This post is half-baked, meaning semi-published.
Think of it like a draft that for some reason has been made available anyway.
It might disappear or change dramatically. But likely the url will continue to point at something relevant.
When I first started drafting the I Can Tell From Myself sequence, it was written as one giant doc, and some sections that got too long for the main body got moved to appendices. Here they are.
(the first post has a shorter version of this, following these same 2 paragraphs)
One of the main ways people make mistakes here, in practice, is that they have one level of “I can tell for myself” (eg “that my partner’s hiding something”) and they extrapolate that to eg “I can tell for myself that my partner is sleeping around”. They can’t. However, They can tell for themself that they can’t trust that their partner isn’t sleeping around, and this is key.
That sentence sounds a bit convoluted, but it is not more convoluted than the reality it describes. Reality is convoluted sometimes! Especially when there’s some sort of distrust.
And attempting to simplify it (in your own mind or in how you talk) causes some sort of problem. You can scroll past this section, or read only the top-level bullets, if you feel like you basically get it.
In this situation, there’s a way to simplify it that might work, which is “I can tell you’re hiding something” but people might mean different things by “hiding something”, in which case you might have them insisting they they aren’t and you’re back into the scenario where you’re overreaching unless you say “[I can tell for myself that] I can’t trust you’re not hiding something”.
(drafted in the context of talking about how we forget to tell for ourselves, and oppressive cultures)
You might ask why. It’s a very good question—one I’ve thought about a lot—but not one I’m going to cover in this post except for a brief summary in this paragraph and the next. Some would argue that it’s human nature, but it seems clear to me that it’s just one expression of human nature. Based on reading Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of our Success and other modeling I’ve done, it seems likely to me that in pre-agricultural society, there was some amount of taking others’ word for it, but in some sense the other was the culture, not other individuals. And this was necessary because the culture encoded knowings that the individuals couldn’t verify. But at that pre-egoic phase, these knowings probably would have been experienced as just part of how everything is—a kind of direct-knowing embedded in the un-self-conscious state of the memetic evolution, similar to how the goose knows where to migrate and the the caterpillar knows when it’s time to turn into a butterfly (even though it doesn’t actually know what’s going to happen when it does). No more conflicted with individual knowings than a conflict between physical needs. There was no “I can tell for myself” as such yet because we didn’t have selves yet. Just knowing, some direct-sensory and some direct-social.
And then about 10k years ago, we invented selves and the capacity for deception, and this changed the memetic evolution landscape. And since then, memeplexes have evolved to encode ways of organizing human society that are based in large part on taking others’ word for it, even when it’s in direct conflict with what we can tell for ourselves. It’s thus necessary to undermine peoples’ sense of self-trust, and substitute in order for society to function. If we don’t do this, we can’t have society as we’ve had it, and these societies were stronger than anything else that could figure out how to exist in this time. But perhaps… if we nurture, rather than undermine, people’s self trust… Can we have a different kind of society? A better society? One that would be even stronger than the self-trust-undermining ones? It seems obvious to me that that’s possible, but we can’t get there in one step.
(If you want to detour into this rabbit hole, here’s my one-page intro to evolution of consciousness & culture in general, my latest take on the history of memetic/cultural operating systems, and my theory of change.)
The thing to note is that all of these self-trust-undermining, everyday gaslighting dynamics, are not incidental or unrelated. They’re part of a whole meta-paradigm—a paradigm for what sort of thing a paradigm even is. Jean Robertson calls this a “cultural platform”.
And part of how that meta-paradigm has stayed in power has involved also overriding peoples’ sense of being able to tell that there’s something defective about the meta-paradigm, and that something better is possible.
Another example here-ish could be “I can tell for myself that this argument someone just made is valid & sound” but extrapolating from that to “therefore I can tell for myself it’s true and relevant” doesn’t actually follow in the real world, since the person making the argument may be missing key information which makes their whole argument not apply. That might be information nobody has (the introduction of chloroflurocarbons (CFCs) is maybe a great example here—they were known to be nontoxic but afaik nobody knew they would fuck up the ozone layer… until they did). Or it might be information that you already have, but don’t know how to put words to, either at all or at least in a way that that knowing can form any sort of viable counterargument.
You may experience something like “I can tell for myself that this argument is correct” then it doesn’t actually follow that you can tell for yourself that its conclusion is true. If you could, you would just think/say that—no need to refer to the argument. You may though have a sense of “I can tell I don’t know how to dismiss this argument, therefore I want to take it seriously and investigate it more” but that’s on a different level.
I’m thinking here of Eliezer’s arguments for AI Doom, which still seems plausible to me but I’m not as aggressively confident in it as I was before.
In general, if I can fully tell for myself that something is the case, then I have a kind of relaxed ease that others will also notice if they look closely, rather than a contempt for people not getting it. Contempt tries to force away other noticings.
Constantly consciously expanding the boundaries of thoughtspace and actionspace. Creator of Intend, a system for improvisationally & creatively staying in touch with what's most important to you, and taking action towards it.
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