LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I am a little confused as to why Israel does not have the hostages yet. My understanding was that Israel has essentially taken control of Gaza and decimated the Hamas leadership. Who are they even "negotiating" with to secure their release? Why can't the IDF just kidnap and waterboard that person to get the location of the remaining prisoners? Does the person with the authority to make a deal also not know? Are there clandestine cells of Hamas personnel hiding in a basement somewhere waiting for some "signal" from a third party to give up the Israelis?

Ah, yes. Recently I volunteered for a medical research along with 3 other people I know. Two of them dropped out in the middle. I can't imagine how any medical research can be methodologically valid this way. On the other hand, me and the other person stayed there, and it's almost over, so the success rate is 50%.

Somehow I just found out about this. Although this happened within a few minutes of me trying to use it:

OK gotcha. But I can just rephrase slightly, let me try again:

• (B’’) “…Gee, I guess this reprocessing must have been a kind of ‘training / practice / exercise’ during which I could forge new better subconscious habits and associations related to ‘type-of-situation X’ (which used to invoke anxiety). And these new subconscious habits and associations are now serving me well when I encounter type-of-situation X (or anything that vaguely rings of it) an adult context too.”

After all, you can’t form new subconscious habits and associations related to “type-of-situation X” except by making “type-of-situation X” thoughts active somehow during that process. It seems plausible to me that invoking a childhood memory where type-of-situation X triggered unhealthy anxiety would be very effective way to do that.

~~

I think what I’m suggesting is not that different from what you’re suggesting. Maybe the difference is when you wrote “…some specific childhood experiences that had to do with spiders, that seemed to be at the root of the phobia…”.

My mental image is, like, there’s some neuron in the amygdala, and one day in childhood it forms Synapse S connecting some input related to the idea of spiders with some output related to fear reactions. Then the goal for the adult therapy session is to delete Synapse S (or form different connections that counteract its effects, or whatever). Basically, my proposal is:

One day in childhood → Synapse S forms

Adult sees spider → Synapse S → fear reactions

I’m contrasting that with:

[What I don’t believe, but it sounds like maybe you do?] Adult sees spider → childhood memory reactivates, at least a little bit → fear reactions

In other words, I want to say that the childhood experience is “at the root of the phobia” as a matter of the historical record of how Synapse S came to be there, but it’s not “at the root of the phobia” in the sense of the episodic memory itself playing a critical causal role in the real-time anxiety reaction.

…And I’m saying that my hypothesis would nevertheless be compatible with childhood-memory-based therapies being effective, because invoking the actual episodic childhood memory itself, in a therapeutic context, is one possible path to delete or inactivate Synapse S.

Well, hmm, on second thought, I guess both stories are possible, maybe they coexist.

Huh—that sounds fascinatingly akin to this description of how to induce first jhana I read the other day.

I love these quotes too, but while reading them a funny thought struck me. Fantasy terms like "elves" and "orcs" seem normal to us now, but Tolkien basically invented their modern usage. At the time he was writing to his son they would have been very new and only used that way by Tolkien himself.

Substituting Tolkien's terms with equivalents from Starcraft makes one of these passages sound ridiculous:

An ultimately evil job. For we are attempting to conquer Kerrigan with the Hivemind. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Kerrigans, and slowly turn Terrans and Protoss into Zerg. Not that in real life things are as clear cut as in a story, and we started out with a great many Zerg on our side … Well, there you are: an SCV amongst the Hydralisks.

Why is this, and would the passage have sounded just as goofy back in the 1940s?

Is it just because the Starcraft terms are less mainstream? Perhaps sci-fi terms are generally less graceful than fantasy ones? Or maybe Tolkien had a special sense for phrasing and names like "Sauron" and "Urukhai" would have sounded just as profound then as they do now?

Discussed tangible directions for research in agent foundations, which was really useful for helping me find a foothold for what people in this field "actually" work on.

I'm also keen in general of this approach of talking about your plans and progress yearly, I think it would be great if everyone doing important things (research and else) would publish something similar. It helps with perspective building of both the person writing the post itself, but also about how the field has changed as seen through their eyes.

It's not clear that "a human which doesn't care about perceived status" is actually human.  A lot depends on whether you consider the AIs that populate the solar system after biological intelligence is obsolete to be "descendants" or "replacements" of today's humans.

How does this interact with MA's salary transparency laws? If you are in a role where no one else shares your title, then no problem. Otherwise, this could enable an employer to pressure others to take pay cuts or smaller raises, or it could force them to tell prospective new employees a much lower lower bound in the salary range for the role they're applying to.

What dose do you believe to be good for that?