but Ray are you really so sure i should not be the one to turn The Sequences into a collection of belligerent tiktoks? i’ve been covering the same beat for ten years what if it’s time for A CHANGE?
LoganStrohl
> I would first be interested to know why you identify as a trans man generally
K so let’s start with, “Is it true that I identify as a trans man?” But in fact I’ll look at the slightly different question, “Is it true that I identify as a man?”, because I think that probably gets more quickly to the heart of the matter. It’s at least clear that I do not identify as a cis man.
I think there’s probably some ambiguity in the way “identify” is used that makes this a little hard for me to answer.
On the one hand, there’s how I present myself to other people. I have a strong impression that most people I encounter have this really strong desire to know whether the person they’re interacting with “is a man” or “is a woman”. I have at times been pretty grumpy about this—lately I’m especially grumpy about it when people find out I’m pregnant and immediately ask, “What is it?”, to which I sometimes reply, “Human, I’m pretty sure.”—and so for a while I presented myself to others as “nonbinary”. I think a lot of that was me being like “I’m not on board with how reliant you are on these particular categories, I don’t want to squish my own thoughts and feelings and perceptions and behaviors into whatever this categorization system means to you, and I’m unwilling to enable your application of this to me.”
Which worked out pretty well while I lived in Berkeley. Most people that I actually wanted to interact with rolled with it. Nearly everyone at my workplace used they/them pronouns for me without any hiccups, for example. And there was generally less stress in my life from the particular direction of gender. It was something I could largely ignore, at least much more so than I had at any other point in my life.
But now I live in a different place where many of the people around me seem to really really want to know whether I am a man or a woman, and it’s so very exhausting to be in constant conflict with them about that. I don’t think they know that they care so much about regarding other people as falling into one of two buckets, but it’s a glaringly-obvious-to-me feature of my interactions with them. So it seems like the options that are realistically on the table for me, if I’d rather avoid the constant battle with the ubiquitous social frame, are to either present myself to them as a man (Mr., he/him, father, clothing style, etc.), or to present myself to them as a woman (Mrs., she/her, mother, etc.).
Of those two options, there is clearly one that causes me to feel tremendous stress and sadness a whole lot of the time when I’m around other people, and another that causes me to feel mostly good and comfortable when I’m around other people. So, socially, I tell other people that I’m a trans man, and this works out ok for me. In that sense, I identify as a man.
But there is another way that I think the word “identify” is often used in the context of gender. It has less to do with social presentation, and more to do with self perception. Sometimes when people say that they “identify” as X, they at least in part mean that they see themselves as X. Perhaps they feel like their conception of X on the inside, or they aspire to embody the properties of their conception of X in the way they live their lives, or they feel really comfortable and at home when they imagine themselves as X, or something like that.
In this second, more personal sense, it is less clear to me whether I identify as a man. I think the most accurate description of my current state with respect to this sense of “gender identity” is that I am agnostic about my gender, or that I am “in the process of figuring it out”.
It seems quite likely to me that the question of “whether I am a man, on the inside” is very much a wrong question, that there simply is no fact of the matter to be discovered here.Yet I am not confident that it’s entirely a wrong question. I do suspect for several reasons, some of them more easily articulable than others, that the question is at least pointing roughly in the direction of something that is real and that actually matters, both to me and to others who have some kind of strong relationship with gender. For instance, I don’t think that yin/yang clusters are entirely arbitrary. I don’t think it’s a complete coincidence that Aztec and Mayan rituals surrounding corn and cacao crops prominently featured the balance between masculine and feminine elements. I don’t even think it’s wrong or dumb or bad that there exist such things today as workshops and ceremonies focused on “the divine feminine” or “the divine masculine”. I personally feel the draw of these frameworks. I feel a kind of illumination and fitting-ness when I think about my experiences through them. And indeed, overall I feel more at home, cozy, resonant, happy, comfortable, when I rest my attention on the traditionally masculine elements of these frameworks, even though I also feel a lot of familiarity around many of the traditionally feminine elements as well.
But now I’d like to discuss another question that is not quite the one you asked, but that seems unavoidable when trying to understand my experience of being trans, and that I think might also clearly distinguish me from “a masculine female” (and here I notice I’m more anxious about getting into hot water, because I’d describe this way of talking and thinking as at best out of fashion, and at worst sometimes seen as grounds for cancellation): “Am I transsexual?”
And to this, the answer seems very clearly to be, “Yes, I absolutely am transsexual”, if we interpret “transsexual” in a quite straightforward way that has little to do with gender and lots to do with physiology. (I think that most “masculine females” are not transexual in this sense! They’re at least somewhat gender non-conforming, but they’re pretty much fine occupying their female bodies. There may be additional differences between me and them, but I’m at least pretty sure about this one.)
Though even with this term, there seem to me to be two categories of thing going on. The first is about how my actual physical body is (or how I plan for it to be). I was born with a typically female body. I have two X chromosomes and no Y chromosome, I went through female puberty and developed breasts and a menstrual cycle and so forth. But I also lack breasts now because I’ve had them removed. And very soon, I will have adult male levels of testosterone in my body, which will probably result in things like a beard, a lower voice, male patterns of fat distribution and muscle development, and perhaps some typically male psychological changes as well (I won’t be surprised if I become more angry, for example). And at that point, it will be pretty misleading to describe me as “female”, and much more accurate to describe me as “transmasculine”.
But additionally, there is the way that I feel about my body and about these changes: I want to be male! And, as a separate fact (not every trans man shares this feeling!), I want not to be female.
I feel so much better now that my breasts are gone. I made the most of them while they existed—I even made money off of them as a professional stripper—but they were a source of constant, low-grade suffering. Every time I paid attention to them, something felt wrong. And they were kind of hard to ignore, ’cause they weren’t small. They were in the way, reminding me of themselves over and over every day, and it just felt bad. I didn’t know why it felt bad, and I still sort of don’t. But it was almost the way I’d expect to feel if some aliens had abducted me and surgically added random lumps of flesh to my body and then deposited me back on earth and wiped my memory. “These don’t belong here. Something is wrong. Get them off.”
And that’s how I still feel about several other features of my physiology. I feel that way about my hips, and my voice, and my musculature (which I have worked very hard, to only somewhat noticeable effect, to modify even without testosterone), and my period, and the truly bizarre things that happen to my cognition just before my period (which I’ll talk more about in a moment). It all feels wrong and weird to me.
But when I wear a shirt that does an especially good job of highlighting my muscles and my chest, I feel happy when I look in the mirror. And when I imaging having a deeper voice, and masculine patterns of hair and fat and muscles and a penis (though I don’t actually plan to get one of those), I feel happy. And I guess it could still turn out that I’m wrong, and I won’t actually feel about the results of testosterone the same way that I feel about the results of top surgery. But I’d be pretty surprised, largely because it seems like almost everyone in my situation does in fact feel a lot better once they’re on hormone therapy.
So in both the personal and the physical senses, it seems right to describe me as transexual.
But the thing is, there’s not a lot of room for nuance in my interactions with strangers and acquaintances. Even if they could easily hold the thought, “This person is more comfortable in a male body, and also they feel kind of confused about ‘masculinity’ but they weakly suspect it’s approximately right that they ‘are a man’ in some sense or another”, it would not be easy for me to communicate that state of affairs, and most people would not want me to try. Given that it’s socially dangerous among some subcultures I often bump into for me to call myself “transexual”, I simply refer to myself as “a trans man”—or, if I seem to be “passing” anyway, just as “a man”. And honestly, I expect it will be awfully relaxing to consistently fly under the radar as simply “a man”, as I expect will happen once I have a beard and a deeper voice.
Ok, I think I’ve touched on most of the other questions in your comment at this point, so now I’ll move on to the topic of pregnancy.
> Has your pregnancy changed or prompted any new thoughts about your gender identity?
Heck. Yes.
When I was planning this pregnancy, I intended to 1) get top surgery first (because I just wasn’t willing to have even bigger and more in-the-way breasts, or to breastfeed, or to deal with the complications that come from lactating without breastfeeding), and then 2) wait until I was “done having kids” to start hormone therapy. I knew I wanted to gestate one kid, and I thought I might want to gestate two.
Now I am not sure whether or not I will try to gestate an additional kid (I’m leaning toward “no”), but if I do, it will definitely have to wait until I’ve been on T for a while (and then gone off of it for six months before conception, as is the standard practice among trans gestational parents). I am not going into another pregnancy with this body, because pregnancy has been even more body-and-brain-dysphoric than I expected.
And to be clear, I did expect to hate pregnancy. I expected to hate getting and recovering from top surgery too; I did that because it seemed worth it to me. Pregnancy is the same. My husband and I wanted to have a kid with our genetics, and this was the way to do that. Creating a new life seems to me like a pretty big and valuable thing, and it seems quite plausibly worth the suffering I expected to undergo. It has been a lot of suffering, and it’s not over yet, but I still think it’s worth it.
My baby bump feels a lot to me like how my breasts did, but way more so. The “alien” aspect is even more prominent, perhaps because there is literally another creature in there wriggling around. At least my breasts did not move of their own accord.
But the effects of pregnancy also seem to be hitting me in particularly gender-relevant ways as well, not just sex/body-relevant.
(And now I’m a bit fearful about describing some of my experiences as “gendered”; I would like to be clear that I’m talking in terms of my own mostly-automatic feelings and associations with femininity and masculinity, and that these associations may be in various ways wrong/bad/inaccurate/harmful. But they exist, and they’re impacting my experience, and I’m going to describe my experience.)
Let me tell you about premenstrual syndrome, or PMS. For me, PMS is mostly a way that my brain is while under the influence of the hormonal changes that immediately precede menstruation, and sometimes last for a whole week. It happens every month, for one to seven days.
What happens to me during PMS is that I feel… “crazy”, is the word I typically use for it. Specifically, the relationship between my emotions and my thoughts changes dramatically.
Ordinarily, my emotions seem to track my thoughts, and especially my beliefs. If I believe something bad is going to happen, I feel scared. If I spend a lot of time planning something and I come to a conclusion about what I will do, I feel prepared. My emotions follow my thoughts.
But during PMS, the relationship is flipped: my thoughts follow my emotions instead. I find myself feeling scared, and then I begin to expect bad things to happen. I feel prepared, and then I believe that I have planned sufficiently. I feel insecure, and I think that my partner is probably angry with me.
I hate this. So much. I aspire to be a person who is exceptionally reasonable, grounded, and clear-thinking. I do not like to be volatile. With decades of practice, I have learned to use my mind differently during PMS. I’m mostly able to act sane, even though I feel crazy (though not always). But it’s exhausting. [Note to commenters who are thinking, “Then why don’t they take [insert birth control method here] so they don’t have periods?” I promise, I have tried a lot of things. For various reasons, none of the things has worked.]
During pregnancy this is happening all the time.
It wasn’t like that at first, but some time in second trimester, it became like perpetual PMS.
Additionally, even though I haven’t lost all that much muscle mass, my body is flooded with the hormone relaxin, which makes my joints and ligaments flimsy. I cannot comfortably run, or use a shovel, or even carry a jug of milk through the grocery store on my own. Compared to how I was before, and especially compared to my husband, I am physically weak and fragile. I have to rely on other people to do things that require strength.
When I imagine that many many pregnant people go through something like this, and then I remember that before birth control, female adults spent much of their time either pregnant or menstruating, some of what’s going on with “femininity” starts to make more sense to me.
I have known trans women who describe hormone therapy as “like a spiritual awakening”. On female hormones, they developed a completely new relationship with and experience of their emotions. They became much more sensitive, much more easily moved, they learned how to cry, they connected with the emotions of others more deeply, they added this whole dimension to their life that was by comparison heavily muted before.
These sorts of things seem to me to have a lot to do with traditionally feminine virtues. Being emotionally open and sensitive, being nurturing, communicating deeply about complex social/emotional topics, recognizing and being moved and motivated by beauty, behaving in ways that are gentle both physically and psychologically, building and maintaining communities whose members are supported and do not have to do things all on their own.
(And I’ve noticed that expectations about these properties are reflected in the ways that strangers, acquaintances, and authors of pregnancy books interact with me about pregnancy. They treat me “like an expecting mother”, which I think is “like an especially hyper-feminine person”. They make a ton of assumptions about what I’m thinking and feeling and how I’m relating to those things. They expect me to already be in love with my unborn baby, to be soft and gentle and nurturing, to be brimming with joy and fear and excitement about bringing a new life into the world and caring for my child. It’s as though they see me a tiny instantiation of some kind of feminine-mother-goddess. I have not been comfortable with this! And I have also noticed that the people and books who have not done this at me are exactly the same ones that say “pregnant person” and “gestational parent”, and they’re the ones that I’m able to make use of rather than rage-quitting out of intense alienation.)
But it seems to me that shifting a brain in that direction comes with costs. For some, the costs are worthwhile. Some people are much more at home in a mind that excels at expressing feminine properties, even if it means access to masculine properties is diminished.
I am not such a person. For me, the costs of this shift are unacceptable. I like to be stable, reasonable, independent, straightforward, and strong. I like being the opposite of on-my-period. I like being the opposite of pregnant. And to me, inside my own head at least, I summarize this as “I like to be masculine”.
So that has kind of clicked into place for me, as a result of pregnancy. I feel a lot clearer about what I want. I’m much more eager to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible, more eager to take a higher dose of testosterone when I do start (I was previously considering a “nonbinary” dose), and more comfortable with the idea that I’ll consistently describe myself as “a man”, “a father or uncle”, and “he/him”. (Though at the moment, I still tend to request “they/he”, when offered the option.)
Pregnancy has felt to me like an overdose of femininity, and now I am done with being a woman.
Hello, I am a CFAR contractor who considers nearly all of their job to be “original research into human rationality”. I don’t do the kind of research many people imagine when they hear the word “research” (RCT-style verifiable social science, and such). But I certainly do systematic inquiry and investigation into a subject in order to discover or revise beliefs, theories, applications, etc. Which is, you know, literally the dictionary.com definition of research.
I’m not very good at telling stories about myself, but I’ll attempt to describe what I do during my ordinary working hours anyway.
All of the time, I keep an eye out for things that seem to be missing or off in what I take to be the current art of rationality. Often I look to what I see in the people close to me, who are disproportionately members of rationality-and-EA-related organizations, watching how they solve problems and think through tricky stuff and live their lives. I also look to my colleagues at CFAR, who spend many many hours in dialogue with people who are studying rationality themselves, for the first time or on a continuing basis. But since my eyes are in my own head, I look most for what is absent in my own personal art of rationality.
For example, when I first read the Sequences in 2012 or 2013, I gained a lot, but I also felt a gaping hole in the shape of something like “recognizing those key moments in real-life experience when the rationality stuff you’ve thought so much about comes whizzing by your head at top speed, looking nothing at all like the abstractions you’ve so far considered”. That’s when I started doing stuff like snapping my fingers every time I saw a stop sign, so I could get a handle on what “noticing” even is, and begin to fill in the hole. I came up with a method of hooking intellectual awareness up to immediate experience, then I spent a whole year throwing the method at a whole bunch of real life situations, keeping track of what I observed, revising the method, talking with people about it as they worked with the same problem themselves, and generally trying to figure out the shape of the world around phenomenology and trigger-action planning.
I was an occasional guest instructor with CFAR at the time, and I think that over the course of my investigations, CFAR went from spending very little time on the phenomenological details of key experiences to working that sort of thing into nearly every class. I think it’s now the case that rationality as it currently exists contains an “art of noticing”.
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. It’s all been the same style of research, though, and if I had to give names to my recent research foci, I’d say I’ve been looking into original seeing, some things related to creativity and unconstrained thought, something about learning and what it means to own your education, and experiences related to community and cooperation.
It’s my impression that CFAR has always had several people doing this kind of thing, and that several current CFAR staff members consider it a crucial part of their jobs as well. When I was hired, Tim described research as “the beating heart” of our organization. Nevertheless, I personally would like more of it in future CFAR, and I’d like it to be done with a bit more deliberate institutional support.
That’s why it was my primary focus when working with Eli to design our 2019 instructor training program. The program consisted partially of several weekend workshops, but in my opinion the most important part happened while everyone was at home.
My main goal, especially for the first weekend, was to help the trainees choose a particular area of study. It was to be something in their own rationality that really mattered to them and that they had not yet mastered. When they left the workshop, they were to set off on their own personal quest to figure out that part of the world and advance the art.
This attitude, which we’ve been calling “questing” of late, is the one with which I hope CFAR instructors will approach any class they intend to teach, whether it’s something like “goal factoring” that many people have taught in the past, or something completely new that nobody’s even tried to name yet. When you really get the hang of the questing mentality, you never stop doing original rationality research. So to whatever degree I achieved my goal with instructor training (which everyone seems to think is a surprisingly large degree), CFAR is moving in the direction of more original rationality research, not less.
(This is a parody post of Basics of Rationalist Discourse by Duncan Sabien.)
man, i’m kinda mad about something going on with this “knowledge” word. i’d really like to insert some space in here between “lots of people believe a thing” and “lots of people know a thing”.
i believed most of the bullet points in a low-confidence, easy-to-change-my-mind kind of way. the real thing is that all the bullet points have been widely rumored. it’s not the case that all those rumoring people had justified true belief that everyone else had justified true belief about the bullet points, or whatever. if you announce a bunch of rumors with the word “knowledge” attached, it increases people’s confidence and a bunch of switches in their mind flip from “here’s a hypothesis i’m holding lightly because it came from the rumor mill” over to “yeah i wasn’t surprised to hear those things, yet now i’m even more sure of them”.
and like, i do recognize that in the vernacular, “common knowledge” (everyone knows everyone knows) isn’t really distinguished from a weaker thing that might be called “common belief” (everyone at-least-somewhat-believes everyone at-least-somewhat-believes). but that doesn’t mean we should go around conflating such things all to hell like normal people do.
ugh blerg grump. i am kind of exasperated. i guess i really want the top level post to own a bunch more of its shit, epistemically.
and i didn’t really mean to direct all of that right at you, Malcolm, your comment just helped the blergness snap into place in my head enough that i ended up typing things.
proto essay on defense against strong frames and false n-chotomies
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I claim that most (all?) concepts are imperfect, by the nature of conceptualization.
I expect we should be especially wary of concepts that lead us to break what were once a myriad of largely undifferentiated perceptions into exactly two categories—especially when we did not ourselves come up with those categories while trying to make sense of our own observations, especially when we did not previously make any effort to make sense of our own observations, and especially especially when we notice ourselves employing the dichotomy all over the place immediately after gaining the concept.
This happened to me today, so i’ve been thinking about how to respond.
What is it to “be wary” in the relevant sense? What should a person do, when they notice that this has happened to them? When they notice that someone has just handed them a strong frame and now they’re thinking in terms of that frame when they’ve never even attempted to deliberately observe the bit of territory that the frame supports, and have never tried to make sense of those observations themselves?I think this kind of situation calls for cognitive first aid. There’s a crucial moment in which you can either lock in your new unexamined and highly compressed way of perceiving the world, or you can become grounded in your own competence as an observer and thinker, thereby gaining the space needed to examine the new frame from the outside.
(Here’s some space where you can pause to think of at least one way you might establish grounding in your own competence as an observer and thinker, before I tell you about my own way.)
I think a good thing to do is to leave the room (or close the book, or the tab, or the video, whatever) and spend at least five minutes attempting to get in direct contact with something. ANYTHING. It does not have to be relevant to the domain of the concept. Best of it’s not. Get out a pencil and sketch the tissue box in front of you. Find something growing in a crack in the sidewalk outside. Derive de morgan’s law using a minimalistic set of derivation rules (like, just assumption plus operator introduction and elimination).
Then, once you’re definitely in direct contact with a real thing that is not whatever concept has just been thrust upon you, spend at least five minutes working toward your own completely original taxonomy.
DO NOT START FROM THE CONCEPT YOU’VE JUST LEARNED AND ADJUST AWAY FROM THERE.
Start instead with some reference experiences: search your memory for specific things that actually happened to you, or that you heard about once, that seem like they might be sort of relevant. Better yet, make some brand new observations, if possible. Then try to build your own taxonomy of those experiences.
In my case today, this would be a taxonomy of social utterances. I’ve just produced a whole bunch of them myself, so these sentences are a fine place to start. I also remember my dad saying, “I’m your father, not your friend.” I remember my neighbor telling me it’s fine to leave the pothole filling party any time and that he’s grateful for any amount of time I can contribute. Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit, and every book I own are made almost entirely of social utterances. If I go downstairs to say “hello” to my fiance, social utterances will almost certainly pour out of both of us. I can use any of these sources to sketch taxonomies.
Here is a brainstorm of things that might belong in a taxonomy of social utterances, which I’ve not yet begun to organize into a rough hierarchy:
stuff people say because they want you to feel something
stuff people say because they want you to know something
stuff people say because they want you to believe something
stuff people say because they want you to be aware of some things
stuff people say because they want you to __not__ be aware of some things
stuff people say because they want you to conceive of your relationship to them in a certain way
stuff people say that has nothing to do with you
stuff people say because they want you to say something to them
stuff people say to change your expectations about what they will do
stuff people say when they want everyone in earshot to know that everyone in earshot has heard what they have said
I cannot make a list like this without at least beginning to accumulate questions. That’s part of Thinking, for me. Here are some accumulated questions.
what is shitposting?
how are Facebook utterances different from Wikipedia utterances?
when am I most often confused about why a person is saying a thing?
why do almost all of my categories include “because” and “want”? what if I made a taxonomy of social utterances that does not involve whatever’s behind “because”, or whatever’s behind “want”?
why do I dislike certain kinds of social utterances?
what are non-social utterances?
why do people say things to make other people feel certain ways? (eg humor to make people feel amusement)
why would someone want everyone in earshot to know that everyone in earshot has heard the thing?
why do we talk?
what can talking do that slapping cannot?
what is fiction?
what is playing pretend?
how does sarcasm work? when does it not work? what is it good for?
when is gossip useful? when is it harmful? why do the first things I think about gossip involve valuations?
The point of this exercise I’ve just done is not that I may come up with a better conceptualization than the one that lead me to seek cognitive first aid to stay cognitively healthy and strong (though that certainly happens now and then).
The point is that I’ve reminded myself that the world is complicated, that any given conceptualization of it attempts to compress an enormous amount of information, and that I am capable of finding my own ways to think about the world. I am now grounded in my own abilities as an observer and thinker, and I remember what it feels like to do something besides capitulate to some big concept I was just handed.
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This proto-post has been brought to you by Anna’s essay on Narrative Synching, which I found something-like disturbingly compelling.
Suppose you wanted to improve your social relationships on the community level. (I think of this as “my ability to take refuge in the sangha”.) What questions might you answer now, and then again in one year, to track your progress?
Here’s what’s come to mind for me so far. I’m probably missing a lot and would really like your help mapping things out. I think it’s a part of the territory I can only just barely perceive at my current level of development.If something tragic happened to you, such as a car crash that partially paralyzed you or the death of a loved one, how many people can you name whom you’d find it easy and natural to ask for help with figuring out your life afterward?
For how many people is it the case that if they were hospitalized for at least a week you would visit them in the hospital?
Over the past month, how lonely have you felt?
In the past two weeks, how often have you collaborated with someone outside of work?
To what degree do you feel like your friends have your back?
Describe the roll of community in your life.
How do you feel as you try to describe the roll of community in your life?
When’s the last time you got angry with someone and confronted them one on one as a result?
When’s the last time you apologized to someone?
How strong is your sense that you’re building something of personal value with the people around you?
When’s the last time you spent more than ten minutes on something that felt motivated by gratitude?
When a big change happens in your life, such as loosing your job or having a baby, how motivated do you feel to share the experience with others?
When you feel motivated to share an experience with others, how satisfied do you tend to be with your attempts to do that?
Do you know the love languages of your five closest friends? To what extent does that influence how you behave toward them?
Does it seem to you that your friends know your love language?
To what extent do you “know how to have friends”?
Describe your relationship with your boss.
Describe your relationships with your co-workers.
When you think about being part of a church, how much longing do you feel?
When you notice that you feel lonely or isolated, how do you tend to respond?
How satisfied do you tend to be with your response to feelings of loneliness or isolation?
Imagine that you suddenly had to move to another city where nobody knew you and there were no rationalists or EAs. How surprised would you be to hear that within two years, you’d feel well supported by a warm and friendly network of local social connections?
Excluding people who live in your house, how many faces can you picture of the people who live on your street? How many of them could you greet by name? How many of them have you spoken to in the past month? How many of them have you helped with something? How many of them have helped you with something?
When you think about your participation in your community, what do you feel dissatisfaction or longing about?
If you suddenly moved to another city, how big is the hole you would leave in your community? What would be its shape? In what ways and to what extent have the people around you come to depend on you?
How much stronger are you with your community than without it? In what ways, specifically, have you allowed it to support you over the past year, and how much benefit did you gain from that?
Here is some information about my relationship with posting essays and comments to LessWrong. I originally wrote it for a different context (in response to a discussion about how many people avoid LW because the comments are too nitpicky/counterproductive) so it’s not engaging directly with anything in the OP, but @Raemon mentioned it would be useful to have here.
*
I *do* post on LW, but in a very different way than I think I would ideally. For example, I can imagine a world where I post my thoughts piecemeal pretty much as I have them, where I have a research agenda or a sequence in mind and I post each piece *as* I write it, in the hope that engagement with my writing will inform what I think, do, and write next. Instead, I do a year’s worth of work (or more), make a 10-essay sequence, send it through many rounds of editing, and only begin publishing any part of it when I’m completely done, having decided in advance to mostly ignore the comments.It appears to me that what I write is strongly in line with the vision of LW (as I understand it; my understanding is more an extrapolation of Eliezer’s founding essays and the name of the site than a reflection of discussion with current mods), but I think it is not in line with the actual culture of LW as it exists. A whole bunch of me does not want to post to LW at all and would rather find a different audience for my work, one where I feel comfortable and excited and surrounded by creative peers who are jamming with each other and building things together or something. But I don’t know of any such place that meets my standards in all the important ways, and LW seems like the place where my contributions are most likely to gradually drag the culture in a direction where I’ll actually *enjoy* posting there, instead of feeling like I’m doing a scary unpleasant diligence thing. (Plus I really believe in the site’s underlying vision!)
Sometimes people do say cool interesting valuable-to-me things under my posts. But it’s pretty rare, and I’m always surprised when this happens. Mostly my posts get not much engagement, and the engagement they do get feels a whole lot to me like people attempting to use my post as an opportunity to score points in one way or another, often by (apparently) trying to demonstrate that they’re ahead of me in some way while also accidentally demonstrating that have probably not even tried to hear me.
My perception is very likely skewed here, but my impression is that the median comment on LW is along the lines of “This is wrong/implausible/inadequate because X.” The comments I *want* are more like, “When I thought about/tried this for five minutes, here is what happened, and here is how I’m thinking about that, and I wonder x y and z.”
Here is a comment thread that demonstrates what it looks like when *I* think that an interesting-to-me post is inadequate/not quite right. I’m not saying commenters in general should be held to this ridiculous standard, I’m just saying, “Here’s a shining example of the kind of thing that is possible, and I really want the world to move in this direction, especially in response to my posts”, or something. (However apparently it wasn’t considered particularly valuable commentary by readers *shrug*.)
Raymond has been trying to get me to post my noticing stuff from Agenty Duck to LW for *years*, or even to let *him* cross post it for me. And I keep saying “no” or “not yet”, because the personal consequences I imagine for me are mostly bad, and I just think I need to make something good enough to outweigh that first. It’s just now, after literally five to ten years of further development, that I’ve gotten that material into a shape where I think the benefit to the world and my local social spaces (and also my bank account) outweighs the personal unpleasantness of posting the stuff to LW.
(This is just one way of looking at it. The full story is a lot bigger and more complicated, I think.)
Acknowledgements
Duncan Sabien helped me with these essays so much that we went back and forth on where and whether to name him as a coauthor. I wrote the vast majority the text for everything but the first essay, “Orientation”, of which I am probably more editor than author. This sequence would not exist in anything like its current form if Duncan hadn’t insisted that I try to describe naturalism in a single short sentence. He also handled all of the image editing and formatting for me.Robin Goins provided alpha feedback that had a huge impact, especially on the later essays. They also influenced some of the material itself over the past year.
My beta readers, who helped me understand what it feels like to go through these essays, made this sequence much more readable. Thank you to Lloyd Strohl III, Eli Tyre, Channa Messinger, and Matthew Lockerman for your feedback.
Although most of the paintings in this sequence are mine, my mother Theresa Strohl painted the one from “Interlude: On Realness” specially for that essay. (It’s the one with the spider web.) She also gave me my first lesson in watercolor, and helped me learn to see.
My dad, Lloyd Strohl II, didn’t contribute directly to the words of this sequence. Nevertheless, he’s still more directly responsible for the perspective it presents than anyone but me.
Many people met with me regularly during May and June of 2021 for my course on nature study, which refined and crystalized much of my understanding of what I was trying to do with naturalism. Several more studied naturalism with me in much smaller groups. I’m grateful for the insight, honesty, and patience of all of them.
Finally, my work is funded by a grant from the Long Term Future Fund, and by my Patreon supporters. Thank you so much for your support.
- 3 Mar 2022 5:55 UTC; 6 points) 's comment on Intro to Naturalism: Orientation by (
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.
Some advice to my past self about autism:
Learn about what life is like for people with a level 2 or 3 autism diagnosis. Use that reference class to predict the nature of your problems and the strategies that are likely to help. Only after making those predictions, adjust for your own capabilities and circumstances. Try this regardless of how you feel about calling yourself autistic or seeking a diagnosis. Just see what happens.
Many stereotypically autistic behaviors are less like symptoms of an illness, and more like excellent strategies for getting shit done and having a good life. It’s just hard to get them all working together. Try leaning into those behaviors and see what’s good about them. For example, you know how when you accidentally do something three times in a row, you then feel compelled to keep doing it the same way at the same time forever? Studying this phenomenon in yourself will lead you to build solid and carefully designed routines that allow you to be a lot more reliably vibrant.
You know how some autistic people have one-on-one aides, caretakers, and therapists who assist in their development and day-to-day wellbeing? Read a bit about what those aides do. You’ll notice right away that the state of the art in this area is crap, but try to imagine what professional autism aides might do if they really had things figured out and were spectacular at their jobs. Then devote as many resources as you can spare for a whole year to figuring out how to perform those services for yourself.
It seems to me that most of what’s written about autism by neurotypicals severely overemphasizes social stuff. You’ll find almost none of it compelling. Try to understand what’s really going on with autism, and your understanding will immediately start paying off in non-social quality of life improvements. Keep at it, and it’ll eventually start paying off in deep and practical social insights as well (which I know you don’t care about right now, but it’s true).
I know you want me to tell you what to read. You’re going to hate my answer. Basically everything related to autism that you pick up will be slightly helpful but woefully inadequate. Most things you find will seem deeply confused and infuriatingly bound up with identity politics. The most practical stuff will be written for parents with autistic children, and most of that will seem to be trying to comfort the parents by making their kids act less weird, never mind what the kids are experiencing or why. It’s really awful, I’m so sorry.
Go get on Google Scholar as you were obviously going to anyway, and you’ll find at least *some* juicy theoretical stuff. After that, your best resources will not be found under “autism”, but under “predictive processing” and “perceptual control theory”. Three notable semi-exceptions are *The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome* by Tony Atwood, *Women and Girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Understanding Life Experiences from Early Childhood to Old Age* by Sarah Hendrickx and Judith Gould, and *The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime* by Mark Haddon. (You’ll get farther with this if you first train the skill “getting the most out of books that you hate”.)
Everything published by the organization “Autism Speaks” is gonna piss you off to no purpose. Just skip it.
(This is a review of the entire sequence.)
On the day when I first conceived of this sequence, my room was covered in giant graph paper sticky notes. The walls, the windows, the dressers, the floor. Sticky pads everywhere, and every one of them packed with word clouds and doodles in messy bold marker.
My world is rich. The grain of the wood on the desk in front of me, the slightly raw sensation inside my nostrils that brightens each time I inhale, the pressure of my search for words as I write that rises up through my chest and makes my brain feel like it’s breathing through a straw. I know as well as almost anybody what MacNeice called “the drunkenness of things being various”, “incorrigibly plural”. I am awash in details; sometimes I swim, sometimes I drown, and in rare merciful moments, I float.
People talk about missing the forest for the trees; I am a creature of individual leaves. The sticky notes with which I had covered my walls were my attempts to recall every twig and branch I had seen while developing my approach to rationality, ever since I asked myself what the existing art is missing back in 2013. Each page was an attempted portrait of a different tree.
The sentence I somehow pulled together for this sequence—”Knowing the territory takes patient and direct observation”—was my sketch of the entire forest all at once.On that day, it had seemed a literally incomprehensible pile of details, as nearly everything I write about does until some time after I’ve published. Yet after two more years of work on this project, I still think that sketch is not only accurate, but pretty close to complete.
I am proud of this sequence. It’s far from perfect; it’s far from adequate, in fact. And I’ll talk about that, too. But as a first-pass summary of how I think about “Intro to Naturalism”, it’s right to say that overall, I think it may be the best thing I’ve done so far.
*I doubt it’s worth much on its own, though. It was really never meant to be. I tried to make it accessible, but I mostly wrote it for myself. I published it publicly anyway because I figure there’s a (reasonable!) limit to the patience of my funders. I’m delighted and a little surprised that other people have found it useful.
To me, this sequence is a bit like a sextant. Suppose you’re trying to navigate to a particular island off the coast of South Africa. It will not, by itself, get you to your destination. It’s not the shore. It’s not a boat. It’s not even a map. You need an awful lot more than this to sail to Madagascar.
But as the captain of the HMS Naturalism, I felt I had no hope of staying on course without writing down this worldview, in summary and in detail.
*
On course toward what, exactly? What is the project of which this sequence is a small but crucial part?
The journey has four parts, according to my current understanding:1) Intro to Naturalism: My attempt to lay out the perspective from which my branch of rationality is practiced.
2) The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism (published in early 2023): A straightforward mechanical description of the procedure, as I tend to present it to people learning it for the first time.
3) Naturalism In Practice: A series of accounts of real-life naturalist studies, in frequent dialog with posts from the earlier two sequences, covering a range of topics and demonstrating what naturalism looks and feels like in practice. (This sequence is currently in the works.)
4) THE ACTUAL GOAL [as yet untitled (and unfunded)]: A synthesis of the previous three sequences, perhaps in book form, comprising a comprehensive practical guide to knowing the territory through patient and direct observation.
(There may need to be a part “3.5”, where I refocus for a while on pedagogy and collaboration, before I am ready for 4.)
If I were less awash in details, I imagine I would have been able to start with part 4. But also, I may never have been able to develop such a thing as naturalism.
*
What can I predict about how this sequence will show up in whatever synthesis I eventually create, provided I eventually get to do that?
I think the core summary will be the same: “Knowing the territory takes patient and direct observation.”
Here are some ways I think it will differ from the original.
1.
I may rely much less on the aesthetics of 19th century natural history; indeed, I may completely rename the discipline.
This framing did a ton of work in helping me understand what I was doing and why; but most people do not have my background, and do not find this framework nearly as supportive or inspiring as I have.
For most readers of LessWrong, the word “naturalism” refers to an ontological claim denying the supernatural. They are completely unfamiliar with the approach to biology that also goes by that name, which focuses on knowing a few organisms deeply rather than on the categorization of organisms.
If I do keep the naturalist framing, I’ll need to double down on it and begin with a discussion of the role of the naturalist approach in the history of science, which would be fun for me but perhaps needlessly inefficient.
2.
If there is a major change to the overall summary, it will probably be a result of further developments in my study of “realness”.
During the study I’m currently writing up—one of “Hug the Query”—the primacy of my intuitions involving these observations has come into sharper focus. I’m not the only person who believes “Interlude On Realness” is the most important post in my intro sequence, even though it’s also the one that’s least integrated with the rest of the sequence. I think that a more mature and positively impactful incarnation of “Intro To Naturalism” might put whatever’s going on with “realness” front and center (presumably after I manage to have more coherent thoughts about what is going on with realness).
3.
As Intro to Naturalism suggests, this approach to investigation is in theory extremely general. I have an even larger vision than the one I’ve so far laid out in this review, in which my approach is thoroughly tested and adapted to an enormous breadth of domains, from AI alignment research to metallurgy to computational ethnomusicology. (I maintain an intuition that’s even a little gears-y about the utility of naturalism for AI alignment research especially.)
However, I am by passion and profession a rationality developer. The version of naturalism that I understand best, and that I am best prepared to write about at length, is particularly tailored to the investigation of human cognitive algorithms. Unless someone swoops in and drops a bunch of money on a far more ambitious and speculative project than I currently plan to undertake, and perhaps even finds me some kind of cofounder with a complementary skillset, the final incarnation of this sequence will be more narrowly focused on rationality in particular than was the original.
4.
The structure of the finished work will almost certainly be the exact opposite of my historical publications. Historically, I published the most abstract discussions, then the instructional guidelines, then the fully concrete demonstrations. I did this not because I thought it was a good idea, but because I’m a tiny human with limited cognitive capacity and it was the only way I could manage to write anything in practice.
The almost-always-correct way to write is to move from concrete to abstract. I expect that anything I present from this sequence in the final work will follow a demonstration and a methodological discussion.
5.
I do not think that I had “patient” in sufficiently clear view when I wrote “Patient Observation”, and I still don’t think I’m quite there yet. It may be the wrong term, or it may be overloaded. It’s terribly important, and I think that communicating about it as well as I’d like to will require 1) breaking it down more carefully, and 2) doing so in dialog with contrasting approaches.
I recently found myself claiming to be “at war with the relatively dumb versions of startup culture aesthetics”. I think that to make my point about “patience” to my satisfaction, I will also need to extol the virtues of efficiency, rapid iteration, decisiveness, etc., as I understand them. This entire approach depends fundamentally on patience, and I don’t think it can be wholeheartedly embraced without first safeguarding the fruits of contrasting approaches (or at least explicitly contending with their loss, where they are in fact threatened).
Wanted:
* a practical guide to talking to the order below you
* a practical guide to talking to the order above you
* a list of diagnostic tests to help grantmakers sort applications by order
* a list of funding strategies for different orders
* a list of examples of each order of problem for several different domains
* some advice for navigating life and the world if you are a monk of order n, including likely obstacle and how to approach them
* how to recognize when you are approaching a problem of order n+1 with order n strategies, how to recognize when you are approaching a problem of order n with order n+1 strategies, and some things to try in each case
* probably other things i’ll think of later when it’s not two and a half hours past my bedtime
(Just responding here to whether or not we dogfood.)
I always have a hard time answering this question, and nearby questions, personally.
Sometimes I ask myself whether I ever use goal factoring, or seeking PCK, or IDC, and my immediate answer is “no”. That’s my immediate answer because when I scan through my memories, almost nothing is labeled “IDC”. It’s just a continuous fluid mass of ongoing problem solving full of fuzzy inarticulate half-formed methods that I’m seldom fully aware of even in the moment.
A few months ago I spent some time paying attention to what’s going on here, and what I found is that I’m using either the mainline workshop techniques, or something clearly descended from them, many times a day. I almost never use them on purpose, in the sense of saying “now I shall execute the goal factoring algorithm” and then doing so. But if I snap my fingers every time I notice a feeling of resolution and clarification about possible action, I find that I snap my fingers quite often. And if, after snapping my fingers, I run through my recent memories, I tend to find that I’ve just done goal factoring almost exactly as it’s taught in mainlines.
This, I think, is what it’s like to fully internalize a skill.
I’ve noticed the same sort of thing in my experience of CFAR’s internal communication as well. In the course of considering our answers to some of these questions, for example, we’ve occasionally run into disagreements with each other. In the moment, my impression was just that we were talking to each other sensibly and working things out. But if I scan through a list of CFAR classes as I recall those memories, I absolutely recognize instances of inner sim, trigger-action planning, againstness, goal factoring, double crux, systemization, comfort zone exploration, internal double crux, pedagogical content knowledge, Polaris, mundanification, focusing, and the strategic level, at minimum.
At one point when discussing the topic of research I said something like, “The easiest way for me to voice my discomfort here would involve talking about how we use words, but that doesn’t feel at all cruxy. What I really care about is [blah]”, and then I described a hypothetical world in which I’d have different beliefs and priorities. I didn’t think of myself as “using double crux”, but in retrospect that is obviously what I was trying to do.
I think techniques look and feel different inside a workshop vs. outside in real life. So different, in fact, that I think most of us would fail to recognize almost every example in our own lives. Nevertheless, I’m confident that CFAR dogfoods continuously.
Survey complete! I answered ALL the questions. ^_^
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about monographs .
“A monograph is a specialist work of writing… or exhibition on a single subject or an aspect of a subject, often by a single author or artist, and usually on a scholarly subject… Unlike a textbook, which surveys the state of knowledge in a field, the main purpose of a monograph is to present primary research and original scholarship ascertaining reliable credibility to the required recipient. This research is presented at length, distinguishing a monograph from an article.”
I think it’s a bit of an antiquated term. Either that or it’s chiefly British, because as an American I’ve seldom encountered it.
I know the word because Sherlock Holmes is always writing monographs. In *A Study In Scarlet*, he says, “I gathered up some scattered ash from the floor. It was dark in colour and flakey—such an ash as is only made by a Trichinopoly. I have made a special study of cigar ashes—in fact, I have written a monograph upon the subject. I flatter myself that I can distinguish at a glance the ash of any known brand, either of cigar or of tobacco.” He also has a monograph on the use of disguise in crime detection, and another on the utilities of dogs in detective work.
When I tried thinking of myself as writing “monographs” on things, I broke though some sort of barrier. The things I wrote turned out less inhibited and more… me. I benefited from them myself more as well.
What I mean by “monograph” is probably a little different from what either Sherlock or academia means, but it’s in the same spirit. I think of it as a photo study or a character sketch, but in non-fiction writing form.
Here are my guidelines for writing a monograph.
1. Pick a topic you can personally investigate. It doesn’t matter whether it’s “scholarly”. It’s fine if other people have already written dozens of books on the subject, regardless of whether you’ve read them, just as long as you can stick your own nose in the actual subject matter as well. It would be hard for me to write a monograph on the cognitive effects of blood redistribution in high-G environments, because I don’t own a fighter jet. But I could absolutely write a monograph on the cognitive effects of blood redistribution during physical inversion, because I can do a handstand against the wall or hang upside down from a horizontal bar.
2. Write down dozens of questions about the topic. Yes, really, dozens. They don’t have to be good questions. Do this in brainstorming mode. Afterward, highlight the questions you feel particularly drawn to. Don’t leave out anything you feel a burning itch to know, even if it seems literally impossible to answer.
3. Pick one of your questions and start writing about it. As you write, do whatever investigations occur to you, and write about them. Favor methods that put you in more direct contact with the territory, even when you expect you could read about someone else’s investigations. Please do write later about somebody’s meta-analysis on whether things fall up, but go drop a bunch of pencils on your own first.
4. Do this with all of the questions on your list that call to you. When you’re done, you’ve written a monograph.
Now that you have some idea of what the heck I’m even doing, maybe I’ll feel more comfortable sharing my monographs here. My plan is to publish them little by little as I write, so other people can influence my investigations. You’ll get a series of “essays”, but they may be in a wide range of styles and formats from poetry to data sets to expository prose, the better to see the topic from many perspectives.
John, I think you’re onto something, at least in that you’ve accurately perceived “something’s not right here” and also substantially narrowed down where the not-rightness is. But I’m not sure quite what the not-rightness is yet, and I also think that this response to “what should be done about it” suggests you’re missing a really big piece of the puzzle somehow.
I think that Duncan’s post is closely related to stuff I’ve been mulling over lately, and I can’t tell whether my following suggestion will therefore come out of left field given the invisible-from-the-outside context of the history of my thoughts, or whether it will be obviously on point, or what. I also don’t have any clear answers yet, just questions that I’m still trying to improve, but here goes.
I wonder how society should treat weird people, both in some ideal post-scarcity future world and also in this one we find ourselves in, starting from where we are with the resources we have. I also wonder how weird people should behave and think and feel when they fully understand their actual relationship with society, and I wonder about the nature of that relationship.
I expect it’s helpful to think of a well defined class of people with a specific straightforward way of being weird, such as people who are mobility impaired and mainly get around using wheelchairs or scooters. (I imagine it would also be really helpful to talk to people from within such a class, rather than acting like I’m confined to analyzing my own imagination, and while I’m not going to do that in this particular comment, I think it would be pretty cool if somebody piped up who actually knows what the world’s like from the perspective of a wheelchair or scooter.)
What would it be like if I had a really hard time walking or couldn’t do it at all, and even my close friends who are hearing went around saying things like “everybody loves hiking” right in front of me? How would I respond by default, and how would I prefer to respond?
What if most of the buildings I wanted to enter were only navigable by stairs? How would I respond by default, and how would I prefer to respond? How does my answer to that change if there are one billion people like me, or ten million, or one thousand or ten, or if I’m literally the only one?
And what are the similarities and difference between “everybody loves hiking” and “the bathroom at the theater is up a flight of stairs and there’s no elevator”? What about when the bathroom’s upstairs at a friend’s house party?
If there were a sovereign island populated mainly by people who were substantially weird in some way related to their physical or sensory abilities (with respect to genpop on the continent)—people with mobility challenges, Deaf people, people with low vision, people who are 6′5″ or taller, people with super smell who vomit when there’s body odor, etc.—what would the built environment of that island look like by default? How would things be designed, and what design principles would seem obvious there that are at best afterthoughts right now? And which of those obvious design principles, if any, would actually make life much better for most people on the continent if they were taken for granted there as well? What paradigms is continental architecture unnecessarily stuck in, to its detriment?
What about all of these things, but for far less visible cognitive and perceptual variance?
My overall point here is that I think Duncan’s sharing first-person information about a kind of problem that is in fact quite deep and complex, and that figuring out the right thing for someone in his position to do is correspondingly difficult. Imagine suggesting to a Deaf person that the lack of closed captioning on a popular TV show shouldn’t feel significant to them once they’ve fully understood that most people can hear. Yes, they are probably not having the best-for-them possible response if they’re deeply emotionally hurt every time they’re reminded of how almost nobody considers people like them when determining the social or physical environment. But in the absence of a much better suggestion than “grieve and move on”, pointing out that they are somehow causing themselves to suffer beyond what the reality of the situation strictly requires seems like… not quite the right move, to me.
How sweet of you to write me this love letter.
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.”
- 31 Jan 2020 7:37 UTC; 6 points) 's comment on how has this forum changed your life? by (
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I, um, don’t have anything coherent to say yet. Just a heads up. I also don’t really know where this comment should go.
But also I don’t really expect to end up with anything coherent to say, and it is quite often the case that when I have something to say, people find it worthwhile to hear my incoherence anyway, because it contains things that underlay their own confused thoughts, and after hearing it they are able to un-confuse some of those thoughts and start making sense themselves. Or something. And I do have something incoherent to say. So here we go.
I think there’s something wrong with the OP. I don’t know what it is, yet. I’m hoping someone else might be able to work it out, or to see whatever it is that’s causing me to say “something wrong” and then correctly identify it as whatever it actually is (possibly not “wrong” at all).
On the one hand, I feel familiarity in parts of your comment, Anna, about “matches my own experiences/observations/hearsay at and near MIRI and CFAR”. Yet when you say “sensible”, I feel, “no, the opposite of that”.
Even though I can pick out several specific places where Jessicata talked about concrete events (e.g. “I believed that I was intrinsically evil” and “[Michael Vassar] was commenting on social epistemology”), I nevertheless have this impression that I most naturally conceptualize as “this post contained no actual things”. While reading it, I felt like I was gazing into a lake that is suspended upside down in the sky, and trying to figure out whether the reflections I’m watching in its surface are treetops or low-hanging clouds. I felt like I was being invited into a mirror-maze that the author had been trapped in for… an unknown but very long amount of time.
There’s something about nearly every phrase (and sentence, and paragraph, and section) here that I just, I just want to spit out, as though the phrase itself thinks it’s made of potato chunks but in fact, out of the corner of my eye, I can tell it is actually made out of a combination of upside-down cloud reflections and glass shards.
Let’s try looking at a particular, not-very-carefully-chosen sentence.
I have so many questions. “As a consequence” seems fine; maybe that really is potato chunks. But then, “the people most mentally concerned” happens, and I’m like, Which people were most mentally concerned? What does it mean to be mentally concerned? How could the author tell that those people were mentally concerned? Then we have “with strange social metaphysics”, and I want to know “what is social metaphysics?”, “what is it for social metaphysics to be strange or not strange?” and “what is it to be mentally concerned with strange social metaphysics”? Next is “were marginalized”. How were they marginalize? What caused the author to believe that they were marginalized? What is it for someone to be marginalized? And I’m going to stop there because it’s a long sentence and my reaction just goes on this way the whole time.
I recognize that it’s possible to ask this many questions of this kind about absolutely any sentence anyone has ever uttered. Nevertheless, I have a pretty strong feeling that this sentence calls for such questions, somehow, much more loudly than most sentences do. And the questions the sentences call for are rarely answered in the post. It’s like a tidal wave of… of whatever it is. More and more of these phrases-calling-for-questions pile up one after another, and there’s no time in between to figure out what’s going on, if you want to follow the post whatsoever.
There are definitely good things in here. A big part of my impression of the author, based on this post, is that they’re smart and insightful, and trying to make the world better. I just, also have this feeling like something… isn’t just wrong here, but is going wrong, and maybe the going has momentum, and I wonder how many readers will get temporarily trapped in the upside down mirror maze while thinking they’re eating potatoes, unless they slow way way down and help me figure out what on earth is happening in this post.