Thanks for adjusting your language to be nicer. I wouldn’t say we’re overwhelmingly confident in our claims, but I am overwhelmingly confident in the value of exploring these topics from first principles, and although I wish I had knockout evidence for STV to share with you today, that would be Nobel Prize tier and I think we’ll have to wait and see what the data brings. For the data we would identify as provisional support, this video is likely the best public resource at this point:
This is in fact the claim of STV, loosely speaking; that there is an identity relationship here. I can see how it would feel like an aggressive claim, but I’d also suggest that positing identity relationships is a very positive thing, as they generally offer clear falsification criteria. Happy to discuss object-level arguments as presented in the linked video.
Hi Mike, I really enjoy your and Andrés’s work, including STV, and I have to say I’m disappointed by how the ideas are presented here, and entirely unsurprised at the reaction they’ve elicited.
There’s a world of a difference between saying “nobody knows what valence is made out of, so we’re trying to see if we can find correlations with symmetries in imaging data” (weird but fascinating) and “There is an identity relationship between suffering and disharmony” (time cube). I know you’re not time cube man, because I’ve read lots of other QRI output over the years, but most folks here will lack that context. This topic is fringe enough that I’d expect everything to be extra-delicately phrased and very well seasoned with ifs and buts.
Again, I’m a big fan of QRI’s mission, but I’d be worried about donating I if I got the sense that the organization viewed STV not as something to test, but as something to prove. Statistically speaking, it’s not likely that STV will turn out to be the correct mechanistic grand theory of valence, simply because it’s the first one (of hopefully many to come). I would like to know:
When do you expect to be able to share the first set of empirical results, and what kinds of conclusions do you expect we will be able to draw from them, depending on how they turn out? Tiny studies with limited statistical power are ok; “oh it’s promising so far but we can’t share details” isn’t.
I hope QRI’s fate isn’t tied to STV – if STV can’t be reconciled with the data, then what alternative ideas would you test next?
Hi Seb, I appreciate the honest feedback and kind frame.
I can say that it’s difficult to write a short piece that will please a diverse audience, but that ducks the responsibility of the writer.
You might be interested in my reply to Linch which notes that STV may be useful even if false; I would be surprised if it were false but it wouldn’t be an end to qualia research, merely a new interesting chapter.
I spoke with the team today about data, and we just got a new batch this week we’re optimistic has exactly the properties we’re looking for (meditative cessations, all 8 jhanas in various orders, DTI along with the fMRI). We have a lot of people on our team page but to this point QRI has mostly been fueled by volunteer work (I paid myself my first paycheck this month, after nearly five years) so we don’t always have the resources to do everything we want to do as fast as we want to do it, but I’m optimistic we’ll have something to at least circulate privately within a few months.
This is in fact the claim of STV, loosely speaking; that there is an identity relationship here. I can see how it would feel like an aggressive claim, but I’d also suggest that positing identity relationships is a very positive thing, as they generally offer clear falsification criteria.
But did you have any reason to posit it? Any evidence that this identity is the case?
Andrés’s STV presentation to Imperial College London’s psychedelics research group is probably the best public resource I can point to on this right now. I can say after these interactions it’s much more clear that people hearing these claims are less interested in the detailed structure of the philosophical argument, and more in the evidence, and in a certain form of evidence. I think this is very reasonable and it’s something we’re finally in a position to work on directly: we spent the last ~year building the technical capacity to do the sorts of studies we believe will either falsify or directly support STV.
Thanks for adjusting your language to be nicer. I wouldn’t say we’re overwhelmingly confident in our claims, but I am overwhelmingly confident in the value of exploring these topics from first principles, and although I wish I had knockout evidence for STV to share with you today, that would be Nobel Prize tier and I think we’ll have to wait and see what the data brings. For the data we would identify as provisional support, this video is likely the best public resource at this point:
This sounds overwhelmingly confident to me, especially since you have no evidence to support either of these claims.
This is in fact the claim of STV, loosely speaking; that there is an identity relationship here. I can see how it would feel like an aggressive claim, but I’d also suggest that positing identity relationships is a very positive thing, as they generally offer clear falsification criteria. Happy to discuss object-level arguments as presented in the linked video.
Hi Mike, I really enjoy your and Andrés’s work, including STV, and I have to say I’m disappointed by how the ideas are presented here, and entirely unsurprised at the reaction they’ve elicited.
There’s a world of a difference between saying “nobody knows what valence is made out of, so we’re trying to see if we can find correlations with symmetries in imaging data” (weird but fascinating) and “There is an identity relationship between suffering and disharmony” (time cube). I know you’re not time cube man, because I’ve read lots of other QRI output over the years, but most folks here will lack that context. This topic is fringe enough that I’d expect everything to be extra-delicately phrased and very well seasoned with ifs and buts.
Again, I’m a big fan of QRI’s mission, but I’d be worried about donating I if I got the sense that the organization viewed STV not as something to test, but as something to prove. Statistically speaking, it’s not likely that STV will turn out to be the correct mechanistic grand theory of valence, simply because it’s the first one (of hopefully many to come). I would like to know:
When do you expect to be able to share the first set of empirical results, and what kinds of conclusions do you expect we will be able to draw from them, depending on how they turn out? Tiny studies with limited statistical power are ok; “oh it’s promising so far but we can’t share details” isn’t.
I hope QRI’s fate isn’t tied to STV – if STV can’t be reconciled with the data, then what alternative ideas would you test next?
Hi Seb, I appreciate the honest feedback and kind frame.
I can say that it’s difficult to write a short piece that will please a diverse audience, but that ducks the responsibility of the writer.
You might be interested in my reply to Linch which notes that STV may be useful even if false; I would be surprised if it were false but it wouldn’t be an end to qualia research, merely a new interesting chapter.
I spoke with the team today about data, and we just got a new batch this week we’re optimistic has exactly the properties we’re looking for (meditative cessations, all 8 jhanas in various orders, DTI along with the fMRI). We have a lot of people on our team page but to this point QRI has mostly been fueled by volunteer work (I paid myself my first paycheck this month, after nearly five years) so we don’t always have the resources to do everything we want to do as fast as we want to do it, but I’m optimistic we’ll have something to at least circulate privately within a few months.
But did you have any reason to posit it? Any evidence that this identity is the case?
Andrés’s STV presentation to Imperial College London’s psychedelics research group is probably the best public resource I can point to on this right now. I can say after these interactions it’s much more clear that people hearing these claims are less interested in the detailed structure of the philosophical argument, and more in the evidence, and in a certain form of evidence. I think this is very reasonable and it’s something we’re finally in a position to work on directly: we spent the last ~year building the technical capacity to do the sorts of studies we believe will either falsify or directly support STV.