I remember being on a circling retreat a number of years ago (indeed, I think it was one Owen was on/ CEA people did sometime Nov/Dec 2019) and I remember, for whatever dumb stupid reason my system 1 freaked the fuck out at the instructor and said “do not trust this person”
and you can hang as many ‘radical honesty’ signs on the door as you want, it is very difficult to tell someone ‘hey for whatever dumb reason my gut is freaking the fuck out at you, probably not anything personal’ when you feel like this
and this did not help with my system 1 flipping out, it just felt like there were uncomfortable truths other people could tell and I couldn’t tell uncomfortable truths back
apparently the guy also hosts these things but more for sexuality? I guess this seems like a reasonable idea in theory given what circling is about but you’d certainly need to make explicitly sure feelings like these are welcome/encouraged? like even when stuff goes well dealing with anxiety around this is an important cost of doing business. (I don’t feel reassured that this was likely to be the case, but I may be mistaken)
not saying circling/radical honesty is bad, i do see a lot of value in these practices
This seems really unrelated to Owen, but because I saw this, I’d flag I also went to a circling retreat in Oxford around that time, it might have been the same one.
I found to be personally fairly uninteresting, and got weird vibes from the instructor. In a discussion that Friday (the first day), he mentioned a lot of metamodernism stuff including a lot of stuff by Ken Wiber. Spirituality vibes similar to what I know of some communities in the Bay.
I did some online searching that evening, and found some reports of sexual harassment and similar around the upper parts of Circling Europe.
My general impression is something like, “Issues of sexual harassment and similar are just endemic in alternative communities.”
I know lots of other people I respect have gotten valuable things from circling and similar circling retreats. I’ve also done a bit of circling without the official mediators and found it to be mostly fine.
I just attended on the first day, and decided not to join for the next two. (That said, in fairness, I find incredibly few activities better than my best non-retreat activities, so this itself isn’t saying much).
At the one I was at, maybe 20% of the group seemed like it was EAs, I don’t remember specifically.
For what it’s worth, my model is that anything with intense emotional openness and big potential emotional shifts (like circling, like some parts of EA) are both high potential reward (self-improvement, self-knowledge, cool and intense experiences) and higher risk (destabilization, being vulnerable to others’ narratives). I believe Anna Salamon talked about this as a mistake when she discussed CFAR doing a lot of circling without being attendant to the power dynamics between people in the circle.
Yeah, I’ve never done circling, but it wouldn’t surprise me if your system-1 was spot on (though I guess this wasn’t the point of your comment – you’re more commenting on double standards of how people reacted to your system-1 freaking out).
I believe anyone who pitches people to participate in circling with others who are pretty much strangers to them (and not super-carefully-vetted) and applies implicit peer pressure and doesn’t warn them that this sort of thing can be psychologically risky and unsafe, is either dangerously clueless or a bad actor.
(I’m mainly noting the potential for abuse. I have no reason to believe that the majority of people who run these things in EA and adjacent spaces are doing things irresponsibly.)
I believe anyone who pitches people to participate in circling with others who are pretty much strangers to them (and not super-carefully-vetted) and applies implicit peer pressure and doesn’t warn them that this sort of thing can be psychologically risky and unsafe, is either dangerously clueless or a bad actor.
For what it’s worth, I live in the Bay Area, where there are large spirituality communities and surprisingly related “professional development” communities. These practices seem surprisingly normal in these communities.
I think that the leaders of these groups are typically very overconfident in their approaches, are a bit desperate to sell them, and not very epistemically sophisticated, so very rarely give adequate warnings and help.
(tbc my perspective then was “I feel like I’m being overly paranoid/unfair here but I’d just been exposed to n=1 anecdata of this sort of spidey sense being correct from a friend, so” and my perspective now is “I now have a very precise model of how this particular train could get derailed and I am … uncertain, but concerned”)
Re: circling/radical honesty
I remember being on a circling retreat a number of years ago (indeed, I think it was one Owen was on/ CEA people did sometime Nov/Dec 2019) and I remember, for whatever dumb stupid reason my system 1 freaked the fuck out at the instructor and said “do not trust this person”
and you can hang as many ‘radical honesty’ signs on the door as you want, it is very difficult to tell someone ‘hey for whatever dumb reason my gut is freaking the fuck out at you, probably not anything personal’ when you feel like this
and this did not help with my system 1 flipping out, it just felt like there were uncomfortable truths other people could tell and I couldn’t tell uncomfortable truths back
apparently the guy also hosts these things but more for sexuality? I guess this seems like a reasonable idea in theory given what circling is about but you’d certainly need to make explicitly sure feelings like these are welcome/encouraged? like even when stuff goes well dealing with anxiety around this is an important cost of doing business. (I don’t feel reassured that this was likely to be the case, but I may be mistaken)
not saying circling/radical honesty is bad, i do see a lot of value in these practices
just
be careful with this shit mk.
This seems really unrelated to Owen, but because I saw this, I’d flag I also went to a circling retreat in Oxford around that time, it might have been the same one.
I found to be personally fairly uninteresting, and got weird vibes from the instructor. In a discussion that Friday (the first day), he mentioned a lot of metamodernism stuff including a lot of stuff by Ken Wiber. Spirituality vibes similar to what I know of some communities in the Bay.
I did some online searching that evening, and found some reports of sexual harassment and similar around the upper parts of Circling Europe.
My general impression is something like, “Issues of sexual harassment and similar are just endemic in alternative communities.”
I know lots of other people I respect have gotten valuable things from circling and similar circling retreats. I’ve also done a bit of circling without the official mediators and found it to be mostly fine.
I just attended on the first day, and decided not to join for the next two. (That said, in fairness, I find incredibly few activities better than my best non-retreat activities, so this itself isn’t saying much).
At the one I was at, maybe 20% of the group seemed like it was EAs, I don’t remember specifically.
For what it’s worth, my model is that anything with intense emotional openness and big potential emotional shifts (like circling, like some parts of EA) are both high potential reward (self-improvement, self-knowledge, cool and intense experiences) and higher risk (destabilization, being vulnerable to others’ narratives). I believe Anna Salamon talked about this as a mistake when she discussed CFAR doing a lot of circling without being attendant to the power dynamics between people in the circle.
yeah this was mostly in the spirit of “are there broader cultural issues we need to work on/ how to we prevent people falling into the same traps”
Yeah, I’ve never done circling, but it wouldn’t surprise me if your system-1 was spot on (though I guess this wasn’t the point of your comment – you’re more commenting on double standards of how people reacted to your system-1 freaking out).
I believe anyone who pitches people to participate in circling with others who are pretty much strangers to them (and not super-carefully-vetted) and applies implicit peer pressure and doesn’t warn them that this sort of thing can be psychologically risky and unsafe, is either dangerously clueless or a bad actor.
(I’m mainly noting the potential for abuse. I have no reason to believe that the majority of people who run these things in EA and adjacent spaces are doing things irresponsibly.)
For what it’s worth, I live in the Bay Area, where there are large spirituality communities and surprisingly related “professional development” communities. These practices seem surprisingly normal in these communities.
I think that the leaders of these groups are typically very overconfident in their approaches, are a bit desperate to sell them, and not very epistemically sophisticated, so very rarely give adequate warnings and help.
(tbc my perspective then was “I feel like I’m being overly paranoid/unfair here but I’d just been exposed to n=1 anecdata of this sort of spidey sense being correct from a friend, so”
and my perspective now is “I now have a very precise model of how this particular train could get derailed and I am … uncertain, but concerned”)