A word about the post modern epistemology section. Quine reached the point in the development of epistemology where there was realization of ontological (and also teleological) commitments to epistemological claims. Because very very few can engage with this and it hasn’t yet lead to a new synthesis that is understandable and usefully supersedes the old conceptions of epistemology we are stuck spinning in the wind, culturally at least. I suspect this is partially a question of language. LW, cogsci, behavioral econ, analytic phil, and various phenomenologists are all groping towards a more technical vocabulary that will allow usefully grappling with this frontier, but are hamstrung by needing to reinvent the wheel over and over again. Each discipline tries out its own technical vocabulary in their carving of the problem space.
romeostevensit
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-commitment/
gloss: Causal models of A->B have ontological commitments to the existence of all hypotheses consistent with the prediction A->B, chiefly that A and B ‘exist’ or are natural kinds in some sense, though other side effects may be present as well. Additionally, ontologies are not telos free.
(decision theory quality * tightness of feedback loops)/proxy divergence = winning
Hello, Atman.
Aether variables are also very relevant to the arguments over flavors of utilitarianism. Also, shunting costs invisibly is like, one of the main things humans are even trying to *do*. I don’t think asking them to stop does much, though giving those dumped on language for expressing themselves is one useful step. If nothing else it allows them to send up a flag such that they can *maybe* go sideways and do their own thing together. Making more available best practices for keeping entryists out of their spaces is probably also good. Mozi is one of my heroes for realizing the meta principle of costs of offense vs costs of defense in friggin Warring States era and risking his life going around teaching seige resistance techniques to tip things in favor of defense (and thus wealth creation).
I don’t know the google trace for this off the top of my head, but I recall a systematic review of top tier innovators which found that the only truly consistent thing among all of them was ritualized walks (as in regular and intentional).
More broadly, my own efforts in this area output the upstream action of sharpening perceptual clarity, because I perceived the two biggest levers: noticing opportunities to chunk into deliberate practice, and noticing when impulses/palliatives were affecting me were both predicated on noticing. It worked far beyond what I naively guessed was possible.
Speaking to the efficacy of rituals: they help build the meta system of self trust which enables better coordination between the parts of yourself that care about vastly different things. Leak proof boxes are way more efficient for containing focused work. Internal parts that can trust boxes not to leak don’t try to hijack core attention as often.
“I wanted to see the experiment description in advance so I could make advance predictions ”
This is incredibly useful as a source of calibration and incredibly underused. You have the opportunity to do this every time you are about to look up information .
This is good for highlighting the ideosyncracy of our own flawed reasoning: we’re each overloading different subsystems with additional tasks based on our history of comparative advantage (I’m really good at X! Better start funelling everything through the X subsystem!), and, vice-versa, coping mechanisms for weak subsystems.
I’m going to naively take Schneier’s side here on the grounds that if I notice a bunch of small holes in my security I have model uncertainty about those holes unexpectedly growing larger. I would try to establish some bounds on estimates of this new parameter by looking for high profile instances. I wouldn’t be that reassured by the fact that most of my peers didn’t seem concerned if, after thinking about it for a few minutes, I couldn’t see how they were directly incentivized to be concerned. Is this flawed?
Dependence on others to hold space is drastically lowered by learning the specific skill of self witnessing. This is one of the core things IFS and Focusing are both pointing to. You should be able to triangulate from the ‘unblending’ step in both to the feeling. I don’t recall their specific terminology. I think Gendlin refers to ‘holding at arms legnth.’ This shrinks the feedback loop on therapy enabling much more rapid progress.
Yes, especially to the extent that you can switch places with the observer and observe yourself with compassion.
I believe that it is possible for some people to get significant amounts of sustainable euphoria. My school’s position is that no one has actually figured out why some people are able to do this and others aren’t, and thus only poor predictive models of who meditation is especially worth it for.
+1 to the linked model. My guess is that this is why yoga shows suspciously high effects on happiness. I think it, unlike other such suspicious effect sizes has a good chance of replicating. To the degree it doesn’t replicate I would have priors on poor/watered down instructions that no longer do the thing.
anecdata: my conscientiousness went up on the big five from one year ago to today (very significant investment in a practice program + retreat over the year).
I’m starting to believe that people with both quite bad and quite good lives are disincentivized to discuss it. I have ground level experience of both ends of the spectrum. If true, this is a large norms tragedy as it results in much less sharing of best practices and everyone reinvents the wheel over and over.
People underestimate ontology fatigue/ontology loading/preexisting ontology complexity etc in UI/UX design. More complicated people have more complex ontologies in their workflows, it’s not very surprising that a design hyperoptimized for one is not very appealing to others. Also, ‘flexible ontology’ services with complicated UIs for the user to roll their own are generally a shitshow. Better for the platform to be popular enough with its base implementation that users start writing custom scripts for enhanced functionality that you then add in/rewrite. See popular online games and social networks. Chain stores exist partially because of the cognitive overhead of ontology loading.
The opposite of asshole filters. In general inverting useful tools is sometimes also super useful.
For another schema in this vein, append the word ‘internal’ to any given useful seeming technique or vice-versa.
It is fairly effortful to write about because it is higher dimensional than the connotation space of words that you need to use to describe it. So you wind up having to halt every few sentences to say things in more ways in order to hopefully get your audience to triangulate on the correct thing. And it only sort of works.
Is the inversion on NVC your invention? I think it is quite beautiful.
I think the necessity of a post like this comes from a modernity induced category error. We’ve turned play from a virtue into a vice by moloching it into a corner of the optimization space where it just hammers the reward loop as hard as possible without needing to be about anything we care about.