Kensho

  • Kensho is a moment of insight or clarity
  • Attempts to share what kensho has felt like have mostly been failures
  • Either people have already experienced kensho, and so they already know what it feels like, or they have not, and a verbal explanation does a really poor job of conveying the experience
  • So, let’s talk about why talking about kensho is difficult
  • Parable:
    • Imagine a world in which people have forgotten to look up from their phones
    • Somehow, let’s say that someone manages to look up from their phone and perceives the world with their own eyes
    • How would this person try to communicate the act of looking up and perceiving the world directly?
  • Example:
    • One of the insights that Valentine had from his moment of kensho were that things were “okay”
    • This was misinterpreted as either:
      • Normative: every outcome is equally morally good
      • About feelings: you’ll always feel good when you’re enlightened
    • In reality saying things were “okay” was less of a statement and more of an instruction, analogous to the command to “look up” in the previous parable
    • It is a prompt to set aside interpretations and just examine sense data as they come in
    • Most people don’t have the conceptual Gears necessary to understand what enlightenment is all about
    • Moreover, instead of recognizing this fact, people take descriptions of enlightenment and put it into the nearest conceptual category that they have
    • This actively works to prevent people from understanding enlightenment
  • There is a real world analog to the skill of “looking up” in the parable – let’s call that skill Looking (with a capital L)
  • This skill helps bypass a trap where your methods of gathering data preclude you from gathering an entire dimension or type of data
  • Once you can Look, things that previously seemed incoherent will make obvious intuitive sense
  • So, how does one learn to Look?
    • Nobody really knows - people with varying degrees of enlightenment have been trying to answer that question for thousands of years
    • Being able to switch frameworks is helpful, but isn’t the whole story
    • In some sense people are already enlightened, they just have to realize it

Universal Love, said the Cactus Person

  • An allegorical story about learning to see the world in an entirely new way
  • Imagine that you’re in a car, but you don’t realize you’re in a car
  • Can operate steering wheel, pedals, dashboard buttons, etc.
  • But when someone tells you to get out of the car, you’re not going to be able to do that until you realize that getting out of the car is something that even makes sense to talk about
  • No sequence of pressing dashboard buttons or steering wheel turning will get you out of the car

The Intelligent Social Web

  • This is a fake framework that has produced meaningful results
    • Overcoming depression
    • Learning to set aside “performance mode” and show true vulnerability
    • More healthy attachment style
    • Participate in athletics without injury
  • Example: improv scene
    • When you start an improv scene, you don’t know what sort of role or character you’re supposed to be playing
    • Even if you think you know what’s going on, your assumptions are often upended by someone else in the same scene doing something unexpected
    • We can think of the scene as a distributed intelligence, with each of the participants contributing some of themselves as computational power, and in turn being guided by the decisions of the scene itself
  • Improv works because what we do in our ordinary day-to-day lives can be seen as a form of improv
    • Roles defined by the web of social relationships we exist in
    • This web forms a distributed “director” that exerts a strong influence on our actions
  • Most of us are playing “characters” in a scene dictated by our social web and we’re completely unaware of this fact
  • This social web holds the position of “Omega” in an ongoing set of Newcomb-like problems
    • In order to model you, “Omega” needs data about you
    • How is this data gathered?
      • People synchronizing their impressions of someone they’ve met via idle chat/gossip
      • Body language and facial expressions
    • People who know what they’re doing can intentionally inject fake data into this social web in order to shape people’s impressions of others or themselves
  • The social web encodes its guidance in the form of stories
    • Stories structure our expectations of who plays what roles and how various situations “should” play out
    • Even if we understand the narratives defining what we’re doing, we may not have enough power to change them
    • Learning to Look can help you discover the roles you’re playing and suggest possible ways to change them

Mythic Mode

  • Fake framework: culture is a distributed intelligence, with people forming its nodes
  • The essay “Meditations on Moloch” allowed people in the rationality community to feel viscerally the struggle they were undertaking against coordination problems and bad Nash Equilibria
  • Facts inform culture, but culture is really shaped and guided by stories
  • The real service that Scott Alexander did with that post was to mythify the fight against existential risk
  • “Mythic mode” is a way of looking at the world through the same lens that Scott Alexander used when he wrote “Meditations on Moloch”
  • Why is this relevant to day-to-day experience?
    • If you’re stuck in a role, just trying to blindly defy it usually won’t get you very far
    • But if you can imagine yourself in a transitional role (like the hero in the hero’s journey) then you can sometimes find ways to use the social web to help you change roles
    • The reason you need to do this with narratives is because system 1 doesn’t understand rational thought
    • It’s important to compartmentalize mythic mode, otherwise you’ll start seeing coincidences everywhere as part of a grand narrative
    • But while you’re in mythic mode, it’s equally important to not let the tendencies and doubts of ordinary rationality get in the way
  • A cue to step into mythic mode is a feeling of being “stuck” or a sense that events aren’t playing out in the way that you thought they would
  • Mythic mode allows you to weave coincidences into a narrative that reassures you that you’re on the right track
  • Example: Valentine’s meeting with a shaolin teacher
    • Went to New York
    • Happened to arrive just as shaolin teacher got back from an overseas trip
    • Being in mythic mode allowed him to see this coincidence as confirmation of a narrative which had him “inevitably” meeting this shaolin teacher
  • Rationalists already use mythic mode, but in a highly limited fashion for toy examples
    • The reason we don’t use it for more is because many people are not sure that sandboxing can reliably work
    • But we’re already embedded in a culture and its influences, and we’re already being nudged in various ways by other people’s narratives
    • So if you don’t learn to deal with subconscious cultural influences in a sandbox, your epistemology is already fatally compromised

Mythic Values/Folk Values

  • Every social group has two sets of values: mythic values and folk values
  • Mythic values are the qualities of the exceptional leaders of a given community
  • Folk values are the qualities of the group’s average members
  • We should treat mythic values and volk values as separate things, and use alignment with mythic values to distinguish leaders from average members
  • But, instead, we pretend that if only we practice the folk values intensely enough, we will somehow ascend to having mythic values