2:12pm August 4, 2013

➸ Musings of Ade: shitifindon: “When facing a difficult decision, I check which...

intersectional -beheadings:

youneedacat:

shitifindon:

“When facing a difficult decision, I check which considerations are consequentialist – which considerations are actually about future consequences. (Recent example from Eliezer: I bought a $1400 mattress in my quest for sleep, over the Internet hence much cheaper than the…

It’s not from LW. I gave up on LW being remotely comprehensible years ago.

It’s from a project that’s done by some of the same people (including an old friend of mine, which is pretty much the only reason I was reading it) that’s supposedly about teaching their methods to people who haven’t learned them already. Although if they manage to be that confusing in their rationality worksheet thing, they might be teaching to people who actually already know this stuff? Idk..

If we’re talking about CFAR, I’m pretty sure that’s in the “sell product to wealthy people" stage of existence.

Not that I approve of that being a strategy, but. (I actually quit a really lucrative job last year because I can’t stand that thing.) I helped write examples like this, and if I had expected them to be for people like me, I would have changed the example.

My favorite example of the sunk cost fallacy is someone riding a bus, and realizing they might have missed their stop, but feeling “since they’re already past their stop, it can’t hurt to stay on the bus.“ Noticing that this is just an excuse to avoid being embarrassed is useful no matter how much money you have. And, the example stated is the most useful for the audience CFAR is trying to target - wealthy young Silicon Valley types that don’t have a lot of lifeskills. It’s not zero-cost to change the example.

Since the web site is public now, it’s not zero-cost to maintain it now, either. I would add my example if I worked with CFAR, but I don’t have enough time to.

I have a naive idea that rationality and lifeskills pair well. (I am eighteen; most of the relevant people are in their late twenties and early thirties, and think I am silly and idealistic. This is fair.)

I really want to translate Less Wrong style rationality - 48 Laws of Power, the Less Wrong sequences, Psychology of Persuasion - into plain english. When I had enough spoons to read them, the named sources helped me understand the world I live in. If I rewrite them, more people could use them.

I want to see if lifeskills that are about lifeskills ("meta-lifeskills”, if that’s not too buzzword-ey) can be taught to everyone, or if those just plain are inaccessible to some people. I don’t think they are, I just think it’s done that way, because male, white nonautistics or “"people with Asperger’s”“ tend to be the ones who can deal with the culture surrounding rationality.

I don’t know if this makes sense, sorry.

I’ve got severe misgivings about the entire thing, but my reasons wouldn’t be easily comprehended by people most likely to like the idea in the first place. And I’d likely be trampled over if I even tried to explain. So I don’t.

I’m not against rationality at all. I’m just not convinced that what they teach is rationality. Nor am I sure that all of their ways of attracting people to their ideas are remotely ethical.

Whenever I try to read that stuff, I’m overwhelmed with an intense sense of being manipulated in a highly disturbing level. It’s like the words say something that sounds like it makes sense, but inside each idea is another idea, hiding, trying to worm its way into my brain. I have never encountered anything like that and had it end well, so I normally give it an extremely wide berth.

I know that a lot of people sincerely believe this is all a good thing, and not all of them are trying to manipulate on that level. But nonetheless manipulation is occurring in a way that’s… much more sophisticated and disturbing than manipulation I normally encounter. I mean, it’s not just manipulation on one level alone. There’s also manipulation designed to make people dismantle their defenses against manipulation, at times at the exact same moment as convincing them that doing this will make them less vulnerable to manipulation! It would be impressive if it wasn’t also really damn scary.

Most people likely to be attracted to it are already lacking in some of the exact faculties that allow me to detect this. And I’m not the only person I know who’s detected it. We just don’t tend to say so, we are too busy staying the hell away.

Plus we know any discussion of it would end at an impasse. Any discussion would end with them demanding proof, but only proof of a certain kind. Cognition that involves the detection of sensory shapes and patterns is completely alien to the kind of cognition they’re trying to develop. (Yes, I know they say intuition is useful in certain circumstances, but the kind of thinking I’m talking about isn’t intuition, either, it’s just extremely different from what they tend to be familiar with. Even my friend doesn’t really understand it and she’s known me twenty years.)

And that’s not even getting into what I think is wrong with the methods themselves. That’s just why I won’t get near the organizations involved. Although I don’t think the methods they’re using are entirely divorced from this problem. It’s just that the scary manipulation angle is only one of many things I’ve seen wrong with them.

But I can’t prove it to someone whose thought is hyper-conceptual, when I’m getting this information through thinking that’s closer to hyper-perceptual and entirely off their radar. Not that I don’t use the balancing influence of conceptual thought, it’s just not where my strengths are.

And usually people attracted to this are so far into conceptual thinking that they’re easy above my level, and I can’t hold my own in an argument with them even if I’m right. And they don’t usually understand that. That being unable to hold your own in a "rational” debate doesn’t make you wrong. And that examining an idea through their preferred method doesn’t make your conclusions right… or even less wrong. ;-)

But I do think it would be good for them to write some stuff in plain language if they’re serious about reaching ordinary people. Preferably without all the weird embedded manipulation, but that may be asking too much. Or may even be impossible - even if the writer intended no manipulation, the ideas themselves may contain the manipulation already. I don’t know. I haven’t looked close enough, too wary.

I do think some of the manipulation was originally intentional on at least some people’s parts, though. It’s too sophisticated, too detailed, to meticulously assembled. That doesn’t happen by accident. I don’t know who, or what, or why. I just know there’s something highly unsettling happening.

As for their tools for rational thinking… Some of them sound right, some sound wrong, it’s very hard to tell the difference on sight, and even when they’re right in the details, there’s something wrong about how they’re put together. And the way they say to do things manufactures a giant blind spot pointed at exactly why they are wrong. I don’t know if that blind spot is part of the manipulation, or if it’s because each person who helped originate that stuff had the blind spot themselves and it got built into their system of thinking by accident.

But none of what I say would stand up to a conversation on their terms. And I’m not willing to have conversations on those terms anyway. I don’t mind if people don’t believe me, they don’t have to believe me. But there’s just… something about the entire method and tone and attitude that my previous conversations with therm have been forced into, that I heartily detest.

But despite my dislike of the whole thing, I would like it if they talked in plain English or had translated their main stuff into plain English. One other thing I’ve disliked about it is the fact that they pretty much make their content inaccessible to cognitively disabled people and people without extensive education and vocabularies.

I actually have a different friend who had taught me a great deal about rational thinking and its place in the world. But:

1. There’s zero manipulation attached.

2. Any resemblance to what they’re doing is superficial.

3. Conclusions reached are not always, or even often, the conclusions they tend to reach with their methods of thinking.

I would describe it, but it’s more things I use, not things I can pull out of my mind at will, all at once, and then describe.

But comparing the two is one reason I’m aware of the differences between anything I’d call rationality, and what they are doing. Also big differences between what I’d call rationality, and in general what that particular type of well off white guys is attracted to in what they call rationality.

I’m sorry for my vagueness and I don’t expect anyone to believe me. I’m just writing about stuff that’s hard to put words around, in the best way I can.

Notes: