I just re-read the OP looking for something that I’d possibly describe as “sly insinuations about the PR industry”, and I couldn’t find any. What I read in it was a bunch of straight-forward claims about what the concept of PR tends to cause in people who use it, and some as-far-as-I-can-tell-completely-honest attempts to gesture at intuitions about how that works and why. Can you give an example of something in the OP that seems to you like it contains a sly insinuation about the PR industry?
LoganStrohl
Karma: 1,924
Thanks Raemon! Those are some very nice things you said about me blushes. I hope this post doesn’t disappoint.
Most of my previous writing has been pretty “here’s a bunch of thoughts and experiences I had in no particular order, which I’m telling you about so I can digest them better myself”. The series I’m working on right now is a lot more “I’ve put a lot of actual work into building a coherent curriculum and I’m writing this for other people rather than just for myself”. (Most of it is a more mature version of the noticing stuff you’ve been trying to get me to post here for ages.) So if you (or anyone else on the LW team) ever do get around to engaging with the strategy directly, I’d love to hear how it goes, and I’d especially love to hear what you wish had been different about my presentation of it. I know how to write for people who specifically subscribe to my personal blogs, but I… really do not know how to write for LW.
This is a good point.
I think one of my central original seeing exercises does walk people through (a version of?) phenomenological reduction, and I wonder if you’d agree. It goes like this.
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Find an object. Doesn’t matter what it is, but this will probably be easier if it’s a concrete, physical object you can hold, such as a pen or a box of tissues.
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Write a sentence about what the object is and how you’re relating it.
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Set a timer for two minutes. During that minute, snap your fingers whenever you notice something new about the object, something you haven’t already snapped your fingers for. If you’re not sure whether something “counts” as worthy of a finger snap, err on the side of inclusion.
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After the two minutes are up, list the strategies and tactics you used to get finger snaps.
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Then extend the list, including strategies and tactics you didn’t use, but perhaps could have, to get even more finger snaps.
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Set the timer for another minute, and continue snapping your fingers every time you notice something new about the object.
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Notice if any of your snaps felt like they were borderline, especially the ones that felt that way because it wasn’t clear that your object is quite what you were snapping about. In the next round, plan to count those sorts of borderline cases as straightforwardly worthy of finger snaps.
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Set one more one minute timer, and keep snapping when you notice something new.
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When the time is up, write a new sentence about what the object is and how you’re relating to it.
(Once you’ve done this a few times, you can do the whole thing very quickly in one smooth motion, no finger snaps required.)
Edit: A cautionary note may be appropriate here. A couple people who have done this exercise reported “feeling like they’re going crazy”, or variations on that. I don’t think there’s actually much danger, but if things start to feel frightening or terribly uncomfortable in the middle of this, I recommend that you stop, do something normal like making dinner, and then evaluate what happened and whether you want to try again.
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I’m pretty sure you don’t mean these things, but I don’t know what you do mean.
A lot of people helped me write this post! They gave me excellent feedback, and it would have been way worse without their help. Thank you so much timepoof, erratio, Phoenix Eliot, Nora Amman, Robin Goins, Matt Goldenberg, and Duncan Sabien. Y’all are the best.
Catching the Spark
Footnote #2:
If that line made perfect sense to you, go straight to “The Orientation Procedure”. Otherwise, here are a few options.
1. If you’re sort of panicking and just need something object level to grab onto immediately, try to catch a spark of curiosity about “confusion”.
2. If you’re overwhelmed by all the sparks you see and are anxious because you don’t know what kind you’re supposed to catch, take either of the other options, or read the sub-essay in the coda at the very end. (It might help, it might not. If you’re not stuck at this point, I recommend saving the coda for later.)
3. If you’re stuck on, “What even is a spark of curiosity and how do I know one when I see it?”, read the main essay without trying the procedure. Then, watch for things that might be sparks of curiosity in your daily life over the next week or two, and come back to these instructions once you think you may have found one.
Footnote #5:
Unless you happen to be studying burrowing owls, I suppose.
Footnote #4:
This might be exactly what CFAR calls “boggling”. I’m calling it something else, because no matter how many times people try to explain boggling to me, 1) I can’t quite understand what it is, and 2) I feel very sure that they are somehow doing it wrong.
Footnote #3:
I do not know what drums are called. I’m just guessing. Sorry, percussionists.
Footnote #1:
If this isn’t readily apparent, notice when the direction of your gaze shifts, and ask yourself why it happened. When the answer is of the form, “I wanted to know X” or “I wondered Y”, the shift in your gaze was preceded by curiosity.
Footnotes (each footnote is a reply to this comment)
I just now discovered that this post exists! From my perspective this seems like a really clear and concise summary of the strategy. Thanks for writing it up. I’m delighted to have run into it. _
Here’s a thing I posted to Facebook four years ago:
In a thread about Jennifer Kahn’s NYT article on CFAR, someone observed that there are an awful lot of articles that amount to “techie birdwatching”, which are sort of like “check out what this crowd of weird people does, aren’t they weird?” Nearly every article I’ve seen on rationalist-related organizations and events has been like that, and I’ve noticed it’s upset some of my fellow birds. It’s mean in real life to treat somebody like a circus freak, and that’s how it can feel to be a secondary character in one of these stories.
I responded with (approximately) the following.
About the birdwatching: I think this comes straight from the story structure. (Application of Orson Scott Card’s MICE model follows.) If you plan to use narrative structure to give your nonfiction article greater emotional impact, you’ve sort of got four basic options:
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You can start with a puzzle that you’ll work with the reader to solve over the course of the story. This could have been “Trustworthy person X claims to have done impressive thing Y using CFAR techniques. How did that happen? I went to a CFAR workshop, and as you may have guessed from the clues I spent most of this article dropping, it turns out the solution to the puzzle is Y.”
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You can follow a specific person, opening with a dilemma that threatens their self-narrative and role in their community, showing their struggle to re-define themselves, and closing with their adoption of a new self-narrative/role. This could have been, “Tod signed up for a CFAR workshop when he could no longer put up with [thing]. This story is about his struggle to learn and apply the techniques taught at the CFAR workshop he attended, and the person he became as a result.”
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You can open with a dark force throwing the world into chaos, follow some people who struggle to re-establish order, and close when they’ve succeeded. This could have been, “Things were fine and dandy at the CFAR worshop until [disaster]. We used a bunch of rationality techniques (which they taught us over the course of the workshop) to deal with [disaster], and in the end things were good again and we had a big party.”
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You can open with an outsider journeying to a strange new land, show them experiencing a bunch of new and interesting things, and close with them returning home a slightly different person than they were when they set out. This one looks like, “I heard about this interesting thing called CFAR, so I attended a workshop to find out what it was all about. While there, I experienced a bunch of things through the eyes of an outsider on an alien world. Then I went home, and found those experiences stayed with me in a narratively satisfying way.”
With the possibilities laid out like that, I think it’s pretty easy to see why most reporters are going to augment their straight-facts reporting with 4-type story structure. It’s just way easier, unless they happen to be reporting on an organization where they’re already an insider. So when a reporter uses 4-type story structure with a Bay Area thing as the setting, the weird and interesting things the main character sees through the eyes of an outsider will be the sort of geeky and bohemian people and behaviors that exist in the Bay. If they didn’t approach it like that, then unless they used some other story structure, the narrative would lose almost all of its emotional resonance.
They’re not necessarily depicting us as bizarre aliens because they find us incomprehensible and like to make fun of us, or anything like that. They’re likely doing it because they know how to tell a good story.
So I think if you want coverage for CFAR (or another unusual organization) that doesn’t focus on how it’s full of weird geeks and cultish behaviors, I think you have to pitch a journalist a story idea from one of the other three categories of structure, and somehow make it easier and/or more compelling for them to stick to that structure instead of falling back on “I’m an outsider going to a new place to see strange things.”
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whoa i totally forgot i wrote that
I wrote up my shame processing method. I think it comes from some combination of Max (inspired by NVC maybe?), Anna (mostly indirectly), and a lot of trial and error. I’ve been using it for a couple of years (in various forms), but I don’t have much PCK on it yet. If you’d like to try it out, I’d love for you to report back on how it went! Please also ask me questions.
What’s up with shame?
According to me, shame is for keeping your actions in line with what you care about. It happens when you feel motivated to do something that you believe might damage what is valuable (whether or not you actually do the thing).
Shame indicates a particular kind of internal conflict. There’s something in favor of the motivation, and something else against it. Both parts are fighting for things that matter to you.
What is this shame processing method supposed to do?
This shame processing method is supposed to aid in the goal of shame itself: staying in contact with what you care about as you act. It’s also supposed to develop a clearer awareness of what is at stake in the conflict so you can use your full intelligence to solve the problem.
What is the method?
The method is basically a series of statements with blanks to fill in. The statements guide you a little at a time toward a more direct way of seeing your conflict. Here’s a template; it’s meant to be filled out in order.
I notice that I feel ashamed. I think I first started feeling it while ___. I care about ___(X). I'm not allowed to want ___ (Y). I worry that if I want Y, ___. What's good about Y is ___(Z). I care about Z, and I also care about X.Example (a real one, from this morning):
I notice that I feel ashamed. I think I first started feeling it while reading the first paragraph of a Lesswrong post. I care about being creative. I’m not allowed to want to move at a comfortable pace. I worry that if I move at a comfortable pace, my thoughts will slow down more and more over time and I’ll become a vegetable. What’s good about moving at a comfortable pace is that there’s no external pressure, so I get to think and act with more freedom. I care about freedom, and I also care about creativity.
On using the template:
The first statement, “I notice that I feel ashamed,” should feel a lot like noticing confusion. To master this method, you’ll need to study experiences of shame until you can reliably recognize them.
The second statement, “I think I first started feeling it while ___,” should feel like giving a police report. You don’t tell stories about what it all means, you just say what happened.
The rest should feel like Focusing. Wait for a felt shift before moving to the next statement.
Done.
I feel daunted by the question, “what are the big open questions the field of Human Rationality needs to answer, in order to help people have more accurate beliefs and/or make better decisions?”, but I also think that it’s the question at the heart of my research interests. So rather than trying to answer the original question directly, I’m going to share a sampling of my current research interests.
Over in the AMA, I wrote, “My way of investigating always pushes into what I can’t yet see or grasp or articulate. Thus, it has the unfortunate property of being quite difficult to communicate about directly until the research program is mostly complete. So I can say a lot about my earlier work on noticing, but talking coherently about what exactly CFAR’s been paying me for lately is much harder.” This will not be a clean bulleted list that doubles as a map of rationality, sorry. It’ll be more like sampling of snapshots from the parts of my mind that are trying to build rationality. Here’s the collage, in no particular order:
There are things you’re subject to, and things you can take as object. For example, I used to do things like cry when an ambulance went by with its siren on, or say “ouch!” when I put a plate away and it went “clink”, yet I wasn’t aware that I was sensitive to sounds. If asked, “Are you sensitive to sounds?” I’d have said “No.” I did avoid certain sounds in local hill-climby ways, like making music playlists with lots of low strings but no trumpets, or not hanging out with people who speak loudly. But I didn’t “know” I was doing these things; I was *subject* to my sound sensitivity. I could not take it as *object*, so I couldn’t deliberately design my daily life to account for it. Now that I can take my sound sensitivity (and many related things) as object, I’m in a much more powerful position. And it *terrifies* me that I went a quarter of a century without recognizing these basic facts of my experience. It terrifies me even more when I imagine an AI researcher being subject to some similarly crucial thing about how agents work. I would very much like to know what other basic facts of my experience I remain unaware of. I would like to know how to find out what I am currently unable to take as object.
On a related note, you know how an awful lot of people in our community are autistic? It seem to me that our community is subject to this fact. (It also seems to me that many individual people in our community remain subject to most of their autistic patterns, and that this is more like the rule than the exception.) I would like to know what’s going on here, and whether some other state of affairs would be preferable, and how to instantiate that state of affairs.
Why do so many people seem to wait around for other people to teach them things, even when they seem to be trying very hard to learn? Do they think they need permission? Do they think they need authority? What are they protecting? Am I inadvertently destroying it when I try to figure things out for myself? What stops people from interrogating the world on their own terms?
I get an awful lot of use out of asking myself questions. I think I’m unusually good at doing this, and that I know a few other people with this property. I suspect that the really useful thing isn’t so much the questions, as whatever I’m doing with my mind most of the time that allows me to ask good questions. I’d like to know what other people are doing with their minds that prevents this, and whether there’s a different thing to do that’s better.
What is “quality”?
Suppose religion is symbiotic, and not just parasitic. What exactly is it doing for people? How is it doing those things? Are there specific problems it’s solving? What are the problems? How can we solve those problems without tolerating the damage religion causes?
[Some spoilers for bits of the premise of A Fire Upon The Deep and other stories in that sequence.] There’s this alien race in Verner Vinge books called the Tines. A “person” of the Tines species looks at first like a pack of several animals. The singleton members that make up a pack use high-frequency sound, rather than chemical neurotransmitters, to think as one mind. The singleton members of a pack age, so when one of your singletons dies, you adopt a new singleton. Since singletons are all slightly different and sort of have their own personalities, part of personal health and hygiene for Tines involves managing these transitions wisely. If you do a good job — never letting several members die in quick succession, never adopting a singleton that can’t harmonize with the rest of you, taking on new singletons before the oldest ones loose the ability to communicate — then you’re effectively immortal. You just keep amassing new skills and perspectives and thought styles, without drifting too far from your original intentions. If you manage the transitions poorly, though — choosing recklessly, not understanding the patterns an old member has been contributing, participating in a war where several of your singletons may die at once — then your mind could easily become suddenly very different, or disorganized and chaotic, or outright insane, in a way you’ve lost the ability to recover from. I think about the Tines a lot when I experiment with new ways of thinking and feeling. I think much of rationality poses a similar danger to the one faced by the Tines. So I’d like to know what practices constitute personal health and hygiene for cognitive growth and development in humans.
What is original seeing? How does it work? When is it most important? When is it the wrong move? How can I become better at it? How can people who are worse at it than I am become better at it?
In another thread, Adam made a comment that I thought was fantastic. I typed to him, “That comment is fantastic!” As I did so, I noticed that I had an option about how to relate to the comment, and to Adam, when I felt a bid from somewhere in my mind to re-phrase as, “I really like that comment,” or, “I enjoyed reading your comment,” or “I’m excited and impressed by your comment.” That bid came from a place that shares a lot of values with Lesswrong-style rationalists, and 20th century science, and really with liberalism in general. It values objectivity, respect, independence, autonomy, and consent, among other things. It holds map-territory distinctions and keeps its distance from the world, in an attempt to see all things clearly. But I decided to stand behind my claim that the “the comment is fantastic”. I did not “own my experience”, in this case, or highlight that my values are part of me rather than part of the world. I have a feeling that something really important is lost in the careful distance we keep all the time from the world and from each other. Something about the power to act, to affect each other in ways that create small-to-mid-sized superorganisms like teams and communities, something about tending our relationship to the world so that we don’t float off in bubbles of abstraction. Whatever that important thing is, I want to understand it. And I want to protect it, and to incorporate it into my patterns of thought, without loosing all I gain from cold clarity and distance.
I would like to think more clearly, especially when it seems important to do so. There are a lot of things that might affect how clearly you think, some of which are discussed in the Sequences. For example, one common pattern of muddy thought is rationalization, so one way to increase your cognitive clarity is to stop completely ignoring the existence of rationalization. I’ve lately been interested in a category of clarity-increasing thingies that might be sensibly described as “the relationship between a cognitive process and its environment”. By “environment”, I meant to include several things:The internal mental environment: the cognitive and emotional situation in which a thought pattern finds itself. Example: When part of my mind is trying to tally up how much money I spent in the past month, and local mental processes desperately want the answer to be “very little” for some reason, my clarity of thought while tallying might not be so great. I expect that well maintained internal mental environments — ones that promote clear thinking — tend to have properties like abundance, spaciousness, and groundedness.
The internal physical environment: the physiological state of a body. For example, hydration seems to play a shockingly important role in how well I maintain my internal mental environment while I think. If I’m trying to solve a math problem and have had nothing to drink for two hours, it’s likely I’m trying to work in a state of frustration and impatience. Similar things are true of sleep and exercise.
The external physical environment: the sensory info coming in from the outside world, and the feedback patterns created by external objects and perceptual processes. When I’ve been having a conversation in one room, and then I move to another room, it often feels as though I’ve left half my thoughts behind. I think this is because I’m making extensive use of the walls and couches and such in my computations. I claim that one’s relationship to the external environment can make more or less use of the environment’s supportive potential, and that environments can be arranged in ways that promote clarity of thought.
The social environment: people, especially frequently encountered ones. The social environment is basically just part of the external physical environment, but it’s such an unusual part that I think it ought to be singled out. First of all, it has powerful effects on the internal mental environment. The phrase “politics is the mind killer” means something like “if you want to design the social environment to maximize muddiness of thought, have I got a deal for you”. Secondly, other minds have the remarkable property of containing complex cognitive processes, which are themselves situated in every level of environment. If you’ve ever confided in a close, reasonable friend who had some distance from your own internal turmoil, you know what I’m getting at here. I’ve thought a lot lately about how to build a “healthy community” in which to situate my thoughts. A good way to think about what I’m trying to do is that I want to cultivate the properties of interpersonal interaction that lead to the highest quality, best maintained internal mental environments for all involved.
What is “groundedness”?
I built a loft bed recently. Not from scratch, just Ikea-style. When I was about halfway through the process, I realized that I’d put one of the panels on backward. I’d made the mistake toward the beginning, so there were already many pieces screwed into that panel, and no way to flip it around without taking the whole bed apart again. At that point, I had a few thoughts in quick succession:I really don’t want to take the whole bed apart and put it back together again.
Maybe I could unscrew the pieces connected to that panel, then carefully balance all of them while I flip the panel around? (Something would probably break if I did that.)
You know what, maybe I don’t want a dumb loft bed anyway.
It so happens that in this particular case, I sighed, took the bed apart, carefully noted where each bit was supposed to go, flipped the panel around, and put it all back together again perfectly. But I’ve certainly been in similar situations where for some reason, I let one mistake lead to more mistakes. I rushed, broke things, lost pieces, hurt other people, or gave up. I’d like to know what circumstances obtain when I get this right, and what circumstances obtain when I don’t. Where can I get patience, groundedness, clarity, gumption, and care?
I’ve developed a taste for reading books that I hate. I like to try on the perspective of one author after another, authors with whom I think I have really fundamental disagreements about how the world works, how one ought to think, and whether yellow is really such a bad color after all. There’s a generalized version of “reading books you hate” that I might call “perceptual dexterity”, or I might call “the ground of creativity”, which is something like having a thousand prehensile eye-stalks in your mind, and I think prehensile eye-stalks are pretty cool. But I also think it’s generally a good idea to avoid reading books you hate, because your hatred of them is often trying to protect you from “your self and worldview falling apart”, or something. I’d like to know whether my self and worldview are falling apart, or whatever. And if not, I’d like to know whether I’m doing something to prevent it that other people could learn to do, and whether they’d thereby gain access to a whole lot more perspectives from which they could triangulate reality.
This isn’t a direct answer to, “What are the LessWrong posts that you wish you had the time to write?” It is a response to a near-by question, though, which is probably something along the lines of, “What problems are you particularly interested in right now?” which is the question that always drives my blogging. Here’s a sampling, in no particular order.
[edit: cross-posted to Ray’s Open Problems post.]
There are things you’re subject to, and things you can take as object. For example, I used to do things like cry when an ambulance went by with its siren on, or say “ouch!” when I put a plate away and it went “clink”, yet I wasn’t aware that I was sensitive to sounds. If asked, “Are you sensitive to sounds?” I’d have said “No.” I did avoid certain sounds in local hill-climby ways, like making music playlists with lots of low strings but no trumpets, or not hanging out with people who speak loudly. But I didn’t “know” I was doing these things; I was *subject* to my sound sensitivity. I could not take it as *object*, so I couldn’t deliberately design my daily life to account for it. Now that I can take my sound sensitivity (and many related things) as object, I’m in a much more powerful position. And it *terrifies* me that I went a quarter of a century without recognizing these basic facts of my experience. It terrifies me even more when I imagine an AI researcher being subject to some similarly crucial thing about how agents work. I would very much like to know what other basic facts of my experience I remain unaware of. I would like to know how to find out what I am currently unable to take as object.
On a related note, you know how an awful lot of people in our community are autistic? It seem to me that our community is subject to this fact. (It also seems to me that many individual people in our community remain subject to most of their autistic patterns, and that this is more like the rule than the exception.) I would like to know what’s going on here, and whether some other state of affairs would be preferable, and how to instantiate that state of affairs.
Why do so many people seem to wait around for other people to teach them things, even when they seem to be trying very hard to learn? Do they think they need permission? Do they think they need authority? What are they protecting? Am I inadvertently destroying it when I try to figure things out for myself? What stops people from interrogating the world on their own terms?
I get an awful lot of use out of asking myself questions. I think I’m unusually good at doing this, and that I know a few other people with this property. I suspect that the really useful thing isn’t so much the questions, as whatever I’m doing with my mind most of the time that allows me to ask good questions. I’d like to know what other people are doing with their minds that prevents this, and whether there’s a different thing to do that’s better.
What is “quality”?
Suppose religion is symbiotic, and not just parasitic. What exactly is it doing for people? How is it doing those things? Are there specific problems it’s solving? What are the problems? How can we solve those problems without tolerating the damage religion causes?
[Some spoilers for bits of the premise of A Fire Upon The Deep and other stories in that sequence.] There’s this alien race in Verner Vinge books called the Tines. A “person” of the Tines species looks at first like a pack of several animals. The singleton members that make up a pack use high-frequency sound, rather than chemical neurotransmitters, to think as one mind. The singleton members of a pack age, so when one of your singletons dies, you adopt a new singleton. Since singletons are all slightly different and sort of have their own personalities, part of personal health and hygiene for Tines involves managing these transitions wisely. If you do a good job — never letting several members die in quick succession, never adopting a singleton that can’t harmonize with the rest of you, taking on new singletons before the oldest ones loose the ability to communicate — then you’re effectively immortal. You just keep amassing new skills and perspectives and thought styles, without drifting too far from your original intentions. If you manage the transitions poorly, though — choosing recklessly, not understanding the patterns an old member has been contributing, participating in a war where several of your singletons may die at once — then your mind could easily become suddenly very different, or disorganized and chaotic, or outright insane, in a way you’ve lost the ability to recover from. I think about the Tines a lot when I experiment with new ways of thinking and feeling. I think much of rationality poses a similar danger to the one faced by the Tines. So I’d like to know what practices constitute personal health and hygiene for cognitive growth and development in humans.
What is original seeing? How does it work? When is it most important? When is it the wrong move? How can I become better at it? How can people who are worse at it than I am become better at it?
In another thread, Adam made a comment that I thought was fantastic. I typed to him, “That comment is fantastic!” As I did so, I noticed that I had an option about how to relate to the comment, and to Adam, when I felt a bid from somewhere in my mind to re-phrase as, “I really like that comment,” or, “I enjoyed reading your comment,” or “I’m excited and impressed by your comment.” That bid came from a place that shares a lot of values with Lesswrong-style rationalists, and 20th century science, and really with liberalism in general. It values objectivity, respect, independence, autonomy, and consent, among other things. It holds map-territory distinctions and keeps its distance from the world, in an attempt to see all things clearly. But I decided to stand behind my claim that the “the comment is fantastic”. I did not “own my experience”, in this case, or highlight that my values are part of me rather than part of the world. I have a feeling that something really important is lost in the careful distance we keep all the time from the world and from each other. Something about the power to act, to affect each other in ways that create small-to-mid-sized superorganisms like teams and communities, something about tending our relationship to the world so that we don’t float off in bubbles of abstraction. Whatever that important thing is, I want to understand it. And I want to protect it, and to incorporate it into my patterns of thought, without loosing all I gain from cold clarity and distance.
I would like to think more clearly, especially when it seems important to do so. There are a lot of things that might affect how clearly you think, some of which are discussed in the Sequences. For example, one common pattern of muddy thought is rationalization, so one way to increase your cognitive clarity is to stop completely ignoring the existence of rationalization. I’ve lately been interested in a category of clarity-increasing thingies that might be sensibly described as “the relationship between a cognitive process and its environment”. By “environment”, I meant to include several things:The internal mental environment: the cognitive and emotional situation in which a thought pattern finds itself. Example: When part of my mind is trying to tally up how much money I spent in the past month, and local mental processes desperately want the answer to be “very little” for some reason, my clarity of thought while tallying might not be so great. I expect that well maintained internal mental environments — ones that promote clear thinking — tend to have properties like abundance, spaciousness, and groundedness.
The internal physical environment: the physiological state of a body. For example, hydration seems to play a shockingly important role in how well I maintain my internal mental environment while I think. If I’m trying to solve a math problem and have had nothing to drink for two hours, it’s likely I’m trying to work in a state of frustration and impatience. Similar things are true of sleep and exercise.
The external physical environment: the sensory info coming in from the outside world, and the feedback patterns created by external objects and perceptual processes. When I’ve been having a conversation in one room, and then I move to another room, it often feels as though I’ve left half my thoughts behind. I think this is because I’m making extensive use of the walls and couches and such in my computations. I claim that one’s relationship to the external environment can make more or less use of the environment’s supportive potential, and that environments can be arranged in ways that promote clarity of thought (see Adam’s notes on the design of the CFAR venue, for instance).
The social environment: people, especially frequently encountered ones. The social environment is basically just part of the external physical environment, but it’s such an unusual part that I think it ought to be singled out. First of all, it has powerful effects on the internal mental environment. The phrase “politics is the mind killer” means something like “if you want to design the social environment to maximize muddiness of thought, have I got a deal for you”. Secondly, other minds have the remarkable property of containing complex cognitive processes, which are themselves situated in every level of environment. If you’ve ever confided in a close, reasonable friend who had some distance from your own internal turmoil, you know what I’m getting at here. I’ve thought a lot lately about how to build a “healthy community” in which to situate my thoughts. A good way to think about what I’m trying to do is that I want to cultivate the properties of interpersonal interaction that lead to the highest quality, best maintained internal mental environments for all involved.
I built a loft bed recently. Not from scratch, just Ikea-style. When I was about halfway through the process, I realized that I’d put one of the panels on backward. I’d made the mistake toward the beginning, so there were already many pieces screwed into that panel, and no way to flip it around without taking the whole bed apart again. At that point, I had a few thoughts in quick succession:
I really don’t want to take the whole bed apart and put it back together again.
Maybe I could unscrew the pieces connected to that panel, then carefully balance all of them while I flip the panel around? (Something would probably break if I did that.)
You know what, maybe I don’t want a dumb loft bed anyway.
It so happens that in this particular case, I sighed, took the bed apart, carefully noted where each bit was supposed to go, flipped the panel around, and put it all back together again perfectly. But I’ve certainly been in similar situations where for some reason, I let one mistake lead to more mistakes. I rushed, broke things, lost pieces, hurt other people, or gave up. I’d like to know what circumstances obtain when I have get this right, and what circumstances obtain when I don’t. Where can I get patience, groundedness, clarity, gumption, and care?
What is “groundedness”?
I’ve developed a taste for reading books that I hate. I like to try on the perspective of one author after another, authors with whom I think I have really fundamental disagreements about how the world works, how one ought to think, and whether yellow is really such a bad color after all. There’s a generalized version of “reading books you hate” that I might call “perceptual dexterity”, or I might call “the ground of creativity”, which is something like having a thousand prehensile eye-stalks in your mind, and I think prehensile eye-stalks are pretty cool. But I also think it’s generally a good idea to avoid reading books you hate, because your hatred of them is often trying to protect you from “your self and worldview falling apart”, or something. I’d like to know whether my self and worldview are falling apart, or whatever. And if not, I’d like to know whether I’m doing something to prevent it that other people could learn to do, and whether they’d thereby gain access to a whole lot more perspective from which they could triangulate reality.
When I read this, I thought (with my feelings, not my words) “It sounds like Rob thinks honor is a combination of virtue and reputation, but I do not think that honor is a combination of virtue and reputation.”
So before I go and try to write a bunch about what I think honor might be, I’d like to check: Do you think that honor is a combination of virtue and reputation? Do you think that’s basically right but incomplete description of honor? Do you think that honor is some other thing entirely, which you could state? Do you not know what honor is in a way that you could state without a lot of time and effort?