The benefits of madness: A positive account of arationality

101 Skatche 22 April 2011 07:43PM

This post originated in a comment I posted about a strange and unpleasant experience I had when pushing myself too hard mentally.  People seemed interested in hearing about it, so I sat down to write.  In the process, however, it became something rather different (and a great deal longer) than what I originally intended.  The incident referred to in the above comment was a case of manic focus gone wrong; but the truth is, often in my life it's gone incredibly right.  I've gotten myself into some pretty strange headspaces, but through discipline and quick thinking I have often been able to turn them to my advantage and put them to good use.

Part 1, then, lays out a sort of cognitive history, focusing on the more extreme states I've been in.  Part 2 continues the narrative; this is where I began to learn to ride them out and make them work for me.  Part 3 is the incident in question: where I overstepped myself and suffered the consequences.

Some of you, however, may want to skip ahead to part 4 (unless you find my autobiographical writings interesting as a case study).  There, I've written a proposal for a series of posts about how to effectively use the full spectrum of somatic and cognitive states to one's advantage.  I have vacillated for a long time about this, for reasons that will be discussed below, but I decided that if I was already laying this much on the line, I might as well take it a step further.  Read if you will; and if you're interested, please say so.

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Slava!

30 [deleted] 03 October 2010 02:47AM

I want to begin with a musical example.  The link is the Coronation Scene from Mussorsky's opera Boris Godunov, in which Boris is crowned Tsar while courtiers sing his praises.  The tune is quoted from an old Russian hymn, "Slava Bogu" or "Glory to God."  And, if I can trust the English subtitles, it's an apt choice, because the song in praise of the Tsar is not too far in tone from hymns in praise of God.  

There is a mode of human expression that I'll call praise, though it is different from the ordinary sort of praise we give someone for a job well done.  It glorifies its object; it piles glory upon glory; its aim is to uplift and exalt.  Praise is given with pomp and majesty, with visual and musical and verbal finery.  It is oddly circular: nobody is alluding to anything specific that's good about the Tsar, but only words like "supreme" and "glory."  Praise, in Hansonian terms, raises the status of the singers by affiliating with the object of praise.  But that curt description doesn't seem to capture the whole experience of praise, which is profoundly compelling, and very strange.

There are no more Tsars.  I can derive no possible advantage from a song in praise of a long-dead Tsar.  And yet I find the Mussorsky piece powerful, not just for the music but for the drama.  Praise also seems to attract people to traditional medievalist fantasy, with its rightful kings and oaths of fealty -- Tolkien, perhaps not coincidentally, included a praise song in his happy ending.  Readers gain no status from the glorification of imaginary kings.  African praise songs were sung not only to kings, gods, and heroes, but to plants and animals, who obviously cannot grant anything to those who praise them.  

I would suspect that there is a distinct human need filled by praise.  We want very badly for something to be an unalloyed repository of good.  It is not normally credible to conceive oneself as perfect, but we need at least something or someone to be worthy of praise. We want to look upwards, towards goodness and light; we want to be the kind of people who are capable of praise, capable of a reverent and appreciative frame of mind.  Unappreciativeness is an ugly emotion.  And it makes it much cognitively simpler if all the goodness and light is in one place.  James Joyce's notes to his play Exiles express something of this idea: "Robert is glad to have in Richard a personality to whom he can pay the tribute of complete admiration, that is to say, one to whom it is not necessary to give always a qualified and half-hearted praise. "

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The mathematical universe: the map that is the territory

68 ata 26 March 2010 09:26AM

This post is for people who are not familiar with the Level IV Multiverse/Ultimate Ensemble/Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, people who are not convinced that there’s any reason to believe it, and people to whom it appears believable or useful but not satisfactory as an actual explanation for anything.

I’ve found that while it’s fairly easy to understand what this idea asserts, it is more difficult to get to the point where it actually seems convincing and intuitively correct, until you independently invent it for yourself. Doing so can be fun, but for those who want to skip that part, I’ve tried to write this post as a kind of intuition pump (of the variety, I hope, that deserves the non-derogatory use of that term) with the goal of leading you along the same line of thinking that I followed, but in a few minutes rather than a few years.


Once upon a time, I was reading some Wikipedia articles on physics, clicking links aimlessly, when I happened upon a page then titled “Ultimate Ensemble”. It described a multiverse of all internally-consistent mathematical structures, thereby allegedly explaining our own universe — it’s mathematically possible, so it exists along with every other possible structure.

Now, I was certainly interested in the question it was attempting to answer. It’s one that most young aspiring deep thinkers (and many very successful deep thinkers) end up at eventually: why is there a universe at all? A friend of mine calls himself an agnostic because, he says, “Who created God?” and “What caused the Big Bang?” are the same question. Of course, they’re not quite the same, but the fundamental point is valid: although nothing happened “before” the Big Bang (as a more naïve version of this query might ask), saying that it caused the universe to exist still requires us to explain what brought about the laws and circumstances allowing the Big Bang to happen. There are some hypotheses that try to explain this universe in terms of a more general multiverse, but all of them seemed to lead to another question: “Okay, fine, then what caused that to be the case?”

The Ultimate Ensemble, although interesting, looked like yet another one of those non-explanations to me. “Alright, so every mathematical structure ‘exists’. Why? Where? If there are all these mathematical structures floating around in some multiverse, what are the laws of this multiverse, and what caused those laws? What’s the evidence for it?” It seemed like every explanation would lead to an infinite regress of multiverses to explain, or a stopsign like “God did it” or “it just exists because it exists and that’s the end of it” (I’ve seen that from several atheists trying to convince themselves or others that this is a non-issue) or “science can never know what lies beyond this point” or “here be dragons”. This was deeply vexing to my 15-year-old self, and after a completely secular upbringing, I suffered a mild bout of spirituality over the following year or so. Fortunately I made a full recovery, but I gave in and decided that Stephen Hawking was right that “Why does the universe bother to exist?” would remain permanently unanswerable.

Last year, I found myself thinking about this question again — but only after unexpectedly making my way back to it while thinking about the idea of an AI being conscious. And the path I took actually suggested an answer this time. 

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Defense Against The Dark Arts: Case Study #1

100 Yvain 28 March 2009 02:31AM

Related to: The Power of Positivist Thinking, On Seeking a Shortening of the Way, Crowley on Religious Experience

Annoyance wants us to stop talking about fancy techniques and get back to basics. I disagree with the philosophy behind his statement, but the principle is sound. In many areas of life - I'm thinking mostly of sports, but not for lack of alternatives - mastery of the basics beats poorly-grounded fancy techniques every time.

One basic of rationality is paying close attention to an argument. Dissecting it to avoid rhetorical tricks, hidden fallacies, and other Dark Arts.  I've been working on this for years, and I still fall short on a regular basis.

Medical educators have started emphasizing case studies in their curricula. Instead of studying arcane principles of disease, student doctors cooperate to analyze a particular patient in detail, ennumerate the principles needed to diagnose her illness, and pay special attention to any errors the patients' doctors made during the treatment. The cases may be rare tropical infections, but they're more often the same everyday diseases common in the general population, forcing the student doctors to always keep the basics in mind. We could do with a tradition of case studies in rationality, though we'd need safeguards to prevent degeneration into political discussion.

Case studies in medicine are most interesting when all the student doctors disagree with each other. To that end, I've chosen as the first case a statement that received sixteen upvotes on Less Wrong, maybe the highest I've ever seen for a comment. I don't mean to insult or embarass everyone who liked it. I liked it too. My cursor was already hovering above the "Vote Up" button by the time I starting having second thoughts. But it deserves dissection, and its popularity gives me a ready response when someone says this material is too basic for 'master rationalists' like ourselves:

In his youth, Steve Jobs went to India to be enlightened. After seeing that the nation claiming to be the source of this great spiritual knowledge was full of hunger, ignorance, squalor, poverty, prejudice, and disease, he came back and said that the East should look to the West for enlightenment.

This anecdote is short, witty, flattering, and utterly opaque to reason. It bears all the hallmarks of the Dark Arts.

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