Your embodiment optimizations are something that always instantly makes me feel better when I’m reminded of them, but I rarely prompt myself into them, but just now I got a hit of a happy feeling from reading early bits and then just straightening my desk/monitor/mouse alignment a bit and then just… ahh <3
When I re-read the first draft, I realized other parts of my office needed a tune-up, and finished writing only after that. So like… double thank you! :-)
Often I experience “quote/response” as a smell, but I think it might work here without being invalid?
I. Regarding Evangelists
Arguing with one of those street preachers, like I at least used to see on college campuses pretty often, strikes me as maybe promising. Stupid and pointless, yes, but if we ignore that for a moment… those preachers work with a kind of script that’s largely meant to hook people into debating them. What kind of clarity would you need to not feel hooked, but walk into the trap anyway, and still navigate it skillfully? You’d need to real-time learn the actual structure of the preacher’s mental program and identify what conversational moves would actually jam his mental code — not just what’s illogical about the content of his words. And you’d need to real-time notice every time you lost even a hint of clarity and got sucked the slightest bit into the rhythms of the hypnotic tirade. This strikes me as quite a bit like BJJ rolling for the mind.
I did this some back in the day!
The time this worked the best, we ended up having coffee together, but then it stalled when he stopped being interested in working with me at any kind of longer term project to attempt to encode some of the bible in logical axioms and seek additional necessarily true implications of the bible. (Maybe this one was cheating a bit, because he was more of a fellowship evangelist than a schizophrenic engaged in public psychosis.)
The key is that I didn’t assert, but rather assumed, this, while talking about all the cool benefits one might get from having a tool that could explain exactly whether and how any given proposition could be logically biblicly justified.
If we made an error in transcribing the bible, and added a contradiction through our own personal misunderstandings, then we would be able to prove anything, even bad things, and it would seem like the bad things were godly to logically naive people! Thus we would need to do QA to detect and scrub such contradictions… and he was very NOT interested in helping me after that… so I let him save face and we agreed that it might be interesting to have coffee again sometime (which we never did).
The central reason I stopped trying to talk to such people is that when I tried to trace the motivations it felt a bit like… like bear baiting or something?
People like that often have good hearts, but just (as far as I can tell) have never really experienced intellectual rigor (or maybe never aimed it at themselves and what they love).
Many likely never had an experience where they deduced “well then I guess it must be the carburetor (and then it was)” or “so these lines MUST be parallel (and they actually were)” or “the variable must sometimes have content that can’t be coerced (and then they found the program conditions that made the type coercion fail)”.
II. Caring About Babies (Even If They Might Never Grow Up)
Also, I stopped because I began to worry that I might break or non-trivially harm someone who was like… like “staying on the wagon through the power of Jesus”? It seems ethically acceptable to poke at my OWN foundations… but maybe not those of random strangers?
A rationality sensei worth learning from is someone whose devotion to truth guides them to lead a dojo, and who would abandon the dojo the moment it’s true for them to do so… Suppose a student stumbles but doesn’t recognize it (like completely missing an obvious selection bias in a proposed experiment). If the sensei is attached to teaching effectively, then their impulse will be to manipulate the student into doing something different, often sliding into the Drama Triangle or weaponizing authority.
I don’t believe that a teacher who does the swift abandonment thing would be an especially good teacher. It sounds unethical.
(Succintly: HEXACO “H” has “honesty” which is relevant to epistemic cooperation, but there are reasons that it also has humility and fairness as tightly correlated parts of the package, and it might not be fair for a sensei to abandon their dojo’s students, especially the ones who aren’t very advanced and “don’t get why they are being abandoned just because of <X>”.)
Basically, I think that a commitment to truth does not have to be the cause of every motion in every instant. When interacting with humans, I think other factors than the truth are properly relevant to the decision. Like promises, cherishing, duties, apologies, precedents, role modeling, caring, and so on.
III. Positive Theories Of Institutional Adequacy
My first step aiming at a pure dojo would be to find co-founders and construct with them a collection of finite commitments and easy promises with failover clauses, that were unlikely to be regretted, to lead the dojo as a group for at least… 3 years? Then, in the first year, maybe you decide it is likely to be shut down.
Enough promises from enough adequate co-founders would make things very likely to work well, I think?
The roles could be theorized about separately from people, and adequate performance of them would hopefully be non-arduous and reasonably rewarding, and establish a platform of safe social certainty atop which the actual novel (shorter term) reactive OODA-looping substance of events and learning and side quests could play out.
Personally, I admire the Rotary system’s model of presidents who first serve as vice-president for a year, then do the President job, then get debunked, and then become a normal “former President” of their club. Eventually (after enough decades) you have ~45 former presidents hanging out (still sometimes serving on committees, planning adventures, etc) while attending the funeral of a former president roughly once per year (until death is cured (maybe/hopefully)).
The existing system of Rotary, full of normally good humans, was compatible with eradicating Polio from everywhere in the world except (tragically (on many levels)) Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Relevantly: I did not invent the Rotary governance system. I just saw it work because my dad was in the club of my town where I grew up, and was the president for a year. Some of the central virtues seem to be laughter, and drinking, and pranks. There was a tradition of bragging about successes, and then being fined (proceeds go to the donation fund) for bragging. It gives me a sense of what a potlatch might have sorta been like?
IV. Theories About People Able To Fulfill Roles
This links, in my mind, to the Drama Triangle stuff. Like: why not… just not do drama? Maybe the drama triangle is just a locally relevant pet theory of a therapist who sees a lot of people who need her kind of therapy?
If people in a local rotary club steal the president’s gavel, and then sneak it back on to the podium just before the end of the meeting with a well timed distraction, couldn’t you, as the president, just laugh and appreciate their cleverness? Its fun! Isn’t humor in the list of 12 virtues? (Oh huh. It isn’t. I think that’s an error, probably?)
Part of how it works, maybe, is that you can discover governors who are unfit for their role (and/or have unfit people in their club (and/or should have fissioned as a club already (or shut down and given money back to investors (or debugged the governor selection system (or...(...)))))) if they overreact to such a prank.
What could cure you of Goodhart drift, at least in the limit, within your own mind? Not just using better and more clever measurements to stave off the entropic slide toward lost purposes, but actually end the drift? …It requires asking, again and again, in the silent voice of stillness: “Where did this thought come from? What purpose does it serve? How does it compare to my intention? What’s actually true here?”
I enjoyed the “silence perspective” here, and I wonder if any of it was connected to an almost literally opposite system of mental practices, that was recently advocated to intentionally create banishable and invokable tulpas that would pop up and give helpful advice in people’s inner working memory as auditory/visual/etc content?
In particular, it’s unclear whether and exactly how a given person would create a rationality dojo as part of their own training.
The thing that seems like it would make sense here is if you were in a business, and you were bottlenecked on hiring talent, and the talent had to be able to engage in cooperative creative systematic problem solving under uncertainty in order to be worth hiring, and then if you can’t hire enough of it already on the open market...
...maybe you hire people close to the target, give them on-the-job training in a “working dojo”, and then promote them to the real job when they can handle the real job?
The wrinkle here is that such a BUSINESS would NOT obviously be a dojo full of hobbyists or religionists or whatever… That context would be at “a higher stakes sort of gambling table” (though maybe lower stakes at a “spiritual level”).
And then the very presence of “the bigger stakes” seems likely to be a dangerous source of “motivation” that would cause motivated cognition to be more common… which is a hole other kettle of worms.
At points in your essay, I was reminded of the cultural aspects of the Toyota Production System.
There’s a scene in Spear’s classic book where someone who has had ~3 months of training in “doing manufacturing optimization experiments slowly and correctly” (as part of training to be a manager with a Japenese boss) and he moves to a new place and gets 3 days of intensive practice sorta “speedrunning” the previous very slow practices...
Despite the imposed pace, Takahashi insisted that Dallis not speculate but always ground alterations in observed data and always test against well-articulated expectations.
Dallis came to see subtleties he had not appreciated before. For example, relocating a jig was not a matter of making a single change. Whether it was to the worker’s left or right, how far away it was, and the angle at which the elbow and wrist had to be bent to grasp it all mattered. He also learned that the demand for speed and the insistence on discipline were not irreconcilable if he could construct high-speed, low-cost prototypes to test an idea.
As he explained to me, “If I had an idea to relocate something, [Mike] Takahashi would challenge me.” If something required welding, was it possible to bolt it in place to test the idea? If it could be bolted, could time be saved with temporary taping? Instead of taping, could it be held in place to see the flaws in the idea with extreme speed? “Mike,” said Dallis, “was trying to get me to go quicker, quicker, quicker, making as little investment as possible in an idea so I could try it and discover its strengths and shortcomings first, before making more of a commitment. It was all about learning at maximum speed.” Dallis was learning how to minimize the trade-off between speed of testing and discipline of learning.
After three days, Dallis had identified 50 problems with the cell’s quality checks, tool changes, and other work. To deal with those problems, he had made 35 changes, with 15 suggestions still to be implemented (see Table 9-2).
This is “part of the larger thing” that Toyota is pretty certain US manufacturers are incapable of teaching their managers to do (hence why Toyota allows people to study them, expecting it to only result in cargo culting of their true cultural genius), and its deeper than that...
VI. Owning And Rationally Tending Something Smaller Than “Your Personal Maximum Kelly Bet”
...because it is a good bet that Takahashi was approaching the training of Dallis as part of a well-theorized process meeting a well defined demand for more and better manufacturing line managers.
(In this case a demand for managers to work in a plant owned by Toyota, but not managed by Japenese managers, because that would either look like “Japan colonizing the US” or else “managers taking one for the team and living in a backwards foreign country for a while”.)
However, as a big picture practical upshot of the full logic here… maybe this is what a rationality dojo looks like, so long as you use it, in playfully fun cooperation with others, to meet more and better goals, faster and cheaper, partly by going meta on the practices, while acting as if every action was also a bet related to articulable anticipations of systematically improving outcomes.
I did this [preacher-hacking] some back in the day!
That was really neat to read. Thank you for sharing!
People like that often have good hearts, but just (as far as I can tell) have never really experienced intellectual rigor (or maybe never aimed it at themselves and what they love).
I agree.
Also, for what it’s worth, my impression is that this is a quality of a mind that’s mostly independent of a mind’s ability to be jammed. If there were a knob for a given mind that would let its owner increase or decrease its logical rigor, I don’t think having more rigor would prevent jamming. It just changes what kinds of things can and can’t jam it.
One of my favorite recent examples was “You cannot know that this statement is true.” It’s like an interpersonal version of the “This statement is false” thing. I know the statement is true, and you can know that I know it’s true, but you can’t know it’s true.
This seems to cause some minds (roughly medium to strong rigor minds) to hiccup and glitch. It causes much less rigorous minds to sort of eyeroll or glaze over as a deflection. Some minds (like those trained to think rigorously in terms of self-reference) can navigate it enough to note “Oh, that’s a cool example” and smoothly move on.
Also, I stopped because I began to worry that I might break or non-trivially harm someone who was like… like “staying on the wagon through the power of Jesus”? It seems ethically acceptable to poke at my OWN foundations… but maybe not those of random strangers?
I like the deeper thing you’re pointing at here. Something like, noticing that certain moves can be ontologically violent, and taking that into account when it comes to being kind to others.
That said, I feel uneasy with the “ethically acceptable” question. It seems to compress too much and dances dangerously close to Drama Triangle dynamics (namely, taking responsibility for someone else’s choices).
But my heart agrees with the intuition I think you’re pointing at here.
Basically, I think that a commitment to truth does not have to be the cause of every motion in every instant. When interacting with humans, I think other factors than the truth are properly relevant to the decision. Like promises, cherishing, duties, apologies, precendents, role modeling, caring, and so on.
I agree. I’m not suggesting abandoning those things. I’m suggesting an internal design in which they flow from devotion to truth.
In practice I find that at least at the stage I’ve reached, I’m not focused on truth in every moment, and often this is perfectly fine. It’s just that when I’m not paying attention like that, it’s easy for some program to boot up that claims to be important for thus-and-such reason but is actually there to distract me.
To the extent that I’ve cleaned up my autopilot so that certain proxies are pretty reliably connected to the process of leaning toward truth, then I can loosen the reigns a bit and still get the desired outcome.
For instance: Sure, promises work okay as a proxy… as long as the promises aren’t being made in order to be liked so as to fill a sense of inadequacy (for instance). If that’s what’s happening, then this idea that it’s fine to drop focus on truth in order to keep promises can keep me confused and never addressing the sense of inadequacy directly. At some point on the devotional path, it’s necessary to turn to cherished promises and say something like “This too. This too can die. Let others distrust and hate me for letting them down if they must. I put this on truth’s altar and set it ablaze. I will keep only whatever remains.”
Thereafter, the reason for caring about promises becomes the linking power between keeping them and the truth — in which case I keep them not because “I made a promise and that’s the game theory” but because the act of keeping a given promise is part of my devotion to truth. It comes before reasons. The reasons are in service to the real thing underneath.
(I also want to add a periodic reminder I’ve said several times in these comments, but I imagine is easy to miss or forget: I’m not saying that this is what everyone should do. I’m saying that this kind of utter devotion seems to me both powerful and necessary for Beisutsukai.)
My first step aiming at a pure dojo would be to find co-founders and construct with them a collection of finite commitments and easy promises with failover clauses, that were unlikely to be regretted, to lead the dojo as a group for at least… 3 years? Then, in the first year, maybe you decide it is likely to be shut down.
Enough promises from enough adequate co-founders would make things very likely to work well, I think?
I have a hard time imagining how this would actually work. It feels too… outside to me. Like it’s pretending we can program the social environment we’re in as though we’re looking at it from the outside. And like it’s also trying to replace “Do the thing and not the non-thing” with semi-formal structures, which from what I can tell basically always decays via Goodhart.
But maybe you have a clever way of navigating that…? I’m happy to have my skepticism dispelled here. I’d just need to understand better what you’re thinking first.
This links, in my mind, to the Drama Triangle stuff. Like: why not… just not do drama? Maybe the drama triangle is just a locally relevant pet theory of a therapist who sees a lot of people who need her kind of therapy?
You might find my reply to bglass clarifying. I wonder how much of this is just a matter of what I mean by Drama here being unclear due to a paucity of examples.
For my part, I really doubt this is just a therapeutic selection effect. I spent a few years trying to name a cultural engine and later found Lynne Forrest’s application of Karpman’s Triangle much, much better at communicating sight of the engine than I’d worked out how to on my own. I’d even encountered Karpman’s Triangle a lot before, but it didn’t land as useful until I combined Forrest’s take with the core thing I was seeing in basically every human culture.
I still think the core thing of “I need you to do/be a certain thing for me to be okay” is better at capturing the essential logic I care about in the Drama Triangle. But in practice, splitting it up into these three strategy types and their interactions seems to make it a lot easier for people to learn how to notice in themselves and others.
With all that said, I do think the essence really amounts to “why not… just not do drama?”
I think the answer is basically that most people — and basically all the loud or visible collectives — are highly addicted to the sensations of drama. It lands a little like “why not… just stop smoking?” Ultimately, yes, of course. But in practice I think it’s trickier than you seem to think it is.
And if I’m mistaken about that, I’d very much love to learn about it. I’d be quite happy to learn of a shortcut.
(Aside: I think this language around addiction is a bit confusing and doesn’t need to be. It’s more like, addiction is avoidance of a sensation or inner experience, and the addictive substance or behavior is an effective and habitual distraction from that intolerable sensation in a way that doesn’t actually address the cause of the sensation in question. This habit loop’s default is to deal with this problem by increasing the addictive substance’s intensity in a kind of arms race, but the actual way out is to turn around and build capacity to be with the “intolerable” experience.)
I enjoyed the “silence perspective” here, and I wonder if any of it was connected to an almost literally opposite system of mental practices, that was recently advocated to intentionally create banishable and invokable tulpas that would pop up and give helpful advice in people’s inner working memory as auditory/visual/etc content?
In short, no. I still haven’t read Duncan’s post. (I felt like I probably got the basic idea from the title combined with having had many conversations with Duncan where he explicitly used shoulder advisors.) The system (as I understand it) is too shallow to cut to the core of confusion. I mean, what are you using to pick your advisors? If you focus on listening to them as your basis, doesn’t this mean you end up with a level of clarity that’s roughly the weighted average of your advisors?
I do think it’s a really good technique. I just don’t see it as on the same tier as cultivating silence.
(It also feels important to acknowledge: Maybe Duncan addresses these and related questions in his post. I might go read it and find out. But in terms of answering the question about how connected the Void stuff is with Duncan’s post, the answer will lie in my impression of what Duncan probably talks about there, and my barely educated impression of Duncan’s point falls far short of the Void.)
> In particular, it’s unclear whether and exactly how a given person would create a rationality dojo as part of their own training.
The thing that seems like it would make sense here is if you were in a business, and you were bottlenecked on hiring talent, and the talent had to be able to engage in cooperative creative systematic problem solving under uncertainty in order to be worth hiring, and then if you can’t hire enough of it already on the open market...
...maybe you hire people close to the target, give them on-the-job training in a “working dojo”, and then promote them to the real job when they can handle the real job?
I wonder about editing that sentence in the OP to clarify. I didn’t mean that it’s unclear how someone could possibly create a dojo as part of their training. I meant that given a Bob, would Bob end up creating a dojo as part of his training, and if so then what would his dojo end up looking like? That seems hard for me to predict.
(I get glimmers of intuitions about this for some people, but I haven’t had much of a chance to calibrate those intuitions.)
But setting that aside to look at your idea:
I like the part where it’s a kind of grounded and real. I don’t care for the part where their livelihood gets tied to training. That slips in perverse incentives. I don’t know of a good way to overcome those here.
I’m reminded of teaching math in university years ago. I tried as hard as I could at the time to find a way to teach well. And I innovated some tricks I still use to this day. But in retrospect, the main hurdle I could never overcome was that the classes I was teaching were required for a wide swath of majors (precalc, business calc, business statistic, etc.). I know I deeply touched a very few students in my years there, and I’m grateful for that opportunity. But for the majority? I could never have hoped to overcome the fact that they were there only because they believed they had to be.
Today I’d be much, much more wicked and direct. While they still have a chance to switch which version of the class they’re in (i.e., in the first week), I would tell them that they’re in for a bizarre ride and that they should leave if they want to, and then demonstrate it ASAP. I’d give them core tools for sovereignty (like the Drama Triangle and somatic self-soothing), spell out the trauma structures associated with math and child-rearing, and focus on them clearing those in themselves first. Every step of the way thereafter, I’d hone in on every breath of bullshit and slay it, and as a class we’d collectively look at how (a) they can each take full conscious ownership of their lives, including whether and how they wanted to navigate my particular “math” class; and (b) how they might orient to passing the end-of-term math test given their resources, including the time remaining in the course. I might very well make the final exam worth 100% of the course grade to help capture the spirit of this.
(Fun fact: “mathematics” comes from the Greek for “one who knows”. Mathema was literally the art of knowing. The above is, in my opinion, not just a prerequisite structure for teaching math but is the art of mathema applied to the bizarre situation of a required academic class on computation.)
Maybe there’s a way to modify that approach for jobs…?
But I tried to figure out something very closely related for over a year and couldn’t figure it out on my own. I got a solution, but it amounted to “Don’t allow any perverse incentives at all. If any threaten, put them on your shoulders, not your students’, and only if it’s natural to make your growing immunity to it part of your practice.”
So… shrug? I’d be curious if you actually have a solution here in the shape you’re pointing at.
At points in your essay, I was reminded of the cultural aspects of the Toyota Production System.
There’s a scene in Spear’s classic book where someone who has had ~3 months of training in “doing manufacturing optimization experiments slowly and correctly” (as part of training to be a manager with a Japenese boss) and he moves to a new place and gets 3 days of intensive practice sorta “speedrunning” the previous very slow practices...
Oh, there’s something lovely and resonant here. Maybe this is what you meant by “working dojo”…?
This has gears turning in the back of my mind. Like it’s fitting a piece together that makes the challenges/pressure-tests make more sense.
It’s funny watching my mind trying to solve that. It’s not something I’m consciously determined to do. But it’s apparently a fun puzzle for me!
I like the groundedness of a tool space as a foundation for a rationality dojo. Like, producing real things and solving real problems. That’s very resonant.
I think there’s something slippery happening in terms of the Art being domain-general but cashing out in domain-specific ways.
I don’t have succinct tidy thoughts at this point. I like the inspiration food.
This is really long but I just wanted to address one tiny little tangent:
With all that said, I do think the essence really amounts to “why not… just not do drama?”
I think the answer is basically that most people — and basically all the loud or visible collectives — are highly addicted to the sensations of drama. It lands a little like “why not… just stop smoking?” Ultimately, yes, of course. But in practice I think it’s trickier than you seem to think it is.
I’ve definitely been guilty of the rescuer role, tho I’ve gotten much better at avoiding the trap. It was because I cared and wanted to help, and I didn’t know how to do so effectively. Learning about the triangle probably would have helped. I first read about it a few days ago, and even now I still have weaker aspects that I want to fix (tho I also strongly disagree with some aspects of the model). So… for some people, at least, it really is as simple as “just don’t do drama”. Which, to be fair, is a lot harder than it sounds when you’re a clueless noob just figuring things out for the first time!
Thank you for this. I learned stuff from it!
Your embodiment optimizations are something that always instantly makes me feel better when I’m reminded of them, but I rarely prompt myself into them, but just now I got a hit of a happy feeling from reading early bits and then just straightening my desk/monitor/mouse alignment a bit and then just… ahh <3
When I re-read the first draft, I realized other parts of my office needed a tune-up, and finished writing only after that. So like… double thank you! :-)
Often I experience “quote/response” as a smell, but I think it might work here without being invalid?
I. Regarding Evangelists
I did this some back in the day!
The time this worked the best, we ended up having coffee together, but then it stalled when he stopped being interested in working with me at any kind of longer term project to attempt to encode some of the bible in logical axioms and seek additional necessarily true implications of the bible. (Maybe this one was cheating a bit, because he was more of a fellowship evangelist than a schizophrenic engaged in public psychosis.)
I think the moment his enthusiasm failed was when he started to understand what it meant in practice that a contradictory axiom system can prove anything?
The key is that I didn’t assert, but rather assumed, this, while talking about all the cool benefits one might get from having a tool that could explain exactly whether and how any given proposition could be logically biblicly justified.
If we made an error in transcribing the bible, and added a contradiction through our own personal misunderstandings, then we would be able to prove anything, even bad things, and it would seem like the bad things were godly to logically naive people! Thus we would need to do QA to detect and scrub such contradictions… and he was very NOT interested in helping me after that… so I let him save face and we agreed that it might be interesting to have coffee again sometime (which we never did).
The central reason I stopped trying to talk to such people is that when I tried to trace the motivations it felt a bit like… like bear baiting or something?
People like that often have good hearts, but just (as far as I can tell) have never really experienced intellectual rigor (or maybe never aimed it at themselves and what they love).
Many likely never had an experience where they deduced “well then I guess it must be the carburetor (and then it was)” or “so these lines MUST be parallel (and they actually were)” or “the variable must sometimes have content that can’t be coerced (and then they found the program conditions that made the type coercion fail)”.
II. Caring About Babies (Even If They Might Never Grow Up)
Also, I stopped because I began to worry that I might break or non-trivially harm someone who was like… like “staying on the wagon through the power of Jesus”? It seems ethically acceptable to poke at my OWN foundations… but maybe not those of random strangers?
I don’t believe that a teacher who does the swift abandonment thing would be an especially good teacher. It sounds unethical.
(Succintly: HEXACO “H” has “honesty” which is relevant to epistemic cooperation, but there are reasons that it also has humility and fairness as tightly correlated parts of the package, and it might not be fair for a sensei to abandon their dojo’s students, especially the ones who aren’t very advanced and “don’t get why they are being abandoned just because of <X>”.)
Basically, I think that a commitment to truth does not have to be the cause of every motion in every instant. When interacting with humans, I think other factors than the truth are properly relevant to the decision. Like promises, cherishing, duties, apologies, precedents, role modeling, caring, and so on.
III. Positive Theories Of Institutional Adequacy
My first step aiming at a pure dojo would be to find co-founders and construct with them a collection of finite commitments and easy promises with failover clauses, that were unlikely to be regretted, to lead the dojo as a group for at least… 3 years? Then, in the first year, maybe you decide it is likely to be shut down.
Enough promises from enough adequate co-founders would make things very likely to work well, I think?
The roles could be theorized about separately from people, and adequate performance of them would hopefully be non-arduous and reasonably rewarding, and establish a platform of safe social certainty atop which the actual novel (shorter term) reactive OODA-looping substance of events and learning and side quests could play out.
Personally, I admire the Rotary system’s model of presidents who first serve as vice-president for a year, then do the President job, then get debunked, and then become a normal “former President” of their club. Eventually (after enough decades) you have ~45 former presidents hanging out (still sometimes serving on committees, planning adventures, etc) while attending the funeral of a former president roughly once per year (until death is cured (maybe/hopefully)).
The existing system of Rotary, full of normally good humans, was compatible with eradicating Polio from everywhere in the world except (tragically (on many levels)) Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Relevantly: I did not invent the Rotary governance system. I just saw it work because my dad was in the club of my town where I grew up, and was the president for a year. Some of the central virtues seem to be laughter, and drinking, and pranks. There was a tradition of bragging about successes, and then being fined (proceeds go to the donation fund) for bragging. It gives me a sense of what a potlatch might have sorta been like?
IV. Theories About People Able To Fulfill Roles
This links, in my mind, to the Drama Triangle stuff. Like: why not… just not do drama? Maybe the drama triangle is just a locally relevant pet theory of a therapist who sees a lot of people who need her kind of therapy?
If people in a local rotary club steal the president’s gavel, and then sneak it back on to the podium just before the end of the meeting with a well timed distraction, couldn’t you, as the president, just laugh and appreciate their cleverness? Its fun! Isn’t humor in the list of 12 virtues? (Oh huh. It isn’t. I think that’s an error, probably?)
Part of how it works, maybe, is that you can discover governors who are unfit for their role (and/or have unfit people in their club (and/or should have fissioned as a club already (or shut down and given money back to investors (or debugged the governor selection system (or...(...)))))) if they overreact to such a prank.
I enjoyed the “silence perspective” here, and I wonder if any of it was connected to an almost literally opposite system of mental practices, that was recently advocated to intentionally create banishable and invokable tulpas that would pop up and give helpful advice in people’s inner working memory as auditory/visual/etc content?
The thing that seems like it would make sense here is if you were in a business, and you were bottlenecked on hiring talent, and the talent had to be able to engage in cooperative creative systematic problem solving under uncertainty in order to be worth hiring, and then if you can’t hire enough of it already on the open market...
...maybe you hire people close to the target, give them on-the-job training in a “working dojo”, and then promote them to the real job when they can handle the real job?
V. How Something To Protect Might Normally Damage Good Rationality Habits
The wrinkle here is that such a BUSINESS would NOT obviously be a dojo full of hobbyists or religionists or whatever… That context would be at “a higher stakes sort of gambling table” (though maybe lower stakes at a “spiritual level”).
And then the very presence of “the bigger stakes” seems likely to be a dangerous source of “motivation” that would cause motivated cognition to be more common… which is a hole other kettle of worms.
At points in your essay, I was reminded of the cultural aspects of the Toyota Production System.
There’s a scene in Spear’s classic book where someone who has had ~3 months of training in “doing manufacturing optimization experiments slowly and correctly” (as part of training to be a manager with a Japenese boss) and he moves to a new place and gets 3 days of intensive practice sorta “speedrunning” the previous very slow practices...
This is “part of the larger thing” that Toyota is pretty certain US manufacturers are incapable of teaching their managers to do (hence why Toyota allows people to study them, expecting it to only result in cargo culting of their true cultural genius), and its deeper than that...
VI. Owning And Rationally Tending Something Smaller Than “Your Personal Maximum Kelly Bet”
...because it is a good bet that Takahashi was approaching the training of Dallis as part of a well-theorized process meeting a well defined demand for more and better manufacturing line managers.
(In this case a demand for managers to work in a plant owned by Toyota, but not managed by Japenese managers, because that would either look like “Japan colonizing the US” or else “managers taking one for the team and living in a backwards foreign country for a while”.)
However, as a big picture practical upshot of the full logic here… maybe this is what a rationality dojo looks like, so long as you use it, in playfully fun cooperation with others, to meet more and better goals, faster and cheaper, partly by going meta on the practices, while acting as if every action was also a bet related to articulable anticipations of systematically improving outcomes.
I’m glad to hear it! :-)
That was really neat to read. Thank you for sharing!
I agree.
Also, for what it’s worth, my impression is that this is a quality of a mind that’s mostly independent of a mind’s ability to be jammed. If there were a knob for a given mind that would let its owner increase or decrease its logical rigor, I don’t think having more rigor would prevent jamming. It just changes what kinds of things can and can’t jam it.
One of my favorite recent examples was “You cannot know that this statement is true.” It’s like an interpersonal version of the “This statement is false” thing. I know the statement is true, and you can know that I know it’s true, but you can’t know it’s true.
This seems to cause some minds (roughly medium to strong rigor minds) to hiccup and glitch. It causes much less rigorous minds to sort of eyeroll or glaze over as a deflection. Some minds (like those trained to think rigorously in terms of self-reference) can navigate it enough to note “Oh, that’s a cool example” and smoothly move on.
I like the deeper thing you’re pointing at here. Something like, noticing that certain moves can be ontologically violent, and taking that into account when it comes to being kind to others.
That said, I feel uneasy with the “ethically acceptable” question. It seems to compress too much and dances dangerously close to Drama Triangle dynamics (namely, taking responsibility for someone else’s choices).
But my heart agrees with the intuition I think you’re pointing at here.
I agree. I’m not suggesting abandoning those things. I’m suggesting an internal design in which they flow from devotion to truth.
In practice I find that at least at the stage I’ve reached, I’m not focused on truth in every moment, and often this is perfectly fine. It’s just that when I’m not paying attention like that, it’s easy for some program to boot up that claims to be important for thus-and-such reason but is actually there to distract me.
To the extent that I’ve cleaned up my autopilot so that certain proxies are pretty reliably connected to the process of leaning toward truth, then I can loosen the reigns a bit and still get the desired outcome.
For instance: Sure, promises work okay as a proxy… as long as the promises aren’t being made in order to be liked so as to fill a sense of inadequacy (for instance). If that’s what’s happening, then this idea that it’s fine to drop focus on truth in order to keep promises can keep me confused and never addressing the sense of inadequacy directly. At some point on the devotional path, it’s necessary to turn to cherished promises and say something like “This too. This too can die. Let others distrust and hate me for letting them down if they must. I put this on truth’s altar and set it ablaze. I will keep only whatever remains.”
Thereafter, the reason for caring about promises becomes the linking power between keeping them and the truth — in which case I keep them not because “I made a promise and that’s the game theory” but because the act of keeping a given promise is part of my devotion to truth. It comes before reasons. The reasons are in service to the real thing underneath.
(I also want to add a periodic reminder I’ve said several times in these comments, but I imagine is easy to miss or forget: I’m not saying that this is what everyone should do. I’m saying that this kind of utter devotion seems to me both powerful and necessary for Beisutsukai.)
I have a hard time imagining how this would actually work. It feels too… outside to me. Like it’s pretending we can program the social environment we’re in as though we’re looking at it from the outside. And like it’s also trying to replace “Do the thing and not the non-thing” with semi-formal structures, which from what I can tell basically always decays via Goodhart.
But maybe you have a clever way of navigating that…? I’m happy to have my skepticism dispelled here. I’d just need to understand better what you’re thinking first.
You might find my reply to bglass clarifying. I wonder how much of this is just a matter of what I mean by Drama here being unclear due to a paucity of examples.
For my part, I really doubt this is just a therapeutic selection effect. I spent a few years trying to name a cultural engine and later found Lynne Forrest’s application of Karpman’s Triangle much, much better at communicating sight of the engine than I’d worked out how to on my own. I’d even encountered Karpman’s Triangle a lot before, but it didn’t land as useful until I combined Forrest’s take with the core thing I was seeing in basically every human culture.
I still think the core thing of “I need you to do/be a certain thing for me to be okay” is better at capturing the essential logic I care about in the Drama Triangle. But in practice, splitting it up into these three strategy types and their interactions seems to make it a lot easier for people to learn how to notice in themselves and others.
With all that said, I do think the essence really amounts to “why not… just not do drama?”
I think the answer is basically that most people — and basically all the loud or visible collectives — are highly addicted to the sensations of drama. It lands a little like “why not… just stop smoking?” Ultimately, yes, of course. But in practice I think it’s trickier than you seem to think it is.
And if I’m mistaken about that, I’d very much love to learn about it. I’d be quite happy to learn of a shortcut.
(Aside: I think this language around addiction is a bit confusing and doesn’t need to be. It’s more like, addiction is avoidance of a sensation or inner experience, and the addictive substance or behavior is an effective and habitual distraction from that intolerable sensation in a way that doesn’t actually address the cause of the sensation in question. This habit loop’s default is to deal with this problem by increasing the addictive substance’s intensity in a kind of arms race, but the actual way out is to turn around and build capacity to be with the “intolerable” experience.)
In short, no. I still haven’t read Duncan’s post. (I felt like I probably got the basic idea from the title combined with having had many conversations with Duncan where he explicitly used shoulder advisors.) The system (as I understand it) is too shallow to cut to the core of confusion. I mean, what are you using to pick your advisors? If you focus on listening to them as your basis, doesn’t this mean you end up with a level of clarity that’s roughly the weighted average of your advisors?
I do think it’s a really good technique. I just don’t see it as on the same tier as cultivating silence.
(It also feels important to acknowledge: Maybe Duncan addresses these and related questions in his post. I might go read it and find out. But in terms of answering the question about how connected the Void stuff is with Duncan’s post, the answer will lie in my impression of what Duncan probably talks about there, and my barely educated impression of Duncan’s point falls far short of the Void.)
I wonder about editing that sentence in the OP to clarify. I didn’t mean that it’s unclear how someone could possibly create a dojo as part of their training. I meant that given a Bob, would Bob end up creating a dojo as part of his training, and if so then what would his dojo end up looking like? That seems hard for me to predict.
(I get glimmers of intuitions about this for some people, but I haven’t had much of a chance to calibrate those intuitions.)
But setting that aside to look at your idea:
I like the part where it’s a kind of grounded and real. I don’t care for the part where their livelihood gets tied to training. That slips in perverse incentives. I don’t know of a good way to overcome those here.
I’m reminded of teaching math in university years ago. I tried as hard as I could at the time to find a way to teach well. And I innovated some tricks I still use to this day. But in retrospect, the main hurdle I could never overcome was that the classes I was teaching were required for a wide swath of majors (precalc, business calc, business statistic, etc.). I know I deeply touched a very few students in my years there, and I’m grateful for that opportunity. But for the majority? I could never have hoped to overcome the fact that they were there only because they believed they had to be.
Today I’d be much, much more wicked and direct. While they still have a chance to switch which version of the class they’re in (i.e., in the first week), I would tell them that they’re in for a bizarre ride and that they should leave if they want to, and then demonstrate it ASAP. I’d give them core tools for sovereignty (like the Drama Triangle and somatic self-soothing), spell out the trauma structures associated with math and child-rearing, and focus on them clearing those in themselves first. Every step of the way thereafter, I’d hone in on every breath of bullshit and slay it, and as a class we’d collectively look at how (a) they can each take full conscious ownership of their lives, including whether and how they wanted to navigate my particular “math” class; and (b) how they might orient to passing the end-of-term math test given their resources, including the time remaining in the course. I might very well make the final exam worth 100% of the course grade to help capture the spirit of this.
(Fun fact: “mathematics” comes from the Greek for “one who knows”. Mathema was literally the art of knowing. The above is, in my opinion, not just a prerequisite structure for teaching math but is the art of mathema applied to the bizarre situation of a required academic class on computation.)
Maybe there’s a way to modify that approach for jobs…?
But I tried to figure out something very closely related for over a year and couldn’t figure it out on my own. I got a solution, but it amounted to “Don’t allow any perverse incentives at all. If any threaten, put them on your shoulders, not your students’, and only if it’s natural to make your growing immunity to it part of your practice.”
So… shrug? I’d be curious if you actually have a solution here in the shape you’re pointing at.
Oh, there’s something lovely and resonant here. Maybe this is what you meant by “working dojo”…?
This has gears turning in the back of my mind. Like it’s fitting a piece together that makes the challenges/pressure-tests make more sense.
It’s funny watching my mind trying to solve that. It’s not something I’m consciously determined to do. But it’s apparently a fun puzzle for me!
I like the groundedness of a tool space as a foundation for a rationality dojo. Like, producing real things and solving real problems. That’s very resonant.
I think there’s something slippery happening in terms of the Art being domain-general but cashing out in domain-specific ways.
I don’t have succinct tidy thoughts at this point. I like the inspiration food.
Thank you for your thought storm. :-)
This is really long but I just wanted to address one tiny little tangent:
I’ve definitely been guilty of the rescuer role, tho I’ve gotten much better at avoiding the trap. It was because I cared and wanted to help, and I didn’t know how to do so effectively. Learning about the triangle probably would have helped. I first read about it a few days ago, and even now I still have weaker aspects that I want to fix (tho I also strongly disagree with some aspects of the model). So… for some people, at least, it really is as simple as “just don’t do drama”. Which, to be fair, is a lot harder than it sounds when you’re a clueless noob just figuring things out for the first time!