Taoism

What is Taosim? The core is 81 little sections (1 pp. or less, most often less) that makes up the Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu. Get the version translated by Stephen Addiss & Stanley Lombardo, as they do not hold your hand and try to explain but instead translate [1]. A very nice feature is that in each section one line is transliterated, and a small dictionary is included in the back - this allows the reader some direct contact with the original text and look over the translators shoulders [2].

Like everything Taoism consists of some high quality core, and then a lot of layers and interpretations and additions on top of varying quality and impact. For me, and most others, the rest is basically garbage - but unlike many things the core of Taoism is pretty easy to identify and go through: get the Tao Te Ching and then read the Wikipedia article to learn about the magic realism style and other cultural artifacts layered on top and you are an instant "expert".

The rest of Taoism is like English and Philosophy departments versus the core texts they study: sure there is some gain, but the ratio of garbage generated (words, papers, books, etc.) that simply critiques and discusses versus original and interesting content is large. Some quality material is generated, and some solid learning can happen. But it seems often that the role and function of these departments is often misconceived - sure, "everything is text", but not all text is of the same quality. English/Philosophy/some other departments are basically academic blog factories which discuss and otherwise point to other material or general thoughts and teach you to "blog" also, if you luck out with a faculty position. Unlike academic blogs real blogs do not have such heavy constrains: high fees, often needing to parrot back a profs position/opinions to get a decent mark, PC and other limiting constraints on thought and expression [3] (tenure does not really work to fill its claimed function), needing to get people in a physical space at the same time, forcing everyone to listen to student X's insipid "thoughts" [4] etc etc etc. Ug, flashbacks to sitting in [5] on African Studies class.

Taoism itself is pretty enigmatic versus, say, Stoicism and much closer to the pure mystical view of the world versus the Stoics pure rational view. But it is interesting to reflect on, especially since where someone sits on the rational/mystical scale seems to be a set point that is built into many people so reflecting on both views will help you understand people. Taoism is the counterpoint to Stoicism, at least in feel and approach, but comes to basically the same conclusions.

44 (snippet). Extreme love exacts a heavy price.
Many possessions entail heavy loss.

Monks used to copy texts by hand, and the Tao is the only book that I personally have done this for. I learned two things doing this (1) I am happy I am not a 1st Century monk, (2) coping a text like the Tao is conducive to deep reflection and makes you a better person [6]. I copied the text for a friend, including the pictograms and dictionary, and this gift gave both to me and to him I think. I probably got much more than him actually (hmm... a crappy hand written book? Gee - "thanks").

Lowdown:
- Tao Te Ching is a short & powerful (but not fast) read.
- The Tao Te Ching embodies the core of a whole philosophy/religion - so it has huge return on investment.
- The view is close to a pure mystical view: since it seems a high portion of people "think" this way it is good to understand this style.

Notes:
[1] This book really demonstrates the power of a good translation - real empirical evidence that you can have widely varying differences in quality and tone that can change a book qualitatively from "ug" to "wow". In the preface they have a small comparison between several translations of the first line, here are 3 of 10 different available translations

The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way (Waley)
The ways that can be walked are not the eternal Way (Mair)
The tao that can be said is not the everlasting tao (Gibbs)

Here how it is done in this book:

Tao called Tao is not Tao.

To my ear this much less verbose style of translation is clear, compact, elegant . The translators aim to retain the "simplicity, rhythm, and power of the Chinese" in order to achieve the impact of the original.
[2] This "interactive" feature is wonderful, very enlightening and fun. In addition to the roman transliteration the pictograms are painted alongside which adds a beauty. Pictograms and stylistic paintings are interspersed in the text which adds some minimalistic visual candy on the journey through the book.
[3] Would a prof say the rest of Taoism is garbage? Or is that "too risky"? What if a student self identifies as a Taoist? Will that offend him/her? Such questions are likely asked around every statement made, trimming down what can be said into the most pablum like residue left. Okay, I admit the rest is not literally garbage - but in terms of diminishing returns for the majority of people it might as well be.
[4] When reading one can simply scan over boring/trite/or otherwise lame material, and one already reads ~ 3X faster than people can speak (maybe ~2X if you read slow like myself, or ~4X if you read very fast), plus people trim out the lamest material when writing (uh, ah, er... this one time... ), and double-takes are easy - simply go back and reread, if someone says something you sorta missed you have to ask them to repeat.
[5] That's right - sitting in: you can crash University classes, since most are huge. I likely should have asked the prof, as I starting doing later, since the class was "small" (~40 people?).
[6] i.e. painful, but constructive pain.

Filters

"The map is not the territory." - Alfred Korzybski

We perceive the world via our senses: the external makes an impression on us. This impression is not neutral and fresh, but heavily filtered and distorted via our biases. We - or more precisely, processes within our minds - silently attach propositions immediately on the impression, and we typically assent to these propositions. Critical thinking is the routinized mechanism of teasing out this filtered and categorized and assented to framework, a bag of tricks used habitually to improve our filters, to question them, to suspend our assent and an attempt to make informed assent. Rhetoric and propaganda is the attempt to use the filters and implications to get an audience to assent to the entire bundle, both the impression and a parasitic framework which is a Trojan horse.

Our minds make up a map of the world, one that is reduced in content but, hopefully, reflective of the significant features of the world. Filtering suggests it is hard to make a good map.

To see the effect of a filter pay attention the next time you learn something new, X, it becomes a new pattern, a new filter and you will start to see item X in the world around you, whereas previously you had filtered it out. Learning new ideas and patterns enables you to make sense of the impressions of the world using your new filter. Everyone is familiar with this, many call this "coincidences" - to the careful they see this as illuminating how our minds work, and a warning, to the less careful they see conspiracy theories and evidence of the supernatural, profound evidence. We can also consider illusions - these are well known examples where our minds profoundly layer something onto an impression which we know is not true, and yet we still perceive incorrectly; to a great extent everything is an illusion, a combination of a true impression and an additional assumed and added framework. By understanding an illusion we can remove assent - facts we can demonstrate to be true will change our assent - although we cannot stop slathering the added framework as it is automatic and uncontrolled. In fact, the existance of illusions is the most clear means of teaching the neccessity for critical thinking.

We can see people as givers of assent - if you are careful you will critically give, or suspend, assent to the impressions and their associated implied (by our minds) propositions, baggage, and implications. If you are not careful you will not examine what the underlying impression is, and take the whole package as true. You will not take the effort to attempt to discriminate what is true, and what is an assumption that we slathered on top.

The agnostic is one who only provides his assent to implications that at strong - what Stoics would call kataleptic impressions - something where the implications are basically not falsifiable. Your feelings of pain, consciousness, existance of external reality - kataleptic. A Bayesian would assign very little uncertainty to kataleptic impressions. Both a Stoic and a Bayesian treat the world differently than most - they work to give assent only to what is concrete and knowable, and treat most of what we "know" as more ephemeral and work to suspend assent.

Lowdown:
- what we see is: illusion = filter(impression), the illusion suggests implications, critical thinking is trying to determine if we should assent to the implications.
- Work to be an agnostic. Focus on the "hard core" and don't cling to the ephemeral. Belief is an uncritical opinion, a freely given assent to an impression, and is irrational and often false.
- Agnostic ~ Stoic ~ Bayesian ~ Critical thinker != the "natural" man.
- Stoic psychology of mind: input - filter(impression), output - assent, or suspension of assent, to the implications we bundle to impressions. To compare peoples minds, compare their assent to impressions; to compare their character, compare how they assent.
- There is nothing new under the sun: NLP seems to be Stoic personality theory, rediscovered and with some more medical information behind it and focusing on the tactics and tricks versus the overarching strategy

Deconstructing the Enneagram

The enneagram is a diagram which embodies a personality theory. The diagram is a 9-pointed figure, and the origins are wrapped in vague and mysterious beginnings - discussion of Eastern European mystics, the Sufis, number theories, etc., is common.

The basic idea is that there are 9 types of people, who are related to each other by the position on the diagram. The two types beside your type, your "wings", are similar and you can tend towards one of them. There are also two other types which you relate to when under stress, or in security, which are across the figure from you. In other words, your main type + the two wings + plus the two "stress/security" points describe you - or 5/9th of the diagram potentially describes you, and the types that "describe you" cover all aspects of the personality space. As you can see the enneagram is not a sharp tool.

The 9 types can be chunked into 3 groups of three - and your wings and stress/security points ensure that your personality spans then entire space of personality as you are related to each of these groups, e.g. the enneagram does not actually seem to discriminate you into a type that is distinct and informative. These three goups describe how information/emotions are processed by your type - head/fear, heart/grief, body/anger. A generous reading is that the enneagram captures your stance towards objective, social, and objective reality - but reading books/webpages about the enneagram does not have this insight leaping out. In terms of labeling and understanding people, the enneagram seems too complex for what it does - 9 types? But you can be close to the wing? Or under stress and thus across the diagram, or perhaps you are secure and thus across in a different direction? Oh yeah - in some of the literature they point out that stress doesn't mean what we normally mean by stress, so maybe you are at your stress point when you are not stressed. Huh? Where are the clear and sharp distinctions that one would look for in order to justify the number of labels?

At best it seems that the 3 groups of three - head/fear, heart/grief, body/anger - offers some insight, and a reduced version of the enneagram (e.g. 3 main types of personality) could be useful. But at this point why even attempt to salvage the enneagram? The big 5 is an emprical description of personality that is on solid, if limited, footing. Why not simply find your big 5 properties, and then think about subjective, social, and objective reality as the environment that you are embedded in and which you must learn to live in in order to thrive? For that matter, if the 9 types actually were clear distinct types they should correspond to clusters of big 5 properties - if we looked at the 5-d space with points for each person who took the test we should see clusters of the points: to be precise, we should see 9 distinct clusters, one for each type. To my knowlege this has not been observed, pretty strong evidence that the "enneagram theory" is false.

You can take an enneagram test for fun - after first hearing of this theory I googled and took 3 different ones, from 3 different web pages which sold enneagram related products, and had three different results - not surprising since the theory does not seem to make sharply distinct categories. Even worse, some of the test show the "points" you have on each personality type and my score was fairly evenly spread over a huge subset (~3/4) of the personally types. Basically I could pick any personality type that sounded nice to me and claim it as "capturing me". To me it seems clear: the enneagram is pseudo-science that offers no insight or constructive means to understand yourself and others. Disturbing, as apparently this model is used by some counsellors and therapists, as a google and amazon search reveals, and since it appears to have no sharp and incisive properties that would justify such use it would be better to say the model is misused by some counsellors and therapists.

Pseudo-science is not inert, and can cause a lot of pain and damage. Any placebo value of the enneagram should exist with any other treatment plan, so I cannot see any value brought to the table. Folk psychology and traditions have the potential have capture interesting truths, but as far as I can tell the enneagram contains no such interesting aspects. In fact, it does not even seem to be a legitamate folk theory - with the "mysterious roots", with vague references to Sufis or other groups, likely being made up in order to give the false sense that the method is an ancient tradition (no evidence is given, and inconsistent stories exist, both of which suggest the "ancient system" claim is false). The story seems to be thus: the enneagram theory was made up in the 20th century, with false historical pedigree, and its claims to sort people into meaningful categories which help you understand yourself and others and grow falls apart under even the weakest examination.

Lowdown
- The enneagram lives up to its name (pronounced "any-a-gram": yes, you too can pick any of the grams/personality types you want to pick to describe yourself), but does not appear to live up to any of its claims.

The big 5

The benchmark in personality is "the big 5". Nerds everywhere will be happy to know that this framework is from lexical analysis - e.g. data mining. The essential features are thus: empirical ("from the field") and reflective of our current society (allowing a comparative study of you versus others). The weaknesses follow from these essential features: no conceptual underpinnings, based on "averages" (persistent and consistent patterns in self reporting and writing), based on self view (if you ever spoke to a jerk, you know they would rate themselves rosy while everyone else would not - so this weakness can be huge) - so if you have higher or more realistic standards and self view than others, you will rate lower in various measures.

The lowdown of the big 5 is this: data analysis reveals clusters of traits that indicate 5 "basis vectors" which build up personality space. e.g. take all the adjectives we can use to describe ourselves, and we can project them into 5 different dimensions that capture how people tend to describe themselves. Simply by taking a test you can see how your personality is described in this 5-d space, which is bound in size in practice by the simple fact that we are finite creatures sharply bounded by time, capacity, and our social environment.

We float on an OCEAN [openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism] with others, and can quickly see how we "measure up" against others. As a simple rule, it seems like we would do well to "max out" on these measures in order to be a successful and happy person (for neuroticism, you want to max out on the low end...).

In short, the big 5 is a fairly flawed system - but one that is quick to determine for oneself, and will give you an impression of both our society and how you are positioned in the personality space of our times. Using your score you can see how others will tend percieve you, how you stand in relations with other, and thus what you may want to focus on in improvement (as we are social creatures our success often depends on the help, or at least not hinderance, of others). As far as personality tests go, this is a decent one and one that is the benchmark. Each dimension gives you a particular area of focus for self improvement, and an actual way of measuring - yes, far from perfect, but a somewhat objective measuring stick to see your progress, weak points, strengths, etc.