It wasn’t my intention to reinforce this dichotomy. Instead, I hoped to encourage people to name things that break the rationalist community’s Overton window, so that others read them and think “Whoopsie, things like that can actually be said here?!” I suspect that way more people here picked up useful heuristics and models in their pre-rationalist days than realize it, because they overupdate on the way of the Sequences being the One True Way. I’ve learned in other communities that breaking taboos with questions like these is a useful means for breaking conformity pressure. My hope was that eventually, this helps a little to reduce the imbalance towards prickliness I perceive in the rationalist community, and with that this dichotomy.
Apparently, I haven’t yet figured out how to express and enact intentions like these in a way that fits the rationalist language game.
Instead, I hoped to encourage people to name things that break the rationalist community’s Overton window, so that others read them and think “Whoopsie, things like that can actually be said here?!”
Is it really the case that such things are outside the Overton Window, though? We’ve had both well-received posts discussing how to incorporate goo-y stuff before [e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5] as well as various posts expressing things in pretty goo-y terms [e.g. 1, 2, 3,4, 5]. I don’t think LW at least has any taboo against saying these kinds of things; writing in an unusual style might invite some extra scrutiny, but generally the posts will still be received well as long as they’re reasonable and well-argued.
It seems to me that there are discussions around the term energy that are blocked by being outside of the Overton Window. I think I had two discussions with Severin in which I needed the concept because it was lifting weights and in both, there was a sense of anxiousness about breaking out of the Overton Window.
How to learn soft skills(first on your list) seems like the perfect example. It uses the term energy once but it does so in a pretty Straussian manner.
I do agree that there’s often a useful intermediate step for escaping the false dichotomy that’s something like “do both A and ¬A.” And then, once you have experiential data of each, you can see the ways that the A/¬A dichotomy was fake and not helpful.
But also I worry about people seeing sentiments like the one immediately above, and doing a fallacy-of-the-gray thing, and thinking it means something like “precision doesn’t matter.”
Precision (and similar stuff) does matter! It’s just not the enemy of the-thing-being-called-goo.
Precision (and similar stuff) does matter! It’s just not the enemy of the-thing-being-called-goo.
Well… in practice it kind of is.
There’s totally a thing where a focus on precision can result in people precluding “goo” and actively attacking attempts to communicate in gooish.
I mean, this is basically what “normies” find annoying about autistic people.
It doesn’t have to be this way. I totally agree, precision totally matters. There’s a kind of flow between precision and “goo” that seems vastly more functional and fun than either one alone. They can support one another super well.
But to say that precision isn’t the enemy of the-thing-being-called-goo seems like it’s glossing over a real sociological thing.
Thanks for the input!
It wasn’t my intention to reinforce this dichotomy. Instead, I hoped to encourage people to name things that break the rationalist community’s Overton window, so that others read them and think “Whoopsie, things like that can actually be said here?!” I suspect that way more people here picked up useful heuristics and models in their pre-rationalist days than realize it, because they overupdate on the way of the Sequences being the One True Way. I’ve learned in other communities that breaking taboos with questions like these is a useful means for breaking conformity pressure. My hope was that eventually, this helps a little to reduce the imbalance towards prickliness I perceive in the rationalist community, and with that this dichotomy.
Apparently, I haven’t yet figured out how to express and enact intentions like these in a way that fits the rationalist language game.
Is it really the case that such things are outside the Overton Window, though? We’ve had both well-received posts discussing how to incorporate goo-y stuff before [e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5] as well as various posts expressing things in pretty goo-y terms [e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. I don’t think LW at least has any taboo against saying these kinds of things; writing in an unusual style might invite some extra scrutiny, but generally the posts will still be received well as long as they’re reasonable and well-argued.
It seems to me that there are discussions around the term energy that are blocked by being outside of the Overton Window. I think I had two discussions with Severin in which I needed the concept because it was lifting weights and in both, there was a sense of anxiousness about breaking out of the Overton Window.
How to learn soft skills(first on your list) seems like the perfect example. It uses the term energy once but it does so in a pretty Straussian manner.
I do agree that there’s often a useful intermediate step for escaping the false dichotomy that’s something like “do both A and ¬A.” And then, once you have experiential data of each, you can see the ways that the A/¬A dichotomy was fake and not helpful.
But also I worry about people seeing sentiments like the one immediately above, and doing a fallacy-of-the-gray thing, and thinking it means something like “precision doesn’t matter.”
Precision (and similar stuff) does matter! It’s just not the enemy of the-thing-being-called-goo.
Well… in practice it kind of is.
There’s totally a thing where a focus on precision can result in people precluding “goo” and actively attacking attempts to communicate in gooish.
I mean, this is basically what “normies” find annoying about autistic people.
It doesn’t have to be this way. I totally agree, precision totally matters. There’s a kind of flow between precision and “goo” that seems vastly more functional and fun than either one alone. They can support one another super well.
But to say that precision isn’t the enemy of the-thing-being-called-goo seems like it’s glossing over a real sociological thing.
Well, to be precise, I said a compound thing which included:
… so I don’t think I fully glossed it over. =P