This is the kind of objection I’m excited to see, and actually made me update down (tentatively, a bit) on the OP. Releasing that recording, or allowing trusted third parties to listen to it and attest to its contents would make me update more, and the more specific claims where you can say “no, indeed, Kyle is exaggerating” the more seriously I’ll take your objection in general.
(I have my own perspective already regardless of the OP.)
I was sent this today, obviously relevant. Not an endorsement whatsoever, haven’t followed up on anything: https://omnicide.exposed/
I’m not exactly sure if any of this is a crux re the OP but it’s interesting. There’s some ambiguously private info I’m leaving out but I’m gently updating in favor of this document, on net I’m still broadly critical though.
Mostly good takes.
Feels maybe pedantic on my part to keep responding? In any case:
“Maple is worried about ai risk and trying to do something about it” isn’t necessarily the whole argument, and I’m not even sure I fully support whatever the steelman would be. But here’s some attempt at such a steelman:
“Maple’s account of the central upstream causes of ai risk (let’s say, perverse market incentives + rivalrous dynamics betw state actors, though maybe this is giving them too much credit) actually seems plausible, and sort of in a way that even Eliezer would agree with, and they are… trying to address those causes. We should be addressing them in these terms, and pointing out if they are object level confused about the causality, or their theory of change is implausible, or they are ineffective, and separately if they are meanwhile harmful. Saying they fit the mold of a classic high-control group and leaving members traumatized doesn’t really get at their cruxes, even if it’s certainly a bad look.”
(This is a better way of expressing it than I had last year or when I was writing my top level comment, actually.)
I do want to point out that you’re implicitly assuming monasteries are good and desirable, and not cults.
If I’m feeling blithe, I want to just be like, oh, monasteries are totally cults, and actually monasteries are often harmful. But also maybe this is fine anyway. Or, insofar as it’s bad, it’s not even because cults are bad. [But this is me being a bit schizo so shrug somewhat.]
Yeah this feels closer, thanks.
So I think the objection that our mutual friend there would make, is that the perspectives/worldviews that are both like, conveyed by modern culture, and which are say “psychologically sustainable” from within modern culture, make most of the “true” good qualities of a Mapler/Soryu under-salient or invisible, and laud qualities which are “”“truly””” in fact harmful, reprehensible etc.
So I expect they would cite factory farming, climate change, obviously x-risk, but also social media, maybe something like “social degeneration”, in this case meaning something like communities fracturing or dissolving, networks becoming sparser and less meaningfully bonded, etc. (tbc not that I endorse all of these as real, but as what they would cite.)
And the claim there is like, you can’t be a normal guy and hold a normal job and have friends and raise your kids, with all of the above around, unless you hold a perspective that normalizes it or ignores it, and that whatever the costs of uh “becoming a Mapler”, they are much smaller in comparison.
Mostly good point. Maybe a crux here is that Maple’s claims re risk are uh sort of plausible ish. (Sort of, I think Soryu’s understanding is kind of technically inept and whatever his spiritual interpretation is seems obviously wrong, but still.)
A big part of what I’m getting at is like, “in context re ai risk etc, and both their posture wrt it and their their adjacency, we should be taking them more seriously, rather than rounding them to modal cult.”
Or like. I think it’s entirely reasonable to ignore them, my claim is more like, if we’re going to engage, the uh naive anti cult model seems unfair/inappropriate.
I thought I had discussed this in a comment but I couldn’t find it.
What I had in mind here was basically the process of becoming a resident involves ~3 months of being embedded in the community, several passes of discussion with longer term residents before committing, etc. I think more recently they’ve done more aggressive filtration before people come at all etc.
(For people who have notifications on for this thread, I edited the top level comment with some more context.)
Thanks for writing this. I… am not particularly optimistic about the org updating based on this, which I’ll talk about below.
For the record, broadly the factual claims seem true as far as I know. A lot of details were news to me but I expect they’re all basically truthful, though I have a lot of nits about tone and implication. I’m making some small updates just based on some new info here, but otherwise no big update for me, at least atm.
I want to highlight what I discussed in my post last year. Framing this in terms of anti-cult literature is sort of assuming the conclusion: if what they were doing was appropriate, those models would condemn it just the same. There’s more nuance here, so part of your argument (inasmuch as you’re making an argument, and a lot of this post is descriptive, which 👍) is that the org is dysfunctional, bleeds people, and is flailing in its paranoia. Which, well, that’s still substantially subject to the same criticism… The point here is that within Maple’s frame their behavior is largely a reasonable response to intense constraints to a society which faces acute existential risk of its own making, etc etc.
He has asked a roomful of us to settle what proportion of students becoming traumatized through the training would be acceptable: “is it 20%? 50%? 100%!?!”.
I actually wasn’t there for this conversation, and during my time this wasn’t part of the rhetoric yet, but I made exactly this point in my post:
Part of the crux here is that under steep tradeoffs, we should be more willing to accept the costs of harming people, especially for modest amounts of harm. Special forces operatives just are traumatized, and no one reasonable says “this is unacceptable under any circumstances.”
I still basically endorse this point.
And more generally:
One common feature of critiques of Maple which is especially frustrating to me, especially from ex Maplers, is that they can only be made by recourse to some secular liberal scientism, and refuse to meet Maple and Soryu, as they say, “where they’re at.” To be clear, I haven’t done that here either, and maybe doing so could be a life’s work, and probably not mine.
That said, I think a reasonable objection there might be something like, “no, this memetic object is simply too toxic, and even trying to entertain it will ensnare you. All you can do is stand from a distance, notice the ways in which it looks diseased, and walk away.” My impression is that Maple got sympathetic attention from the broader rat scene circa 2019 because their schtick felt like a reasonable posture given what rats already believed, and potentially an important angle.
Edit: one more point I want to add which I mention in my post, it’s not clear how much Maple differs from say +1s intensity rinzai monastery, in the harmful respects.
My impression is that Kyle’s point of reference for another Zen monastery in America is Great Vow in Oregon. What’s interesting about that case is that I was told when I was there that a. they initially tried to do the full intensity Rinzai thing and had many people burn out, I believe feel harmed etc, and b. the Roshi also had a major falling out with her initial protege(s?). And even then, Great Vow isn’t pure rinzai, and already (sort of) represents one more step of westernization than Maple does.
More generally the interesting question here is to what extent these are standard features of traditional training monasteries (afaict very much yes, at least for most of them), esp in Rinzai. And then obviously, are these good? Are they effective? Are the outcomes desirable? -- and the OP kind of collapses this into “does Maple qualify, by this modern Western framework”, which I think is a pretty unsatisfying question.
You would likely be interested in HSRS (Hierarchical SRS). (Not my project but I know the author.) The tl;dr it’s a framework for a. representing hierarchical knowledge dependencies, including grammatical structures, b. “sampling” from points in the tree, where deps are often a class of objects, c. sequencing such samples so that material is introduced only when its deps are satisfied, and d. inferring which parts of the dep tree were likely most responsible for recollection failures and updating their review state accordingly.
My bet would be that you could probably get claude code to write most of the deck basically from where you son is up to ~late elementary school, and from there you have escape velocity. I’d be very curious if you do something like this, I suspect that early literacy edtech is heavily underoptimized etc.
This feels somehow like a straw, but reflecting on it briefly it also feels like a hole in my explanation, and maybe that I’m just wrong here.
Maybe a different story I could tell would be that it’s more like “if you want, you can join us in trying to do something really hard, which has power law returns, knowing that the modal outcome is burnout and some psychological damage”, so comparable to competitive bodybuilding, or maybe classical musical training, or doing a startup. (Edit: note, Maple doesn’t include the “modal outcome is moderate psychological damage” part, though neither do the examples really.)
Thanks for an object level response!
Yup, that’s an accurate enough paraphrase.
I’ll say first, I… don’t actually endorse their model, maybe at all, but this post was to contextualize what the model even is, and that it’s maybe in principle plausible, and that their choices are made with respect to that, rather than just random-spiritual-community-is-bad-just-because-they’re-bad.
(1), people who greatly inspire others almost never started out as followers in a school for how to become inspiring (this is similar to the issues with CFAR, although I’d say it was less outlandish to assume that rationality is teachable rather than sainthood).
I think this is kind of wrong, lots of religious leaders trained within standard institutions within established traditions, lots of musicians get extensive training/coaching in all the aspects of performance besides their instrument etc. This also isn’t really a crux, because:
(2), even if you could create a bunch of particularly virtuous and x-risk-concerned individuals, the path to impact would remain non-obvious from there, since they’d neither be famous nor powerful nor particularly smart or rational or skilled, so how are they going to have an outsized impact later?
So Maple’s theory of change is not necessarily “get people enlightened, and then make sure they’re as agentic as possible”, but more like, get people enlightened, and then some combination of:
use whatever wisdom they gain to solve technical alignment
(this seems mostly just silly to me)
have them diffuse that wisdom into eg. tech culture, “purifying it from the inside-out’”
(again, I don’t think this is likely at all, like I said, but maybe more plausible)
resolve the incentives of the AI race domestically and internationally… somehow
Er, well, it was that plus stuff like this post that Ray linked above (I didn’t necessarily remember this exactly, maybe there was just this one post.) If my gloss landed wrong I’m mostly glad to defer to you there.
I’m also pretty displeased with him as a philosopher and sociologist or whatever. I think when he says things like what you’re referring to, it’s both rhetorical abuse, and he’s trying to do something like evoke the “functional core” or “revealed affective posture” or maybe just “vibe”, regardless of whatever the explicit arguments are that some ideology uses. I think this is definitely the right move sometimes but I agree that Soryu kind of sucks at it, or is using mostly inappropriately.
Is this an example of my failing to meet him where he’s at?
Fair, no, obviously giving people a normal kind of fair shot is fine, though this wasn’t really what I meant. The thing that I was criticizing in that line would be more like “criticizing the output of his views without addressing the generators” (which is sorta what you’ve done here, but I’m not bothered by in context), vs “addressing the conception of value in which his claims are made.” So specifically, eg. that awakening is more valuable than ~all kinds of material wealth, that species extinction and also just killing of animals generically are a kind of extreme moral injury, etc. Those are fine to disagree with, and I disagree with them, but ignoring those kinds of cruxes makes the critiques mostly sort of useless/irrelevant.
(I might just be wrong here. I had some memory that after the Brent Dill affair there were some “we bungled the whole thing, actually, and people were harmed as a result” type posts on facebook.)
FWIW there’s a large number of lay Buddhist teachers in the West, many of them formerly ordained, without lineage transmission. The thing that’s weird in Soryu’s case is that he’s teaching outside of his lineage, without having disrobed. My understanding is that his permission to teach was through Shinzen Young, and I’m not aware of that having been revoked. I expect rats don’t really care about lineage, but eg. Shinzen also gave permission to teach to Michael Taft, who teaches meditation in the Bay, and no one seems to be bothered by.
This is very in the weeds but I think the transmission thing mostly hardly matters, if you’re not already pilled on the tradition in its own (again, mythologized) framework here, then mostly each teacher has to independently demonstrate their reliability and authority, etc.
No mostly that was Vaniver having been confusing in context. Like, if you just leave out the Catholic part of the explanation it’s just “(mythologized) transmission of authority from the Buddha”, which Soryu doesn’t have and isn’t being misleading about. Even within Catholicism, monastic ordination != priestly ordination, IIRC you can’t have both, but in Orthodoxy you can, but they’re still orthogonal etc.
In this case neither misleading nor a lie. Ordination in Zen is generally a much lower threshold, and sometimes orthogonal from Dharma Transmission, and just requires a commitment to the tradition, not some demonstrated understanding.
I had that in mind, and some things people wrote after the Brent Dill stuff.
Well, I’m sorta mostly sympathetic, but I think “what is [in] fact harm” is doing most of the work here. So you’ll find basically every traditionally trained living teacher being like “oh sure, the teachers I revere absolutely treat their students like shit, scream at them, demean them, etc. This is functional! I endorse this!”—and I’m like, ok well, in decent part this stops being an objection about soryu himself.