I know I’ve been very inactive this year, but if anyone’s been holding out for new content, all of that will be on the new site. And there’s already new content if you’ve only been reading stuff found here on WordPress.

It’s still a little lackluster, e.g. it’s missing the ability to comment / follow. I’ll hopefully get an RSS feed up in the coming weeks.  EDIT: Here’s the longform RSS and the shortform RSS XML links.

Right now, my main priority is to backport / edit some old posts, so it can achieve the goals I laid out in my Year Three Review, where I wanted a shortform and a longform place to put my thoughts.

So this quarter, I’ve been tutoring for an undergraduate computer science course, and one interesting thing that I’ve revised is how I think about teaching/learning.

Let me try to illustrate. Here’s a conversation that happened between some staff and the professor one day; it’s about what advice to give students when testing their code.

Tutor A: “I think that we should remind students to be very thorough about how they approach testing their code. Like, so far, I’ve been telling them that every line of code they write should have a test.”

Tutor B: “Hmmm, that might backfire. After all, lots of those lines of code are in functions, and we really just want them to make sure that their functions are working as intended. It’s not really feasible to test lines of code inside a function.”

Professor: “Actually…that seems like a fine outcome. We want students to be thinking about testing, and I’d actually be very excited if someone came up to me and asked how to test for what goes on inside a function…”

This was surprising to me because most discussions I’ve previously had about student learning had focused on how to reduce confusion for the students. But in this scenario, the professor was fine with it happening; if anything, they seemed pleased that the concepts, when taken to their extremes, incited more questions.

And this general concept, of giving students something that’s Not The Answer, in an effort to move them closer to The Answer seems to show up in several other areas.

For example, from my shallow understanding of how kōans work in Zen Buddhism, there’s a similar mechanic going on. The point of a kōan isn’t to develop a fully satisfactory answer to the question it asks, but to wrestle with the strangeness / paradoxical nature of the kōan. The auxiliary things that happen along the way, en route to the answer is really what the kōan is about.

To be clear, the thing I’m trying to point at isn’t just giving people practice problems, the way that we already do for math or physics.

Rather, I’m imagining things like people purposefully writing incorrect / confusing material, such that it prompts students to ask more questions. I guess there’s already a good amount of people in the rationality space who write abstrusely, but I wonder how many are doing so for pedagogical reasons? Seeing as noticing confusion is an oft-cited useful skill, I think that there’s more to do here, especially if you’re upfront about how some of the material is going to be incomplete, and maybe sometimes even wrong.

It seems like there’s a slew of related useful skills here. Several times, in math class, for example, I’ve had my instructor make an error while doing some proof. And now I’m confused about how we got from step N to step N+1. Sometimes I figure that they’re just wrong, and I write what I think is correct. And sometimes I get scared that I’m the one who doesn’t understand.

But this whole process raises good questions. What if I hadn’t noticed that something was wrong? What does that say about my understanding? When I do notice that something is wrong, how do I know if it’s me or the other person?

This all seems applicable outside of a pedagogical context.

In 2018, not counting the small essays that found their way to my short-form blog, I wrote 16 full-length blog posts.

I am disappointed by this because one of my constant goals with blogging is to write new essays every week. Partially, it feels bad because I did mostly succeed in hitting my original goal of weekly essays in both 2016 and 2017, so I felt like going for another year would be doable. And partially it feels bad because I feel like this means I’ve grown less as a person because I’ve had less bloggable thoughts, or something like that.

This is a blog post to dive into what happened with my blog posts in 2018.

Near the end of 2017  I went off to college, and it was then that I realized my writing schedule had taken a hit. Aside from adjusting to the environment, rationality-esque things felt less important and useful. There weren’t a lot of rationalists at school, I had less free time, social incentives produced different focuses, etc. etc.. Typical stuff. Thus, it seems like the outside view might have predicted a drop in my writing output. Looking at my 2017 review post, though, it seems like I was still enthusiastic and optimistic for 2018; I’d outlined some areas which I had wanted to explore.

Now, a year (and relatively few blog posts) later, it looks like things have gone contra my expectations, if not altogether awry.

Admitting that this has been a problem and addressing it has been difficult for me. For most of 2018, I had a large ball of guilt, wherein I kept reminding myself that I had this blog I was very much not attending to. In the rare moments where I would find the time and excitement to write a blog post, the feeling didn’t last. If I asked my gut what happened, I’d get an answer like:

“Well, it…just kinda snowballed, y’know? Like, I guess maybe I had some good thoughts, but then I wasn’t really interacting that much with the rationality community…then I had other things taking up time…and then I just…didn’t want to write all that much…and then I started to feel less like the sort of person who writes…and all the while I felt bad because I had this large archive of my previous thoughts kind of staring back at me like ‘Okay Owen, what are you gonna do next?’ and it felt hard to top some of my previous essays, or something like that.”

This essay has been a long-time coming. But it hasn’t been until now that I’ve found the time, inclination, and clarity to structure my thoughts on this topic. I’ve broken up my thoughts on writing (or my lack thereof) into three sections: Level Up or Shut Up, Static vs Evolving, and You Can Only Go So Meta.

1] Level Up or Shut Up:

One big chunk of the issue was that, from a personal growth perspective, I found myself hitting the same issues over and over again. It’s not just that I was rediscovering the same principles, but rather, I found myself struggling to do things I’d thought were obvious…like Doing The Obvious Things, or making TAPs when I wanted to make something a habit.

(There’s a larger question here of why I wasn’t progressing, why I kept running into the same roadblocks, and what this all means for rationality skills in general. For now, I’m just taking it as a given.)

I outlined this state of mind in Coming Full Circle, where I felt like I’d already written essays about any sort of problem I might encounter. In a way, it felt like it meant I hadn’t “progressed”, or something like that, with regards to my rationality skills. As a result, I felt like I’d either be repeating myself in new blog posts or I’d have to wait until something else new and interesting came by (which didn’t happen often).

And if I kept writing about the same topics, it felt like I’d be admitting that rationality didn’t work, given that the very person who espoused these techniques (me) was still getting screwed over. Thus, fears of hypocrisy were also there.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I think that an issue with gratuitous categorization is that you might be able to recognize an issue—and then leave it at that, feeling lifted by the momentary satisfaction of naming a Thing. It becomes very easy to think “Oh hey! I recognize that I’m currently having an issue with X! This situation fits pattern X!”, whereupon I’d feel good for having made the connection between my current situation and an existing concept, but then I wouldn’t go any farther to solve it.

Problems are interesting when you tackle them for the first time, but I think there’s definitely a fading novelty thing going on here too, where the 17th time you realize “Oh, I guess Murphyjitsu would have come in handy in this situation too”, you begin to tire of it all.

(And once again, it says something about the quality of your solutions if they aren’t continuously effective, or if they become aversive to use. But we’re sidestepping that for now as well.)

Reflecting back on this now, the dichotomy between “write about the same stuff while looking like a hypocrite” and “wait long periods of time for novel ideas” was a false one. In Meditations on the Medium, I expressed frustration with essays being static snapshots. I think that the quality of explanations can always be made better. Even though I might already have had an essay that detailed whatever self-improvement things were on my mind that week, it could still have been useful to revisit the essay, update it, and maybe add some more recent examples.

But that doing so felt weird on a blog, where updates to older posts wouldn’t get immediately pushed back up to the top and shown. And speaking of the blog format…

2] Static vs Evolving:

When I’m writing blog posts, there’s always tension between several goals, which aren’t always complementary. The conflict can be succinctly summarized as a question of, “Am I writing this blog post for my benefit or the benefit of my readers?”, which is explored in Writing as Input vs Writing as Output.

On the one hand, I want to be able to use blog posts as a way to capture my current state of mind. There’s immediate short-term value in tracking what problems I’m currently facing and which thoughts are currently on my mind. Explication is useful for disambiguating concepts and fitting them into a larger structure. Focusing on the present, however, is necessarily going to date my posts. As I keep growing and changing, many of the posts get rendered obsolete, as they are no longer accurate portrayals of who I am, or become superseded by future essays.

On the other hand, I also want my blog posts to be as timeless as they can; the best case is that they stay useful even long after I’ve written them. In practice, this means I’d like for them to be crystallized explanations of concepts, so even if time passes, they can still serve as essays for future reference or pedagogy for future readers. However, optimizing for clarity of explanation is a longer process, requiring me to spend more time and attention on my essays.

It’s much easier to throw care to the winds and write what’s on my mind, than to try to craft something explanatorily useful. It seems like what I personally needed this year was more therapeutic stream-of-consciousness stuff, but I kept wanting to output more long-lived, crystallized content. The disconnect led to more aversion. One way I could have made more of a compromise was to keep privately writing periodic blog posts, and then do a later pass to cull the best stuff into public posts.

But of course that didn’t occur to me at the time. For 2019, one large project I want to undertake is to apply a stronger filter / polish on my existing posts. But more on that later.

3] You Can Only Go So Meta:

Also alluded to in Coming Full Circle, when you go ever meta on the writing process and rationality, you start to hit some conceptual limits; it feels like you’ve categorized everything that there is. In the beginning of Chapter 6 of Inadequate Equilibria (ctrl-f for “In other words”), Yudkowsky goes over some general guidelines for thinking, where he writes:

“Try to spend most of your time thinking about the object level. If you’re spending more of your time thinking about your own reasoning ability and competence than you spend thinking about Japan’s interest rates and NGDP, or competing omega-6 vs. omega-3 metabolic pathways, you’re taking your eye off the ball.”

And, well, mindlevelup is a pretty meta blog…

Speaking generally, I think it is good to be focused on object-level things. There’s a pattern of dive into something object-level → muck around for a bit → discover new things → generalize to a larger concept. The important part of this process is that, in order to be discovering new connections in the direction of “specific to general”, you need to be constantly interacting with the world. Along the same lines as fact posts, I think there’s more object-level stuff I haven’t explored.

For example, I think that I carved out a set of useful thoughts about relationships when I started a romantic relationship. Similarly, much of my time in university is spent doing computer science; presumably there are more fact-based posts I could make, where I write about something technical. A lot of the good Paul Graham stuff, too, seems to be drawing a lot of his insights from his time spent “in the field”. Meta-level stuff has a self-referential flavor which I think makes it so appealing to the nerd-types (of whom I’d count myself a member). It also makes it easy to get tangled up in the structure of concepts and trick yourself into thinking you’re gaining insight.

Sticking to something more concrete and “real” gives you better feedback and potentially more useful thoughts. Still, though, I can’t shake my feeling of disappointment at the state of self-help. There is a book on self-help that I wish existed, and it currently doesn’t exist. I’d like to write this book, if only in bits and pieces at a time, fractured into snippets of blog posts. This is definitely an excuse-of-sorts to keep writing meta-stuff, but, sigh, I wish that the state of meta-level self-help was just better.

(Of course there are reasons why self-help doesn’t look like the structured edifice of mental models that I wish it did, but that’s also a topic for another time.)

Reviewing 2018:

That all being said, it’s not like I wrote nothing at all in 2018. Just less. And the posts that did get written were, I feel, at least of similar, if not greater quality, than my best stuff in years past. Some essays have already been alluded to above, but, at the risk of some redundancy,  here’s a quick overview of my favorite posts of this year:

1. Replace Stereotypes with Experiences points out a common categorization error I’d found myself making. Even now, I seem to mix up initial aesthetic / affect with the actual sensory feeling I’d get while engaging in a topic. This feels ingrained, in the same way that things like the halo effect prey on our surface-level impressions.
   
   
2. A Developmental Framework for Rationality did a good job of outlining how I progressed throughout rationality. I was inspired by Kegan’s levels of adult development. Of course, now, it seems I’ve regressed or something, but I think the core ideas of shifting priorities about what rationality is “really” about still hits the nail on the head.
   
   
3. Meditations on the Medium represents a good collection of innovative thoughts and frustrations I have with text as a medium. I think especially now, having reflective essays on the nature of knowledge representation is high-value. Computers and digital mediums are allowing for several new degrees of freedom, and I think this stuff is underexplored.
   
   
4. Normative vs Descriptive Confusions gave me more clarity towards an internal conflict, brought on by the increased fluidity I had started to view myself with. Though I don’t I’ve got a full answer yet, I like this framing. It also started out as a more of “okay, let’s try to just get this mess of thoughts I have onto paper into something more structured”, and I think it does a passable job of straddling the line between “represent my state of mind at that time” and “walk new readers towards my conclusions”.
   
   
5. Fading Novelty finally outlined my stab at the Big Experiential Phenomenon that I think about a lot. As a phenomenon, it appears to be largely entwined with how we live life, i.e. in how humans continuously seeking out new experiences, which makes it difficult to look at in isolation. But I’m glad I now have a semi-well-structured essay to serve as a central point, after making several implicit references.
   
   
6. Letting Others Be Vulnerable got shared a lot on Facebook, and it presented a crystallization of a model about accepting others I’d been mulling on for a while. It’s also probably the most coherent and organized out of my posts on things related to the social sphere.

So those are some of my favorite posts from this year.

Here are the other stats for 2018, compared to 2016 and 2017:

Words written:
In 2016: 30,000 words.
In 2017: 75,000 words.
In 2018: 23,000 words.

So I ended up writing even less than I did in 2016.

Given that I wrote less, it makes sense that I received less views.

Page views:
In 2016: 4,912 views.
In 2017: 17,914 views.
In 2018: 11,869 views.

In 2017, I tracked my time with Toggl and found that around 200 hours were spent writing MLU posts. I have since stopped using Toggl, and I don’t know how much time I spent writing blog posts this year. A rough estimate is 2 hours per 1000 words, so I probably spent around 50 hours this year.

And, that’s what it is.

I think 3 years is a long time to be blogging. If you add up all the stuff that I’ve written, it’s around 120,000 words, which is enough to fill a book. Like in previous years, I’ve taken the time to compile all of 2018’s posts into a PDF for offline reading. It’s on the Post Compilations page now.

One question I’ve been wondering on and off is, “How do blogs die?”

I often stumble across interesting blogs on the internet with a large archive of posts…and no formal farewell at the end? I guess it’s maybe a more gradual thing, as the authors move on to other pursuits. And maybe I’m a stickler for closure, but I can’t help wanting some sort of acknowledgment of things left unfinished—but of course I’ve felt the same slow disengagement myself, so I can sympathize.

Several times this year, as I struggled to churn out blog posts, I wondered if it wasn’t easier to just make an official hiatus post and let myself just live without the burden of writing at the back of my mind. Yet, in the same way that uncertainty can be comforting, it felt like not writing such a post would enable me to keep telling myself that I was making progress.

“It’s not an official end yet!” I wanted to cry out. Not as if that helped, really. The blog posts still sputtered.

My prediction in the beginning of the year for 2018 was 3 primers and 50,000 words. I hit a little under half of that, and there were no real primers that got written.

For 2019, I’m more aware of the pitfalls and changes that I’ll go through. I don’t know if the right move is to just stop making goals. There are still things I want to write about. I just don’t feel like pushing myself as much to get them done, outside of maintaining a consistent schedule.

I sort of wish I could go back to a weekly schedule, where I’d feel excited to explore different concepts, but there’s mental stuff in the way, i.e. the things I outlined above.

But, more concretely…

Into 2019:

When writing for this year, I want to keep doing the introspective stuff that helps me with explicating my own thoughts, goals, priorities, and worries. I also want to devote more time to a showcase of the best of my writing, creating a new blog where I can put The Good Stuff in a way to maximize readability / pedagogy. In other words, I’d like to separate my thoughts into the messy stuff (which might be private) versus the readable stuff, and then I’d want to post them to different places.

What would the new public showcase look like?

What I want is a nice looking statically generated blog that gives me more control to try experimental UI features. WordPress is very nice for analytics and easily deploying posts, but I don’t really care for either of those features right now.

I think Read The Sequences is a really good example of the sort of aesthetic I want to shoot for, of a well-polished series of essays written in a clear fashion. Meaningness, to a lesser extent, has also influenced my aesthetic views.

I already have the seed of some code with Volta, a small Python script which turns my markdown files into HTML. So there’s not too much work that’s needed to put together this new site. The final part would be, of course, culling the content / re-editing things to make a more coherent collection.

There’s a lot about this idea that I’m excited about. However, I also know that writing has dropped as a priority for me, whether I want to admit it or not. Realistically, I don’t expect to have a lot of time in the short-term where I’ll feel excited to make large amounts of progress on this project.

That’s why I’ve decided to give myself a complete break, guilt-free, from writing anything major and public for the next three months.

It feels like the biggest ball of bad-feels I have inside of me is worrying about fully losing my rationality faculties if I stop writing, but, looking back, my writing has already been rather sparse. I’d rather spend some time just doing more stuff in the world and come back with a fresher take on things.

I might write some more things between now and April, but I won’t hold myself to it.

Recently, I drew a comic about the importance of being accepting when someone opens up to you. I think I did a passable job of condensing the main points into the text, but I figured that a more in-depth explanation was probably worth a blog post in itself. Plus, it’s been a while since the last blog post, and I’ve been doing a very poor job sticking to my supposed weekly release schedule.

Here’s the comic, if you haven’t seen it:

Before we begin, a quick clarification: I am agnostic about whether or not the relationships I describe below are of a romantic nature or not. I think that the process of “becoming closer to someone” is roughly the same, no matter the relationship type.

In the above comic, it’s not exactly clear how people are supposed to be “interacting”. To make things clearer, below is an illustration simplified model I’ll be using throughout the essay. (I stole the idea of representing people as 2-D shapes from Kevin Simler’s fantastic essay on Personhood, which I’d also recommend checking out.)

This is a person:

They have a lot of things inside of them, and some of them get shown to other people:

On the outside, on their surface edges, they have nice, smooth, grooves on the outside. They are the pieces that make connecting with other people.

On the inside, we have lots of pointier pieces that we keep hidden, the pieces which might cause disagreement. If we were to let them out, they might grate against other people.

Our external surface represents the facets of ourselves that we show, be it the words we speak, the reactions we show, and the body language we display. Our interactions can be thought to involve our edges bumping into each other. So we’re choosy about what gets shown and what gets kept hidden.

Sometimes, this choosiness is explicit, like selecting which jokes to tell to signal you’re part of some in-group (EX: “If we’re ordering pizza, make sure to get two boxes!”). Other times, it’s implicit, like the pauses in our speech and the way we behave (EX: interrupting less when the other speaker seems important).

The default action, I think, is to push for being agreeable, and this drive sometimes even trumps being true to our beliefs. We want to be able to look good in front of other people, and we want to be liked. This means that when we meet people, both sides selectively focus on actions which allow for a harmonious interaction.

What makes for a “harmonious interaction”?

First off, norms. There are shared expectations for what polite interaction looks like (though what the norm is, exactly, might differ between cultures or sub-groups), and we will have a tendency to focus on steering our interactions to follows such expectations, partially because other people expect us to. (See Simler’s essay on Personhood for more on how the recursive justification for norms bottom out.)

On top of that, there is a tendency for our relationships with people to fall into different roles. In fact, many of our roles are defined by the limits of what we are and aren’t willing to share. Some example potential roles are below:

• Your co-workers, the people you talk about work with.
• Your drinking friends, the people you joke with and go do fun things with.
• Your longtime friends, the people you reminisce with.

But what happens when our interactions break through the defaults, the norms, and the roles? Social psychology tells us that relationships deepen with iterated sharing, as both sides open up and become more vulnerable. But what does all of that really entail? What counts as vulnerable? And when it happens, what does the whole deepening process feel like, to the two people in the relationship?

I think the first piece of the puzzle has to do with our internal models of others, i.e. the picture we have of them in our heads. The models we have are largely going to be based off of the edges the other person shows, as those are the most visible pieces of information. We’re often incentivized to improve the models other people have us because said model shapes how others treat us. Their model will determine the predictions they make, the recommendations they give, and how they behave. The more accurate it is, we might reason, the better they can help us out.

One reason to share more, then, is that we’re trying to give the other party a better picture of what we’re “really” like, so that they can interact with us in more relevant ways. On top of this, I think we also like to feel validated—knowing that someone else has a grasp of all the things in our head can make us feel less alone.

When we start to share information about ourselves, though, it’s likely not going to be stuff that makes us look good. Our best qualities are likely already on display at our edges. The stuff we keep beneath, then, is disproportionately likely to be the stuff we don’t want other people to see (at least not immediately). Herein lies our fears, our insecurities, our prejudices, and our perversions. It’s going to be things which are more likely to cause disagreement, to make people like us less.

This is the stuff we were perhaps hesitant to share at first because it likely didn’t help contribute to a harmonious interaction.

It’s strong, sometimes dark, stuff. For the person revealing such information, there’s a lot of trust involved. Vulnerability, I think, has a lot to do with how damning the information you’re providing is. When we share something that the other person could use to hurt us, we’re demonstrating that we trust them. Though they could, we don’t think they will. It might still be scary (after all, there is still potential risk involved), but we’re willing to swallow that fear.

From a feelings-based perspective, opening up can feel bonding. If you open up and receptive and acknowledging, you feel comforted. There’s a feeling of security when you know that the person on the other side is willing to listen and accept whatever it is you tell them.

But for the receiver to be able to be accepting is where I think the second difficulty lies, and I think this part of the share/receive model of vulnerability has been given less attention.

From the receiver’s perspective, they learned something new about the speaker which likely clashes with their existing model. They initially had a model which was nice and neat, of a pleasant person. As the other side opens up, all the initial reasons they had to be close to the other side can feel dwarfed by the new information being shared. Doubts like “Did I misjudge the other person? Is this what they’re ‘really’ like?” can arise.

There seems to be a potential unfortunate dynamic where people are drawn together and then are subsequently pulled apart after opening up because both sides start to show their messier edges.

I think a key skill of compassion and understanding is to be able to remember that everything you learn is true. People are a lot of things. They are the excellent person you knew them as, with all their positive qualities. And they are also the strange person they’ve revealed themselves to be, with all their secret grudges and sadnesses. People are a huge mix of beliefs, feelings, thoughts, words, and matter.

But, given the roles that we usually play, we typically hold only a fraction of those in mind when we’re interacting with someone.

For example, it might suffice to think of the professor in lecture as just another Mentor figure. You might reason, “They are there to Teach, and I am here to Learn,” with all the associated baggage that comes with the student-teacher role. This sort of “reduction to roles” can be seen as dehumanizing, but it happens regardless. Roles can be thought of as compressed ways of representing rules of how to interact. Oftentimes, having a fully nuanced model of the other person is just…not very relevant to the interaction at hand, and you can get along fine with a simplified model of the other person that highlights only a few relevant qualities.

I’m not knocking the use of social roles or trades. It’s fine that some of your interactions are transactional; many of our interactions in life are.

But when someone opens up, they’re trying to tell you more about themselves, and you likely want to learn more about them. It’s a different sort of interaction altogether. You want to appreciate them as the human that they are, rather than abstract them away with a simplified model that attempts to 80/20 how they work.

And because we’re predisposed to have our nice and neat models of the other person, as well as compressed role-based models, it can be difficult to fit this new, messy model of the other person in mind. It’s easier to focus on just the negatives or just the positives. And unfortunately, our oft-demonstrated negativity bias means that the bad parts can easily dominate our overall judgment.

This why I think it’s so important to bias towards cultivating a state of mind where you can be appreciative of other people opening up, even when it seems like the more you learn about them, the less there is the two of you have in common.

What are the components of this attitude?

One part is reframing the way we look at people being vulnerable, as I outlined above. When you learn more about someone, it is very likely that you’ll learn information that will make you feel less agreeable, close, or drawn to someone. The very fact that they’re sharing such information, though, is itself a sign of closeness.

Still, it can be disappointing to learn that our model of someone was wrong, when it turns out they’re not “the person we knew”.

From an epistemological standpoint, though, things have just improved. Your goal is to know more about how the other person, and they’ve just offered information to update your model. That’s great! And from a complexity standpoint, they’ve just gotten more interesting. It turns out there is more depth to them than you knew, that they are more than just the nice, neat coating they showed you. That means more things to explore and discover, perhaps like a favorite book that you learn has more chapters than you thought.

The second part of this involves self-honesty. Though most of this essay has focused on the ways that other people can break your nice, neat models, it pays to remember that you’re a person too. It’s important to ask if you’re modeling your own messiness. I think it can become easier to accept people as mixed-bag bundles when you start to see yourself as a mixed bag. Coming to terms with yourself as someone who simultaneously harbors a combination of strengths and vices isn’t necessary, but I think it helps a lot.

When you’ve developed a way of looking at yourself that doesn’t shy away from the dark and messy bits, you hopefully develop a better intuition about it feels like to hold the entirety (or, more realistically, a more representative sample) of a person’s personality in mind. Then, perhaps it no longer seems strange when people open up, and our perfect surface-level model becomes messier because we’ve come to expect people to be an unruly collection of things.

The end goal here is to develop your sense of “human-ness” such that you can anticipate, expect, and normalize the messiness that’s inherent in all of us.

My hope is that these suggestions + framing allow us to reckon with one another more fully and make the process of building close bonds easier.

A simplified way I think about communication is with a multi-stage model, where the information flows from one step to the next, often becoming transformed along the way, sort of like the game of Telephone.

By “communication”, I mean to refer to the process by which an idea travels from one person’s head to another’s. When discussed in this manner, it is relevant to questions I have about pedagogy and the nature of media, i.e. how to teach things and how the vehicles we use to transmit information affect the process.

At each step, I will go over what happens to the information being presented.

Here is basic multi-stage example to start us off:

Ankit has a thought about the question of consciousness.
He writes it down into an essay and sends it to Beth.
Beth reads the essay and interprets the ideas in her head.
She excitedly explains them to Cai Yi.

If we track the development of the idea, as it goes through host to host, there are several natural places where the idea is stored:

1. Your mind.
2. The initial medium.
3. Primary receiver’s mind.
4. Primary receiver’s medium.
5. Secondary receiver’s mind.
6. and so on

I think it is easier to think of each stage as a place where the idea lives, and potential changes to the idea happen as it transitions from stage to stage.

Let’s dive into the stages:

Your Mind:
This is the initial place where the idea is generated. Oftentimes, the generative factors for your idea, i.e. the things that caused you to think about it in the first place, might not be explicit. They might instead be aliefs, experiences, or emotional responses. More verbal or explicit models, of course, can also play a role. And while you can trust yourself to have some sort of underlying reasoning, the base justifications aren’t always available.

Inside your own head, you also have immediate access to a lot of different trails of thought. A big benefit is being able to quickly pick up a combination of very disparate types of internal objects and composing them to bolster your initial idea. This immediacy can also lend a nebulous quality to idea composition. You can have mental pointers to cached thoughts and make gratuitous use of them to reference different ideas.

Because everything is directly available, there’s not necessarily a need to have things be neat or tidy.
Initial Medium:
When moving your idea from your head to your first medium, there is an immediate bias towards writing down explicit models. Much of this has to do with the linearity of our speech and text, i.e. our default mediums—they encourage a paradigm of progression. As a result, there is pressure to move away from the subtle and non-verbalized reasons that make up your idea and towards more legible ones.

Legible ideas are easier to transmit because they adapt well to the intermediary mediums we use to bridge minds. Showing a chain of “and then this leads to this” makes sense when our essays read top to bottom and when audio is heard from start to finish.

At this secondary stage, your reasoning or explanation may already change. While it can be useful to seek a clearer way to express what is in our minds, the question we answer changes from “Why do I think this?” to “How can I write/say what I am thinking and why?”
Primary Receiver’s Mind:
Now that you’ve put your thoughts into a medium, it goes and travels into someone else’s head. Here, I think the best case is that the primary receiver comes away with the explicit models you intended to put into the medium.

Often, though, that doesn’t even happen. People often skim material; a lossy transfer of information is the norm.

Here’s a diagram showing what might happen:

Overall, even during just one-on-one communication, there’s multiple stages of interpretation happening. There’s a double illusion of transparency which can happen:

The speaker might fail to give useful Generators (instead opting to say things which they merely Recognize to be useful), while the listener might just pattern-match to existing insights. From the speaker’s perspective, things make sense as they can match up their words to their thoughts and of course things fit together. From the listener’s perspective perspective, things make sense because they can match what they received with their thoughts and of course their own insights are correct.

But unless both sides check in to see that the things which make sense to them are the same thing, then we run the risk of miscommunication.
Moving Forward:
What are some of the implications of this model? I think the most important one is that miscommunication, even just minor ones, are the norm. It’s far too easy to jump to the optimistic conclusion that both sides are talking about the same thing. To change this, the basic prescription is to put in more effort in ohw we give and receive information.

More actionably speaking, here is some Obvious Advice:

1. Paraphrase what you are hearing. If you think that you picked up on what the important bits were, hand them back to the speaker for verification, i.e. “I thought you said that X was the important part. Is that right?”
2. Give and get examples. As the explainer, it is very helpful to triangulate concepts with examples. As the receiver, you can use example to help with paraphrasing to see if you’ve understood the point.
3. Asking for more clarification and reducing your own confidence in your comprehension abilities. Next time you think you know what’s happening, seriously consider the possibility that you could be mistaken.
4. When communicating, pay attention to the stage after the one you are currently on. For example, when writing, it can be useful to also be thinking about how a third-party might respond to the words you write, in addition to focusing on translating your thoughts to the medium.

Here’s the link: https://owenshen24.github.io/muse/

There’s already some stuff up there, but it’s all quite short.

Basically stuff where people assert that  <thing in life> is <metaphorical thing>.

For example, here is Viktor Frankl on love:

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him…Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.”

I don’t know what to take this as. Sometimes when people say philosophical things like this, they mean it in a metaphorical sense.

Like, if I said something like:

“Life is just an endless series of waits—you wait for your food, for your diploma, and finally, for death. Things are always on pause, and we never truly hit play.”

In my life-philosophy-aphorism-thingy, I’m just abstracting some parts of life and emphasizing them. My point might be something like “When you spend all your time looking forward to things, you miss the present,” and maybe this means it’s good to pay more attention to things currently happening.

But, in his quote, Frankl seems to also be trying to imply something about how the world works. In addition to pointing out how love is a powerful way to understand others, he also seems to state that by loving others, you are able to bring them to new heights and help their growth.

Does he actually mean that, or is it just to further the metaphor?

Now, the sort of obvious response is “Well, of course Frankl meant it at least somewhat metaphorically. People can love one another and still drag each other down, so we know it’s not true all of the time.”

But that’s not what I’m concerned about. My question is more something like, “Is this model of love enabling growth a useful model to have?”

Some more context:

At all times, I’m carrying simplified models of social dynamics that are general-case heuristics. I operate off of narrative and meaning; through the lens I look at the world through, I shape my experience. I’m always injecting this extra ontological layer onto the world.

For example, there’s something that feels like quest completion when I do things that are topically related to goals I care about, e.g. I finish reading a textbook on AI.

Thus, I’m always very unsure when people say things about life because I don’t know what sense of truth to be taking them on, and to what extent I should be incorporating them into this extra “meaning layer” vs my default model of “how the world works”.

This is sort of like the normative vs descriptive distinction found in other areas like ethics and economics: It’s never clear to me if any given life philosophy is supposed to give an idealized version of how a certain thing in life should be/feel like, or if they’re asserting that it’s how things actually work.

(I mean, in most cases, the aphoristic life philosophies you see are going to be sacrificing full coverage for more brevity, so there will undoubtedly be edge cases they fail to cover. But I would still classify one of them as descriptive if their point is to compress categories, rather than to put forth a new version of how something should be.)

I have a lot of difficulty differentiating between these two areas because the boundaries between “how the mind could work” and “how the mind currently works” feel very, very fuzzy to me.

Like, if I bumped into a life philosophy that said something like “Willpower does not exist,” I can see myself actually seriously taking that into consideration.

Sure, after incorporating it into my worldview, you could probably still identify times where I get tired, circle it, and yell, “Aha! You see! You clearly ran out of willpower here! So you didn’t actually act on this piece of life philosophy. Therefore, it must have been just metaphorical!”

But that’s not the point. Rather, it’s something like, from the inside, I would have a different experience and would likely account my tiredness to something else, maybe something that would lead to less guilt and shame versus if I had just felt bad that my willpower was insufficient.

So, really, this is about wants vs reality.

I don’t know to what extent I should exert my desires about social things and attempt to map them onto reality vs pay attention to what’s going in reality and infer what that means about my wants.

In other non self-improvement areas, I find this a lot less difficult of a debate, often because reality wins out as the final arbiter. In engineering, for instance, reality is already a fixed set of rules, so using those, you attempt to find the closest approximation to your wants.

But when it comes to mental stuff, it’s difficult because there’s entanglement between your models of how the world works and how you actually behave in said world. Like in the above example, we might expect that someone who doesn’t believe in willpower could actually see better results, independent of whether or we could identify patterns of phenomena that we’d label “willpower”. A lot of this has to do with how fuzzy our labels are for mental things and how easily we reify such descriptive labels.

So it’s hard because whenever I discover something that seems like a bias or a weakness, there seem to be two very distinct responses I could try: One is to look inwards, see what’s going on, and maybe end up accepting it as a genuine need, and then working around it. The other is to look at it and then compare it to some idealized version of how I “want” things to work, and then endeavor to mold myself more into that sort of person.

The hidden conflict here, then becomes a question of “Do I want to make myself more of the person I already want to be, or do I want to learn more about what sort of person I “really” am?”

More practically, I find this a difficult conundrum because it’s hampering my ability to make judgment calls on what is actually possible in principle.

Like, human minds are actually pretty powerful. People can do crazy shit like stay outside for hours in freezing temperatures, memorize multiple decks of shuffled cards, or read over four hundred pages in an hour. I myself have done things that, at one point or another, I thought would be semi-impossible to do. (Most of these are thing in close-up magic which require large amounts of finger dexterity.)

The point being that I do in fact think that it’d be good to take some of these seemingly-metaphorical claims seriously and actually attempt to work towards them, because, it seems plausible that I could in fact modify myself accordingly.

But I don’t know which ones.

And maybe most importantly, I myself have opinions on how social things should be! There are ways that I wish humans would work that contradicts existing psychological research, and I don’t know if the right move is to take the research model as given and look for ways to debias or to say “Screw it” and push on for a solution nonetheless, shooting for a better way to impart my own wants onto reality.

For example, fading novelty seems to imply that relationships will lose their luster over time. What if you just told yourself this wasn’t how it worked, and then made yourself still feel excited about things, 10 years down the line?

Yes, this is still a really fuzzy line, as any intervention you take might involve things like messing with neurotransmitters or other biological things which you’d need a descriptive model of, in order to affect things in the first place.

In this example, I think that if you were trying to infer your wants from this phenomenon, you might think that this implied that you were unable to form lasting bonds with people, or something like that, so you would only go for short-term relationships, while the luster was still there.

Whereas, if you take reality as-is and then enforce your wants anyway, I think this is still an instance of acting more prescriptively, even if you’re acting off a descriptive model.

Overall, this entire discussion seems to have the same flavor as the distinction between rationality techniques which place restrictions/systems in place (e.g. precommitment, habit formation) and those which aim for alignment (e.g. Focusing, Internal Double Crux).

I’m still not sure how to resolve these conflicting intuitions. Any suggestions?

A core aspect of human experience is our pursuit of novelty. There is something tantalizing about new pleasures, sensations, and experiences that feels hard-coded into how we operate. “Variety is the spice of life” and all that.

Conversely, things which were once new eventually lose their shine over time, and our search for novelty continues. Things which once enamored us are left on the wayside as our attention is captured by shinier, newer things. “The novelty has faded” and all that.

A few examples to drive the point home:

1. Songs which sounded so entrancing upon the first few listenings become dull after being put on repeat.
2. Foods which were so delicious during the first few tastings become bland after being eaten day after day.
3. Clothes which looked so beautiful when initially worn fade into yet another outfit after being worn over and over.

Repetition dulls us.

In psychology, this phenomenon whereby repeated exposure to a stimulus leads to a decreased response is called habituation. (This is rather unfortunate, as I’ve become accustomed to using “habituate” to refer to the act of making something a habit.) This general pattern of a reduced response is quite ubiquitous across nature. For example, animals which leap into a prepared state upon hearing a loud noise soon grow to ignore it if the noise isn’t paired with actual danger.

In short, it’s a basic form of learning.

From a survival standpoint, a bias towards newness is reasonable. Things in our environment which did not change, e.g. trees, shrubs, or familiar tribe members, likely presented less of a threat than new additions, e.g. fresh tracks, gathering storm clouds, or a stranger in our midst. Had we not had such a filter for newness, our thoughts might have looked like:

“Oh wow, that’s new! Look at that majestic tree! It looks just as good as it did yesterday! Oh wow, that’s new! Look at that lush grass! It’s so fluffy! Oh wow, that’s new! Look at that tiger. It’s so— ”

Constantly taking note of everything in your environment is costly; focusing on just what’s new is an effective optimization that often doesn’t require much of a trade-off. Yet, despite it’s useful roots, I think that fading novelty is also responsible some of the difficulties we experience with learning and self-improvement. It also presents several challenges from a philosophical perspective.

****

On the self-improvement side of things, I think fading novelty makes practicing rationality skills more difficult because it hampers habit creation and contributes to the illusion of understanding.

Consider the process of creating a new habit:

When starting a new regimen, be it a new diet, productivity app, or exercise, there is often an initial burst of success. Our undertaker in question may have such thoughts as:

“Yes, finally! This is the [thing] that will work for me! Look at how well things have been going! This is effective in all the ways that previous [things] have not! This time, it’ll be different!”

I’ve personally thought things along these lines when switching up my productivity app of choice, from Google Keep to Workflowy to Google Drive to Dynalist to Evernote.

But of course, I think that the initial excitement / effectiveness of switching something new has little to do with the actual merits of the new thing compared to the old. The real difference is the mere change itself—by changing to something new, your brain is now more interested.

Now, I don’t mean to necessarily knock this initial burst of excitement. I’m glad that humans have the ability to jumpstart new projects, and switching to something novel seems to be one of the easiest motivation hacks we have at our disposal. However, I think that this decay over time (from our initial excitement) is often not factored in when people start new regimens.

Novelty fades, and it seems to do so at a rate faster than the rough baseline of two months needed to form a habit. This leads to an overall negative cycle where someone might try out a new rationality skill or productivity app, experience an initial surge of success, and then, after having become acclimated, give up too easily. This can lead someone to switch constantly, never sticking with something long enough for it to become a habit.

Taken to extremes, you’ll look like the rationality junkie described in In Defense of The Obvious, where you’re compelled to seek out ever-more radical-seeming insights because you’ve exhausted the benefit provided to you by more “normal” or “obvious” interventions.

****

Cue someone reviewing a topic they’ve seen before:

The decreased response we get from the same stimulus plays a pernicious role in learning, where I think it contributes to a sense of false understanding. In the same way that a song heard over and over becomes easy to recognize, something analogous with books that we read over and over, as well as concepts we review over and over. Fading novelty leads us to think we understand something, when we really might not.

Because novelty fades, subjects we try to learn might start to look dull (and other newer areas more enticing) before we’ve actually mastered them. Thus, when trying to review, you might think “This doesn’t seem new to me. Of course I already know this”, except that “know” has been substituted to mean one of the easier recognition-based checks for understanding, rather than one of the harder actionable-based checks.

Compare the previous thought with:

“Huh. This looks familiar, but I don’t think I could have come up with this idea by myself, nor could I explain it to someone else. So even though it doesn’t seem new, I think I need more review.”

Here are some more examples where such a substitution happens:

1. If someone gives us advice, we’ll often ask ourselves “Have I heard similar advice before?” instead of “Could I act on this advice, and if so, what are some examples?”
2. When reviewing math, it’s easier to ask ourselves “Do these symbols look familiar?” instead of “If I covered up the steps, could I reproduce this proof?”
3. Similarly, when reading a book, it’s easier to check “Have I read these words already?” instead of “Did these words give me ideas I hadn’t considered before?”

Due to fading novelty, we interpret familiarity as recognition and make the fallacious leap towards equating this with comprehension. You can end up lulling yourself into a false sense of understanding, which in turn can hinder you from putting in more effort towards areas where you do in fact need improvement.

The aforementioned two areas, habit formation and learning, are where I am predominantly concerned about fading novelty presenting challenges. They are both centered around the efforts of an individual and self-improvement. On a broader scale, I think similar issues manifest.

For example, in the sciences, there is often a larger focus on coming up with novel results than replicating previous studies. Similarly, I think this also part of why the rationality community has so few good introductory texts—once you’re “in the know”, it might not feel very motivating to write down the intro stuff because it’s no longer new and hence no longer exciting.

****

I think interventions which aim to solve the issues I’ve outlined will either try to reduce the dulling caused by habituation or find another more invariant form of reinforcement to carry us through repetition after repetition.

Psychologists have identified several factors which contribute to the feeling of fading novelty. They include perceived variety, quantity, and stimulus strength. The important thing to note here is that the sensation of habituation is largely a psychological one. Experiments which changed the amount of attention participants paid to relevant factors were found to either increase or decrease the amount of consumption before satiety kicked in.

This seems to indicate that we can reduce the effects through altering our perception of these factors.

For more simple problems like fatigue brought on by satiation during studying, this suggests using something like context switching to make it seem like a greater amount of time has passed. In other words, taking 10 minutes to do something very different to take your mind off work can do a lot more to improve your willingness to continue than spending 20 minutes idly staring at the same textbook pages.

However, it does seem more difficult to apply such a strategy towards habit creation, given that frequency is what we want to max out on. Trying to trick ourselves into thinking that we didn’t do the habit often seems counterproductive.

I can think of some applications, but they’re a bit a stretch. For example, using a productivity app with a dull UI (“You can’t have the novelty fade if it isn’t even exciting to use the first time around!“) or an app that randomly changes its UI (which might lead to compulsions to open the app, absent the intended reason).

Perhaps it would be more tractable to look for a different psychological approach. In addition to our cravings for novelty, humans also have a drive for optimization. We want things to get better, we’re always on the lookout for improvement. This drive to improve can be used to cut through the humdrum that repetition brings on. Ideally, this is what Good Practice is about.

Athletes and performers channel this attitude a lot, I think. Their work consists of executing a small set of skills, but they need to do them over and over, well past the point of novelty, in pursuit of perfection.

For reviewing topics we think we know, this altered view will hopefully substitute back in the more practical actionable-based checks for understanding. In addition, I think the practicing analogy can bring up additional inspiration for ways to improve. For example, there might be questions like “Can I execute this skill even when I am tired or distracted?” or “How easy is this to do with my eyes closed?” which normally make sense in a practice context, but could be ported with analogs over to a learning context.

This attitude has parallels to deliberate practice (see here and here for overviews), of being more intentional and analytical about which areas to improve on.

Given that life is all about change, I don’t think it’s coherent to fully have a view that separates itself from seeking novelty. But I think this is useful insofar as it shifts the scope, so that it focuses on change with regards to the same task, rather than the task itself.

I’ve noticed myself confused about how to think about growth. I have two conflicting lines of thought: (1) Most of what we learn is not retained, and yet, (2) across many domains, we seem to be able to build off prior knowledge and advance anyway. What’s going on here?

Well, first off, our default methods for learning are sub-optimal. As I’ve pointed out before, there is a pernicious illusion of understanding that can creep up on you. Reading a textbook can feel like you’re “studying”, but unless you’re actually testing yourself along the way, you’ll be wasting your time. Similarly, coming up with a math proof is far more difficult than verifying that is correct, but, internally, they can feel like the same thing. (See Conceptual Similarity Does Not Imply Actionable Similarity and Recognizing vs Generating for more examples.) Furthermore, it seems like our ability recall decays exponentially, meaning that, in a short amount of time, we fail to remember much of what we learn.

Anecdotally, it’s often the case that people freely admit they remember little of what they learned in the past. People often say things like, “Ah, it’s been a while…I don’t really remember” and this is a socially acceptable excuse for not being able to recall many details. I’ve had difficulty reviewing things like notes I’ve taken in different classes. I can remember that there was a time when the notes made more sense, but they don’t make sense now. The memory of fluency is there, but not the fluency itself.

This illusion of understanding paired with the decay seems to imply that most of what we read proves to be largely inaccessible in the long run, let alone actionable. If you believe strongly in having what we learn influence what we do, this is worrying. This means the quality your information diet would seem to have little effect on your long-term outcomes.

There are once again considerations involving fading novelty here. For example, though re-reading a book might better help solidify its ideas in your head, if you’ve (perhaps mistakenly) marked something as “already read”, then you’ll be driven to other, newer / shinier options.

What all this seems to point to is that the cards are stacked against us when we’re trying to learn anything at all. So what’s actually going on when people do in fact learn things and improve?

One thing is that we do have a good idea of what it takes to improve our recall. Spaced repetition, deliberate practice, and retrieval practice are all well-documented interventions which outperform our defaults when it comes to building more explicit knowledge. So perhaps people who see a lot of growth of this type are those who’ve managed to discover these strategies and use them?

It does seem like there are generalized principles for learning well which stay roughly the same across different disciplines. For example, ensuring that your practice environment is very similar to your performance environment, e.g. how a magician wants to practice their tricks in front of spectators, rather than just in front of a mirror or how a driver wants to practice driving on the actual road, rather than just in the parking lot.

That seems to condemn everyone else, though, to a fate of never learning much at all. Yet, most people seem to be able to improve at some things, simply given time.

Something we often observe is the Pareto Principle—most of the impact can often be traced back to just a few of the contributors, rather than being more equally spread amongst all of the contributors. So perhaps it’s okay that we forget most of what we learn if it turns out that the small amounts we do remember end up being responsible for our growth. Taken at face value, though, this seems too optimistic. Anyone who’s kicked themselves for forgetting a crucial formula on a test knows how unreliable our memory can be, if left to its own devices.

But what does seem interesting to tug at is the notion of experience. We seem to develop better models and expectations for how things work by virtue of just interacting with them for a while. This is largely a passive process that doesn’t look like the intentional process I described earlier for maximizing our learning. The sort of benefits afforded to us by experience feel more implicit than the explicit knowledge I had in mind when I talked about growth in the passages above. It’s the difference between “I’ve had similar experiences 100 times before, so I think the result will look like this” and “I’ve got a model with gears that explains why the result will look like this”.

So perhaps the original way I was thinking of growth was mistaken. Maybe explicit knowledge doesn’t capture most of how people grow and there’s this other class of implicit knowledge— things we know but can’t clearly recall or explicate. And perhaps implicit knowledge can explain how we grow.

If this is the case, then a question to investigate is “For a given field, to what extent does success appear to come from implicit vs explicit knowledge?”

I think Implicit knowledge is important for “performance” areas like sports, martial arts, sales, and public speaking. These are situations where there is some given setting with a set of standard rules, the goal does not vary much, and you’re interacting with other humans. You don’t have time in a performance to pause and consult detailed references. Doing so would break the flow of the performance. Thus, experience, with its non-verbal models, is what you rely on.

But that’s not everything. There are also areas where explicit knowledge plays a bigger role. Much has been written about “mathematical intuition” and the insights that seem to come only from experience, but I think this misses the obvious—at its core, you still need to be able to have a strong command of how concepts link to one another in order to make progress. And the manipulations used in proofs seem like explicit models, requiring recall. These types of manipulations and models seem to span most sciences, where what you need models of is something that’s rather alien-looking, compared to the sorts of phenomena our brains have been dealing with for most of our evolutionary history. Models in the sciences have precision or a sense of discreteness that is often absent from implicit models; it is difficult to port our gut feelings into this framework.

From this, a potential answer emerges: implicit knowledge can be thought of as being effective at modeling humans, relationships, conflicts, and other mainstays across most of human society. Explicit knowledge is effective in domains where our intuitions and non-verbal models fail us. This shows up when looking at things we have not had to model for most of human history (EX: gears-like models of nature) and requires a different type of knowledge.

Thus, we should expect to see more passive growth in domains where experience can provide better models over time of the environment and less passive growth in domains where experience is a mistaken guide.

More speculatively, perhaps this is why people seem to think of themselves as not having a “knack” or “talent” for the sciences? If our default strategies for learning lend themselves less easily to the optima when it comes to gaining explicit knowledge, their suspicions might not be far off. Rather than a knack, though, perhaps what they lack is a good set of strategies for improving?

This is disappointing for me; I wish I had converted more time and thoughts into blog posts. For two years, like magic, a new mindlevelup post would appear every Friday. This past half year, coming up with new essays has been a lot more difficult. I’ll speculate on reasons in a moment, but I want to take the moment to say that I think there have been at least a few good posts this year—A Developmental Framework for Rationality and Musings on the Medium are both crystallizations of trains of thought I’ve been harboring for a while.

I have not written many new blog posts this year.

Why?

By and large, when another Friday comes around, I feel…drained. I feel like I don’t have something blog-worth to write about. Part of this, at least, has to do with how my relationship with rationality has changed. I’m less intentional or goal driven—for example, I no longer have weekly or monthly check-ins. If I dive deeper into the feeling of not having something to write about, there’s a sort of dissatisfaction with repeating myself. I feel like the ideas in my head are just rehashes of existing essays I’ve already written.

In the past, when this sort of feeling happened, I would go meta and inspect the process behind where the feeling of repetition came from. Except, now that I’ve already written about those essays, they form new existing essays that I pattern-match my thoughts on to. For every way that I think I can go meta, my brain helpfully reminds me that such thoughts are already covered ground.

Here is an overview of my mental taxonomy of How Things I Write Are Secretly Just Reskins of Things I’ve Already Written:

Say I’m tired of all this abstract reasoning? Maybe I just want to dive into the specifics of what makes rationality concepts useful in the first place?

There’s an essay on that.

Well, am I worried about the object-level impact of this blog then? Do I wonder if writing this stuff is even helpful?

There’s an essay on that.

Huh. Say, maybe I’m wondering about the meta-level effects of writing in general? Am I wondering about the ways in which writing can affect rationality as a field?

There’s an essay on that. And another longer essay on that.

Okay. But what about abstracting over the entire process of even approaching rationality, about the different approaches one can take? Going meta on rationality itself?

There’s an essay on that.

Oh. How about abstracting over the entire process about how it feels bad to revisit old ideas in the first place? The very problem I’m having right now?

There’s an essay on that.

Um. What about how just because I think that these essays are secretly reskins, there’s actually subtle differences here, and those differences are important? That my surface-level pattern-matching is faulty?

There’s an essay on that.

Ack. What about going meta on this whole process and writing about how it’s been hard to write things—you guessed it.

There’s an essay on that (and no, it’s not this one you’re reading).

All in all, that’s already several levels of meta. It feels binding, like I’ve partitioned the space of possible essays into the above categories. For every new essay idea I come up, a part of me believes that it’s just another instantiation of the spirit behind one of the above essays.

It’s like the way that Red, in Pokemon: Origin Of Species, describes Pokemon types—if you’ve already decided that attributes X, Y, and Z slot into categories A, B, and C, how do you know when you’ve discovered a new type?

The broader question, of course, is “When do your categories fail to be sufficient to describe the territory?” And that requires attention to be paid to the little places where things seem not quite right.

Clearly, then, the correct answer to this bind of sorts…was to write yet another meta-essay about the nature of this constriction. I think putting it into this sort of perspective has helped me get a grasp for which things I might not feel too enthused to write about for the short-term future.

All that means, though, is that I’ll be questing off for some more curious things which break my conceptions and I’ll bring back something new.