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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: Three Iterative Processes, published by LoganStrohl on May 12, 2023 on LessWrong.
Throughout all four phases of naturalism, there are three processes that are constantly repeating in the background: Story revision, POU loops, and a few kinds of oscillation that together I think of as "breathing".
Story Revision
Story revision begins at the very start of a study. If you started with “Catching the Spark”—the orientation procedure I suggested in "Getting Started"—then articulating a story was an explicit part of the process. Otherwise, you probably encountered at least one story about your topic along the way.
I’ve presented “orientation” as something that happens only at the beginning, but that’s not really the case. Reorientation is always happening; as a mentor, I run through an abbreviated version of the orientation procedure at nearly every meeting, until I notice that a student has made a habit of asking and answering these questions on their own. In my own practice, I keep a running list of stories in my notes, a big-picture history of my studies.
There are three parts of story revision:
What's your story about what's going on?
Draw out the assumptions in your story that you might be able to check through direct observation.
Pick according to your curiosity or your sense of what would help you understand the whole space most, and try to investigate that.
A real person's story statements often don’t make a lot of sense to onlookers, presumably because they're meant to reflect intuitions or felt senses more than rigid concepts; I often find myself reminding students, "Remember that this only needs to make sense to you." But for the sake of having some kind of illustration, here is a chronological list of story statements I recorded while studying a pattern in my learning-related actions that I called “failure, smallness, and tumbling”:
Sept. 15: I think that if I focus on what I'm doing wrong, I'll learn faster from my mistakes.
Sept. 16: When I pay attention to the outcome of a goal-directed behavior, I focus in on what I believe to have been under my control.
Sept. 28: I care a lot about exerting control over myself.
Oct. 3: I am very careful to control my words and actions so that I don't attract the attention of people who would hurt me if they knew I am different.
Oct. 17: Part of me thinks that if I let go, everything will fall apart.
Oct. 20: Part of me believes that caring in front of people about things you aren't already good at is too dangerous.
Oct. 22: When I get small, it's because I feel that I've been surrounded by something dangerous, and contracting is as close as you can get to running away when you're surrounded.
Nov. 22: When I'm “trying really hard”, I'm afraid that if I let go, things will fall apart.
What you see in this list is how my responses to "What's my story about what's going on?" evolved over time. Each time I asked myself that question and got new response, I adjusted my study accordingly.
For most people, it’s a good idea to deliberately revisit and perhaps revise your overall story on a regular basis (often around twice a month), and whenever you’re feeling floaty or like things have shifted. It’s important for navigation: When you stay focused on the details of your experience for too long, you may not notice that you’ve come to regard a topic in a completely new way. Knowing that your overall story has shifted can lead you to reconsider your strategy, rather than continuing to investigate experiences that no longer seem relevant.
POU Loops
I discussed Predict-Observe-Update loops in “Collection”, but I’ll say a few words about them here as well.
These are the parts of a POU loop:
Predict: Vividly simulate what you expect to experience—what phenomenology you expect to encounter—when your fulcrum experience occurs.
Observe: When ...
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