The only part of these processes that actually requires real-time interaction is getting people over what I call their "meta-issue" -- the schema they have that gets in the way of being able to reflect on their issues.
For example, I've had clients who had what you might call a "be a good student" schema that keeps them from accurately reporting their emotions, responses, or progress in applying a reconsolidation technique. Others who would deflect and deny ever having any negative experiences or even any problems, despite having ju...
the CFAR techniques as a whole never went meta enough to catch "meta-issues," not in any really systematic way.
There is no level of meta systemization that can overrule a person's meta issues, because their meta issues are always "one level higher than you". ;-) To put it more precisely, no passive information-passing process can bypass a person's meta issues, any more than you can turn a shredder into a fax machine by feeding it a copier manual. The incoming information gets processed through an existing filter that deletes any information that does
...I just got around to reading this; thank you for writing it!
I hadn't thought much about the role of memory in trauma and emotional stuff until pretty recently, possibly based on some kind of present-moment-experience-focused thing I inherited from circling culture. But my experiences using the bio-emotive framework were memory-based in a really important way, and reading this helped something click into place for me about integration being literally integration of memory networks, parts as memory networks, etc.
Using bio-emotive to examine the relati...
Using bio-emotive to examine the relationship between an emotional reaction I'm having now and a related memory has given the phrase "being present" a meaning it didn't have for me before; often when we aren't present it's because we're in a real sense in the past, possibly way back in the past depending on what memories are being activated.
This reminded me of this bit (not sure if I agree with all of it, but it's an interesting perspective):
The purpose of memory is not to maintain veridical records of the past so...
Google Activity History is sort of terrifying but also great. I used it when someone stole my laptop to learn that the thief had googled pawn shops in the area; I contacted one of the pawn shops they looked up and a bit later they called me telling me someone had brought in a laptop matching my description. They lied to her and told her they needed to process the laptop for a few hours and she needed to come back, and in that time the police were called, she was arrested, and I got my laptop back the same day it was stolen.
Here is my brain dump: I have mostly given up on the Berkeley rationality community as a possible village. I think the people who showed up here were mostly selected for being bad at villaging, and that the awful shit that's been happening around here lately is downstream of that. I think there is something toxic / dysfunctional woven deep into the community fabric (which has something to do with the ways in which the Mission interacts poorly with people's psychologies) and I don't feel very hopeful about even being able to show it clearly t...
I upvoted this because it gave me some concepts to use to look at some experiences I've had. The speculations at the level of physical mechanism aren't really cruxes for me so I mostly don't care about them, and same with facts of the matter about what any particular Pali text actually says. What's interesting to me is what Romeo gets out of a combination of reading them and reflecting on his own experience, that might be relevant to me reflecting on my own experience.
Why should I believe any of this?
Gut reaction to this question is that it's the wrong question. I don't view this post as telling you anything you're supposed to believe on Romeo's word.
I don’t view this post as telling you anything you’re supposed to believe on Romeo’s word.
On what other basis, then, are we to believe any of this stuff about rewiring neurons, “electrical resistance = emotional resistance”, etc. etc.? We’ve been told that there’s no evidence whatsoever for any of it and that Romeo got the idea for the latter claim, in particular, from literally nowhere at all. So we can’t believe any of this on the basis of evidence, because we’ve been given none, and told that none is forthcoming. And you say we’re not to believe it o
...This is fantastic and absolutely the conversation I want to be having. Resonates quite a lot with my experience, especially as a description of what it is exactly that I got out of circling.
In your language circling naturally stirs up sankharas because relational shit is happening (e.g. people are paying attention to you or ignoring you, liking or disliking what you say, etc) and then hopefully, if the circle is being well-facilitated, you sometimes get coached into a state where you can notice and work with your "causal links in the perceptual syste...
Yeah, I agree that at the earlier stages it's not clear that ambition is a thing to aim for, and I would also advise people to prioritize health broadly.
I agree that encouragement and guidance is good, and more generally think that mentorship is really, really deeply important. I am not about this "individual rationality" life anymore. It's group rationality or nothing.
He says that "Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers". I'd update this to say that "ONE WAY OF THINKING ABOUT politics is AS IF IT IS an extension of war by other means. Arguments CAN BE THOUGHT OF AS soldiers".
This is a good shift for you to have made and I'm glad you can make it. Now you can just do this mentally to everyone's writing (and speaking, for that matter) all the time.
But asking writers to do it themselves is crippling. The new sentence you propose is obviously technically mo...
Terence Tao is great; I haven't read that book but I like his writing a lot in general. I am a big fan of the Princeton Lectures in Analysis by Stein and Shakarchi; clear writing, good exercises, great diagrams, focus on examples and applications.
(Edit: also, fun fact, Stein was Tao's advisor.)
Epistemic status: ex-math grad student
I think you're equivocating between two possible meanings of "choose" here. There's "choose" as in you start telling people "I want to write a book" and then there's "choose" as in you actually decide to actually write the book, which is quite different. I think Ray is asking about something like how to cultivate the capacity to do the latter. It is not at all trivially easy. Most goals are fake; making them real is a genuine skill.
Tongue-in-cheek: "when their pathological need to do something outweighs their pathological need to do nothing."
In more detail: there are several different kinds of deep-rooted psychological needs that ambition might be powered by, and I think the resulting different kinds of ambition are different enough to discuss as distinct entities (in particular, they vary in how prosocial they are). Some possibilities off the top of my head, not mutually exclusive, inspired by Enneagram types:
1. Reinforce a particular identity / self-narrative (e.g. &quo...
I also don't have much of this skill and made it through life without needing to have it; I was able to coast on raw intelligence for quite a long time, up through my 2nd year of grad school or so. Welp.
Except in romantic relationships; I've historically consistently found it easy to have commitment, follow-through, reliability, focused attention, etc. in that context (although it was kinda being fueled by neediness so there were other things going on there).
It feels like I have not yet found e.g. a job that I deeply value enough to commit to in...
There's an interesting thing authentic relating people do at workshops that they call "setting intentions," and I think it works in a different way than either of these. The difference seems to me to be that the intention is being "held by the group." I'm not sure how to explain what I mean by this. There are at least two visible signs of it:
1) people remind each other about the intention, and
2) people reward each other for following through on the intention.
If everyone knows the intention is being held by the group in this...
Glad to see you're writing about this! I think motivation is a really central topic and there's lots more to be said about it than has been said so far around here.
When we're struggling with motivation to do X, it's because only S2 predicts/believes that X will lead to reward. S1 isn't convinced. Your S2 models say X is good, but S1 models don't see it. This isn't necessarily a bug. S2 reasoning can be really shitty, people can come up with all kinds of dumb plans for things that won't help, and it's not so bad...
This seems like a bad idea to me; I think people who are trying to have good ideas should develop courage instead. If you don't have courage your ideas are being pushed around by fear in general, and asking for a particular source of that fear to be ameliorated will not solve the general problem.
Thanks for writing this up! I'm excited to see more people running experiments like this.
When you say "if I take X as a prompt, I get Y," how many trials did you wait? In my own experimentation I've found lil' GPT-2's performance to be really variable across trials, and I've needed to wait 5 trials in some cases to get results I even sort of liked.
My sense overall of how lil' GPT-2 functions after playing with it for awhile on several different kinds of prompts is that it has a strong sense of genre, and has done so...
Thanks for writing this! I am very excited that this post exists. I think what this model suggests about procrastination and addiction alone (namely, that they're things that managers and firefighters are doing to protect exiles) are already huge, and resonate strongly with my experience.
In the beginning of 2018 I experienced a dramatic shift that I still don't quite understand; my sense of it at the time was that there was this crippling fear / shame that had been preventing me from doing almost anything, that suddenly lifted (for several reaso...
things that had been too scary for me to think about became thinkable (e.g. regrettable dynamics in my romantic relationships), and I think this is a crucial observation for the rationality project. When you have exile-manager-firefighter dynamics going on and you don't know how to unblend from them, you cannot think clearly about anything that triggers the exile, and trying to make yourself do it anyway will generate tremendous internal resistance in one form or another (getting angry, getting bored, getting sleepy, getting confused, all sorts of cr...
This is a bad argument for transhumanism; it proves way too much. I'm a little surprised that this needs to be said.
Consider: "having food is good. Having more and tastier food is better. This is common sense. Transfoodism is the philosophy that we should take this common sense seriously, and have as much food as possible, as tasty as we can make it, even if doing so involves strange new technology." But we tried that, and what happened was obesity, addiction, terrible things happening to our gut flora, etc. It is just blatantly false in ge...
Yeah, "Life is good" doesn't validly imply "Living forever is good". There can obviously be offsetting costs; I think it's good to point this out, so we don't confuse "there's a presumption of evidence for (transhumanist intervention blah)" with "there's an ironclad argument against any possible offsetting risks/costs turning up in the future".
Like Said, I took Eliezer to just be saying "there's no currently obvious reason to think that the optimal healthy lifespan for most people i...
Consider: “having food is good. Having more and tastier food is better. This is common sense. Transfoodism is the philosophy that we should take this common sense seriously, and have as much food as possible, as tasty as we can make it, even if doing so involves strange new technology.” But we tried that, and what happened was obesity, addiction, terrible things happening to our gut flora, etc. It is just blatantly false in general that having more of a good thing is better.
Conclusion does not follow from example.
You are making exactly the mistake which
...This whole conversation makes me deeply uncomfortable. I expect to strongly disagree at pretty low levels with almost anyone else trying to have this conversation, I don't know how to resolve those disagreements, and meanwhile I worry about people seriously advocating for positions that seem deeply confused to me and those positions spreading memetically.
For example: why do people think consciousness has anything to do with moral weight?
why do people think consciousness has anything to do with moral weight?
Is there anything that it seems to you likely does have to do with moral weight?
I feel pretty confused about these topics, but it's hard for me to imagine that conscious experience wouldn't at least be an input into judgments I would endorse about what's valuable.
For anyone who is curious, I cite much of the literature arguing over criteria for moral patienthood/weight in the footnotes of this section of my original moral patienthood report. My brief comments on why I've focused on consciousness thus far are here.
Relevant reading: gwern's The Narrowing Circle. He makes the important point that moral circles have actually narrowed in various ways, and also that it never feels that way because the things outside the circle don't seem to matter anymore. Two straightforward examples are gods and our dead ancestors.
Not mr-hire, but I got a lot of value from things more in the space of "improve your ability to control the elephant." I expect the lowest hanging fruit will vary from person to person, and part of the point of this post was to alert people to the fact that there are different strategies that they might not be considering (either for themselves or people they're giving advice to)
I think there was a general skill of "learn how to focus on a task", which I learned by combination of:
– finding projects that I cared enough about to actu...
I think the original mythology of the rationality community is based around cheat codes
A lot of the original mythology, in the sense of the things Eliezer wrote about in the sequences, is about avoiding self-deception. I continue to think this is very important but think the writing in the Sequences doesn't do a good job of teaching it.
The main issue I see with the cheat code / munchkin philosophy as it actually played out on LW is that it involved a lot of stuff I would describe as tricking yourself or the rider fighting against / overriding the ele...
As a counter to this, I got very very far with this sort of self-improvement for a very long time (though I think LW was very bad at teaching it, and I mostly got it from other sources.) I've recently focused on the alignment based models as I was starting to get to the point of diminishing returns with the other way, but I did get a lot out of the previous paradigm
I think the alignment based models are very very powerful, and I also think that the overriding the elephant models are quite powerful and get too much of a bad rap.
This question feels confused to me but I'm having some difficulty precisely describing the nature of the confusion. When a human programmer sets up an IRL problem they get to choose what the domain of the reward function is. If the reward function is, for example, a function of the pixels of a video frame, IRL (hopefully) learns which video frames human drivers appear to prefer and which they don't, based on which such preferences best reproduce driving data.
You might imagine that with unrealistic amounts of computational power IRL might attempt...
IRL does not need to answer this question along the way to solving the problem it's designed to solve. Consider, for example, using IRL for autonomous driving. The input is a bunch of human-generated driving data, for example video from inside a car as a human drives it or more abstract (time, position, etc.) data tracking the car over time, and IRL attempts to learn a reward function which produces a policy which produces driving data that mimics its input data. At no point in this process does IRL need to do anything like reason about the distinctio...
Thanks for the mirror! My recommendation is more complicated than this, and I'm not sure how to describe it succinctly. I think there is a skill you can learn through practices like circling which is something like getting in direct emotional contact with a group, as distinct from (but related to) getting in direct emotional contact with the individual humans in that group. From there you have a basis for asking yourself questions like, how healthy is this group? How will the health of the group change if you remove this member from it? Etc.
It also s...
*nods*
I think there is something interesting here. I can see how I might be missing a perspective or modality that allows you to model small groups of people more directly, which is something I sometimes get hints of, but usually don't do too much (i.e. I don't participate in lots of group flow-states, communal dancing, most forms of circling, etc.). I could see how you could use that perspective to build high-level models of a community, though I am still not sure whether that's actually a good idea. But it seems worth a try.
I appreciate the thought. I don't feel like I've laid out my position in very much detail so I'm not at all convinced that you've accurately understood it. Can you mirror back to me what you think my position is? (Edit: I guess I really want you to pass my ITT which is a somewhat bigger ask.)
In particular, when I say "real, living, breathing entity" I did not mean to imply a human entity; groups are their own sorts of entities and need to be understood on their own terms, but I think it does not even occur to many people to try in the sense that I have in mind.
Sure, let me give it a try:
My model is that you are recommending to think about communities in a way that I would describe as "using your emotional modalities" and encouraging people to try to connect the consequences of their actions, to have a direct emotional impact on their experience. The most straightforward way to do this, is to try to increase the level of empathy you have for the people in the community. One way I would expect one could achieve that concretely, is by imagining you taking an action, such as moving to the Bay Area, and th...
(For additional context on this comment you can read this FB status of mine about tribes.)
There's something strange about the way in which many of us were trained to accept as normal that two of the biggest transitions in our lives - high school to college, college to a job - get packaged in with abandoning a community. In both of those cases it's not as bad as it could be because everyone is sort of abandoning the community at the same time, but it still normalizes the thing in a way that bugs me.
There's a similar normalization of abandonme...
I thought about this comment for an hour after I read it, and think this perspective is actively bad advice for community/institution building, at least applied naively, and I also expect applied at the level at which you are thinking about it. I think mentally anthropomorphizing communities of our size (i.e. anything above ~100) gives rise to really bad heuristic, and I think will cause you to waste the waste majority of your effort, and get critical questions like the ones discussed in this article wrong. I expect starting to do it will initially give yo...
Yes, absolutely. This is what graduate school and CFAR workshops are for. I used to say both of the following things back in 2013-2014:
I have personally benefited a ton over the last year and a half through osmosing things from dif...
I think your description of the human relationship to heroin is just wrong. First of all, lots of people in fact do heroin. Second, heroin generates reward but not necessarily long-term reward; kids are taught in school about addiction, tolerance, and other sorts of bad things that might happen to you in the long run (including social disapproval, which I bet is a much more important reason than you're modeling) if you do too much heroin.
Video games are to my mind a much clearer example of wireheading in humans, especially the ones furthest in the fa...
Yes, this.
There's a thing MIRI people talk about, about the distinction between "cartesian" and "naturalized" agents: a cartesian agent is something like AIXI that has a "cartesian boundary" separating itself from the environment, so it can try to have accurate beliefs about the environment, then try to take the best actions on the environment given those beliefs. But a naturalized agent, which is what we actually are and what any AI we build actually is, is part of the environment; there is no cartesian boundary. Among ...
The problem is that the standard justifications of Bayesian probability are in a framework where the facts that you are uncertain about are not in any way affected by whether or not you believe them!
I want to point out that this is not an esoteric abstract problem but a concrete issue that actual humans face all the time. There's a large class of propositions whose truth value is heavily affected by how much you believe (and by "believe" I mean "alieve") them - e.g. propositions about yourself like "I am confident" or eve...
I think the LW zeitgeist doesn't really engage with this.
Really? I feel quite the opposite, unless you're saying we could do still more. I think LW is actually one of the few communities that take this sort of non-dualism/naturalism in arriving at a probabilistic judgement (and all its meta levels) seriously. We've been repeatedly exposed to the fact that Newcomblike problems are everywhere since a long time ago, and then relatively recently, with Simler's wonderful post on crony beliefs (and now, his even more delightful book with Ha...
General advice that I think basically applies to everybody is to try to lock down sleep, diet, and exercise (not sure what order these go in exactly) solidly.
Random sleep tips:
The drum circle leading up to sunset was beautiful, but the drum (+ dance + singing) circle after sunset was really fun. I drummed and it was fun! Then I danced and it was fun! Then I sang and it was fun! Nat started improvising a melody and I tried that and it was fun, and then Nat started improvising lyrics and I tried that and it was even better –
and then we played one of my favorite games, sing-as-many-songs-with-the-same-chord-progression-at-the-same-time-as-possible, with the most people I've ever gotten to do it with –
anyway, all of that made me really happy, and I feel really grateful to everyone who helped make it all possible.
Pledged $50 / mo. I haven't been to an event at REACH yet but I'm happy about the events I've seen on Facebook being hosted there, and expect to attend and/or host something there in the nearish future if it keeps existing. Everything Ray et al. have been writing about community health and so forth resonates with me and I'm happy to put my money where my resonance is.
I think a pattern that makes sense to me is cycles of exploration and exploitation: learn about the world, act on that understanding, use the observations you acquired from acting to guide further learning, etc. The world is big and complicated enough that I think you don't hit anything close to diminishing marginal returns on asking "why?" (my experience, if anything, has been increasing marginal returns as I've gotten better at learning things), although I agree that it's important to get some acting going on in there too.
Teaching is not about methodology; it's metis, not episteme. (I am also not a schoolteacher but I have taught at CFAR workshops.)
I love cousin_it's suggestion that you should start teaching a student regularly as soon as possible, but I have an additional suggestion about how to spend that time: namely, your goal should not be to teach anyone anything but to find out how students' minds work (and since anyone can be a student, this means your goal is to find out how people's minds work), and how those minds interface with the material ...
I'm personally quite worried about disruptions to the food supply chain severe enough to cause food shortages in e.g. the Bay Area in the next few months but not sure what to do with that worry other than to stock up more on non-perishables. Would very much appreciate seeing more people thinking and researching about this.