Note that as someone who has up and moved multiple times, I can assure you that it’s possible to make friends in other cities. If you’ve never moved out of your home city, I recommend doing it at least once, for a few years, even if you move back at the end.
mr-hire(Matt Goldenberg)
Karma: 2,615
How to Read a Book is the quintessential how to book on gaining knowledge from a modernist perspective. What would a metamodern version of HTRAB look like?
HTRAB says that the main question you should be asking when reading a book is “Is this true?” The relationship you’re concerned with is between the material and the real world.
But in a meta-modern perspective, you want to consider many other relationships.
One of those is the three way relationships between yourself, the material, and reality. Asking questions like “What new perspectives can I gain from this?” and “How does this relate to my other models of the world?”
Another is the relationship between the author and their source material. What does this writing say about the perspective of the author? Why did they choose to write this. This is bringing in a more post-modern/critical theory perspective.
HTRAB recommends “Synoptic Reading”—finding many books on the same subject or that circle around a specific topic to get a broad overview of the topic.
A meta-modern take would also look into other ways of grouping books. What about exploring facets of yourself through exploring authors that think differently and similarly to you? What about crafting a narrative as you dig into interesting parts of each book you move through?
What other takes would a Meta-Modern version of HTRAB encompass?
I’d love to see a cluster analysis. I suspect there will be some obvious groups like “AI alignment vs. rationality”, but also could give some interesting data on things like if “rationality vs. postrationality” is a real split or “Combat vs. Nurture” etc.
In that same vein, I’d also be really interested to see the vote results if pairwise-bounded quadratic voting was used. Intuitively to me this feels like an interesting attempt to look at “debiasing” the votes away from factions, and looking more at what the non-factional consensus is.
Note that I considered this, but saw that the final decision of what would be included was subjective anyway, and it would be a stronger signal to the judges to spend a lot of my points on a few posts I thought really deserved it and would otherwise be underrated.
I’m quite interested in ICF, and it sounds pretty similar to a lot of the rationality development we’re doing with Athena. Would love to chat with you all about it.
Are you asking about my particular realization here, or this part:
And the thing is, I would go as far as to say many people in the rationality community experience this same frustration. They found a group that they feel like should be their tribe, but they really don’t feel a close connection to most people in it, and feel alienated as a result.
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I like this and would find a post moderately valuable. I think sometimes posts with a lot of synonyms are hard to have take aways from, because it’s hard to remember all the synonyms. What I think is useful is comparing and contrasting the different takes, creating a richer view of the whole framework by examining it from many angles.
Re Knightian Uncertainty vs. Risk, I wrote a post that discusses the interaction of different types of risks (including knightian) here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eA9a5fpi6vAmyyp74/how-to-understand-and-mitigate-risk
Sometimes when I can’t explain a concept except into relation to another concept, I use that as a sign that I need to approach one of the concepts from a completely separate/unique angle to get a handle on it.
FITTING IN AND THE RATIONALITY COMMUNITY
One of my biggest learning experiences over the last few years was moving to the Bay Area, and attempting to be accepted into the “Rationality Tribe”.
When I first took my CFAR workshop years ago, and interacted with the people in the group, I was enamored. A group of people who was into saving the world, self-improvement, understanding their own minds, connecting with others—I felt like I had found my people.
A few short months later I moved to the Bay Area.
I had never been good at joining groups or tribes. From a very early age, I made my friend group (sometimes very small) by finding solid individuals that could connect to my particular brand of manic, ambitious, and open, and bringing them together through my own events and hangouts.
In Portland, where I was before moving to the Bay, I really felt I had a handle on this, meeting people at events (knowing there weren’t many who would connect with me in Portland), then regularly hosting my own events like dinner parties and meetups to bring together the best people.
Anyway, when I got to the Bay, I for the first time tried really hard to be accepted into existing tribes. Not only did I finally think I had found a large group of people I would fit in with, I was also operating under the assumption that I needed to be liked by all these peoples because they were allies in changing the world for the better.
And honestly, this made me miserable. While I did find a few solid people I really enjoyed, trying to be liked and accepted by the majority of people in the rationality community was an exercise in frustration—Being popular has always run counter to my ability to express myself honestly and openly, and I kept having to bounce between the two choices.
And the thing is, I would go as far as to say many people in the rationality community experience this same frustration. They found a group that they feel like should be their tribe, but they really don’t feel a close connection to most people in it, and feel alienated as a result.
What feels real to me is that there are people in the rationality community that I like, and love. And there are people outside of the rationality community that I like and love. And that it makes a lot of sense for me to stop trying to bounce from round hole to round hole, trying to see if my square peg fits in.
Instead, like always, I’ll just make my island, and invite the people who want to be there with me.
generally I think you can make incremental improvements in each domain and get improvements-in-life-outcome.
To me this implies some level on the continuum of realism about rationality. For instance I often think taht to make improvements on life outcomes I have to purposefully go off of pareto improvements in these domaiins, and sometimes sacrifice them. Because I don’t think my brain runs that code natively, and sometimes efficient native code is in direct opposition to naive rationality.
Maybe a bit late to ask about this, but I realized how a vote really depends on the information you guys have from the votes (seeing as the votes are really used just to give a signal, and aren’t actually deciding anything).
Do you see all the votes, along with the user names?
Do you see each users’ votes, but anonymized?
Do you see only the final count, and not the votes?
I like the edits!
One thing I think might be worth doing is linking to the post on Realism about Rationality, and explicitly listing at is a potential crux for this post.
I’m pretty onboard theoreticallly with the idea of being a robust agent, but I don’t actually endorse it as a goal because I tend to be a rationality anti-realist.
Not an expert here, but my understanding is that Rationalist Solstice Advent is supposed to have an Arc. Just like it’s on the longest night of the year, at a time when nights are getting shorter, Solstice reminds you that there is darkness in the universe, and also that together we can find light. The celebration of light would not be as powerful without the reminder of darkness.
I didn’t go to Solstice Advent this year. I was basically going by the description here:
I decided what message fit in every place in the arc and found a piece that fit there. Only after that did I approach potential speakers. I ended up using four existing pieces wholesale; the rest were based on existing pieces but were either remixed or heavily edited by the speaker.
Whereas I would imagine a Solstice that put heavy emphasis on personal stories would have quite a different process.
Thanks for the work you (and the other organizers) put into this, as well as writing up a retrospective.
The most powerful solstice advent I attended was years ago in Seattle. I remember the service included a lot of personal stories people gave of them specifically dealing with darkness.
I remember being surprised years later when I attended a solstice advent in the bay, and there were speeches from the sequences instead of the personal stories.
I’m curious if I just attended a very unique solstice advent , or there has been a change in how the solstice was run. Would there be any possiblity of considering the format like I experienced in the future, with people telling personal stories?
Any combination of goals/drives could have a (possibly non-linear) mapping which turns them into a single unified goal in that sense, or vice versa. .
Yeah, I think that if the brain in fact is mapped that way it would be meaningful to say you have a single goal.
Let me put it more simply: can achieving “self-determination” alleviate your need to eat, sleep, and relieve yourself? If not, then there are some basic biological needs (maintenance of which is a goal) that have to be met separately
Maybe, it depends on how the brain is mapped. I know of at least a few psychology theories which would say things like avoiding pain and getting food are in the service of higher psychological needs. If you came to believe for instance that eating wouldn’t actually lead to those higher goals, you would stop.
I think this is pretty unlikely. But again, I’m not sure.
Prioritization of goals is not the same as goal unification.
It can be if the basic structure is “I need to get my basic needs taken care of so that I can work on my ultimate goal”.
I think Kaj has a good link on experimental proof for Maslow’s Hierarchy.
I also think that it wouldn’t be a stretch to call Self-determination theory a “single goal” framework, that goal being “self-determination”, which is a single goal made up of 3 seperate subgoals, which crucially, must be obtained together to create meaning (if they could be obtained seperately to create meaning, and people were OK with that, than I don’t think it would be fair to categorize it as a single goal theory.
It’s interesting because Maslow’s Hierarchy actually seems to point to the exact opposite idea to me. It seems to point to the idea that everything we do, even eating food, is in service of eventual self-actualization.
This is of course ignoring the fact that Maslow seems to basically be false experimentally.
I actually think it’s quite useful to make a statement like “Man, it would be great if the community would.”
I think its’ a strawman to translate this to “I want the all powerful entity that runs the community to...”
And I think it stems from an attitude that “You shouldn’t complain about problems if you don’t have real solutions.”
Which seems wrong to me. People pointing out problems even when they don’t have solutions is useful. People pointing out better equilibria even if they don’t have plans to get there is also useful.
A lot of time this complaint seems to be hiding a deeper complaint which is “You pointing out problems without solutions makes me stressed and frustrated.”—Which is OK to state, but also I get this sense of like “OK, but that’s not really the person’s problem who pointed it out, learn to handle your own emotional reactions.”
I’m pretty pessimistic about this, it’s never worked for me before, nor did I I find any existing subgroup in the rationality community that I could do this.
Definitely, but why limit it to just rationalists in that case?