Oh! I realized I was describing the same concept here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/diFBzESLKvKoBetrr/black-hole-narratives
Alexei
Karma: 2,860
Watch Elon Musk’s Neuralink presentation
I realize it might feel a bit silly/pointless to you to write such “simple” posts, especially on a website like LW. But this is actually the ideal level for me, and I find this very helpful. Thank you!
Strong upvote for: 1) reading C.S. Lewis in the first place (since I think he is largely outside of the rationalist canon), 2) steel-manning his opinions, 3) connecting his opinions to the rationalist diaspora, 4) understanding Lewis’ point at a pretty deep level.
To draw from this post, Jordan Peterson, and a few other things I’ve read, I think their message is something like:
“We, as a society, are losing something very valuable. There is the Way (Tao) of living that used to be passed from generation to generation. This Way is in part reflected in our religion, traditions, and virtues. Over time there was an erosion, especially on the religious side. This led to the society that abandoned religion, traditions, and virtues. We should try to get back to the Way.”
I mostly agree. I think the best route is to find a new way “back”, rather than try to undo the steps that led us here. Trying to teach religion, tradition, or virtues directly is largely missing the Way. (Similarly to how teaching only the first 11 virtues of rationality is missing the last and most important one.) At this point we have come so far as a society that we should be able to find new, more direct, and more epistemically honest ways of teaching Tao.
Random spot check: I ran the paragraphs about the lawyers by my lawyer friend and she approved.
Another consideration is that people splitting off become explorers. If they don’t realize that, they’re very likely to fail or not to go very far. And I’d say overall explorers are very valuable. But if everyone is one, then that doesn’t work.
Basically agree, but for every group there’s probably some size / some disagreement where it would be better off splitting. So may be I’d rephrase this as people / groups have a modern bias for splitting too early.
I basically agree. Hence this post, which I hope says more than just “get out of the car,” but provides additional tools.
There’s a sort of egging on that I think is going on when people keep repeating “get out of the car.” And I think it works. It’s something like… trying to get the person frustrated enough to look outside of the space of the solutions they’ve looked at already. Or, may be more accurately, reexamine more of their assumptions than they have so far. I think it works for people who already want to “get out of the car”. But I also agree that it has a bit of the higher-than-thou tone. Some people respond to that, some people find it off putting. I tried to do both, but who knows how well that turned out.
I sympathize. And I don’t know what else to say. If someone is trying to get you to agree that “2+2=4”, you know it’ll end with you buying into the whole algebra thing and then math and then who knows what else. Every piece of information you take in sets you up to learn / update on other information in a different way.
My most charitable interpretation (and please correct me if I’m wrong) of your comment is something like: “Hmm, this sounds interesting, but, man oh man, I’m not sure where this guy is trying to lead me. What will happen to my mind / to my behavior / to me if I start doing this? Or if I just start thinking about this?”
And if my interpretation is correct, then the only thing I can say is: look at the people who are pointing this way. And see if you want to be more or less like them. See if they have happy / successful lives. Which parts of them do you like and want to emulate? Which parts seem off? I don’t think we know each other, but you can probably find other people in your life who would make a decent substitute.
In my post I mean neither of those definitions. I’m taking about the thing your mind does during recounting a particular story.
Black hole narratives
This was a pretty enjoyable read. Meandering, but in a nice relaxing way, without being overly dogmatic. More like musing.
Hypothesis: there are less comments per user on LW 2.0 than the old LW, because the user base is more educated as to where they have a valuable opinion vs where they don’t.
Color me impressed!
This makes me wonder if you could get a safe and extremely useful oracle if you only allow it to output a few bits (eg buy/sell some specific stock).
“Muddled thinking but very interesting direction”
Seems fine as a practical solution. But it’s still nice to do the math to figure out the formula, just like we have a formula for gravity.
Thanks for the update! I’m glad to hear there was some traction. Certainly more than I expected.
On a purely fun note, sometimes I imagine our universe running on such “willingness to pay” for each quantum event. At each point in time various entities observing this universe bid on each quantum event, and the next point in time is computed from the bid winners.