Steelmanning Divination

This comment is going to seem unrelated or only tangentially related to the post, at first. I promise that it’s quite relevant, but explaining the relevance up-front would make the comment longer and more awkward.

Open up an old-school Dungeons & Dragons rule book (like this this one), and one thing you’ll find a whole lot of is random tables.

The idea was simple: your characters would encounter some situation; the Dungeon Master (DM) would roll some dice; then he’d consult a table, which would tell him what the outcome of the situation was, given the result of the die rolls.

Here’s a table for diseases (or disorders)^[1]:

If a player character contracted a disease, or developed a disorder (which, itself, would’ve been determined by some other die rolls), the DM would roll three dice: one (a d100) to determine the afflicted part of the body; one (a d8) for whether the affliction was acute or chronic; and a third (another d8) to determine severity. The table above indicated which values on each die corresponded to which outcome.

Here’s a table for determining whether a previously undiscovered fortress or castle is inhabited, and by whom (or by what!)^[2]:

Finally, here’s a table for determining what happens when two magical potions are mixed (or, when a character drinks them both)^[3]:

Random tables fell out of favor, for a time.^[4] But they’ve been making somewhat of a comeback (along with many other features of “old-school” D&D—the so-called “Old-School Renaissance”). One sees discussions of random tables, now and then, on blogs and web forums dedicated to tabletop role-playing games. Often, people put together their own random tables.

And—as with everything else—one sees arguments about them.

Arguments for: These usually involve the word ‘fun’. Randomness is fun, we are told, and surprises are fun; and a random table can inspire a Dungeon Master, and suggest possibilities.

Arguments against: Randomness, the critics say, does not make sense; and surprises are not fun. (Because—it is implied—they might be bad; or they are often bad; or they are usually bad.)

Both sides miss the point entirely. Very few people—even among those who love a good random table—understand the tables’ nature, and their purpose. Without understanding, when people today try to construct random tables for use in their D&D games, they often find that something is missing—some ineffable quality that makes these modern imitations of the work of Gygax fail to have quite the same satisfying and enriching effect on the game as did the random tables in the D&D rule books of old.

And that ‘something’ is that random tables are not about the mere fact of randomness.

Here is what random tables really are: they are representations of a probability distribution across a set of outcomes. As such, they encode two critical things: first, what outcomes are possible; second, those outcomes’ relative frequency.

And in consequence, here is something else that random tables are: they are models of the game world.

Look again at that first table I presented (with the diseases and disorders). A character is exposed to disease; the DM rolls d100^[5]. On a roll of 1, 2, or 3, the character contracts an affliction of the blood; on a roll of 4, an illness of the bones; a roll of 5 signifies a nervous system disorder.

But another way to look at this, is that blood-related disorders are 3 times more likely—and thus 3 times more common—than bone-related disorders (at least, among adventurers!).

And the table has no entry for a disease of the lymphatic system. As a consequence, in this fictional world, no such illnesses exist (or, perhaps, they do not occur among the sorts of people that the player characters are).

Similarly, the second table (with the castles) tells us that among small-sized strongholds found in wilderness regions, 45% are deserted entirely, 15% are infested with monsters, and the remaining 40% are occupied by civilized folk.

When constructing, or choosing to use, a random table of outcomes, what you are doing is modeling the fictional world of the game. The relative frequency of the possible outcomes of the category of situation which is to be resolved by rolling on the table—and, no less importantly, which outcomes are present in the distribution at all, and which are not—are facts about that world.

Now consider two random tables, for the same situation—let us say, two versions of the disease & disorder table given above. The first is as presented, while the second has all the same rows, but the distribution is altered: on this latter table, only a single number each (out of 100, on the d100) will yield any result but ‘skin’—to which the remaining 85 out of 100 numbers are now allocated.

What are the consequences for using this latter table? Well, in a D&D game where the DM chooses to use it (in place of the original table), it is rare indeed for any character to fall ill with a disease of the respiratory system—but afflictions of the skin are terrifyingly commonplace. One hopes that the DM has a good explanation for this skew (perhaps the fictional world on which the action takes place lacks an ozone layer, resulting in a permanent epidemic of skin cancers); if not, the modeled world will fail to make much sense (one can only suspend disbelief so far, after all, and perhaps—even after we’ve accepted the existence of dragons and elves—being told that skin conditions are 85 times more common than the cold, the flu, bronchitis, and every other respiratory condition combined, is a bridge too far).

And, similarly, we may imagine yet another version of this same table—an expanded one, with many more rows than merely the 16 we see above (with the die roll result ranges—i.e., the probability mass—of the existing entries being compressed, to make room); and these additional rows are all mental or psychological disorders. In this setting, characters are just as much in danger of developing a debilitating phobia, or lapsing into psychosis, as developing a skin condition. This, too, will result in a very different game world—and a very different game—than the original table.

The point, in other words, is not simply the fact of using a random table. The point, rather, is: just what exactly is on that random table, and what is not on it; and what is the distribution of the listed things. Not all random tables are created equal; not all are equally ‘fun’. The details are everything.

And now consider the application of the same caveat—to random tables, not of outcomes in a game, but of outcomes of a method of divination.

Suppose that we accept the basic idea, that we wish to be prompted to take some perspective, or think along certain lines, chosen at random out of a pool of such. The question, however, is: what, specifically, is the set of perspectives or prompts from which we are selecting? What perspectives are on there? What will be the relative frequency of certain perspectives or prompts, if you draw from this distribution repeatedly? And what is not in there?

We may imagine, for instance, two versions of the same divinatory device. In both versions, you draw a card from a shuffled 52-card deck, then consult a booklet of prompts, where each card corresponds to one entry. But the booklets are different; they were written (and the sets of prompts compiled) by people with very different philosophies (a Buddhist and a Randian, perhaps; or a Christian and a Communist).

Would not your choice of which version of this device to use for your divinations, affect the long-term outcome of using it? Might not your actions be nudged in one direction, or another—systematically? Might there not be some prominent gaps, in one or both of the distributions—perspectives which are simply absent from the set of possible prompts? What would be the consequence of such a lack?

Generators of random outcomes can be extremely efficient ways to model complex systems, by abstracting away the details of causal interactions. But be careful that the outcome distribution of the generator is one which you actually endorse.

This post makes the best case I’ve seen for a steelmanned version of divination. Unfortunately, many of its substantive points are also either wrong or misleading. I’ll start small, by giving the least serious misleading statement. Then I’ll point out two wrong statements along with one extremely misleading statement, and end with why this all matters.

Vaniver's post is good and LW is better for having it. This is intended as a discussion of how it could be made better, and the criticism here should not distract you from how useful the post is.

The smallest misleading statement

Let’s start with the smallest misleading statement. Vaniver gives the throwaway remark early on that he and another rationalist had the impression that “Xunzi simply had a lot more mental horsepower than many other core figures.” That’s because many of the core figures lived before Xunzi, who comes at the end of the classical (pre-imperial) period.

To the extent that Xunzi’s work is richer than theirs, it is richer because Xunzi can build on their work. Xunzi can argue against Mozi and Mencius; Mozi and Mencius can’t argue against Xunzi.

It’s like saying that Derek Parfit had more mental horsepower than Bertrand Russell, because he made finer ethical distinctions. Of course he did. Parfit can take advantage of Russell’s knowledge. Russell can’t take advantage of Parfit’s.

The historical mistakes

To see where the post could be better, let’s see what Vaniver was trying to do. He attempts to answer two questions in this post. The historical question: what did Xunzi mean by rituals, and why did he think they were a good idea? The second, conceptual question: how can we steelman his argument?

To answer these questions, the post makes three substantive claims. The first two are claims of historical interpretation. The third claim is more conceptual.

• When Xunzi talks about divination, he probably means the I Ching.
• It’s unclear what reasons Xunzi gives for divination. “Sadly, [figuring out the reasons] was left as an exercise for the reader; the surrounding paragraphs are only vaguely related.”
• The I Ching can be steelmanned as a version of Oblique Strategies for life.

The first two historical statements are wrong. The third conceptual claim is correct, but is phrased in a way which doesn't allow full learning.

When Xunzi talks about divination, he does not mean the I Ching. Reading Xunzi makes it clear that he thinks of ritual and divination as social activities; Vaniver gets his historical interpretation wrong immediately by assuming an individualistic framework. If the I Ching is used at all, it's in a communal setting. All of Xunzi's other ritual examples are communal.

Xunzi’s reasons for supporting divination rituals are very clear. To quote the SEP article:

. . . rituals, in Xunzi’s conception, not only facilitate social cohesion, but also foster moral and psychological development.

Those are the questions of historical interpretation that Vaniver gets wrong.

The misleading conceptual answer: missing out on real learning

What of Vaniver’s core claim that the I Ching can be seen as steelmanned perspective-taking? That’s certainly true. As I said, this post makes an excellent argument for it.

This exact point was made seventeen centuries earlier by Wang Bi’s commentary on the I Ching, which Vaniver does not mention. Tze-Ki Hon, writing on “Wang Bi's sustained efforts to obliterate the fortune-telling aspects of the hexagrams” in his article “Human Agency and Change: A Reading of Wang Bi’s Yijing Commentary,” points out [pdf, p. 238]:

By stressing human agency and activism in his reading of hexagrams, it is clear that Wang Bi sees the Yijing as a series of metaphors. If indeed human beings have to constantly find the optimum balance between the demands of their surroundings and their own needs, then the purpose of studying the Yijing is to expand one’s horizons so as to be at ease with changes. Reading the Yijing becomes an occasion to develop a mental picture of one's surroundings, such that one finds out the opportunities and limitations in a given situation.

I doubt Vaniver would find anything to disagree with in the above paragraph.

The problem with Vaniver not mentioning Wang Bi is that it prevents full learning. The unfortunate outcome is that even though Vaniver is reading a text from a different time and culture, very little is learned. By reading Xunzi as Brian Eno, creative visionary and co-inventor of Oblique Strategies, he misses out on Xunzi as Xunzi, thinker on self-cultivation and architect of social order.

Reading the I Ching as Oblique Strategies gives him nothing new, as he already knew about Oblique Strategies beforehand; he ends up with what he started. Reading the I Ching as the I Ching gives him Wang Bi, philosophical perspectives on self-cultivation and living in an uncertain world, historical depth, awe at the line of commentators who found so much to interpret, and Oblique Strategies if he wanted it.

(Incidentally, there is also a missed chance to mention other applications of the Yijing, as seen in Kidder Smith Jr., Peter K. Bol, Joseph A. Adler and Don J. Wyatt’s book Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching. Just as Xunzi is richer for having come after Mencius, Zhu Xi is richer for having come after Wang Bi.)

The unfortunate consequences

There’s nothing wrong in Vaniver having come up with his interpretation on his own. The real problem comes about when people with no knowledge of Chinese philosophy read Vaniver’s post and come away with wrong views. They---being acute readers---will likely read the false implicatures facilitated by his post and come away with the impression that Xunzi’s rituals work on an individual level, that other thinkers are less worth reading than Xunzi, and that in ancient China the I Ching was mostly read as a divination manual rather than a tool for communal change or a series of metaphors.

This last one is worrying. There’s the mindset that these “old ways” made sense from a rational perspective which those in the past missed, and now here we are, the rationalists, elucidating why they worked. All in all, it’s an excellent way to miss out on reading the past honestly on its own terms and to not realise that there were rationalists in the past as well. (It is also quite a patronising way to read past texts, as though people now have a monopoly on rational thinking!)

This post would have been richer if he had emphasised the social aspect of divination and brought in some of Wang Bi’s specific interpretations of the hexagrams for concrete examples of interpreting them as fields of action. Instead, Wang Bi’s wheel is reinvented. With two hours of extra work, the post could have been so much richer. Both the SEP and the IEP are freely available, and I’m not saying anything groundbreaking.

And the shame is that there is a lot that is interesting in Xunzi for rationalists. Xunzi thinks that the hierarchical rituals help to create a more egalitarian society. What kind of hierarchical rituals are allowed? Why? How can we steelman that argument? What implications does it have for institutional design? He thinks that these rituals have certain standards and origins. Is there a concrete way of having metrics for these standards? To what extent can evolutionary explanations account for these rituals?

(For more on rituals, see Daniel A. Bell’s paper “Hierarchical Rituals for Egalitarian Societies” and chapter four, pp. 181--188 of Puett's To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China.)

There’s a lot in Xunzi that's useful and interesting. Misreading him is a sure way to miss it.

Why this matters

Why does this matter? You might think that the conceptual point is the real one that matters. Who cares about interpretation and scene-setting?

I've already partly answered this above when I talked about how Vaniver's perspective stunts full learning. But here's another way of looking at it. Imagine a post on artificial intelligence which began:

Many people talk about artificial intelligence (AI) nowadays. But what is AI? It's not clear at all. But we can take a stab at it by looking at the etymology of the word “artificial,” from the Latin artificialis, from artificium, meaning handicraft. We can thus conclude that “artificial intelligence” refers to the intelligence possessed by handicrafts---baskets, chairs, and the like.

That’s about how badly the post reads to me. Just as a knowledge of etymology does not automatically enable one to write well about AI, a knowledge of randomisation in rationality does not automatically enable one to write well about Xunzi. The post on artificial intelligence may make cogent points later, but the very way it’s phrased is so misguided as to make it harmful to readers who aren’t familiar with AI.

As I mentioned earlier, Vaniver's post is good and LW is better for having it. I hope this comment adds to making it better and more complete.

Some years ago I got interested in the Yi Jing after reading Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, which features the Yi Jing prominently where the book within the book (which is the alternate dimension/history version of The Man in the High Castle) is written by using the Yi Jing to make plot decisions and one of the characters relies on it heavily to navigate life. I went on to write a WebOS Yi Jing phone app so I could more easily consult it from my phone and played around with it myself.

My experience of it was mostly that it offered me nothing I wasn't already doing on my own, but I could see how it would have been helpful to others who lack my particular natural disposition to letting my mind go quiet and seeing what it has to tell me. As you note, it seems a good way to be able to step back and consider something from a different angle, and to consider different aspects of something you may be currently ignoring. The commentary on the Yi Jing is carefully worded such that it's more about the decision generation process than the decision itself, and when used well I think can result in the sort of sudden realization of the action you will take the same way my sitting quietly and waiting for insight does.

I also know a decent number of rationalists who enjoy playing with Tarot cards for seemingly this same reason. Tarot works a bit different because it more tells a story than highlights a virtue, but I think like you much of the value comes from placing an random framing on events, injecting noise into an otherwise too stable algorithm, and helping people get out of local maxima/minima traps.

I'd also include rubber ducking as a modern divination method. I think it does something similar, but by using a different method to get you to see things more clearly and find out what you already implicitly knew but weren't making explicit enough to let it have an impact on your actions. My speculation at a possible mechanism of action here is something like what happens when I sit quietly with a decision and wait for an answer: you let the established patterns of thought get out of the way and let other things come through so you can consider them, in part because you can generate your own internal noise if you stop trying to direct your thought. But not everyone finds this easy or possible, in which case more traditional divination methods with external noise injection are likely useful.

In an innovation workshop we were taught the following technique:

Make a list of 6 things your company is good at

Make a list of 6 applications of your product(s)

Make a list of 6 random words (Disney characters? City names?)

Roll 3 dice and select the corresponding words from the lists. Think about those 3 words and see what ideas you can come up with based on them.

Everyone I spoke to agreed that this was the best technique which we were taught. I knew constrained creativity was a thing but I think using this technique really drove the point home. I don't think this is quite the same thing as traditional divination (e.g. you can repeat this a few times and then choose your best idea) but I wonder if it is relying on similar principles.

Rereading this post, I'm a bit struck by how much effort I put into explaining my history with the underlying ideas, and motivating that this specifically is cool. I think this made sense as a rhetorical move--I'm hoping that a skeptical audience will follow me into territory labeled 'woo' so that they can see the parts of it that are real--and also as a pedagogical move (proofs may be easy to verify, but all of the interesting content of how they actually discovered that line of thought in concept space has been cleaned away; in this post, rather than hiding the sprues they were part of the content, and perhaps even the main content. [Some part of me wants to signpost that a bit more clearly, tho perhaps it is obvious?]

There's something that itches about this post, where it feels like I never turn 'the idea' into a sentence. "If one regards it as proper form, one will have good fortune." Sure, but that leaves much of the work to the reader; this post is more like a log of me as a reader doing some more of the work, and leaving yet more work to my reader. It's not a clear condensation of the point, it doesn't address previous scholarship [LW · GW], it doesn't even clearly identify the relevant points that I had identified, and it doesn't transmit many of the tips and tricks I picked up. A sentence that feels like it would have fit (at least some of what I wanted to convey?) is this description of Tarot readings: "they are not about fortelling your inevitable future, but taking control of it through self knowledge and awareness." [But in reading that, there's something pleasing about the holistic vagueness of "proper form"; the point of having proper form is not just 'taking control'!]

For example, an important point that came up [LW(p) · GW(p)] when reading AllAmericanBreakfast's exploration of using divination was the 'skill of discernment', and that looking at random perspectives and lenses helps train this as well. Once I got a Tarot reading that I'll paraphrase as "this person you're having an interpersonal conflict with is 100% in the wrong," and as soon as I saw the card I burst out laughing; it was clearly not resonant with my experience or the situation, and yet there was still something useful out of seeing myself react to that perspective in that way. Other times, it really is just noise. Somehow, it reminds me of baseball, where an important feature of the game is that the large majority of at-bats do not result in hits. Demonstrating the skill of discernment is present in the original post--but only when I talk about sifting through the sections of Xunzi, giving the specific reasons why I dismissed some parts and thought that the quoted section was a hit that justified additional research, contemplation, and exploration. The ongoing importance of that skill to divination is basically left out.

I also hadn't realized until reading AllAmericanBreakfast's exploration how much it might help to convey that the little things mattered; my translation of the I Ching surely impacted my experience of doing divination with it deeply, like my Tarot deck impacted my experience of doing Tarot readings. I make a related point in passing ("the particular claim made by a source is what distribution is most useful"), and SaidAchmiz's excellent comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] explains it much more fully. When I think of where to go from here, matching the 'advice distribution' to some mixture of the reader and the world feels like a central point.

Expanding on that, I think the traditional style of Tarot reading mostly cares about which cards end up in which positions, drawing on the mythical associations of the card's name more than the features of the cards themselves. Whether or not cards are 'reversed' is significant, but as an orderly person and a longtime Magic: The Gathering player, I can't stand shuffling methods that randomize the orientation of the cards. The tableau defines the relationships between the cards and constructs the overall perspective.

So the way I do Tarot readings is often quite simple: three cards, one for me, one for the other party, and the third for the relationship. [Another common three-card spread is 'past, present, and future'; this page that I found while writing this review suggests a few spreads and questions that I am excited to try. As is perhaps obvious, the questions seeding how to relate to the cards you draw will have a huge impact on the variety and usefulness of perspectives you will generate.] But this works in part because my deck is so beautiful and detailed; as an example, I'll do (and 'live-blog') a reading about my relationship to this post.

I am the "princet of ground"; in a cave, his staff planted firmly behind him, a glowing triangle (the symbol of ground) floating in his hands. The clear story is that I'm delving deep into the past, looking for treasure while maintaining my grounding; the subtler point is that I initially wrote "holding a glowing triangle" and then realized that it in fact wasn't being touched by the princet, in a way that rhymes with my sense that I don't actually understand this fully, or haven't distilled it crisply enough.

The post is the 3 of wind; three swords piercing a heart in the middle of a storm. The meaning of this is, uh, obscure. And yet, perhaps that obscurity is the relevance? The post is not clear--it is three 'stabs at the heart of the matter', which while they touch the point, they have not cleared away the stormclouds or lightning or rain.

The relationship is "The Fountain" (or "Wheel of Fortune"); a fat figure eats and drinks at a party while their reflection is emaciated and surrounded by flame. Water pours from the fountain, causing ripples in the pool. I try out a few stories here, and none of them resonate strongly; am I the fortunate figure, reaping the rewards of having written a solid post? Is the reader the emaciated figure? Is the reflection the illusion of transparency [? · GW], where there's a sense that they got it, but actually they missed it, or the post itself is insight porn [LW(p) · GW(p)]? [As I say in a comment, "if someone is going to get something out of the I Ching, they're going to do it through practice, not through a summary".] The fountain resonates with gradual change, with water moving, in a way that seems hard to articulate but somehow rhymes with people reading this post, seeing things more clearly, or having more tools to see things more broadly and understand more perspectives. [One of my favorite comments about this post was posted by a friend to Facebook, where she attended a Red Tent event that involved someone doing a Tarot reading, and reading this post gave her a clear affordance of how to relate to it in a healthy and connective way, instead of being forced into a dilemma of whether to suppress her disbelief or cause a conflict with the other women there.]

The perspective that seems most resonant, after thinking about it for a few minutes, is that the relationship is a mixture of pride and shame. I like this post; I think it's good, I think it's an example of one of my comparative advantages as a rationalist, I am glad to have written it, and I am glad that people liked it. And also... I am ashamed that this is a 2019 post, instead of a 2015 one; that it is just an advertisement seeking to "open a door that was rightfully closed on the likes of fortune cookies and astrology to rescue things like the I Ching, that seem superficially similar but have a real depth to them," instead of having much depth of its own. And while I still pull out the deck or the I Ching for some major instances, the regular habit never quite stuck in a way that made me suspect I wasn't being creative enough, or pushing enough towards my growth edge. ['If you are bored of reading Tarot cards,' that perspective says, 'you are not asking spicy enough questions.']

The SSC post that motivated finally finishing this up was Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success [LW · GW], which discusses the game-theoretic validity of randomization in competitive endeavors (like hunters vs. prey, or generals vs. generals). It seemed important to also bring up the other sorts of validity, of randomness as debiasing or de-confounding (like why randomized controlled trials are good) or randomness as mechanism to make salient pre-existing principles. I'm reminded of some online advice-purveyor who would often get emails from people asking if their generic advice applied to their specific situation; almost always, the answer was 'yes,' and there was something about the personal attention that was relevant; having it be the case that this particular bit of advice was selected for the situation you're in makes it feel worth considering in a way that "yeah, I guess I could throw this whole book of advice at my problem" doesn't.

Relevant quotes:

Original text is from Discourse on Heaven of Xunzi:

雩而雨，何也？曰：無佗也，猶不雩而雨也。日月食而救之，天旱而雩，卜筮然後決大事，非以為得求也，以文之也。故君子以為文，而百姓以為神。以為文則吉，以為神則凶也。

The Britannica says:

Another celebrated essay is “A Discussion of Heaven,” in which he attacks superstitious and supernatural beliefs. One of the work’s main themes is that unusual natural phenomena (eclipses, etc.) are no less natural for their irregularity—hence are not evil omens—and therefore men should not be concerned at their occurrence. Xunzi’s denial of supernaturalism led him into a sophisticated interpretation of popular religious observances and superstitions. He asserted that these were merely poetic fictions, useful for the common people because they provided an orderly outlet for human emotions, but not to be taken as true by educated men. There Xunzi inaugurated a rationalistic trend in Confucianism that has been congenial to scientific thinking.

Stanford Encyclopedia

Heaven never intercedes directly in human affairs, but human affairs are certain to succeed or fail according to a timeless pattern that Heaven determined before human beings existed...

Thus rituals are not merely received practices or convenient social institutions; they are practicable forms in which the sages aimed to encapsulate the fundamental patterns of the universe. No human being, not even a sage, can know Heaven, but we can know Heaven’s Way, which is the surest path to a flourishing and blessed life. Because human beings have limited knowledge and abilities, it is difficult for us to attain this deep understanding, and therefore the sages handed down the rituals to help us follow in their footsteps.

I once did a thought experiment where I tried to figure out how divination practices might directly help decisions.

The Druids were legendarily learned. What information we have says they were responsible for maintaining the oral history of their people, and for management of sacrifices, and reading of omens and the weather. They were reputed to have advanced knowledge of plants and animals.

I wondered about divination before battle. Naturally, birds aren't really random - I expect a lot of people have noticed things like how they suddenly go quiet when a wet gust of wind blows through immediately prior to a storm. I expect if I were a Druid, I would have spent a lot of time watching birds, and know more things like this.

As a keeper of the oral history, I'll know the reported outcome of previous battles and some important details about them (the weather, say).

Things like how many warriors my tribe has I can see with my eyes, and whether the other guys have more or less can be had by scouting like usual.

There's also the matter of appeasing the gods, and offering them sacrifice. Now there's a story from Greek myth about how early on the gods were tricked into accepting the fatty, gristly parts of the animal as the best parts, on the grounds that the smoke from burning those was better able to reach Olympus and nourish them. This agrees with casual observation: when I ruin a steak on the grill it smokes a lot more than when I ruin chicken on the grill. Smoke is a pretty good indicator of things like wind direction and strength, and further when it rises it can do things like show you where the wind changes above your level (like in smokestacks where it suddenly gets sheared off at a certain height).

So bird behavior provides information about barometric pressure, and the smoke from a sacrifice provides information about the movement of air pretty high up, and the oral history provides a sort of prior for similar circumstances.

So, if I were a Druid and knew what Druids know, I could make better than average predictions about the outcome of a battle if I made a burnt offering and read omens from birds.

This post made me try adding more randomness to my life for a week or so. I learned a small amount. I remain excited about automated tools that help do things like this, e.g. recent work from Ought.

Promoted to curated: This is probably the post on LW I referenced most often in the last few months while a lot of the discussion of cultural rationality was going on.

I think there is a lot of value in reading and learning from the best writings throughout all of history, both because they usually tend to have good ideas, and also because it gives a much stronger grounded sense of history. I think there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in analyzing a bunch of historical classics through a rationality lense.

Nitpick: conservation of expected evidence does not seem to me like why you can’t do divination with a random number generator.

This crystallizes a class of strategies which I was aware of, and used sometimes -- eg I have in the past had dice-tables of topics to think about in the shower. But I didn't make the connection to older practices, and I don't think most people would've recognized this as a useful strategy (as opposed to a gimmick). So now the situation is that this post exists to explain the randomized-library-of-strategies approach, but there isn't much in the way of well curated strategy-libraries to sample from.

In an ideal world, the randomly-sampled strategies would be explicit about what they are (rather than disguising themselves as predictions), and would have a feedback mechanism attached. You'd go to a web page, click "tell me what to think about", and it says "pay attention to relationships you might be neglecting" or something, and 24 hours later you rate whether that caused you to notice anything important. Hopefully bringing attention to this concept will cause people to build more tools like that.

For selecting from an array of useful frames, could the process be improved by using spaced repetition instead of random draw?

Perhaps, use a process that starts with a few crucual elemental frames and presents them in a cycle, then starts introducing new frames, and as you go the frequency of the older frames decreases. Never does it draw two very similar frames on consecutive sessions.

I had actually discussed writing a post with Elliot about Tarot cards, but when this post came out there wasn't any need since it already expressed the core idea extremely elegantly.

Could the phenomenon described in the post explain why people find psychedelics useful for self-development?

There is the random perturbation - seeing music, hearing thoughts, ...

The authority of an old sage performing divinations is replaced in psychedelics with direct experience of the perturbation. And the perturbation is amplified by the feeling of detachedness from one-self, people often have on a trip.

I don't have any experience with psychedelics, though, so I'm just theorizing.

This is a great post!

I think I get some kind of similar benefit just by reading a lot and from lots of different sources but would you recommend something like what you described doing with the I Ching to others as a habitual practice they should adopt?

I wonder if variations on the same thing might be similarly helpful, e.g. a service that emails you a random essay or an app that pings you to remind you to read a random LW post.

http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/cyclops

Something similar to this? With the root notion of the action, weather it be divination or a walk in the woods being to detach yourself from your own mind and force yourself to reflect?

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