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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Locating Fulcrum Experiences, published by LoganStrohl on April 28, 2023 on LessWrong.
Note: There are two appendices at the end of this post. The first contains a summary of the steps I’ve described here. The second is a glossary of key terms I’ve introduced in this essay.
Once you’ve booted up some curiosity and original seeing—perhaps even identified a question that’s crucial to your story—it’s time to start making observations. At this stage, the purpose of these observations is not so much to find an answer to your question, as to get in closer contact with the world so you’re well positioned to ask better questions.
But how do you determine which parts of the world are relevant to your topic, especially when you know that your basic conceptualization of the issue may be flawed?
Standard approaches to this problem include using a working model to make testable predictions, and seeking expert advice. Here we'll take a more bottom-up approach; instead of investigating large models from the start, or relying on the models of others, naturalism focuses first and foremost on the immediate sense data you can personally gather. You'll direct your data-gathering (even in the absence of any coherent model!) by identifying something I call a fulcrum experience.
What is a fulcrum experience?
A fulcrum experience is a collection of sensations that would lead you to relate differently to your topic if you observed it closely.
For example, when I studied courage, “fear” turned out to be a fulcrum experience for me. After really paying attention to experiences of fear in detail, I automatically thought about courage, bravery, cowardice, and related topics quite differently from how I had before. In the past, I’d implicitly assumed that being courageous meant taking actions I am afraid of. By observing fear, I learned about a range of cognitive reactions to the experience of being afraid; I came to think instead that courage has much more to do with where my actions come from, and how that relates to my overall system of values, than with which actions I ultimately take.
Once I was really paying attention to my experiences surrounding fear, my previous conceptualization simply crumbled. After enough study, a new way of thinking gradually emerged, founded more on direct observation than on vague storytelling. Therefore, fear was a fulcrum experience.
Locating fulcrum experiences is the first main phase of naturalist study. By “locating fulcrum experiences”, I mean 1) anticipating which experiences will have the power to shift your perspective in such a way that key features of your topic become clearly visible to you, and 2) anticipating where to find those experiences so that you can study them in depth. If you’re able to identify and explore fulcrum experiences, you’ll likely find yourself asking questions based on thoughts you were not previously capable of entertaining.
Suppose I’m concerned about something to do with where my beliefs come from. My current story is that, “Sometimes I believe things because I think they’re true, but sometimes I believe things for other reasons than that, and I’m worried about the beliefs that are indifferent to truth.” My current quest is, “What leads me to form beliefs other than attempts to guess the truth?”
It is of course possible to try answering a question like this by just consulting existing models of myself, or of people in general (“Well, probably motivated reasoning!”), but that’s not what comes next in the particular strategy I’m discussing. In this strategy, rather than doing my best to answer the question with whatever information I already have, the purpose of the question is to lead me toward fresh observations.
It’s often easy to make fresh observations: On the chair in front of me, the pattern of the weave makes many little ...
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