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: Investigating Fabrication, published by LoganStrohl on May 18, 2023 on LessWrong.

Note 1: This was originally published in 2021. I'm now re-publishing it in 2023 as the penultimate post in The Nuts and Bolts Of Naturalism, as a demonstration of the method. I intend to publish a collection of much-more-complete demonstrations in the future, and I plan for them to explicitly discuss each step as I've described it in the sequence. For now, though, I hope that this partial demo will give you a taste of one way the overall process can go.(For a similarly partial demo by someone other than me, check out "Maps of Maps, and Empty Expectations" by Nora Ammann.)

Note 2: This essay was written in response to “Lies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options”. I expect it’ll be pretty confusing to read this one without having read that one first. However, I’m not the boss of you, and it isn’t obvious to me anyway which reading order is best overall. If prolonged confusion makes you grumpy, I recommend reading Duncan’s essay first. But if you try it backwards, I’d love to hear how that goes.

1. Motivation

When I read Duncan's essay "Lies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options," it seemed to me to point toward something that's worth knowing for real, rather than just worth knowing about.

I think it does a good job of helping the reader build a new concept that could conceivably be taken as a hypothesis in important situations. The hypothesis is, “Perhaps this thing that seems to me like an option isn’t really a possibility, and it only seems like one because I’m in the grips of a map/territory conflation.” (Or, at least, “Perhaps the person I’m arguing with thinks their made-up option is real because [etc.].”)

But I wasn’t satisfied with my new concept “fabricated options”. There were some super important questions that I’d need to answer before I could put it to use.

For instance,

Which situations are the crucial ones for promoting this hypothesis to attention?

How do I actually move my mind to recognize that the option I’m considering might be fabricated?

Once I’ve posed the hypothesis, how do I confirm or deny it?

When I’ve successfully identified a fabricated option, how can I prevent the usual harm?

And, my favorite: How can I stop making this kind of mistake in the first place?

So I set out to investigate option fabrication (the act), and what my brain is up to in the moments just before a fabricated option appears. I hoped that if I could learn where fabricated options come from, and what they are made of, I’d be a long way toward answering many of the practical questions on my list.

2. Approach

I did naturalism to this. (One of the reasons this essay felt worth writing and sharing is to give people more chances to see what naturalism looks like in practice.)

I assumed that there's sometimes A Thing Going On in my brain that in some ways resembles what Duncan called "fabricated options", and that my default understanding of the Thing is worse than I'd prefer. I set out to observe the Thing myself, directly and in real time, and to gradually build my own understanding of whatever I found. I tried to observe the Thing both in the "field" (as it occurs naturally in the course of daily life) and in the "lab" (as it occurs when I deliberately create controllable conditions that might give rise to it).

This was not a full naturalist study (which usually takes at least a month), but was instead a "let's see what comes of a week or two" dalliance. Still, it turned out to follow the arc of a mostly complete study: Sensitization, zooming in, zooming out, and experimentation. [ETA: Though I used different terms here, these correspond to Locating Fulcrum Experiences, Getting Your Eyes On, Collection, and Experimentation.]

3. Lab Work, Part 1

In accordance with the “try it immediately” heuristic, I ...