This essay had a significant influence on my growth in the past two years. I shifted from perceiving discomfort as something I am subject to, to considering my relationship with discomfort as an object that can be managed. There are many other writings and experiences that contributed to this growth, but this was the first piece I encountered that talked about managing our relationship with hazards as a thing we can manipulate and improve at. It made me wonder why all human activity may be considered running in the meadow and why contracting may be bad, it showed me how dangers can be mitigated through clearer communication of boundaries, it made me aware of how people can be hazards too.
After working through Nook Nature, I think I sort of understand now why contracting might be bad. Trying to manage my fears and do things (instead of just trying to avoid mistakes) has indeed led to a more enjoyable experience and makes me feel more alive. However, I still stand by my original comment, in that I'm not quite clear what exactly the author is trying to convey.
Something that strikes me as I reread this piece is that I can't tell which are the assumptions, the claims, and the arguments. For example, the essay says that Meadow Theory claims contraction is bad, as in "it is the claim of this theory and this philosophy that this is bad". Yet there does not seem to be an explanation or argument for why this claim might be true. Does that mean we are supposed to take it as an assumption instead?
I don't know how I would rewrite this essay to make it clearer, but if I were to write a piece to myself that captures part of what I have learnt, it would look something like this:
Expanding our surface area of contact with reality enriches our lives. We can expand into new areas, such as traveling to new places or growing a company, or delve deeper into specific areas, like honing our skills in cooking or mastering a musical instrument. Growth makes life more enjoyable and fulfilling.
Unfortunately, life is filled with hazards, both big and small, and exploring brings us into contact with more of such hazards. For instance, when we travel to a new country, we may face unfamiliar food, language barriers, or cultural misunderstandings. Similarly, as we hone our culinary skills, we may come across complex techniques that have greater risks, such as flambéing or working with sharp knives.
Hazards are unpleasant and can be dangerous, so our instinct is to eliminate them. And if we can’t, we try to eliminate them from our experiences. For example, if we can’t eradicate a disease, then maybe we use antimicrobial soap to wash our hands, or we avoid crowded areas. We think that hazards are the problem to be dealt with, but is this really the case?
Let’s consider an analogy. Imagine you are running freely in a meadow. You're blindfolded, but that's fine, because the meadow is safe. Now, imagine someone informing you that there is a single post somewhere in the meadow. You might get hurt if you run headlong into a post! What do you do? You slow down and feel your way through, just in case the post is right in front of you.
Suppose the person had been mistaken and there isn’t actually any post in the meadow. Would anything change? No, you still move slowly because you believe there is a post out there. You contract not because there is actual danger, but because you are (sanely) afraid of getting hurt.
Our instinctive response is to get rid of posts, or at least get rid of the possibility of encountering posts as we traverse the meadow. We avoid areas known to contain posts, like how people who are afraid of being laughed at might avoid performing on stage. We stick to known routes, like those who choose to remain in their hometowns simply because it feels comfortable, or people who only read books that get good reviews so they won’t waste their time on bad books.
When we have a responsibility for or are helping others, we also strive to eliminate posts from their explorations of reality. We ban children from playing outside, because it is dangerous. We tell our employees exactly what to do, so they won't do it wrongly.
Trying to avoid all posts is costly. There are many hazards in the world. Trying to eliminate all hazards from your experience of the world leads to an increasingly narrow life. You wake up in a city you hate, because you're afraid to move to a new place. You stay in a numbing job, because you fear rejection in your job applications. You avoid talking to people, because you’re afraid they might laugh at you. You don't really try to improve your skills, because you're afraid of discovering you’re not so talented after all. In striving to avoid all potential risks, we end up living a limited life.
Imagine if you knew that the meadow contained only one post, and you managed to locate it. You would feel relieved, knowing that it's safe everywhere else, and you could resume running freely.
But as you venture further into the meadow, your certainty about the post's location diminishes. You start to slow down again, because the danger can be anywhere. You contract, not just because you are afraid of danger, but because you're not sure where the danger lies. If the post was on top of a small hill, then you would still be able to run freely, slowing down only once you sense the ground sloping upwards. You can’t tell if you are nearing a post, so you slow down everywhere.
Rather than trying to eliminate all posts, the key is to become better at discerning where hazards are more likely to be, so that we can take the appropriate amount of caution. There are several approaches to managing this uncertainty for ourselves.
One approach is to seek guidance from those who have explored the same area. For example, learning from mentors or seeking advice from experts can provide valuable insights and reduce uncertainty. Maybe we learn from our elders that "pride comes before a fall", so we know to pay attention to whether we are becoming arrogant and careless.
Another approach is to familiarize ourselves with the terrain, so we gain the knowledge and experience that allow us to better predict where posts tend to be. Maybe after cold calling hundreds of strangers, we start to figure out what leads to better results and what leads to rejections.
We can also get better at seeing, or by making our blindfolds less opaque. Rationality skills, for example, can help us improve at the general skill of seeing reality for what it is, as opposed to what we perceive.
Yet another approach is to increase our capacity to handle potential hazards. As we grow and develop, our ability to navigate challenges expands. A post that is the size of a grass stalk may be fatal to someone the size of an ant, but a mere irritation to someone as big as a human. For example, the more self-assured we are, the less impact others' opinions have on our self-esteem. Similarly, having more financial resources allows us to take greater financial risks.
Notice that all these approaches encourage you to explore reality, rather than shrink from it. Better yet, these explorations can help you get better at navigating the meadow, so you can explore parts of the meadow that contain larger, more dangerous posts. These approaches enable you to explore more of the world, not less.
The principles of managing uncertainty also apply when we are helping others. Rather than trying to completely shield them from all hazards, we can set boundaries and provide guidance to help them navigate their own explorations. For instance, providing the critical guidelines for a junior team member would ensure they do not make catastrophic mistakes, while still allowing them to learn from their own errors. We can teach children to notice how hunger affects their emotions, rather than just telling them what and when to eat. Such an approach promotes growth and resilience while still providing a safety net within certain limits.
In summary, living expansively in a world of hazards means understanding and managing risks rather than trying to eliminate all possibilities of danger. We don’t need to ensure that there are no hazards, just ensure that we approach hazards appropriately. We want to be more cautious in areas where there is greater danger to us, and to get better at dealing with hazards so we can explore more areas expansively.
What you think of as a failure to fully eliminate all hazards may in fact be a deliberate decision to hold back so as to promote a healthier, more productive approach to dealing with hazards in the world.
Author's note:
The essay below centers mostly on a philosophy of parenting. However, it's not "about" parenting—rather, parenting is a domain in which the concepts I'd like to convey can be easily represented and productively applied. Parenting is one specific instantiation of the broader set of ideas, just as one might use an essay about football or baseball as a vehicle for the concepts of friction or acceleration or collision elasticity.
Author's note II:
Feedback on this draft ran thus:
I'm not sure how to get readers to do the latter thing; I think it is the correct thing to do and had sort of implicitly assumed that everybody already would. Since I don't know what changes to make to this draft to encourage the latter thing for readers like the one above, I'm just bluntly making the recommendation. Hopefully I will get better at helping in the near future.
I. The meadow
Imagine a wide, level, grassy meadow, stretching to the horizon, empty of all obstacles.
This meadow will be our metaphor for the world/the territory/reality-as-a-whole, and the picture of it will gradually grow more complex as we step through various thought experiments. But for the moment, it's just one big blank plane.
Now imagine a blindfolded child, running through the meadow.
This is safe, because the meadow contains nothing besides soft, springy grass. There are no walls or other obstacles to run into. If they trip or tumble, they'll be fine.
Running will be our metaphor for human activity. It is good to run. More precisely, it's good to be able to run—to have the freedom to move in whatever direction you please, at whatever speed you please, without fear or constraint. The ideal state is one in which the blindfolded child can run as much as they want to, wherever they want to, whenever they feel like.
(The blindfold is our metaphor for the state of human knowledge—our inability to perceive and comprehend the vast majority of what goes on around us, and our uncertainties and confusions about even the tiny slice we do manage to be aware of.)
II. The post
Now imagine a parent, lounging on the grass, idly supervising the child as they run.
The parent is not blindfolded, because the parent has a wealth of experience and knowledge (relative to the child). They can "see" the world more clearly, so in our metaphor they can straightforwardly see.
(Though they are still unable to see what's behind them, or what's very far away, or what they fail to properly attend to, or things that blend in with the grass or the sky.)
In the infinite meadow, the parent's job is extremely easy. The child is safe; they will run and play and eventually tire and come back to the parent for food and rest and conversation.
But imagine for a moment that the meadow is not empty. Imagine instead that it contains one single post, standing upright in the middle of everything.
Running into this post would not be pleasant. If the child does so, they could be seriously hurt, or possibly even killed.
A handful of possible responses to the inclusion of the post:
...there are certainly others. The parent might attempt to dig up the post, for instance, or surround it with soft objects. Or they might say nothing and "let the kid learn their lesson."
It seems reasonable, though, to say that the job of the parent is to somehow navigate the child-post interaction. That what a parent is is someone who takes responsibility for figuring out a policy for dealing with this post situation.
(Or what a manager is, or a principal, or a general, or anyone who is in any sort of privileged position in which they have greater power and intel than other beings in their circle of concern.)
III. Expansiveness (and its opposite)
We will return to the parent later. First, though, I want to talk a little bit about the internal experience of the blindfolded child.
I would like to use the word expansiveness (as in "an expansive mood") to refer to the property referenced above, of having the freedom and confidence to move at any speed, in any direction, following the whim of the moment.
In the infinite, empty meadow, it's easy to feel expansive. To not-closely-track one's own position, to not-think-about which way one will move next, to not treat any given impulse as a weighty decision in need of careful evaluation.
But imagine that you are the blindfolded child, and that somehow you suddenly become aware of the existence of the post, without knowing its precise location.
I claim that, in that moment, you would be very likely to undergo a contraction. To make a substantial shift away from freewheeling expansiveness toward anxiety, wariness, a sort of feeling-one's-way-gingerly-forward. What makes sense in an infinite meadow makes less sense in a meadow known to contain a dangerous obstacle. The fear of possibly slamming into a post has an immediate impact on one's estimation of how good of an idea "running around" is.
This is bad. Or, more precisely, it is the claim of this theory and this philosophy that this is bad. It is correct to contract in response to danger, but expansiveness, to the greatest degree supported by the environment, is the goal. Contraction is often necessary and justified, but it is always seen as an unfortunate cost. It's one thing to choose to walk. It's another thing altogether to be unable to freely run, because of an expectation that doing so will result in pain or injury.
IV. Uncertainty
An interesting thing happens, if you are the blindfolded child and you are standing at the post.
If you have your hands on it, and you know with certainty that it is the only post, then suddenly you're back to expansiveness. As long as you run away from that spot, you can carry on as you were before...
...at first. As you continue to meander, your uncertainty about the location of the post grows. At first, you are quite certain that it's a dozen steps behind you—that if you turned around and took a dozen steps back and waved your arms, you'd bump into it.
But after you run for a bit, and then pause, and then get up and run a bit more, and blindly turn and turn and turn again, each time with a little more room for error about just exactly how much, it becomes harder and harder to have any confidence at all that you know where the post is, and could find it again (or avoid it) on purpose. It doesn't take long at all before your-anticipations-about-its-location have become so diffuse that it might as well be anywhere.
In fact, the above picture is slightly misleading, because it implies that you/the child/the blue dot can confidently locate itself within the meadow. From a dot-centric perspective, with the meadow expanding effectively infinitely in every direction, and the dot's own orientation toward or away from the post becoming increasingly uncertain as time goes on, the t=5 step looks more like:
There is (of course) a range of responses to personal risk. Some people would experience greater contraction than others, for a given likelihood of running into the post; there are some people who aggressively insist on "still running anyway" even when they know there's a post somewhere out there, and others who creep and crawl and feel their way forward even when the odds of encountering a post are very low.
But it seems to me that the impact of maybe-there's-a-post is of the same kind in all cases, even though people have different sensitivity to it and respond in different ways.
In "The correct response to uncertainty is not half-speed," Anna Salamon notes that many humans respond to uncertainty by doing something like averaging across strategies. That is, if they're not sure whether they've already passed their destination, or whether it's still ahead of them, they will tend to slow down, even though this is a worse strategy in each of the possible worlds.
This rhymes in my mind with the tendency of many humans to treat a 50% chance of guilt (and correspondingly a 50% chance of innocence) as if someone is 100% likely to be sort of guilty. It's rare to find people for whom split and commit is a natural or well-practiced move; as a class, we are not particularly good at composite strategies, especially if we are not paying close and effortful attention.
And so it seems safe to me to predict that, as one's uncertainty as to the location of the post "bleeds" further and further out, tainting more and more of the meadow, most people will have a duller, slower, sadder, and more contracted experience in every square meter, and during every time step. Even a very low risk (say, 0.1%) of encountering the post in the next ten steps tends to temper one's ability to be truly expansive and carefree—it's rare for people to respond to small risks with a correctly proportionately small behavior change.
(c.f. concepts such as risk aversion and loss aversion)
It's for this reason that meadow theory puts a premium on identifying the precise location of dangerous obstacles. The more accurately you can pin down exactly where the post is (and continue to track it even as time passes and you move around), the more the existence of the post does not result in general contraction.
V. Parenting under meadow theory
This, then, is the primary responsibility of parents (and managers, principals, generals, etc.) under meadow theory: to help the blindfolded children locate the obstacles within the meadow. If a child knows where the hazards are, they can still be relatively expansive—there's plenty of joy to be had running full-tilt down hallways, even if the walls mean they can't turn left or right at will. But as their uncertainty rises, their ability to run freely sharply contracts.
This responsibility expresses itself in two broad categories of parental action. The first is providing specific warnings about the locations of specific, known hazards, e.g.:
...this list could go on for quite literally thousands of entries; human culture has built up a large repository of informal knowledge about where many hazards lie, and each individual adult human brain contains a significant fraction of that total.
No one human, though, comes anywhere close to carrying a complete copy, and even the sum total of all human wisdom regarding posts-in-the-meadow is a woefully impoverished subset. Known dangers present themselves anew in endlessly varied ways; there are dangers which no one has encountered yet; there are dangers which did not exist until we created them (e.g. the profoundly negative impact of Instagram on the self-esteem of many young girls); there are dangers which we don't know about because no one has yet survived an encounter and come back to warn the rest of us.
Thus, the second category of parental action is teaching children the general skill of how to recognize a hazard before you smack into it face-first. Of knowing what sorts of signs mean that one should slow down, because one has entered a region that's less safe than usual.
(Metaphors here are less clean, but one could imagine e.g. human echolocation, which is indeed sensitive enough to allow blind humans to detect and avoid many dangerous objects. Or one could imagine a kind of outside view aggregation—if you are moving through the meadow and suddenly all of the voices fall away behind you, this may be a sign that you are entering dangerous territory which is unpopulated for a reason.)
Some vague gestures in this direction:
...etc. Each of the items in the above list is a generator for items in the first list; they are generalized inductions from the set of historical observations of posts that help people to focus their attention in places where new posts are more likely.
It's worth reiterating that these two precepts of meadow theory are different from many other parenting philosophies. Meadow theory says that you, as a parent, should:
...and furthermore that this is the end of your responsibility, at least when it comes to the question of defending your child against the environment. Other theories of parenting say that you should e.g. prevent the child from running into a post by any means necessary, including those which are highly costly to you, the child, or your relationship (such as by keeping them confined to a known-safe area of the meadow), or that you should dissuade your child from ever running fast enough that they would be injured by a post, if one were there, regardless of how likely there is to be one.
(Etc.)
VI. People-as-posts
Assuming that you are reasonably on board with the claim that uncertainty about the location of the post leads to contraction, it's worth taking a brief aside to note that other people are also posts.
And indeed, as the above uncertainty principle would predict, it is when other people's boundaries and norms are clear and unambiguous that they are easiest to interact with.
With total strangers (who in America at least we largely know not to touch) and close friends (whose willingness to be touched is understood in detail), it's relatively simple to answer questions like "should I give this person a long, lingering hug?" Ditto for contexts where roles and norms are explicit in common knowledge (e.g. a corporate office, or a martial arts dojo, or the Sunday service at a church, or a married couple interacting in the privacy of their own home).
Where it becomes difficult is with people who may want a hug, but who may instead punish you for offering one, or who may be open to hugs in one context and strongly opposed to them in another, for reasons that are not immediately apparent or legible.
In all sorts of domains—money, romance, political or religious affiliation, physical interactions, communication norms, tidiness—it's when people's true boundaries are unknown or highly variable that others must contract, cautiously feeling their way forward.
(Or barrel forward blindly and hope for the best.)
The more that each of us knows what the other likes and dislikes, wants and avers, can handle and can't handle, the more each of us can make frequent and confident motions even fairly close to the line, without having to worry about unknowingly and accidentally crossing it.
The less defined those boundaries are, the more they bleed out and pollute the space between us such that neither of us can feel expansive (if we care about not violating them).
Thus, it is useful and prosocial to make the locations of one's own boundaries and fences and wants and needs outwardly legible. The more people have to tiptoe carefully around one another's hidden landmines, the worse things are for everyone. Parents, according to meadow theory (and managers, principals, etc.), should help their children locate and assert their own boundaries, and should model setting and clearly communicating boundaries in a way that the children can see and learn from, not merely because this is good for one's own sake but because it causes each person to accidentally steal less of the common space via uncertain boundary leak.
Hazards that everyone can "see" are much easier to avoid, and much easier to pass by closely, at speed, without danger.
VII. Interlude: Logan Strohl on courage
(Compiled from multiple sources)
VIII. Summary
I claim this is an extremely useful way to think about parenting, as well as things like difficult interpersonal conversations, or project management, or teaching/pedagogy, or directing literal troops in a literal war.
I don't think the above represents the sum total of useful actions to take within the meadow. There are other things that people can do which are helpful, such as bulldozing hazards to make the meadow safer for everyone, or building small closed-in enclaves for meadow-runners who are unable to perceive or comprehend certain hazards.
But the first priority should be to help people precisely locate known hazards, such that they can be reasonably confident about where those known hazards aren't, and the second priority should be to translate the hazard-locating skill. Everything else seems to me to be dependent on something unsustainable (e.g. "I'll sacrifice my own priorities entirely and devote my time and attention to the task of keeping you safe myself") or unrealistically optimistic (e.g. "we'll make the entire meadow entirely safe").
Author's note: These days, my thoughts go onto my substack instead of onto LessWrong. Everything I write becomes free after a week or so, but it’s only paid subscriptions that make it possible for me to write. If you found a coffee’s worth of value in this or any of my other work, please consider signing up to support me; every bill I can pay with writing is a bill I don’t have to pay by doing other stuff instead. I also accept and greatly appreciate one-time donations of any size.