Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Some lead lives of loud desperation.
romeostevensit
Karma: 8,880
Updates and Reflections on Optimal Exercise after Nearly a Decade
The Hard Work of Translation (Buddhism)
How to Lurk Less (and benefit others while benefiting yourself)
Thoughts on ADHD
Your Prioritization is Underspecified
My guess for why I was wrong about US housing
Why do Contemplative Practitioners Make so Many Metaphysical Claims?
Buddhist Psychotechnology for Withstanding Apocalypse Stress
Psycho-cybernetics: experimental notes
I really like this post. I’d been previously pointing people to the checklist from Bill Hamilton’s Saints and Psychopaths for lack of anything else readily linkable but will start linking this.
In trying to write some responses to some of the things I have personal experience with and feel like I want to add to it highlights what you said at the beginning, it is really really hard to think clearly and write clearly about this topic because there are always multiple interpretations of the behaviors in question. Thank you for the effort of writing it.
WRT positive things to look for I’ll add this: A palpable sense of the frame moving around organically. With frame controllers, if something threatens their frame there is a palpable sense of tension within the group.
Fuzzier: do people make fun of the leader(s)
To their face
Behind their back
Not at all
My favorite scenes have always had 1 as far as I can remember.
Below an excerpt from something I recently wrote about abusive patterns in spiritual communities:
Good teachers don’t encourage hungry ghost dynamics in students. This touches on a bunch of entangled dynamics which I’ll do my best to describe. The people coming to a teacher often fall into the category of looking for someone to fix everything that is wrong with their life. Even if the seeker logically rejects this narrative it can often be an emotional reality that they are looking for a dharma daddy. Bad teachers will encourage this dynamic in a few ways, an important one being that they don’t undermine seeker’s tendency to look to them for all the answers. I’ve seen this first hand where everything the teacher in a space said was a corrective, with the underlying principles never clearly expounded. This lead to an evaporative cooling process whereby people not susceptible to this sort of attack simply left, leaving an environment where everyone is deferring to the person all the time. New people entering who don’t know any better then copy what they see. There was also a sense of pride for masochistic tendencies, that others ‘couldn’t handle’ the ‘real’ things that were going on in the scene.
Hungry ghosts feel highly uncertain about themselves and the world, they always feel they are doing everything wrong. They are drawn towards the overconfident people who act as though they are doing everything correctly. This will select for narcissistic or exploitative teachers. This dovetails with the Guru model which, as I understand it, has been poorly translated to the west. A good teacher is less like a priest and more like a PhD advisor. This also ties in with the point about questions mentioned previously. Hungry ghosts will be satisfied by glossy answers, assuming that any lack of understanding is a failure on their part. They will also create an environment hostile to real questions as they don’t want anything deflating the bubble of the infallibility of the teacher. There will also be a lot of interactions that seem to be about mutual validation of being on the correct path instead of openness to multiple approaches.
Such hungry ghost dynamics can be detected by how engaging with a scene makes you feel. If you exit feeling agitated, like you are doing something wrong, like others are making more progress than you and you need to ‘hurry up’, like there is winning to be done, like you are overloaded with things you need to learn, these are all bad signs. Good teaching creates more relaxed looseness, more playfulness, more freedom, more feeling of confidence and the tractability of practice. In short, the teachings themselves creating a palpable sense of less dukkha.
This would seem to be counter to what I’ll call the high discipline focused schools. I won’t say there’s nothing to discipline, especially as specific periods of formal practice. But given how poor most schools are in producing people with obvious levels of insight I think the burden of proof lies with them to show that what they are offering works. A higher level of commitment that is asked for should also come with a higher level of demonstrated effects. (I’ll add here abusers will avoid any explicitness about the commitments they are actually asking for and receiving from you. This is for deniability later. After all, you did those things of ‘your own volition.’)
And just because it can never be said too many times: if something looks hierarchical, cloistered, with members sleeping with each other, and personal finances becoming entangled in the org run far far away very fast.
IMO, A large number of mental health professionals simply aren’t a good fit for high intelligence people having philosophical crises. People know this and intuitively avoid the large hassle and expense of sorting through a large number of bad matches. Finding solid people to refer to who are not otherwise associated with the community in any way would be helpful.
I had a realization while reading this post, that underlying all the complicated sociology and game theory of changing family and romantic relationships and gender relations and all of it there is a simple economic fact: people are wealthier than in the past, and wealthier people don’t need each other as badly.
Idea for a short story in which everyone has to take such a literacy test and is restricted to a lifestyle of only having the luxuries they understand.
The meta lesson I learned by squinting at things and holding them at arms distance was this: don’t be middle class. Live like a grad student and then retire having never acclimated to consumptive patterns that seem to be more about auditioning to be upper class than about enjoyment of the life material prosperity can provide.
The Handbook of Rationality (2021, MIT press) is now open access
I believe many people interpret claims that they might be causing harm as a social attack and not about causal reality.
Currently the burden of proof is on those who claim danger, while we would prefer the burden of proof to be on those who claim safety. Burden of proof moves are regulated by tribal circuitry IME.
Schindler had a concrete thing he was able to do. He had a money->people pipeline. I think most of the ways rationalists are feeling smug about being ahead of the curve here boils down to an error that we are still making: okay you’ve made the update, now how does it propagate through the world model to generate meaningfully different actions? Who has taken action? Has anyone who has taken action talked about it anywhere? Do any of the proposed or taken actions look remotely helpful?
I hope these responses help people understand that the hostility to journalists is not based on hyperbole. They really are like this. They really are competing to wreck the commons for a few advertising dollars.
Humans who won typically just choose harder goals and don’t spend a lot of time patting themselves on the back online. Fwiw superforecasters were disproportionately ssc readers, I interviewed four of them. Also, lw, like most self help communities, attracts the walking wounded. See mental health incidence in the ssc survey. Going from well below average in several metrics to slightly above doesn’t look impressive from the outside but is very large from the inside.