I’ll close by saying that, like Geoff, I do not believe that CT is literally true. My current belief is that it is worthy of serious investigation and that the approach to psychology that it has inspired - that of mapping out individual beliefs and actions in a detailed and systematic manner, will be of great value even if the theory itself turns out to not be.

FWIW, the idea of a person's belief system having some fundamental criteria has been influential on my work with what I call EPIC beliefs (beliefs that are necessary for a person to see themselves and the world as having Esteem, Predict/ability, and being an Independent Collaborator).

However, I have not found intermediate mapping of beliefs to be all that helpful, since the kinds of things I help people with tend to center on concrete childhood experiences (or patterns thereof), and most all of the relevant beliefs can be found by inspecting the six layers or belief classes I call SAMMSA (Surface, Attitude, Model, Mirror, Shadow, and Assumptions).

EPIC and SAMMSA are the result of spending a lot of time mapping my own and others' beliefs and looking for common structural patterns, and mostly noticing that even among people with experience at RMI or Gendlin's Focusing, it's hard to keep the mapping exercise tied to concrete emotional beliefs without wandering off into all sorts of random distractions.

Based on my own experience, I would suggest that EPIC is a more basic or fundamental model than IG's are, and that IGs are simply things people believe are necessary conditions for themselves or the world to be EPIC - i.e., basically good, fair, predictable/masterable, with a place for them to participate in a meaningful "higher" purpose than just existing, by their own free choice.

I also don't think that "elegant updating" is or should be a premise in CT: compare with PCT's model of "reorganization", and you'll see that their model is more basic: stuff gets rewired until the conflict goes away, and "elegant" is defined evolutionarily, i.e., what you get is what's easiest for your brain to rewire to, not what necessarily involves the most human-level elegance of belief update.

By the way, when I was first referred to the CT website, my first reaction to the "evidence" put forth on the site amounted to, "ugh... these guys don't understand what 'evidence' means". It was very off-putting. Nonetheless, as I said, I did manage to take away the idea of IG-as-belief-mediator; I just didn't find your approach to be radically different from what's already in PCT and the Method of Levels, which also assume we have a hierarchy of goods determining our behavior, and suggest mapping some portion of that hierarchy in order to change behavior. I'd strongly suggest, before embarking on new research in that area, that you check out what already exists for PCT theory and its clinical spin-off, the Method of Levels.

Hey Peter,

Thanks for writing this.

I’m the primary researcher working on Connection Theory at Leverage. I don’t have time to give an in-depth argument for why I consider CT to be worth investigating at the moment, but I will briefly respond to your post:

Objections I & II:

I think that your skeptical position is reasonable given your current state of knowledge. I agree that the existing CT documents do not make a persuasive case.

The CT research program has not yet begun. The evidence presented in the CT documents is from preliminary investigations carried out shortly after the theory’s creation when Geoff was working on his own.

My current plan is a follows: Come to understand CT and how to apply it well enough to design (and be able to carry out) a testing methodology that will provide high quality evidence. Perform some preliminary experiments. If the results are promising, create training material and programs that produce researchers who reliably create the same charts, predictions and recommendations from the same data. Recruit many aspiring researchers. Train many researchers. Begin large-scale testing.

Objection III:

I agree that a casual reading of CT suggests that it conflicts with existing science. I thought so as well and initially dismissed the theory for just that reason. Several extended conversations with Geoff and the experience of having my CT chart created convinced me otherwise. Very briefly:

The brain is complicated and the relationship between brain processes and our everyday experience of acting and updating is poorly understood. Since CT is trying to be a maximally elegant theory of just these things, CT does not attempt to say anything one way or the other about the brain and so strictly speaking does not predict that beliefs can be changed by modifying the brain. That said, it is easy to specify a theory, which we might call CT’, that is identical in every respect except that it allows beliefs to be modified directly by altering the brain.

“Elegant updating” is imprecisely defined in the current version of CT. This is definitely a problem with the theory. That said, I don’t think the concept is hopelessly imprecise. For one, elegant updating as defined by CT does not mean ideal Bayesian updating. One of the criteria of elegance is that the update involve the fewest changes from the previous set of beliefs. This means that a less globally-elegant theory may be favored over a more globally-elegant theory due to path-dependence. This introduces another source of less-than-optimally-rational beliefs. If we imagine a newly formed CT-compliant mind with a very minimal belief system updating in accordance with this conception of elegance and the constraints from their intrinsic goods (IGs), I think we should actually expects its beliefs to be totally insane, even more so than the H&B literature would suggest. Of course, we will need to do research in developmental psychology to confirm this suspicion.

It is surprisingly easy to explain many common biases within the CT framework. The first bias you mentioned, scope insensitivity, is an excellent example. Studies have shown that the amount people are willing to donate to save 2,000 birds is about the same as what they are willing to donate to save 200,000 birds. Why might that be?

According to CT, people only care about something if it is part of a path to one of their IGs. The IGs we’ve observed so far are mostly about particular relationships with other people, group membership, social acceptance, pleasure and sometimes ideal states of the world (world-scale IGs or WSIGs) such as world peace, universal harmony or universal human flourishing. Whether or not many birds (or even humans!) die in the short term is likely to be totally irrelevant to whether or not a person’s IGs are eventually fulfilled. Even WSIGs are unlikely to compel donation unless the person believes their donation action to be a necessary part of a strategy in which a very large number of people donate (and thus produce the desired state). It just isn’t very plausible that your individual attempt to save a small number of lives through donation will be critical to the eventual achievement of universal flourishing (for example). That leaves social acceptance as the next most likely explanation for donation. Since the number of social points people get from donating tends not to scale very well, there is no reason to expect the amount that they donate to scale. This is not the only possible CT-compliant explanation for scope insensitivity, but my guess is that it is the most commonly applicable.

I’ll close by saying that, like Geoff, I do not believe that CT is literally true. My current belief is that it is worthy of serious investigation and that the approach to psychology that it has inspired - that of mapping out individual beliefs and actions in a detailed and systematic manner, will be of great value even if the theory itself turns out to not be.

Jasen Murray's answers to Holden's questions were problematic, and did not well-represent the Singularity Institute's positions. That is an old interview, and since that time we've done many things to explain what we plan to do with new funding. For example we published a strategic plan and I gave this video interview. Moreover, the donation page linked in the OP has the most up-to-date information on what we plan to do with new funding: see Future Plans You Can Help Support.

I'm a newly registered member of LW (long-time lurker) and was thinking of posting about this very topic. Like many in the community, I have a background in science / math / philosophy, but unlike many, I have also spent many years working to understand what Jasen calls the "Buddhist claim" experientially (i.e. through meditation) and being involved with the contemporary traditions that emphasize attaining that understanding. I see myself as an "insider" straddling both communities, well-situated to talk about what Buddhists are going on about regarding "self" and "not-self" and enlightenment in a way that would be highly comprehensible to people who frame the world in a contemporary scientific way.

Specifically, I was considering a three-part series along these lines:

1) Highly abridged history of Buddhist thought concerning "insight" meditation and the insight into "no-self"; overview of contemporary secular traditions focusing on attaining this insight. Risks and benefits of pursuing it.

2) Case study: Have 1500 years of Buddhist tradition yielded a novel testable model of an aspect of human psychological development?

3) How science has dropped the ball concerning research on meditation and "spirituality"; how some communities of meditators have come to know more about meditation than scientists do; some thoughts on why; some thoughts on how this could be changed.

However, I don't want to pre-empt anyone's post (in particular Jasen's, since he mentioned it), and also, I don't know the extent to which this is an interesting topic to LW-ers, or what the community norms are for newly-registered members initiating new posts. So I'd like to get some sense of whether people here would like to see posts on this topic, and in particular, what Jasen thinks about the prospect of me posting.

First of all, thank you so much for posting this. I've been contemplating composing a similar post for a while now but haven't because I did not feel like my experience was sufficiently extensive or my understanding was sufficiently deep. I eagerly anticipate future posts.

That said, I'm a bit puzzled by your framing of this domain as "arational." Rationality, at least as LW has been using the word, refers to the art of obtaining true beliefs and making good decisions, not following any particular method. Your attitude and behavior with regard to your "mystical" experiences seems far more rational than both the hasty enthusiasm and reflexive dismissal that are more common. Most of what my brain does might as well be magic to me. The suggestion that ideas spoken to you by glowing spirit animals should be evaluated in much the same way as ideas that arise in less fantastic (though often no less mysterious) ways seems quite plausible and worthy of investigation. You seem to have done a good job at keeping your eye on the ball by focusing on the usefulness of these experiences without accepting poorly thought out explanations of their origins.

It may be the case that we have the normative, mathematical description of what rationality looks like down really well, but that doesn't mean we have a good handle on how best to approximate this using a human brain. My guess is that we've only scratched the surface. Peak or "mystical" experiences, much like AI and meta-ethics, seem to be a domain in which human reasoning fails more reliably than average. Applying the techniques of X-Rationality to this domain with the assumption that all of reality can be understood and integrated into a coherent model seems like a fun and potentially lucrative endeavor.

So now, in traditional LW style, I shall begin my own contribution with a quibble and then share some related thoughts:

Many of them come from spiritual, religious or occult sources, and it can be a little tricky to tease apart the techniques from the metaphysical beliefs (the best case, perhaps, is the Buddhist system, which holds (roughly) that the unenlightened mind can't truly understand reality anyway, so you'd best just shut up and meditate).

As far as I understand it, the Buddhist claim is that the unenlightened mind fails to understand the nature of one particular aspect of reality: it's own experience of the world and relationship to it. One important goal of what is typically called "insight meditation" seems to be to cause people to really grok that the map is not the territory when it comes to the category of "self." What follows is my own, very tentative, model of "enlightenment":

By striving to dissect your momentary experience in greater and greater detail, the process by which certain experiences are labeled "self" and others "not-self" becomes apparent. It also becomes apparent that the creation of this sense of a separate self is at least partially responsible for the rejection of or "flinching away" from certain aspects of your sensory experience and that this is one of the primary causes of suffering (which seems to be something like "mental conflict"). My understanding of "enlightenment" is as the final elimination (rather than just suppression) of this tendency to "shoot the messenger." This possibility is extremely intriguing to me because it seems like it should eliminate not only suffering but what might be the single most important source of "wireheading" behaviors in humans. People who claim to have achieved it say it's about as difficult as getting an M.D. Seems worthy of investigation.

Rather than go on and on here, I think it's about time I organized my experience and research into a top-level post.

Attention: Anyone still interested in attending the course must get their application in by midnight on Friday the 8th of April. I would like to make the final decision about who to accept by mid April and need to finish interviewing applicants before then.

But "produc[ing] formidable rationalists" sounds like it's meant to make the world better in a generalized way, by producing people who can shine the light of rationality into every dark corner, et cetera.

Precisely. The Singularity Institute was founded due to Eliezer's belief that trying to build FAI was the best strategy for making the world a better place. That is the goal. FAI is just a sub-goal. There is still consensus that FAI is the most promising route, but it does not seem wise to put all of our eggs in one basket. We can't do all of the work that needs to be done within one organization and we don't plan to try.

Through programs like Rationality Boot Camp, we expect to identify people who really care about improving the world and radically increase their chances of coming to correct conclusions about what needs to be done and then actually doing so. Not only will more highly-motivated, rational people improve the world at a much faster rate, they will also serve as checks on our sanity. I don't expect that we are sufficiently sane at the moment to reliably solve the world's problems and we're really going to need to step up our game if we hope to solve FAI. This program is just the beginning. The initial investment is relatively small and, if we can actually do what we think we can, the program should pay for itself in the future. We'd have to be crazy not to try this. It may well be too confusing from a PR perspective to run future versions of the program within SingInst, but if so we can just turn it into its own organization.

If you have concrete proposals for valuable projects that you think we're neglecting and would like to help out with I would be happy to have a Skype chat and then put you in contact with Michael Vassar.

To what degree will opting out of specific exercises/events be accepted or tolerated?

(Mostly asking out of curiosity, but if I were seriously considering going this would be a significant issue; I have a rather firm policy of not considering myself obligated to do things unless I've actively agreed to the specific thing, including reserving the right to decline to do things based on the tone or context of the request or demand, as an anti-foot-in-the-door measure, and your description of the nature of the event leads me to be unsure of whether this policy would get me sent home or otherwise cause problems.)

What's the expected time load -- "full-time" or "all-consuming"? I can probably keep my freelance work down to about 20 hours a week, but would have to break the lease on my apartment to cut it down to nothing.

This essentially sounds like a more organized (and therefore probably better) version of what I was intending to try and teach myself this summer, so I am extremely, extremely interested. However, I'm currently a student and won't be on break for the beginning of June. Should I still apply? Airfare won't be an issue, and I'm willing to self-study and self-test (or get others to test me on) anything that I would otherwise miss in the first few days.