.
“Premature reification” is what I’ve heard Ozzie call something similar, and that’s the handle I most often use for it.
There are probably some types of error that a child wouldn’t make, but an adult would, because adults more readily project one of their pre-existing reifications.
...but also, you need a reification to build things or coordinate. They’re not a thing you want to stop doing, they’re a thing you want to learn to monitor, manage, and question sometimes.
It is good to have some tools to dislodge or rewrite reifications which don’t actually apply. (And this seems to be what he sees as a selling-point of altered states.)
Did you have some conception of where it would have came from and what it was referring to? How can one understand an idiom if one doesn’t understand the constituent parts?
Yes; I liked it a lot, and haven’t come across a better introduction to this topic. (You might want to read some of the summaries to figure out if you’ll find the topic interesting.)
I am thinking whether wizards and really are shamanistic instances.
In a lot of stories wizards know a lot but are impractical, disinvolved and overtly theorethical. Those aspects don’t really jive with the high wisdom aspects.
It is more that wizard are people that have knowledge that other people do not have. And while it might utilise wisdom to come up with such unusual things being able to receive or wield it doesn’t have so high requirements. Wizards are associated with spellbooks and stuff which is clearly in the domain of sticking with a lot of propositional knowledge.
In particular my mind is that in Dungeos and Dragons, wizards have intelligence as their spellcasting stat while the cleric and monk have wisdom, sorcerers and warlock have charisma. I guess the more general class of “spellcasters” catches more fo the aspects and wizard is like the “default” spellcaster.
When the shaman is donning the deer mask they are essentially playing singleplayer D&D activating the muscle “roleplay”.
Some fo the speelcaster seem to be revolving around some of the actions deemed beneficial. The warlock is about relying in an entity outside of yourself, your patron to get things done, to channel the other. Sorceresser are about enbodying the the improvement. You don’t use the magic, you are the magic. Clerics tap into devotion and how intense focus and elaborate system opens new options.
I had previously watched an episode or two of this, and felt pretty meh about it. It felt like he overpromised and underdelivered, and talked a lot without getting to an actual point. I’m trying it again solely on the strength of your recommendation / it seems like you think there’s a solid payoff if you stick with it.
This is good to know; I’ve seen some people recommend it with “if you get through two lectures and you don’t like it, it’s not for you.” So I’m not sure how strongly you should take my recommendation.
In particular, I think one of the things I liked most about it was seeing a thing I’m already deeply familiar with / interested in (rationality / how to orient one’s life) from a new angle. The “history of philosophy as seen by a cognitive scientist” sounds way more interesting to me than “history of philosophy as seen by a philosopher”, or something similar; it might or might not sound interesting to you.
That said, I think there’s a thing going on with ‘underdelivery’, where the lecture is much more “these are the problems meditation is trying to solve, and this is why you might expect meditation to solve them” (with an ecosystem of practices, rather than just meditation), but listening to the lecture doesn’t make you a skilled meditator; you have to actually meditate if you want to solve the problems that meditation solves. [You could imagine a similar lecture on physiology, wherein you end up with a knowledge of the history of movement and exercise and a sense of what you need to do—but also, you won’t actually get fit without moving.]
As well, a lot of his points are something like “here’s a phrase that we’ve trivialized, but which you should take seriously”, but maybe you do take the phrase seriously already, or him pointing at this still leads to you seeing the trivialized thing, since he hasn’t actually helped you realize its meaning.
I’ve just watched two episodes now, and while it’s interesting, it’s also… throwing up a lot of epistemic red flags for me.
He goes off on all these interesting tangents, but it feels more like “just so stories”. Like he can throw all this information at me to get me to nod along and follow where he’s going, without ever actually proving anything, and because there’s all these tangents I feel like he can slip stuff in without me noticing.
I’ve been listening to him for two hours now, and I still don’t quite get what his thesis is, except “There’s a meaning crisis.” I feel like he’s trying to push me towards a solution without being upfront from the beginning about what that solution is.… “Traditionalism”, maybe?
Or like maybe he’s saying something simple in a very complex and long-winded way in order to feel deep? But maybe that is the required method of saying it to get it deeper into your brain.
Here’s a single concrete thing he does that drives me nuts. I wonder if it may be a part of what is setting you off, too?
He overuses the term “unifying.” He uses it three times an episode, to mean a different thing than I would usually mean by it. I really wish he’d cut it out.
I usually see “unifying” as signifying that there is an overarching model that takes some of the complexity of several models, and collapses them down together. Something that reduces “special casing.”
He almost never means that. It’s always adding more, or tying together, or connecting bits without simplifying. It comes off to me like a string of broken promises.
In my notes, it means that I produce a ton of pre-emptive “Summary Here Headers” (for theory unifications that seem to never come), that I had to delete in the end. Because usually, there isn’t a deep shared root to summarize. When I come back to fill them in, all I find is a tangential binding that’s thin as a thread. Which is just not enough to cohesively summarize the next 3 things he talked about as if they were a single object.
I think his “big theory” is actually something more like… spoilers… which I wouldn’t have guessed at accurately from the first 2 episodes.
(I can’t get spoilers to work on markdown, ugh. Stop reading if you want to avoid them.)
Maybe “attention as a terrain,” or maybe something about aligning high-abstraction frames with embodied ones? The former feels basic to me at this point, but the later’s actually a pretty decent line of thought.
I can’t recall any specific examples of him using “Unifying” that way, but what you describe does ring familiar. I think he tends to use verbose language where unnecessary. I’d love to get the Paul-Graham-edited-for-simplicity version of these lectures.
He isn’t offering traditionalism, he recognizes that’s infeasible. He’s looking for something that’s compatible with science and rationality, but also achieves the same thing traditional systems achieved (like creating meaning, purpose, fulfillment, community, etc.) His solution is to create an “ecosystem of practices” (such as meditation, journaling, circling and such) that are practiced communally. Sometimes he also calls it “The religion that isn’t a religion”.
On the one hand, I think there’s still place for him to be clearer about his solution, on the other hand, he’s clear that he’s not actually sure yet how a solution would look like, and the purpose of this series is to define and understand the problem really well, and understand a bunch of background materiel that he expects will be relevant for finding a solution.
And yes, I think there’s room for simplifying. If not the thesis, then at least the presentation. He uses very complex vocabulary that I’m not sure is really necessary. To me it feels like it detracts rather than add.
His solution is to create an “ecosystem of practices” (such as meditation, journaling, circling and such) that are practiced communally. Sometimes he also calls it “The religion that isn’t a religion”
Two episodes / two hours in and he hasn’t mentioned any of this that I recall. I feel like the introductory session should at least vaguely mention where he’s going to be steering BEFORE you’ve invested many hours.
I am pretty sympathetic to his reason for not doing this, which is something like “yes, at the end of the lecture you can say two sentences that feel to you like they capture the spirit. But do those two sentences have the power to transmit the spirit?” I think most summaries (mine included!) are papering over some of the inferential distance.
I do also think he’s much more tentative about proposed solutions than the problem. This isn’t a “I have a great new exercise plan which will solve the obesity crisis”, it’s closer to “we’re in an obesity crisis, this is the history of it and how I think the underlying physiological mechanisms work, and here’s what might be a sketch of a solution.” At which point foregrounding the sketch of the solution seems like it’s putting the emphasis in the wrong place.
He goes off on all these interesting tangents, but it feels more like “just so stories”.
Consider doing some epistemic spot checks, where you randomly select some claims and try to figure out if his story checks out. One of the benefits of something like this lecture club is with enough eyes, we can actually get decent coverage on all of the bits of the lecture, and figure out where he’s made mistakes or been misleading or so on, or if the number of mistakes is actually pretty low, end up confident in the remainder.
[I’m doing a more involved version of this that’s going to pay off for some of the later lectures, which is he references a bunch of works by more recent philosophers, and so I’m reading some of those books to try to better situate what he says / see how much his take and my take agree.]
The issue here is that the easy, straightforward facts are all legit to the best of my knowledge (e.g. the basic history of the Bronze Age collapse and such), but the points that his thesis is more strongly built upon are not just straightforward fact checks (e.g. Pretending to be a deer helps you hunt deer, and tribes with shamans outperformed tribes without, etc)
It’s like you list a bunch of real facts and real knowledge in order to make your point sound legit, and then put a bunch of wild speculation on top of it. (I’m not saying that’s what he’s doing, but that it’s a really easy thing to do, and really hard to tell apart).
I got somewhat of a similar feeling skipped into episode title that seemed more interesting. Now having myself “spoiled” ona couple of things it is more clear what he is doing with the presentation. He is using sophisticated opinion in choosing a partiuclar path/story and wants the path to be followable step-by-step to the one that is walking it.
It is a the difference between coming up with a proof vs explaining a proof.
In doing the reverse ordering I can make connections on what the talkpoints are later connected to. Presented here itis “shamans do wonky stuff and it somehow works” but in reference to later how it might be plausible that the wierd stuff has tangilble (understandable by me here now) advantages makes it a more dynamic landscape to think in. Part fo the point might be that the shamans might be able to pick up on the advantages and thus a reason to repeat the behaviour/technique but they might not have a good gear-level understanding what it is doing or why it is working (or they or some of them could but can’t neccesarily chare the insight to the uninitiated).
His digression about shamans really getting into the mindset of a deer in order to better track them reminds me of a skill “Pretending to Be” that I think is useful for many skills.
Episode 1: Introduction
There’s a great SSC post, Read History of Philosophy Backwards, which seems relevant to framing the first half of the series. That is, the point of talking about shamans isn’t that it’s better than what we’re doing today, or a direct response to the meaning crisis; the point of looking at shamans is in part to figure out how they worked (both what problems they were solving, and how they were solving them) and in part to figure out what life / society was like before there were any shamans.
I was a bit bugged by the ‘placebo effect’ discussion, mostly because I think he worded things wrong; ‘placebo effect is 30-40% as effective as full medicine’ is different from ‘you do 30-40% better with placebo than nothing’.
What is the difference of the placebo wordings? Are you not including the placebo half into the full medice and consider anythign not part of the chemical medice to not be medicine?
I think the denominators of them are different. The first wording is “(medicine—placebo) / (medicine—no treatment) = 0.65”, whereas the second wording is “(placebo—no treatment) / (no treatment) = 1.35″.
I am still a bit confused. I would read the first as “(treatment-chemical)/treatment = 0.35” and I guess the overall point was. I don’t think the case of secretly injecting peope with chemical was ever referred to or is it a typical experimental setting.
I see the meaning crisis as a function of increased neoteny. Parents provide meaning for children, elders provide meaning for adults. We don’t have village elders and everyone is getting more child-like as they get wealthier.
Huh, I think I agree with lots of components of this, but somehow they’re linked together in a way that seems shaky to me, or like it’s jumping too far too quickly.
Like, yes there’s increased neoteny, and yes there’s increased wealth, but it’s another leap to say that wealth makes people more neotenous. [More likely, from my models, there’s another thing that is causing both, like the increased size and specialization of society. People have to learn longer / have more subservient roles to fit into larger, more complicated organizations, and those larger, more complicated organizations are better at producing goods and services / serving as ‘parents’ for much longer. More peace leads to less trauma which leads to less ‘growing up fast.’]
I appreciated the Foolishness vs Ignorance distinction he drew up in Episode 1.
“Foolishness is lack of wisdom, Ignorance is lack of knowledge” sounds initially trite. But when he drills a little further into it, it became clear that his use of “Foolishness” is trying to gesture at premature pattern-identification and pattern-fixation, with a failure to notice alternative patterns.
“Premature reification” is what I’ve heard Ozzie call something similar, and that’s the handle I most often use for it.
There are probably some types of error that a child wouldn’t make, but an adult would, because adults more readily project one of their pre-existing reifications.
...but also, you need a reification to build things or coordinate. They’re not a thing you want to stop doing, they’re a thing you want to learn to monitor, manage, and question sometimes.
It is good to have some tools to dislodge or rewrite reifications which don’t actually apply. (And this seems to be what he sees as a selling-point of altered states.)
I had no idea that the metaphor “think outside the box” was derived from a math puzzle. That’s pretty cool.
Did you have some conception of where it would have came from and what it was referring to? How can one understand an idiom if one doesn’t understand the constituent parts?
Would you still say it’s worth following along with this series?
Yes; I liked it a lot, and haven’t come across a better introduction to this topic. (You might want to read some of the summaries to figure out if you’ll find the topic interesting.)
I am thinking whether wizards and really are shamanistic instances.
In a lot of stories wizards know a lot but are impractical, disinvolved and overtly theorethical. Those aspects don’t really jive with the high wisdom aspects.
It is more that wizard are people that have knowledge that other people do not have. And while it might utilise wisdom to come up with such unusual things being able to receive or wield it doesn’t have so high requirements. Wizards are associated with spellbooks and stuff which is clearly in the domain of sticking with a lot of propositional knowledge.
In particular my mind is that in Dungeos and Dragons, wizards have intelligence as their spellcasting stat while the cleric and monk have wisdom, sorcerers and warlock have charisma. I guess the more general class of “spellcasters” catches more fo the aspects and wizard is like the “default” spellcaster.
When the shaman is donning the deer mask they are essentially playing singleplayer D&D activating the muscle “roleplay”.
Some fo the speelcaster seem to be revolving around some of the actions deemed beneficial. The warlock is about relying in an entity outside of yourself, your patron to get things done, to channel the other. Sorceresser are about enbodying the the improvement. You don’t use the magic, you are the magic. Clerics tap into devotion and how intense focus and elaborate system opens new options.
I had previously watched an episode or two of this, and felt pretty meh about it. It felt like he overpromised and underdelivered, and talked a lot without getting to an actual point. I’m trying it again solely on the strength of your recommendation / it seems like you think there’s a solid payoff if you stick with it.
This is good to know; I’ve seen some people recommend it with “if you get through two lectures and you don’t like it, it’s not for you.” So I’m not sure how strongly you should take my recommendation.
In particular, I think one of the things I liked most about it was seeing a thing I’m already deeply familiar with / interested in (rationality / how to orient one’s life) from a new angle. The “history of philosophy as seen by a cognitive scientist” sounds way more interesting to me than “history of philosophy as seen by a philosopher”, or something similar; it might or might not sound interesting to you.
That said, I think there’s a thing going on with ‘underdelivery’, where the lecture is much more “these are the problems meditation is trying to solve, and this is why you might expect meditation to solve them” (with an ecosystem of practices, rather than just meditation), but listening to the lecture doesn’t make you a skilled meditator; you have to actually meditate if you want to solve the problems that meditation solves. [You could imagine a similar lecture on physiology, wherein you end up with a knowledge of the history of movement and exercise and a sense of what you need to do—but also, you won’t actually get fit without moving.]
As well, a lot of his points are something like “here’s a phrase that we’ve trivialized, but which you should take seriously”, but maybe you do take the phrase seriously already, or him pointing at this still leads to you seeing the trivialized thing, since he hasn’t actually helped you realize its meaning.
I’ve just watched two episodes now, and while it’s interesting, it’s also… throwing up a lot of epistemic red flags for me.
He goes off on all these interesting tangents, but it feels more like “just so stories”. Like he can throw all this information at me to get me to nod along and follow where he’s going, without ever actually proving anything, and because there’s all these tangents I feel like he can slip stuff in without me noticing.
I’ve been listening to him for two hours now, and I still don’t quite get what his thesis is, except “There’s a meaning crisis.” I feel like he’s trying to push me towards a solution without being upfront from the beginning about what that solution is.… “Traditionalism”, maybe?
Or like maybe he’s saying something simple in a very complex and long-winded way in order to feel deep? But maybe that is the required method of saying it to get it deeper into your brain.
Here’s a single concrete thing he does that drives me nuts. I wonder if it may be a part of what is setting you off, too?
He overuses the term “unifying.” He uses it three times an episode, to mean a different thing than I would usually mean by it. I really wish he’d cut it out.
I usually see “unifying” as signifying that there is an overarching model that takes some of the complexity of several models, and collapses them down together. Something that reduces “special casing.”
He almost never means that. It’s always adding more, or tying together, or connecting bits without simplifying. It comes off to me like a string of broken promises.
In my notes, it means that I produce a ton of pre-emptive “Summary Here Headers” (for theory unifications that seem to never come), that I had to delete in the end. Because usually, there isn’t a deep shared root to summarize. When I come back to fill them in, all I find is a tangential binding that’s thin as a thread. Which is just not enough to cohesively summarize the next 3 things he talked about as if they were a single object.
I think his “big theory” is actually something more like… spoilers… which I wouldn’t have guessed at accurately from the first 2 episodes.
(I can’t get spoilers to work on markdown, ugh. Stop reading if you want to avoid them.)
Maybe “attention as a terrain,” or maybe something about aligning high-abstraction frames with embodied ones? The former feels basic to me at this point, but the later’s actually a pretty decent line of thought.
I can’t recall any specific examples of him using “Unifying” that way, but what you describe does ring familiar. I think he tends to use verbose language where unnecessary. I’d love to get the Paul-Graham-edited-for-simplicity version of these lectures.
He isn’t offering traditionalism, he recognizes that’s infeasible. He’s looking for something that’s compatible with science and rationality, but also achieves the same thing traditional systems achieved (like creating meaning, purpose, fulfillment, community, etc.) His solution is to create an “ecosystem of practices” (such as meditation, journaling, circling and such) that are practiced communally. Sometimes he also calls it “The religion that isn’t a religion”.
On the one hand, I think there’s still place for him to be clearer about his solution, on the other hand, he’s clear that he’s not actually sure yet how a solution would look like, and the purpose of this series is to define and understand the problem really well, and understand a bunch of background materiel that he expects will be relevant for finding a solution.
And yes, I think there’s room for simplifying. If not the thesis, then at least the presentation. He uses very complex vocabulary that I’m not sure is really necessary. To me it feels like it detracts rather than add.
Two episodes / two hours in and he hasn’t mentioned any of this that I recall. I feel like the introductory session should at least vaguely mention where he’s going to be steering BEFORE you’ve invested many hours.
I am pretty sympathetic to his reason for not doing this, which is something like “yes, at the end of the lecture you can say two sentences that feel to you like they capture the spirit. But do those two sentences have the power to transmit the spirit?” I think most summaries (mine included!) are papering over some of the inferential distance.
I do also think he’s much more tentative about proposed solutions than the problem. This isn’t a “I have a great new exercise plan which will solve the obesity crisis”, it’s closer to “we’re in an obesity crisis, this is the history of it and how I think the underlying physiological mechanisms work, and here’s what might be a sketch of a solution.” At which point foregrounding the sketch of the solution seems like it’s putting the emphasis in the wrong place.
Yoav’s reply seems right to me. Also:
Consider doing some epistemic spot checks, where you randomly select some claims and try to figure out if his story checks out. One of the benefits of something like this lecture club is with enough eyes, we can actually get decent coverage on all of the bits of the lecture, and figure out where he’s made mistakes or been misleading or so on, or if the number of mistakes is actually pretty low, end up confident in the remainder.
[I’m doing a more involved version of this that’s going to pay off for some of the later lectures, which is he references a bunch of works by more recent philosophers, and so I’m reading some of those books to try to better situate what he says / see how much his take and my take agree.]
The issue here is that the easy, straightforward facts are all legit to the best of my knowledge (e.g. the basic history of the Bronze Age collapse and such), but the points that his thesis is more strongly built upon are not just straightforward fact checks (e.g. Pretending to be a deer helps you hunt deer, and tribes with shamans outperformed tribes without, etc)
It’s like you list a bunch of real facts and real knowledge in order to make your point sound legit, and then put a bunch of wild speculation on top of it. (I’m not saying that’s what he’s doing, but that it’s a really easy thing to do, and really hard to tell apart).
I got somewhat of a similar feeling skipped into episode title that seemed more interesting. Now having myself “spoiled” ona couple of things it is more clear what he is doing with the presentation. He is using sophisticated opinion in choosing a partiuclar path/story and wants the path to be followable step-by-step to the one that is walking it.
It is a the difference between coming up with a proof vs explaining a proof.
In doing the reverse ordering I can make connections on what the talkpoints are later connected to. Presented here itis “shamans do wonky stuff and it somehow works” but in reference to later how it might be plausible that the wierd stuff has tangilble (understandable by me here now) advantages makes it a more dynamic landscape to think in. Part fo the point might be that the shamans might be able to pick up on the advantages and thus a reason to repeat the behaviour/technique but they might not have a good gear-level understanding what it is doing or why it is working (or they or some of them could but can’t neccesarily chare the insight to the uninitiated).
His digression about shamans really getting into the mindset of a deer in order to better track them reminds me of a skill “Pretending to Be” that I think is useful for many skills.