I appreciate the point, and think this is true for a large class of insights (e.g. explaining how to do quadratic equations, or how to use a new online editor). However, when people use phrases like “You can’t teach someone to have emotional awareness” or “You can’t teach someone to be a good father” I think that those statements are false, but it’s the case that communicating the S1 experiences to teach those things is very hard.
I think that many fundamental truths of rationality are in this reference class, which is why I think HPMOR and the Beisutsukai are so valuable—for conveying the feeling of rationality. And so I think that the inferential gap in things like this ends up plugged with platitudes, because it’s not easy to turn these insights into words. There’s a sense when I talk to someone who has had a significant personal revelation and solved some significant bug, that they say “I realised I just had to care about the truth” and I’m like “That sentence is used so much, that everyone listening will nod their heads but nobody will understand exactly what you meant”. And it’s often used to mean different valuable insights.
From being on both sides of trying to give and get advice that affects S1, the only consistent thing I find works is what Ozy says, except you don’t work out one way to convey the insight, you work out many ways that might convey the insight, and different people will need different explanations. That is, you generally have to phrase the same idea many different ways, sometimes using different metaphors, to find a way to present it that will click for somebody (assuming the inferential distance is short enough that this is even possible).
I appreciate the point, and think this is true for a large class of insights (e.g. explaining how to do quadratic equations, or how to use a new online editor). However, when people use phrases like “You can’t teach someone to have emotional awareness” or “You can’t teach someone to be a good father” I think that those statements are false, but it’s the case that communicating the S1 experiences to teach those things is very hard.
I think that many fundamental truths of rationality are in this reference class, which is why I think HPMOR and the Beisutsukai are so valuable—for conveying the feeling of rationality. And so I think that the inferential gap in things like this ends up plugged with platitudes, because it’s not easy to turn these insights into words. There’s a sense when I talk to someone who has had a significant personal revelation and solved some significant bug, that they say “I realised I just had to care about the truth” and I’m like “That sentence is used so much, that everyone listening will nod their heads but nobody will understand exactly what you meant”. And it’s often used to mean different valuable insights.
From being on both sides of trying to give and get advice that affects S1, the only consistent thing I find works is what Ozy says, except you don’t work out one way to convey the insight, you work out many ways that might convey the insight, and different people will need different explanations. That is, you generally have to phrase the same idea many different ways, sometimes using different metaphors, to find a way to present it that will click for somebody (assuming the inferential distance is short enough that this is even possible).