LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I think Valentine gave a good description of psychopath as "people who are naturally unconstrained by social pressures and have no qualms breaking even profound taboos if they think it'll benefit them", where just eyeballing human nature, that seems to be a "real" category that would show up as a distinct blip in a graph of human behaviour and not just "how constrained by social pressures people are is a normally distributed property and people get called psychopaths in linear proportion to how far left they are on the bell curve".

Another interesting idea on these lines is a steam airship. Water molecules have less molecular weight than air, so a steam airship gets more lift from steam than from air at the same temperature. 

Theoretically it's possible to make a wet air balloon. Something that floats just because it's full of very humid air. This is how clouds stay up despite the weight of the water drops. But even in hot dry conditions, the lift is tiny.

I really do think this term would be very useful if it could be brought into common usage. Here is two examples I met from just the last 12 hours:

Yesterday I was eating tabletop raclette (kind of like mixed grill) with my family, and my wife tried to tell my son that he shouldn't try to just fry a lot of mushrooms together, that wouldn't be delicious. He got so sad because his shifgrethor was violated while he was having fun trying to cook real food for the first time.
A few hours ago, my wife told me about an article about proffesional test takers in China, who are paid by schools to take the university entrance exam multiple times, thus artificially inflating the schools statistics. I immediatly annoyed her by starting a long theory about how to optimally game the system, instead of just respecting shifgrethor and saying that it sounded really interesting.

Only look at the spoiled text if you are waiving shifgrethor!

::::spoiler  I think the word shifgrethor is too hard to pronounce to ever catch on. ::::

Now I can make the question more precise - why do you think it's safe to have more access to your thoughts and feelings than your subconscious gave you? And how exactly do you plan to deal with all the hostile telepaths out there (possibly including parts of yourself?).

An answer I'd give is that for a lot of people, most of the hostile telepaths are ultimately not that dangerous if you're confident enough to be able to deal with them. As Valentine mentioned, often it's enough to notice that you are actually not anymore in the kind of a situation where the strategies would be necessary.

Unfortunately, many of the strategies also behave in such a way as to make themselves necessary, or to prevent the person from noticing that they could be abandoned:

• Maybe I had a parent that wanted me to be dependent on them, so that they could control me. Even if I manage to break away from that parent, I may still have the belief that if someone wants to control me, then I have to genuinely believe that I cannot escape their control or they'll hurt me. This belief will tend to get me into abusive relationships... and then that strategy again becomes necessary for protecting me while in the relationship, when I would never have gotten into that relationship in the first place if not for that very strategy!
• Maybe I believe that if I cause someone else any discomfort, I have to say I'm really sorry and experience genuine distress. As a result, I always execute this strategy, believing it to be crucial for my safety. If I were to ever not execute it, I might notice that some people are actually okay with me not reacting in such an extreme way... but because I always execute it, I never get the chance to notice that it'd be safe not to.

One of the ways by which these kinds of strategies get implemented [? · GW] is that the psyche develops a sense of extreme discomfort around acting in the "wrong" way, with successful execution of that strategy then blocking that sense of discomfort. For example, the thought of not apologizing when you thought someone might be upset at you might feel excruciatingly uncomfortable, with that discomfort subsiding once you did apologize.

I believe this is also related to the way that awareness narrows around the strategy - feeling the original discomfort is very unpleasant, and the mind tends to want to contract awareness in ways that keep discomfort out. If awareness to broaden, then it would become aware of the unpleasant thing that the strategy is trying to push out of awareness. So for example, in the center of that discomfort of not-yet-having-apologized might be a memory of a time when you weren't really sorry and your mother was upset at you... and if you were to instead execute the strategy of desperately apologizing, then that would feel somewhat less painful and your awareness would naturally contract around that act of desperate apology, causing the original memory and the pain associated with that to drop away.

And something that practices like meditation can do is to bring the original discomfort into awareness in such a way that it can gradually stop feeling so unpleasant. (Though this can also go badly and bring something painful into awareness faster than the person is capable of dealing with it.) If that happens so that the original pain stops feeling so painful, then the self-deceptive strategies can stop creating situations where they perpetuate their own need to exist.

Now that's not to say that you would be guaranteed to be safe. A brief discussion I had on Twitter:

Me: I wonder to what extent significant parts of Buddhism got so focused on renunciation because that's the "safe" kind of mental transformation in the sense of not upsetting secular rulers.

While the kind of practice that dismantles societal programming and makes you go out in the world to change things, can easily become a threat for established power structures and a target for being rooted out.

Societal forces exerting evolutionary pressure on spiritual practice and selecting it for increased harmlessness/renunciation.

(Parallels of this idea in the context of corporate mindfulness training programs and such left as an exercise for the reader.)

(Or for that matter, parallels in the context of notions like "our group of ten people meditating is by itself an act of healing the world", which have some truth to them but also conveniently keep any change pretty localized and non-threatening.)

David Chapman: Yes this is very much the case in the history of sutrayana vs vajrayana. Vajrayana was typically reserved for the aristocratic elite, for this reason, and intermittently also appropriated by anti-establishment forces when they could.

Romeo Stevens (@romeostevensit [LW · GW] ): The ambitious sects were indeed wiped out

Aneesh Mulye: This wasn't so much of a thing in India; yes, it happened, but engagement with the world and with rulers was def a part of Indian Buddhist (and Shaiva, and most if not all other) traditions.

One solution involved only an elite having access to the hardcore agentifying stuff.

The extermination of all Indian Buddhism (what's called 'Tibetan' today, but that's just because it survived only in Tibet), and all Tantrik institutions (and Indic, generally), engaged with the world as they were, at the hands of the hateful Muslims, is why this didn't survive.

So apparently there were times in history when meditators did get a lot more confidence and self-insight, used that to become more powerful until they were seen as threats and wiped out, and that's why so many of the surviving meditative traditions are focused on things like withdrawing from the world and living as ascetics.

Closeness is the operating drive, but it's not the operating telos. The drive is towards some sort of state or feeling--of relating, standing shoulder-to-shoulder looking out at the world, standing back-to-back defending against the world; of knowing each other, of seeing the same things, of making the same meaning; of integrated seeing / thinking. But the telos is tikkun olam (repairing/correcting/reforming the world)--you can't do that without a shared idea of better.

As an analogy, curiosity is a drive, which is towards confusion, revelation, analogy, memory; but the telos is truth and skill.

In your example, I would say that someone could be struggling with "moral responsibility" while also doing a bunch of research or taking a bunch of action to fix what needs to be fixed; or they could be struggling with "moral responsibility" while eating snacks and playing video games. Vibes are signals and signals are cheap and hacked.

Some belated Author's Notes:

.This was heavily based on several [LW · GW] interesting [? · GW] blog [LW · GW] posts [LW · GW] written by lsusr. All errors are mine.

.I understand prediction markets just well enough to feel reasonably sure this story """makes""" """sense""" (modulo its absurd implicit and explicit premises), but not well enough to be confident I can explain anything in it any further without making a mistake or contradicting myself. Accordingly, I'm falling back on an "if you think you've found a plot hole, try to work it out on your own, and if you can't then I guess I actually did screw up lol" stance.

.The fact that

was an intended part of the narrative and I'm suprised no-one's brought it up yet.

It is worth noting that Ziz has already proposed the same idea in False Faces, although I think Valentine did a better job of systematizing and explaining the reasons for its existence.

Another interesting direction of thought is the connection to Gregory Bateson’s theory that double binds cause schizophrenia. Spitballing here: it could be that a double bind triggers an attempt to construct a "false face" (a self-deceptive module), similar to a normal situation involving a hostile telepath. However, because the double bind is contradictory, the internal mechanism that tries to create the false face to appease the hostile telepath malfunctions, resulting in mental chaos.

I've noticed that the karma system makes me gravitate towards posts of very high karma. Are there low-karma posts that impacted you? Maybe you think they are underrated or that they fail in interesting ways.

Another possibility is Posthuman Technocapital Singularity, everything goes in the same approximate direction, there are a lot of competing agents but without sharp destabilization or power concertation, and Moloch wins. Probably wins, idk

 https://docs.osmarks.net/hypha/posthuman_technocapital_singularity

Like if there's an email I keep freezing around. I can tell there's something there. I might even have some intuitive guesses about what it is!

…but I do not check. I don't introspect on whether my guesses feel right.

Instead, I hypothesize. What hostile telepath problem might someone in my shoes be trying to solve such that this behavior arises?

I tried doing this and it felt promising, and then I noticed a familiar feeling of wanting tell a person affected by my possible self-deception how I'd now solved the problem and would behave differently from now on. And I remembered that on each previous time when I'd had that feeling and told the other person something like that, my behavior had in fact not changed at all as a consequence.

And now I'm chuckling at myself.