2018-03-12 RRG Notes
- Valentine had a moment of kensho
- Moment of insight or clarity
- Preview of what true enlightenment is like
- Attempts to share what it feels like to have that experience have mostly been failures
- Enlightenment isn't an insight
- It's not a matter of learning something new
- It's a matter of seeing what's already there
- That's not insight? Reinterpreting existing knowledge is totally an insight!
- Every profound insight looks stunningly obvious after you've had it
- So instead of attempting to share Kensho, Valentine is talking about why talking about kensho is difficult
- Parable
- Imagine a world in which people have forgotten to look up from their phones
- Somehow, let's say a person looks up from their phone
- Can see the world directly
- Oh my god, are we literally reinventing the parable of Plato's cave?
- Can you try to communicate the concept of looking at the world directly?
- Example:
- People misinterpreted Valentine saying that things were "okay" as either
- Normative: every outcome is equally morally good
- A statement about feelings: you'll always feel good when you're enlightened
- The problem is that saying that things are "okay" isn't a statement, so much as it is an instruction
- Examine the real world
- Set aside interpretations and just look
- Most people don't have the type of conceptual gears needed to understand what enlightenment is about
- However, instead of recognizing that they don't have the intellectual tools to comprehend enlightenment, they put enlightenment into the nearest conceptual category they have
- This actively works to stop people from understanding enlightenment
- There is a skill analogous to "looking up" - let's call it "Looking" with a capital "L"
- You need this skill to bypass a trap where your methods of gathering data preclude the ability to get an entire dimension or type of data
- Once you can Look, you can see things that prompt the creation of Gears, which change how you see the world
- Things that previously seemed incoherent or mystical will make obvious intuitive sense
- Some of those things really matter
- So how does one learn to Look?
- Nobody really knows - people with varying degrees of enlightenment have been trying to answer the question for thousands of years
- Being able to switch between frameworks is helpful
- People are, in some ways, already enlightened
- Even here, his argument is just wrong. Building monuments to loved ones is not a human universal. Jains leave their bodies out to be consumed by carrion birds. Other cultures cremate their dead and scatter their ashes, or put them in a holy river
- Also, that link for "beautiful monuments to honor lost loved ones" is hilarious. Does it go to an image of the Taj Mahal? No. A picture of the Pyramid at Giza? No. A picture of a beautiful cemetery? No. It goes to some modernist grotesquerie built at Burning Man.
- Valentine's kensho was deliberately induced - and he plans to write about the methods of induction in a future post
- To be honest, I don't have a whole lot to say beyond what Said Achmiz said in his comments - the post talks about kensho, and talks about why kensho is hard to communicate about, but doesn't communicate why kensho is important. Why should I care about kensho? Why should I care that other people have kensho? Do these people somehow get superpowers? If I Look at something, so I shoot lasers out of my eyes at it, once I've had a kensho of the 3rd level of the 9th dan?
- https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/tMhEv28KJYWsu6Wdo/kensh#comment-hYiyo8JbgXtT5wcZx
- As far as I can tell, all this enlightenment, kensho, whatever, is a set of ways of detaching your own experience from your emotions and interpretations, allowing you to perceive sensations as sensations, without attaching any kind of interpretive or normative content to them
- The reason for doing this is that this allows you to understand why you think what you think and why you feel what you feel
- This allows you to clearly engage with other ways of thinking and experiencing the world, without dismissing those ways because they're not superior according to the criteria you use for evaluating such things
- This allows you to productively introspect and retain equinaminity in the face of adversity, because you can examine your reactions as if they were separate things and see what caused them, and why you interpret your reactions in the way that you do
- See, I explained why you want kensho. Was that so hard?
- Given the highly allegorical nature of this particular post, I've had to modify the structure much more so than usual in order to make it work as an outline
- The story is about learning to see the world in an entirely new way
- Analogy:
- You're in a car, but you don't realize you're in a car
- You can operate the steering wheel, the pedals, and all the buttons on the dashboard
- But when someone tells you to get out of the car, you're not going to be able to do that until you realize that getting out of the car is something that even makes sense to talk about
- No sequence of pressing dashboard buttons or steering wheel turning or manipulation of the pedals will get you out of the car
- My problem with this is exactly the problem that Said had with the post above. Before you tell me to get out of the car, you need to explain why I should want to get out of the car
- This is a fake framework
- Has produced meaningful results
- Overcoming depression
- Learning to set aside "performance mode" and show true vulnerability
- Shifting to a more healthy attachment style
- Participate in athletics without injury
- Example: improv scene
- When you start an improv scene, you have no idea what role you're supposed to be playing
- Even if you think you know what's going on, your assumptions are often upended by someone else in the scene doing something unexpected
- Your job as a player is to co-create the scene, not play a fixed character
- There's no director - instead the "director" can be modeled as a sort of distributed intelligence that arises from the individual players in the scene
- Players have to be guided, but not purely passive
- Improv works because what we do in improv is, in a sense, what we do all the time
- The web of social relationships we're embedded in defines our roles
- Our web of social connections forms a distributed "director" that exerts a strong influence on our actions
- Example: when you go visit your parents, after having moved out, there's a sense of conflict as everyone has to readjust to the new person that you've become
- Other examples:
- Serial abuse victims
- Religious conversions
- Most of us are playing "characters" in a "scene" directed by our social web, and we're completely unaware of this fact
- https://xkcd.com/610/
- Careful, you might cut yourself on that Edge (see, I can gratuitously capitalize words too!)
- The social web holds the position of "Omega" in an ongoing set of Newcomb-like problems
- Needs to know what kind of role you're playing and how well you're going to be playing it
- Lots of resources go into computing a model of you
- How is this model built?
- Idle chat/gossip
- People synchronize their impressions of someone they've met
- Body language and facial expressions
- People who know what they're doing can manipulate this social web to shape peoples impressions of others or themselves, in a way that may be at odds with reality
- The social web encodes its guidance in the form of stories
- Story structures our expectations of who plays what roles and how various situations play out
- Even if we understand the roles and scripts we're playing out, we may not have enough power to change them
- Learning how to Look can help you discover the roles your playing and suggest possible ways to change them
- Is this literally another self-help-for-smart-people thing?
- A lot of this sort of stuff is mentioned in 'How to Win Friends and Influence People
- I'm just getting tired of the weird terminology, and the implication that this is some kind of new insight, when in reality this is well-trodden ground
- I'm also skeptical of the claims. Even one of those claims would fall under the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" rule, but all of them? What next, you're going to tell me that's it's a floor was and a dessert topping too?
- Conclusion: this is either obvious or wrong, and even after reading it twice, I'm not quite sure which it is… and I'm not sure that Valentine does either.
- Fake framework: culture is a distributed intelligence, with people as its nodes
- The essay "Meditations on Moloch" allowed people in the rationality community to feel viscerally the struggle they were undertaking against coordination problems and bad Nash Equlibria
- Facts inform culture, but culture is really shaped and guided by stories
- The real service that Scott Alexander did was to mythify the fight against existential risk
- Mythic mode is a way of looking at the world through the same story-like lens that Scott used when he wrote "Meditations on Moloch"
- So why is any of this relevant?
- Usually when you're stuck in a role, just trying to blindly defy it won't get you very far
- However, if you can identify a transitional role (like the Hero's Journey, or another similar archetype) you can perhaps find a way to use the social web to help you change roles
- However, in order to do this, you have to learn how to experience the story from the inside
- What you're actually doing here is reshaping the way you communicate with others, at a subconscious level
- Can't do this through rational thought - need to use the tools of narrative, since that's what your system 1 understands best
- So what's interesting is that I actually do this; but I don't use mythic characters. My go-to character for what to do when everything goes wrong is James Lovell, crack pilot and commander of Apollo 13
- More to the point, I reach for the preternatural calm that both the Apollo 13 astronauts and mission control displayed when they dealt with that ill-fated mission. I try to be the person who says, "Houston, we've had a problem," when the all the lights are blinking red across the board
- I suppose that's my criticism of "mythic mode" - you don't need myths! There are plenty of real-life heroes out there who kept their heads and succeeded in adverse situations. You just need to read about them
- It's important to compartmentalize mythic mode - some of the conincidences you see in mythic mode will be mere coincidences, and will not be signs of a grand narrative
- But, while you're in mythic mode, it's important to not let the tools of ordinary rationality get in the way
- A cue to step into mythic mode can be a sense of "stuck-ness" or a sense that things aren't playing out the way you thought they would
- Mythic mode allows you to see and take advantage of coincidences
- Sigh. This essay was going so well… I was just about to actually agree with it before it went off the rails with this prosperity gospel nonsense
- Rationalists already use mythic mode, but in a highly limited fashion for toy examples
- The reason we don't use it for more is because many people are not sure that sandboxing can reliably work
- But we're already embedded in culture and its influences, and we're already being nudged in various ways
- So if you don't learn how to deal with subconscious cultural influences in a sandbox, your epistemology is already fatally compromised
- I agree with all that, but it doesn't seem like Valentine himself is doing an especially good job of maintaining that sandbox
- I did not get the sense that he was speaking from "inside a sandbox" when he talked about the fact that he arrived in New York at the same time as his Shaolin teacher was a product of the narrative
- I'm also not at all convinced by Val and Qiaochu_Yuan's insistence that they're managing to sandbox all this woo they're dealing with. One of the pitfalls mentioned in this very sequence of posts is how someone can loudly protest, "This isn't touching me, this isn't touching me!" while the ideas influence their actions, to the point of causing them to join or leave religions, move states, etc.
- If your epistemics are being eroded by the dangerous ideas you're dabbling with, you're going to be the last one to find out
- Every social group has two sets of values: mythic values and folk values
- Mythic values are the qualities of the group's extraordinary members - the ones that everyone else wants to emulate
- Mythic values of Catholic Christianity - emulating Christ and the saints
- Mythic values of nerd culture - figures like Nikola Tesla and Elon Musk, combining deep scientific knowledge with inventiveness and material success
- Mythic values of conservatism - soldiers, cowboys, strength, courage and physical dominance
- Nope. Strength, courage, etc, are all part of conservatives' mythic values, but they're means, not ends. The end is self-reliance. The ultimate conservative archetype is Davy Crockett, "king of the wild frontier". A more family oriented conservative archetype would be Little House on the Prairie, or maybe William Munny and his daughter at the beginning of Unforgiven. All people who have the strength to go out and fend for themselves, in the absence of any support from society
- Folk values are the qualities of the group's average members
- Nerd culture's folk values center more around trivia and the pursuit of specific hobbies like role playing games, etc.
- Conservative folk values are liking country music and guns
- Not sure what catholic folk values are
- We should treat mythic values and folk values as separate things, and use the presence of mythic values to separate the leadership of the community from its average members
- But instead, we pretend that if only we practice the folk values hard enough, we will somehow ascend to having the mythic values
