A funny thing happens with woo sometimes, in the rationality community. There's a frame that says: this is a mix of figurative stuff and dumb stuff, let's try to figure out what the figurative stuff is pointing at and salvage it. Let's call this "salvage epistemology". Unambiguous examples include the rationality community's engagement with religions, cold-reading professions like psychics, bodywork, and chaos magic. Ambiguous examples include intensive meditation, Circling, and many uses of psychedelics.
The salvage epistemology frame got locally popular in parts of the rationality community for awhile. And this is a basically fine thing to do, in a context where you have hyper-analytical programmers who are not at risk of buying into the crazy, but who do need a lens that will weaken their perceptual filters around social dynamics, body language, and muscle tension.
But there's a bad thing happens when you have a group that are culturally adjacent to the hyper-analytical programmers, but who aren't that sort of person themselves. They can't, or shouldn't, take for granted that they're not at risk of falling into the crazy. For them, salvage epistemology disarms an important piece of their immune system.
I think salvage epistemology is infohazardous to a subset of people, and we should use it less, disclaim it more, and be careful to notice when it's leading people in over their heads.
Are people here mostly materialists? I'm not. In a Cartesian sense, the most authentic experience possible is that of consciousness itself, with matter being something our mind imagines to explain phenomenon that we think might be real outside of our imagination (but we can never really know).
In other words, we know that idealism is true, because we experience pure ideas constantly, and we suspect that the images our minds serve up might actually correspond to some reality out there (Kant's things-in-themselves).
The map might really be the territory. Like, if you read a book by Tolkein and find that the map doesn't match the text, which is right? And if Tolkein clarified, would he be right, considering the thing he's talking about doesn't even exist? Except it kinda does, in that we're debating real things, and they impact us, etc?
I don't think we're anywhere near approaching a meaningful metaphysics, so the confidence of the materialists seems misplaced. I mean, yeah, I've seen matter, so I know it's real. But I've also seen matter in my dreams (including under a microscope, where it continued to be "real").
A funny thing happens with woo sometimes, in the rationality community. There's a frame that says: this is a mix of figurative stuff and dumb stuff, let's try to figure out what the figurative stuff is pointing at and salvage it. Let's call this "salvage epistemology". Unambiguous examples include the rationality community's engagement with religions, cold-reading professions like psychics, bodywork, and chaos magic. Ambiguous examples include intensive meditation, Circling, and many uses of psychedelics.
The salvage epistemology frame got locally popular in parts of the rationality community for awhile. And this is a basically fine thing to do, in a context where you have hyper-analytical programmers who are not at risk of buying into the crazy, but who do need a lens that will weaken their perceptual filters around social dynamics, body language, and muscle tension.
But there's a bad thing happens when you have a group that are culturally adjacent to the hyper-analytical programmers, but who aren't that sort of person themselves. They can't, or shouldn't, take for granted that they're not at risk of falling into the crazy. For them, salvage epistemology disarms an important piece of their immune system.
I think salvage epistemology is infohazardous to a subset of people, and we should use it less, disclaim it more, and be careful to notice when it's leading people in over their heads.