Last week I gave an invited talk as part of the Integral Altruism speaker series. A recording of the talk and the extensive Q&A is up on YouTube; it’s close to 90 minutes long. If you’d rather read than watch/listen, I had Claude convert the transcript into something more like essay form.
In the talk I try to cover roughly how the postrationalist scene got started and how it later merged with other scenes thinking along similar lines but with different intellectual starting points. If it contains any errors (because you were there and remember it differently than me!), please let me know in the comments.
Thanks for having me. This is exciting to get to talk about this stuff. I occasionally grab people at conferences and they’ll ask me questions about this or we’ll just get on this topic. It’s kind of fun because there’s a lot of interesting history here in the community and it’s not very well documented. Having opportunities to capture this stuff is helpful, especially now that we’re further on and there’s actually some history to tell, whereas for a long time there wasn’t because it was all just sort of new and fresh.
Jack said I want to talk about the history of the postrationalist movement as I think of it. Maybe before I jump into that, it’s worth saying a little bit about what I mean by this postrationalist movement, just so we’re defining terms a little bit here.
It’s obviously defined relative to the rationalist movement, by which I specifically really mean the movement that centered around the community that grew out of the Sequences that Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote, and then grew into this community around LessWrong and CFAR and other related organizations. It also developed in person in Berkeley, where we had an in-person rationalist community.
You’ll also notice that I’m always very careful to use the word “rationalist” as opposed to “rationalism.” This is mostly to help make a clear distinction between this movement and the only tangentially related philosophical position that happens to inconveniently share roughly the same name.
The postrationalist community really grows out of this. We have a rationalist community and then there’s a set of us that kind of want to, in integral theory talk, transcend and extend this thing that rationality is.
Getting to the history of it, it really starts in my mind in Berkeley, around 2014-2015. I’m a little fuzzy on exactly when this was, but I remember it really all coalesced at this house party. The social scene in Berkeley really evolved around these house parties. One of the group houses where we all live decides to throw a party for whatever reason. There could be no reason, there could be a theme or not. Then 50, 100 people show up, cram into a single house, and we talk about stuff. There’s dancing, there’s drinking, there’s philosophizing. It’s generally a fun time.
At one of these parties there was this extended conversation that started between myself, Malcolm Ocean, and Ethan Ashkii. If you don’t know who the two of them are, that’s fine. Malcolm is a little more public online, so you may be more familiar with him. He and Ethan had been getting into Robert Kegan’s work and they had been reading it, so we were having a conversation about it. It went well into the night. I think that particular house party, Ethan and I stayed up till sunrise talking about this stuff after Malcolm disappeared at some point.
From there we formed something like a philosophical circle. We had nominally a book club—that was the official structure of it—but it was mostly just an excuse to get together every two to three weeks and talk about whatever we had been reading in this space of how do we be rationalist but actually win.
I think this is the seed of it. We had looked around and were frustrated with the fact that we had all these friends that were going through CFAR, which offers these rationality training seminars to try to teach people how to be better at applying the lessons of rationality. We had lots of friends that had done these things, but all of our friends still kind of sucked. Not that they were bad people, but they were not actually succeeding at making their lives better. They were not actually achieving their goals in the ways that we would hope that they would be able to.
So there was something around: what’s missing? What is the problem? I think we didn’t quite know how to have the whole answer at this point, but I think the direction we were going in was what’s missing is the embodied piece, the integration of this into life and how to actually do this. It’s not enough to be able to sit down carefully, reason this stuff out, and then have a theory. You have to actually live it. The actual process of living it is quite a bit more complex and nuanced than sitting down and doing some calculations on paper or writing a blog post about how you’re going to solve the world’s problems. Actually solving the world’s problems is quite a bit harder than writing about it.
Kind of obvious when I say it that way, but the rationalist community has this real bias towards the idea that hey, maybe if we apply intellect and smarts hard enough and better than people have done in the past we can achieve better. It’s not a terrible intuition. This does work sometimes. There are lots of problems that are lowhanging fruit that can basically be solved by just thinking about it harder because nobody had bothered to think about it very hard before. But I think they make the mistake of overgeneralizing from those examples and thinking that this is a general strategy that will work all the time, not a strategy that works in isolated cases where people have not tried hard enough.
Back onto the story here. We did have this postrat circle, made up of myself, Malcolm, Ethan, and several other people that sort of came in and out. Two other people that I think are important are Mike Plotz and Michael Valentine Smith. You maybe know him, maybe you don’t. He was one of the instructors at CFAR, sort of part of the early in-person rationalist community as it was getting formed around 2011 or so. He would later link up with us more directly, but at that time he was still more heavily invested in the CFAR world and trying to make the rationalist project itself into something.
At this reading group that we had, there were a few books that were pretty important that we read. These are sort of the foundational texts of how we went from being steeped in this rationalist community to figuring out what was missing.
The important books were:
The Inner Game of Tennis - I think that’s the first book we read. If you’ve not read it, on the surface it is a sports book about how to get better at tennis, written in the ‘70s when tennis had skyrocketed in popularity. But it’s actually secretly a book about Zen. By the end of the book, the secret is mostly out. I can’t remember if he’s very explicit about bringing in all this Buddhist terminology stuff, but that’s essentially what the book is by the end of it.
Impro by Keith Johnstone - A book about improvisational theater, but it contains some really important concepts that turned out to be essential for what I think of as the core of postrationalist thought. Maybe one of the most important chapters in this book are about mask work and trance states. Mask work is essentially when you do improvisational theater but it’s based in shamanic rituals that people have been doing for thousands or tens of thousands of years, where people literally put on a mask and then become the character, inhabit the character that the mask represents. This points to some interesting aspects of human psychology that were really important for us to explore.
The other part that’s connected with mask work is trance states. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here around what we can think of as trance states. I think we can take a fairly expansive view of trance states—they can be these mystical things but they can also look like being hyperfocused on the work you’re doing in front of you. They don’t have to be this strange mystical thing, they could just be being hyperfocused on writing something or writing some code or drawing a picture. Even driving, you can get into trance state while driving. It offered a window into some interesting aspects of human psychology that turned out to be really important for us to get into.
Robert Kegan’s work - We read The Evolving Self and In Over Our Heads. I think maybe he had a couple of books out at that time that he had written with Lisa Lahey, and then I think a couple more books have come out since then that they’ve produced. We also spent quite a bit of time with the manual for doing what’s called the subject-object interview, which is a way of essentially assessing someone’s cognitive developmental level in Kegan’s system. We spent a bunch of time with that manual, interviewing each other and trying to figure this stuff out. That was kind of fun. Really getting inside this theory before, I think, the better explainers that exist online now. Those things didn’t exist—we had to read the source material to produce the explainers.
David Chapman’s Meaningness book - I’m sure many of you have engaged with that. It was in a much rougher state 15 years ago or whatever the timeline is here. David does a great job of pulling together a lot of disparate threads, so that was really useful for us to read and provided a lot of stuff for us to talk about and think about.
I also want to throw in here that we were also reading Ribbonfarm. If you’re not familiar with the Ribbonfarm blog, this was Venkatesh Rao on Twitter and Sarah Perry. There were a couple other people on Ribbonfarm, but they were the two key folks here. Their writing was definitely quite interesting to us. It turned out to be important because it actually linked us up with a larger movement of folks that were not in the space of the rationalist movement but were very interested in similar ideas and had come to them from a different direction—maybe not quite the reified rationality of the rationalist movement but very much from a modernist rationalist perspective and then looking to figure out what’s beyond that.
I will say that at some point further down the line someone read Ken Wilber and pointed us in that direction. I think Matt Goldstein, I don’t know if any of you are familiar with him, maybe introduced us to Ken Wilber and integral theory. That was kind of interesting. But by the time we read Wilber, this is maybe 2017, 2018, I think we had kind of already worked out all these ideas for ourselves. We were like, “Yeah, sure, this guy’s basically correct. He’s offering an alternative explanation of this stuff to the way that we are,” but definitely thinking along the same lines.
I know I have said a lot of stuff, so this is maybe a good stopping point to open it up for questions if you have any before I continue the story.
Q: How do you think about the relationship between postrationality and David Chapman’s metarationality?
I think these are basically the same thing. We have different words for them basically for historical reasons. The reason I’ve talked about postrationality is that we weren’t actually originally thinking of ourselves as postrationalists. I think I’m the person that started using this terminology within the group and got us calling ourselves this.
It was largely because I had been thinking a lot about the modernist-postmodernist transition. I was reading a lot more philosophy than everyone else was and I was really looking at what happened in this process in the early 20th century where we go from what are the seeds of modernism in philosophical thought that developed over the 17th and 18th and through the 19th century, and then how we got to postmodernism, which really developed out of the seeds around 1900 or so, late 1880s, 1890s, in reaction to industrialization. It pushed philosophers to really grapple with the loss of humanity within the modernist project. Lots of people didn’t really catch up to this until later. I think as a whole, society didn’t fully grapple with this until maybe the post-World War II era. But philosophers were dealing with it.
Also there’s this strain where in the 19th century German philosophers were bringing in a lot of Buddhist thought into the European philosophical tradition. This also proved to be a really important mixing in order to create what would become the postmodernist philosophical project.
So I was getting very into this. I was reading Husserl, I was reading Heidegger and then Sartre, and seeing like, okay, there’s something that they got right that I felt like they had some understanding of things. But then also looking at how the postmodernist project fell apart and crumbled in on itself with a bunch of what I would now call grifters—people that weren’t really part of this.
I think this is maybe an interesting thing to bring up and gets me back onto the story: there’s this pattern where once you have some sort of way of understanding the world and then you transcend it, this can also look like the thing before you had that.
Maybe to be more concrete about this: the modernist project offered some improvements over what we were doing in the premodernist world. And then the postmodernist project tries to take all the good stuff out of modernism and then do something more, make it better. But it importantly is built on top of the scaffolding of modernism and can’t exist without this modernist project underneath it.
But if you are coming to this fresh and you are some sort of premodernist, then postmodernism suddenly gives you cover to do your stuff and maybe pass yourself off as a postmodernist even though in fact you don’t understand modernism well enough to be a postmodernist. And then this whole thing just sort of collapsed.
I think we see the same problem with rationality. We have this postrationalist or metarationalist movement, and it is really built on top of this foundation of rationality and says hey, these are a lot of really useful tools but they’re not enough on their own. We need to integrate them into this larger system—or in fact maybe meta-system, because it’s not really a single system, it’s much more nebulous than that.
But it unfortunately gives a lot of cover for if someone wants to be pre-rationalist to sneak their way in, because to the outside person that doesn’t have enough knowledge of all of this, it’s hard to distinguish between the postrationalist saying “Oh yeah, you got to integrate your understanding into your body” and a pre-rationalist perspective of being anti-intellectual.
I think this is a consistently tricky problem. And actually this gets me back onto the story. I almost very quickly regretted ever coining the word postrationality. I think maybe other people feel perhaps the same way about metarationality because it gives this cover.
As things continued to evolve, the in-person scene that we had just kind of fell apart. Over time people just moved on with their lives. We had kind of explored these ideas and they were no longer the pressing things for us because we had figured it out.
I was writing some things about it. Malcolm did. This is where Val links up with this—Michael Valentine Smith writes a number of things about it. We’re also now linked up with this broader movement that’s happening around Ribbonfarm. It’s now really on Twitter. We see the seeds of what eventually become Metatopia start to develop really out of this Ribbonfarm-adjacent Twitter community.
Then it grows from there, but we’re now in a place today where the community is fragmented, splintered. It’s not really one thing anymore. It’s sort of too big to be one thing, so it can’t keep coherence. But I think also there’s this—what I want to say—I was sort of hinting at, there’s this grifter problem. Maybe that’s ungenerous. If we go to David’s model, there’s the geeks, sociopaths, and mops model, which I don’t know if you’re familiar with, but I will assume that you are for the sake of argument here. Essentially the mops and sociopaths showed up and kind of diluted the community in some ways.
However, because you are all willing to jump on a call here, I’m just going to assume that you’re all in the geek category and you’re all the true believers of metarationality/postrationality, so don’t worry, you’re all safe.
I think that’s kind of where we are today. It’s not really one thing. I think where I see the postrationalist movement, if it’s even a separate movement really, going from here is trying to thread some tricky path of how do we build a community that is supportive of helping people move through multiple stages of development.
I think this is quite interesting to people that are interested in integral theory and other things. There’s this challenge I’ve already hinted at where in some sense people need to move through a modernist rationalist phase in their life before they can properly get to a postrationalist, metarationality, postmodernist type phase and way of understanding. Without going through that, you can’t actually get to that place, or so I would claim.
I think this is quite tricky. It’s very easy to point people at one thing and say “Okay, here’s the example, just be like this.” It’s much harder to be like, “Actually there are multiple phases to this. You are going to have to spend time being in the not maximally correct phase of this thing because it is actually a developmental stage through which you have to move in order to get to the final one”—or if we even want to call it the final one. I think that’s maybe not even the right terminology here.
I think that is quite tricky to figure out and it is persistently the challenge for this type of community to figure out how to navigate that and support the development of folks through stuff.
And of course traditionally I think the way that we’ve done this is through things that look like organized religion. This is why I’m quite big on—as Jack mentioned, I practice Zen—and I think one of the things that’s really nice about Zen and some other forms of Buddhism is that they really create a space where this kind of development can happen and it is managed in a way through community structures and through your relationship with a teacher that help guide you through this without it becoming... yeah, without the risk to think that “Oh, I’ve totally got it, I’ve totally already figured it out” before maybe at least within the tradition we’re willing to say okay yeah, you figured it out.
So that’s I think maybe that’s all I really had to say. I’ll leave it there and we can open up for questions.
Q: So I guess my first question for you Gordon is something about making sure I can distinguish postrationality from rationality. So in your view, what’s the defining feature of postrationality relative to traditional rationality? The second part is, one objection that I’ve heard about postrationality is, if rationality can be described like Eliezer does as the art of winning, then anything that works is rationality by definition. So is postrationality just rationality under a different label? And the last part here is just for you personally, what has postrationality actually changed about how you make decisions and take action? What do you do differently now than when you were just a rationalist?
Yeah, okay. What was the first part of the question again?
The defining feature of postrationality versus traditional rationality.
I would say the defining thing is maybe just this word integration. There’s a lot of complexity hidden behind saying that, but that’s fundamentally what I see as the difference.
Maybe this gets into the second part of the question. I think you’re right, this is a very common objection. I have responded to this objection so many times from people. They’re like, “Why do we even need this? Rationality is supposed to be this all-encompassing thing that if it’s the way that works then it is rationality.” And I’m like, okay, yes, I think there is this version of it that you can believe.
But the thing that is maybe written into the Sequences or the thing that people believe is the true rationality, that’s just not the on-the-ground reality of what people are doing. There is this vibe that rationalists have, and I think it is actually based in a bunch of metaphysical assumptions that rationalists tend to make. I’m not saying that these assumptions are not useful in some way and that they don’t produce good, accurate world models. I think that is definitely true—they do work for that.
But they have these assumptions that when taken to their extremes lead them to believe that essentially they can pull off something like the traditional rationalism philosophical project. I often describe it as: your typical rationalist is secretly a logical positivist. If you don’t know what that means, logical positivism was this movement in philosophy mostly in the first half of the 20th century, but it does actually stretch back a bit further. It really coalesced in the early 20th century where people really went hard on trying to make this work.
The idea is more or less that we can positively construct an accurate explanation of the world from first principles. So you could provide a logical accounting in mathematical terms of the entirety of the universe. The problem is that this just doesn’t work. Now, people figured this out about the middle of the 20th century, in the 50s and 60s. Within the tradition of analytical philosophy, logical positivism is effectively dead. There are definitely people that still harbor sympathies towards it, but there are clear definitive arguments that prevent this sort of line of reasoning from working.
So from a technical perspective it does not work. That does not mean that lots of people don’t have this intuition that it should be true—that if we just think hard enough and do enough math and have an accurate enough world model, then actually the map will fully describe the territory. In fact, I don’t even need the territory because I have the map.
As I say this, hopefully this all sounds like, okay yeah, obviously this is not right. But the problem is that the assumptions that power this worldview are often deeply baked in for people and it can be hard for them to notice it. So sometimes my arguments have to veer into the world of psychologizing people because I think that this is what’s going on.
That’s kind of why I think we need something like postrationality or metarationality, because people have these assumptions that something like logical positivism is possible. We need really some way to get people through that. Now not everyone has this. Some people just figure this out for themselves and never get caught in these traps. But lots of people will explicitly say, “Yeah, of course logical positivism is not correct, that’s not what I’m trying to do,” and then I think they immediately turn around and act as if it were true.
That’s where I really see the need here. And then what was the third part of your question?
What has postrationality actually changed about how you make decisions or take action? What do you do differently now than you did a decade or two ago when you were just a rationalist?
Sure. Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I’d have to go back quite a bit further. And this gets a little bit complicated, because for myself, I kind of can’t answer this question. That’s maybe what I’ll say, but I’ll give you an answer anyway.
The reason I sort of can’t answer this question is because postrationality didn’t exist for me—I helped co-create it. But the things that would become postrationality, or the cornerstones of it... for me it was some combination of, it’s inextricably tied up with the process of what in Buddhist terms we would maybe call enlightenment or awakening and the path to that process.
And maybe we don’t want to totally go down that route here, but it basically freed me from, I would say it was helpful for freeing me from my ontology, from the map of the world that I had and the narratives, the stories I was telling myself about how the world was, so I could actually engage directly with the world as it is.
This is kind of tricky because early on there’s a point where you actually can’t see the story. You can’t see that all of your knowledge is being interpreted through this layer—at least for myself, I couldn’t see that all this knowledge was being interpreted through this layer. I could not see the layer. It’s like the fish swimming in the ocean—I couldn’t see the water.
So it was very helpful in the sense of helping me through that process of breaking out of that, of being trapped by my own beliefs. And really living in a place today where I don’t know, I kind of just feel free to act and think and do things. I’m not so caught up in the idea of them.
I feel like that’s underselling it, but I feel like that’s the only way I can do it without giving a whole other talk about enlightenment and all that kind of stuff. So we’ll leave it there unless people have more follow-up questions about it.
And it’s funny that you were mentioning the logical positivism and the rationalism stuff because I was just reading recently Popper’s takedown of empiricism, rationalism, logic. That resonated quite strongly with me, your answer there. So thank you for that.
Q: Can I ask two things? First of all, you said the main motivation was to be more effective at winning. Did you actually try to measure how that was working out? And the other thing was, the Gemini language model told me postrationality has made some criticisms of the effective altruism movement. Maybe you could say a bit about that.
Sure. What was the first part of the question again?
Did you try to measure your winning?
Yeah, not explicitly. I haven’t quantified it. I haven’t put together a spreadsheet of how much am I winning at my life. However, what I would say is that having gone down this path, at least for myself I can say this is true—my life is dramatically better than it was 15 years ago. Was it improved in ways thanks to rationalist stuff? Yes, of course. Was it improved even more by what I am lumping into the postrationalist project? 100%.
There are a lot of things about life that I think aren’t really solved by doing math about it. There were things that were, you know, I had a lot of what I would call psychological shadow—things like codependent behavior, low self-esteem issues. I was just kind of depressed and anxious, just a lot of this stuff. And there was no amount of sitting down and thinking about it that could fix it. In fact, thinking about it arguably made it worse.
The things that I actually needed to do were much more like just getting out there and having experiences that would help me work through these issues and get experiences that would show me that, hey actually, there’s a different way to live and do things. But I attribute a lot of that to what I am considering this postrationalist strain of thought because it really says, you know, in modern terms we would say “go touch grass.” That’s fundamentally also one of the core ideas of this postrationalist project, whereas I think what I often see rationalists doing, and what certainly I was doing before moving in this direction, was: why do I need to touch grass? I can just think about grass real hard, and that’s basically just as good as touching it, so I don’t actually have to touch it.
So no real actual measurement here of stuff, but if I go back 15 years ago, average day of my life was maybe, if I ranked it on a scale out of 10, I would say that most days of my life were a three or a four out of 10. And now my life is nine out of 10 every day.
Now, I’ll be totally honest that a bunch of this is because of Buddhist-related things. But I wouldn’t have done any of that stuff if it wasn’t bundled into this postrationalist project. So this is as much a pitch for postrationality as it is for Buddhism. Hopefully that answers your question some, but I know it’s not a full accounting really.
The other part of your question in terms of criticisms of EA—I think I know that I myself have a lot of criticisms of EA, and I think maybe other postrationalists do, mostly because many EAs are utilitarians. And there’s a lot of stuff about utilitarianism that is I think just wrong. I think that’s as simple as that. I don’t even have to engage on a philosophical level. I think that is just wrong in terms of actually producing the best outcomes, and it’s because utilitarianism has this sort of baked-in idea of utility function but it doesn’t really address where utility comes from. This is not a fully answered question within the framework.
I think consequentialist thinking is quite important. It’s important to think through what will be the effects of my actions, how does cause and effect work. But I think many of the weird edge case things where EA goes off in strange directions are ignoring the reality of what humans care about.
The total scope insensitivity, for example, of many EA folks is I think kind of a mistake. It’s not totally unreasonable, but it is not practically reasonable from the way that we live our lives today. Maybe one day we will have enough abundance that being less scope sensitive will be possible. I think we see a trend over time that greater abundance allows lower scope sensitivity, greater expansion of the moral circle. I think that’s great, I think we should do more of that. But I often think it’s a mistake to immediately jump to “Okay, I have to cause zero harm today.” This causes people a lot of psychological distress and difficulty and I think pushes people in weird directions. I wish people wouldn’t do quite so much of it.
So that’s kind of my critique there. Hopefully that’s helpful. I’m sure other people have critiqued other things that I’m just not familiar with.
Q: You mentioned that the process of enlightenment for you was seeing the layer through which you interpreted reality. Do you think enlightenment is a one-time process where you see through the one layer, or is it a continual process where you discover layer after layer? I guess in traditional Buddhist terms, Gordon, obviously this is sort of the whole question of sudden versus gradual enlightenment.
Yeah, happy to talk about this. I think that it’s both. I don’t think there’s actually an either-or here. I think there is a critical insight that happens. I will assume that most of you are up to speed on what I’m about to talk about, but if you’re not, apologies.
So there is a critical insight that comes at the end of the path to what I would call enlightenment. And this is the insight that there is no separation between self and other, or at least that’s how I would phrase it. Other people might phrase it other ways. This is this final critical insight. Some people might choose to phrase it slightly differently or would say that there is a slightly different but related insight that you have to have after this. But we can elide those details and say that there’s that.
Okay, so you have this insight. Great. Your mental processes are totally reformed by this because your fundamental understanding of the world is now changed forever. And in fact, this doesn’t mean that you’re somehow permanently enlightened forever. You just crossed this first barrier of “Hey, you finally cleared out all of the croft that was separating you from being able to engage with reality directly.” But this doesn’t mean that you suddenly start engaging with reality directly all the time. There’s still plenty of opportunity to get lost in your own thoughts, to forget what’s going on.
I’m in fact doing some of it right now. I’m very focused on talking to all of you, which means that there’s a bunch of stuff that I am not paying attention to that I am just pushing out of my awareness, because I only have so much capacity to engage. I can only be so focused on so much stuff at once.
And it is really this continual process. There are all these, you know, I talk about them as habits of mind—I think other people talk about them other ways. But there’s just all this stuff lying around. So in some ways I kind of try to avoid even using the word enlightenment because, although it’s this thing that people know about, there’s really just this continual process of liberating yourself from your own confusions that you’re constantly heaping on yourself just through the process of living life.
The only way not to continue to keep heaping them on is to not live a lay life. You have to go live in the monastery and just sit all the time. That’s an option, you can do that. But there’s very few people that can live a continually liberated life and continue to free themselves in every moment from this stuff.
The reality for most of us is, okay, enlightenment is you cross this barrier, now you don’t have this fundamental confusion anymore, but you still got to wake up every day and commit yourself to the practice of staying awake.
Just a sort of brief follow-on question there just to make sure I’m understanding what you’re pointing out with the terminology that you’re using Gordon. Are you talking about sort of stream entry or like what Michael Valentine’s written about as kensho, like that initial glimpse? Are you talking about more of the final, you know, dying the great death maybe in your tradition?
Dying the great death. Yeah, I’m talking about dying the great death. Right, where the fundamental separate sense of separation never returns. Yeah. Okay.
Right, the process from stream entry until you die the great death, that is the path as we sometimes talk about it, and it is very important. But I’m in fact talking about what happens after that great death.
Q: I have a very practical question actually. If suppose I were to shop for a good Zen teacher, what can you recommend?
Yeah, totally. And you said you’re in Switzerland, right? Yeah, Zurich-based.
Yeah, okay, great. I know there’s a lot of folks in Europe, although I feel like there’s not as much... You know, I mostly know the Zen world. There is not zero Zen in Europe, but I know that there’s a lot more of other traditions in Europe than Zen.
My general advice is to find someone who you feel has their life together. That’s maybe the number one thing. There are a lot of meditation teachers out there and they maybe tell you that “Oh yeah, you do this stuff and you’re right,” but then their actual own life is a mess. This person definitely has some understanding, but I would be very nervous about taking them as my teacher and being in that kind of relationship with them.
This is perhaps very Zen of me, but I think that lineage is very important. It’s very important in the sense that their teacher has essentially certified this person understands and is emotionally mature enough to teach. I think that’s very important. I know that not every tradition has this or feels the same way about it, so take it with a grain of salt, but I think that’s quite important.
I’m not going to say that it’s perfect. I think no human institution is. And I think this is why it’s quite tricky to find a teacher, because if you work closely with a teacher on this process of waking up, you’re quite vulnerable. You have to be very vulnerable with them, very open with them in order to make progress. They have to be very vulnerable with you, and that is, as any time you’re in that type of relationship, it is possible to abuse it.
So I think it’s very important to be careful here. Pay attention to your intuitions. If you feel like, hey, this is not the right person, then they’re probably not the right person. If you get nervous about something, pay attention to that, notice that.
And otherwise it’s just like, go and try. That’s I think the best thing to do. If you haven’t found a teacher that you like yet or a sangha that you’re excited to be part of, just keep searching. There are tons of them out there. You will find the right thing for you, you just have to look.
Q: I have two questions. The first is, do you have a sense of how much your writings have helped people moving from a rationalist to a postrationalist stage? And the second question is, how would the world look different if the average person was a postrationalist?
Sure. On the first question, I don’t know. It’s kind of hard for me to figure this out. I know of a handful of people who have told me that they read things I wrote and it was very important for them. It was critical to their thinking and the development of their thinking. So I know that. But we’re talking like five, six, seven people here. So maybe there’s more people, I don’t know. I’d kind of like to think that there are, but although I’d also say that I try not to have too many delusions of grandeur here.
The reality is that if someone is, let’s say a rationalist today and they get interested in postrationality, it was actually going to be the culmination of reading things written by dozens of people that will be helpful to them along the way. No one person’s writing is really going to be sufficient, I think. I know we all want to be that person—or maybe not everybody wants to be this person, but as a writer it’s very easy to fall into this idea of “I will write the thing that wakes the world up” or something like that.
And occasionally there are people that pull this off. I think Eliezer Yudkowsky is maybe arguably a person like this. He has written a bunch of stuff that pretty consistently there are people that read it and their life is radically transformed by having read his writing. And I know because I meet them all the time—they’re many of my friends.
So this is, I won’t say it’s impossible, but I think the reality is that it’s a lot of stuff. And in many ways, even someone like Eliezer, it works because he’s building on a foundation that people are coming in with that actually comes from a bunch of different people. He is tying together a lot of sources, things that were written by other people, reusing examples, arguments that they had worked out, and then he’s taken them and made his own.
So maybe one day we will get the postrationalist version of Eliezer. Someone will do this. You could maybe argue that David Chapman is this, but I don’t think it’s quite there yet. I don’t think it’s 100% working. The machine isn’t working quite that way.
And then in terms of what was the second part of the question?
How would the world be different if the average person was a postrationalist?
Oh yeah. I like to think it’d be a lot nicer and kinder and more compassionate, and people would just be more reasonable about things. Yeah, I think maybe in my mind people would be a lot more humble.
I was talking to someone about this not long ago. They asked me a somewhat related question. They were like, “What’s the thing you want everyone to come away from reading your book? How do you want them to be different afterwards?” And I thought about it and I realized that the answer was I want them to have more epistemic humility coming out of it—deep epistemic humility, not the surface level epistemic humility that I think a lot of rationalists have, which is like “Oh yeah, I’m going to put probabilities on things and I’ll be nominally uncertain about stuff.”
I mean no, actually being very deeply uncertain that you even know what the hell is going on, that you are even correct, that you’re a person. Or that, you know, here I am drinking a cup of water out of my thermos. Is this a thermos? Am I even right about this? I’m not saying that you need to spend all your time navel-gazing and going down some very deep path of introspection here and being, you know, taking you in the direction of psychosis or something.
But that there’s a huge amount of scaffolding that the entire way we interact with the world in every moment is built on top of, and people just take that for granted. And I think that being able to see that gives you this kind of very deep humility that everything that I think I know is extremely contingent. And that in some fundamental sense, I don’t know. I don’t really know anything.
And I think this is sort of the end stage of the postrationalist project—something like “I don’t know anything, but I’m going to get on with my life anyway.” And I like to imagine that this would make the world a much more functional place.
But I don’t know. I don’t know if the average person being a postrationalist is in the cards, but it could be interesting to see if it ever played out.
Q: So you talked briefly about effective altruism and you talked about utilitarianism. I’m wondering, this kind of fundamental uncertainty about the world, if you have any takes on how that impacts the effective altruism project and in general our attempts at doing good in the world.
Yeah, totally. One of my favorite quotes that I want to say that maybe this is attributed to Anna Salamon, but I could be wrong about my memory here of who I originally heard this from, was that we’re great at figuring out the size of the impact of our work. We’re really bad at figuring out the sign though.
So it’s easy to figure out that yeah, we’re doing something, it’s having some sort of impact on people. The question is always, is this actually good or bad? And I think this is quite tricky.
Maybe just to pick on an example, cash transfers are maybe a great example here where it’s really hard to work out what are all the second and third and fourth degree order effects of cash transfers. On the surface it seems great—people are poor, let’s give them money so they can buy things and not be poor and bootstrap themselves out of poverty. Sounds great.
But there are a lot of interesting second, third order effects of implementing these sort of policies that are really hard for us to figure out. We might not know the answer for decades. If we run a cash transfer program for a long time and maybe the ultimate outcome is actually bad... I’m not saying that it is, I am saying that I hold a decent amount of uncertainty about this. And I feel this way about a lot of stuff.
There are some things that I think are a little bit more clear are straightforwardly good, although even there I’m like, I don’t know. For example, I think work on animal welfare mostly seems good in terms of making the conditions for animals in farming settings, especially factory farming settings, better seems straightforwardly good. But even there I hold some uncertainty about, well, I don’t know, what are the long-term consequences of this? Does it make farming more palatable to people and then actually we increase meat consumption because it’s less bad what we’re doing? I don’t know, it’s sort of hard to game this all out.
So that’s where I sort of say that we sort of just don’t know.
Q: So you’ve written about epistemic circularity and the problem of the criterion, right? So if we can’t escape circular justification, how does that inform how we approach these questions about what’s good and how to do good? Like how do we know at the end if we can’t escape that epistemic circularity?
Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, I should be clear that the epistemic circularity that I’ve written about—and this is my book plug: you should definitely read my book. It’s on the web. It’s fundamentaluncertainty.com. You can find the book there. It’s currently in a sort of pre-print phase. There’s a draft of it that’s available and then I’m working on the final revision of it now for publication.
But yeah, essentially this is a problem that exists within our system of reasoning. It doesn’t actually exist in the world. It only exists because we’ve developed a system of reasoning that helps us model the world, but it is an artifact of that system of reasoning. And if we just don’t engage with that, this problem kind of disappears.
Now, this is not an argument for disengaging from all rational thought. And I think this is the thing that we have to be careful about to not lose sight of. It is instead saying that we can use rational thought to help us work out details of stuff. It is a very useful tool, but ultimately stuff is founded in our experience. And that is where all of our beliefs and everything come from.
So it means that if I’m looking for myself for what is important, it ultimately comes down to: what do I care about? What do other people care about?
I think that I’m very aligned with—maybe I’ll get in trouble for saying these words for reasons—but I feel like at least narrowly in this capacity I’m very aligned with Heidegger that care is the fundamental thing. This is the central thing at the heart of everything that is a part of our lives, of the way we understand it. Everything is built out of this thing that we want to, that it makes sense to call care. Of what is it that we’re motivated by? What is it that we are concerned with? What is it we are trying to achieve? And it all really flows downstream from there.
I don’t know how much of an answer that is, but that’s my sort of abstract answer to the question.
No, that makes sense. And it kind of reminds me of what you were saying earlier about within the utilitarian framework, the utility itself is not sort of examined or explained—it’s got to come from outside the frame in a certain sense.
Right, yeah.
Q: I do have one more question. I’ve read your sequence of posts on Zen and rationality, but I just kind of wanted to hear some more of your thoughts on how you see postrationality in Zen, or how is... I guess maybe I was thinking, how has your Zen practice informed your perspective on sort of questions of postrationality? Maybe that’s sort of backwards because from what the history you gave it seemed more like maybe your examinations of postrationality sort of led you into Zen practice to begin with. But I’m just curious to hear a little bit more about how you see Zen or maybe Buddhism in general or contemplative practice even more generally fitting in with these sorts of things.
Yeah, totally. Yeah, I would say that I came to formal Buddhist practice mostly because I was reading about all this stuff and then sort of a thread that I haven’t really brought up here is I was also interested in positive psychology stuff. You know, how can I make my life better by applying various sorts of positive psychology techniques? This is also very related to the CFAR project and what they’re doing. They’re fundamentally, I think—I don’t think they would frame themselves this way—but it’s a positive psychology project.
And yeah, sort of came to this place of like, okay, I’ve got all these ideas, I’ve tried all this stuff, and it’s still not... I can tell that there’s more and I don’t know how to do it.
And so over the course of about a year of searching around, I eventually convinced myself that I think Buddhism basically is the closest thing that we have to a living tradition of how to integrate this stuff. And I’m not going to say that this is true of every strain of Buddhism. I think some lineages are better at this than others. Some are very explicit about it, some are not.
I think for me I took it as: there is a set of stuff that Buddhists have figured out. They know how to teach it. That’s the part I’m missing, and I need to engage with it.
Now I would say that from having spent a lot of time in a lot of Buddhist spaces that Buddhism is not the same thing as metarationality or postrationality. There are in fact—the vast majority of Buddhists you will meet in the world are pre-rationalist, premodernist people and thinkers. And I don’t mean this in any way to be disparaging towards any of them. It is just that they have not yet fully engaged with rationalist thought or modernist thought in a way that would allow them to actually be sort of in this postrationalist, this metarationalist headspace.
So I really see there is sort of this synthesis here of taking all these parts together to build—I don’t want to say build a better Buddhism, I don’t know that that’s quite right—but I think that there is something here where we could imagine a Buddhist tradition that integrates more of these insights from the rationalist project.
And I think there are some teachers that do a bit of this. Shinzen Young is probably the first name that comes to mind in this space. But I think there are definitely other folks, and I think there’s opportunity here in terms of formulating a style of practice that is able to integrate both the anti-intellectual strain that exists within Zen—the sort of primitivist strain that is getting back to the fundamental reality of just being—and the benefits of being able to apply rationalist thought to actually live our lay lives, because we are not going to just sit on a cushion in a monastery. That’s not the life for most of us.
We have to live in the relative world, and living in the relative world means fully engaging with form. And that is sort of the culmination of what the rationalist project is—how do I fully engage with form? And Buddhism is how do I maybe fully engage with the absolute? And then integrate those two things together, the relative and the absolute together.
So yeah. I know we’re basically out of time, so maybe that’s a good point to stop.
[Closing remarks]
Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing. So I just wanted to say a big thank you one more time, Gordon, for joining us today. This I found super interesting and can’t wait to continue this conversation with you or these conversations with you. Thanks again, Gordon, for joining us today and this was really great. Looking forward to seeing you all again soon.
Great. Yeah, thanks so much to all of you for having me. Really appreciate it.
Thank you, Gordon. Thanks, everyone.