Biggest failure of the Rat community right now is neglecting emotional work, biggest upgrade to my rationality BY FAR (possibly more than reading the sequences even) has been in feeling all my emotions & letting them move through me till I’m back to clarity. This is feminine coded rationality imo (though for silly cultural reasons). AoA / Joe Hudson is the best resource on all this. He also works with Sama & OAI compute teams (lol).
A few concrete examples from my life.
When I fully feel my anger and let it move through me (apologies for woo terms!) I get back to clarity. My natural thoughts are correct, I don’t need to do galexy brained metacognition & self-correction to maintain the semblance of clear thinking like I used to
When I fully feel my shame & forgive/accept myself it becomes much easier for me to execute long-term self-improvement plans, where I tackle character flaws (e.g. lower conscientiousness than I’d like) with a bunch of 5% improvements, whereas previously I felt too much shame to “sit in the problem” for so long in a gradual improvement approach. Self-acceptance has made self-improvement stuff so much easier to think about clearly.
In general: Emotion biasing me → fully welcome the emotion → no longer biasing me, just integrated information/perspective! It also feels better and is a practice I can do. Highly recommend!
I doubt a more emotionally integrated rationalist community would fix the gender problem, but it would definitely help. I’ve heard girls I know call the Rat/EA cluster “inhumane” and IMO this is getting at something that repulses a lot of people, there’s a serious focus on head over emotions/heart/integrated-bodymind. Not as bad as Spock, but still pretty bad. Some lip service is paid to Focusing and Internal Double Crux (which are emotion-y kind of) but empirically most rats aren’t very emotionally well-integrated, there’s still a “Logical part” which is hammering down more “Irrational” parts, as opposed to working together. And this requires inner work! Not just reading replacing guilt once, for example.
All this relates to insecurity as well, it’s very hard to think rationally when you’re insecure. Preverbal thoughts and expectations will be warped at a deep level by emotional pieces trying to protect you. A lot can be done about that though, Chris is the main pioneer in the emotional security space IMO. Though the AoA/Joe Hudson stuff helps a ton too. All paths to the same goal.
Biggest failure of the Rat community right now is neglecting emotional work, biggest upgrade to my rationality BY FAR (possibly more than reading the sequences even) has been in feeling all my emotions & letting them move through me till I’m back to clarity. This is feminine coded rationality imo (though for silly cultural reasons). AoA / Joe Hudson is the best resource on all this. He also works with Sama & OAI compute teams (lol).
A few concrete examples from my life.
When I fully feel my anger and let it move through me (apologies for woo terms!) I get back to clarity. My natural thoughts are correct, I don’t need to do galexy brained metacognition & self-correction to maintain the semblance of clear thinking like I used to
When I fully feel my shame & forgive/accept myself it becomes much easier for me to execute long-term self-improvement plans, where I tackle character flaws (e.g. lower conscientiousness than I’d like) with a bunch of 5% improvements, whereas previously I felt too much shame to “sit in the problem” for so long in a gradual improvement approach. Self-acceptance has made self-improvement stuff so much easier to think about clearly.
In general: Emotion biasing me → fully welcome the emotion → no longer biasing me, just integrated information/perspective! It also feels better and is a practice I can do. Highly recommend!
I doubt a more emotionally integrated rationalist community would fix the gender problem, but it would definitely help. I’ve heard girls I know call the Rat/EA cluster “inhumane” and IMO this is getting at something that repulses a lot of people, there’s a serious focus on head over emotions/heart/integrated-bodymind. Not as bad as Spock, but still pretty bad. Some lip service is paid to Focusing and Internal Double Crux (which are emotion-y kind of) but empirically most rats aren’t very emotionally well-integrated, there’s still a “Logical part” which is hammering down more “Irrational” parts, as opposed to working together. And this requires inner work! Not just reading replacing guilt once, for example.
All this relates to insecurity as well, it’s very hard to think rationally when you’re insecure. Preverbal thoughts and expectations will be warped at a deep level by emotional pieces trying to protect you. A lot can be done about that though, Chris is the main pioneer in the emotional security space IMO. Though the AoA/Joe Hudson stuff helps a ton too. All paths to the same goal.