I had an extremely nerdy friend group in college, which led to weird effects since we couldn’t all be “the nerd”. One of my friends still gets annoyed at the fact that she became the “jock” and the “sensible person”, just because she was slightly less helpless at life than the rest of us. Her reaction seems to be something like, “I’m for real actually a nerd, why are you making me play this other role??”
PeterBorah
Karma: 447
I am really happy that this post was written, and mildly annoyed by the same things you’re annoyed by.
To explain rather than excuse, there’s a good reason that meditation teachers historically avoid giving clear answers like this. That’s because their goal is not to help you intellectually understand meditation, but rather to help you do meditation.
It’s very easy to mentally slip from “I intellectually understand what sort of thing this is” to “I understand the thing itself”, and so meditation teachers hit this problem with a hammer by just refusing to explain it, so you’re forced to try it instead. This problem is what the “get out of the car” section is talking about.
I have some worry that this post will make it easier for people to make errors like:
“I’m angry, because X is a jerk. Aha, I should try the thing Kaj was talking about, and notice that feeling angry is not helping me with my goal of utterly destroying X.”
(This is exaggerated, but mistakes of this shape are really, really easy to make.)
I think it’s definitely worth the cost, but it is a cost.
This is really interesting and helpful, thank you.
My original introduction to status was in Impro, which describes it in the context of an improv scene. This means (as I recall) that it mostly focuses on things that are directly observable in body language, like eye contact and taking up space.
Since you suggest we think of most of those things as being about “size” rather than “status”, I’m curious whether you think there are body language indicators of high/low status, or whether that’s inherently contextual and based on actual power.
(One hypothesis: signs of nervousness like talking too quickly or fidgeting might be markers of low status?)
This is probably not the “simplest” explanation I could give, but I find it memorable. I heard this story in college, but haven’t looked for the reference.
~~~
There was apparently once a study for a new medication, which the researchers really thought would work. So they went through the whole process of a randomized trial, and it came back with no result. The medicine didn’t help.
They thought about this for a while, and then wondered if maybe the problem was that people weren’t taking the medicine regularly enough. Perhaps people were skipping days, or taking it at different times every day, and this was screwing things up? So they re-ran the study, this time tracking compliance. And lo and behold, people who regularly took the medicine did indeed do better than average!
As good scientists, however, they applied the same analysis to their placebo tests. And they found that people who regularly took the placebo also did better than average.
It turns out that the medicine was indeed worthless, but that the sort of people who remember to take their medicine every day are just generally healthier, because they are more likely to be concientious and do things like exercise and eat well.
This post is interesting to me, because I feel strong resistance to acting as you suggest. (Background: I made a lot of money from buying Ether at $0.80, but was into crypto before I was into rationalism.)
I think my intuition is some sort of fear of social risk? I’m mostly willing to tell people what I think the right move is, but if they’re not motivated to figure out the details themselves, then I worry that they will be upset if the most likely outcome (losing 100% of their money) happens, and that I’ll bear the social cost.
Appreciate the impolitic question. :) I think I was doing some sort of social move that was trying to reset the burden of proof, rather than actually sharing data, but of course sharing data is better. (I do think people too often assume that their status quo bias is some sort of principled wisdom, so asking “are you sure the burden of proof is on your side?” is moderately useful. But data is better.)
I’m more confident on the independent action side than the independent thought side, so I’ll start with that: I am taking more concrete steps towards achieving my goals, in ways that (inside-view) seem directly related to meditation et. al. For instance, I’m noticing much faster when I’m unhappy with a situation, and taking action more directly to fix it. Some specific examples are quitting my job last spring, and successfully pitching my boss on a change of plan at my current job. (Possible confounder is that I’m generally gaining confidence over time, and am getting more career capital, so maybe I would get better at these things anyway. I’m not immediately sure how to prove that this isn’t true, though it inside-view doesn’t seem to be.)
In terms of independent thought, I’ve been able to do things like e.g. plan out a strategy for a startup that requires some not-yet-fully-achieved innovation, and am making steady progress at chipping away at the remaining unknowns. In the past, I anticipate I would have been overwhelmed by the sense that I wasn’t allowed to do that, or that there were too many unknowns to be able to plan, but meditation and CFAR practices help me to separate that from the work of understanding it better.
None of this directly relates to mythic mode, because I haven’t done much of specifically that. My main instance of using mythic mode was at the CFAR tier II workshop, where we used it to uncover a deeply hidden emotional trait (specifically a fear of my own anger), which has been emotionally and socially helpful to recognize and deal with. It feels like having awareness of that is pretty important for being able to think and act effectively, but I don’t have good external evidence of that.
I suspect it’s more about trivial inconveniences and failure to “summon sapience”. I was homeschooled and don’t think I’m particularly traumatized about paper, and I love it when I remember to use it, but I have to stop and remember that it’s a good idea, and then go get and use it, which doesn’t always happen.
For me at least, the multiple agents framework isn’t the natural, obvious one, but rather a really useful theoretical frame that helps me solve problems that used to seem insoluble. Something like how it becomes much easier to precisely deal with change over time once you learn calculus. (As I use it more, it becomes more intuitive, again like calculus, but it’s still not my default frame.)
Before I did my first CFAR workshop, I had a lot of issues that felt like, “I’m really confused about this thing” or “I’m overwhelmed when I try to think about this thing” or “I know the right thing to do but I mysteriously don’t actually do it”. The CFAR IDC class recommended I model these situations as “I have precise and detailed beliefs and desires, I just happen to have many of them and they sometimes contradict each other.” When I tried out this framework, I found that a lot of previously unsolvable problems became surprisingly easy to solve. For example, “I’m really torn about my job” became, “I am really excited about precisely this aspect of my job, and really unhappy about precisely this aspect”. Then it’s possible to adjudicate between those two perspectives, find compromises or collaborations, etc.
It would be rude of me to assume that your mind works the same as mine, so take the following strictly as a hypothesis. But I would guess that what’s going on for you is that you identify really strongly with one set of preferences/desires/beliefs in your mind, and experience other preferences/desires/beliefs as “pain, pleasure, stupidity, and ignorance”. The experiment this suggests is to try spending a few minutes pretending those things are the “real you”, and the “agenty” part is the annoying external interloper caused by corrupted hardware. If I’m right, the sign would be that you find there is some detail and coherence to the “identity” of those things that feel like flaws, even if you’re not sure it’s an identity you approve of.
Note that I don’t think the multiple agents thing is the one true ontology. I find that as I learn to integrate the parts better, they start feeling more like a single working system. But it’s a really helpful theoretical tool for me.
I’m still not 100% sure I understand Val’s definition of Looking, so I’m not quite willing to commit to the claim that it’s the same as Kaj’s definition. But I do think it’s not that hard to square Kaj’s definition with those quotes, so I’ll try to do that.
Kaj’s definition is:
being able to develop the necessary mental sharpness to notice slightly lower-level processing stages in your cognitive processes, and study the raw concepts which then get turned into higher-level cognitive content, rather than only seeing the high-level cognitive content.
Everything you experience, no matter the object, is experienced via your own cognitive processes. When you’re doing math, or talking to a friend, or examining the world, that is an experience you are having, which is being filtered by your cognitive processes, and therefore to which the structure of your mind is relevant.
As Kaj describes, the part of your thought processes you normally have conscious access to are a tiny fragment of what is actually happening. When you practice the skill of making more of it conscious and making finer and finer discriminations in mental experience, you find that there is a lot of information that your conscious mind would normally skip over. This includes plenty of information about “the world”.
So consider the last quote as an example:
A while back I was interacting with a friend of a friend (distant from this community). His demeanor was very forceful as he pushed on wanting feedback about how to make himself more productive. I felt funny about the situation and a little disoriented, so I Looked at him. My sense of him as an experiencing being deepened, and I started noticing sensations in my own body/emotion system that were tagged as “resonant” (which is something I’ve picked up mostly from Circling). I also could clearly see the social dynamics he was playing at. When my mind put the pieces together, I got an impression of a person whose social strategies had his inner emotional world hurting a lot but also suppressed below his own conscious awareness. This gave me some things to test out that panned out pretty on-the-nose.
A fictionalized expansion of that, based on my experiences, might be:
“I was running my usual algorithms for helping someone, but I felt funny about the situation and a little disoriented. In the past I would have just kept trying, or maybe just jumped over to a coping mechanism like trying to get out of the situation. However, I had enough mental sharpness to notice the feeling as it arose, so instead I decided to study my experience of the situation. Specifically, I tried to pay attention to how my mind was constructing the concept of “him”. (Though since my moment-to-moment experience doesn’t distinguish between “him” and “my concept of him”, and since I have no unmediated access to the “him” that is presumably a complex quantum wavefunction, that mental motion might better be described as just “paying attention to my experience of him”, or even “paying attention to him”.) When I did that, I was able to see past the slightly dehumanizing category I was subconsciously putting him in, and was able to pick up on the parts of my mind that were interacting with him on a more human, agent-to-agent level. I was able to notice somatic markers in my body that were part of a process of modeling and empathizing with him, from which I derived both more emotional investment in him and also more information about the social dynamics of the situation, as processed by my system 1, which my conscious mind had been mostly ignoring. I was able to use all of this information to put together an intuitively appealing story about why he was acting this way, and what was going on beneath the surface. This hypothesis immediately suggested some experiments to try, which panned out as the hypothesis predicted.”
This model assumes that truth and politeness are in a simple tradeoff relationship, and if that were true I would absolutely agree that truth is more important. But I don’t think the territory is that simple.
Our goal is not just to maximize the truth on the website at this current moment, but to optimize the process of discovering and sharing truth. One effect of a comment is to directly share some truth, and so removing comments or banning people does, in the short term, reduce the amount of truth produced. However, another effect of a comment is to incentivize or disincentivize other posters, by creating a welcoming or hostile environment. Since those posters may also produce comments that contain truth, a comment can in this way indirectly encourage or discourage the later production of truth.
The downstream effects of the incentivization/disincentivization of comments containing truth will, I think, often swamp the short-term effect of the specific truth shared in the specific comment. (This has some similarities to the long-termist view in altruism.)
This analysis explains why 4chan is not at the forefront of scientific discovery.
I’m not sure why you assume social awareness and connection requires a lack of consent.
It’s extremely common, in my experience, for someone to request what you’re calling “social manipulation”. For example, the entire industry of therapy is people paying money to receive effective social manipulation that helps them be happier and more effective.
Is this a social worry (“people will use it as a blugeon”) or an epistemic worry (“people will incorrectly think there’s a hierarchy, but actually they’re all useful frames”)?
I don’t have strong feelings about shell/shield/staff, but I’ve gotten a lot of value out of Kegan levels, and I think the hierarchy is actually a loadbearing part of the theory. (Specifically, it matters that each level is legible to the one after it, but not vice versa.) I endorse being careful about the social implications, but I wouldn’t want that to become a generalized claim that there aren’t skill hierarchies in the territory.
I’ve stuck to no fiction. (I unthinkingly read a few paragraphs of a short story that came across my Twitter, but otherwise have been consistent.)
It’s mostly been fairly easy. It’s really obvious now that it’s a social pica. I think some of the time I would have spent on it has been going to increased use of LessWrong and Facebook, which are also social picas, but those are both more genuinely social, and harder to lose 8 hours at a time to.
There was at least one night where I was pretty unhappy, and didn’t have access to any actual friends to spend time with, and really wanted to lose myself in a book. I probably think that ordinarily it would have been an ok thing to do as a coping mechanism, but it was useful to observe how badly I needed the coping mechanism. That makes it obvious how much I need the real thing.
There are also a couple things I’m genuinely looking forward to reading when Lent is over. (Murphy’s Quest, for one.) But I’d say those things are probably ~1/4 or less the amount of fiction I would have read this month without Lent.
This has been an especially exciting/productive/momentum-filled month for me. This probably makes it easier than normal to not read fiction. Though maybe there’s some causality the other direction as well?
Wordpress seems like a very apt comparison, since LessWrong is also being conceptualized as a bunch of individual blogs with varying moderation policies.
… which once again points to the critical necessity of being able to tell when (and how often, etc.) someone is using such a power; hence the need for a moderation log.
Does Wordpress have such a system?
(To be clear, I support the idea of a moderation log. I’m just curious whether it’s actually as necessary as you claim.)
Ok, then that’s the crux of this argument. Personally, I value Eliezer’s writing and Conor Moreton’s writing more than I value a culture of unfettered criticism.
This seems like a good argument for the archipelago concept? You can have your culture of unfettered criticism on some blogs, and I can read my desired authors on their blogs. Would there be negative consequences for you if that model were followed?
The question of whether enlightenment is wireheading is really interesting (and perhaps important) to me. Would love to hear Val’s explicit take on that.
(Context: I am more-or-less convinced that there is a repeatable phenomenon called enlightenment, and also that both meditation and CFAR-style introspection have the potential to trigger it. I also meditate moderately regularly and find it very beneficial and insight-provoking. I currently suspect englightenment might be wireheading.)
Edit: This theory only makes sense if “the enlightenment experience” is a distinct thing from “the clarity of sight that accompanies a lot of meditation”. I definitely think the latter is a good thing and is clearly not wireheading. But I am confused/turned off by stuff like the “everything is ok” paragraph, and that seems to be an important part of most enlightenment experiences.
(This is an entirely meta post, which feels like it might not be helpful, but I’ll post it anyway because I’m trying to have weaker babble filters. Feel free to ignore if it’s useless.
I generally enjoy your writing style, and think it’s evocative and clear-in-aggregate. But I find this comment entirely inscrutable. I think there’s something about the interaction between your “gesturing” style and a short comment, that doesn’t work as well for me as a reader compared to that style in a longer piece where the I can get into the flow of what you’re saying and figure out your referents inductively.
Either that or you’re referencing things I haven’t read or don’t remember.)
This is excellent, thank you for writing it.
I’m not as advanced as you, but I’ve gotten many of the earlier benefits you describe and think you’ve described them well. That said, I have some confusion about how stuff like this paragraph works:
And because those emotions no longer felt aversive, I didn’t have a reason to invest in not feeling those things—unless I had some other reason than the intrinsic aversiveness of an emotion to do so.
What does it mean to have another reason beyond the intrinsic aversiveness of an emotion? Who’s the “I” who might have such a reason, and what form does such a reason take?
This is a specific question that comes out of a more general confusion, which is: why do descriptions of enlightenment and other advanced states so often seem to claim that enlightenment is almost epiphenomenal? If it were really the case that it didn’t change anything, how would we know people had experienced it?
This almost seems too obvious to say, but one reason to be bothered by the move from “tall” to “leader” is that sometimes you want your group to have a leader with skills that cause the group to succeed, and the most optimal choice for that might not be the tallest person.
This feels like a really useful framing. It meshes with other fake frameworks I sometimes use, but the emphasis on the web pulling you back in if you don’t break with it hard enough feels true and important.
If anyone remembers the r/place experiment Reddit did, similar dynamics were extremely apparent. (In brief, /r/place was a blank 1000x1000 pixel canvas, where anyone with a Reddit account could place one colored pixel anywhere they wanted every 5 minutes.) It was actually really hard to randomly vandalize anything, because wrong pixels looked out of place and would be fixed pretty fast. The only things that worked were:
1) Building a new pattern in a neutral location (which might eventually grow big enough to challenge existing patterns), or
2) Nudging a pattern into a different nearby attractor.
You didn’t see coherent images dissolving into noise, because bystanders would fix things too fast. But you did see things like adding genitalia to Charizard, or changing the text “PC MASTER RACE” to “PC MASTURBATE”, because those could start as relatively minor changes that bystanders might decide to help with.
The most skillful application of this I saw was when some people working on the powerful “Rainbow Road” pattern didn’t want to overwrite the Where’s Waldo image. They decided to try to send the road through a “portal”. You can see it happen between 0:35 and 0:45 in the timelapse. A small team coordinated on Discord to build an entrance and exit portal, with a little bit of rainbow coming out of each, in exactly the right spot that the “hivemind” would naturally run into it. This worked amazingly well, and the hivemind moved to continuing the rainbow from the other end of the portal pretty much effortlessly.
The lesson I draw is that if you want to break out of a script, you can’t just act illegibly and hope that will work. You need to put in the work to create or appropriate a script of your own.