Set a Yoda Timer and share the most important idea you haven’t had time to express. Five minutes is all you get.

Phew, okay, you asked for it. Since I only get five minutes I'm not going to filter for niceness.

Most people, including and especially most rationalists, are disconnected from an incredibly important part of what it means to be human, which for lack of a better word I'll call the soul. The soul is the part of you that you're talking to when you're doing Focusing in a particular way. It's where great art comes from. It's where the power that comes from having something to protect comes from. The nondegenerate form of circling is learning how to communicate soul-to-soul. It may or may not have something to do with the enteric nervous system.

Yoda Timed (plus an extra 30 seconds at the end to finish up, and then another minute to edit):

There is a type of diversity that is super important for communities. It isn't race or gender, and it isn't even belief/ tribe. It has more to do with having lots of Different Types of People.

If your car breaks down, is there a mechanic in your community you can trust to not screw you over? If everyone is making high salaries, who in your community would be available to dog-sit in your home for twenty bucks a night?

This is one reason why I don't think the Archipelago solution will work. It is even further sub-dividing an already homogenous group. Let's say some people are more of the social sort, and some people are more of the intellectual conversation sort. The social sorts will hold parties that won't have the interesting conversations they desire. The intellectual sorts will have to be intellectual by themselves since they aren't the "arrange a gathering" type.

This also leads to the (erroneous) assumption that because the rationality community consists primarily of Type X of person, that that specific type of person must be inherently better at rationality as a whole.

I think people often worship their problems, and this directly ties into this post. Eliezer covered this with Musashi’s proverb of how one should strike the enemy rather than their blade:

The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him.

I noticed this today at martial arts when sparring someone with four times my experience; I was so intimidated that all my strikes were aimed at their guard! There was no way I was going to score a point unless they moved into my kicks. This was ridiculous. I fixed it and actually landed a few blows (to be sure, I would have gotten rolled if they actually tried).

It’s been said before, it’s been said by this very post, and yet there is still value in repeating the idea once again: do not worship your problems. You may have read this post and thought, "gee, I’m not like alkjash, there’s no way I’d win that competition". Maybe so, but I am confident that there are problems you could easily decimate if you let yourself win.

Strike true, or don’t strike at all.

Most important idea huh?

Here goes nothin'..

I think that while the community in general has a large amount of declarative information. A very small amount of it is actually put into procedural format. We have repertoires of information and expertise, we can do some really cool things with our minds when we properly use them. However, we are missing a curriculum. We are missing a centralized place where a repository of literally all the most useful information lies. We have no textbook. We have pieces like Hammertime which try to amend some of this with daily exercises and motivational blurbs to reinforce actual practice. We have the sequences, which do a good job of laying down epistemic hygiene and probabilistic thinking. But even the sequences still failed in certain ways. There are few practice problems, there are few guided opportunities to attempt what you just read. We have certain groups like CFAR's rationality checklist (imo only really covers epistemic hygiene) and the applied cannon. But these are not sufficient.

Jeez that was stressful. I went about 32 seconds over the time limit, but cutting off mid-sentence sounded like a bad time

Also, links were only added after I finished.

Also also, this is not a literal endorsement of my beliefs about the state of rationality. That was an attempt for me to push as much of this idea out of my head as possible in five minutes, so there's probably [75%] going to be some bad wording or misrepresentation or straight up falsity. But that was my best shot.

The episodic (Diachronic Done Right) link points to a 404. I tried searching via google and couldn't find anything -- any chance it was moved or otherwise still exists? It sounds pretty interesting and I'd like to read it if possible.

One of the mantras that’s been very useful to me recently is ‘Progress isn’t Linear’.I often find that when I’m trying to fix bugs, I will give up if I miss a few days or run into a problem I don’t know how to solve. ‘Progress isn’t Linear’ reminds me that it’s okay to have problems and I can try again.

I was lazily walking home from the dentist's today, reading this post and mulling over a technical problem. I had had a few good ideas, but nothing I felt was sufficient. I made myself an ultimatum: "find a tractable solution in 5 minutes or someone you care about dies".${}^1$ Lo and behold, I had a good answer within 2 minutes, after having thought about it idly for two hours.

${}^1$ Probably too extreme for many people, but it worked for me; I was able to put myself in that situation and confident that I wouldn't suffer mental harm from doing so. Please, don't do this if you don't think the results would be good for you and your situation.

Based on this, I decided to see how fast I could write. I set 5 minute timers, with the initial goal of writing 400 words in each 5 minute block. I got closer to 200 words in 5 minutes, but with four 5-minute timers, I wrote a 900-word post [LW · GW] in half an hour

I grew up in Oakland, but didn't return after college. Looking at California as it was then and as it's changed since I've left, I keep feeling like housing policy is really the nexus of so many different problems (and that this is true nationwide as well). We're struggling with homelessness, high costs of living, climate change, wildfires etc., and housing has such a big role to play in all of those. We make new housing construction so hard, not just with zoning but with lot size and coverage restrictions, parking requirements, and arduous consultation and permitting processes. So many of the most desirable neighborhoods in the country, Greenwich Village, Rittenhouse Square etc. would be illegal to build today! Hard to build housing means rising rents, rising rents mean high cost of living and people being pushed into homelessness. People moving to exurbs add carbon emissions, and low density inside cities chokes public transit systems that can't get a critical mass of riders. As we push farther into urban-wilderness boundaries, we put more people at risk in wildfires. I'm not by any means the first person to say this, but I just wish more people could see the whole web of connections.

Phew that was hard, I ended up taking about an extra 30 seconds to get it done, but it's a good exercise in just putting words down and not spending too much time searching for perfection. 

Idea I haven’t had time to express:

My brand of social anxiety (so I’m assuming others have it too) might come from the combinatorial explosion of more people in a group - thus more paths of information flows. I find it very easy to talk to someone 1 on 1, and I can usually have a good conversation with anyone. But once the group gets a bit bigger, I think I get a bit scrambled by trying to simulate all of the potential flows of information and feedback loops.

I think this is where politics (at a very basic level) can come from - once you hit 4 people in a group, you have 24* different permutations/factions/sub-groups.

So my thinking here is that I might be using an inefficient “theory of mind simulator” for more complicated scenarios, but I’m also interested in the System Theory of small groups (like bands).

*(I think?)

That was tough! I took 7 minutes. Thank you for prompting me to think about that, I want to learn more and flesh it out. I’m circling around something but haven’t quite captured it yet.

There is a very helpful model of the human:
= a person has needs
there are approximating lists - https://www.cnvc.org/training/resource/needs-inventory
- whenever need is met, we generate pleasant feelings
- whenever need is not met, we generate unpleasant feeling

- paying attention to feelings can help us discover unmet needs, even if we aren't initially conscious of them

= there is an important difference between 'a strategy' and 'a need'
understanding of which can change behavior significantly

"need" is something that can be satisfied in many ways.
model proposes, that if we don't fixate on the strategy and satisfy the need in a different way
it will be just as good.

with clear understanding of these things lots of conflicts can be solved.
conflict is often when people try to satisfy their needs with strategies that don't satisfy needs of another.

focusing on needs and not on strategies can help us find different ways that satisfy all included.

This is applicable to sub-minds or sub-agents within one person.

Some needs are overlooked by society.
E.g my need for being seen, for friendly acknowledgement of my (light) struggles is unsatisfied at this moment.
To the extent that I initially thought to dedicate idea of "me wanting more understanding, and being afraid to ask for it" as the most important.

(NVC in general turned out to be a very important tool for me)

One important idea that I have not yet had time to share widely, explained in five minutes:

What happens if we assume that a comfortable life and reproduction are inviolable priviledges, and imagine a world where these are (by the magic of positing) guaranteed never to be violated for any human? This suggests that the number of humans would increase exponentially, without end, until eventually some point is hit where the energy and resources available in the universe, available at the reach of mankind, is less than the resources needed to provide a comfortable life to every person. Therefore, there can exist no world where both reproduction and a comfortable life are guaranteed for all individuals, unless we happen to live in a world where there is infinite energy (negentropy) and resources.

---

The explanation might not be perfect, and the important implications that I believe follow may not be clear from this, but this is a principle that I often find myself meditating upon.

Were long-standing research problems actually ever presented at IMO? AFAIK, problems featured there already have solutions.