What happens when you get there? What do you feel?

In the context of "just the very first step" and "slow way, way down", I notice that I enumerate the possibilities (turn or continue), create space for the answers to "what happens if I?" for each possibility, and then my eyes want to follow those paths out one at a time (or kinda gestalt whole-maze-at-once, for one this simple) and come back and compare those two answers to "what happens if?". Then again, I tend to rely heavily on spatial thinking, and I've put many hours into trying to empathize with little machines who can't see the maze from the birds-eye view like I can. 

Now go back to the beginning of the maze, and this time, try taking it algorithmically. Imagine reaching out with your right hand to touch the wall, and keep your hand in contact with the wall the whole time you walk forward.

Feels like there's not that "stop" imposed as it was in the first instance. Feels also like once I orient my avatar of myself in the maze to make sure it's the right hand on the wall, I throw out the "which way I'm facing" data because I know it'd be trivial to recalculate later if you asked for it. 

Also feels like you could as easily have asked for the left hand. I had to look back and check to do the right-hand-on-wall technique; I realize now that I reflexively simulated left-hand-on-wall and the resulting deja vu upon returning to the first square. I suspect that this is because I prefer to keep my right hand free when exploring a new place, because I'm right handed. 

Go back to the beginning again, and notice exactly how your default strategy feels different.

I worry, here, that I might do a better comparison if I'd been nudged to name and snapshot the feeling of the default solving. The worry might be unfounded, though -- looking back (glad I started a comment there!), I see how my default solving parallelized solving all the prospective paths, reminiscent now of that slime mold that they tricked into reinventing the Tokyo metro system. 

There is a certain way it feels to recognize that turning left cannot lead you to the exit faster than going straight.

Feels like building something unambiguously adequate-or-better for the task at hand. Feels like replacing a bunch of arithmetic with a single integer. Feels like choosing an additional axiom to free up logic for less-certain parts of the problem. 

I have a word for it, actually. It feels like reifying. Feels like what I've usually thought the compiler people meant when they use that word. 

How would you describe the main sensation by which you navigate when you encounter a maze?

I usually use the name "logic" for it. This may be wrong, or mismatched from how others use their words. There's a solidity to it (and the word 'solid' may indeed share roots with 'logic'?). It's the part with the bricks and the good straight boards, the part where you don't have to revisit a conclusion to make sure it's still true once you confirmed it. It's the work stereotyped as being for men, fix the car this once, build the deck this once, dig a cellar out and we'll have a cellar forever:  things that change slowly enough that the change is negligible. (Contrast that against the work stereotyped as being for women, the constant maintenance of keeping on sweeping the floor that keeps getting dirty again or keeping on washing and folding the clothes that wouldn't be doing their jobs if they just stayed the way you left them.)

Where is the lever that moves your mind into contact with physical necessity? 

What is it like to be out of contact with physical necessity? 

...that's my marginalia from a single read of this post. If I think more things about it later, I'll try to remember to come back and leave another comment. 

Here is a maze. Don't solve it yet

Oops! Too late! Way, way too late.

It was a big gaudy thing that caught my eye as soon as it scrolled into view, was obviously a maze, and mazes are designed to be solved. It took less than a second to solve, which was less time than it took to reorient my attention to the point in the text I was reading, and about 20 seconds before I reached the text "Don't solve it yet" in my reading.

Maybe a spoiler cover with a more prominent "Here is a maze. Don't solve it yet" above would have helped?

I notice that the most value I got from your essay is a reminder of the core principles of naturalism, and an indicator / reminder that just observing is enough to make a significant amount of good things happen.

I did get confused when reading the first half of this essay, because I still don't know what it means to "hug the query". I could try to put it into words ("prefer more direct and strong evidence that reduces inferential distance, which makes your inference more robust to errors") but I don't have a felt-sense of what this would mean and no concrete examples come to mind immediately.

Reading your example, I feel like this didn''t match my felt-sense for what "hugging the query" seems to me (even as I was writing this line!), and after I spent a minute or so verifying this, I felt like I couldn't point out any way where this didn't make sense as an example of "hugging the query". Hugging the query, to me, feels like burning the hedge down, or trying to walk around the maze instead of solving it, or cutting through walls if I ever hit a dead end. I guess to me the 'anchor' is the endpoint in my head due how I envision the maze as a hedge maze. Imagining more restricted examples of mazes feels claustrophobic and makes my mind anchor on potential reasons for why I'm in such a maze, instead of trying to simply solve the maze, which is quite interesting! As far as I can tell, what I seem to be feeling here is another instance of what it seems to me to feel like to apply reduction to problems.

I have not done that work. I do not have PCK on this, and so I cannot tell you a straighter or easier path than the entire self-directed naturalist method itself.

Yes, it seems likely to me that a lot of rationalist skills cannot be easily taught in a standardized format. One-on-one teaching sessions work a lot better, with a teacher who understands to sort-of debug the student as they apply the skill, fail, notice interesting things, and refine their understanding of the art. The example that comes to mind is learning how to write math proofs.

I'm looking forward to your next essay.

What I'm curious about is how you balance this with the art of examining your assumptions.

Puzzle games are a good way of examining how my own mind works, and I often find that I go through an algorithm like:

• Do I see the obvious answer?
• What are a few straightforward things I could try?

Then Step 3 I see as similar to your maze-solving method:

• What are the required steps to solve this? What elements constrain the search space?

But I often find that for difficult puzzles, a fourth step is required:

• What assumptions am I making, that would lead me to overlook the correct answer if the assumption was false?

For instance, I may think a lever can only be pulled, and not pushed - or I may be operating under a much harder to understand assumption, like "In this maze, the only thing that matters are visual elements" when it turns out the solution to this puzzle actually involved auditory cues.

What does it feel like for you to hold your mind in that posture? How would you describe the main sensation by which you navigate when you encounter a maze?

Constrained, there's no other way for things to be. But I don't feel that nearly as strongly when I think of picking up my cup. Yet if I imagine moving my arm away from the cup instead of towards, I might feel just a touch of that constraint. When I consider getting up, and not imagining crazy ways to move, I feel constrained. The objects next to my legs, the screen in front (the mouse and keyboard at my side less so, oddly enough), I feel constraint. 

This kind of reminds me of the primitive reachability [LW · GW], and Eliezer's explanation of what is behind the illusion of "free will". 

You're terrifying me with this essay. Reading your work is like teetering on the brink of an abyss.