For now, here is an unsatisfactory response that will be very rambly and probably off topic.
(For what it's worth, I found it quite helpful to see these motivations laid out like this, and am glad that you Logan wrote this comment and that you Raemon asked the question that provoked it.)
but the parent comment felt like it was too focused in on math
er, sorry, too focused in on math for it to help me with the thing i'm trying to figure out, in a way i was quickly able to recognize, i meant. i didn't mean to assert that it was just too focused in on math for a comment, in some generic purpose-independent way! 😛
Where does 'interaction' fit in all of this anyway?
Logan:
it somehow fits into the heart of deep mastery [from "Knowing"]
Ooh huh hmmm!
I had missed this before, but… I think achieving deep mastery is actually not the goal of {the part of my work I consider most important}. Or, to be more precise, it's not the job of this part of my work to produce deep mastery. I think.
(The Knowing article describes deep mastery as "extensive familiarity, lots of factual knowledge, rich predictive and explanatory models, and also practical mastery in a wide variety of s...
the conversation with robin you quoted did feel relevant, but the parent comment felt like it was too focused in on math and thereby somewhat orthogonal to or missing the point of what i was trying to figure out. (the real thing i'm interested in isn't even about math but about philosophical intuitions.)
this made me want to try to say the thing differently, this time using the concept of gears-level models:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/B7P97C27rvHPz3s9B/gears-in-understanding
(maybe everything i'm saying below is obvious already, but then again, maybe it...
Given our discussion on the "territory" essay about how the "in contact with the territory vs. all in the map" distinction has been confusing me, I've been trying to find a way to think about the "observing vs. merely seeing" distinction without identifying it with the other one.
{My first attempt to phrase it that seems to be actually at all helping with my confusion} is this: "Observation (in the relevant sense) is bringing my {anticipations / implicit models} in contact with something that might {contradict / resist / collide with / set / correct / chan...
I had a different conversation with Robin in the draft documents that I think was very relevant, but I can't find that one either. Blerg.
Anyway, "the thing that resists expectation" is my current best way of identifying "the territory", at least inside my own head. This has been true since gyroscopes and my study of fabricated options. I think the takeaway from that conversation I can't find was something like, "The ease with which your incorrect expectations encounter resistance-that-you-perceive-as-resistance corresponds to the directness of your observa...
This comment is about something I'm confused about, and I'm sufficiently confused about it that I can't write it as a clearly-articulated question or statement. Its current state is more like a confused question that my brain in trying to untangle as I'm reading this sequence. So I'll probably meander, and the meandering probably won't come together into a clear satisfying thing by the end of this comment.
A big reason I'm interested in Logan-style naturalism is that you (Logan) frequently say things about it that resonate with ways in which I approach my...
I love this comment. I expect that whatever must be going on in your head for you to have written it is near the top of "good things that could plausibly result from my writing this essay series". I am delighted.
I, too, will now say some rambly things that are part of my process of thinking rather than any sort of conclusion. I predict that they will sound a lot more confident than I actually feel.
According to me, you're obviously interacting with the territory when you're doing math. (I say this even though I've never watched you math, and have only barel...
Just a smidge of a reply, because I haven't grokked all of the above but this felt maybe useful:
Math (and certain ways of doing logic in general) has an unusual property in that it is an extremely parsimonious map? It's a map that clings super tightly to the territory, with unusually little in the way of the problems gestured at in the image below.
So maybe that resolves the distinction between "wait, amn't I in full contact with the territory?" and "wait, amn't I also just staring at my map?"
Unlike most maps, math/logic don't throw a wide lasso aroun...
So I feel like the internet has made people think there are no good people to look up to, and this makes it harder to trust new people.
This strongly clicked for me. It feels like there is more to say around this (and I don't know what / don't know how to say it yet), but this feels like part of the puzzle.
[Added:] Actually, perhaps it seems even more central to me that it feels like the same thing that has made people think there are no good people to look up to also has made have a decreased sense of looking up to institutional cultures. Like, my inner si...
FWIW, https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ counts all confirmed cases and has a table by country, which lists the Diamond Princess separately ("international conveyance"). It doesn't distinguish asymptomatic from mild, but does separate out "serious, critical" cases, which stand at 36/705 (plus 7/705 deaths and 100/705 recovered).
Not quite the same, but similar mood: since there is no evidence, we thought we'd check if we could reinterpret the evidence to not be evidence.
... (read more)