> Remmelt's piece was largely an attempt to lay out what Glen Weyl thought about the Rationalist Community and EA Community,
Actually, it was an attempt at clarifying common attentional/perception blindspots I had mapped out for groups in the community over the preceding two years. Part of that was illustrating how Glen Weyl might be thinking differently than thought leaders in the community.
But actually I was conversationally explaining a tool that people could use to map attentional/perceptual blindspots.
- the I-IV. labelled psychological distances throughout the post (where distances represented both over past and future from the reference point respectively of {now, here, this, my}),
- along with approach vs. avoid inclination (eg. embody rich nuances from impoverished pigeonholes vs. decouple from the messy noise to elegant order)
- and corresponding regulatory focus over structure vs. process-based representations.
One thing I find a little frustrating about Scott’s selective depictions of the blindspots piece is that Scott seems to interpreting the claims made as being vague (definitely true in some cases) and as some kind of low-information signalling to others in the community to do the thing that is already commonly promoted as socially acceptable/good (mostly not true; I do think I was engaging in some signalling both in feel-good-relate-with-diverse-humans-stuff and in promote-my-own-intellectual-work-stuff but I felt quite some tension around posting this piece in the community; Scott’s response on individualism speaks for itself).
Whereas the perceptual and motivational distinctions I was trying to clarify are actually specific, somewhat internally consistent within the model I ended up developing, and took a lot of background research (core insights from dozens of papers) and many feedback rounds and revisions to get at.
Note also that I had not had a conversation with Glen when I wrote the post. In our first call, Glen said that the post roughly resonated for him (my paraphrase), but that he also thought it overlooked how like EA/rationality concepts. Eg. he said that Hindu religious conceptions can also be very far in psychological distance and abstraction, meaning there is diversity of human culture and thought that the blindspots post did not represent much.
Thanks for the clarifications, this was helpful, I wrote my comment quickly without revisiting the piece carefully. For what it's worth I knew that you wrote the post before Glen contacted you, which is why I specified that this opened the conversation up. I think this vindicates the value of your piece even more than the alternative in certain ways in fact.
All of us are busy, so would also be unreasonable of me to assume people read the post line by line.
I think by me referring in the post to Glen Weyl, that got a lot of people distracted by intergroup tensions (I was not aware at the time that Scott and others had been having online exchanges with Glen; which is on me because I could just have googled around).
> Remmelt's piece was largely an attempt to lay out what Glen Weyl thought about the Rationalist Community and EA Community,
Actually, it was an attempt at clarifying common attentional/perception blindspots I had mapped out for groups in the community over the preceding two years. Part of that was illustrating how Glen Weyl might be thinking differently than thought leaders in the community.
But actually I was conversationally explaining a tool that people could use to map attentional/perceptual blindspots.
Try looking at the post (forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LJwGdex4nn76iA8xy/some-blindspots-in-rationality-and-effective-altruism) and piecing together:
- the I-IV. labelled psychological distances throughout the post (where distances represented both over past and future from the reference point respectively of {now, here, this, my}),
- along with approach vs. avoid inclination (eg. embody rich nuances from impoverished pigeonholes vs. decouple from the messy noise to elegant order)
- and corresponding regulatory focus over structure vs. process-based representations.
One thing I find a little frustrating about Scott’s selective depictions of the blindspots piece is that Scott seems to interpreting the claims made as being vague (definitely true in some cases) and as some kind of low-information signalling to others in the community to do the thing that is already commonly promoted as socially acceptable/good (mostly not true; I do think I was engaging in some signalling both in feel-good-relate-with-diverse-humans-stuff and in promote-my-own-intellectual-work-stuff but I felt quite some tension around posting this piece in the community; Scott’s response on individualism speaks for itself).
Whereas the perceptual and motivational distinctions I was trying to clarify are actually specific, somewhat internally consistent within the model I ended up developing, and took a lot of background research (core insights from dozens of papers) and many feedback rounds and revisions to get at.
Note also that I had not had a conversation with Glen when I wrote the post. In our first call, Glen said that the post roughly resonated for him (my paraphrase), but that he also thought it overlooked how like EA/rationality concepts. Eg. he said that Hindu religious conceptions can also be very far in psychological distance and abstraction, meaning there is diversity of human culture and thought that the blindspots post did not represent much.
Thanks for the clarifications, this was helpful, I wrote my comment quickly without revisiting the piece carefully. For what it's worth I knew that you wrote the post before Glen contacted you, which is why I specified that this opened the conversation up. I think this vindicates the value of your piece even more than the alternative in certain ways in fact.
Happy to!
All of us are busy, so would also be unreasonable of me to assume people read the post line by line.
I think by me referring in the post to Glen Weyl, that got a lot of people distracted by intergroup tensions (I was not aware at the time that Scott and others had been having online exchanges with Glen; which is on me because I could just have googled around).