Posts

What I Learned (Conclusion To "The Sense Of Physical Necessity") 2024-03-20T21:24:37.464Z
Experimentation (Part 7 of "The Sense Of Physical Necessity") 2024-03-18T21:25:56.527Z
Collection (Part 6 of "The Sense Of Physical Necessity") 2024-03-14T21:37:00.160Z
Closeness To the Issue (Part 5 of "The Sense Of Physical Necessity") 2024-03-09T00:36:47.388Z
Mud and Despair (Part 4 of "The Sense Of Physical Necessity") 2024-03-07T00:14:23.975Z
Locating My Eyes (Part 3 of "The Sense of Physical Necessity") 2024-02-29T03:09:25.810Z
Choosing My Quest (Part 2 of "The Sense Of Physical Necessity") 2024-02-24T21:31:45.377Z
The Sense Of Physical Necessity: A Naturalism Demo (Introduction) 2024-02-24T02:56:31.458Z
Spaciousness In Partner Dance: A Naturalism Demo 2023-11-19T07:00:19.555Z
Which rationality posts are begging for further practical development? 2023-07-23T22:22:04.389Z
Look At What's In Front Of You (Conclusion to The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism) 2023-05-25T19:00:44.835Z
Investigating Fabrication 2023-05-18T17:46:52.783Z
Support Structures for Naturalist Study 2023-05-15T00:25:44.098Z
Three Iterative Processes 2023-05-12T02:50:06.723Z
Naturalist Experimentation 2023-05-10T04:28:32.013Z
Naturalist Collection 2023-05-06T00:37:42.774Z
Getting Your Eyes On 2023-05-02T00:33:20.493Z
Locating Fulcrum Experiences 2023-04-28T20:14:03.644Z
Getting Started With Naturalism 2023-04-23T21:02:25.988Z
Introducing the Nuts and Bolts Of Naturalism 2023-04-22T18:31:25.620Z
Reflections on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance 2023-02-26T20:46:29.553Z
Fucking Goddamn Basics of Rationalist Discourse 2023-02-04T01:47:32.578Z
My Model Of EA Burnout 2023-01-25T17:52:42.770Z
How To Observe Abstract Objects 2022-09-30T02:11:38.987Z
Naturalism 2022-02-24T19:45:21.659Z
Patient Observation 2022-02-23T19:31:45.062Z
Direct Observation 2022-02-21T20:51:45.060Z
Observation 2022-02-19T18:47:08.917Z
Interlude: On Realness 2022-02-17T19:02:16.551Z
The Territory 2022-02-15T18:56:36.992Z
Knowing 2022-02-13T07:53:59.031Z
Intro to Naturalism: Orientation 2022-02-13T07:52:03.503Z
Research Facilitation Invitation 2021-07-10T01:04:06.002Z
Announcing My Free Online Course "Original Seeing With a Focus On Life" 2021-07-08T01:26:00.985Z
Five Suggestions For Rationality Research and Development 2021-06-14T01:09:26.532Z
Catching the Spark 2021-01-30T23:23:57.383Z
LoganStrohl's Shortform 2019-12-03T17:46:19.117Z
Training Reflective Attention 2014-12-21T12:53:52.558Z
Simulate and Defer To More Rational Selves 2014-09-17T18:11:10.505Z
What It's Like to Notice Things 2014-09-17T14:19:02.157Z
A Dialogue On Doublethink 2014-05-11T19:38:47.821Z
On Straw Vulcan Rationality 2014-02-02T08:11:54.705Z
Tell Culture 2014-01-18T20:13:09.414Z
Rational Resolutions: Special CFAR Mini-workshop SATURDAY 2014-01-02T20:32:26.931Z
Human Memory: Problem Set 2013-10-31T04:08:45.436Z
Meditation Trains Metacognition 2013-10-20T00:47:03.927Z
How do you say no? 2013-10-04T03:44:12.712Z
Ketogenic Soylent 2013-09-27T01:17:33.889Z
Polyphasic Sleep Seed Study: Reprise 2013-09-21T22:29:05.744Z
Seed Study: Polyphasic Sleep in Ten Steps 2013-07-11T07:17:20.355Z

Comments

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Polyphasic Sleep Seed Study: Reprise · 2024-03-18T20:26:54.571Z · LW · GW

Ah, so would I! I think I never actually got to see more info on the outcome. I don't know whether or not anything was actually compiled. Once it was in Leverage's hands, I guess I lost track of it somehow, but I don't remember why.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Locating My Eyes (Part 3 of "The Sense of Physical Necessity") · 2024-03-14T01:39:57.516Z · LW · GW

thanks!

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on The Sense Of Physical Necessity: A Naturalism Demo (Introduction) · 2024-03-07T00:24:17.973Z · LW · GW

A note on illustrations:

Somebody brought up that their friend assumed my illustrations are AI generated. So I want to clarify: With the exception of the two dancers in "Spaciousness In Partner Dance" (AI generated) and the spider web in "On Realness" (commissioned from Theresa Strohl, my mother), I've painted all the illustrations by hand myself. Duncan Sabien has edited them slightly to make them work with LW's site background.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Locating My Eyes (Part 3 of "The Sense of Physical Necessity") · 2024-03-01T20:51:48.053Z · LW · GW

(Designated Buddhism thread)

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Choosing My Quest (Part 2 of "The Sense Of Physical Necessity") · 2024-02-25T04:49:25.674Z · LW · GW

I ordinarily do not allow discussions of Buddhism on my posts because I hate moderating them. I haven't worked out what exactly it is about Buddhism, but it seems to cause things to go wonky in a way that's sort of similar to politics.

Also, my way of thinking and writing and doing things in general seems to bring out a lot of people who want to talk about Buddhism, and I want my work discussed mostly on its own terms, without it being immediately embroiled in whatever thing it is that tends to happen when people start talking about Buddhism.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Choosing My Quest (Part 2 of "The Sense Of Physical Necessity") · 2024-02-24T21:35:48.363Z · LW · GW

One of my moderation rules forbids discussion of Buddhism by default.

Since there was a big old section on meditation in this post, and the type of meditation I described is pretty specifically shikantaza from Soto Zen, I'm designating this here thread as the place where people can talk about Buddhism-related stuff if they want to, just this once, as a treat. 

I don't promise to participate. My other moderation rules still apply.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on 12 interesting things I learned studying the discovery of nature's laws · 2024-01-08T22:56:40.342Z · LW · GW

I have thought fondly of this post several times since I read it.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Monks of Magnitude · 2023-12-21T04:47:47.869Z · LW · GW

This post helped me relate to my own work better. I feel less confused about what's going on with the differences between my own working pace and the pace of many around me. I am obviously more like a 10,000 day monk than a 10 day monk, and I should think and plan accordingly. 

Partly because I read this post, I spend frewer resources frantically trying to show off a Marketable Product(TM) as quickly as possible ("How can I make a Unit out of this for the Workshop next month?"), and I spend more resources aiming for the progress I actually think would be valuable ("In the world where I have robustly solved X one year from now, what happened in the intervening twelve months?").

Outside of academia (or perhaps even inside of it, at this point), our society does not really have a place for monks of the larger magnitudes, so it's uncomfortable to try to be one. But if I'm going to try to be one, which I absolutely am, it's awfully helpful to be able to recognize that as what I'm doing. It impacts how I structure my research and writing projects. It impacts how I ask for funding. It impacts how I communicate about priorities and boundaries ("I'm not scheduling meetings this quarter.") 

I plot my largest project on a multi-decade timescale, and although there are reasons I'm concerned about this, "lots of other people don't seem to commit to such things" is no longer among them.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Intro to Naturalism: Orientation · 2023-12-10T23:47:33.375Z · LW · GW

(This is a review of the entire sequence.)

On the day when I first conceived of this sequence, my room was covered in giant graph paper sticky notes. The walls, the windows, the dressers, the floor. Sticky pads everywhere, and every one of them packed with word clouds and doodles in messy bold marker.

My world is rich. The grain of the wood on the desk in front of me, the slightly raw sensation inside my nostrils that brightens each time I inhale, the pressure of my search for words as I write that rises up through my chest and makes my brain feel like it’s breathing through a straw. I know as well as almost anybody what MacNeice called “the drunkenness of things being various”, “incorrigibly plural”. I am awash in details; sometimes I swim, sometimes I drown, and in rare merciful moments, I float.

People talk about missing the forest for the trees; I am a creature of individual leaves. The sticky notes with which I had covered my walls were my attempts to recall every twig and branch I had seen while developing my approach to rationality, ever since I asked myself what the existing art is missing back in 2013. Each page was an attempted portrait of a different tree. 

The sentence I somehow pulled together for this sequence—”Knowing the territory takes patient and direct observation”—was my sketch of the entire forest all at once. 


 


 

On that day, it had seemed a literally incomprehensible pile of details, as nearly everything I write about does until some time after I’ve published. Yet after two more years of work on this project, I still think that sketch is not only accurate, but pretty close to complete.

I am proud of this sequence. It’s far from perfect; it’s far from adequate, in fact. And I’ll talk about that, too. But as a first-pass summary of how I think about “Intro to Naturalism”, it’s right to say that overall, I think it may be the best thing I’ve done so far.


*

I doubt it’s worth much on its own, though. It was really never meant to be. I tried to make it accessible, but I mostly wrote it for myself. I published it publicly anyway because I figure there’s a (reasonable!) limit to the patience of my funders. I’m delighted and a little surprised that other people have found it useful.

To me, this sequence is a bit like a sextant. Suppose you’re trying to navigate to a particular island off the coast of South Africa. It will not, by itself, get you to your destination. It’s not the shore. It’s not a boat. It’s not even a map. You need an awful lot more than this to sail to Madagascar.

But as the captain of the HMS Naturalism, I felt I had no hope of staying on course without writing down this worldview, in summary and in detail.

*

On course toward what, exactly? What is the project of which this sequence is a small but crucial part?

The journey has four parts, according to my current understanding:

1) Intro to Naturalism: My attempt to lay out the perspective from which my branch of rationality is practiced.

2) The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism (published in early 2023): A straightforward mechanical description of the procedure, as I tend to present it to people learning it for the first time.

3) Naturalism In Practice: A series of accounts of real-life naturalist studies, in frequent dialog with posts from the earlier two sequences, covering a range of topics and demonstrating what naturalism looks and feels like in practice. (This sequence is currently in the works.)

4) THE ACTUAL GOAL [as yet untitled (and unfunded)]: A synthesis of the previous three sequences, perhaps in book form, comprising a comprehensive practical guide to knowing the territory through patient and direct observation.

(There may need to be a part “3.5”, where I refocus for a while on pedagogy and collaboration, before I am ready for 4.)

If I were less awash in details, I imagine I would have been able to start with part 4. But also, I may never have been able to develop such a thing as naturalism.

*

What can I predict about how this sequence will show up in whatever synthesis I eventually create, provided I eventually get to do that?

I think the core summary will be the same: “Knowing the territory takes patient and direct observation.”

Here are some ways I think it will differ from the original.

1.

I may rely much less on the aesthetics of 19th century natural history; indeed, I may completely rename the discipline. 

This framing did a ton of work in helping me understand what I was doing and why; but most people do not have my background, and do not find this framework nearly as supportive or inspiring as I have.

For most readers of LessWrong, the word “naturalism” refers to an ontological claim denying the supernatural. They are completely unfamiliar with the approach to biology that also goes by that name, which focuses on knowing a few organisms deeply rather than on the categorization of organisms. 

If I do keep the naturalist framing, I’ll need to double down on it and begin with a discussion of the role of the naturalist approach in the history of science, which would be fun for me but perhaps needlessly inefficient.

2.

If there is a major change to the overall summary, it will probably be a result of further developments in my study of “realness”.

During the study I’m currently writing up—one of “Hug the Query”—the primacy of my intuitions involving these observations has come into sharper focus. I’m not the only person who believes “Interlude On Realness” is the most important post in my intro sequence, even though it’s also the one that’s least integrated with the rest of the sequence. I think that a more mature and positively impactful incarnation of “Intro To Naturalism” might put whatever’s going on with “realness” front and center (presumably after I manage to have more coherent thoughts about what is going on with realness).

3.

As Intro to Naturalism suggests, this approach to investigation is in theory extremely general. I have an even larger vision than the one I’ve so far laid out in this review, in which my approach is thoroughly tested and adapted to an enormous breadth of domains, from AI alignment research to metallurgy to computational ethnomusicology. (I maintain an intuition that’s even a little gears-y about the utility of naturalism for AI alignment research especially.)

However, I am by passion and profession a rationality developer. The version of naturalism that I understand best, and that I am best prepared to write about at length, is particularly tailored to the investigation of human cognitive algorithms. Unless someone swoops in and drops a bunch of money on a far more ambitious and speculative project than I currently plan to undertake, and perhaps even finds me some kind of cofounder with a complementary skillset, the final incarnation of this sequence will be more narrowly focused on rationality in particular than was the original.

4.

The structure of the finished work will almost certainly be the exact opposite of my historical publications. Historically, I published the most abstract discussions, then the instructional guidelines, then the fully concrete demonstrations. I did this not because I thought it was a good idea, but because I’m a tiny human with limited cognitive capacity and it was the only way I could manage to write anything in practice.

The almost-always-correct way to write is to move from concrete to abstract. I expect that anything I present from this sequence in the final work will follow a demonstration and a methodological discussion.

5.

I do not think that I had “patient” in sufficiently clear view when I wrote “Patient Observation”, and I still don’t think I’m quite there yet. It may be the wrong term, or it may be overloaded. It’s terribly important, and I think that communicating about it as well as I’d like to will require 1) breaking it down more carefully, and 2) doing so in dialog with contrasting approaches.

I recently found myself claiming to be “at war with the relatively dumb versions of startup culture aesthetics”. I think that to make my point about “patience” to my satisfaction, I will also need to extol the virtues of efficiency, rapid iteration, decisiveness, etc., as I understand them. This entire approach depends fundamentally on patience, and I don’t think it can be wholeheartedly embraced without first safeguarding the fruits of contrasting approaches (or at least explicitly contending with their loss, where they are in fact threatened).

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Spaciousness In Partner Dance: A Naturalism Demo · 2023-11-21T05:11:16.993Z · LW · GW

>A visualization where a hose of heavy running water enters at the top of your head and pours out through the pads of your hands results in a pretty solid frame for lateral.

hm i've never heard that one! i'll try it out, thanks!

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Sunset at Noon · 2023-10-29T00:20:02.443Z · LW · GW

if you wanna second-guess yourself even harder, 

1) look around the room and attempt to produce three instances of something resembling tiny quiet confusion (or louder than that if it's available)
2) try to precisely describe the difference between surprise and confusion
3) sketch a taxonomy of confusing experiences and then ask yourself what you might be missing

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Sunset at Noon · 2023-10-28T17:05:42.371Z · LW · GW

I feel embarrassed that I'm just now reading this. >_< ' (Ray knows but: I'm the aforementioned "Brienne Yudkowsky", my name's just different now.) I enjoyed it; it's really interesting and valuable to see my thoughts contextualized from the outside and narrativized. It's usually hard for me to see forests when I'm surrounded by trees.

> There are very few opportunities to practice noticing confusion.

I'm really curious how you relate to this claim six years later.

 

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Which rationality posts are begging for further practical development? · 2023-08-16T01:16:57.607Z · LW · GW

I wrote up "How To Think Of Things" for CFAR a while back. I probably wanna at least edit it some before making it a top level post, but I'm curious what you think of it.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on LoganStrohl's Shortform · 2023-08-04T18:51:07.082Z · LW · GW

"What did pregnancy do to your cognition?"

(Interested in responses to this from other people who have been pregnant, but here's my own answer.)

I think the main thing pregnancy seemed to do to my mind was reduce my associative speed. This had all kinds of effects on the rest of my cognition and experience, because it's a capacity I rely on almost constantly, but I think this was the central mechanism.

I'm not sure I have my concepts carved up right here, but by "associative speed" I mean "the thing that lets your thoughts go far and fast during a babble challenge". During pregnancy I'd try to do a task like "What does the smell of this chocolate make me think of?" and nothing would come to me for ages and ages (by which I mean a full one to three seconds), and then tiny bits of things would trickle in, but with no vibrancy or motion, no suggestion of more thoughts coming on their tails.

At the height of my mnemonics training, when I was super buff in raw creativity muscles, I'd try something like that and it was an almost overwhelming flood of life-like imaginings that felt effortless, almost like closing your eyes on mushrooms. My brain on pregnancy was the opposite of that, and it felt like death.

I was terrified that my associative speed would stay that low forever. Six weeks postpartum, it's not quite back to normal yet, but I think it's close.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Babble challenge: 50 ways of sending something to the moon · 2023-08-01T17:34:07.016Z · LW · GW

>They're... free? Nothing bad happens when you generate them. You ignore them and move on and consolidate the good ideas later. 

I understood BenWr to be suggesting this was false. His pruner is rejecting "bad ideas" for a reason, and perhaps it is a good reason; perhaps bad things do happen if he deliberately lets in more "bad ideas".

If that were true for people in general, or for a significant minority of people, I'd definitely want to understand what the bad thing is, how it works, whether "having bad ideas" tends to be good on net anyway, and how to mitigate the bad thing if so. 

I do think that lots of people—at least 85% of people, in my experiences running this kind of exercise with others—experience some kind of pain or suffering when "trying to have bad ideas", at least at first. (I did a series of mnemonics workshops before I even started using this kind of thing in rationality training, so n is somewhere around... 350?) 

It has always appeared to me that the painful parts of the experience are coming from a combination of "doing new things is hard", "doing things I've trained myself not to do is uncomfortable", and "social image-based stuff like 'what if people see this and think I'm bad' or 'what if I see this and think I'm bad". All of these concerns are important to address in some way, I claim, for a person to get really good at this. I haven't actually seen anybody investigate what's going on for them and then decide that they do not want to gain the skillset. (There certainly are people who decide not to use negatively-valenced emotions when committing things to memory, and who decide to keep their "thinking like a villain" knob turned down pretty low, and these decisions seem similar to "try not to have bad ideas"; but I think they're not dealbreakers for the central skill, and I think "try not to have bad ideas" probably is.)

However, I think I was much, much worse ten years ago at making space for the people I'm teaching to find their own way of doing things. So maybe if I ran mnemonics workshops today, many more people would pipe up to be like "You know what? This is bad for me. No thank you."

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Babble challenge: 50 ways of sending something to the moon · 2023-08-01T04:36:20.560Z · LW · GW

I don't know what it says about me that

"Eat it then eat lots of beans then fart while in a handstand." 

was the fourth thing I thought of. Wtf brain.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Babble challenge: 50 ways of sending something to the moon · 2023-08-01T04:26:45.191Z · LW · GW

I started out with the procedure I describe here, as a warmup. I got to number 11 in the first three minutes, then when I started the second half of the procedure I just kept going. 

This list took me about 30 minutes, so it's probably not the same as "the best 50 ideas I can come up with in an hour". If I were going to do another 30 minutes to make a better list, I think I'd highlight my favorite ideas so far, ask myself what it was like to come up with those ones in particular, and try to adopt more of whatever mental postures those are for the rest of the time. I expect I'd have fewer ideas in the subsequent half hour, but they'd probably be more to my liking, on average. 

A different thing I think I could do with that second half hour to make a better list would be to pick several of the items from the first list that seem like they could use further development, perhaps because they have an obvious practical flaw (such as "but there's no air between the Earth and the moon!") and take them as prompts, each for three to five minutes.

If I wanted to just explode this list into way more ideas that are all over the place, I'd try the grid method I describe at the bottom of the document I linked above.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Babble challenge: 50 ways of sending something to the moon · 2023-08-01T04:12:39.577Z · LW · GW
  1. Put it on a rocket and light the fuel.
  2. Use a big catapult.
  3. Give it to a gigantic bird.
  4. Eat it then eat lots of beans and fart while in a handstand.
  5. Put it on the hand of a clock, then speed time up a whole bunch so it's flug really fast off the end.
  6. Hot air balloon.
  7. Blimp.
  8. Hold it and jump really high.
  9. Go around back of the moon and shove the moon into the Earth.
  10. Use an airplane.
  11. Throw it hard with your arm.
  12. Put something really heavy at the end of a slide, put that slide end on the moon, and send the thing down the slide.
  13. Smash an asteroid into the Earth so the part of Earth the object's on breaks off and smashes into the moon.
  14. Use a portal gun and shove the thing through the portal.
  15. Use a shrink ray so the thing's so small that... something something particle physics, waveforms, everywhere all at once.
  16. Locate the parallel dimension where the thing's already on the moon and go there.
  17. Drop something really heavy on the other end of a teeter totter. 
  18. Trebuchet.
  19. Fire it from a big gun.
  20. Gigantic bow and arrow.
  21. Use one of those toys with the yoyo thing on rails until it goes so fast it's flung off the end all the way to the moon.
  22. Eat it, then eat a super poisonous mushroom, then vomit upward.
  23. Send it to exactly the right star then explode the star in such a way that the object is propelled toward the moon.
  24. Put it on a comet that's headed for the moon.
  25. Put it inside of a soccer ball and kick it really hard.
  26. Pick it up off of the ground way harder than you meant to.
  27. Put it in a Chalmers book then make me read the Chalmers book.
  28. Drop it on the best trampoline ever.
  29. Put it on a ferris wheel that spins really super fast.
  30. Locate a time when it's already there, then time travel to that time.
  31. Put it on a barbell and give the barbell to one of those guys who drops barbells really loudly at the gym to show off, but dose him with insecurity juice so he drops the barbell so hard it goes all the way through the center of the Earth and out the other side and to the moon.
  32. Tie it to the foot of a gymnast before she does a super flippy flip so she flings it off of the end of her foot and to the moon.
  33. Give the idea to Atrus or one of the other D'ni Myst characters and ask them to write a detailed description of it being on the moon.
  34. Put it in the straw of my water bottle, seal the lid on, and send the bottle from sea level to the top of a tall mountain really fast so the pressure change launches the object to the moon.
  35. Go find a bit of moon rock and put the object on it.
  36. Make a ladder from the Earth to the moon and climb the ladder while holding the object.
  37. Elevator to the moon.
  38. Escalator to the moon.
  39. Staircase to the moon.
  40. Float it on the surface of a pot of water, then heat the water super hot super quickly so it's exploded off the surface.
  41. Sneak it into an astronaut's luggage.
  42. Give it to a USPS mail carrier with a moon address and a shittton of stamps.
  43. Put it in an elephant's trunk, then give him sneezing powder.
  44. Put it in the ocean, then make an enormous wave.
  45. Shove it in a super duper volcano then block up all the other volcanoes so there's only one way for the pressure to escape.
  46. Put it in a car and tell Yahoo Maps to send it to the bottom of the ocean.
  47. Give it to GPT5 and ask the robot to send it to the moon.
  48. Go back in time to retrieve DaVinci and give him a million dollars to send it to the moon.
  49. Put it on the negative pole of a gigantic magnet and shove the positive pole of another gigantic magnet against it.
  50. Put it on one side of a pancake and flip the pancake way too hard.

Jacob I like this post and I had a good time. Thanks :)

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on How To Observe Abstract Objects · 2023-08-01T02:14:58.984Z · LW · GW

I'm really happy to hear you tried this! Thanks for telling us about it.

>it seems pretty obviously connected to me

I'm curious what happens when you try to spell out why it's connected.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on How To Observe Abstract Objects · 2023-07-27T23:41:54.571Z · LW · GW

I think it was something like three to five out of 75 people (so like 5%).

Two of the three people I'm thinking of didn't tell me all that much detail. Most of my model of what's going on at least some of the time comes from talking in more depth with just one of them. That's nowhere near enough information to make any remotely confident generalized claims; but it did seem like enough to include a note of caution.

I think most of the people likely to run into this kind of trouble are autistic. According to my model (which is roughly the "weak central coherence" theory), autistic people are dealing with way more sensory information most of the time, because their top-down processing is relatively weak compared to their bottom-up processing. They're not pruning stuff like normal. It just hits them all at once, and they can't organize it. 

(I don't know why I'm saying "them" as though I'm not such a person.) 

Departing now from standard stories about how autism works, and veering into my own speculation.

It seems to me that autistics tend to choose one of two strategies for coping with this. (I'm using "choose" very loosely here. It might happen when we're two years old.) Either we let everything in and become the "primarily sensory sensitive" flavor of autistic, or we dissociate and become the "primarily sensory insensitive" flavor of autistic. (It's more complicated than that; most of us don't fall cleanly into one category or the other in every circumstance.) 

Some of us freak out when an ambulance goes by, and can't think straight when there's a coke can in the same room because it keeps making tiny bubble sounds, and can tell you in great detail about the sensations happening on every inch of skin. Like me. 

Others of us are hardly ever aware that our bodies exist, may not notice you're calling our name when we are standing right next to you, and spend most of our time "with our heads in the clouds". (IME the clouds are often programming, math, or writing fiction.)

According to my story, sensory insensitive autistics have learned to live whatever-kind-of-life-they-have while constantly ignoring almost everything that's happening to them. They're not the only sort of person like this; plenty of neurotypicals also have their heads in the clouds almost all of the time. The thing is, head-in-the-clouds neurotypicals are still pretty much fine if they let through a bit more bottom-up data. It's not what they prefer or are comfortable with, but their basic way of processing information does not rely on never doing this. It doesn't threaten to break them.

Sensory insensitive autistics, though, depend on this extreme strategy for basic survival. When guided to make a move that would let in the flood—the flood that I constantly swim in, but that they have no practice coping with head-on—they can immediately tell that they're in danger of drowning, and they go NOPE, NO THANKS, DO NOT LIKE THIS.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Tuning your Cognitive Strategies · 2023-07-27T23:13:33.317Z · LW · GW

My unedited notes while reading this post, including an initial exercise log:

"Your cognition is much more powerful than just the part you have conscious access to, and it's crucial to make good use of it."

heck yeah

"A small tweak to how your brain processes information in general is worth more than a big upgrade to your conscious repository of cognitive tricks."

  • absofuckinlutely

"More creativity and good ideas just "popping into your head"."

  • oh that is appealing; pregnancy killed this and it's coming back but i'm still starving

"Once you realize exactly what is and what isn't under your conscious control, you stop beating yourself about not doing the impossible."

  • is this true?

What does it mean to "tune" your "cognitive strategies"?

"Having good quality thinking happen effortlessly and automatically is great... unless you are a control freak, in which case you should Tune Your Emotional Processing before even reading this page."

  • oh shoot, am I a control freak? i think i might be a control freak. but maybe not in the way Squirrell's talking about? probably i should read both essays but i bet i'm ready for this one.

"How to tell if you have it?"

  • this section reminds me a lot of a bit of my writing that Duncan shared to LW once. i wonder if i can find it.
  • no i cannot find it.
  • Duncan found it for me!
  • Though I think what I demonstrate in this email does match the second two bullet points, it doesn't really match the first. This session of thought was difficult, and required willpower. That's why I don't do it (in this much depth) constantly.

"When you don't like whatever has risen up to the top of the cauldron, the last thing you want is to try to "fix it". You only have access to the topmost layer, so it would be hopelessly ineffective anyway. But it's much worse than that - by attempting to "fix" your cognition, you stop being able to see how it works. How well your cognition works is shown not by what thoughts you have at the moment, but rather by the pattern of how one or more thoughts combine into a new thought ("cognitive strategy"). Instead, you want to learn as much as possible about the differences ("deltas") between each thought and the next, as they occur to you."

  • Oh wow. Another take on the problem solving/study framing, I think.
  • From "Getting Started with Naturalism", in [the section](Starting Place 2: Try Catching the Spark (All Of It, Or Just Part Of It)) where I summarize "Catching the Spark": The final section of the procedure, "Choosing Your Quest", leads you to reconnect with your intuitions from the beginning, then to choose a “quest”, a related question that will guide your investigations going forward. Going through this part of the process tends to be especially important for people who started out desperate to solve a problem (provided naturalism is in fact a good approach for them); it requires that you re-frame whatever you hope to solve as something that might be understood, something whose workings may be discovered through careful investigation.
  • It recommends something a little different though. It's a goal orientation-->study framing, but "learn as much as possible about the deltas between temporally adjacent thoughts" is a place to focus attention that I don't believe I've ever attempted.
  • this seems like pretty much an obvious, complete, ready-to-go technique that i could immediately implement the moment i chose to. however i do not think the "obvious" version would be "effortless" or "not requiring of willpower", so perhaps i'm wrong about what the technique is supposed to be.

meta: i appear to be halfway through the post and part of me is still waiting for the post to start because it's happening in the form of bullet points, which apparently i categorize as "part of an introduction, not the body of a post". but actually i think this just is the post.

"However, by carefully looking at the "deltas" between conscious thoughts, we can get rid of the last remaining level of indirection (this is the key insight of this whole page!): Cognitive strategy -> Reward or punishment You have learned to perceive your cognitive strategies as they happen, and developed some heuristics that tell you whether they are good or bad. Now your brain can update cognitive strategies immediately, and do it regardless of the topic of your thoughts. Even when you generate a useless idea from another useless idea, you can still track whether the cognitive strategy behind it was sound, and learn from the experience."

  • hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. hmmmmmm. hmm.
  • this.... seems.............. great if you're happy to rely on your existing taste network. this is what the part in Zen and Motorcycles is about, where the guy demonstrates to the students that they already know how to write well.
  • granted, i think most people are shit at putting their existing taste network to use when doing almost anything deliberately, precisely because they don't know how to observe experiences that are quiet or fleeting, and so there's a ton of value here.
  • but apparently i was expecting something different, and something about the distance between what i expected and what i heard made me be all "this some kind of dangerous/bad/circular"
  • oh oh oh i think i've got it. what happened was, i thought this was going to tell me about improving my thoughts. instead it is telling me about improving my actions by listening to my thoughts.
  • no, reading back through, i think that's not what happened.
  • suppose i read this section while being deliberately grumpy at it. what stands out?
    • "punishment"
    • (oh, some curiosity seems to have made it through the grumpiness: what is "cognitive strategies"?)
    • "whether they are good or bad"
    • "sound"
  • what are the grumps picking out here? they seem to be picking out things about judgement and rejection.
  • i suspect i do not disagree with Squirrel anything propositional here. my current story is that they and i have different aesthetic intuitions about how to relate to preconscious thought, and my introspective skill rests heavily on my aesthetic taste. wait, surely that *is* a substantive disagreement? no, i think it's not; i think it's likely they accomplish almost exactly the same thing using almost exactly the same strategies, but their version of the strategies feels a little different, and it sounds a little different when described. hmmmmm. i'm still conflicted on this. ah, ok perhaps the thing is:
    • there's a type of strategy with parts X, Y, Z. they and i have the same Y and Z. X can actually be several different things, as long as it has properties that allow it to fill the right roles in the strategy with Y and Z. their X' involves something judgement-flavored. my X'' involves something awesomeness/discernment/beauty-flavored. both X' and X'' function basically the same in the overall strategy. (obviously discernment is mostly another word for judgement.)
  • "Note: awareness is a muscle. Time spent trying to see your thoughts more clearly is time well spent, regardless of the degree to which you succeed at getting any specific results."
    • yes ok fine. i will compile and publish the load of attention stuff that seemed kind of tangential and i wasn't sure people would be interested in.
  • "Pick a small problem, question or thinking puzzle of any kind."
    • I will divide 347 by 16 in my head. (i am bad with numbers and this may be embarrassing if anybody reads this but i will do it anyway.)
    • "Beware of "school trauma": think about whatever you want to think about, not things someone else would like you to think about."
    • do i want to think about dividing 347 by 16? no not really. i do sort of want to be able to mental math, but perhaps i can find a better topic for this exercise. what do i actually want to think about? what is exciting to me right now? music, especially Arvo Pärt. but i'm not sure i have any live puzzles on that at the moment. there's "why do i keep being unable to read the bass line year after year?", but i think i'm reaching for a less fully internal problem. same with "how is it that i'm still only reading tabs for guitar instead of standard notation?" there's of course this problem i'm trying to solve at this very moment, but i don't want something so self-referential either. still, i'm drawn to "something with this guitar, since it's right here and also about music." hm what if i tried to describe Pärt's tintinnabuli compositional method *spatially*, using the guitar neck? i'm not really sure that makes sense, but if i succeeded, i imagine it would allow me to *improvise* guitar music in tintinnabulation! yes bingo that is a small external non-self-referential problem i want to think about. (i don't know if it's a "thinking puzzle"; i don't know what "thinking" is.)
    • "If you don't have any ideas, you can always pick "picking a puzzle" as your puzzle."
    • oh lol apparently Squirrell didn't share my intuition about self reference.
  • "Load the puzzle into your memory, and let go."
    • i'm not sure what they mean by "into my memory". but i will pick up the guitar and try to get a handle on the problem. and then "let go"? interesting that i chose the phrase "get a handle on".
    • i think i need to read more before i get going.
    • "Instead of focusing on solving the puzzle, focus on the question 'where do my thoughts go when this puzzle enters my attention'?" <3<3<3<3<3
    • "Aim for sub-second timescales. In fact, you can easily have a chain of 5 or more conscious thoughts in one second. If you think you can't, you're just missing skill in noticing it." who the fuck is this is this me from a parallel dimension what is going on. i feel electrified right now. like watching Stephan Lambiel on the ice.
    • me in What It's Like To Notice Things: "("Can you really distinguish between 200 and 500 milliseconds?" Yes, but it's an acquired skill. I spent a block of a few minutes every day for a month, then several blocks a day for about a week, doing this Psychomotor Vigilance Task when I was gathering data for the polyphasic sleep experiment. It gives you fast feedback on simple response time. I'm not sure if it's useful for anything else, but it comes in handy when taking notes on experiences that pass very quickly.)"
  • ok this seems like a good point at which to try a bit, before moving to the next step
    • it's unfortunate that i can't hold the guitar and type a the same time. "easily"; i can't hold the guitar and type easily at the same time. i play a string. there's a fruit fly here. the string i play is A. but i don't need to know that it's A, because i'm doing this spatially. i suspect i am not doing "let go", unless "let go" is in contrast to something i'm already not doing. what if i "let go" more though? what if i load the problem into memory more though. i have a guitar, but where is tintinnabuli? there is force here, when i do that. do i want the force? i suspect i do not want the force, but i do want tintinnabuli present. what if i invite it with openness, while holding the guitar. i play the second string. i kill the gnat, and i'm sad and conflicted about killing the gnat. i refocus on the guitar. i play the second string, and i plan to play the second string over and over while inviting "tintinnabuli". i imagine "down". the first string comes to mind. "two steps". but! but up could happen also. it is a rule, a rule that is not yet established. "the t line has a relationship to the melody. i haven't yet invented that relationship." i think words, and i want to think spaces. curious: what are these concepts spatially? i'm aware of frets.
    • all right that's enough of a sample for now. i'll continue reading.
    • ah i think i have not captured the level of granularity Squirrell wants. i didn't realize we were working so small. i'll try again.
    • left hand fingers on the strings in a familiar pattern-->settling in-->plucking as comes naturally with my right hand-->happiness/comfort/"harmony"/resolution-->"arpeggio"
    • the act of typing is definitely getting in the way as i hold the guitar. if i want a reflective record, i think i'll either need to record my voice, or plan not to record during and rely on my memory.
  • "Think which "deltas" are doing good work for you, and which aren't."
    • this part gives me the grumps again
    • "All you ever need to do is notice useful deltas, and have that little "oh, nice!" reaction. That's it. Really."
    • i'm not sure what "useful" is doing here. but also i feel grumpy at "useful", and i feel reflectively grumpy at "i'm not sure what 'useful' is doing here" because it's a smoke screen for feeling grumpy at "useful". "i'm not sure what 'useful' is doing here" sounds like it involves curiosity but mostly it doesn't. if i meant it for real, i'd want to know what "useful" is doing here, but mainly i just want "useful" to go away. however, "wanting 'useful' to go away" isn't allowed, so i pretend i am expressing ignorance or confusion. anyway, i don't need to do anything besides... wait, hang on a second. it's the space between thoughts. that's the point. not the thoughts. i thought i had the hang of it but i was wrong. try again. don't write it down this time, just figure out how to improvise tintinnabulation spatially, and look at the space between thoughts.
    • uuuuuuhhhhh ok this might be a big deal. i can't tell yet. it's a little unfamiliar and not yet easy. i'm not certain it'll go anywhere. but it feels different, and good. i'll describe what i was doing.
    • first of all, i got rid of words. words were obviously in my way. way too cumbersome. i don't think in words, especially not when engaging with music. instead i put my hands on the guitar and started doing things. i tried to rest my attention on the spaces between thoughts while doing things. on the transitions. "thoughts" is certainly a misleading term here, for me. "impulses" is much more accurate. "the things that moved my fingers", perhaps. but smaller than that even; sometimes it was the things that moved my fingers, sometimes it was the redirection of my attention in response to what i heard, sometimes it was the way my chest felt. but i tried to... no, "rest" is the wrong word. i did not rest my attention on the space between mental movements. my attention *surfed* the space between mental movements. i wouldn't describe it as "effortless", but it was not at all "thinky". and i did begin to make progress on the problem, "using only system one" or something. it felt nice. but i didn't get very far. i'm not sure the "progress" was real.
    • more concretely, what did i do, with my fingers? i played some notes, and i liked some of them in sequence. so i replayed those notes, and then i added more afterward, and then i felt the completion of a phrase. i repeated the phrase several times. then i started adding notes on top of the melody. well, beneath the melody. but at first i didn't like the notes. i felt a traffic jam, and looked for its source, and realized that i was trying to play two different notes on the same string. i searched for the note i wanted on the string below, and found it. oh, i hadn't realized this before now, but i did uncover an important principle of spatial tintinnabuli composition: the fifth fret of the adjacent lower string equals the open string. i knew this already, of course, but i had not contextualized it this way. i had used this information to tune the instrument, and sometimes i had intellectually-top-down transcribed something into another physical chord configuration using this principle, but i had not visualized the sixth and seventh frets of the adjacent lower string as copies of the first and second frets of the string above it. i really did make concrete progress on the problem in practice without thinking about it intellectually.
    • oh fuck i just remembered that the very earliest version of my attempt to communicate about "naturalism" qua comprehensive method was called "how to solve a problem before you know what the problem is". that sounds an awful lot like what i did here. but this method is smaller and a little different. this is for immediate right-in-front-of-you-all-at-once problems. (maybe it's for other kinds of problems also.)
  • "The delta which moves you into noticing your deltas is very useful. Give it the reward it deserves!"
    • yeah i seem to really hate this reward/punishment framing, yet i can't belief report that it doesn't accurately describe what i'm doing (and what i endorse doing)
Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Tuning your Cognitive Strategies · 2023-07-27T22:41:21.556Z · LW · GW

The "notice something new" exercise in that post is extremely similar to "pay attention to the delta between thoughts". Seems to me that it's directing attention toward the same psychological event type, just not in the context of attempting to solve a problem.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Tuning your Cognitive Strategies · 2023-07-27T22:38:09.176Z · LW · GW

One of my "responsible use" notes in "How To Observe Abstract Objects" seems directly relevant here:

However, a few people seem to have an overall cognitive strategy that crucially depends on not looking at things too closely (or something like that), and this is actively bad for some of them. If you try this for a minute and hate it, especially in an “I feel like I’m going crazy” kind of way, I do not recommend continuing. Go touch some grass instead. I’ve never seen this cause damage in just a few minutes (or at all, as far as I can tell), but I do think there’s a danger of dismantling somebody’s central coping mechanism if they push past their own red flags about it over and over again, or for a whole hour at once.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning · 2023-07-20T23:14:24.262Z · LW · GW

>and people were still confused, and then I gave up and just identified as a woman

D: i know those feels. that's kinda where i am lately. (except man instead of woman)

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on LoganStrohl's Shortform · 2023-07-16T02:13:31.411Z · LW · GW

I'm interested in a couple of things from people who have read the Sequences (or AI to Zombies) and have thought a lot about applied rationality.

1) I would like to hear what you think it might be especially valuable to study in this way.  Which Sequence posts (or other existing resources) seem really important, but also lack crucial info about what exactly the concrete skill is or how to gain it? Also, what parts of rationality seem important to you but just do not seem to have been explored much from an application perspective? What do you think are some open problems in applied rationality?

2) Do you want to form an adventuring party? In what area/around what question or topic?

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on LoganStrohl's Shortform · 2023-07-16T01:59:40.587Z · LW · GW

I've recently written up an overview of my naturalism project, including where it's been and where it's headed. I've tried this a few times, but this is the first time I'm actually pretty happy with the result. So I thought I'd share it.

*

In the upcoming year, I intend to execute Part Three of my naturalism publication project.

(Briefly: What is naturalism? 

Naturalism is an investigative method that focuses attention on the points in daily life where subjective experience intersects with crucial information. It brings reflective awareness to experiences that were always available, but that our preconceptions inclined us to discard; it thereby grants us the opportunity to fold those observations into our stories about the world. It is a gradual process of original seeing, clarification, and deconfusion. At its best, naturalism results in a greater ability to interact agentically with the world as it is, rather than fumbling haphazardly through a facade of misapprehensions.) 

Part Zero of the project was developing the basic methodology of naturalism, on my own and in collaboration with others. If you start counting at my first essays on “tortoise skills” and "noticing", it took about six years.

In Part One, I tried to communicate the worldview of naturalism. In a LessWrong sequence called "Intro to Naturalism", I picked out the concepts that seem foundational to my approach, named them, and elaborated on each. The summary sentence is, "Knowing the territory takes patient and direct observation." Creating the sequence wasn't just a matter of writing; in search of an accurate and concise description, I continued running and revising the curriculum, worked things out with other developers, and ran an experimental month-long course online. Part One took one year.

In Part Two, I tried to communicate the methodology of naturalism, in the relatively linear and self-contained form of a curriculum. (The actual practice is messier than that.) After a lot of testing and revising, I published a second sequence called "The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism".

Part Three will demonstrate the method. I will choose a topic to be the subject of a naturalist study (probably something from the Sequences or the CFAR handbook, to start), learn what I can about it over the course of one week to three months while taking many notes, and compose an account of the process and my findings. I expect that each piece will be similar to my post “Investigating Fabrication”, but better. 

Then, I will choose a new subject, and do it again. I'll continue until I've covered a range of topics and shown several ways of wrestling with relevant challenges, then I'll tie everything into another LessWrong sequence on naturalism. In addition to generating some real-life, detailed, concrete examples of every part of the naturalist methodology, I hope that this part of the project will provide a few valuable companion pieces to existing writings on applied rationality. 

(I also have a bit of a hope that I'll get others to join me for some of these studies and to publish their own accounts.)

Although I hope that the direct products of Parts One through Three are worthwhile in themselves, I do not consider any of them to be complete. I think that the philosophy, methodology, and demonstration are all essential to mastering naturalism, so my ultimate goal with this project is Part Four: A comprehensive manual of naturalism that weaves together the previous parts. I may attempt to publish Part Four in print, and not just as a LessWrong sequence.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on The virtue of determination · 2023-07-12T02:24:06.026Z · LW · GW

The grinding inevitability is not a pressure on you from the outside, but a pressure from you, towards the world. This type of determination is the feeling of being an agent with desires and preferences. You are the unstoppable force, moving towards the things you care about, not because you have to but simply because that’s what it means to care. 

Word.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on LoganStrohl's Shortform · 2023-07-09T23:11:00.669Z · LW · GW

I had a baby on June 20th. I wrote a whole bunch of stuff about what it was like for me to give birth at home without pain medication. I've just published it all to my website, along with photos and videos. 

CN: If you click on "words", you won't see anybody naked. If you click on "photos" or "videos", you will see me very extra naked. 

The "words" section includes a birth story, followed by a Q&A section with things like "What do contractions feel like?", "How did you handle the pain?", and "How did you think about labor, going into it?". There's also a bit at the very bottom of the page where you can submit more questions, though of course you're also welcome to ask me stuff here.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Getting Your Eyes On · 2023-07-06T19:20:02.212Z · LW · GW

thanks! fixed

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Look At What's In Front Of You (Conclusion to The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism) · 2023-05-25T19:19:20.192Z · LW · GW

More on the moth: 

Members of this particular species can be either nocturnal or diurnal. I noticed my confusion when I saw one pollinating a lilac in bright moonlight, because I'd never seen a hummingbird at night before. That's what prompted me to take a closer look; up close it was clearly not a bird at all, but a bug!

For many years, I thought, "The first time I saw a sphinx moth, I thought it was a hummingbird." I've only recently realized that I have no idea how many moths I mistook for hummingbirds before that point. I may have seen them dozens of times during the day and never thought twice about it.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Advice for newly busy people · 2023-05-12T01:49:23.264Z · LW · GW

As someone who's about to become a father, I find this highly relevant. I will be studying and practicing several bits of this advice, especially the Productivity Purge and the Decide10 system, before the baby arrives. Thanks a bunch for writing this up.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Naturalist Experimentation · 2023-05-11T02:32:29.961Z · LW · GW

Yeah, makes sense. I'm pretty bad at this kind of thing I think, but I'll think about it and if I come up with something I'll let you know.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Naturalist Experimentation · 2023-05-10T21:55:15.779Z · LW · GW

I am curious whether reading or skimming the Wikipedia articles on "naturalistic observation" and "natural history" helps at all with getting where I'm coming from.

I certainly don't claim it was the best possible term to choose, but to me it seems extremely precise and accurate (though ambiguous, and i recognize that ppl round these parts are more familiar with philosophical naturalism qua ontological claim). In ecology, entomology, etc., the connotations go way beyond liking natural stuff, and suggest an orientation toward research topics and a corresponding set of methodologies. It's the thing Jane Goodall did, and also James Audubon. My stuff is like "What if the naturalist paradigm, but for stuff that includes rationality and not just for finches? What would that look like?"

[edit: on phone, might add links and mb further reply later]

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Naturalist Experimentation · 2023-05-10T19:57:23.580Z · LW · GW

Oh perhaps some of the confusion with this post in particular is coming from the fact that I tried to contrast three different frameworks for experimentation. Sometimes when people contrast different frameworks, they are doing that because they want to convince the reader that one of them is better than the others. I'm definitely not trying to do that here! I contrasted three experimental frameworks because in order to take the actions that are part of the overall naturalist investigative method, it's important to deliberately avoid falling into either of the other two near-by frames. I was trying to describe the mindset that the actions comprising naturalist experimentation come from.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Naturalist Experimentation · 2023-05-10T19:53:12.272Z · LW · GW

Thanks @Raemon. I agree with all of that.

>I don't know anyone who recommends "don't put much effort into understanding, just try stuff and see if it works", so I didn't expect that was the baseline that this sequence is arguing against.

@Dagon, I caution you that if you read this sequence (or the intro one) with the assumption that it's primarily trying to argue something, you'll probably be at risk of badly misinterpreting me.

I have a story that you're looking for and evaluating arguments here because you don't know what naturalism is or why it might be worth learning, so you hope to find motivating claims and arguments for paying attention to any of this in the first place. If this is a true story about you, I think that's pretty reasonable! I think it would be ridiculous of me to be like, "Here's a huge amount of work I suggest that you take on without having any particular reason for doing so," and I'm not very surprised if this sequence comes off that way to lots of people. But its actual intended audience is people who already want to learn something like this, for some reason, and are ready to do so.

This sequence is somewhere between a syllabus outline and a how-to guide. If you read a book about "how to design and tend a vegetable patch" through an argumentative lens, I expect you're going to find a lot of completely unsupported or incoherent arguments everywhere, it'll be pretty frustrating, and you probably won't learn nearly as much about how to design and tend a vegetable patch as you otherwise might. "How To Garden" is a completely different book from "Raised Bed Organic Gardening Is Better Than All of the Other Kinds of Gardening, and Here Is Why." I have tried to write the former type of book so far, not the latter.

 

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Naturalist Experimentation · 2023-05-10T17:47:42.305Z · LW · GW

I realize this is only a response to one small thing in your comment and perhaps I will come back to the rest later, but I want to point out that according to me, I am definitely not arguing against anything at all.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on What Boston Can Teach Us About What a Woman Is · 2023-05-09T19:12:00.018Z · LW · GW

a) I do remember that. b) It it still seems like a pretty good pointer to a (the?) main way I think of and experience myself, but I want to be clear that I was being at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and I would not in full honesty claim that I "identify as a tiger", or any sort of otherkin.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Investigating Fabrication · 2023-05-09T17:56:44.174Z · LW · GW

Related: Intro to Naturalism and especially The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism (still coming out, a few posts not yet published).

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on What Boston Can Teach Us About What a Woman Is · 2023-05-06T20:50:12.603Z · LW · GW

> I would first be interested to know why you identify as a trans man generally

K so let's start with, "Is it true that I identify as a trans man?" But in fact I'll look at the slightly different question, "Is it true that I identify as a man?", because I think that probably gets more quickly to the heart of the matter. It's at least clear that I do not identify as a cis man.

I think there's probably some ambiguity in the way "identify" is used that makes this a little hard for me to answer.

On the one hand, there's how I present myself to other people. I have a strong impression that most people I encounter have this really strong desire to know whether the person they're interacting with "is a man" or "is a woman". I have at times been pretty grumpy about this—lately I'm especially grumpy about it when people find out I'm pregnant and immediately ask, "What is it?", to which I sometimes reply, "Human, I'm pretty sure."—and so for a while I presented myself to others as "nonbinary". I think a lot of that was me being like "I'm not on board with how reliant you are on these particular categories, I don't want to squish my own thoughts and feelings and perceptions and behaviors into whatever this categorization system means to you, and I'm unwilling to enable your application of this to me."

Which worked out pretty well while I lived in Berkeley. Most people that I actually wanted to interact with rolled with it. Nearly everyone at my workplace used they/them pronouns for me without any hiccups, for example. And there was generally less stress in my life from the particular direction of gender. It was something I could largely ignore, at least much more so than I had at any other point in my life.

But now I live in a different place where many of the people around me seem to really really want to know whether I am a man or a woman, and it's so very exhausting to be in constant conflict with them about that. I don't think they know that they care so much about regarding other people as falling into one of two buckets, but it's a glaringly-obvious-to-me feature of my interactions with them. So it seems like the options that are realistically on the table for me, if I'd rather avoid the constant battle with the ubiquitous social frame, are to either present myself to them as a man (Mr., he/him, father, clothing style, etc.), or to present myself to them as a woman (Mrs., she/her, mother, etc.).

Of those two options, there is clearly one that causes me to feel tremendous stress and sadness a whole lot of the time when I'm around other people, and another that causes me to feel mostly good and comfortable when I'm around other people. So, socially, I tell other people that I'm a trans man, and this works out ok for me. In that sense, I identify as a man.

But there is another way that I think the word "identify" is often used in the context of gender. It has less to do with social presentation, and more to do with self perception. Sometimes when people say that they "identify" as X, they at least in part mean that they see themselves as X. Perhaps they feel like their conception of X on the inside, or they aspire to embody the properties of their conception of X in the way they live their lives, or they feel really comfortable and at home when they imagine themselves as X, or something like that.

In this second, more personal sense, it is less clear to me whether I identify as a man. I think the most accurate description of my current state with respect to this sense of "gender identity" is that I am agnostic about my gender, or that I am "in the process of figuring it out". 

It seems quite likely to me that the question of "whether I am a man, on the inside" is very much a wrong question, that there simply is no fact of the matter to be discovered here.

Yet I am not confident that it's entirely a wrong question. I do suspect for several reasons, some of them more easily articulable than others, that the question is at least pointing roughly in the direction of something that is real and that actually matters, both to me and to others who have some kind of strong relationship with gender. For instance, I don't think that yin/yang clusters are entirely arbitrary. I don't think it's a complete coincidence that Aztec and Mayan rituals surrounding corn and cacao crops prominently featured the balance between masculine and feminine elements. I don't even think it's wrong or dumb or bad that there exist such things today as workshops and ceremonies focused on "the divine feminine" or "the divine masculine". I personally feel the draw of these frameworks. I feel a kind of illumination and fitting-ness when I think about my experiences through them. And indeed, overall I feel more at home, cozy, resonant, happy, comfortable, when I rest my attention on the traditionally masculine elements of these frameworks, even though I also feel a lot of familiarity around many of the traditionally feminine elements as well.

But now I'd like to discuss another question that is not quite the one you asked, but that seems unavoidable when trying to understand my experience of being trans, and that I think might also clearly distinguish me from "a masculine female" (and here I notice I'm more anxious about getting into hot water, because I'd describe this way of talking and thinking as at best out of fashion, and at worst sometimes seen as grounds for cancellation): "Am I transsexual?"

And to this, the answer seems very clearly to be, "Yes, I absolutely am transsexual", if we interpret "transsexual" in a quite straightforward way that has little to do with gender and lots to do with physiology. (I think that most "masculine females" are not transexual in this sense! They're at least somewhat gender non-conforming, but they're pretty much fine occupying their female bodies. There may be additional differences between me and them, but I'm at least pretty sure about this one.)

Though even with this term, there seem to me to be two categories of thing going on. The first is about how my actual physical body is (or how I plan for it to be). I was born with a typically female body. I have two X chromosomes and no Y chromosome, I went through female puberty and developed breasts and a menstrual cycle and so forth. But I also lack breasts now because I've had them removed. And very soon, I will have adult male levels of testosterone in my body, which will probably result in things like a beard, a lower voice, male patterns of fat distribution and muscle development, and perhaps some typically male psychological changes as well (I won't be surprised if I become more angry, for example). And at that point, it will be pretty misleading to describe me as "female", and much more accurate to describe me as "transmasculine".

But additionally, there is the way that I feel about my body and about these changes: I want to be male! And, as a separate fact (not every trans man shares this feeling!), I want not to be female.

I feel so much better now that my breasts are gone. I made the most of them while they existed—I even made money off of them as a professional stripper—but they were a source of constant, low-grade suffering. Every time I paid attention to them, something felt wrong. And they were kind of hard to ignore, 'cause they weren't small. They were in the way, reminding me of themselves over and over every day, and it just felt bad. I didn't know why it felt bad, and I still sort of don't. But it was almost the way I'd expect to feel if some aliens had abducted me and surgically added random lumps of flesh to my body and then deposited me back on earth and wiped my memory. "These don't belong here. Something is wrong. Get them off."

And that's how I still feel about several other features of my physiology. I feel that way about my hips, and my voice, and my musculature (which I have worked very hard, to only somewhat noticeable effect, to modify even without testosterone), and my period, and the truly bizarre things that happen to my cognition just before my period (which I'll talk more about in a moment). It all feels wrong and weird to me.

But when I wear a shirt that does an especially good job of highlighting my muscles and my chest, I feel happy when I look in the mirror. And when I imaging having a deeper voice, and masculine patterns of hair and fat and muscles and a penis (though I don't actually plan to get one of those), I feel happy. And I guess it could still turn out that I'm wrong, and I won't actually feel about the results of testosterone the same way that I feel about the results of top surgery. But I'd be pretty surprised, largely because it seems like almost everyone in my situation does in fact feel a lot better once they're on hormone therapy.

So in both the personal and the physical senses, it seems right to describe me as transexual.

But the thing is, there's not a lot of room for nuance in my interactions with strangers and acquaintances. Even if they could easily hold the thought, "This person is more comfortable in a male body, and also they feel kind of confused about 'masculinity' but they weakly suspect it's approximately right that they 'are a man' in some sense or another", it would not be easy for me to communicate that state of affairs, and most people would not want me to try. Given that it's socially dangerous among some subcultures I often bump into for me to call myself "transexual", I simply refer to myself as "a trans man"—or, if I seem to be "passing" anyway, just as "a man". And honestly, I expect it will be awfully relaxing to consistently fly under the radar as simply "a man", as I expect will happen once I have a beard and a deeper voice.

Ok, I think I've touched on most of the other questions in your comment at this point, so now I'll move on to the topic of pregnancy.

> Has your pregnancy changed or prompted any new thoughts about your gender identity?

Heck. Yes.

When I was planning this pregnancy, I intended to 1) get top surgery first (because I just wasn't willing to have even bigger and more in-the-way breasts, or to breastfeed, or to deal with the complications that come from lactating without breastfeeding), and then 2) wait until I was "done having kids" to start hormone therapy. I knew I wanted to gestate one kid, and I thought I might want to gestate two.

Now I am not sure whether or not I will try to gestate an additional kid (I'm leaning toward "no"), but if I do, it will definitely have to wait until I've been on T for a while (and then gone off of it for six months before conception, as is the standard practice among trans gestational parents). I am not going into another pregnancy with this body, because pregnancy has been even more body-and-brain-dysphoric than I expected.

And to be clear, I did expect to hate pregnancy. I expected to hate getting and recovering from top surgery too; I did that because it seemed worth it to me. Pregnancy is the same. My husband and I wanted to have a kid with our genetics, and this was the way to do that. Creating a new life seems to me like a pretty big and valuable thing, and it seems quite plausibly worth the suffering I expected to undergo. It has been a lot of suffering, and it's not over yet, but I still think it's worth it.

My baby bump feels a lot to me like how my breasts did, but way more so. The "alien" aspect is even more prominent, perhaps because there is literally another creature in there wriggling around. At least my breasts did not move of their own accord.

But the effects of pregnancy also seem to be hitting me in particularly gender-relevant ways as well, not just sex/body-relevant.

(And now I'm a bit fearful about describing some of my experiences as "gendered"; I would like to be clear that I'm talking in terms of my own mostly-automatic feelings and associations with femininity and masculinity, and that these associations may be in various ways wrong/bad/inaccurate/harmful. But they exist, and they're impacting my experience, and I'm going to describe my experience.)

Let me tell you about premenstrual syndrome, or PMS. For me, PMS is mostly a way that my brain is while under the influence of the hormonal changes that immediately precede menstruation, and sometimes last for a whole week. It happens every month, for one to seven days.

What happens to me during PMS is that I feel... "crazy", is the word I typically use for it. Specifically, the relationship between my emotions and my thoughts changes dramatically.

Ordinarily, my emotions seem to track my thoughts, and especially my beliefs. If I believe something bad is going to happen, I feel scared. If I spend a lot of time planning something and I come to a conclusion about what I will do, I feel prepared. My emotions follow my thoughts.

But during PMS, the relationship is flipped: my thoughts follow my emotions instead. I find myself feeling scared, and then I begin to expect bad things to happen. I feel prepared, and then I believe that I have planned sufficiently. I feel insecure, and I think that my partner is probably angry with me.

I hate this. So much. I aspire to be a person who is exceptionally reasonable, grounded, and clear-thinking. I do not like to be volatile. With decades of practice, I have learned to use my mind differently during PMS. I'm mostly able to act sane, even though I feel crazy (though not always). But it's exhausting. [Note to commenters who are thinking, "Then why don't they take [insert birth control method here] so they don't have periods?" I promise, I have tried a lot of things. For various reasons, none of the things has worked.]

During pregnancy this is happening all the time.

It wasn't like that at first, but some time in second trimester, it became like perpetual PMS.

Additionally, even though I haven't lost all that much muscle mass, my body is flooded with the hormone relaxin, which makes my joints and ligaments flimsy. I cannot comfortably run, or use a shovel, or even carry a jug of milk through the grocery store on my own. Compared to how I was before, and especially compared to my husband, I am physically weak and fragile. I have to rely on other people to do things that require strength.

When I imagine that many many pregnant people go through something like this, and then I remember that before birth control, female adults spent much of their time either pregnant or menstruating, some of what's going on with "femininity" starts to make more sense to me.

I have known trans women who describe hormone therapy as "like a spiritual awakening". On female hormones, they developed a completely new relationship with and experience of their emotions. They became much more sensitive, much more easily moved, they learned how to cry, they connected with the emotions of others more deeply, they added this whole dimension to their life that was by comparison heavily muted before.

These sorts of things seem to me to have a lot to do with traditionally feminine virtues. Being emotionally open and sensitive, being nurturing, communicating deeply about complex social/emotional topics, recognizing and being moved and motivated by beauty, behaving in ways that are gentle both physically and psychologically, building and maintaining communities whose members are supported and do not have to do things all on their own.

(And I've noticed that expectations about these properties are reflected in the ways that strangers, acquaintances, and authors of pregnancy books interact with me about pregnancy. They treat me "like an expecting mother", which I think is "like an especially hyper-feminine person". They make a ton of assumptions about what I'm thinking and feeling and how I'm relating to those things. They expect me to already be in love with my unborn baby, to be soft and gentle and nurturing, to be brimming with joy and fear and excitement about bringing a new life into the world and caring for my child. It's as though they see me a tiny instantiation of some kind of feminine-mother-goddess. I have not been comfortable with this! And I have also noticed that the people and books who have not done this at me are exactly the same ones that say "pregnant person" and "gestational parent", and they're the ones that I'm able to make use of rather than rage-quitting out of intense alienation.)

But it seems to me that shifting a brain in that direction comes with costs. For some, the costs are worthwhile. Some people are much more at home in a mind that excels at expressing feminine properties, even if it means access to masculine properties is diminished.

I am not such a person. For me, the costs of this shift are unacceptable. I like to be stable, reasonable, independent, straightforward, and strong. I like being the opposite of on-my-period. I like being the opposite of pregnant. And to me, inside my own head at least, I summarize this as "I like to be masculine".

So that has kind of clicked into place for me, as a result of pregnancy. I feel a lot clearer about what I want. I'm much more eager to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible, more eager to take a higher dose of testosterone when I do start (I was previously considering a "nonbinary" dose), and more comfortable with the idea that I'll consistently describe myself as "a man", "a father or uncle", and "he/him". (Though at the moment, I still tend to request "they/he", when offered the option.)

Pregnancy has felt to me like an overdose of femininity, and now I am done with being a woman.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Naturalist Collection · 2023-05-06T18:05:03.190Z · LW · GW

Awesome! I'd love to hear about how that experimentation goes, if you feel like reporting back later.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Naturalist Collection · 2023-05-06T05:47:23.884Z · LW · GW

the next essay, which is called "experimentation", will talk directly about the "fixing it" thing

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Naturalist Collection · 2023-05-06T03:31:25.172Z · LW · GW

Yes, I think that's a good guess about one of the things that goes wrong. It's also, I think, almost exactly the thing that makes my writing especially valuable and nearly unique for the people who benefit a lot from it. The more of this kind of thing I have in a piece, the more the people who appreciate it really appreciate it, 'cause it's like I'm actually looking at things and helping their minds get the hang of actually looking at things, and mostly people just don't do that in writing, outside of maybe some poetry. But I think it's really super duper important to be able to pay attention to what's actually going on if you want to do the rationality stuff in the crucial moments when it matters, and not just in the ones where you managed to pattern-match to high level concepts about rationality things! (That's what this whole program is about.) So one day I'd really like to get good at making bridges or something that reach all the way to the people who are just like "wtf is this weird poetry". But in the mean time I hope I'm doing useful things for the people who are already pretty close to being able to pay attention to what's actually going on.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on What Boston Can Teach Us About What a Woman Is · 2023-05-05T17:34:01.510Z · LW · GW

TBC the main thing that prompted me to comment here was 

>The common justification trotted out (that it’s necessary to include the theoretically-possible transman who somehow can get pregnant and apparently suffers no dysphoria from carrying a fetus to term) is completely daft.

I think that pretty few people have actually known a trans guy or nonbinary person who was out while pregnant. It's a pretty socially uncomfortable situation, and one that sort of points a microscope at many things about being trans. Maybe even among the relatively few of us who exist, most of us don't want to talk about it because geeze, we're already going through enough. Pregnancy tends to be really damn hard even for cis women. But I actually do like the idea of talking about this on LW in particular.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Locating Fulcrum Experiences · 2023-05-05T03:50:26.706Z · LW · GW

I just noticed that you have a post called "Noticing Frame Differences", and I'm gonna go read it (in the next few days) in case that turns out to help.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on What Boston Can Teach Us About What a Woman Is · 2023-05-05T03:29:15.810Z · LW · GW

Hi! I'm not sure where exactly in this thread to jump in, so I'm just doing it here.

I like this thread! It's definitely one of my favorite discussions about gender between people with pretty different perspectives. I also like the OP; I found it to be surprisingly clear and grounded, and to point at some places where I am pretty confused myself.

>Originally you said that my post lacked an "understanding of the experiences of trans people" and I'm still eager to learn more! What am I missing exactly and what sources would you recommend I read?

I'm taking a pretty big risk here, and it may turn out that I regret this discussion or even retract my comment, but: I'm a trans man who's 33 weeks pregnant. It's a wild ride! AMA, if you're interested!

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Getting Your Eyes On · 2023-05-02T03:13:36.293Z · LW · GW

lol i even commented on his post. my memory is dumb.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Getting Your Eyes On · 2023-05-02T03:12:12.401Z · LW · GW

oh right yeah i think he would indeed have been at one of the things where i did this story in person

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Getting Your Eyes On · 2023-05-02T03:10:00.671Z · LW · GW

wow what is this some kind of crazy coincidence/parallel thing or did Mark hear me talking about mushrooms at some point?

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Locating Fulcrum Experiences · 2023-05-01T15:24:29.179Z · LW · GW

I will now try to communicate an implicit conjecture in this essay that I think of as "Conservation of Attention". This may possibly speak more directly to @spxtr, who suggested that our internal models of cognition may be dramatically different. I apologize that I will probably do this in a rather round-about way; "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."

Conservation of Attention states (roughly) that attention can be redistributed, but not increased.

I think that this very short, rough statement of the conjecture is technically false, in the following way: Brains and bodies share resources, and it is indeed possible to increase or decrease the overall resources available to the entire system, or to shift resources between cognitive and physiological processes. For example, I expect that attention really does decrease overall during starvation, and increase overall during recovery from starvation (or perhaps even during recover from moderately low blood sugar). According to my understanding of what's up with caffeine, as adenosine builds up over the course of the day, it decreases the possible *expenditure* of resources by the body and mind, regardless of what resources are physically available; so a shot of caffeine (which binds to and thereby incapacitates the adenosine receptors) may increase attention overall by widening the valve of ATP expenditure (or something along those lines). I also expect that sufficiently intense exercise tends to reduce the availability of cognitive resources, as those resources are redistributed to the muscular and cardiovascular systems. So in fact, attention can be increased or decreased globally by the activities of the rest of the body.

(There is also something going on with certain drugs, such as mescaline especially but IME also high doses of THC, that looks on the surface a lot like "increasing overall attention", perhaps by a caffeine-like reduction-of-restrictive-mechanisms that is far more precisely targeted to whatever cognitive processes I'm pointing toward when I say "attention". But my model of psychoactive drugs feels to me even more shaky than my model of metabolism, and anyway I'm pretty sure my observations are also consistent with a model where attention is merely redistributed in unusual ways during drug trips.)

The truer version of my conjecture runs more like this:

1) Every human contains a control system that is constantly governing the expenditure of resources on attention;

2) the reference point of the attention expenditure control system is an output of larger control systems that ensure overall economy of resource expenditure in a mind and body; and

3) the economics of cognitive resources are determined by the structure of the mind/body system, and perhaps also by the patterns of environmental stimuli a human encounters.

4) Therefore, it is at least extremely difficult and perhaps impossible to globally increase a human's attention in the long term without dramatically changing their overall life circumstances.

5) However, temporary reallocation of attention is clearly possible, and can be accomplished deliberately and therefore strategically.

Why do I lay out this model here?

Because I do not think that any part of what I do in naturalism involves "paying more attention" than anyone else, including my past self. I think it is generally quite ridiculous to "try to pay more attention, in general". I won't go so far as to say that I'm certain it can't be done, but I think that it at minimum requires an enormous lifestyle change that is probably not a good idea for most people most of the time.

(Indeed, I think this is a common failure mode among people who "get into mindfulness". They mistake the reallocation of attention for an increase in attention, and thereby fail to take deliberate, strategic control of their attention. They reallocate in ways that may tend to reduce stress, but there is so much more to be gained from the deliberate development of novel patterns of attention allocation over time.)

Similarly, I do not "notice more things [in general]" (although it may be the case that I more frequently devote more attention to the things that I notice). According to my model, "noticing" is the rapid reallocation of attention. A person "notices" something when they suddenly start paying much more attention to it than they were paying moments before.

According to my tentative working model of ADHD, ADHDers really do "notice more things": their attention reallocates more frequently and more rapidly. Autistics, by contrast, tend to reallocate more of our attention, on average, when reallocation occurs. (I have sometimes been accused of "trying to make everyone autistic", and that would perhaps be an accurate assessment if I were suggesting that people "pay more attention" or "notice things more". But I'm not suggesting that! I am suggesting much more strategic reallocation of attention.)

So in these terms, "Locating Fulcrum Experiences" is a method of preparing yourself to rapidly reallocate a large amount of attention away from its default state and toward a carefully chosen set of stimuli in precisely the moments when you are a tiny little bit aware that the set of stimuli is present.

Which (further implicit conjecture) is not necessarily easy or straightforward! (Perhaps this is where we disagree?) And thus I have written an essay explaining how to do it.

Comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) on Locating Fulcrum Experiences · 2023-05-01T14:13:54.579Z · LW · GW

Ok, I'm going to put some effort into building a bridge here, even without further detail about where things are going wrong for you. It'll mostly be shots in the dark, so I will probably miss. But I expect this is a pretty common response, so I'll give it a try anyway.

I'll start by focusing on, "What does this particular essay contain besides 'I pay attention and notice things'?"

According to me, this essay is not about "I pay attention and notice things". This essay is about "I pay attention to *particular* things, I employ *particular strategies* for deciding what to pay attention to, and I make very careful guesses about *what* I will notice so that I am able to pay attention to the right things at the right times."

I rather doubt that was anywhere near sufficient to build a bridge between this essay and wherever you are, let alone between you and all the rest of my naturalism writings, so in my next (probably much more sprawling) comment I will try to dig into some of the implicit stuff underneath my summary. (However I would love to hear whether this comment on its own was at all helpful to you, in case I'm wrong.)