Worried that I might already be a post-rationalist. I’m very interested in minimizing miscommunication, and helping people through the uncanny valley of rationality. Feel free to pm me about either of those things.
Hazard
Karma: 3,068
It’s not clear to me what if anything we disagree on.
I agree that personality categories are useful for predicting someone’s behavior across time.
I don’t think using essences to make predictions is the “wrong thing to do in general” either.
I agree climate can be a useful predictive category for thinking about a region.
My point about taking the wrong thing as a causal variable “leading you to overestimate your ability to make precise causal interventions” is actually very relevant to Duncan’s recent post. Many thought experiments are misleading/bogus/don’t-do-what-they-say-on-label exactly because they posit impossible interventions.
Causal vs Predictive Models, and the Causal Taboo
Predictive Categories Make Bad Causal Variables
“People are over sensitive to ostracism because human brains are hardwired to be sensitive to it, because in the ancestral environment it meant death.”
Evopsyche seems mostly overkill for explaining why a particular person is strongly attached to social reality.
People who did not care what their parents or school-teachers thought of them had a very hard time. “Socialization” as the process of the people around you integrating you (often forcefully) into the local social reality. Unless you meet a minimum bar of socialization, it’s very common to be shunted through systems that treat you worse and worse. Awareness of this, and the lasting imprint of coercive methods used to integrate one into social reality, seem like they can explain most of an individuals resistance to breaking from it.
I greatly appreciate posts that describe when different flavors of self work (or different kinds of problems) don’t feel like how one expected. A somewhat reversed example for me, for some years I didn’t notice the intense judgement I had within me that would occasionally point at others and myself, largely because I had a particular stereotype of what “being judgemental” looked like. I correctly determined I didn’t do the stereotypically judgemental thing, and stopped hunting.
I agree that meeting a person where they are is pretty important. You also seem to spend time with very different people than who I spend time with, and you have a very different reference for “people” and “where they are”. This post probably isn’t going to be too useful to the people you reference in your hypotheticals. It has been very useful for various people I know, so I’m meeting them where they are :)
You mention that it’s useful to have conversations where you try to get on the same page about what you mean when you use certain words (3rd to last paragraph of your comment). I think that’s frequently super important and often useful to do. I’m assuming you’re mentioning it because you see my post as saying this doesn’t matter and shouldn’t be done. If you can point out what part seemed to be arguing that, I can see if I agree that my wording was ambiguous and/or poorly phrased. Currently I still don’t think the content of my post argues or implies or sets the philosophical underpinnings for the claims you say it does. So we probably won’t get out of this unless we dive into specifics.
As a shortcut, if you have similar criticisms of A Human’s Guide to Words, then we probably do disagree a lot. But if you don’t think EY “thinks words aren’t useful” then we just have a misunderstanding.
This is awkward because I’m pretty sure I don’t believe anything your reply asserts I believe.
To clarify, is it the case that from reading my post you’ve concluded that I don’t think labels/words are useful and that I don’t think we need language for complex thought? If that’s the case, can you help me understand how you got that?
Some thoughts: the “When” in the title was meant to make this distinct from simply “Arguing Definitions Is Arguing Decisions”. Of all arguments about definitions, some unknown about have the qualities I’m pointing at.
When you mention that I promptly forget that words/labels are useful, do you think I said things that contradicted the idea of words being useful, or did that fact that I didn’t keep circling back to “words are great” make you infer I don’t care about them? Mayhaps I find the idea of thinking people shouldn’t use language as so ridiculous that I didn’t feel a need to hedge against that interpretation, but you run into these sorts of people often and have high priors for that interpretation?
I’ll file a complaint to this imaginary workplace.
I’m short on actual conversations I can remember the details of, so if you have any that you think make a good example, feel free to share. Examples are some of the most important parts and I don’t like it whenever I have to make them up.
When Arguing Definitions is Arguing Decisions
I’m reflecting back on this sequence I started two years ago. There’s some good stuff in it. I recently made a comic strip that has more of my up to date thoughts on language here. Who knows, maybe I’ll come back and synthesize things.
Agreed that there’s something missing. I didn’t provide much of a model about what emotions are, mostly because I didn’t have much of one when I wrote this. It was also the case that for some time I used my lack of a mechanistic model of emotions as an excuse to ignore the ways I was obviously hurting.
In response to Raemon’s comment here, I and a few others gave some more concrete thoughts on what negative repercussions are.
I intend to write some follow up posts with what I’ve learned in the intervening years. One thing I need to expand on is what I actually did with “fix it or stop complaining”, because if I take your comment at face value, we were clearly not doing the same thing, yet we both felt it sensical to call what we did “fix it or stop complaining”.
Another thought, these days I’m thinking a bit more in terms of “disavowed desires” instead of “repressed emotions”. Desires (or subagents) feel like the mental things that generate loops across time, that make things come up again and again. Emotions are the transient expressions of these desires. Emotions actually can “just go away” if you ignore them, but I haven’t found that to be the case for desires (I’m thinking less “I desire to have some lunch” and more “I desire to be accepted by others”. Well, it’s less “can I get this to go away rn?” (which you can almost always do with [drugs/video games/media/activity/etc]) and more “will this pop back up?”).
This post of mine includes the exposition of one disavowed desire I’ve struggled with which generated a lot of emotions over the years which I ignored. The header “A Serious Pardox” describes the disavowed desire. Knots by R.D Laing describes in poetic language a lot of these emotional paradoxes.
All that being said, I’ve spent the last yearish more in a mode of understanding and building agency. This has felt possible because I feel I’ve unraveled enough emotional paradoxes that I’ll know if/when I’m doing something that hurts me (agency isn’t safe when you’re not aligned). I’ve got a few threads about the process of building agency with an eye on not backsliding on emotional stuff, and another post which frames a lot of this journey.
Great post! Would also be interested in reading your distributed systems papers.
Rao made his framework by combining his consulting experience with the TV show The Office. I don’t believe he was trying to describe all corporations, which leaves me with the question “How would I determine which workplaces have these dynamics?”
The world he describes doesn’t seem incompatible with the corporate world that the book Moral Mazes depicts.
I’ve not been in the working world long enough to have any data on what’s common or normal, and haven’t been at my current workplace long enough to have a sense for if it matches Rao’s frame (it doesn’t seem like it does).
You also don’t think your work place fits the bill. Have you interacted with any work places that seemed to match up? How many work places have you interacted with enough to feel confident making the judgement either way? I’m very interested to get more data points.
From reading lots of Rao’s stuff, I also got the sense that he’s writing descriptively, and specifically, he’s trying to describe The Office. It’ll be truthful to the degree that The Office captures some truths, and to the degree that Rao’s own consulting experience fills in the details.
I appreciate you writing this! Describing how exactly a set of ideas fucked with you, how the ideas interlock, and what you think their structure is, is something I’m always glad to see.
Sometimes when I’m writing an email to someone at work, I noticing I’m making various faces, as if to convey the emotion in the sentence I’m writing. It’s like… I’m composing a sentence, I’m imagining what I’m trying to express, and I’m imagining that expression, and along with that comes the physical faces and mental stances of the thing I’m expressing. It’s like I’m trying to fill in and inhabit some imagined state.
Over the past year I’ve noticed a similar sort of feeling when I’m thinking about something I could potentially do, and I’m being motivated by appearing impressive. The idea/thought is there, and then I try to “fill it up” and momentarily live into that world. There’s normally a slight tension in my forehead that starts to form. There’s also a sort of “zooming in” feeling in my head. It likely sounds drastic me typing it out, but this is all pretty subtle and I didn’t notice it for a while.
Anywho, mostly if I find myself pleasurably stewing in the imagined state of the thing, it’s a sign for me that it’s about impressiveness. I seem to not sit in the idea when there’s other motivations? I can’t think of any reason why that would be the case, but it seems to be for me.
Dope, it was nice to check and see that contrary to what I expect, it’s not always being used that way :)
Some idle musings on using naive to convey specific content.
Sometimes I might want to communicate that I think someone’s wrong, and I also think they’re wrong in a way that’s only likely to happen if they lack experience X. Or similar, they are wrong because they haven’t had experience X. That’s something I can imagine being relevant and something I’d want to communicate. Though I’d specifically want to mention the experience that I think they’re lacking. Otherwise it feels like I’m asserting “there just is this thing that is being generally privy to how things work” and you can be privy or not, which feels like it would pull me away from looking at specific things and understanding how they work, and instead towards trying to “figure out the secret”. (This is less relevant to your post, because you are actually talking about things one can do)
There’s another thing which is in between what I just mentioned, and “naive” as a pure intentional put-down. It’s something like “You are wrong, you are wrong because you haven’t had experience X, and everyone who has had experience X is able to tell that you are wrong and haven’t had experience X.” The extra piece here is the assertion that “there are many people who know you are wrong”. Maybe those many people are “us”, maybe not. I’m having a much harder time thinking of an example where that’s something that’s useful to communicate, and is too close asserting group pressure for my liking.
I generally agree with this post.
And man, that feels kinda naive to me.
Is there something you wanted to communicate here that was more than “that feels wrong/not true”? All usage and explications of “naive” that I’ve encountered seemed to focus on “the thing here that is bad or shameful is that we experienced people know this and you don’t, get with the program”.
This is very interesting to me! I’d like to hear more about how the two group’s behavior looks diff, and also your thoughts on what’s the difference that makes the difference, what are the pieces of “being brought up to go to college” that lead to one class of reactions?