Yes, but also once you get good at vibing you want to go vibe with people on your favorite frequency / topic.
Also I think some topics are more “vibable“ than others, and rationality is just not one of them.
It’s less that thoughts alone are poison and more that, spending attention on thoughts is poison to the process of observing being (because it’s distracting from the pure observing being-ness of being).
Enjoying the music is different from saying “I enjoy the music”. In that difference is the difference between the thought and the doing part of enjoying the music.
There are plenty of things that are usually impaired by thinking. Thinking, however, is not one of them. So while I’m sure you could “vibe” about rationality, that would need to be an activity very different from actually doing rationality.
(Of course one doesn’t have to be doing rationality all the time! And some of those things that are usually impaired by thinking are excellent things to do. So, for the avoidance of doubt, I’m not saying that “vibing” is a Bad Thing. I’m not sure it belongs here, though. Why do we need “What vibing feels like” any more than we need “What being stoned feels like” or “What cuddling with a romantic partner feels like”?)
It’s worth considering the description of “acting via system 1”. As similar and relevant to vibing as described.
Healthy rationality long term needs to integrate both s1 and s2. Not just get the s2 right. Also the more s2 functions that can be entrusted to s1 effectively, the more s2 is free to leap forward into smarter ways of doing things.
One thing that’s important about this post is that it’s meant to evoke a particular set of felt senses more than be literally accurate. For instance, under certain definitions of “thinking”, the only way to avoid it would be to be unconscious or dead, which I’m obviously not trying to state here. This post was merely trying to evoke a certain phenomenological state, without delving into why that state was useful.
There’s a few reasons I think that vibing is useful for rationality, besides being an affordance that can allow you to enjoy communication in a new way (which I think would be reason enough). Note that many of these depend on models that I haven’t written up yet, so I don’t have the means to show why I believe them.
Vibing allows groups to communicate in a way that minimizes rationalizations and defensiveness in the discussion
Vibing allows a sort of proto “Looking” where you can see the world and your own psychology more for what it is as a group
Vibing allows groups to quickly see if a person will fit into their culture
Vibing gives you a better sense of the values people are actually optimizing for, including your own
I think that this sort of list can be dangerous because consciously trying to achieve these things can prevent you from vibing, in a similar way that consciously trying to practice reading people can harm circling, even though it’s a benefit of circling.
It’s tough to engage in the sort of rationality that the Berkeley rationality community likes to engage in.
A good analogy is circling, which is a style of communication that the Berkeley rationality HAS picked up. You might say “it’s tough to engage in rationality without logic being a central component of communication,” but I think a central thing that makes circling so good at getting at important truths is that it allows and encourages you to engage in communication where you don’t feel the need to justify everything you say logically. (Someone will disagree with me here, just substitute “logic” for some other thing that exists in normal rationality discourse but not in circling).
Vibing is importantly different from circling, but it has this same quality of getting at “truthiness” that typical rationality discussion can’t get at by throwing away some of the tenets of traditional rationality communication. I don’t think you should necessarily be talking about rationality when vibing, but I do think that you’re engaging in rationality when vibing, in a similar manner to circling.
It seems to me like you are using “rationality” with a much broader meaning than currently appears to me to be useful.
“Vibing”, as you describe it, appears to be fundamentally non-rational. Once again, that doesn’t mean it’s bad, it doesn’t even mean it’s not extremely valuable, but something that essentially requires stopping thinking as soon as it rears its ugly head is, whatever its merits, not engaging in rationality. Even if it provides a way of getting at truths that what-I-would-call-rationality can’t reach.
(Cf. the discussions long ago about the perils of saying “rational” when we actually mean “optimal” or “good”.)
FYI, the way I define “instrumental rationality”, which I think is “specific enough to be useful” without being so specific as to be overly constraining, is:
“The study of how to improve your cognitive processes in order to make better decisions.”
And for epistemic rationality, “the study of how to improve your cognitive processes in order to have beliefs that more accurately reflect reality.”
In both cases, I think it’s actually plausible that the OP has some bearing. [Although, disclaimer that I’m not 100% sure I grok the OP, and might be talking about something subtly different].
I think it’s a crucial rationalist skill to be able to apply “thinking” of the sort the OP is gesturing at avoiding. But, it seems quite important to me that there’s types of ideas and literal truths that are harder to grasp if you’re only capable of thinking in a highly analytical way.
One lens to look at this through: You need to both babble and prune in order to find useful things to say, and generating good babble can involve a lot of cognitive work that looks superficially irrational. This is fine, although you will eventually want to make sure the babble can pass through some kind of pruning filter.
example 1: drawing connections between things you wouldn’t otherwise be able to notice, even if reason you drew those connections didn’t make much sense. I.e you happened to be staring at a tree and it pointed you towards a tree metaphor
example 2: if you’re highly engaging your prune module to check if things make sense, you may be overly committing to a given ontology that isn’t actually quite right. Or your S1 might be picking up on things that are important that you can’t fully articulate, and you’re tempted to throw that information out completely rather than stew on it until you have a better idea of what’s going on.
This isn’t an argument for “vibing” in particular being useful, but it’s a more general argument that even epistemic rationality often requires you to be operate in modes that seem superficially “a-rational”, to give you access to more ideas and information.
Elsethread I used the “music” as an example of something that requires good vibes in order to execute well, and I think there are kinds intellectual creativity that are more in the genre-of-rationality (i.e. puzzle solving) that may also benefit more from being in a playful mode, although I’m less confident about the details of this.
I mostly agree with this. If rationality means “systematized winning” them I’m comfortable including Vibing in it, but if it means something more specific than I wouldn’t include this in rationality. However, I still think it belongs on LessWrong, which is more about creating common knowledge to allow for systematized winning.
Actually I take that last part back. I could see people who love to vibe about rationality. I think I actually do too, just at a certain level of depth / casually,
Yes, but also once you get good at vibing you want to go vibe with people on your favorite frequency / topic. Also I think some topics are more “vibable“ than others, and rationality is just not one of them.
It’s gotta be tough to engage in any sort of rationality with a mindset that says that “thoughts are poison to the flow of value”.
It’s tricky, that’s for sure.
It’s less that thoughts alone are poison and more that, spending attention on thoughts is poison to the process of observing being (because it’s distracting from the pure observing being-ness of being).
Enjoying the music is different from saying “I enjoy the music”. In that difference is the difference between the thought and the doing part of enjoying the music.
There are plenty of things that are usually impaired by thinking. Thinking, however, is not one of them. So while I’m sure you could “vibe” about rationality, that would need to be an activity very different from actually doing rationality.
(Of course one doesn’t have to be doing rationality all the time! And some of those things that are usually impaired by thinking are excellent things to do. So, for the avoidance of doubt, I’m not saying that “vibing” is a Bad Thing. I’m not sure it belongs here, though. Why do we need “What vibing feels like” any more than we need “What being stoned feels like” or “What cuddling with a romantic partner feels like”?)
It’s worth considering the description of “acting via system 1”. As similar and relevant to vibing as described.
Healthy rationality long term needs to integrate both s1 and s2. Not just get the s2 right. Also the more s2 functions that can be entrusted to s1 effectively, the more s2 is free to leap forward into smarter ways of doing things.
One thing that’s important about this post is that it’s meant to evoke a particular set of felt senses more than be literally accurate. For instance, under certain definitions of “thinking”, the only way to avoid it would be to be unconscious or dead, which I’m obviously not trying to state here. This post was merely trying to evoke a certain phenomenological state, without delving into why that state was useful.
There’s a few reasons I think that vibing is useful for rationality, besides being an affordance that can allow you to enjoy communication in a new way (which I think would be reason enough). Note that many of these depend on models that I haven’t written up yet, so I don’t have the means to show why I believe them.
Vibing allows groups to communicate in a way that minimizes rationalizations and defensiveness in the discussion
Vibing allows a sort of proto “Looking” where you can see the world and your own psychology more for what it is as a group
Vibing allows groups to quickly see if a person will fit into their culture
Vibing gives you a better sense of the values people are actually optimizing for, including your own
I think that this sort of list can be dangerous because consciously trying to achieve these things can prevent you from vibing, in a similar way that consciously trying to practice reading people can harm circling, even though it’s a benefit of circling.
It’s tough to engage in the sort of rationality that the Berkeley rationality community likes to engage in.
A good analogy is circling, which is a style of communication that the Berkeley rationality HAS picked up. You might say “it’s tough to engage in rationality without logic being a central component of communication,” but I think a central thing that makes circling so good at getting at important truths is that it allows and encourages you to engage in communication where you don’t feel the need to justify everything you say logically. (Someone will disagree with me here, just substitute “logic” for some other thing that exists in normal rationality discourse but not in circling).
Vibing is importantly different from circling, but it has this same quality of getting at “truthiness” that typical rationality discussion can’t get at by throwing away some of the tenets of traditional rationality communication. I don’t think you should necessarily be talking about rationality when vibing, but I do think that you’re engaging in rationality when vibing, in a similar manner to circling.
It seems to me like you are using “rationality” with a much broader meaning than currently appears to me to be useful.
“Vibing”, as you describe it, appears to be fundamentally non-rational. Once again, that doesn’t mean it’s bad, it doesn’t even mean it’s not extremely valuable, but something that essentially requires stopping thinking as soon as it rears its ugly head is, whatever its merits, not engaging in rationality. Even if it provides a way of getting at truths that what-I-would-call-rationality can’t reach.
(Cf. the discussions long ago about the perils of saying “rational” when we actually mean “optimal” or “good”.)
FYI, the way I define “instrumental rationality”, which I think is “specific enough to be useful” without being so specific as to be overly constraining, is:
“The study of how to improve your cognitive processes in order to make better decisions.”
And for epistemic rationality, “the study of how to improve your cognitive processes in order to have beliefs that more accurately reflect reality.”
In both cases, I think it’s actually plausible that the OP has some bearing. [Although, disclaimer that I’m not 100% sure I grok the OP, and might be talking about something subtly different].
I think it’s a crucial rationalist skill to be able to apply “thinking” of the sort the OP is gesturing at avoiding. But, it seems quite important to me that there’s types of ideas and literal truths that are harder to grasp if you’re only capable of thinking in a highly analytical way.
One lens to look at this through: You need to both babble and prune in order to find useful things to say, and generating good babble can involve a lot of cognitive work that looks superficially irrational. This is fine, although you will eventually want to make sure the babble can pass through some kind of pruning filter.
example 1: drawing connections between things you wouldn’t otherwise be able to notice, even if reason you drew those connections didn’t make much sense. I.e you happened to be staring at a tree and it pointed you towards a tree metaphor
example 2: if you’re highly engaging your prune module to check if things make sense, you may be overly committing to a given ontology that isn’t actually quite right. Or your S1 might be picking up on things that are important that you can’t fully articulate, and you’re tempted to throw that information out completely rather than stew on it until you have a better idea of what’s going on.
This isn’t an argument for “vibing” in particular being useful, but it’s a more general argument that even epistemic rationality often requires you to be operate in modes that seem superficially “a-rational”, to give you access to more ideas and information.
Elsethread I used the “music” as an example of something that requires good vibes in order to execute well, and I think there are kinds intellectual creativity that are more in the genre-of-rationality (i.e. puzzle solving) that may also benefit more from being in a playful mode, although I’m less confident about the details of this.
I mostly agree with this. If rationality means “systematized winning” them I’m comfortable including Vibing in it, but if it means something more specific than I wouldn’t include this in rationality. However, I still think it belongs on LessWrong, which is more about creating common knowledge to allow for systematized winning.
Actually I take that last part back. I could see people who love to vibe about rationality. I think I actually do too, just at a certain level of depth / casually,