(This is my second comment on this site, so it is probable that the formatting will come out gross. I am operating on the assumption that it is similar to Reddit, given Markdown)
To be as succinct as possible, fair enough.
I want to have this conversation too! I was trying to express what I believe to be the origins of people’s frustrations with you, not to try to discourage you. Although I can understand how I failed to communicate that.
I am going to wrap this up with the part of your reply that concerns experiential distance and respond to both. I suspect that a lot of fear of epistemic contamination comes from the emphasis on personal experience. Personal (meatspace) experiences, especially in groups, can trigger floods of emotions and feelings of insights without those first being fed through rational processing. Therefore it seems reasonable to be suspicious of anyone who claims to teach through personal experience. That being said, the experimental spirit suggests the following course of action: get a small group and try to close their experiential gap gradually, while having them extensively document anything they encounter on the way, then publish that for peer analysis and digestion. Of course that relies on more energy and time than you might have.
This seems like an unfair conflation of what happened in the Kensho post and everything else. The Circling post was entirely an attempt to communicate in words! All of these comments are attempts to communicate in words!
On a general level, I totally concede that I am operating from relatively weak ground. It has been a while—or at least felt like a while—since I read any of the posts I mentioned (tacitly or otherwise) with the exception of Kensho, so that is definitely coloring my vision.
If I spent all my time defending myself on LW like this instead of just using what I believe my skills to be to do cool stuff, then I won’t ever get around to doing the cool stuff. So at some point I am just going to stop engaging in this conversation, especially if people continue to assume bad faith on the part of people like me and Val, in order to focus my energy and attention on doing the cool stuff.
I acknowledge that many people are responding to your ideas with unwarranted hostility and forcing you onto the defensive in a way that I know must be draining. So I apologize for essentially doing that in my original reply to you. I think that I, personally, am unacceptably biased against a lot of ideas due to their “flavor” so to speak, rather than their actual strength.
Do you really want to punish me for not consistently sticking to a particular level of weakening of my true belief?
As to consistency, I actually do want to hold you to some standard of strength with respect to beliefs, because otherwise you could very easily make your beliefs unassuming enough to pass through arbitrary filters. I find ideas interesting; I want to know A, not any of its more easily defensible variants. But I don’t want to punish you or do anything that could even be construed as such.
In summary, I am sorry that I came off as harsh.
EDIT: Fixed terrible (and accidental) bolding.
I think that perhaps what bothers a lot of rationalists about your (or Valentine’s) assertions is down to three factors:
You don’t tend to make specific claims or predictions. I think you would come off better—certainly to me and I suspect to others—if you were to preregister hypotheses more, like you did in the above comment. I believe that you could and should be more specific, perhaps stating that over a six month period you expect to work n more hours without burning out or that a consensus of reports from outsiders about your mental well-being will show a marked positive change during a particular time period that the evaluators did not know was special. While these would obviously not constitute strong evidence, a willingness to informally test your ideas would at least signal honest belief.
You seem to make little to no attempt to actually communicate your ideas in words, or even define your concepts in words. Frankly, it continues to strike me as suspicious that you claim difficulty in even analogizing or approximating your ideas verbally. Even something as weak as the rubber-sheet analogy for General Relativity would—once again—signal an honest attempt.
There doesn’t seem to be consistency on the strength of claims surrounding frameworks. As mentioned elsewhere in thread, Valentine seems to claim that mythic mode generated favorable coincidences like he was bribing the DM. Yet other times Valentine seems to stay acknowledge that the narrative description of reality is at best of metaphorical use.
I think that given recent rationalist interest in meditation, fake frameworks, etc., and in light of what seems to be a case of miscommunication and/or under-communication, there should be some attempt to establish a common basis of understanding, so that if someone asks, “Are you saying x?” they can be instantly redirected to a page that gives the relevant definitions and claims. If you view this is as impossible, do you think that that is a fact of your map or of the relevant territory?
Anyway, I really hope everyone can reach a point of mutual intelligibility, if nothing else.