The recent ACX reader book review of The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding is extremely good. So good that I’m tempted to do something pretty new and write about it. And am tempted to write about being tempted to write about it. I strongly recommend reading it, it will make my goofy title here make more sense.
There’s a lot of ways that review is point-in-time relevant to me. Partly I’m writing this for Facebook (dumping it on Substack instead because it’s a better fit for the projected length), where I recently had a moment of inspired (passive) social outreach that took the form of engaging with the friend recommendations tab. My stubborn policy with Facebook is to only have as “friends” people I actually know, so mostly this was a round of collecting names I sort-of-recognize from high school, where most of my pre-existing small friendo-base was from. Names and faces I recognize from a lifetime ago, it’s natural when reflecting the arc of your education that there’s moments when you think about the people who were along for the same ride. There’s a whole other essay that could be written here that I’ll truncate (badly) to: I hope I was memorable and for good things but I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if I was not. I was a pretty cringey kid and that mostly kept on through all of college too. I often get the sense that I was kind of lucky to be as tolerated as I was, but on the other hand north Fargo was a hella chill place and spending time in California has, if nothing else, very very strongly highlighted how good we had it in the Fargo public schools.
Anyways, here is where I break the somber, humble, reflective quality of the above to engage in more or less the same flavor of hubris I would have in my youth. I agree with the book review’s author in that its aspirations seem to describe a certain kind of person that can come to be:
I promised self-understanding for the capital-R-Rationalist community back at the beginning, and here it is.
You might assume that the Rationalist community is squarely in Philosophic understanding — and I think that’s mostly right. Just looking at Eliezer's “Twelve Virtues of Rationality”, I’m seeing argument, empiricism, simplicity, precision, and scholarship — pitch-perfect expressions of what Egan means by “Philosophic” understanding.
But at our best moments, I think, we have one toe in the Ironic.
I think you see it, for example, in the community’s penchant for yelling “Chesterton’s Fence!” whenever anyone criticizes something they don’t understand. Philosophic understanding is obsessed with things making sense; Ironic understanding says, reality is always a few steps beyond you. “Chesterton’s Fence” is a Rationalist shorthand for the idea that we should expect the world to be more complex than our models; if something looks stupid, you should consider that the stupidity may be in you.
I think we see a sign that we’re stepping into Ironic, too, in our skepticism toward political ideologies.
A person in Philosophic thinks we build beliefs the way a mason builds a house: a general scheme is a house, each data point is a brick, and logic is the mortar that holds them together. An Ironist thinks we build beliefs the way that you’d wrestle a trans-dimensional octopus: carefully. A catchy idea isn’t an object that will just let you put it down, it’s a slippery, multi-tentacled monster that wants nothing more than to crawl in your brain, grab the levels of motivation and speech, and use you to spread itself to others. Anyone entering the octopus-wrestling arena needs to take proper care.
The metaphor (with all its problems!) is mine, but the idea fits what Egan is saying. An Ironist, he writes, will mistrust all ideologies.
His ideal is something very different: someone who can be skeptical even of their skepticism, so they can see what’s good (or useful, or valid, or beautiful) in every perspective. Such a person can, say, “support a neo-conservative or liberal or radical political initiate for its likely beneficial effects without becoming a neoconservative or a liberal or a radical”. They can have control even over their Philosophic metanarratives; they can keep their octopuses in line.
Hindsight bias for sure, but I think I’ve always thought in probabilities, which is clearly something that does not come natural to most people. If true, it’s difficult to tell if that predisposition or other random things made me a good fit for reading the sequences. In either case, I’d already gone through a transformational “skepticism toward political ideologies” phase circa early 2013; I didn’t get around to reading the sequences until around 2018 by which time I’d definitely already figured out the wisdom in ripping out the brain octopi and gutting them for just the bits that are good.
For the most part, I’ve been strictly on the outside of rationalism-as-a-community-project. I’m mostly just a guy who reads (and excessively rereads) Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten. If anything, I’m maybe post-rationalism-adjacent, which is another whole can of worms I’m not really prepared to discuss here, except to say that the revolution in Bayesian reasoning inspired by the sequences influenced some worldviews that, while modestly faithful to the core inspirations, were not strictly good fits for the structures it set up to influence the real world. I love all the ways the sequences encourage you to think about the world, but I (and others) am less convinced of the obviousness of the specific solutions Yudkowsky’s writings imply and the directions Less Wrong-style rationalism undertook thereafter.
(But I’m not super impressed with all the cringe woo/egregore/vibes/feelsgoodman shit post-rats get up to either.)
That said, while the reviewer takes Egan’s “kinds of understanding” and overlays it onto “capital-R-Rationalism” (what I would call/call here “Less Wrong-style rationalism”), I think it’s maybe a better fit for describing the sort of Eigenrobot-esque TPOT-y post-rationalism, the parts of it that I personally quite like, that tends to flirt with nihilism only to then be like “jk LOL get fucked nerd life rules”. As alluded to/partially embraced by Scott Alexander in:
Where do we see this? Only a few months ago, in his book review of What We Owe the Future, Scott responded to the Repugnant Conclusion (a seemingly-unwinnable philosophical paradox) by saying:
“I’m not sure I want to play the philosophy game. Maybe MacAskill can come up with some clever proof that the commitments I list above imply I have to have my eyes pecked out by angry seagulls or something. If that’s true, I will just not do that, and switch to some other set of axioms….
“I realize this is ‘anti-intellectual’ and ‘defeating the entire point of philosophy’. If you want to complain, you can find me in World A, along with my 4,999,999,999 blissfully happy friends.”
For someone who has only Philosophic understanding, logic isn’t something that can be easily disobeyed. But logic, for an Ironist, is a game that can be played — or not! Egan writes that, for the “sophisticated” (Socratic) Ironist, the point of logic and science and intelligence is to live well, and not cause others pain. I suspect Scott would concur: in a follow-up post, he writes:
“On questions of truth, or questions of how to genuinely help promote happiness and avoid suffering, I will follow the crazy train to the ends of the earth. But if it’s some weird spur line to “how about we make everyone worse off for no reason?” I don’t think my epistemic or moral commitments require me to follow it there.”
As I recall, there was a brief moment in time in my life where I thought writing was my destiny. It was somewhere after my childhood aspirational goal of “bus driver” and before there was a more serious fork at the choice between pharmacy and string bass, where nominative determinism won out (still can’t believe I made it all the way to 2016 before noticing I was a professional dispenser).
My dad’s a prolific writer, an old school print journalist, so it seemed like the closest thing to the family business. I definitely never wanted to be a journalist, I can’t even recall specifically enjoying writing, and I was noticeably not even good at it, but I liked books a lot growing up and maybe secretly wanted to be an author. The adult version of this is “I like reading lots of intellectual internet schmaltz and maybe secretly want to start a Substack”.
As with a number of things, it was an interest quashed largely by a low quality of high school experience (also what ultimately sealed off string bass as a career path too). I can still recall the precise moment I realized I had a grudge against English class.
Still, I’ve had a bit of a renaissance with it, partly from having read a lot of prolific rationalist writing, partly from realizing you can sort of get away with writing freeform-if-grammatically-pretty-crappy stuff like, say, this sentence. Between writing and rewriting Navigating Retail Pharmacy and my job experience over the last decade or so I’m starting to think it might be a relative strength.
The other side of this is that a few years ago I discovered long-form critical analysis of video games and it’s the kind of thing I wonder if I’d known about in high school would have made me more receptive to the kinds of things English was trying but failing to teach. If it would have been the kind of thing that would have elevated my hobby instead of being a distraction from it.
On one hand, I remember our high school psychology teacher was obsessed with “research” (in hindsight, likely social science research, which I’ll give myself credit for being skeptical of even back then) and I recall walking into the computer lab one time to her ranting to someone about how everyone would love research if they could research what they like and then interrupting her to be like, “no, I definitely don’t want to research the things I like, I’d rather just do the things I like”.
On the other hand, if instead of reading Hatchet and slogging through dumbass MLA formatted papers in sophomore English, I had the option of doing an 8 hour critique of Morrowind (with or without the MLA formatting) I probably would have been more open to the idea of cultural critique and/or humanities more broadly and less resigned to just using SparkNotes to maximally pass the class.
(Or even just let me pick the books, yeah? If 18-year-old me would have been tasked with writing critically about, say, Dune or Time Enough for Love I would maybe have at least gone to some interesting places with it.)
Continuing on:
Reviewer: I feel like his system describes a lot of us Rationalists oddly well?
Alice: How do you mean?
Reviewer: I won’t share too many personal details; I am wearing a mask, after all. But as a kid, a lot of my learning was driven by jokes — I read Calvin and Hobbes so many times, I probably had all the SAT words memorized. I got a feel for the constraints of reality through the copy of Guinness Book of World Records that my mom got for me when I was nine years old — right at the beginning of Egan’s “Romantic” span. And I probed what might lie beyond the edges of reality by getting really into cryptids and paranormal nonsense.
Alice: Good for you! I think that describes a lot of kids.
Reviewer: I wouldn’t disagree — I think I went further: I jumped into Philosophic understanding by becoming a young-earth creationist, when assigned to a middle-school science-class debate over the age of the Earth. Don’t judge! The web was young, and I was, too. But I recall the absolute thrill of realizing that I could find anomalies that could overturn other people’s entire schemas. There’s a bit of Egan’s writing that I find haunting:
“As the years go by, we may forget the ardor of early Philosophic understanding, and, of course, it comes to some only partially, as a feeble glow rather than a lightning flash. But it can feel like what Faust sold his soul for.”
I felt exactly that, and I was hooked.
Alice: Did you stay a young-earth creationist?
Reviewer: No — and it wasn’t because I was mocked out of the belief. I kept pursuing the truth, trying to build a general scheme that could hold all the evidence, and after a year or two, gave it up. But that got me into theology, which gave me an urge to learn history and philosophy — to understand where I fit in the cosmos.
Alice: Are you a theologian, now?
Reviewer: No — I’m an agnostic. I lost my ability to hold together my theological schema years ago. But the process of moving through that, of pursuing the truth no matter what it ended up suggesting to me, has made me an intellectual thrill-junkie. I sorely want to find something else big that I’m wrong about — something as big as “my entire worldview”. I’m find myself deeply skeptical of my convictions, but I’m pretty skeptical of my skepticism, too, so it’s not a downer — the whole thing is actually pretty danged freeing.
Alice: So you’re saying that it’s your religious history that birthed your rationalism.
Reviewer: In large part, yes! It’s given me a deep fondness for religions to this day. And from my experience, I think an unusually high number of people in the capital-R-Rationalist community have similar stories, too.
I think a lot of my developmental experience maps here as well—onto Egan’s theories on education as described by the reviewer that is. I think this happened, for me, independently, perhaps in spite of the education I got but not strictly necessarily; I don’t really recall being especially unhappy or distressingly bored with my education except where already noted (ie especially English class). We can compare and contrast.
As a young child I was obsessed with Greek, Roman, and Egyptian mythology. So much so that I can still recall the precise moment I swore off religion in 6th grade when encountering a religious westernization of an Egyptian text in class.
But also, my dad had a lot of comic strip anthology books around the house. Calvin and Hobbes even, but also Garfield, Dilbert, The Far Side, and others. I wrote a joke just the other day about how there was never not a Bloom County or FoxTrot book within arm’s reach of the toilet (our family’s second cat was named Quincy).
I don’t remember much of elementary school except for some early relationships and occasionally getting detention without a good understanding of why. I was deathly afraid of detention not for the moral faux pas but because it meant I couldn’t play video games for an entire afternoon.
I think my love of science came before middle school but it was certainly brought more into categorial structure by the life/earth/physical science trichotomy we had there. By this time I had a healthy PBS diet of Ken Burns history documentaries and Bill Nye the Science Guy—and also, Monty Python!
The final one is to study humor — not just jokes anymore, but comedy at its finest. Egan cites (at length!) Monty Python as a group of people who were particularly brilliant in their use of the English language. Examining their skits can lead us into not just an appreciation of semantics (the study of how meaning is made from smaller pieces, like etymology) but also pragmatics (the study of how meaning is made in social situations).
I’d suggest George Carlin—a high school era favorite of mine—qualifies here too.
By high school I’d already mostly been set on the pharmacy path and was doing two sciences a semester the whole way through. College and career killed part of that love-of-science by taking a lot of the joy of discovery out of it, something I would partially rediscover again several years later playing the Witness and similar kinds of puzzle games.
There’s quite a few levels on which I didn’t really understand what I was getting into by going to pharmacy school (or college in general). College coursework definitely crushed my interest in the subject matter by reducing it to test material but also I had basically no contextual background before hitting the major proper. And I can’t be sure this was a common experience; my first IPPE preceptor supposedly wanted to fail me because I “didn’t ask enough questions”—though in my defense I already had a part-time job as an intern working inpatient with about a dozen pharmacists to whom I could pose any questions I actually had.
Let’s try to back away from complaining about pharmacy school again, except to say in passing I kind of wish I could relive it just to see what I would get out of it with the context of my professional experience and without the pressure to ace the tests. Again, tragedy in the academics of it being reduced to mimetics.
I don’t know if I can identify much in and around high school that shepherded me towards the rationalist path or meshes especially well with the Eganian framework. Maybe improv since that was a continuation of comedy-as-study and there were a lot of practical lessons there that I carried on with me too.
Reviewer: In this book, he mostly uses the word “educated”. But in the years after he wrote it, I think he realized that word wasn’t distinctive enough (and to some potential allies, actually had a negative connotation), because he switched to using another one-word summary of his whole “five kinds of understanding” model. But frankly I think it was a terrible choice, and I’ve tried hard to scrub any mention of it from the review so far.
Alice: What word was it? Out with it!
Reviewer: [suddenly finding his shoes very interesting, and speaking in a quiet voice] “Imagination”.
Do I think it’s fair to say I’m abnormally “imaginative”? Well, it seems Egan and/or our anonymous reviewer are already being sort of definitionally fluid with the words “imagination” and “irony” so we can find framing where this does and doesn’t quite fit.
For “imagination” inasmuch as we think of it as a creative force, I think I’m pretty lacking there. I’m not really much of a freeform artist, most of my creativity comes under constraints.
For “imagination” as a proxy for some sort of thinking-outside-the-box-iness, yeah, I’d say that hits me right. For example, I notice that this post is now getting way too self-aggrandizing than I intended, however I’ve decided I’m okay with this because I’ve already included tons of personal anecdotes that I haven’t previously documented and even if nobody reads this it’s better to dump them anywhere than trust them only to memory. So let’s transition awkwardly away with a passage from this Scholar’s Stage article I happened to be reading right as I stalled on trying to figure out how to end this paragraph:
Last week I met someone who wanted to start up their own substack. Their problem? “I don’t feel like I have anything worth saying. How do you overcome that feeling?” I told him that I rarely feel this way. This is not because I have an especially high opinion of myself. I am not any sort of brilliant. But I do not write to express brilliance. My writing has a different goal. I write to think. Putting pen to paper focuses the brain. It is forces fuzzy conceptions into careful thought. Once those thoughts are published for the world to see, they can be refined once again, as counterarguments flow in, objections are raised, and caveats and counterexamples are thrown at me. Write because you want to solve a problem, I told my new friend, not because you have solved one already.
Irony is a different beast that requires exploration. “Irony”, ironically (and like “like” and “literally”), has metaphorically drifted off from its literal meaning. The dictionary(.com) definition of irony is:
the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning: the irony of her reply, “How nice!” when I said I had to work all weekend.
Literature.
a technique of indicating, as through character or plot development, an intention or attitude opposite to that which is actually or ostensibly stated.
(especially in contemporary writing) a manner of organizing a work so as to give full expression to contradictory or complementary impulses, attitudes, etc., especially as a means of indicating detachment from a subject, theme, or emotion.
Eganian “irony” is less about contradiction of meaning but refers to meta-exploration of philosophic ideas. I wouldn’t say there are neat cleavage lines where this seems to apply to certain delineated parts of the rationalist community, but as mentioned above there’s a higher likelihood of finding this willingness-to-question-the-orthodox in a particular type of rationalist sub-demographic. Some of this might certainly be reactionary, and some of them are less principled in whether they were ever a genuine Bayesian adherent to begin with (versus just having fashionably Bayesian friends—TPOT, like anything else vaguely counterculture, suffers from attracting people more obsessed with its aesthetics than any kind of meaty, principled epistemics), but most of the best voices worth listening to have arrived there by protracted meta-scrutiny of both the modern rationalist orthodox and just, like, life, man.
Nowadays “irony” often denotes something that’s more accurately described as nihilistic or subversive of the intent to which it’s responding. It’s less about contradiction than about juxtaposition. See also: “ironic shitposting”, which I endorse, but again is something that, perhaps ironically ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°), demands some meta-explanation.
I guess my attachment to it is most succinctly explained by the older, traditional word for “the juxtaposition of two things designed to cause positive cognitive dissonance”: comedy. Like comedy, ironic (shit)posting is a tool that needs to be wielded well, both to get the desired effect (laughter retweets) but also to prevent from spiraling off into proper nihilism. There’s a reason this, too, was first a meme, and then a different kind of meme making fun of the first meme:
Everything can be a punchline, but “everything can be a punchline” can’t be your terminal value. If you truly believe in the worthlessness of everything, meta-examination requires you to non-meta remove yourself from the planet discussion. Else, you’re expected to put in the work of finding something meta-important, or at least shut up and stop being so goddamn cringe about it.
The metaphor (with all its problems!) is mine, but the idea fits what Egan is saying. An Ironist, he writes, will mistrust all ideologies.
Q: And then collapse in indecision, unable to believe anything except their own skepticism?
Well, yes, that happens sometimes! This is a known fail state of Ironists — Egan refers to them as “alienated”, cut off from the world.
Meta-skepticism, like irony-as-modern-comedy, also cannot be your terminal value. It, too, is a tool that needs to be wielded well, both to get the desired effect (better beliefs) but also to prevent spiraling off into confusing the map with the territory. It’s why critical theory is such a shitshow, like yeah you can reduce any sociocultural element to racism or sexism or whatever but tearing shit down that you didn’t build doesn’t get you credit for not having built something cool to replace it with. Being a clever arguer that writes their conclusions first and then scrambles to justify the underwritten leads you to bad ideas, poor epistemics can always be turned back on you.
“Sure, but…” The Prophet fumed. “Whatever. Fine. You’re doing the best you can, conditional on being a bad person. When you die, God will give you the best afterlife possible, conditional on sending you to Hell.”
You will eventually have to leave your epistemic house if you ever want to get somewhere, and the worse your map the more likely you are to move away from your goal.