Summary: Would you like to help me with my research by letting me try to help you with your research?

One of my brand new sub-projects at the moment (underneath the larger "naturalism" heading) is research facilitation.

So far, I've mostly been developing the [school? methodology? whatever it is] by asking people to bring me their problems, and then helping them re-orient to the "problem" as a field of study. This is an especially valuable approach for problems that have stuck around for a long time despite repeated attempts to solve them.

But that's not the primary use case I envision for naturalism. Or at least, it's not the one that makes me eager to pour all of these resources into it.

When someone brings me a confusing or recalcitrant problem, and then they begin to relate to it as a field of study using naturalist methods, they almost invariably go through this period that I should probably have named by now. Let's call it "pre-conceptual intimacy".

In pre-conceptual intimacy, they're making a lot of fascinating observations and surprisingly quick improvements to relevant parts of life. But they're also feeling very confused and disoriented, because their pre-existing concepts around the problem just don't seem to make sense anymore, and they don't have new stories about what's going on yet either. They tend to utter phrases like, "Is memory even a thing?", "How could I ever have thought that?", and "I really have no idea what's going on with this, and it turns out I never have."

The spark of life in my work, the place where I'm most confident I have something really valuable here, is the progress I see people making in the midst of pre-conceptual intimacy.

Why? Because it means I may have a general methodology that works at intellectual frontiers, in the absence of established paradigms. Which is where we are, as a species, in human rationality, AI alignment, and presumably other important places I'm not even able to gesture toward.

So here is my vision for this research facilitation sub-project.

If I imagine that I've succeeded utterly, I envision that I'm able to meet with a researcher for one hour who is starting with "I have a hunch that there's something important, and I'm motivated to work on it, but I don't even know what the thing is, I have no idea where to start, and there are no domain-specific resources because I might be the first person who's e...

Lucas Chu

Lucas Chu

Lucas Chu

Lucas Chu