Nice post!
As someone slightly annoyed by epistemic status, I felt that your argument in favor of them was pretty convincing.
For the discussion of replacing guilt and standards, the "Confidence all the way up" post also seems relevant.
My main point here is that improving babble doesn't mean reducing prune. Alkjash sometimes speaks as if it's just a matter of opening the floodgates. Sometimes people do need to just relax, turn off their prune, and open the floodgates. But if you try to do this in general, you might have initial success but then experience backlash, since you may have failed to address the underlying reasons why you had closed the gates to begin with.
I think that depends on your personality, and where you're at in your life. By default, I'm very good at babble (intuition you would say), but my prune was initially weak. Every maths teacher I had before the age of 20 was basically "you got good intuition, but you need to stop following the first idea that comes to your mind". So I need to improve my prune. But I know others who have trouble babbling. Maybe that was the case for Alkjash.
Last thing: every time I read about babble and prune, I think about this quote from Goro Shimura, on his friend the mathematician Yutaka Taniyama:
Taniyama was not a very careful person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes, but he made mistakes in a good direction, and so eventually, he got right answers, and I tried to imitate him, but I found out that it is very difficult to make good mistakes.
I think that depends on your personality
Right, good point. I was assuming that most people do have some kind of need for more babble, and primarily arguing that even then just opening the floodgates is a rather course approach which may not work. But the law of equal and opposite advice applies.
In in-person discussions, a good way to lessen this problem is to preface statements with qualifiers like "This is a dumb question, but..." or "Here's a crazy idea:" or "I don't endorse this, but I was thinking..." and so on. This creates a kind of protection for the speaker. They still get credit for good ideas; but if the idea really was bad, they take less of a hit.
This doesn't work as well for longform text discussions, because readers know you had time to think things through. But [epistemic status:] flags can play a similar role. If you don't feel like an idea is good enough, you preface it with [epistemic status: super dumb] or whatever, and take some comfort in the fact that if the reader doesn't like what you wrote, they were warned.
I think having this norm is much better than attempting to sustain a norm that everything is "epistemic status: raw thoughts" by default.
I mostly agree with this angle, my mind is definitely changed. This disagreement reminds me of the culture war between "take personal responsibility even though society sucks" and "society is to blame for putting us in shitty situations."
My main point here is that improving babble doesn't mean reducing prune. Alkjash sometimes speaks as if it's just a matter of opening the floodgates. Sometimes people do need to just relax, turn off their prune, and open the floodgates. But if you try to do this in general, you might have initial success but then experience backlash, since you may have failed to address the underlying reasons why you had closed the gates to begin with.
I do agree with this in general, although at that time of writing I think my prune was particularly pathological, and simply opening the floodgates led to uniformly positive outcomes. Independently, one thing I tried to emphasize is that improving babble is often about trying on different prune, hence the anecdotes about poetry and weirdly constrained writing.
[epistemic status: raw thoughts]
When I look at a book, generally I try to visualize the text as the product of the author(s) whole lives, full of their own mistakes, water cooler conversation, dinner table discussion with friends, scribbled notes, tenth drafts, old homework assignments, college essays, and shower thoughts -- subjected to an extensive editing process to strip away anything contrary to the image that the author wants to give off.
But I still tend to feel much more motivated to babble when I'm striving for an end result that I think will be original, useful, and tractable. I have a deep distrust in "exercises" unless they're widely endorsed by experts in the field and excellence in that field is easy to determine for an outsider.
One of the issues with perfectionism is that there are many cases where early work is inadequate or even harmful, even though further polish has the potential to create something of great utility. It's the Straw Vulcan problem as applied to the things we make for ourselves.
That doesn't mean you have to start perfect. In fact, you can't. Nor should you give up in advance. You have to go through an iterative process to get there. Good babble means trusting in that messy process to get you, in the end, to a perfect product.
It seems like some writers have habits to combat this, like writing every day or writing so many words a day. As long as you meet your quota, it’s okay to try harder.
Some do this in public, by publishing on a regular schedule.
If you write more than you need, you can prune more to get better quality.
I enjoyed the book write better, faster, in which an author set out on a series of self-experimentations to write faster. First she tried measuring words per hour. She was quite successful at getting this to be much higher, but it turned out that this resulted in writing for less time each day (so average wordcount per day was about the same). She then tried to maximize words per day, which was again successful, but this similarly resulted in writing less on subsequent days. (She might have then had the same experience on the week level, I don't remember.) And finally, she tried to write as much as possible in one month, but this resulted in burn-out which left her unable to write for several months.
And she sold the book promising to teach readers how to write faster anyway. She somewhat downplayed the extent to which all her experiments failed to increase her global average productivity. But, she included all her data at the end of the book.
Her conclusion (a conclusion which seems somewhat common amongst artists) was that there is a finite resource, "inspiration", which is used up by writing. This resource is re-filled only by "life experience" or something.
This is an accounting of various thoughts I had when reading the Babble & Prune sequence.
It is ironic, to me, that the Babble & Prune sequence ends with a call to exclude epistemic status tags from posts:
What happens to the reader when every post starts, "epistemic status: mostly true with a chance of rain?"
[...]
Instead of conditioning readers to hate us, I propose we return to a saner time, where the fact that your words are but a pale wavering shadow of the grand, mysterious truth in your heart is the default assumption about human communication. Where truth is a dance of successive approximations yet no step in that dance requires adult supervision. Where quibbles over certitude are banished to the comments section where they belong.
I interpret Alkjash as thinking that, if the standards were just lower in the first place, people would feel free to write more, which would get us further in the end (because the good stuff can bubble to the top).
Indeed, my impression is that the LessWrong team has worked to make LessWrong a space where people feel they can share raw thoughts rather than requiring everything to be carefully refined.
But in my opinion, the "epistemic status" flags, and similar tools, help rather than hurt.
There is a phenomenon -- let me know if you think of a better name -- which I call the new twitter account problem. My personal interaction with Twitter has been as follows:
LessWrong 1.0 had a similar problem. The frontpage got "too good" for people to feel like they could really post on. The "discussion post" was invented. A lot of activity moved to discussion. But then Discussion got too good, and people felt like they had to have something good even to post it in Discussion. Open Threads were created within Discussion, as the new low-bar-to-entry forum.
I've heard that a similar pattern has also played out on other discussion platforms. Increasing layers of "no really, it's OK to post raw thoughts" are created as old layers get too respectable.
In in-person discussions, a good way to lessen this problem is to preface statements with qualifiers like "This is a dumb question, but..." or "Here's a crazy idea:" or "I don't endorse this, but I was thinking..." and so on. This creates a kind of protection for the speaker. They still get credit for good ideas; but if the idea really was bad, they take less of a hit.
This doesn't work as well for longform text discussions, because readers know you had time to think things through. But [epistemic status:] flags can play a similar role. If you don't feel like an idea is good enough, you preface it with [epistemic status: super dumb] or whatever, and take some comfort in the fact that if the reader doesn't like what you wrote, they were warned.
I think having this norm is much better than attempting to sustain a norm that everything is "epistemic status: raw thoughts" by default.
OK, so epistemic status flags are one way to combat the new-twitter-account problem. Do we have any other tools?
One tool is to purposefully lower your standards. I believe the book IMPRO includes an exercise in which you point to random things around you and call them absolutely wrong things; (point to tree) "there's a lamp-post" (point to grass) "there's some spaghetti" etc. Perhaps saying absurd things on purpose helps prove to your s1 that nothing horrible will happen if you say something wrong. Another example of this is Allie Brosh drunk posting (notable because the explains the thought process behind it). This is commonly called shitposting. Unfortunately, Allie Brosh wrote less after that experiment, so it's not clear that it had a positive impact. Anecdotally, I've heard that a friend had dramatically positive results with the IMPRO version.
I don't think we should just work on improving our babble, though. I think it's really important to aspire to higher and higher standards. I want to become stronger! How can we reconcile this with the dampening effect high standards can create?
The true answer is that if "holding yourself to a high standard" makes you do/say too little, then your concept of "standard" is broken. We intuitively reason based on blame/guilt, which makes improper inaction seem less bad than improper action. If we could free ourselves of that mode of reasoning, perhaps we could just not have the new-twitter-account problem in the first place.
In The best you can, Nate Soares writes:
It's easy to paralyze yourself if you try to do the "right thing." There's always more uncertainty to be had. There's always more information you could gather. It's hard to become confident that you're doing the right thing. This can lead to paralysis, and persistent inaction.
It's much easier, I think, to stop asking "is this action the right action to take?" and instead ask "what's the best action I can identify at the moment?"
Sometimes, the best action you can identify is "search for more alternatives." Sometimes, it's "study more" or "learn more." Sometimes, it's a specific action. The nice thing is that "what's the best action I can find in the next five minutes?" always has a concrete answer. If you search for that, instead, you won't get paralyzed.
He elaborates more on similar thoughts in Deliberate once. But more relevantly to Babble&Prune, his post Half-assing it with everything you've got describes the mindset required to orient perfectionism at the meta-problem of avoiding overmuch perfectionism.
We face two problems:
Nate focuses on the first problem, describing how some situations call for a measured effort, while other situations call for an all-out effort. But we also want to do the second: the more favorable our payoff per time/effort spent, the less we need to spend on things calling for a measured effort, and the more results we get when we go all-out.
One thing university art classes do is force you to spend a long time on a single drawing. This teaches you how good you can get if you spend a lot of time on a single piece. It also teaches you how to fruitfully spend that much time on a piece.
But to grow as an artist, you also need to learn speed. You shouldn't carefully plan every drawing you do. Artists also practice gesture drawings, in which you have a very short amount of time to capture the general pose of a model. So, a deliberate practice of art involves practicing at all time-scales.
There's probably a natural slow-to-fast progression for many skills, where you need to go slow at first to be able to do it well, but can do it faster and faster after that.
Your prune should not just accept/reject. It should have degrees. You should be able to step it up or down appropriately. Furthermore, you want your prune to give you specific feedback -- not just "that's bad", but "that's mismatched", etc. I suggest listening to your internal critic with a felt sense / focusing lens. You may find that you know more than you thought about what makes for good work.
You want your babble to be able to conform to the highest standards it can while remaining creative. You want it to be like GPT-3, not entirely random words. So pay attention to what your taste says about your babble -- the trick isn't to cast your standards aside, but rather to pay attention to them without letting them stop babble. Give your babble a little breathing room from your prune.
Alkjash mentioned that babble is not generating things with independent randomness, but rather, is more like a random walk in concept-space. A lot of the skill of good babble is in generating good mutations of ideas, not just good ideas. You can see this as you practice babble on longer time-scales. Give yourself more time to write a sentence, and you may see yourself go through several mutations of that sentence before settling on one to write. Part of what it means to spend more time on a drawing or painting is giving yourself more time to plan each line, and more time to fiddle with it, seeking improvements.
My main point here is that improving babble doesn't mean reducing prune. Alkjash sometimes speaks as if it's just a matter of opening the floodgates. Sometimes people do need to just relax, turn off their prune, and open the floodgates. But if you try to do this in general, you might have initial success but then experience backlash, since you may have failed to address the underlying reasons why you had closed the gates to begin with.
I think one of the most useful models in Babble & Prune was the three gates.
Actually, after starting this section I remembered that I already wrote my thoughts on this in the Babble & Prune section of Capturing Ideas, particularly the part about developing ideas. Go read that if you want a further elaboration of why just opening the floodgates isn't exactly the goal.