I really like this distinction. Thank you for writing this up.
A few related thoughts/claims:
Because lies are contagious in the mind, this tends to encourage the inner spread of use of clinging. Eventually the child learns to live in a hypo-psychotic delusion that's compatible with the adults'.
Hence transgenerational trauma.
From a mind design point of view, I think it makes tremendous sense to relinquish all clinging in tandem with learning skillful non-clinging-based ways of navigating others' violence-backed demands. My guess is, the primal psyche (very loosely speaking, "System 1") will actively fight relinquishing clinging unless and until it feels the novel safety of doing so.
I think it's reasonable to view the Sequences as having been an attempt to offer a cognitive alternative to clinging. Hence e.g. the Litany of Gendlin.
I'm glad to have helped. :)
I'll answer the rest by PM. Diving into Integral Theory here strikes me as a bit off topic (though I certainly don't mind the question).
I don't think everyone playing on the propositional level is unaware of its shortcomings…
I didn't mean to imply that everyone was unaware this way. I meant to point at the culture as a whole. Like, if the whole of LW were a single person, then that person strikes me as being unaware this way, even if many of that person's "organs" have a different perspective.
…propositional knowledge is the knowledge that scales…
That's actually really unclear to me. Christendom would have been better defined by a social order (and thus by individuals' knowing how to participate in that culture) than it would have by a set of propositions. Likewise #metoo spread because it was a viable knowing-how: read a #metoo story with the hashtag, then feel moved to share your own with the hashtag such that others see yours.
I'm not sure "actionable" is the right lens but something nearby resonated.
Agreed. I mean actionability as an example type. A different sort of example would be Scott introducing the frame of Moloch. His essay didn't really offer new explicit models or explanations, and it didn't really make any action pathways viable for the individual reader. But it was still powerful in a way that I think importantly counts.
By way of contrast, way back in the day when CFAR was but a glimmer in Eliezer's & Anna's eye, there was an attempted debiasing technique vs. the sunk cost fallacy called "Pretend you're a teleporting alien". The idea was to imagine that you had just teleported into this body and mind, with memories and so on, but that your history was something other than what this human's memory claimed. Anna and Eliezer offered this to a few people, presumably because the thought experiment worked for them, but by my understanding it fell flat. It was too boring to use. It sure seems actionable, but in practice it neither lit up a meaningful new perspective (the way Meditations on Moloch did) nor afforded a viable action pathway (despite having specific steps that people could in theory follow).
What it means to know (in a way that matters) why that technique didn't work is that you can share a debiasing technique with others that they can and do use. Models and ideas might be helpful for getting there… but something goes really odd when the implicit goal is the propositional model. Too much room for conversational Goodharting.
But a step in the right direction (I think) is noticing that the "alien" frame doesn't in practice have the kind of "kick" that the Moloch idea does. Despite having in-theory actionable steps, it doesn't galvanize a mind with meaning. Turns out, that's actually really important for a viable art of rationality.
Not necessarily because it's the best or only way, as Romeo said, because it's a thing that can scale in a particular way and so is useful to build around.
I'm wanting to emphasize that I'm not trying to denigrate this. In case that wasn't clear. I think this is valuable and good.
…an environment that's explicitly oriented towards bridging gaps between explicit and tacit knowledge…
This resonates pretty well with where my intuition tends to point.
Some of this is just about tacit or experiential knowledge just being real-damn-hard-to-convey in writing.
That's something of an illusion. It's a habit we've learned in terms of how to relate to writing. (Although it's kind of true because we've all learned it… but it's possible to circumnavigate this by noticing what's going on, which a subcommunity like LW can potentially do.)
Contrast with e.g. Lectio Divina.
More generally, one can dialogue with the text rather than just scan it for information. You can read a sentence and let it sink in. How does it feel to read it? What is it like to wear the perspective that would say that sentence? What's the feel on the inside of the worldview being espoused? How can you choose to allow the very act of reading to transform you?
A lot of Buddhist texts seem to have been designed to be read this way. You read the teachings slowly, to let it really absorb, and in doing so it guides your mind to mimic the way of being that lets you slip into insight.
This is also part of the value of poetry. What makes poetry powerful and important is that it's writing designed specifically to create an impact beneath the propositional level. There's a reason Rumi focused on poetry after his enlightenment:
"Sit down, be still, and listen.
You are drunk
and this is
the edge of the roof."
~Rumi
Culture has quite a few tools like these for powerfully conveying deep ways of knowing. Along the same lines as I mentioned in my earlier comment above, I can imagine a potential Less Wrong that wants to devote energy and effort toward mastering this multimodal communication process in order to dynamically create a powerful community of deep practice of rationality. But it's not what I observe. I doubt three months from now that there'll be any relevant uptick in how much poetry appears on LW, for instance. It's just not what the culture seems to want — which, again, seems like a fine choice.
I can't point to a specific post without doing more digging than I care to do right now. I wouldn't be too shocked to find out I'm drastically wrong. It's just my impression from (a) years of interacting with Less Wrong before plus (b) popping in every now and again to see what social dynamics have and haven't changed.
With that caveat… here are a couple of frames to triangulate what I was referring to:
From what I've seen, LW seems to want to say "yes" maximally to this direction. Which is a fine choice. There aren't other groups that can make this choice with this degree of skill and intelligence as far as I know.
There's just some friction with this view when I want to point at certain perspectival and participatory forms of knowing, e.g. about the nature of the self. You can't argue an ego into recognizing itself. The whole OP was an attempt to offer a perspective that would help transform what was seeable and actionable; it was never meant to be a logical argument, really. So when asked "What can I do with this knowledge?", it's very tricky to give a propositional model that is actually actionable in this context — but it's quite straightforward to give some instructions that someone can try so as to discover for themselves what they experience.
I was just noticing that bypassing theory to offer participatory forms of knowing was a mild violation of norms here as I understand them. But I was guessing it was a forgivable violation, and that the potential benefit justified the mild social bruising.
I think what I'd personally prefer (over the new version), is a quick: “Epistemic Status: Fake Framework”.
Like so? (See edit at top.) I'm familiar with the idea behind this convention. Just not sure how LW has started formatting it, or if there's desire to develop much precision on this formatting.
I think a lot of the earlier disagreements or concerns at the time had less to do with flagging frameworks as fake, and more to do with not trusting that they were eventually going to ground out as “connected more clearly to the rest of our scientific understanding of the world”.
Mmm. That makes sense.
My impression looking back now is that the dynamic was something like:
(Proceed with loop.)
What I wasn't acknowledging to myself (and thus not to anyone else either) at the time was that I was loving the frustration of being misunderstood. Which is why I got exasperated instead of just… being clearer given feedback about how I wasn't clear.
I'm now much better at just communicating. Mostly by caring a heck of a lot more about actually listening to others.
I think you're naming something I didn't hear back then. And if nothing else, it's something you value now, and I can see how it makes sense as a value to want to ground Less Wrong in. Thanks for speaking to that.
I don’t think things necessarily need to be ‘rigorously grounded’ to be in the 2018 Book, but I do think the book should include “taking stock of ‘what the epistemic status of each post is’ and checking for community consensus on whether the claims of the post hold up’", with some posts flagged as "this seems straightforwardly true" and others flagged as "this seems to point in an interesting and useful thing, but further work is needed."
That seems great. Kind of like what Duncan did with the CFAR handbook.
This is all to say: I have gotten value out of this post and think it’s pointing at a true thing, but it’s also a post that I’d be particularly interested in people reviewing, from a standpoint of “okay, what actual claims is the post implying? What are the limits of the fake framework here? How does this connect to the rest of our best understanding of what's going on in the brain?” (the previous round of commenters explored this somewhat but only in very vague terms).
Mmm. That's a noble wish. I like it.
I won't respond to that right now. I don't know enough to offer the full rigor I imagine you'd like, either. So I hope for your sake that others dive in on this.
I've made my edits. I think my most questionable call was to go ahead and expand the bit on how to Look in this case.
If I understand the review plan correctly, I think this means I'm past the point where I can get feedback on that edit before voting happens for this article. Alas. I'm juggling a tension between (a) what I think is actually most helpful vs. (b) what I imagine is most fitting to where Less Wrong culture seems to want to go.
If it somehow makes more sense to include the original and ignore this edit, I'm actually fine with that. I had originally planned on not making edits.
But I do hope this new version is clearer and more helpful. I think it has the same content as the original, just clarified a bit.
I don't know if I'll ever get to a full editing of this. I'll jot notes here of how I would edit it as I reread this.
So, with all that said, here are the edits I'd make:
Thank you. Thank you for sharing how you were impacted. That touched me. I'm delighted to have played a role in you enjoying your life more fully. :-)
The post’s focus on salient examples (family roles, the convert boyfriend, the white man’s role) also has a downside, in that it’s somewhat difficult to keep track of the main thrust of Valentine’s argument. The entire introductory section also does nothing to help the essay cohere; it makes claims about personal benefits Valentine has acquired by using this framework. These claims are neither substantiated nor explored further in the essay, and they are also unnecessary — the essay is compelling by the force of its insight and not by promising a laundry list of results.
I quite agree. Thank you for stating this so clearly.
At the time I was under the delusion that people would read and consider what I had to say because they consciously could expect a benefit from doing so. So I tried to state the value up front. I think I was also a little embarrassed to be talking in public in a way I wasn't aware of, so the "laundry list" was a way of assuaging my unrecognized shame.
All of which is to say, I agree. :-) And I'm glad this point got into the reviews for this.
I think you want John Vervaeke's series "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis". Very grounded in the scientific materialist framework, and thoroughly answers your question while also giving a wonderful historical overview of Western meaning-making. You'll know if this is for you after watching the first two episodes, possibly after the first one.