So far, I’ve only read the introduction. It pulls together things I already believe, so I like it.
First thought is James C. Scott’s work—Two Cheers for Anarchism is a good starting point. He writes about tyranny’s demands for legibility.
Also, a lot of science requires taking a close look at the world.
See also “the map is not the territory”—but it takes time to see the territory.
I’ve been doing qi gong—it’s amazingly easy to think I know what I’m feeling physically, and a lot of work to actually start to notice it.
And I’ve been thinking that a way for rationalism to go wrong is to think that good enough concepts reliably trump observation. Sometimes concepts work—perpetual motion machines really are impossible—but mostly you need to keep looking at the world.
NancyLebovitz
Maybe there’s an organization to contribute to, though I grant that isn’t much of an observance. Other than that, there’s telling the story.
I’ve found that searching on [name of product or company sucks] can turn up interesting results, or a significant lack of results.
Look at customer reviews, especially those with a geeky level of detail.
Thanks. What is your culture?
Any thoughts about supporting biodiversity (perhaps especially for food crops)?
Rats could be a good bit better than average, and still pretty bad.
Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency by Tom DeMarco
Another book: Slack (unallocated time) is essential for change, learning, and even doing things well.
I’m pretty sure this is the book with the description of what happens when two companies that don’t do the work to write good contracts attempt to deal with each other.
Yes. Now how do we sieve good information out of this environment?
The Speed of Rumor
Did Vassar argue that existing EA organizations weren’t doing the work they said they were doing, or that EA as such was a bad idea? Or maybe that it was too hard to get organizations to do it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_Ameisen
A sidetrack, but a French surgeon found that Baclofen (a muscle relaxant) cured his alcoholism by curing the craving. He was surprised to find that it cured compulsive spending when he didn’t even realize he had a problem.
He had a hard time raising money for an official experiment, and it came out inconclusive, and he died before the research got any further.
This is interesting to me because I was brought up to go to college, but I didn’t take it seriously (plausibly from depression or somesuch), and I definitely think of him as a guy with an interesting perspective. Okay, a smart guy with an interesting perspective, but not a god.
It had never occurred to me before that maybe people who were brought up to assume they were going to college might generally have a different take on the world than I do.
This is reminding me of a book called Plain and Simple by a woman who spent some time as a guest in Amish Families. She found that she’d mistakenly believed that having lots of options was the right way to live, but the actual effect was that she wasn’t making decisions. The revelation hit when she realized she actually wanted something in particular, and ferociously re-decorated her kitchen in as somewhat Amish style. “Ferociously” seems like weirdly strong language, but she seemed surprised that she could really want something and go for it.
It’s a smallish thing, but I think it’s pointing at a pervasive modern error.
“”Why didn’t you tell him the truth? Were you afraid?”
“I’m not afraid. I chose not to tell him, because I anticipated negative consequences if I did so.”
“What do you think ‘fear’ is, exactly?”″
The possibly amusing thing is that I read it as being someone who thought fear was shameful and was therefore lying, or possibly lying to themself about not feeling fear. I wasn’t expecting a discussion of p-zombies, though perhaps I should have been.
Does being strongly inhibited against knowing one’s own emotions make one more like a p-zombie?
As for social inhibitions against denying what other people say about their motives, it’s quite true that it can be socially corrosive to propose alternate motives for what people are doing, but I don’t think your proposal will make things much worse.
We’re already there. A lot of political discourse include assuming the worst about the other side’s motivations.
Have a theory about why people can be reluctant to google. It may be excessively bitter.
To a large extent (especially for neurotypical people, though it seems to depend on the subject) learning is an unconscious process. The result is that people don’t know how they learned and don’t know how to teach.
What’s more, people are apt to want to just get things done and also apt to have punishment as an easy strategy. So they shame people for not knowing what they are supposed to have picked up somehow.
This means that googling indicates that you didn’t know something already, so googling means getting past an emotional barrier.
That’s certainly not the only thing that’s going on. I think asking questions as socializing is a thing, and so is not realizing the amazing scope of what can be searched for. And for some of us, just being old enough that the habit of googling didn’t get developed.
I’m a frequent and pretty habitual googler, and I’ve mostly stopped calling it “living in the future”.
It seems to me this is getting into Social Safety Net territory. Elliott is cautious because he really has fewer resources. Would the group benefit if he’s given more so he isn’t running so close to the edge?
Just to underline the fundamental question: if pain isn’t a good metric (and I agree that it isn’t) what is a good metric?
I’m recommending Bruce Frantzis’ tai chi, qi gong, bagua etc. classes at Energyarts.com.
One of the fundamental principles is to put out reliable 70% effort—this is enough to create progress without much chance of injury or burnout. Considerably less effort if you’re sick or injured.
This is harder than it sounds, if you’re from a culture which assumes that more effort = better results and is a sign of more virtue.
Your effort level is what you can do that day. You aren’t competing with yourself. You aren’t expecting that you can make yourself do today what you could do yesterday. You may not be able to do as much with one side of your body as the other. Respect that. In fact, let the stronger side match the weaker side.
I tend to think of overvaluing effort as an American issue, but it appears in other cultures, too. Frantzis teaches water method—the 70% approach—but there’s also fire method in Chinese tradition, which involves pursuing enlightenment or whatever with as much force as you can muster.
This sort of steady effort might be best for sports and qi gong, but it’s my impression that high effort followed by relaxation is better for intellectual work.
What have you been learning? How has it been working out for you?
Until I read this, I didn’t realize there are different possible claims about the dangers of cults. One claim—the one gwern is debunking—is that cults are a large-scale danger, and practically anyone can be taken over by a cult.
The other less hyperbolic claim is that cults can seriously screw up people’s lives, even if it’s a smallish proportion of people. I still think that’s true.
The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam by Barbara Tuchman.