I've only circled twice, not sure how relevant this is. (FWIW, my takeaway so far is "eh, pretty okay, depends a lot on facilitator and situation"). But, some perspective I think is important to the debates going on here.
5 years ago, I was very pro "giving people an excuse to be more vulnerable than they'd normally feel comfortable being."
I'm still pretty pro this. But... in a less naive way than I was 5 years ago.
It seemed like being vulnerable was basically how you got anything worthwhile. I saw people curled up in their shells, desperately lacking in intimacy in ways that was having a crippling effect on them. They lived in fear of expressing themselves, of taking risks. And having an environment conducive to exploring intimacy and vulnerability was profoundly valuable. (I was at least somewhat this type of person, although I don't think it was as big a deal for me as for other people I knew)
And the thing that I intellectually understood, but took several years to grok, was that being vulnerable is in fact vulnerable, and you can get hurt doing it.
[my impression is that circling, at least as described by Unreal, is not primarily about vul...
Ideally, everyone would have the opportunity to explore vulnerability carefully, step by step, with a skilled therapist or something to turn to if things ever got dicey.
I think this is an essential line, and a core problem. For more than a half century the social capital of the average person in the US has been falling and falling and falling. A therapist is sort of just a person you pay to pretend to be a genuine friend, without you having to reciprocate friendship back at them. That it is considered reasonable or ideal (as the first thought) to go to a paid professional to get basic F2F friend services is historically weird.
Maybe it is the best we can do, but... like... it didn't used to be this way I don't think, and that suggests that it could be like it was in the past if we knew what was causing it.
A therapist is also someone who is bound by confidentiality - things you tell them don't get spread around and used against you by other people.
I think the Shell, Shield, Staff post by SquirrelInHell feels very relevant to all of this. (Not sure if SquirrelInHell would endorse my application of it here).
A few people said the original post was too poetical, and I'm not sure I can summarize it without resorting to most of the same poetry, but here goes:
i. Shell
If the world seems scary, often people first start by forming a shell. The shell prevents the world from affecting them at all. This is "safe", but it means that you're limiting your opportunity for growth. Well meaning friends may try to coax you out of your shell, but you know that if you leave your shell they'll start trampling over your boundar.ies and hurting you.
ii. Shield
An evolution of the shell is the shield. You figure out which parts of the world are most threatening, and develop a defense specifically against those. Instead of fully protecting you, the shield points to only one side. This has the advantage that it gives you more flexibility. You can let parts of the world affect you that seem trustworthy, allowing you to learn and grow. Occasionally this results in your getting stabbed, but you've become resilient enough that i...
One thing that's not great about this framing is that since the three things come in an order it's easy to get into an implicit frame where people with staffs are better than people with shields who are better than people with shells, or at least be worried that other people are doing this. (I have this concern about Kegan levels, for example, and it seems related to PDV's concerns around circling / NVC.)
So I'd like to push strongly for additional norms around this sort of thing, of the form "and also let's agree that we won't criticize people for having a different pattern than us or try to pressure them into 'leveling up' from our perspective."
Is this a social worry ("people will use it as a blugeon") or an epistemic worry ("people will incorrectly think there's a hierarchy, but actually they're all useful frames")?
I don't have strong feelings about shell/shield/staff, but I've gotten a lot of value out of Kegan levels, and I think the hierarchy is actually a loadbearing part of the theory. (Specifically, it matters that each level is legible to the one after it, but not vice versa.) I endorse being careful about the social implications, but I wouldn't want that to become a generalized claim that there aren't skill hierarchies in the territory.
The closest bonds I have in my life, are bonds that have been tested. One of my closest friends is someone with whom I decided to make a 450-person conference happen, given us having zero experience running conferences, and we eventually had some really big names coming, and things could have gone badly wrong and reflected terribly on us. But we worked hard and it succeeded, and now I know that when that friend tells me that we are going to do ambitious project X, then we are going to do ambitious project X, and they will not leave me behind to fail.
I trust that person in a way that I couldn't have if we hadn't opened ourselves to massive failure.
Something else I want in life, is the ability to talk with people about what thought processes I'm having, what's stressing me out, and what I'm worried about. Maybe I'm angry at my partner. Maybe I'm feeling depressed. However, many people have very different internal lives, and if you don't quite have the same internal life I have, something I say could come across wrong - as petty, or as selfish, or as nasty for example - when I'm trying to deal with the thought processes and reason about wh...
My guess, after several years of very similar conversations with you, is that there's a cluster of things (I'd vaguely call "fuzzy emotional group stuff") that just... aren't relevant to you as much, for one reason or another. It may be that different people get value from different things, and you don't get value from this class of thing. It may be that you have some kind of conceptual blocker and if you successfully understood the the thing, you'd suddenly get a lot of value out of it. I don't know.
Again, Scott Alexander's "Concept Shaped Holes" thing seems relevant. I, Qiaochu and I think others have attempted to explain a variety of things in this cluster, but we keep saying "these sorts of things are really hard to communciate via text-based media - you really need to just try it." Ultimately you either believe that (and are willing to think about reasons why this may all make sense without asking others to explain it in exhaustive detail, and/or just try stuff for yourself and lean hard into it to actually have a chance of gaining benefit), or you don't.
And I certainly understand that being frustrating, b...
a) People are part of the territory. Not only that, they contain relevant map bits, such that I alone could never collect all the map bits without them.
b) My System 2 alone is not sufficient for epistemic rationality. System 1 not only has to be involved, but it is in fact the main determinant of my epistemics. As most "beliefs" are actually aliefs (nonverbal beliefs below the level of consciousness).
c) As such, it is ideal for my System 1 and 2 to work together to form correct beliefs. And, it is ideal for me to be able to fully engage with other people and their epistemics / beliefs. Where 'fully engage' means engaging with both System 1 and 2. (Do not mistake me as saying, "It's good to fully open up to people and expose myself." That's not what I mean. I mean that I want to be able to skillfully navigate human interaction—like I have a dashboard where I can see all the incoming streams of data. And I want to notice where I'm inclined to block/parry vs allow/receive, among other possible moves.)
The emotional involvement that occurs (the SNS activation) is a System 1 response, which to me indicates that I'm about to receive some pretty important data, and whatever happens next could be an important update for me.
I think I have way more to say on this, but I'm out of time for now. AMA.
I think the idealized way to do it is with small, incremental steps that let you explore new, untrusted domains and people as safely as you can, and the issue is that life doesn't necessarily provide safe, small, incremental steps where you can easily formally verify everything before diving in. Sometimes you meet a new person, find a new activity, or experience a new thing, and you don't have much choice between taking a leap of faith, or being so hesitant that the opportunity passes you by before you had the chance to explore it.
Or, even when life is providing you with a nice "difficulty curve" / "formal verification curve", the fact remains that there's a difference between maximizing safety, and maximizing expected value. Sometimes they are the same, but sometimes the payoff of seizing a new opportunity quickly (and, having a habit of seizing new opportunities quickly) lets you gain much more than you'd get by minimizing damage.
Because I haven't seen much in the way concrete comments on evidence that circling is real, I'm going to share a slightly outdated list of the concrete things I've gotten from practicing circling:
- a sense of what boundaries are, why they're important, and how to source them internally
- my rate of resolving emotionally-charged conflict over text went from < 1% to ≈80%-90% in the first month or three of me starting circling
- a tool ("Curiosity") for taking any conversation and making it genuinely interesting and likely deeper for me
- confidence and ability to connect more deeply with anyone who seems open to connecting more deeply with me
- the superpower of being able to describe to other people what I imagine they feel in their bodies in certain situations, and be right, even when they couldn't've generated the descriptions
- empathy of the "I'm with you in what you're feeling" sort rather than the "I have a conscious model of how you work and what's going on with you and can predict what you'll do" sort
- a language for talking about how I react in situations on a relational level
- a better understand...
Based on recent experience in the community around the subject, I think Circling is both toxic and a feedback-loop trap.
To paraphrase two friends who had similar strong negative reactions:
This is one of those "this thing is intensely intimate, but it is going to be pushed on me as if it isn't" things, where people will look down on me for not doing it because it is Therapeutic.
I am fairly sure this would be bad for me, in the same way meditation is bad for me, and I have a terror that because of the social aspect people I want to be friends with will come to decide it is essential to being friends.
This is something I would not do with anyone I did not trust absolutely. No matter what it ostensibly holds about how it should not "force you to open up or try to get you to be vulnerable", I am quite sure that, as practiced by humans, it will, and participants will be blinded to this obvious truth by the benefits and feeling of purity they have gained from it. Like NVC, I consider anyone engaging in this while in interaction with me a hostile actor.
EDIT:
I notice I feel trepidation and fear as I prepare to discuss this. I'm afraid I won't be able to giv...
So, I think a pretty strong analogy can be made to sex. Circling, like sex, is a vulnerable activity, and like sex, it's possible or even easy to do in a way that is nonconsensual and harmful. Like sex, it can cause harm so bad that people develop defenses of the form "anyone trying to engage with me even slightly in this way needs to back the fuck off," which I'm fine with and want to respect. (Also like sex, it can be amazing and I think there's something important about it.)
What bugs me about this comment is the lack of a clear distinction between "Circling is bad for me and people like me as we stand" and "Circling is bad, period, in general." Like, I'm entirely happy with
I consider anyone engaging in this while in interaction with me a hostile actor.
because you're just clearly stating a boundary, but not at all happy with
Anyone who uses this kind of frame is someone who is unsafe to know.
because it's phrased as a strong empirical claim about me and people I like. There's a huge difference between "people should not try to hit on me" and "sex in general is bad and anyone who attempts to have it is bad."
Also, I want to ask you more about your reaction to the quoted chunk, but... I... can't?
That's excellent.
One remark: The larger that number is, (1) the less people will be used to seeing threads with some comments not displayed, hence (2) the more likely they are to forget that they are seeing only a partial picture; and also (3) the less it matters if the notice saying some comments haven't been loaded yet is ugly; so it may be worth making it more prominent.
My guess it’s better to do that than to have this annoying loading experience, but I should really get around to refactoring our comment system.
Yeah, it seems like we're making the experience worse in some actual cases, in exchange for making it better in other hypothetical cases.
If whenever we hit a limit we increase it, why even have the limit!?
As someone who thinks he has learned a lot from integrating parts of NVC into his communication, and has benefited a bit from circling, would you be open to elaborating a bit more on what makes you think people who use NVC language are hostile?
(In my model both circling and NVC are roughly analogous to seatbelts, which will help you a bit if you bump into someone, but won't help if you barrel at 80 miles per hour into a wall. But them not helping in that situation does not strike me as a particularly good reason to have super strong negative reactions to seatbelts)
NVC in practice conflates two very different things:
(1) Report observations, inferences, and value judgments separately.
(2) Only feelings and perspectives exist and can be the object of conversation, not facts.
The first is right, the second is wrong. The ideology suffers from the same ambiguity - in principle "owning your experience" is a necessary Rationality practice; in practice, Circling can sometimes push people towards privileging some experiences over others, ones that are more feelingsy, and away from being able to own their experience as beings with incomplete information about an actual reality.
It's been my experience that when I encounter someone using NVC, or that general area of speech-type, that they are Bad Actors who are using it as a... tool to enforce their will, or make it seem like they are being reasonable and making reasonable requests when they aren't. And it often reads as general passive aggressiveness to me, even when people possibly don't mean it that way (I prefer more directness). I don't think it's inherent to the tool, but I can see how it could attract those sorts of people.
Circling seems really interesting and possibly useful to me, but only in specific settings, and a random meetup group is NOT one of them (unless it's staying really superficial, or I guess strangers you will never see again). For a closed group of friends, it sounds like it could be great though, and the sort of thing I'd be really into. If everyone was like me that would make it more difficult to spread, but then people with higher risk tolerances could go to larger/public circling events to learn and then take the skill back to their smaller/private groups.
If anybody DOES do it as a meetup topic, I strongly suggest that RSVP is required so that people can see who else is going, and can choose to stay away if an individual they specifically distrust would be in attendance (or can choose to go if they see that everyone who has RSVPd is a person they would feel comfortable with)
Of course, there are rather few people whose desires or goals are to intentionally cause harm.
But there is a rather significant amount of people who don't particularly care (much) about you and your boundaries, when those stand in the way of whatever their goals ARE. While they might not actively desire to harm you, they certainly will if that's the path that gets them what they want. I do consider those people to be Bad Actors.
For example, a corporation doesn't have in its mission statement "Pollute the Earth and Engage in Questionable Labor Practices!".... I feel like this has already been covered already somewhere between paperclips and Moloch.
I feel like you only engaged with the weakest strawman of what I said.
They both are situations of enforced sharing, ostensibly optional but socially mandated. They establish rules within which you must operate, which can and inevitably will be used against anyone less skilled in them. They can be good, but mostly for people who are already socially secure and powerful, and the downside risk is very large risk of totally losing self-image and identity, destroying load-bearing coping mechanisms, and generally taking someone with very few tools to deal with the world and breaking those tools in the name of giving them better ones.
I see. I think we are seeing things from slightly different perspectives here. I've always engaged with NVC as a method of personal communication, embedded in a broader world that is basically unaware of the structure of the NVC frame. I haven't been in environments that seem to insist that an NVC frame is used, but would probably have a very bad reaction to it, for the reasons you outlined in the comment.
So, I'm going to say this because it might be counterintuitive: I don't see a contradiction between my article and these comments here.
All the pitfalls of humanity (Goodharting, cognitive blindspots, status games, ulterior motives, etc.) can come alive in Circling. They are present because the ingredients you start with in a circle are humans. So all the human errors totally play out. They're baked into the final pie.
If you prefer to only put in totally trusted ingredients, that makes sense to me. If you prefer not to put things at risk you don't want to risk, that makes sense to me, and I endorse that behavior.
Circling isn't "separate" from the real world. It tries to be a microcosm of the real world, with a few notable tweaks, such as: You are encouraged to be more mindful of the present moment. There is also a trend towards making things "object" that were "subject." (I.e. revealing the water that you've been swimming in, unawares)
But, humans being humans, we do not always notice. We do not always see the patterns we are stuck in / re-enacting. And most of us are not trustworthy. Thus there is always risk.
Like in re...
I have, and have talked with others who have encountered weaponized NVC and it is indeed super horrible. People get gaslighted, having their own emotional needs used to enforce ideological consistent behavior.
I'd put the disclaimer 'Don't go around handing the keys to your soul to people who don't give a shit about you. Self identified 'utilitarians' might not give a shit about you, so be careful.'
It's somewhat broader than that. It's not necessary for the environment to insist on NVC, as long as it treats NVC as high-status and... I'm going to say "aspirationally normative" and hope that makes sense. See Val's comment here. That is, from my standpoint, an obvious social attack, enabled by NVC being, not necessarily normative, but treated as aligned with a general goal. As long as I accept the framing that NVC is good, I have no recourse but to take the status hit and accept the implicit premise that I need to demonstrate I'm not morally/epistemically/socially inferior.
I do believe that is possible to use NVC ethically. (It is also probably possible to Circle ethically.) But Hagbard's Law still applies; communication is only possible between equals, whether it's ostensibly nonviolent or not. If there is a power struggle in progress, all signals are distorted; all utterances are going to be received as moves in the power game first, communication second.
Meta:
I feel really uneasy with a policy of upvoting comments based on the fact that they offer a dissenting opinion. That rewards contrarianism instead of good epistemics whenever there's a difference.
I think a better policy is, upvote only posts that support good epistemics and good discussion norms; and if you don't see a dissenting opinion appearing, try to form one yourself under the constraints of good epistemics and good discussion norms.
FWIW.
One of the founders of Circling Europe sincerely and apropos-of-nothing thanked me for writing this post earlier this year, which I view as a sign that there were good consequences of me writing this post. My guess is that a bunch of rationalists found their way to Circling, and it was beneficial for people.
I've heard it said that this is one of the more rationalist-friendly summaries of Circling. I don't know it's the best possible such, but I think it's doing OK. I would certainly write it differently now, but shrug.
At this point I've done 1000+ hours of Circling, and this post isn't that far off from what I currently believe about Circling.
I'm less clear on the connection between Circling and 'rationality' because I have lost some touch with what 'rationality' is, and I think the concept 'rationality' is less personally meaningful to me now.
I do believe that Circling has a deep connection to epistemics, belief formation, and belief updating, and can teach us many things about how those things work. Similar to meditation, Circling can guide people to understanding perception and seeing through their own percepti...
I think this
I have lost some touch with what 'rationality' is, and I think the concept 'rationality' is less personally meaningful to me now.
is useful information in itself, in that it suggests that maybe Circling, or some other things that for whatever reason tend to accompany it, may tend to move people who do it away from LW-style "rationality" with time. Whether that's a good thing (because LW-style "rationality" is actually too narrow or something of the kind) or a bad thing (because LW-style "rationality" is still more or less the best that's on offer, and moving away from it almost inevitably means not thinking so clearly) is a separate question, of course.
There was someone on LessWrong a few years ago who would respond to all negative criticism, however damning, by saying brightly,"Thanks for the feedback! I really appreciate hearing other views!" (If you recognise who I'm talking about, please don't mention his name. It was some years ago and he may have moved on.)
The NVC practitioners' responses here seem to me to have a like nature. You could program a chatbot to say things like "I hear that you feel strongly about [insert their words], but it's not clear to me why you feel that way. My preference would be for you to talk about your perspective instead of making factually-structured statements."
Being a chatbot does not necessarily feel like being a chatbot.
Probably obvious from context, but worth saying explicitly: The person in question, despite responding in that positive-sounding manner, never actually seemed to make any substantial change in behaviour in response to the criticism.
Huh? Have you seen Valentine's reply to PDV in this very thread:
I get the impression that there’s something here that matters a lot to you. I can’t yet tell what it is though. It sounds like you feel really unsafe when reading Unreal’s self-reveal, and that you need others to recognize some kind of danger you see in it. If that’s right, then I don’t yet see what the danger you see is, but I’d like to. My preference would be for you to talk about your perspective (“I feel”, “I think”, “When I encounter X, I experience Y”, etc.) instead of making factually-structured statements about “most people”, because I find it easier to understand where you’re coming from if you talk from your perspective.
By the way, Richard's analogy with chatbots is also spot on. The first chatbot (ELIZA) was inspired by Carl Rogers.
I was afraid going into this post (about this post triggering idea inoculation around circling) but I'm a lot more relieved now after reading through to the end. Thanks for writing such a reasonable and even-handed description!
I have embarrassingly strong things to say in favor of circling. It has, with no exaggeration, changed my life (see, this is why I shouldn't have written the first LW post about circling), although I think I've also been lucky to get to work with unusually good facilitators. Re: its relevance to rationality, I think that among many other things it can be a powerful way to find blind spots, although it's also susceptible to many levels of Goodharting.
The details reminds me a lot of hypnosis, with thoughts about thoughts, instead of just thinking things directly.
Breath. Body attention. Meta. Listen to the voice. Respond and recieve. Be open to the update. Body attention. Meta. Listen to the voice. Everyone trancing themselves and everyone else in a fuzzy haze...
Or how about, actually, NO!
How about instead we try to ramp up our critical faculties and talk about models and evidence?
I do not trust casual hypnosis because hypnosis can become "not casual" very fast.
Hypnosis is a power tool and basically it is one of those "things I won't work with" unless it is wartime and my side is losing and it seems highly relevant to victory. And it probably wouldn't be my side I'd be hypnotizing, it would be the bad guys.
"We broke the rules, Harry," she said in a hoarse voice. "We broke the rules."
"I..." Harry swallowed. "I still don't see how, I've been thinking but -"
"I asked if the Transfiguration was safe and you answered me! "
There was a pause...
"Right..." Harry said slowly. "That's probably one of those things they don&#x...
My own experience with circling is much more like hypnosis than it is like the more cognitive/alert state described in this post. On the other hand, this may be because ordinary social charisma has a strong hypnotic effect on me.
My experience with being in circles is that the closer they are to the original “genuine article” (with The extreme end being me being birthday circled by Guy Sengstock, the founder of circling) the more it feels like plain old hypnosis: a rapid induction of an emotional catharsis, tears, gratitude, a sort of suspended or awed and highly receptive state of mind...
My other personal observation of circling is that it makes men hotter, by making them more hypnotic.
I think hypnosis is nothing more than a mental state in which one is more disposed to play along with suggestions. It’s not inherently bad — you may choose to induce a suggestible state in order to learn faster, or to be more spontaneously creative. You can induce it by doing perfectly “normal“ things like looking deep into someone’s eyes and breathing deeply. I don’t think it’s an especially dangerous tool, especially given how common it is and how many people use hypnotic techniques without knowin...
I’ll add that I don’t expect the people most effective at inducing highly suggestible trance states to identify as hypnotists. For example, you enter such a state every time you’re totally absorbed in a movie, and we call the people who caused that effect “filmmakers” and “actors”, not hypnotists.
The cluster of things I’m calling hypnotism involves pretty much any ”guided meditation”, the opening ritual/warmup to most physical classes like martial arts or dance, some kinds of teaching, flirting of the kind where one partner “leads” the other, political rallies, movies, etc. It’s not so universal as to be meaningless, but it’s really really common.
It doesn’t permanently remove one’s agency, but literal hypnotists and cult leaders don’t do that either. Suggestible states are usually temporary and you don’t totally lose your preexisting personality. See Gwern’s research on “brainwashing” being mostly a myth. I think being influenced hypnotically to some extent is common, and as we go through our days we’re affected by a lot of influences, but total mind control is probably impossible.
I would totally buy that circling can have cool epistemic and relational properties beyond the hypnotic effect it has on some people. I’m just reporting that the hypnotic effect does exist.
Yeah, to me it feels like "sure, you can do 'magic' and make me cry and hug and shudder, but that has very little to do with my long-term behavior patterns, it's just a transient effect." It feels like being flipped onto the mat by a skilled martial artist; I'm being a guinea pig for someone to demonstrate a cool trick.
Yeah. With these recent discussions I'm not sure instrumental rationality deserves the name anymore. It's too welcoming of woo. "You are the easiest person to fool" (Feynman).
I mean, I get why instrumental rationality exists. People noticed that epistemic rationality doesn't lead to success in life. But neither does science, look at all these starving postdocs. Neither does art, look at all these starving artists. Clearly we need "instrumental science" that makes you Tony Stark, and "instrumental art" that makes you Ron Hubbard. Or not.
To me, epistemic rationality is a great idea that solves the problem it sets out to solve. "Always try to find the simplest alternative explanation for the same data, compared to your idea." But when people mix it with self-help, it just creeps me out.
Circling is a practice, much like meditation is a practice.
There are many forms of it (again, like there are many forms of meditation). There are even life philosophies built around it. There are lots of intellectual, heady discussions of its theoretical underpinnings, often centered in Ken Wilber's Integral Theory. Subcultures have risen from it. It is mostly practiced in the US and Europe. It attracts lots of New Age-y, hippie, self-help-guru types. My guess is that the median age of practicers is in the 30's. I sometimes refer to practicers of Circling as relationalists (or just Circlers).
In recent years, Circling has caught the eye of rationalists, and that's why this post is showing up here, on LessWrong. I can hopefully direct people here who have the question, "I've heard of this thing called Circling, but... what exactly is it?" And further, people who ask, "Why is this thing so ****ing hard to explain? Just tell me!"
You are probably familiar with the term inferential distance.
Well, my friend Tiffany suggested a similar term to me, experiential distance—the gap in understanding caused by the distance between different sets of experiences. Let's just say that certain Circling experiences can create a big experiential distance, and this gap isn't easily closed using words. Much of the relevant "data" is in the nonverbal, subjective aspects of the experience, and even if I came up with a good metaphor or explanation, it would never close the gap. (This is annoyingly Postmodern, yes?)
[Ho ho~ how I do love poking fun at Postmodernism~]
But! There are still things to say, so I will say them. Just know that this post may not feel like eating a satisfying meal. I suspect it will feel more like licking a Pop-Tart, on the non-frosted side.
Some notes first.
Note #1: I'm not writing this to sell Circling or persuade you that it's good. I recommend using your own sense of curiosity, intuition, and intelligence to guide you. I don't want you to "put away" any of your thinking-feeling parts just to absorb what I'm saying. Rather, try remaining fully in contact with your awareness, your sensations, and your thoughts. (I hope this makes sense as a mental move.)
Note #2: The best introduction to Circling is to actually try it. It's like if I tried to explain watching Toy Story to someone who's never seen a movie. You don't explain movies to people; you just sit them down and have them watch one. So, I encourage you to stop reading at any time you notice yourself wanting to try it. My words will be mere pale ghosts. Pale ghosts, I tell you!
Note #3: This post is written by a rationalist who's done 400+ hours of Circling and has tried all the main styles / schools of Circling.
OK, I will try to explain what a circle is (the activity, not the general practice), but I also want to direct your attention to this handy 100-page PDF I found that attempts to explain everything Circling, if you're willing to skim it. (It is written by a relative amateur to the Circling world and contains many disputed sentences, but it is thorough. Just take it all with a grain of salt.)
So what is a circle?
You start by sitting with other people in a circle. So far, so good!
Group sizes can be as small as 2 and as large as 50+, but 4-12 is perhaps more expected.
There are often explicitly stated agreements or principles. These help create common knowledge about what to expect. The agreements aren't the same across circles or across schools of Circling. But a few common ones include "Honor self", "Own your experience", "Stay with the level of sensation", ...
There is usually at least one facilitator. They are responsible for tracking time and declaring the circle's start and end. Mostly they function as extra-good, extra-mindful participants—they're not "in charge" of the circle.
Then the group "has a conversation." Or maybe more accurately, it experiences what it’s like to be together, and sometimes intra-reports what that experience is like.
[^I'm actually super proud of this description! It's so succinctly what it is!]
Two common types of circles: Organic vs Birthday
Organic circles are more like a loose hivemind, where the group starts with no particular goal or orientation. Sometimes, a focal point emerges; sometimes it doesn't. Each individual has the freedom to point their attention however they will, and each individual can try to direct the group's attention in various ways. What happens when you put a certain selection of molecules into a container? How do they react? Do they bond? Do they stay the fuck away? What is it like to be a molecule in this situation? What is it like to be the molecule across from you?
Birthday circles start with a particular focal point. One person is chosen to be birthday circled, and the facilitator then gently cradles the group's attention towards this person, much like you can guide your attention back to your breath in meditation. And then the group tries to imagine/embody what it's like to be this person and "see through their eyes"—while also noticing what it's like to be themselves trying to do this.
Circling is often called a "relational practice."
It's a practice that's about the question of: What is it like to be me? What is it like to be me, while with another? What is it like for me to try to feel what the other is feeling? How might I express me? How does the other receive me and my expression?
In other words, it's a practice that explores what it means to be a sentient entity, among other sentient entities. And in particular what it means to be a human, among other humans.
If you haven't thought to yourself, "Being sentient is pretty weird; being a human is super weird; being a human around other humans is super-duper crazy weird." Then I suspect you haven't explored this space to its fullest extent. Circling has helped me feel more of the strangeness of this existence.
How is Circling related to rationality?
I notice I feel trepidation and fear as I prepare to discuss this. I'm afraid I won't be able to give you what you want, that you'll become bored or start judging me.
[^This is a Circling move I just made: revealing what I'm feeling and what I'm imagining will happen.]
If this were an actual circle, I could ask you and check if it's true—are you feeling bored? [I invite you to check.]
I felt afraid just now—that fear was borne out of some assumptions about reality I was implicitly making. But without having to know and delineate what the assumptions are, I can check those assumptions by asking you—you who are part of reality and have relevant data.
By asking you while feeling my fear and anticipation, I open up the parts of me that can update, like opening so many eyes that usually stay closed. And depending on how you respond, I can receive the data any number of ways (including having the data bounce off, integrating the data, or disbelieving the data).
So, perhaps one way Circling is related to rationality is that it can:
What does it mean to be open to an update?
If you've experienced a more recent iteration of CFAR's Comfort Zone Exploration class (aka CoZE), it is just that.
There are parts of me that are scared of looking over the fence, where there might be dragons in the territory. (Why is the fence even there? Who knows. It belongs to Chesterton.)
My job, then, is not to shove the scared parts over the fence, or to suggest they shut their eyes and jump over it, or to destroy the fence. I walk next to the fence with my scared part, and I sit with and acknowledge the fear. Then I play around with getting closer to the fence; I play with waving my arms above the fence; I play with peeking over it; I play with touching the fence.
And this whole time, I'm quite aware of the fear; I do not push it down or call it inappropriate or dissociate. I listen to it, and I try to notice all my internal sensations and my awareness. I am fully exposed to new information, like walking into an ice bath slowly with all my senses awake. In my experience, being in an SNS-activated state really primes me for new information in a way that being calm (PSNS activation) does not.
And this is when I am most open to receiving new inputs from the world, where I might be the most affected by the new data.
I can practice playing around with this during Circling, and it can be quite powerful.
What does it mean to receive data with all my faculties available?
This means I'm not mindlessly "accepting" whatever is happening in front of me. All of me is engaged, such that I can notice and call bullshit if that's what's up.
If I'm actually in touch with my body and my felt senses, I can notice all the small niggling parts that are like, "Uhhh" or "Errgh." Often they're nonverbal. Even the tiniest flinches of discomfort or retraction I will use as signals of something, even if I don't really understand what they mean. And I can then also choose to name them out loud, if I want to. And see how the other person reacts to that.
In other words, my epistemic defense system is online and running. It's not taking a break during any of this, nor do I want it to be. If things still manage to slip past, I want to be able to notice it later on and investigate. Sometimes slowing things down helps. My mind will also automatically defend itself—in circles, I've fallen asleep, gotten distracted, failed to parse sentences, become aggressively confused or bored, among other things. What's cool is being able to notice all this as it's happening.
However, if I'm not in touch with my body—if I'm dissociated, if I don't normally feel my body/emotions, if I'm overwhelmed, if I'm solely in my thoughts—then that is a skill area I'd want to work on first. How to learn to stay aware of myself and my felt-sense body, even when I'm uncomfortable or my nervous system is activated. Circling can also train this, similar to Focusing.
The more I train this skill, the more I'll be able to engage with the universe. Rather than avoid the parts of it I don't like or don't want to acknowledge or don't want to look at.
I suspect some people might not even realize what they're missing out on here. People who've lived their entire lives without much of an "emotional library" or without understanding that their body is giving them all kinds of data. Usually these people don't go looking for the "missing thing" until some major problems crop up in their lives that they can't explain.
Circling as a rationality training ground
Circling can be a turbocharged training ground for a variety of rationality skills, including:
I've also found it to be powerful in combination with:
After using one of the above techniques to find a core assumption, I can use Circling to test out its validity. (My core assumptions often have something to do with other people, "Nobody can understand me, and even if they could, they wouldn't want to.") I can sometimes feel those assumptions being challenged during a circle.
So, if I try being in any ole circle, will I get all of the above?
Probably not.
Circles are high-variance. (The parameters of each circle matter a lot. Like who's in it, who's facilitating, what school of Circling is it based on, what are the lighting conditions, etc.)
I've circled about a hundred times by now, and a lot of those were in 3-day chunks. I guess multi-day immersions are a pretty good way to really try it out, so maybe try that and see? They reduce the variance in some dimensions.
What are some pitfalls of Circling?
1) You might become a "connection junkie".
Circling is (in its final form) a truth-seeking practice. IMO. But a lot of folks flock to it as a way to feel connected to other people.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact I suspect human-to-human contact is something many of us are seriously lacking, possibly starving for. It might be good for us to get more of this in our lives.
That said, there can be such a thing as "too much of a good thing."
2) You might obtain false beliefs.
I think this is always a risk, for humans, in life. But Circling does have a way of making things more salient than usual, and if some of those super-salient things lead you to believing, somehow, the "wrong" things, then maybe that's more of a problem.
I think this isn't actually a huge problem, as long as one has a good meta- or meta-meta-process for arriving eventually at true beliefs. (See the rest of this website for more!)
I also think this is mitigated by exposing yourself to a wide range of data. Like, consciously avoid being in a bubble. Join multiple cult-ures [sic].
3) Circles can be bad / harmful.
IMO, there is a qualitative difference between good and bad circles.
Concretely, the good facilitators understand the nuances of mental health and have done at least some research on therapy modalities. Circling isn't therapy, but psychological stuff comes up a fair amount. And if you vulnerably open up in a situation where they're not actually equipped to navigate your mental health issues, that could be quite bad indeed.
A good facilitator will also not force you to open up or try to get you to be vulnerable (this goes against Circling's principles). Instead they will tune into your nervous system and try to tell when you're feeling stressed or anxious or frozen and will probably reflect this back at you to check. Circling is not about "getting somewhere" or "healing you" or "solving a problem." So ... if you encounter a circle where that seems to be what's happening, try saying something out loud like "I have a story we're trying to fix something."
Good facilitation often costs money—there's a correlation, anyway. I wouldn't assume the facilitation will be good just because it costs money, but it's an easy signpost.
Final thoughts
It's not like Circling has taken over the world or anything. So the same question posed to rationality has to be posed to it, Given it hasn't, why do you think it’s real?
And like with rationality, for me the answer is kind of like, I dunno because my inside view says it is?
/licks a Pop-Tart