Epistemology applied to everything. 💫 Host of Reason Is Fun podcast w/
@DavidDeutschOxf
🎙️ Taking critical rationalism into life – how to improve both.
'Self discipline' is a patch for being conflicted about what you want to do.
Often, productive people are interpreted as 'having discipline': able to force themselves to do the work even when it's unpleasant.
But creative productivity only ever works in *spite* of that.
On naval gazing --
We weren't meant to constantly be thinking about our internal state.
Emotions are meant to move through us and help guide our actions, while our mind is freed up to think about the world outside.
'Self discipline' is a patch for being conflicted about what you want to do.
Often, productive people are interpreted as 'having discipline': able to force themselves to do the work even when it's unpleasant.
But creative productivity only ever works in *spite* of that.
If someone is depressed or anxious (and especially if exercise, socialising and SSRIs don’t work), there is an active thinking process happening that is renewing the stress.
Critical Rationalism (CR) – An Introduction 🧵
✨Table of Contents✨
1-7: Context, Community & History 🗺🕰
8-10: WHAT IS IT? ℹ️
11-22+: Key Concepts 🔑
Coming soon:
- Deutsch's key ideas 🔑
- Common misconceptions 🙈
- Crit rats VS bay rats VS post-rats VS meta-rats 🐀🐁
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There is a skill of how to access information from your emotions.
Most people don’t know how.
They literally cannot read their feelings, in the same way that illiterates cannot read words.
Intellectuals are often illiterate *plus* deny it’s possible to learn to read.
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A lot of people think introspection is unusually error-prone, subject to confirmation bias and making up stories, with no way of being verified or refuted.
This is false—if you have the right instruments.
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There’s this thing I discovered where people react to 1yo babies offering objects with an exaggerated, “THANK you! Thank you!” as they take the object and then pass it back to the baby.
What’s the purpose of this?
One of the biggest sources of discontent is a mental motion that many do continually:
Planning what decision you will make ahead of when the time comes to make the decision.
The real answer to productivity and motivation is to resolve the conflicts you have.
Once unconflicted about what to do, even hard work is effortless, motivation-wise.
(And fun.
#ReasonIsFun
)
It becomes effortful to *not* do it. It pulls you in and demands you keep working.
Attempts to reassure someone is often just trying to protect them from negative emotions.
“Aw it’s not so bad!”
This has the opposite of the intended effect: It assumes the negative emotions themselves are at fault, and tries to avoid *them*.
This feels like being managed.
Discipline is fighting yourself.
Wasted energy. Wasted creativity.
Put that instead into figuring out what you actually most want.
Solve problems in doing what you want with reason, not force.
Alexander Technique is simply an approach (really it’s a set of techniques) for getting out of being stuck in your head.
1. Gets you out of being stuck (thinking ground to a halt, or tunnel vision)
2. Gets you out of your head and back into the world (feel alive, expansive)
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It's not rational to need reasons for things.
It's not rational to require arguments/actions to be logically sound, or for the person to be well-read.
All these are authoritarian ways of thinking about rationality.
Rationality is about improving ideas, not validating them.
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Critical Rationalism (CR) – An Introduction 🧵
✨Table of Contents✨
1-7: Context, Community & History 🗺🕰
8-10: WHAT IS IT? ℹ️
11-22+: Key Concepts 🔑
Coming soon:
- Deutsch's key ideas 🔑
- Common misconceptions 🙈
- Crit rats VS bay rats VS post-rats VS meta-rats 🐀🐁
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There is only one thing that matters, which is…
Destroying the means of correcting errors (Karl Popper)
Coercion (Taking Children Seriously)
Anti-rational processes (David Deutsch)
Resistance (Art of Accomplishment)
Tanha (Buddhism)
Ugh Fields / Flinching (LessWrong)
Stasis.
A lot of people think introspection is unusually error-prone, subject to confirmation bias and making up stories, with no way of being verified or refuted.
This is false—if you have the right instruments.
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The most important concept I’ve found in the philosophy of flourishing (aka psychology) is 𝗳𝗶𝘅𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻.
Other terms for this:
tanha, end-gaining, resistance, avoidance, being ‘grabby’, clinging, stasis, compulsion
You can be fixated 𝘵𝘰 or fixated 𝘢𝘸𝘢𝘺-𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮.
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It sounds cute and simplicistic — like meaningless motivational self-help talk — but the world really does work this way.
Problems really are soluble. What's stopping you really is conflicting ideas. Force is trying to reach answers/truth using brute authority instead of reason.
When emotions are fully left alone – that is, fully felt, unresisted – the mind can focus not on self-coercion but on the 𝘦𝘹𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭 world it's interfacing with.
(Learning 𝘩𝘰𝘸 to allow emotions to move freely is a skill, which does take some thought to acquire.)
Episode -1 is a conversation with David Deutsch about AGI.
It covers:
• epistemology
• how AI is different from AGI
• limits of LLMs
• why the Turing Test is not a test.
"I've tried everything! Self-discipline, Beeminder, social media time-outs, Tony Robbins, waking at 5am... Nothing seems to work!"
Cool, have you tried reason?
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Boundaries are not saying no.
Or making sure something doesn't happen.
Or distancing.
Or even letting yourself have wants in the face of others'.
A boundary is simply "If you do X, I will do Y."
Good boundaries:
- don't require anything from the other person
- are kind for
Prep Activity: Set a loving boundary
Today’s exercise is designed to help you see how it feels to set a boundary that is a bridge rather than a wall.
Pick a place in your life where you have a little resentment and draw a simple boundary that increases your ability to love.
•
The reason people don’t make massive progress on every dimension of life is that they get stuck by hang-ups/traumas/memes/blind-spots/coping strategies that narrow behaviour (including thought) to avoid pain or fear.
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💖 Date Lulie 🧵
Me: 32, Oxford, seeking a relatively traditional relationship + lots of interesting conversations and exploring ideas 😊
Looking for: [see quote tweet below]
More info:
@ash6av
shared values, e.g.
- research or writing oriented (bouncing ideas off each other)
- empathy
- values health & aesthetics
+ monogamy and interested in TCS
in other words: intellectual, emotional and physical connection. hard to describe in a list because people are unique
Humans, uniquely, build sky-scrapers.
We see the world and think about how to manipulate it, how to shape it.
It's the mind getting caught up in how our internal state 'should' be that causes diversions that the mind thinks is its job to fix.
Which is what caused the problem!
Karl Popper said we have a duty to be optimistic.
This is an epistemological claim as much as a moral one. Pessimism is a false view of what people are—it supposes we’re impotent.
In fact, we can’t help but create. Our creative nature remains even when blocked or thwarted.
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OPTIMISM
❌ Things will work out.
✅ All that's needed to make things work out is the right knowledge.
The Principle of Optimism: all evils are caused by lack of knowledge.
All problems are soluble.
Everything is possible, so long as it doesn't violate the laws of physics.
People often choose goals and then put 'how to get there' second. This is upside-down.
You don't even know if you'll enjoy that life until you try it out.
So relentlessly redirect focus from the end result to: what can I do *now* to see what it's like to do?
📃 NEW: Introduction to Alexander Technique – It's Not Posture
Explaining these key ideas:
👁 Awareness
☯️ Non-doing
⏯ Inhibition
⛹️♂️ Intentions
Big thanks to
@m_ashcroft
🙌 (whose pinned tweets you should read if you haven't already!)
It’s bizarre how almost everyone tends to only listen to ideas from people who are broadly similar to them.
So much of the growth of knowledge rests simply on translating ideas from different subcultures.
What are the best things you've found for personal progress?
(Including progress on goals, idea-generation, creativity, scientific progress, innovation, skills, etc., as well as personal life.)
bodies of knowledge, ideas, techniques, books, practices, etc.
One of the themes of this account is:
How to get unstuck
🚸 Children are creative, fast-learning, alive and vividly present.
Something happens which shuts those down as we enter adulthood, so only a small number of people make progress.
I claim we all can.
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Reminder that trying to have any reasons at all for what you do is authoritarian epistemology.
It’s justificationism, it doesn’t work, it leads to things like choice paralysis and burnout.
Your conscious mind doesn’t know stuff like that. Check heart/gut instead.
@metaLulie
@nosilverv
not exactly
afaict it does happen to people, but it’s not the options themselves causing it
it’s not being in touch with oneself enough to feel intrinsic “yes/no” and trying to decide using external means(been there, and watched in others)
Starting to think the meaning crisis is fake, and it’s more a coercion crisis.
Specifically:
Now that we have more freedom than ever before, anti-rational memes must resort to more insidious forms of coercion.
Q:
Which Popper should I start with?
A:
Don’t read Popper, read Deutsch.
Start with The Fabric of Reality.
Then read The Beginning of Infinity.
Unless you don’t like STEM, or if BoI’s table of contents excites you more, in which case flip the order.
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How come if you solve suffering personally (e.g. becoming enlightened in ~the neobuddhist sense), this doesn’t result in a ton of objective progress/discoveries?
In less inscrutable terms:
What’s happening is there’s some inner voice (sometimes subconscious or somatic rather than in words) that’s beating you up or limiting you.
You can’t actually control this voice. It just happens. It’s a true part of your experience.
What you can do
You don’t have to be effective and you don’t have to be an altruist. You don’t need a logical or ethical framework. You don’t need to maximize impact or minimize regret
You can do whatever you want forever for no reason
More important than enjoyment in the moment:
What gives you ENERGY? What DRAINS you?
This is closer to what Richard Feynman and David Deutsch call "fun" than the superficial kind of 'fun'.
@metaLulie
yeah I would say that’s a misunderstanding. Desires aren’t the cause of suffering, tanha is, or fixation. This correlates with desire but can be separated
It’s an unfortunate fact that most abuse happens without the victim realising it’s abuse until later, because if they’d known earlier they’re more likely to have done something about it.
A lot of abuse stories are previously-invisible instances of “Wait, that wasn’t normal?”
My favourite personal development course I keep going on about is AOA’s Connection Course (VIEW).
I’ve done it 10+ times and it keeps improving every aspect of my life.
Three years since I first took it, here’s my attempt to synthesise why. AMA.
🧵
It can feel simultaneously like it’s happening *to* you, and that there’s something you need to *do* to fix it.
These contract each other.
If thought is uncontrollable, you can be like a taoist or stoic and embrace the flow of life.
And you can only do what you know.
The reason self-love is difficult for so many is that there is a confusion about what the self is.
(Also it’s required for fallibilism. Read on.)
We think our conscious explicit thinky part is our ‘self’. But the voice in the head is often not very kind to us!
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Episode 0 is a conversation with David Deutsch about Effective Altruism, x-risk, and e/acc.
- EA's epistemology
- how do we make progress given the unpredictability of new knowledge?
- what to do about x-risk
- e/acc's physics
(feat.
@BasedBeffJezos
)
🔊 Behind the scenes — audio musing to a friend about:
- individual progress
- how to approach researching suffering and psychological blocks
- technical skills help grounding to reality
- Alexander Technique
The ‘Safe Uncertainty Fallacy’ is a misunderstanding of the argument being made here.
I think this fallacy is in fact extremely rare, and the actual position is something like the below. 🧵
[context:
]
The deeper mistake here is thinking intellectual predictions can capture all the nuances.
Reality is rich and complex.
It's easy to imagine a future that goes well.
It's harder to find a present that you enjoy.
The best psychology / personal development tools
— explained in terms of Daniel Kahneman’s framework —
🌼🌸🌺🌸🌼
1. Gendlin Focusing
Get explicit content from your System 1.
Do thoughts create feelings, or do feelings create thoughts?
thoughts creating feelings e.g. you interpret something and then that produces emotions
feelings creating thoughts e.g. you have some physical sensory information which then prompts thoughts
(Open question)
⚡️🐭 RAT FEST 🐀⚡️
(crit rat weekend round 2!)
The second critical/pan-rationalist weekend is this summer and I’d love to meet you there!
WHEN: June 30-July 2 🌞
WHERE: Philadelphia, USA 🇺🇸
WHAT: Firey discussion, friendly hangouts, food and fun!
The big problem with non-self-coercion is:
If you take it at face value, and don’t have a practice or guidance, it will 🦆 you.
The way antirational memes/hangups work is via blindspots.
The coercion will simply move to somewhere it’s harder to see.
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I used to think that when Buddha said sometimes you have to clench your teeth & crush mind with mind, this was a rare instance in which he advocated for something unskillful.
But I've seen so many people try to heal without ANY suppression or repression, as a corrective for an
Turns out, emotions don’t feel ‘bad’ as such unless you’re trying to resist/control them or tense up around them. They feel more freeing/enlivening.
And like emotional literacy allows you to read them, unresisting is a bit like learning to write/speak—from and with the body.
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When someone has a big psychological transformation and are different as a person afterwards, what’s happening is they have changed their inexplicit worldview.
In the vast majority of cases, you didn't need to prepare or plan.
You were already ready.
Making a plan ahead of time is wasted energy: you will have maximum information only at the time the decision needs to be made.
Thinkers are alienated by the view that the body has wisdom, and that there are valuable non-verbal processes that are accessed through somatic practices.
Feelers are alienated by the requirement for precision in abstract thought, constraints, and narrowing in with criticism.
These all describe the same thing, namely when a mind is blocking out parts of the world.
All adult minds do this all the time.
Rationality, emotional development, embodiment work, and energetics are all means of unblocking different domains where this blindness occurs.
Never mind particular frameworks, what are some the most fundamental concepts and skills for happiness and free thought?
Thread on some I’ve found
👇
[P.S. You can see why it’s hard to claim one framework will solve all your problems.]
Consuming is a myth.
Whenever we watch or read something, we’re coming up with new ideas—otherwise, we get bored.
So it’s not
- consumption vs production
it’s
- creation vs boredom
Mindless consumption isn’t fun, nor is it even really consuming. It’s noise.
People wondering if this protest is real since it has a wry edge:
I know several of the people in this video personally.
I’ve been trying to tell my community (crit rats) that these people are genuinely afraid, that it’s not just a thought experiment but existential terror.
There are a few very different ways to reduce the repetitive (critical) voice in the head:
1. Interact with it.
2. Deconstruct it.
3. See that it’s meta & redirect to content.
4. Learn the skill of switching into the wordless, embodied state.
🧵
Things that sabotage thought & happiness:
- words in your head
- thinking about past/future actions
- clinging to an idea
- resisting feelings
- internal meta discussion
- thinking about your self instead of the world
- confining your mind to a narrow slice of reality
- 'trying'
Episode 1 is a conversation with David Deutsch about the 'fun criterion', anger and emotional fluidity.
Topics:
• problems with the Fun Criterion
• debate: Anger is good, actually
• what is suffering?
• necessity of conflicting theories in creativity
Popper on the scientific method:
"the first thing that I want to say as an introduction is that this is a subject that does not exist. Now the fact that this subject does not exist may strike some of you as strange. You are, after all, supposed to be taking a course in it."
❤️ Wired for Love is the best book I've read on how to think about romantic relationships.
🔗 It's about what causes stability and what causes instability in relationships.
It changed my mind in several big ways. It made me not just a better partner, but a better friend.
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