Would you be up for saying a little more about "I have benefitted greatly from being around the CFAR nexus", and/or about what you're hoping for?
I agree this conversational format may not work, but I'm finding it helpful for now. I'm gonna keep saying piecemeal bits I care about. (In a more proper conversation, I'd take more care to try to paraphrase you first etc. But I'm liking you sharing the bits you're sharing.)
I agree one can participate in a tradition of deep know-how (even as a teacher) without being I-it about it. Good cultures are typically like this IMO. I was complaining about "solving psychology," not about "drawing on a tradition." Chapter three of CS Lewis's "The Abolition of Man" points to the difference, if you've read it or feel like reading it. A passage:
In older systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him were prescribed by the Tao -- a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to depart. They did not cut men to some pattern they had chosen.... They initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which overarched him and them alike. It was but old birds teaching new birds to fly. This will be changed. Values are now mere natural phenomena.... It is one more part of Nature which they have conquered.
(If you somehow feel like investing time in this subpoint, the place I'm coming from here will likely make more sense if you read "The abolition of man"; also happy to try by talking here.)
I would ideally like a tradition where pieces can be individually tested and thrown out, but where it's still a tradition, not an I-it.
...
I agree there are many known psychological interventions out there of large effect-size and unclear sign, most clearly recreational drugs, but also including e.g. AoA and bodywork. It is at this point a clearly bad idea to go "I'll go hunting for things with large effects on psychology of unknown sorts, try lots of them, gather people who can try lots of them in dialog, and call this good."
What's needed instead is way to tell what's good.
The rationality community's traditional answer to "is X psychological intervention good?" is "does it help you form more accurate beliefs" (epistemic rationality) and "does it help you hit your stated / verbally endorsed goals" (instrumental rationality). I still think this notion of "good" helped build stuff that was, in fact, good mostly. (But limited in e.g. not helping the person you mention who doesn't know how to cry, and in setting people up for burnout, and many similar gaps).
Our new stuff at aCFAR is mostly a small but significant dif from the traditional rationality definition. We keep "form true beliefs" as a goal. But in place of the "instrumental rationality" part: instead of working to aid "agency" and verbally endorsed goals (and the ego who verbally endorses those goals), we're working with:
- pride (with what elicits small sparks/flashes of "I like this," "this makes me feel warm and empowered and like I like what I stand for," "this is part of the lineage that made me possible, and that I choose to tend")
- the sources of morale or energy to do stuff
- the Self that Eugene Gendlin discusses in Focusing (which is the same as the Self of IFS).
These are all attempts to empower something like "be a cohesive self, who doesn't glide past tiny notes of discord but instead tunes into all the data coming in, and is in full contact with the outside world, including all known science."
(I expect to be more articulately coherent on this in about six months.)
ETA: I want one self encountering the outside world full-on. My objection to "solve psychology" as an angle on things, is that it divides me in two: a "psychologist" part, and a "have psychology done to me" part.
(I imagine you, Richard, agree that the goal is like this, but then think the route to this goal is more like "do psychology" / "have psychology done to you"?)
1Do you want to try a LessWrong dialog? Are those still a thing?
ETA: Or, if they're not (or even if they are), maybe a quickly-written coauthored post where we try to exposit where we're each coming from, what we agree about already, where we seem to have different inclinations, etc?
I just replied to a chunk of this. To respond to a couple other chunks:
that the point of a lot of neo-hippie techniques is to get people out of their "mechanistic reasoning" frame, e.g. to get them to start saying things that they feel without first checking whether those things are true. And more generally to let more aspects of one's psyche "bubble up",
IMO, it's indeed good (and part of the art of rationality) to notice what you're perceiving without first "checking whether [your perception] is true." And then it's good to check afterward. Terry Pratchett has some solid basic rationality in his delightful novel "The Wee Free Men," in which his protagonist succeeds using "first sight, and second thought" -- "first sight" to see what her eyes are actually reporting, without rounding to what she was expecting to see, and "second thought" to double check her thinking.
So I believe the neo-hippies are inline with traditional rationality on this point. (IMO, traditional rationality doesn't want "mechanistic reasoning," authority, peer review, your priors, or anything else gating full conscious access to your perceptions, nor the ability to discuss your perceptions.)
I realize you said "saying things they feel", whereas I said "notice what you perceive". But "feel" in neohippy circles usually refers to a perception or belief (e.g., "I feel this is risky"). If we discuss only cases where it refers to an emotion ("I feel scared"), well, for those too I'd like to allow them into full consciousness.
man, I really want someone to actually try to "solve psychology" by combining insights from neo-hippies with systematizing thinking.
It makes sense to me that you want that! But it's not what I want to do, nor what I want aCFAR to do. Maybe try Chris Lakin? I believe he's trying for something like this, and I cheer for his efforts.
I don't desire to try this myself, because... my current angle is not [seeing people as things to solve or help, using techniques and models]. It's more [seeing people as wise self-authored creatures to befriend and build things with, who admittedly have a bunch of ~trauma and parasitic memes and stuff, but who even so mostly need listening and support in their ~autonomous process of making sense of the world and doing things they care about].
In other words, I want something more "I-and-thou" with the people we're interacting with, compared to "solving psychology" which is more I-it.
Past-me thinks that's an odd thing for me to trust in, in light of [phenomenon: sometimes I or others thought we handed someone a tool, but actually we handed it to some not-so-aligned-meme that's squatting in them, and that now uses this tool to get more control.] My current take, though, is that while [accidentally up-powering parasitic memes, to ill effect] definitely happens, this can be mostly avoided by a culture of assisting a central self, who is also a point of pride/authorship, to come more fully online and to notice where they do and don't have distaste for what's up. (This is why I like Focusing but don't like IDC -- only Self should be dialog with parts.) (It's different from pastCFAR!agentiness, which aimed to empower a system 2 virtual self, rather than the Self Gendlin and IFS talk about).
Why I'm betting on doing both of these things at once: from my POV they're basically one thing. And that one thing is: having a go at the world with everything we've got.
When it comes to figuring out what's true: I want to let my perceptions "bubble up" and to let bits of how a given perception does/doesn't reconcile with other perceptions also bubble up, and to actively chew on the puzzle-points and maybe actively grab info that might help me make sense of things. Where the purpose of all that is to get the best guess I can about what's going on in the world. This is how Gendlin's Focusing comes to be useful in scientific research: a scientist notices their inclinations about a scientific puzzle, notices what perceptions/intuitions/frames/etc bubble up as they stare at it, notices how their current intuitions don't quite feel right (Eliezer's "tiny note of discord" / "noticing confusion"), etc. Which helps in science according to both Gendlin and our own attempts at CFAR (eg, Edward Kmett got a small breakthrough on a thing he'd been stuck on for awhile when he tried the "Focusing for research" class).
IMO this stuff is bottom-up-ish, mixed with top-down replies to and knitting together of the bottom-up bits, and applies in the absence of any particular emotional blocks, and also with more difficulty in their presence.
When it comes to accomplishing cool stuff [the other half of being human, besides figuring out what's true], I think there's a fairly similar structure, where [energy / morale / traction / a calibrated "yes I can do something here, let me bet on that and have a go] bubbles up from different models + perceptions ("someone on the internet is wrong! and I can help!"). And I can do top-down-ish things to help many different bits of the bottom-up morale-pieces cohere into a single project that is "onto something". (And to help disband that project's reified bits after a given one turns empty, so I can go back to locating something of quality and again be onto something.)
I'm not sure how to say this well.
But the usefulness of mechanistic reasoning seems like one of our best clues about the universe, and I sort of can't imagine someone making a serious go at the above without including it.
This seemed to read to me though that aCFAR is justifying itself as needing funds primarily because of trying to sustain a community. ... What did you mean here?
From my POV, the main reason I want aCFAR in existence is to sustain (and allow to better-develop) a particular angle on rationality practice.
Like, suppose there were a bunch of people doing a bunch of bits of neat music, and you sorta had the idea that a jazz-type thing was nascent. And then maybe if you create a really cool bar or something with the right set of musicians and fans and stuff invited at once (a center), jazz congeals and becomes a thing.
My feeling is there's a particular take on rationality that I want to help pop into existence. There's a bunch of rhymes between stuff different ones of us staff are doing, near also Friedrich Hayek's work and Christopher Alexander's. I think we're onto something, I want to see where it goes. And I think this thing develops best via practicing it together, in various ways -- aCFAR staff trying it on ourselves and each other and volunteers; folks who don't work for aCFAR but who are independently doing "rhyming" stuff coming and riffing and showing us there angles; the bits and pieces combining; etc.
This is the "community" (of creating / practicing/ refining) that I meant we are trying to cultivate. (Not our new alumni community, although it'll overlap it.)
Does that make sense?
If anyone is considering donating and wants to talk a little first, do please book my calendly. 15 minutes, easy! :) (Also happy to talk with people about things other than donating, though easiest for me if we do that in January, all else equal; can still schedule now)
We are indeed so considering, downstream of your comment! Thanks. I think we'll submit our project there in an hour or two. Do you have thoughts re: what we should put as our fundraising goal? I assume it should be a target for how much donation comes to us via Manifund, rather than overall?
Great to hear from you; thanks for popping in! I like the thing you're describing, re: your work at CFAR_2013, and that angle on rationality/CFAR more generally. I'd say it describes our current stuff... 5 out of 10 maybe? I agree there's more emphasis now on receptive posture to the world (and also on tuning into taste, and the data taste brings up). I'm not sure what else to say at this moment, but I'm really glad you're bringing your perspective in, and wanted to say that and say hi.