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Oscar_Cunningham comments on [SEQ RERUN] Two Cult Koans - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (23)
I think that there is an actual impossibility lurking here.
Imagine the situation in which the pupil is fixed in this view "To learn from my teacher, it suffices to learn his words off by heart." and never does anything more. The teacher notices the problem, and tries to help the pupil by telling him that it is not enough to learn the words, you must understand the meaning, and put the teachings into practice.
The pupil is grateful for the teaching and writes it in his note book "To learn from my teacher, it is not enough to learn the words, I must understand the meaning, and put the teachings into practice." It is only twenty four words, many of them short. The pupil puts the teaching into his spaced repetition software, and is soon word perfect, although he continues to ignore the meaning of the teachings he memorizes.
What more can the teacher do? Can words point beyond words? Obviously yes, but if the pupil looks at the finger and not at the moon, is there anything that the teacher can say that will get through to the pupil? It may be that it is actually impossible for the teacher to help the pupil until the pupil is changed by the impact of external events.
I think that I have understood the first koan. I am still mystified by the second koan. I suspect that it relates to things that Eliezer has experienced or seen. Eliezer has examples of followership in mind and the koans would be clear in context.
No, but there may be something the teacher can do.
In particular, the teacher could tell the student to take on various tasks or do experiments which might lead to a breakthrough, or possibly work to lower the student's level of background anxiety-- the latter is plausible to me because there might be a reason the student has no trust in his or her own perceptions and thoughts, and that reason might be locked in place by fear. Of course, I'm just guessing about a hypothetical student-- the teacher (if competent) should be able to form hypotheses about why the student is so stuck and what might help.