It seems to me like a stretch to take Sean’s commitment to authenticity as being just like what a scientists does who’s committed to the truth.
You could similarly describe the commitment to God of a catholic as Catholicism being like rationalism. Even when you can even argue that the search for the nature of God was important for the enlightenment, it’s still different then our standard rationality. If you would ask Sean whether he sees his Circling as connecting with the divine, he would likely say yes when he’s in an audience with other spiritual people.
Eliezer argued in Beyond the Reach of God that rationalists shouldn’t believe in sacred principles that could be fundamentally more valuable.
In the particular case of Circling Europe, claiming authenticity as the only value reduces participant safety. There’s some danger when the person who leads a Circle believes that whatever happens in a Circle will be psychological healthy for all participants.
It sometimes leads to powerful male figures making unwelcome sexual advances to women because the guy is just “authentically expressing himself” and this lead to a bunch of women not wanting to associate with Circling Europe anymore.
I don’t mean to pitch ‘radical honesty’ here, or other sorts of excessive openness; authentic relationships include distance and walls and politeness and flexible preferences.
I have a sense that you don’t have a good idea of what radical honesty is. I think there’s a good chance that you would be pleasantly surprised if you would do a workshop with someone like Taber Shadburne.
In my experience it’s less monotheistic then the ideal of Circling of Sean towards which you point and much more cognizant about trade-offs between different values.
It seems to me like a stretch to take Sean’s commitment to authenticity as being just like what a scientists does who’s committed to the truth.
I mean, all analogies are stretches; the question is in what way and how far. There’s a reason the post has ‘cousin’ in the title instead of ‘sibling’ or ‘distant relation.’
You could similarly describe the commitment to God of a catholic as Catholicism being like rationalism.
Specifically, the way I would do that is as follows:
Suppose for these paragraphs we use “Faith” to refer to ‘privileging model A over model B’ when we’re making decisions and those two models disagree with each other. This can be used to protectively shield beliefs from criticism (“Well, I get that you have all these detailed arguments for the historical record not being the way I think it is, but God Said So, and I have faith in God.”), and it can be used to integrate considerations that are too remote to be positively identified in a model but which can be easily labelled (“Well, I get that I am extremely confident that the experiment would go a particular way, but Empiricism Requires We Run It, and I have faith in Empiricism.”).
In my youth I got to see an example of this up close, where the church I was a member of was considering undergoing a major construction project; one of the members was a financial analyst and looked at the numbers and thought “this really doesn’t add up,” but put that against Bible verses that “God would provide” and reluctantly supported the project.
The difference between the Catholic and the Rationalist is not whether they have ‘multiple models’ (both do) and whether or not they have different weights for their models (both do), but what they think the weights should be and how they justify those weights. Importantly, it’s also not that the Rationalist has ‘tested’ the thing they have Faith in and the Catholic hasn’t; both Faith procedures described here are self-reinforcing (“Turns out, God says I should trust God!” and “Turns out, running experiments suggests that I should run experiments!”). It’s that empiricism has other coherence properties that seem pretty solid, and that trusting God doesn’t have those properties, and what other coherence properties it has seem much shakier.
Thus I think rationalists are doing the right thing, and Catholics are doing the wrong thing, because the rationalists are using this mechanism in order to make themselves predictably better off (according to me) and the Catholics are making themselves predictably worse off (according to me). When I turn my attention towards Circlers, I notice “huh, there’s an empiricism thing going on here, and a reflection thing; both of those seem like they have solid coherence properties.”
Eliezer argued in Beyond the Reach of God that rationalists shouldn’t believe in sacred principles that could be fundamentally more valuable.
I interpret that differently; I saw in it “the universe runs on system dynamics, not morality” and more weakly “there is no policy that you can follow that will guarantee good consequences.”
To be clear, “empiricism” is not a policy that guarantees good consequences. It’s a virtue, and virtues act by both only giving probabilistic guarantees and by shifting the standards of what ‘success’ even means.
I have a sense that you don’t have a good idea of what radical honesty is. I think there’s a good chance that you would be pleasantly surprised if you would do a workshop with someone like Taber Shadburne.
I think it’s worth separating “radical honesty” as understood by its originators and “radical honesty” as interpreted-by-default; I am not surprised to learn of people under that banner who are successfully doing something healthy and authentic.
The problem here is closer to “if you want to add an additional ‘should’ to an equilibrium, you should anticipate resistance in the form of reductios,” and I do not think that “authenticity is better than inauthenticity” means “always being completely honest,” and instead means a more nuanced and subtle thing.
Fwiw I’ve never met a radical honesty person who wasn’t just counter signaling by using pre existing high status to defect on social norms about not explicitly leveraging your status.
Strangely, the people I can remember aiming for radical honesty read as low status people to me hoping to raise their status via radical honesty, and being mad at the world for not giving them more status for their dedication to the virtue of honesty.
Have you actually meet radical honesty people in the first place?
If I would meet a person well trained in radical honesty and one well trained in Circling Europe, I think it’s more likely the Circling Europe person will defect on social norms in the way towards which you are pointing.
It seems to me like a stretch to take Sean’s commitment to authenticity as being just like what a scientists does who’s committed to the truth.
You could similarly describe the commitment to God of a catholic as Catholicism being like rationalism. Even when you can even argue that the search for the nature of God was important for the enlightenment, it’s still different then our standard rationality. If you would ask Sean whether he sees his Circling as connecting with the divine, he would likely say yes when he’s in an audience with other spiritual people.
Eliezer argued in Beyond the Reach of God that rationalists shouldn’t believe in sacred principles that could be fundamentally more valuable.
In the particular case of Circling Europe, claiming authenticity as the only value reduces participant safety. There’s some danger when the person who leads a Circle believes that whatever happens in a Circle will be psychological healthy for all participants.
It sometimes leads to powerful male figures making unwelcome sexual advances to women because the guy is just “authentically expressing himself” and this lead to a bunch of women not wanting to associate with Circling Europe anymore.
I have a sense that you don’t have a good idea of what radical honesty is. I think there’s a good chance that you would be pleasantly surprised if you would do a workshop with someone like Taber Shadburne.
In my experience it’s less monotheistic then the ideal of Circling of Sean towards which you point and much more cognizant about trade-offs between different values.
I mean, all analogies are stretches; the question is in what way and how far. There’s a reason the post has ‘cousin’ in the title instead of ‘sibling’ or ‘distant relation.’
Specifically, the way I would do that is as follows:
Suppose for these paragraphs we use “Faith” to refer to ‘privileging model A over model B’ when we’re making decisions and those two models disagree with each other. This can be used to protectively shield beliefs from criticism (“Well, I get that you have all these detailed arguments for the historical record not being the way I think it is, but God Said So, and I have faith in God.”), and it can be used to integrate considerations that are too remote to be positively identified in a model but which can be easily labelled (“Well, I get that I am extremely confident that the experiment would go a particular way, but Empiricism Requires We Run It, and I have faith in Empiricism.”).
In my youth I got to see an example of this up close, where the church I was a member of was considering undergoing a major construction project; one of the members was a financial analyst and looked at the numbers and thought “this really doesn’t add up,” but put that against Bible verses that “God would provide” and reluctantly supported the project.
The difference between the Catholic and the Rationalist is not whether they have ‘multiple models’ (both do) and whether or not they have different weights for their models (both do), but what they think the weights should be and how they justify those weights. Importantly, it’s also not that the Rationalist has ‘tested’ the thing they have Faith in and the Catholic hasn’t; both Faith procedures described here are self-reinforcing (“Turns out, God says I should trust God!” and “Turns out, running experiments suggests that I should run experiments!”). It’s that empiricism has other coherence properties that seem pretty solid, and that trusting God doesn’t have those properties, and what other coherence properties it has seem much shakier.
Thus I think rationalists are doing the right thing, and Catholics are doing the wrong thing, because the rationalists are using this mechanism in order to make themselves predictably better off (according to me) and the Catholics are making themselves predictably worse off (according to me). When I turn my attention towards Circlers, I notice “huh, there’s an empiricism thing going on here, and a reflection thing; both of those seem like they have solid coherence properties.”
I interpret that differently; I saw in it “the universe runs on system dynamics, not morality” and more weakly “there is no policy that you can follow that will guarantee good consequences.”
To be clear, “empiricism” is not a policy that guarantees good consequences. It’s a virtue, and virtues act by both only giving probabilistic guarantees and by shifting the standards of what ‘success’ even means.
I think it’s worth separating “radical honesty” as understood by its originators and “radical honesty” as interpreted-by-default; I am not surprised to learn of people under that banner who are successfully doing something healthy and authentic.
The problem here is closer to “if you want to add an additional ‘should’ to an equilibrium, you should anticipate resistance in the form of reductios,” and I do not think that “authenticity is better than inauthenticity” means “always being completely honest,” and instead means a more nuanced and subtle thing.
Fwiw I’ve never met a radical honesty person who wasn’t just counter signaling by using pre existing high status to defect on social norms about not explicitly leveraging your status.
Strangely, the people I can remember aiming for radical honesty read as low status people to me hoping to raise their status via radical honesty, and being mad at the world for not giving them more status for their dedication to the virtue of honesty.
Have you actually meet radical honesty people in the first place?
If I would meet a person well trained in radical honesty and one well trained in Circling Europe, I think it’s more likely the Circling Europe person will defect on social norms in the way towards which you are pointing.
Fundamentally more valuable than what?
Nonsacred things.