On the day when I first conceived of this sequence, my room was covered in giant graph paper sticky notes. The walls, the windows, the dressers, the floor. Sticky pads everywhere, and every one of them packed with word clouds and doodles in messy bold marker.
My world is rich. The grain of the wood on the desk in front of me, the slightly raw sensation inside my nostrils that brightens each time I inhale, the pressure of my search for words as I write that rises up through my chest and makes my brain feel like it’s breathing through a straw. I know as well as almost anybody what MacNeice called “the drunkenness of things being various”, “incorrigibly plural”. I am awash in details; sometimes I swim, sometimes I drown, and in rare merciful moments, I float.
People talk about missing the forest for the trees; I am a creature of individual leaves. The sticky notes with which I had covered my walls were my attempts to recall every twig and branch I had seen while developing my approach to rationality, ever since I asked myself what the existing art is missing back in 2013. Each page was an attempted portrait of a different tree.
The sentence I somehow pulled together for this sequence—”Knowing the territory takes patient and direct observation”—was my sketch of the entire forest all at once.
On that day, it had seemed a literally incomprehensible pile of details, as nearly everything I write about does until some time after I’ve published. Yet after two more years of work on this project, I still think that sketch is not only accurate, but pretty close to complete.
I am proud of this sequence. It’s far from perfect; it’s far from adequate, in fact. And I’ll talk about that, too. But as a first-pass summary of how I think about “Intro to Naturalism”, it’s right to say that overall, I think it may be the best thing I’ve done so far.
*
I doubt it’s worth much on its own, though. It was really never meant to be. I tried to make it accessible, but I mostly wrote it for myself. I published it publicly anyway because I figure there’s a (reasonable!) limit to the patience of my funders. I’m delighted and a little surprised that other people have found it useful.
To me, this sequence is a bit like a sextant. Suppose you’re trying to navigate to a particular island off the coast of South Africa. It will not, by itself, get you to your destination. It’s not the shore. It’s not a boat. It’s not even a map. You need an awful lot more than this to sail to Madagascar.
But as the captain of the HMS Naturalism, I felt I had no hope of staying on course without writing down this worldview, in summary and in detail.
*
On course toward what, exactly? What is the project of which this sequence is a small but crucial part?
The journey has four parts, according to my current understanding:
1) Intro to Naturalism: My attempt to lay out the perspective from which my branch of rationality is practiced.
2) The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism (published in early 2023): A straightforward mechanical description of the procedure, as I tend to present it to people learning it for the first time.
3) Naturalism In Practice: A series of accounts of real-life naturalist studies, in frequent dialog with posts from the earlier two sequences, covering a range of topics and demonstrating what naturalism looks and feels like in practice. (This sequence is currently in the works.)
4) THE ACTUAL GOAL [as yet untitled (and unfunded)]: A synthesis of the previous three sequences, perhaps in book form, comprising a comprehensive practical guide to knowing the territory through patient and direct observation.
(There may need to be a part “3.5”, where I refocus for a while on pedagogy and collaboration, before I am ready for 4.)
If I were less awash in details, I imagine I would have been able to start with part 4. But also, I may never have been able to develop such a thing as naturalism.
*
What can I predict about how this sequence will show up in whatever synthesis I eventually create, provided I eventually get to do that?
I think the core summary will be the same: “Knowing the territory takes patient and direct observation.”
Here are some ways I think it will differ from the original.
1.
I may rely much less on the aesthetics of 19th century natural history; indeed, I may completely rename the discipline.
This framing did a ton of work in helping me understand what I was doing and why; but most people do not have my background, and do not find this framework nearly as supportive or inspiring as I have.
For most readers of LessWrong, the word “naturalism” refers to an ontological claim denying the supernatural. They are completely unfamiliar with the approach to biology that also goes by that name, which focuses on knowing a few organisms deeply rather than on the categorization of organisms.
If I do keep the naturalist framing, I’ll need to double down on it and begin with a discussion of the role of the naturalist approach in the history of science, which would be fun for me but perhaps needlessly inefficient.
2.
If there is a major change to the overall summary, it will probably be a result of further developments in my study of “realness”.
During the study I’m currently writing up—one of “Hug the Query”—the primacy of my intuitions involving these observations has come into sharper focus. I’m not the only person who believes “Interlude On Realness” is the most important post in my intro sequence, even though it’s also the one that’s least integrated with the rest of the sequence. I think that a more mature and positively impactful incarnation of “Intro To Naturalism” might put whatever’s going on with “realness” front and center (presumably after I manage to have more coherent thoughts about what is going on with realness).
3.
As Intro to Naturalism suggests, this approach to investigation is in theory extremely general. I have an even larger vision than the one I’ve so far laid out in this review, in which my approach is thoroughly tested and adapted to an enormous breadth of domains, from AI alignment research to metallurgy to computational ethnomusicology. (I maintain an intuition that’s even a little gears-y about the utility of naturalism for AI alignment research especially.)
However, I am by passion and profession a rationality developer. The version of naturalism that I understand best, and that I am best prepared to write about at length, is particularly tailored to the investigation of human cognitive algorithms. Unless someone swoops in and drops a bunch of money on a far more ambitious and speculative project than I currently plan to undertake, and perhaps even finds me some kind of cofounder with a complementary skillset, the final incarnation of this sequence will be more narrowly focused on rationality in particular than was the original.
4.
The structure of the finished work will almost certainly be the exact opposite of my historical publications. Historically, I published the most abstract discussions, then the instructional guidelines, then the fully concrete demonstrations. I did this not because I thought it was a good idea, but because I’m a tiny human with limited cognitive capacity and it was the only way I could manage to write anything in practice.
The almost-always-correct way to write is to move from concrete to abstract. I expect that anything I present from this sequence in the final work will follow a demonstration and a methodological discussion.
5.
I do not think that I had “patient” in sufficiently clear view when I wrote “Patient Observation”, and I still don’t think I’m quite there yet. It may be the wrong term, or it may be overloaded. It’s terribly important, and I think that communicating about it as well as I’d like to will require 1) breaking it down more carefully, and 2) doing so in dialog with contrasting approaches.
I recently found myself claiming to be “at war with the relatively dumb versions of startup culture aesthetics”. I think that to make my point about “patience” to my satisfaction, I will also need to extol the virtues of efficiency, rapid iteration, decisiveness, etc., as I understand them. This entire approach depends fundamentally on patience, and I don’t think it can be wholeheartedly embraced without first safeguarding the fruits of contrasting approaches (or at least explicitly contending with their loss, where they are in fact threatened).
a) I am excited by the prospect of there eventually being some kind of naturalism book
b) I like the idea of either reframing away from Naturalism, or introducing the concept more thoroughly. I was definitely among the people going “huh?” at it, but I feel interested in the prospect of establishing the version of the concept that was inspiring to you.
c) I feel especially excited for you doing an exploration of decisiveness/rapid-iteration/efficiency/other-virtues-that-seem-maybe-at-odds with patience, and then saying more things about patience.
I’m planning to write a review of the Patience post from this sequence since it felt among the most important to me personally. And it’s definitely been a big struggle that, like, “but, so much stuff is happening so fast, I can tell I need some kind of patience that I don’t currently have, but I really don’t know how to relate to it.”
(This is a review of the entire sequence.)
On the day when I first conceived of this sequence, my room was covered in giant graph paper sticky notes. The walls, the windows, the dressers, the floor. Sticky pads everywhere, and every one of them packed with word clouds and doodles in messy bold marker.
My world is rich. The grain of the wood on the desk in front of me, the slightly raw sensation inside my nostrils that brightens each time I inhale, the pressure of my search for words as I write that rises up through my chest and makes my brain feel like it’s breathing through a straw. I know as well as almost anybody what MacNeice called “the drunkenness of things being various”, “incorrigibly plural”. I am awash in details; sometimes I swim, sometimes I drown, and in rare merciful moments, I float.
People talk about missing the forest for the trees; I am a creature of individual leaves. The sticky notes with which I had covered my walls were my attempts to recall every twig and branch I had seen while developing my approach to rationality, ever since I asked myself what the existing art is missing back in 2013. Each page was an attempted portrait of a different tree.
The sentence I somehow pulled together for this sequence—”Knowing the territory takes patient and direct observation”—was my sketch of the entire forest all at once.
On that day, it had seemed a literally incomprehensible pile of details, as nearly everything I write about does until some time after I’ve published. Yet after two more years of work on this project, I still think that sketch is not only accurate, but pretty close to complete.
I am proud of this sequence. It’s far from perfect; it’s far from adequate, in fact. And I’ll talk about that, too. But as a first-pass summary of how I think about “Intro to Naturalism”, it’s right to say that overall, I think it may be the best thing I’ve done so far.
*
I doubt it’s worth much on its own, though. It was really never meant to be. I tried to make it accessible, but I mostly wrote it for myself. I published it publicly anyway because I figure there’s a (reasonable!) limit to the patience of my funders. I’m delighted and a little surprised that other people have found it useful.
To me, this sequence is a bit like a sextant. Suppose you’re trying to navigate to a particular island off the coast of South Africa. It will not, by itself, get you to your destination. It’s not the shore. It’s not a boat. It’s not even a map. You need an awful lot more than this to sail to Madagascar.
But as the captain of the HMS Naturalism, I felt I had no hope of staying on course without writing down this worldview, in summary and in detail.
*
On course toward what, exactly? What is the project of which this sequence is a small but crucial part?
The journey has four parts, according to my current understanding:
1) Intro to Naturalism: My attempt to lay out the perspective from which my branch of rationality is practiced.
2) The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism (published in early 2023): A straightforward mechanical description of the procedure, as I tend to present it to people learning it for the first time.
3) Naturalism In Practice: A series of accounts of real-life naturalist studies, in frequent dialog with posts from the earlier two sequences, covering a range of topics and demonstrating what naturalism looks and feels like in practice. (This sequence is currently in the works.)
4) THE ACTUAL GOAL [as yet untitled (and unfunded)]: A synthesis of the previous three sequences, perhaps in book form, comprising a comprehensive practical guide to knowing the territory through patient and direct observation.
(There may need to be a part “3.5”, where I refocus for a while on pedagogy and collaboration, before I am ready for 4.)
If I were less awash in details, I imagine I would have been able to start with part 4. But also, I may never have been able to develop such a thing as naturalism.
*
What can I predict about how this sequence will show up in whatever synthesis I eventually create, provided I eventually get to do that?
I think the core summary will be the same: “Knowing the territory takes patient and direct observation.”
Here are some ways I think it will differ from the original.
1.
I may rely much less on the aesthetics of 19th century natural history; indeed, I may completely rename the discipline.
This framing did a ton of work in helping me understand what I was doing and why; but most people do not have my background, and do not find this framework nearly as supportive or inspiring as I have.
For most readers of LessWrong, the word “naturalism” refers to an ontological claim denying the supernatural. They are completely unfamiliar with the approach to biology that also goes by that name, which focuses on knowing a few organisms deeply rather than on the categorization of organisms.
If I do keep the naturalist framing, I’ll need to double down on it and begin with a discussion of the role of the naturalist approach in the history of science, which would be fun for me but perhaps needlessly inefficient.
2.
If there is a major change to the overall summary, it will probably be a result of further developments in my study of “realness”.
During the study I’m currently writing up—one of “Hug the Query”—the primacy of my intuitions involving these observations has come into sharper focus. I’m not the only person who believes “Interlude On Realness” is the most important post in my intro sequence, even though it’s also the one that’s least integrated with the rest of the sequence. I think that a more mature and positively impactful incarnation of “Intro To Naturalism” might put whatever’s going on with “realness” front and center (presumably after I manage to have more coherent thoughts about what is going on with realness).
3.
As Intro to Naturalism suggests, this approach to investigation is in theory extremely general. I have an even larger vision than the one I’ve so far laid out in this review, in which my approach is thoroughly tested and adapted to an enormous breadth of domains, from AI alignment research to metallurgy to computational ethnomusicology. (I maintain an intuition that’s even a little gears-y about the utility of naturalism for AI alignment research especially.)
However, I am by passion and profession a rationality developer. The version of naturalism that I understand best, and that I am best prepared to write about at length, is particularly tailored to the investigation of human cognitive algorithms. Unless someone swoops in and drops a bunch of money on a far more ambitious and speculative project than I currently plan to undertake, and perhaps even finds me some kind of cofounder with a complementary skillset, the final incarnation of this sequence will be more narrowly focused on rationality in particular than was the original.
4.
The structure of the finished work will almost certainly be the exact opposite of my historical publications. Historically, I published the most abstract discussions, then the instructional guidelines, then the fully concrete demonstrations. I did this not because I thought it was a good idea, but because I’m a tiny human with limited cognitive capacity and it was the only way I could manage to write anything in practice.
The almost-always-correct way to write is to move from concrete to abstract. I expect that anything I present from this sequence in the final work will follow a demonstration and a methodological discussion.
5.
I do not think that I had “patient” in sufficiently clear view when I wrote “Patient Observation”, and I still don’t think I’m quite there yet. It may be the wrong term, or it may be overloaded. It’s terribly important, and I think that communicating about it as well as I’d like to will require 1) breaking it down more carefully, and 2) doing so in dialog with contrasting approaches.
I recently found myself claiming to be “at war with the relatively dumb versions of startup culture aesthetics”. I think that to make my point about “patience” to my satisfaction, I will also need to extol the virtues of efficiency, rapid iteration, decisiveness, etc., as I understand them. This entire approach depends fundamentally on patience, and I don’t think it can be wholeheartedly embraced without first safeguarding the fruits of contrasting approaches (or at least explicitly contending with their loss, where they are in fact threatened).
Oh man
a) I am excited by the prospect of there eventually being some kind of naturalism book
b) I like the idea of either reframing away from Naturalism, or introducing the concept more thoroughly. I was definitely among the people going “huh?” at it, but I feel interested in the prospect of establishing the version of the concept that was inspiring to you.
c) I feel especially excited for you doing an exploration of decisiveness/rapid-iteration/efficiency/other-virtues-that-seem-maybe-at-odds with patience, and then saying more things about patience.
I’m planning to write a review of the Patience post from this sequence since it felt among the most important to me personally. And it’s definitely been a big struggle that, like, “but, so much stuff is happening so fast, I can tell I need some kind of patience that I don’t currently have, but I really don’t know how to relate to it.”