Celia Green is a figure who should interest some LW readers. If you can imagine Eliezer, not as an A.I. futurist in 2000s America, but as a parapsychologist in 1960s Britain - she must have been a little like that. She founded her own research institute in her mid-20s, invented psychological theories meant to explain why the human race was walking around resigned to mortality and ignorance, felt that her peers (who got all the research money) were doing everything wrong... I would say that her two outstanding books are The Human Evasion and Advice to Clever Children. The first book, while still very obscure, has slowly acquired a fanbase online; but the second book remains thoroughly unknown.
For a synopsis of what the books are about, I think something I wrote in 1993 (I've been promoting her work on the Internet for years) remains reasonable. They contain an analysis of the alleged deficiencies and hidden motivations of normal human psychology, description of an alternative outlook, and an examination of various topics from that new perspective. There is some similarity to the rationalist ideal developed in the Sequences here, in that her alternative involves existential urgency, deep respect for uncertainty, and superhuman aspiration.
There are also prominent differences. Green's starting point is not Bayesian calculation, it's Humean skepticism. Green would agree that one should aspire to "think like reality", but for her this would mean, above all, being mindful of "total uncertainty". It's a fact that I don't know what comes next, that I don't know the true nature of reality, that I don't know what's possible if I try; I may have habitual opinions about these matters, but a moment's honest reflection shows that none of these opinions are knowledge in any genuine sense; even if they are correct, I don't know them to be correct. So if I am interested in thinking like reality, I can begin by acknowledging the radical uncertainty of my situation. I exist, I don't know why, I don't know what I am, I don't know what the world is or what it has planned for me. I may have my ideas, but I should be able to see them as ideas and hold them apart from the unknown reality.
If you are like me, you will enjoy the outlook of open-ended striving that Green develops in this intellectual context, but you will be jarred by her account of ordinary, non-striving psychology. Her answer to the question, why does the human race have such petty interests and limited ambitions, is that it is sunk in an orgy of mutual hatred, mostly disguised, and resulting from an attempt to evade the psychology of striving. More precisely, to be a finite human being is to be in a desperate and frustrating situation; and people attempt to solve this problem, not by overcoming their limitations, but by suppressing their reactions to the situation. Other people are central to the resulting psychological maneuvers. They are a way for you to distract yourself from your own situation, and they are a safe target if the existential frustration and desperation reassert themselves.
Celia Green's psychological ideas are the product of her personal confrontation with the mysterious existential situation, and also her confrontation with an uncomprehending society. I've thought for some time that her portrayal of universal human depravity results from overestimating the potential of the average human being; that in effect she has asked herself, if I were that person, how could I possibly lead the life I see them living, and say the things I hear them saying, unless I were that twisted up inside? Nonetheless, I do think she has described an aspect of human psychology which is real and largely unexamined, and also that her advice on how to avoid the resentful turning-away from reality, and live in the uncertainty, is quite profound. One reason I'm promoting these books is in the hope that some small part of the culture at large is finally ready to digest their contents and critically assess them. People ought to be doing PhDs on the thought of Celia Green, but she's unknown in that world.
As for Celia Green herself, she's still alive and still going. She has a blog and a personal website and an organization based near Oxford. She's an "academic exile", but true to her philosophy, she hasn't compromised one iota and hopes to start her own private university. She may especially be of interest to the metaphysically inclined faction of LW readers, identified by Yvain in a recent blog post.
Yes. We're semi-evolved monkeys created by a blind idiot god that has fortuitously created something with intellectual escape velocity. Everything we achieve as a result, we are by definition only just rational enough to achieve it, or it would have happened earlier.
And yet, society does not treat modern life-saving medicine as a talkshow curiosity, nor the urge to rally to support the victims of disasters, including the "impersonally caused badness" of natural disasters. So her diagnosis seems wide of the mark.
Has she expressed any view about the people who actually are going for the big ones, trying to cure aging and end death? SENS, cryonics, uploading, AGI? I don't get the impression these ideas have impinged upon her.
In science, that's generally not a good sign, except in the initial stages of someone discovering a new thing.
Alas for the flower that is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air. Has her fanbase, as you call it, done anything new with these ideas?
I've never seen the significance of lucid dreaming, btw. I mean, "Hey, I can be conscious while dreaming, how cool is that?!?!" But, so what? Being conscious while waking seems more important to me.
That is a generic explanation; rather like saying that a bridge collapsed because the inspectors didn't do their job. It doesn't tell us whether people fall short of rationality because of purely intellectual shortcomings (e.g. innumeracy), or whether there are also emotional and willful elements at work. Green's psychological ideas can even be expressed in the language of biases and heuristics: sane psychology results from an "evasion bias", and existential psychology corrects for that using an "uncertainty heuristic".
How often do people talk about preventing earthquakes or tsunamis? Maybe you could lubricate the tectonic plates so they roll more smoothly, or dissipate the tidal wave before it reaches the shore... Now, doesn't that sound like a child's response to a disaster? Not just helping the survivors, but naively wanting to stop it from ever happening again.
Adults are in general far more resigned to the idea that life will always be a string of disasters. But it's usually only a few young adults who then draw the logical conclusion that life is a mistake and we should all stop reproducing and commit suicide. It's the willingness to go on living in a gloomy world, without fixing it or fleeing it, that really typifies "sanity", I think. (By this criterion, LW is certainly not a sane site, since it has an apocalyptic eschatology whose outcome people hope to affect.)
I actually agree that Celia Green's explanation for this state of affairs, in its pure form, doesn't quite add up. It must derive from the experience of having her own proposals repeatedly shot down; she must have eventually concluded that people just don't want truth or transhumanity. In reality, there would be other factors at work as well, such as a simple feeling of helplessness, as well as the cognitive inefficiencies at all levels that were inherited from the idiot god. But resentment of other people's freedom, and a taste for sabotage and suffering, are also part of human psychology, and one should consider to what extent such morbid factors are responsible for the resistance to one's favorite futurist schemes (along with legitimate criticisms).
Not to my knowledge. She has an aphorism, "If the human race took death seriously, there would be no more of it", but it could be construed as support for transhumanism (no more death) or as support for antinatalism (no more human race).
Again, not to my knowledge.
Earlier, I likened Green to Schopenhauer, and there is another similarity in that Schopenhauer had many decades of sporadic contact with academia before his ideas began to achieve genuine currency. Green has had associations with a number of academics (H.H. Price, Hans Eysenck, Michael Lockwood), but her thought remains unknown and unremarked within the system.