LessWrong 2.0 Reader

For the US to undertake such a shift, it would help if you could convince them they'd do better in a secret race than an open one. There are indications that this may be possible, and there are indications that it may be impossible.

I'm listening to an Ecosystemics Futures podcast episode, which, to characterize... it's a podcast where the host has to keep asking guests whether the things they're saying are classified or not just in case she has to scrub it. At one point, Lue Elizondo does assert, in the context of talking to a couple of other people who know a lot about government secrets and in the context of talking about situations where excessive secrecy may be doing a lot of harm, quoting Chris Mellon, "We won the cold war against the soviet union not because we were better at keeping secrets, we won the cold war because we knew how to move information and secrets more efficiently across the government than the russians." I can believe the same thing could potentially be said about China too, censorship cultures don't seem to be good for ensuring availability of information, so that might be a useful claim if you ever want to convince the US to undertake this.

Right now, though, Vance has asserted straight out many times that working in the open is where the US's advantage is. That's probably not true at all, working in the open is how you give your advantage away or at least make it ephemeral, but that's the sentiment you're going to be up against over the next four years.

Hate to be that person, but is that April 18th deadline AoE/PDT/a secret third thing?

Can a Finite-State Fox Catch a Markov Mouse? for more details

Hm. On the one hand, I agree that there are distinct things at play here and share the instinct that it'd be appropriate to have different words for these different things. But on the other hand, I'm not sure if the different words should fall under the umbrella of solitude, like "romantic solitude" and "seeing human faces solitude".

I dunno, maybe it should. After all, it seems that in different conceptualizations of solitude, it's about being isolated from something (others' minds, others' physical presence).

Ultimately, I'm trusting Newport here. I think highly of him and know that he's read a lot of relevant literature. At the same time, I still wouldn't argue too confidently that his preferred definition is the most useful one.

That makes sense. I didn't mean to imply that such an extreme degree of isolation is a net positive. I don't think it is.

That makes sense. Although I think the larger point I was making still stands: that in reading the book you're primarily consuming someone else's thoughts, just like you would be if the author sat there on the bench lecturing you (it'd be different if it were more of a two-way conversation; I should have clarified that in the post).

I suppose "primarily" isn't true for all readers, for all books. Perhaps some readers go slowly enough where they actually spend more of their time contemplating than they do reading, but I get the sense that that is pretty rare.

Cool! I have a feeling you'd like a lot of Cal Newport's work like Digital Minimalism and Deep Work.

When I'm walking around or riding the train, I want to be able to hear what's going on around me.

That makes sense about walking around, but why do you want to hear what's going on around you when you're riding the train?

Yeah, that all makes sense. I think solitude probably exists along a spectrum, where in listening to music maybe you have 8/10 solitude instead of 10/10 but in watching a TV show you only get 2/10. The relevant question is probably "to what extent are the outputs of other minds influencing your thoughts".

Actually, now that I think about it, I wonder why we're focusing on the outputs of other minds. What about other things that influence your thoughts? Like, I don't know, bumble bees flying around you? I'm afraid of bumble bees so I know I'd have trouble focusing on my own thoughts in that scenario.

That said, I'm sure that outputs of other minds are probably a large majority of what is intrusive and prevents you from focusing on your own thoughts. But it still seems to me like the thing we actually care about is being able to focus on your own thoughts, not just reducing your exposure to the outputs of other minds.

Hm. I was actually assuming in this post that the podcasts in question were actually "Effective Information" as opposed to "Trivia" or "Mental Masturbation". The issue is that even if they are "Effective Information", you also need to have solitude in your "diet", and the benefit of additional "Effective Information" probably isn't worth the cost of less solitude.

But I'm also realizing now that much of the time podcasts aren't actually "Effective Information" and are instead something like "Trivia" or "Mental Masturbation". And I see that as a separate but also relevant problem. And I think that carbs is probably a good analogy for that too. Or maybe something like refined sugar. It's a quick hedonic hit and probably ok to have in limited doses, but you really don't want to have too much of it in your diet.