# Briefly on MAPLE, and the broader community

I'd been working on a very long piece of writing to try to contextualize my views here but it seems like now's the time to try to talk about this stuff online directly.

(I was a resident at Maple for two years from 2019-2021, and then later for six months as a "villager" in 2022, and worked for them remotely for all of 2023.)

I've been frustrated by the criticism that's been made of Maple in public[^s9uewl0rtm], which has seemed mostly unhelpful, and not a productive contribution to the discourse.[^fwgk9dkfzuo] One person, who I mostly *do* respect, did a lot of angry and perhaps manipulative finagling behind the scenes about this stuff, but broadly didn't write about it etc., I'm not sure why. 

One story I might tell for that person, and part of why I myself haven't written about Maple publicly yet, is that it's very difficult to do so in a way that doesn't just smear individuals, most of whom are still my friends. Worse is that the discourse will almost invariably take a nuanced and sensitive take, and turn it into mud to sling. It's surprising and unusual that eg. MIRI and CFAR were able to say "our research project has failed" and "we fucked up, and also our stuff doesn't really work that well" respectively, without a complete loss of face. That spoke very strongly to the virtue of the rat scene, because this kind of move is more or less a non-starter everywhere else, that I'm aware of.

Lots of ex Maplers I've talked to are variously angry, some (newly) traumatized, confused, etc., but the vibe has generally been "gosh it's fucking complicated," maybe with some part of "this isn't my problem to adjudicate." For myself, I would add "I don't want to harm people due to my anger, and I don't trust the discourse here."

Similarly even the ex Black Lotus people I've talked to, where Black Lotus was vastly more cut-and-dry in being insane and harmful, felt that the discourse (even in this case being basically just comprised of rats, since no one cared about Black Lotus outside of our scene) basically threw them under the bus, and misunderstood what happened, what was good about BL, and maybe even what went wrong.

I think that criticism of Maple can't be made by sneering appeals to Western secular culture. 
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I think Maple is *trying* to do something pretty fundamentally weird and illegible, and whatever appropriate critique there might be of it would have to address the broader tradeoffs in which their strategies are being applied. Furthermore their strategies also need to be contextualized in broader historical spiritual culture, etc etc. I don't think that's happened yet, partially because it's too deep and too hard, and because potentially the world is literally at stake. More specifically:

*   Sleep deprivation, uh, "brainwashing" (intensive indoctrination), and intense social demands from peers and an abbot are standard techniques in monastic traditions from East to West.
    *   Note that these are not the *main* techniques of these traditions, but still very common features.
    *   It's interesting that humans seem to have independently invented monasticism, complete with robes and chanting and vows of poverty, at least 3 times, so, well, something is "working" about it one way or the other.
*   The *product* of monasteries is saints, at least in small quantities. What identifies a saint is maybe less about the success conditions defined by their tradition (some don't quite have any, tbc), but more a kind of "perfection of virtue" which is identifiable from outside of the lineage.
    *   To some extent, we might say that laypeople in whatever culture are also just indoctrinated into venerating the defined "saints" and saint-producing institutions of their culture. But, what's distinctive about these traditions is that they create people (not every monk, certainly, but a relatively consistent minority, in institutions that sometimes last millennia) capable of outstanding displays of virtue *as understood by the broader culture*, not just their monastic order, and still recognizable for what they are by us, today, in a foreign culture.
*   It looks like, the way things are going, the most likely outcome of the current AI race is the end of our species. No one wants this, and yet no one seems to be capable of making choices otherwise.
    *   (Fine yes, some people think this is just false, but their arguments insofar as they have them smell like cope. I haven't seen anti-safetyist arguments that actually address the technical claims made by Eliezer etc.)
*   Maple's thesis is that they're trying to produce saints that can apprehend x-risk, given that extant monastic traditions are all basically conservative and premodern.
    *   The claim here might be something like "the existing incentives just point towards doom, and it will take some very unusual kind of virtue and skill to be able to escape that, and build a way out for others"
    *   Part of the crux here is that under steep tradeoffs, we should be more willing to accept the costs of harming people, especially for modest amounts of harm. Special forces operatives just are traumatized, and no one reasonable says "this is unacceptable under any circumstances."

However, I don't think what Maple is doing is working or will work.
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AFAICT, Maple traumatizes ~all of its members at least a little bit, and sometimes a fair bit. Note, though, most come in already traumatized, and leave probably on net about as badly off as they were before, maybe a bit better. But this is par for the course for monastic traditions in general, and especially for Rinzai Zen in particular.[^4bosqnjyswm] In some ways this is impossible, and keeping in mind that Maple is doing some memetically problematic stuff as well, but Maple is pretty careful about getting informed consent from people who join.

Re memetic harms in particular, I think that yes, Maple is doing some obviously sketchy stuff re how people are indoctrinated and make spiritual commitments to the cause. I think Maple makes dissenting ideas very difficult to hold within the org, and often has a vibe of "indeed, we all already agree that x, because x is obviously the case and virtuous people would clearly agree," rather than respecting people's discernment and autonomy etc.

From my vantage point, Maple is producing few enough [micro-saints](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort), and their advanced students seem lopsided enough that I don't trust their ability to train up a meaningful vanguard. Furthermore I think that probably with the exception of the one actual AI researcher there, people at Maple basically don't understand what AI is, or maybe even the non-technical incentives that create it, to be able to take any productive actions within the research community or in the broader politics.

More broadly I'm skeptical of attempts at cultural change like this. To some extent this is just an ingrained pessimism on my part, but I would point to countless religious revivals and cultural movements in the last two centuries, that seem to have mostly achieved a few decades of fervor and devotion among their members, and not much else. Maple likes to cite the impact of Quakers on abolitionism, though I'm skeptical. But fine, let's say abolitionism worked, (first and second wave) feminism somewhat worked, civil rights somewhat worked—though I have a sort of pseudo-marxist view here, that these each have more to do with economic incentives than "cultural progress" per se—but I don't see any plausible bull case for Maple in the time we have.

Maple is correct about the modern disease, in a very important way.
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There's a couple claims here: 

1.  The culture feels something like "confused," or that it's forgotten, or at least is quickly forgetting, what all *this* (being, joy, love, etc.) was for. I don't have narrow claims about the nature of value in principle, but when I look at what we're all doing with our time and attention and care, it usually feels monstrous and insane.
    1.  There's a common hippy fantasy that rounds to ~"noble savage" which I think is mostly wrong, and maybe similarly of cottagecore, etc. etc. Things were pretty bad before, in many ways, but the current thing feels much more confused.
2.  On value in principle, the abstractions that are en vogue (usually assuming that value will be ~~straightforwardly~~ \[edit: trivially\] tractable to reductionism, or even that we're almost there, etc.) seem just transparently wrong to me, yes, on the basis of my """meditation practice."""
    1.  Furthermore, the apprehensions of value that I encounter seem basically cartoonish and grotesque, and I take the fact that people find these compelling or resonant as yet more evidence that something has gone very wrong.
    2.  No, I don't think I've just gotten memed into Buddhism, I think Buddhism is probably *wrong.*

That said, I both don't trust that Maple as an organization or more importantly as a spiritual community has its head screwed on straight to be able to apprehend the truth, in a way I would recognize or agree with. They *also* seem tied in knots, with their own packet of institutional and lineage trauma, and I don't really want to see their schtick diffused into my communities and the broader culture.

One common feature of critiques of Maple which is especially frustrating to me, especially from ex Maplers, is that they can only be made by recourse to some secular liberal scientism, and refuse to meet Maple and Soryu, as they say, "where they're at." To be clear, I haven't done that here either, and maybe doing so could be a life's work, and probably not mine.

I'll add that I think rats are largely already doing their job here, and I don't really think that "direct apprehension of goodness" or whatever is going to solve alignment. Nonetheless I'm still deeply sympathetic to something at least adjacent to Maple's perspective, which is a large part of why I've stuck around all this hippy bs for so long.

[^s9uewl0rtm]: I have three in mind, whom I won't name, but just to be explicit I'm not counting @habryka here.  

[^fwgk9dkfzuo]: Also just to note, the Aella post from 2021 was probably fine, though her post was actually just "maybe this is bad? I'm not sure" (with a followup a month later of "actually I think it's probably fine").  

[^4bosqnjyswm]: Maple isn't technically "in the lineage" of Rinzai, and doesn't have any Zen lineage-holders, but is imo certainly practicing Rinzai in spirit, though they're careful not to use the language or branding of Zen.