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: Getting Started With Naturalism, published by LoganStrohl on April 23, 2023 on LessWrong.

How Does a Naturalist Study Begin?

There are many different ways to start. Whichever way(s) you choose, what’s important is that 1) you cultivate a lot of original seeing, and 2) you develop a clear sense of your own curiosity. Any starting point that sets you on that track is a correct starting point for naturalism.

What do I mean by “a clear sense of your own curiosity”?

When dealing with challenges, questions, and observations, there are many ways to regard the world that are useful for different purposes: As something you can control, as a community of which you are a part, as raw material for building things, even as an adversary to overcome. The naturalist stance deemphasizes most ways relating to the world, and regards the world instead as something that may reveal itself to you as you open up to it.

The type of curiosity I’m talking about is a yearning for contact with the territory (or with some part of the territory). When I am curious in this way, and maintain that curiosity, it is not burdensome to engage in patient and direct observation. Rather, I find the practice of naturalism inevitable.

What I have to offer as you start off is not so much a specific recommendation as an incomplete menu of options, all of which attempt to cultivate curiosity and original seeing. In my experience, some people can skip this introductory part altogether, while others need to spend a week or more learning how to deliberately pay attention to anything at all before they even begin to consider their chosen object of study. Even I start my studies in different places at different times. There are many good ways to begin, and I hope you will take the time to find (or make) your own.

Starting Place 1: Skip this whole essay. Go straight to “Locating Fulcrum Experiences”.

I don’t often run into situations where this is really the right move, but it does happen. I’m talking first about the “skip ahead” option here because I hope it’ll make the goal of the other options clearer.

I once talked to a person who had found the idea of “comparative advantage” really useful, and wanted to figure out how it might generalize beyond the domain of economics. “I want to be able to use the concept as a lens,” they told me, “and I want to learn to recognize instances where it applies, more-or-less reflexively.” I could tell that they should probably skip straight to “Locating Fulcrum Experiences” for these reasons:

They already knew quite specifically what it was they wanted to study. They came in with, “I want to generalize comparative advantage,” and not with, “I have a vague sense that something somehow important might be going on with whatever thing people are pointing toward when they say ‘comparative advantage’.”

They seemed primarily curious, primarily driven to learn and to understand; they did not seem desperate to make a problem go away immediately. Problem solving is good, of course, but the naturalist approach usually requires a curiosity-dominant orientation to work.

There was no obvious-to-me sign that they might be deeply confused about comparative advantage, or about cross-domain application, such that they might need a complete overhaul of their conceptualization.

If you know quite precisely what you want to study, you feel more immediately driven by curiosity than by problem-solving, and you’re pretty sure you are not fundamentally confused, then I think there’s a good chance you should skip all of this and go straight to Locating Fulcrum Experience. [I'll put a link here as soon as the next essay's published]

If that’s not you, here are some other possible starting places.

Starting Place 2: Try Catching the Spark (All Of It, Or Just Part Of It)

Catching the Spark is an orientation proce...