Why should “that which can be destroyed by the truth” be destroyed? Because the truth is fundamentally more real and valuable than what it replaces, which must be implemented on a deeper level than “what my current beliefs think.” Similarly, why should “that which can be destroyed by authenticity” be destroyed? Because authenticity is fundamentally more real and valuable than what it replaces, which must be implemented on a deeper level than “what my current beliefs think.” I don’t mean to pitch ‘radical honesty’ here, or other sorts of excessive openness; authentic relationships include distance and walls and politeness and flexible preferences.
To expand on Said and quanticle's comments here, I find this argument deeply unconvincing, and here's why. I see three things missing here:
I think you're right that the functional role of "authentic" in the above post is as an applause light. But... I think the same goes for "truth," in the way that you point out in your 2nd point. [In the post as a whole, I think "deep" also doesn't justify its directionality, but I think that's perhaps more understandable.]
That is, a description of what 'truth' is looks like The Simple Truth, which is about 20 pages long. I'm editing in that link to the relevant paragraph, as well as an IOU for 'authenticity,' which I think will be a Project to actually pay down.
But for this comment, let me see if I can write a short version that does enough of the work.
"Truth" is a label we use to distinguish the products of a coherence process, where a 'statement' corresponds to 'reality.' Untruth is when that coherence process fails, where the statement either corresponds to a different reality than the one we're in or fails to correspond to any possible reality. There are also interesting edge cases that point out the importance of the process that generates coherence, rather than it merely happening to be true that the two correspond with one another in this instance.
Thank you, this is somewhat helpful.
I do have much to say about this concept as you’ve described it. I wonder if you would prefer such comments here, or saved for the fuller description/explanation posts which you intend (if I understand your comments correctly) to write in the future?
(This is complicated by the fact that I also, now, have comments I’d like to make about this post, which depend on the concept of ‘authenticity’ as you describe it. I worry that such comments will simply result in you saying “ah, well, I can’t properly respond to that until I write the real post explaining ‘authenticity’”—yet they would be comments relevant to the points made in this post, rather than comments about the concept as such.)
(This, by the way, is why I prefer Eliezer’s method of starting from the dependencies…)
(This, by the way, is why I prefer Eliezer’s method of starting from the dependencies…)
I wanted to note that if dependencies are randomly already present in some fraction of the population, the 'reverse order' lets you convey your point to growing fractions of the population (as you go back and fill in more and more dependencies), whereas the 'linear order' doesn't let you convey your point until the end (when everyone is able to get it at once).
I think Circling, or related practices, are an important part of the great common Neo-Enlightenment project of human progress. It’s a mechanism to understand more about ourselves and each other, and it involves some deliberate attempts to not steer towards ‘candy’ and instead stay focused on deepening. It’s a genuine practice with a body of knowledge, and Circling Europe in particular seems to have had a technological edge (in that their online Circling platform has allowed them to get many more people spending many more hours Circling).
I also think there are massive cultural differences between ‘rationalists’ as a people group and ‘relationalists’ (what I sometimes hear them called) as a people group. As an analogy, I think athleticism is an important part of being a human with a body, and yet have difficulty finding fitness approaches or products that don’t want to scream ‘jock masculinity!’ or ‘yoga femininity!’ at me. Consider Convict Conditioning, a solid series of graduated bodyweight exercises that build small skills in the right order, pitched as the sort of thing you can do in prison and which will make you “a TRUE man.”
Most people who come to Circling events do it because
Like this comment and/but my experience has been the opposite. All or even majority rationalist circles are harder to skill up in because the process is constantly getting derailed by cognitive defense mechanisms against imprecise, non theory driven metis.
This isn't a criticism of this post or of Vaniver, but more a comment on Circling in general prompted by it. This example struck me in particular:
Orient towards your impressions and emotions and stories as being yours, instead of about the external world. “I feel alone” instead of “you betrayed me.”
It strikes me as very disturbing that this should be the example that comes to mind. It seems clear to me that one should not, under any circumstances engage in a group therapy exercise designed to lower your emotional barriers and create vulnerability in the presence of anyone you trust less than 100%, let alone someone you think has 'betrayed' you. This seems like a great way to get manipulated, taken advantage of by sexual abusers, gaslighted etc, which is a particular concern given the multiple allegations of abuse and sexual misconduct in the EA/Circling communities (1, 2, ChristianKl's comment). Reframing these behaviours as personal emotions and stories seems like it would further contribute to the potential for such abuse.
It seems clear to me that one should not, under any circumstances engage in a group therapy exercise designed to lower your emotional barriers and create vulnerability in the presence of anyone you trust less than 100%
I agree with this almost completely. Two quibbles: first, styles of Circling vary in how much they are a "group therapy exercise" (vs. something more like a shared exploration or meditation), and I think "100%" trust of people is an unreasonable bar; like, I don't think you should extend that level of trust to anyone, even yourself. So there's actual meat in the question of "what's it like to Circle with someone that you 90% trust? Should you do that?".
Also I think the ideal of Circling agrees with this underlying sentiment, in that the goal is not to lower emotional barriers but to understand them. It may be that as part of understanding them, they get lowered, or they might be maintained or raised. I've been in many Circles where the content of the Circle was "huh, it seems like we don't trust each other enough to be open / handle deep topic X. What's that like?".
One of the things that I worry about some with Circling and rationalists is something like... the uncann
"I feel alone" isn't a statement of something being a failure. It's just a statement about the current emotional state.
Perhaps this is a tangent to the discussion, but "I feel alone" is not a statement about an emotional state. It is a confused statement that on the surface appears to be about emotions ("I feel...") but the thing that follows those first two words is not an emotion, but a claim about the world: "(I am) alone."
"I feel sad" is a description of an emotional state. "I feel sad about..." or "I feel sad that.." are descriptions of emotional states, together with, but separate from, a statement of a belief about the world. "I feel alone" and similar phrases, such as the general pattern "I feel that...", confuse feelings with beliefs.
Every statement of the form "I feel that..." is false, because what follows the "that" is a belief about the world, not a feeling. Acknowledging it as a belief makes it possible to consider "Is this belief true? Why do I believe it is true?" Miscalling it a feeling protects it from testing against reality: "How can you question my FEELINGS?"
Indeed; “I feel alone” has different connotations than “I feel lonely”. Namely:
“I feel lonely” simply connotes “I have a certain mental/emotional state”.
“I feel alone” connotes “I feel lonely; also, I believe that I am alone (and that the latter is the cause of the former), but I don’t want to claim this outright—I prefer only to imply it, in a way that prevents anyone from asking whether that belief is true”.
I'm sorry but the type of certifications done by an organization like Circling Europe is insufficient. I'm not sure if circling is intrinsically even a good idea given that it necessarily involves participation of multiple other non-professionals. But even setting that aside, I would assume a level of training and oversight comparable to the psychotherapy field would be necessary before I'd feel comfortable with this at all.
I've gotten the most out of smaller circles with higher trust where knives can come out. Letting things be safe enough on the meta level that they can feel dangerous on the object level and that's okay. Sort of like a cross with doom circling. With bigger groups attention feels too diffuse.
I'm still skeptical of Circling, but this is exactly the sort of post I want to encourage in general: trying to explain something many readers are skeptical of, while staying within this site's epistemic standards and going only one inferential step out.
Orient towards your impressions and emotions and stories as being yours, instead of about the external world. “I feel alone” instead of “you betrayed me.”
"Alice betrayed Bob" contains some information that "Bob feels alone" doesn't contain, though. I don't think we should always discard such information.
I think that this perspective focuses entirely too much on people’s feelings about things, and not nearly enough on the facts of the matter. Consider the following alternative analysis, based on a simple enumeration of possibilities.
We start with Bob believing that Alice betrayed him. There are then two possibilities for the truth value of this belief; and, orthogonally, there are two[1] possibilities for how Bob chooses to proceed with his interaction with Alice. This yields a joint set of four scenarios:
Alice betrayed Bob. Bob expresses his belief straightforwardly, saying: “Alice, you betrayed me”.
Alice betrayed Bob. Bob uses the NVC-style[2] expression, saying: “I feel alone” (or something along these lines).
Alice did not betray Bob. Bob behaves as in scenario (1).
Alice did not betray Bob. Bob behaves as in scenario (2).
In scenario 1, Bob maintains his defenses, so to speak; he does not make himself vulnerable to further exploitation, abuse, etc. on Alice’s part. He curtails (though by no means entirely closes off) the possibility of reconciliation or understanding—but as we have stipulated that Alice did indeed betray Bob, this is fine; the onus to make a concer
But also I think I run into this alternative impression a lot, and so something is off about how I or others are communicating about it. I'd be interested in hearing why it seems like Circling would push towards 'letting betrayal slide' or 'lowering boundaries' or similar things.
[I have some hypotheses, which are mostly of the form "oh, I was assuming prereq X." For example, I think there's a thing that happens sometimes where people don't feel licensed to have their own boundaries or preferences, or aren't practiced at doing so, and so when you say something like "operate based on your boundaries or preferences, rather than rules of type X" the person goes "but... I can't? And you're taking away my only means of protecting myself?". The hope is it's like pushing a kid into a pool with a lifeguard right there, and so it generally works out fine, but presumably there's some way to make the process more clear, or to figure out in what cases you need a totally different approach.]
I very much don't hesitate insisting on my boundaries and preferences, and Im still aversive to th...
I think I see another drawback of these kinds of techniques: when someone criticizes your thing, your first thought is "let's analyze why the person said that", rather than "wait, is my thing bad?" It's worrying that the thing you're defending happens to teach that kind of mental move.
I remain sceptical of how you use internal/external. To give an example: Lets say a higher-up does something that makes me angry. Then I might want to scream at him but find myself unable to. If however he sensed this and offered me to scream without sanction (and lets say this is credible), I wouldn't want that. Thats because what I wanted was never about more decibel per se, but the significance this has under normal circumstances, and he has altered the significance. Now is the remaining barrier to "really expressing" myself internal or external? Keep in mind that we could repeat the above for any behaviour that doesn't directly harm anyone (the harm is not here because it is specifically anger we are talking about. Declarations of love could similarly be robbed of their meaning).
Like, if I have a desire to be understood on a narrow technical point, the more Circling move is to go into what it's like to want to convey the point, but the thing the emotion wants is to just explain the thing already; if it could pick its expression it would pick a lecture.
This is going in the right direction.
Also, after leaving this in the back of my head for the last few days, I think I have an inroad to explaining the problem in a less emotion-focused way. To start off: What effects can and should circling have on the social reality while not circling?
If I'm inferring correctly,
That seems mostly correct.
To the extent it's possible, I think it's good for people to have the option of Circling with strangers, in order to minimize worries in this vein; I think this is one of the other things that makes the possibility of Circling online neat.
I think doing it with strangers you never see again dissolves the worries I'm talking about for many people, though not quite for me (and it raises new problems about being intimate with strangers).
The stuff above is too vague to really do much with, so I'm looking forward to that post of yours. I will say though that I didn't imagine literal forgetting agreements - even if it were possible to keep them (and while we're at it, how do you imagine keeping a confidentiality agreement without keeping a forgetting agreement? Clearly your reaction can give a lot of information about what went on, even if you never Tell anyone) because that would sort of defeat the point, no? But clearly there is some expectation that people react differently then they normally would, or else how the hell is it a good idea for you to act differently?
I can't speak for Vaniver or Circling, but I've participated in related practice T-Group, and what they said there is:
This isn't supposed to be how you communicate every day, any more than Tai Chi is supposed to be how you walk every day. But if you practice the weird, specific movements of Tai Chi, you will find yourself with more options and fewer problems when you move in your everyday life, and that is helpful. Similarly, T-Group (and I assume Circling) uses weird social/verbal muscles to give you the ability to do different things in your relationships, but that doesn't mean you are non-consensually T-Grouping people all the time.
Note that this doesn't apply to NVC, which I have the impression is meant to be direct practice for handling conflicts.
I actually objected (and was somewhat surprised Vaniver didn't object to) your description upthread of "either Alice betrayed Bob, or she didn't". Betrayal is very much not an atomic object (and importantly so, not just in the generic "everything is complicated" sense)
(Note: the following all tracks how I personally use the word Betrayal. Notably, others might use the word differently. But, the fact that people use words differently is a related, important point)
Betrayal is a meaning that people assign to actions, and only really has meaning insofar as people assign it. It exists in social reality, personal subjective experience, and interpersonal subjective experience. It is not objective fact about reality, except insofar as personal subjective experiences are part of reality.
If Alice and Bob have an explicit agreement that they are monogamous, and that cheating is an act of betrayal, and then Alice has sex with Carl, there are three concrete facts of the matter: Alice had sex outside the relationship, Alice took an action that both parties agreed they would not do, and furthermore agreed was a betrayal. In this case it's all pretty clear cut.
But, often (I would expect most of th
So, wait. Have you ever used Circling to resolve conflicts? Or, seen it used this way? Or, know anyone (whose word you trust) who has used it this way?
I have seen... maybe a dozen attempts to use it this way that I can remember (at least vaguely). Some of them were successful, some weren't; many had the flavor of "well, we haven't resolved anything yet but we know a lot more now". (Also I'm not counting conflicts about where the group attention should be going, which are happen pretty frequently.)
Some of the conflicts were quite serious / high-stakes; described somewhat vaguely, I remember one where a wife was trying to 'save her marriage' (the husband was also in the Circle), and over the course of an hour or so we got to the label of her felt sense of what was happening, figured out an "if X, then Y" belief that she had so deeply she hadn't ever looked at it, and then when she asked the question "is that true?" it dissolved and she was able to look at the situation with fresh eyes.
I don't remember being one of the primary parties for any of those conflicts; the closest was when I organized a Circle focused on me to work through my stance towards someone in my life that I was havi
I think someone should maybe write a post describing how meditation is a form of empiricism, and then it should follow as a pretty easy corollary that Circling is also a form of empiricism.
I'd be interested in that, but don't think I believe it enough to write it myself.
A brief sketch of why: there's the "external universe", and the "conscious mind", and normal scientific empiricism is a way for the conscious mind to expose itself to the universe, letting it be reshaped to better match the universe that it's in.
When you look at meditation, then you're replacing "external universe" with something like the "mental universe." And so you still have this way for the conscious mind to expose itself to the mental universe that it's in, and be reshaped to better match it. But it's less obvious that 'the mental universe as revealed by meditation' is worth reshaping towards, or has the 'nourishing properties of the universe' or whatever.
Like, with regular science we have materialism, and a pretty strong belief that there's one underlying reality, and that it's explainable through math. With Circling, we have other people to get around our blind spots. With meditation... there's some reason to be optimistic, but it seems weaker.
Mod note: One of the threads here ended up including a lot of discussion of LW norms. I've moved it over to this meta thread.
(Some of those comments, including the initial one, were object-level relevant to this post. I apologize for moving all of them indiscriminately. Our comment-moving-features are a bit janky and it's easier to move an entire thread than individual subthreads. I also apologize for breaking a lot of the comment-permalinks in that thread, and we'll look into fixing those. Meanwhile, you can actually still hover-over the comments in quest
It seems to me like a stretch to take Sean's commitment to authenticity as being just like what a scientists does who's committed to the truth.
You could similarly describe the commitment to God of a catholic as Catholicism being like rationalism. Even when you can even argue that the search for the nature of God was important for the enlightenment, it's still different then our standard rationality. If you would ask Sean whether he sees his Circling as connecting with the divine, he would likely say yes when he's in an audience with ot...
It seems to me like a stretch to take Sean's commitment to authenticity as being just like what a scientists does who's committed to the truth.
I mean, all analogies are stretches; the question is in what way and how far. There's a reason the post has 'cousin' in the title instead of 'sibling' or 'distant relation.'
You could similarly describe the commitment to God of a catholic as Catholicism being like rationalism.
Specifically, the way I would do that is as follows:
Suppose for these paragraphs we use "Faith" to refer to 'privileging model A over model B' when we're making decisions and those two models disagree with each other. This can be used to protectively shield beliefs from criticism ("Well, I get that you have all these detailed arguments for the historical record not being the way I think it is, but God Said So, and I have faith in God."), and it can be used to integrate considerations that are too remote to be positively identified in a model but which can be easily labelled ("Well, I get that I am extremely confident that the experiment would go a particular way, but Empiricism Requires We Run It, and I have faith in Empiricism.").
In my youth I got to see an example of t
A slight bit of style critique: I spent the first half of the post thinking "why does he keep capitalizing the word circle and using it this way?". I've literally never heard of this.
It's possible that I'm just way out of the norm here. I don't live in a rationalist hub of activity, but I do read a good portion of LW and a few related blogs.
This post is hard for me to review, because I both 1) really like this post and 2) really failed to deliver on the IOUs. As is, I think the post deserves highly upvoted comments that are critical / have clarifying questions; I give some responses, but not enough that I feel like this is 'complete', even considering the long threads in the comments.
[This is somewhat especially disappointing, because I deliberately had "December 31st" as a deadline so that this would get into the 2019 review instead of the 2020 review, and had hoped this would be the first p...
I first noticed the way in which Circling was trying to implement empiricism early in my Circling experience, but it fully crystallized when a Circler said something that rhymes with P.C. Hodgell’s “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” I can’t remember the words precisely, but it was something like “in the practice, I have a deep level of trust that I should be open to the universe.”
I am deeply puzzled that you see these things as expressing the same sentiment.
To be clear, are you saying that your interpretation of the latter quote’s mea
Often, I talk to people who are highly skeptical, systematic thinkers who are frustrated with the level of inexplicable interest in Circling (previously discussed on LW) among some rationalists. “Sure,” they might say, “I can see how it might be a fun experience for some people, but why give it all this attention?” When people who are interested in Circling can’t give them a good response besides “try it, and perhaps then you’ll get why we like it,” there’s nothing in that response that distinguishes a contagious mind-virus from something useful for reasons not yet understood.
This post isn’t an attempt to fully explain what Circling is, nor do I think I’ll be able to capture everything that’s good about Circling. The hope is to clearly identify one way in which Circling is deeply principled in a way that rhymes with rationality, and potentially explains a substantial fraction of rationalist interest in Circling. As some context; I’m certified to lead Circles in the Circling Europe style after going through their training program, but I’ve done less Circling than Unreal had when she wrote this post, and I have minimal experience with the other styles.
Fundamentally, I think the thing that sets Circling apart is that it focuses on updating based on experience and strives to create a tight, high-bandwidth feedback loop to generate that experience. Add in some other principles and reflection, and you have a functioning culture of empiricism directed at human connection and psychology. I think they’d describe it a bit differently and put the emphasis in different places, while thinking that my characterization isn’t too unfair. This foundation of empiricism makes Circling seem to me like a ‘cousin of Rationality,’ though focused on people instead of systems.
I first noticed the way in which Circling was trying to implement empiricism early in my Circling experience, but it fully crystallized when a Circler said something that rhymes with P.C. Hodgell’s “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” I can’t remember the words precisely, but it was something like “in the practice, I have a deep level of trust that I should be open to the universe.” That is, he didn’t trust that authentic expression will predictably lead to success according to his current goals, but rather that a methodological commitment to putting himself out there and seeing what happens would lead to deeper understanding and connection with others, even though it requires relinquishing attachment to specific goals. This is a cognitive clone of how scientists don’t trust that running experiments will predictably lead to confirmation of their current hypotheses, but rather that a methodological commitment to experimentation and seeing what happens would lead to a deeper understanding of nature. A commitment to natural science is fueled by a belief that the process of openness and updating is worth doing; a commitment to human science is fueled by a belief that the process of openness and updating is worth doing.
Why should “that which can be destroyed by the truth” be destroyed? Because the truth is fundamentally more real and valuable than what it replaces, which must be implemented on a deeper level than “what my current beliefs think.” Similarly, why should “that which can be destroyed by authenticity” be destroyed? Because authenticity [IOU: a link as good as 'The Simple Truth'] is fundamentally more real and valuable than what it replaces, which must be implemented on a deeper level than “what my current beliefs think.” I don’t mean to pitch ‘radical honesty’ here, or other sorts of excessive openness; authentic relationships include distance and walls and politeness and flexible preferences.
So what is Circling, and why do I think it’s empirical in this way? I sometimes describe Circling as “multiplayer meditation.” That is, like a meditative practice, it involves a significant chunk of time devoted to attending to your own attention. Unlike sitting meditation, it happens in connection with other people, which allows you to see the parts of your mind that activate around other people, instead of just the parts that activate when you’re sitting with yourself. It also lets you attend to what’s happening in other people, both to get to understand them better and to see the ways in which they are or aren’t a mirror of what’s going on in you. It’s sometimes like ‘the group’ trying to meditate about ‘itself.’ A basic kind of Circle holds one of the members as the ‘object of meditation’, like a mantra or breathing with a sitting meditation, with a different member acting as facilitator, keeping the timebox, opening and closing, and helping guide attention towards the object when it drifts. Other Circles have no predefined object, and go wherever the group’s attention takes them.
As part of this exploration, people often run into situations where they don’t have social scripts. Circling has its own set of scripts that allow for navigation of trickier territory, and also trains script-writing skills. They often run into situations that are vulnerable, where people are encouraged to follow their attention and name their dilemmas; if you’re trying to deepen your understanding of yourself and become attuned to subtler distinctions between experiences and emotions, running roughshod over your boundaries or switching them off is a clumsy and mistaken way to do so. Circles often find themselves meditating on why they cannot go deeper in that moment, not yet at least, in a way that welcomes and incorporates the resistance.
Circling Europe has five principles; each of these has a specialized meaning that takes them at least a page to explain, and so my attempt to summarize them in a paragraph will definitely miss out on important nuance. As well, after attempting to explain them normally, I’ll try to view them through the lens of updating and feedback.
Having said all that, I want to note that I might be underselling Commitment to Connection. The story I'm telling here is "Circling is powered in part by a methodological commitment to openness," and noting that science and rationality are powered similarly, but another story you could tell is "Circling is powered in part by a commitment to connection." That is, a scientist might say "yes, it's hard to learn that you're wrong, but it's worth it" and analogously a Circler might say "yes, it's hard to look at difficult things, but it's worth it," but furthermore a Circler might say "yes, it's hard to look at difficult things, but we're in this together."
It’s one thing to have a feedback loop that builds techne, but I think Circling goes further. I think it taps into the power of reflection that creates a Lens That Sees Its Flaws. Humans can Circle, and humans can understand Circling; they can Circle about Circling. (They can also write blog posts about Circling, but that one’s a bit harder.) There’s also a benefit to meditating together, as I will have an easier time seeing my blind spots when they’re pointed out to me by other members of a Circle than when I go roaming through my mind by myself. Circling seems to be a way to widen your own lens, and see more of yourself, cultivating those parts to be more deliberate and reflective instead of remaining hidden and unknown.