Hiding in a shrubbery
hamnox
Karma: 1,268
Cheerful Harberger Day
Meetup : Love and Sex in Salt Lake City
I went to some martial arts class, jiu jitsu, and before they taught me anything else they taught me how to break falls safely. Same with parkour class. You’re going to fall, they said. You need a way to catch yourself without fucking up your arms or back. It’s not just as mistakes when you’re learning a new move, either, though it will certainly happen more often then. You’re throwing yourself all over the place, tripping each other; you’re going to hit the ground at momentum. You need to know how to handle yourself when that happens, how to roll with it and get up right after safe and sound. Every class, the first thing we do is drill break falls.
I don’t think The Art of Rationality has that.
Yes we notice the skulls. It seems like I see a new treatise pointing out the valley of bad rationality every few months. And yet...
When you share what you know, do you share safety skills and warnings with it?
Do you have a sense of how likely are you to injure yourself in your practice?
What specific actions do you take when you notice you’re taking epistemic damage?
How strong are your skills in harm-minimization? Do you have it down to ingrained reaction or habit?
Do you practice locating individual personal abilities + limits with the distribution of expected human traits as a guide, or are you fitting your strategies to a population-level statistic?
I have some ideas.
I wanna hear yours.
Took the survey.
I think I failed it.
The most commonsense example of making assumptions irrelevant I’ve heard of is from weapons safety: always act as if the gun is loaded.
See also
Cut away from yourself
Eating Mealsquares instead of Soylent
Epistemology Volume of “A Map That Reflects the Territory” Set—My Personal Commentary
What I Learned From Running a Pol.is Conversation
And yet it’s a true observation, and entirely relevant if you’re going to concern yourself with convincing other people to resist against being human.
The tails come apart. If you aim for extremes, you wind up selecting against other forms of goodness. It’s not robust. This is bad both for your goals, if you are incorrect about your goals at all, and socially bad, because it moves you off of (?)cooperative ground(?) where seeking your values correlates with seeking theirs.
I like having these distinctions laid out to think about. While it’s on my mind I’d like to share an extension of Brienne’s quadrants I’d made in my own notes.
To “Easy vs. Difficult” and “Fast vs. Slow”, I added a third dimension of “Hype vs. Signal”. A grand epiphany can turn out to be insight porn. A long gruel to attain wizardry could be an investment scam. Bug patches can be surface-level fads. Tortoise skill practice might be lotus-eating distraction.
(I may have been a bit disillusioned with rationality lore at the time I named these. Because yes, it *was* demoralizing to get 2-3% returns when I expected bursts of 300%.)
A useful core can have many subtly-off instantiations. The expected signal-to-noise ratio matters, when you’re figuring out where it makes sense to focus your efforts.
My first thought was a slightly more sophisticated version of “OMG, WANT!”. This seems like a brilliant idea, and I’d absolutely love to see it come to fruition. I can taste the sweet hintings of a future rationality dojos, already envision the unfolding of a greater future where more is possible. Ten weeks dedicated strictly to the Art, with other people who will actually CARE DEEPLY about being sane. How could I NOT want to be there? I’m a little iffy on whether or not all of these ideas are really the best, but hey—it’s a work in progress.
I open up an application and start typing. But I’m finding myself intimidated by vastly open-ended form questions, and the mention that they’re looking for “people who’ve demonstrated high productivity” and “who already seem like good epistemic rationalists”. I have no such qualifications; I’m inexperienced, lazy, and honestly, I’ve internalized frustratingly little of what I’ve ‘learned’ on LessWrong. So I close the window.
But, the only way I can possible be sure that I won’t get in is if I don’t apply. And I do want to go, I really want this experience. So I open it and start again.
Then close it once more a few seconds later. Open. Close. Open. Close.
I think I may have a problem.
I think I also understand why rejection therapy is part of the curriculum. Unwillingness to put yourself out there is a severe handicap to winning.
Faerie Rings
Faerie Ring meet #2: At Gather.Town
Suggestions:
wear gloves. seriously, major life hack for sensory dysphoria.
individually pack things yourself from bulk purchases right away. It can be a lovely experience, making forty little gifts to your future self.
It’s a worse tradeoff to have to engage with bad packaging every time you want a thing. you get efficiency benefits from dealing with that all at once. you’re very correct to point that out.
Small reusable containers exist! get beautiful ones, get neatly stackable ones, get convenient ones.
part of *my* experience with disposables is wincing at the environmental externalities
Deli paper, metal foil, plastic sheets and bags.
Make plates stackable in your fridge. Repurpose something used to store pot lids, probably
I’m starting 30 days of rejection therapy. Right off the bat, I notice I have low inhibitions against asking for ridiculous things that are sure to be rejected. I cultivated an identity of being an oddball who makes bizarre and safely ignorable interjections back in high school, so such things are right inside my comfort zone. What I am not comfortable with is the making suggestions reasonable enough that there is uncertainty about whether or not someone will accept them, or such that asking might be interpreted to suggest specific negative traits (e.g. greedy or dangerous) instead of a general peculiarity.
I decided to make a move West with my friend. It’s sudden and it’s a change, so my brain keeps hitting the panic button every time I think about it. When I reframe it as happening a year or two from now, I know it’s somewhere that I’ll want to be close to eventually, that having in-state tuition right now doesn’t make it much more likely that I’ll get somewhere in college, and loss aversion (plus persistent alief in own unworthiness) is making me cling a lot harder to my local safety nets than I actually believe they’re worth. Now I just need to pull my head out of the ground long enough to set specific subgoals and murphy-proof my landing plan..
edit: After murphy-proofing, it’s apparent the cost of hitting undo on the sudden move is higher than I realized. It would be highly preferable to negotiate spending a couple of weeks with said friend to get more information, and I can probably optimize a short visit to claim a good portion of the social and motivational benefits I was looking for anyways.
Post is very informal. It reads like, well, a personal blog post. A little in the direction of raw freewriting. It’s fluid. Easy to read and relate to.
That matters, when you’re trying to convey nuanced information about how minds work. Relatable means the reader is making connections with their personal experiences; one of the most powerful ways to check comprehension and increase retention. This post shows a subtle error as it appears from the inside. It doesn’t surprise me that this post sparked some rich discussion in the comments.
To be frank, I’d be very wary of trying to suggest edits. I don’t want this post to lose that feeling of unfiltered thought-to-page, when it’s a crucial element of its magic. Maybe I’d add some doodley illustrations to vividly supplement the textual imagery. I imagine it *could* get clearer benefit from light restructuring and expansions. The most authentic-*feeling* writing does not perfectly align with with the most *authentic* writing, after all.
(Maybe edit the bit at the end of “Relevant context” so the ironic ‘stands out’ better… It was perfectly clear from context that this was ironic, but it could have been clearer from ?structure?wording?. idk “yeah nopes” felt kind of weak as the turning point.)
What I would like to see: It’s a year later now. Write a postscript with updated thoughts since then. How has your model, and your use of it, evolved since you wrote this post? Does the basic practice of “sit with the fact that I’m feeling something, and hug the child that brought that emotion instead of slapping them” produce the same results for you it did at the start?
Also expand on the ‘related’. See if you can find specific posts and quotes to support the sentiment of safety as the biggest barrer to rational thinking/discourse. If you can collect and quotes some small anecdotes of other people’s experiences with needing or finding emotional safety to improve their thinking, I believe that would make it feel more… ?connected?. Increase safety not just by providing a skill but also generating a sense that ‘i am not alone in this’.
I have one niggling question: Is it actually true that most people have all the machinery to move their ears? I thought there was a piece missing or something in the median person....
Looking up the facts, it looks as though that whether conscious control can be taught is under contention but the function is all there.
sigh. This post digs into why I can’t watch the news without feeling frustrated.
Because even when I agree with the newscaster’s overall assessment of a situation, there’s just… never quite enough acknowledgement that some evidence might point a different direction than is politically convenient. That small or selective samples can even appear to point against the truth. That alternate perspectives on the facts don’t come into existence solely to try to knock yours down.
[Question] What would a zetetic explanation be for the rationality community?
uncomfortable squirm
In my culture, one is to be super wary of lionizing martyrs.
I want to be excited about cool new holiday ideas. I think trying a fast in a coordinated group is a splendid idea. I want to celebrate the amazing capacity of humans to care about others and to do hard things for good reasons.
but pain is not the unit of effort.
dying for the cause is not a success.
not every cost is avoidable, but i never, ever want to become the kind of person
who mistakes the price sacrificed for a value bought
In my culture there’s a meta-tradition around ritual hardships or labors: you are to set aside at least 5 minutes, by the very clock, for considering how you might cheat. If you find you could get results without the hardship, you are expected to cheat for the results and then go find some other way to challenge yourself.
I finished a Machine Learning Course by Andrew Ng!
WOOOH ME! AND COURSERA!!
Edit: I changed my mind. My awesomest achievement of the month is endless conversations and a kiss from a poly connection who thinks deeply and plays DDR and mini-golf and reads fascinating books and makes art. I’m high on hedons right now.