Lulie
@reasonisfun
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Epistemology applied to everything. 💫 Host of Reason Is Fun podcast w/ @DavidDeutschOxf 🎙️ Taking critical rationalism into life – how to improve both.
Oxford, UK
Joined April 2015
I tweet about: 💭 philosophy (epistemology, reason) 🧠 psychology, mental blocks 🎭 emotion, inexplicit knowledge, phenomenology 👩🍼 culture, memetics, tradition (relationships, parenting, scientific research) 🗽 non-coercion (applied to learning & productivity) Best threads — 1/
'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.
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Rereading the Fabric of Reality (20 years since I first read it) — this page is hilarious. He spends a full page saying imaginary objects cannot affect real objects 😂 “It is only what really happens that can cause other things really to happen.” dying 😂😂😂
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This works because the major components in love are curiosity and freedom. Suddenly you can let things happen while paying attention and leaning into things and you stop getting stuck because you get to explore new patterns rather than clinging to the old ones.
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Goldwater: “We’re not all Magnus Carlsen.” Deutsch: “Yes we are.” Goldwater: “I have taught literal geniuses and you don’t have to teach them. But the mass of people aren’t that fluent in actually gaining knowledge and then taking creative leaps.” Deutsch: “You’re not drawing
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Nice counter to some of the points I made! Especially about attunement. I think I underestimate how alien the noncoercive view is. It’s not just the idea children are full people, although that’s part of it — “everyone can get everything they want” is the truly alien part. 🤯
@reasonisfun @jonnym1ller @astupple Being attuned to your baby and curious about what your baby wants or doesn’t want, is interested in or not interested in, what makes your baby’s heart sing, and what doesn’t, and how it is all evolving and changing all the time, is absolutely vital. There is sooooo much that is
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7. I suspect TCS would be by default pretty down on all of these. And the reason is that its epistemology is incompatible with things we learn from embodied experimentation (which it kind of says doesn’t exist?). Weirdly, there’s a scientistic bend to TCS (aka applied
@DefenderOfBasic Animals feel pain and emotions. Mothers and infants bond through touch. Secondhand smoke is harmful. Sleep is essential for memory and health. Trauma affects the body. Plants communicate and respond to the environment. Stress contributes to illness. Exercise improves mental
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Further: If you create a non-coercive inner world, a non-coercive outer world naturally follows. (It’s harder the other way around.)
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“I saw everything as coercion, but you kind of have to look through the coercion and see what it is that people are trying to solve with that” 🔥💥
@jchalupa_ @reasonisfun Not that evidence is needed, but I personally had a HUGE ‘take 2 steps back before taking 10 steps forward’ thing discovering TCS via research about FoR and BoI around when our oldest was born. And it was getting stuck in #1. It was messy. So I think it is good criticism, because
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This is part of why figuring out parenting is important. Not to have an agenda for one’s child turning out a certain way, but because being a well-adjusted world-historic genius is *awesome*. People want to be successful!
He was a one man living proof that humanity can produce well-adjusted world-historic geniuses, and I think that's something that's important to have. Any time someone says something like "People can't be eidetic!" you can just point to the man who was, and we can build to that.
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I wrote a thing translating attachment theory for TCS minded people:
@GarethWall @DavidDeutschOxf Indeed. I think TCS (or David in this case) would read phrases like “take charge” and assume it means something coercive. In reality, it doesn’t need to be like that (and actually, doing it in a coercive way makes it less effective). Here I believe @DavidDeutschOxf is pointing
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Here’s another thing I’ve seen inconsistency on — On the one hand, it’s true that how to be happy in life is a thing that takes learning. On the other, people reading TCS often get the idea that all you need to do is remove coercion (then voila, flourishing). I’m undecided!
I wrote more about this here: https://t.co/JAeCpEe1kT
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In this comment, I expand a bit why it’s not possible to have a theory of non-coercion without a theory of internal coercion:
@ryanboothops TCS as a framework is pretty bad at creating agency by itself. It’s compatible with facilitating kids not learning agency (and it is itself okay with this, because it doesn’t have goals for kids like that). It does create freedom, but whether that amounts to the kids growing up
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6. Because TCS doesn’t really have a theory of trauma, and it frames everything as theories, it also doesn’t have a theory of infant trauma. (IIRC it’s also somewhat vague about what counts as coercion in the infant stage?) It kind of suggests that, as long as you are generally
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👶 Disagreements I currently have with Taking Children Seriously: 1. The idea that it’s possible to be non-coercive without transforming your inner world (including blindspots/‘shadow’). It’s possible to vastly reduce external coercion, but without a non-coercive inner world,
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(This is one reason it’s better to think of life as being about pursuing your problems/interests, rather than about finding what’s True or Rational, or about getting rid of all your errors. All is but a woven web of guesses, and we don’t know what we know.)
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Applies to families and children, too.
Non-coercive love means you can literally ask to feel certain things and it’s effortless The whole system joins in to help out
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It reminds me of how my little sister (who was a child at the time, homeschooled) was once asked by a school kid the capital of some Baltic country, replied, “I don’t know and will never need to know”, and then went to our big world map poster and stuck some Blu Tack over it.
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Fascinating conversation and line-by-line article analysis about how vital chosen ignorance is for learning. Relevant for anyone interested in education.
I'm joined by Liberty Fitz-Claridge (@l1berty) for Episode 243 of ToKCast: Reading and reflecting on "In praise of ignorance" by @DavidDeutschOxf. You can find the original article here: https://t.co/UNBdCCXBGU
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Alternative views?
Families are a dying, legacy social technology. Everyone hates them. Communists want to replace the family with the Party. Fascists want to replace the family with the State. Liberals want to replace the family with the Market. Why? Because families are bad.
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This post is assuming the emotions are valid and the *theories* are wrong – which causes layer of suffering/constriction on top of the emotions. Emotions aren't the bad guy here. The unpleasant aspect is caused by wrong beliefs.
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