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Your description is beautiful in the sense that you use the word :) thank you for sharing
"pain and pain receptor spread across and through animal bodies basically is like a currency for the evolutionary perspective... so species can pay for survival with more pain(receptors)"
I found this interesting to mull on, an interesting property of pleasure and pain is acting as a universal measure of value, making trade-offs easier
I love "divine carrot" as a term! I think a lot about what it would mean to totally replace stick as motivation, like societies getting off of "burning coal indoors for warmth" maybe humans can "get off burning suffering for motivation"
Ha, maybe! Seems like while we're here though we might as well be working out way down the list of "ideas that might change everything". People report trying a lot of things and then hitting on something that works (like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fFY2HeC9i2Tx8FEnK/my-resentful-story-of-becoming-a-medical-miracle)
Ha, thank you! It slipped my mind, I've just added it :)
Thank you for writing this, I found it really valuable!
Noted, thank you for the feedback
Amazing work, this is really important meta problem
From memory the first part was something Richard Bartlett tweeted, the second was my addendum 😄.
Glad you liked them 😊
I'm tipsy and on a train, so I shall help you
sit down at a computer
open a blank document
call to mind your beloved
bring into your heart the way they make you feel
and then just type a stream of conciousness
tell the bouncer of your mind to take a break
and just type words, they don't have to make any sense at all
and just keep going
if you follow that vein down, you'll strike on high-minded sentiments worth sharing at a wedding
Expertps from things I've squiriled away under "marriage and relationships" that might be relevant to others
- "loving someone is creating a context for their growth, fostering a deep well of reciprocal good will"
- https://xkcd.com/2386/
- "Relationship advice from my wise nonna. Deeply in love with husband for 60 years. After he came back from the war he was suffering from PTSD, he needed a lot of support. But she knew that they still had shared values and dreams, and she clung on to that, and nursed him back to health. This shows we can connect with people at a deeper level, not just the surface behaviour.
- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PySEyxTKh5hzDeK9y/my-marriage-vows
- "I swear
Whatever aid you ask of me, I shall render it
Whoever you ask me to be, I shall endeavour to become" - "this seems very new to you
but seeing someone you like and building a life with them is as old as the seasons changing
humans arn't as good at it as we used to be, because we need each other less
but this hides the fact that we still desperately need other people, people who will be close with us
your branches have intertwined, and if you're brave and determined they will grow
you will grow so tall, and so vast, and the branches of your love will hold so much
they will hold your long lives, they will hold the lives of your children the lives of your friends"
Links I've been collecting for when I get around to trying to ansewr this question for myself:
* "MDMA Solo" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25974701
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19997984
* https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/how-i-attained-persistent-self-love
* https://twitter.com/m_ashcroft/status/1486398240643760133
* https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZbgCx2ntD5eu8Cno9/how-to-be-happy
* https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/well-being
* https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tEDXpFgsHsm5T8sWz/app-and-book-recommendations-for-people-who-want-to-be
* that alicorn luminosity sequence
* https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BfTW9jmDzujYkhjAb/you-are-probably-underestimating-how-good-self-love-can-be
* https://kajsotala.fi/2017/07/how-i-found-fixed-the-root-problem-behind-my-depression-and-anxiety-after-20-years/
* https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j3QDAqSQFi4BpHxQK/a-guide-for-productivity-2
* https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iYR9hKzTKGhZwTPWK/meaningful-rest
* https://alexvermeer.com/life-hacking/
* https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLSJHJzRjLjRuQ3us/how-feeling-more-secure-feels-different-than-i-expected
https://qualiacomputing.com/2021/04/04/* buddhist-annealing-wireheading-done-right-with-the-seven-factors-of-awakening/
* https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/i2Q3DTsQq9THhFEgR/introducing-effective-self-help
I've been thinking about this notion a great deal thanks so much for posting! I also have an intuition towards that which is good being non-arbitrary, akin to pi or gravity.
This gives me hope on how AGI might play out, but I'm aware we can't be certain this is the case until we have a proven theory of value a la the symetry theory of valence, and maybe even then we couldn't be sure any sufficiently capable mind would be exposed to the same dynamics humans are.
re the first question I assumed it was asking "what are you symathetic to" rather than "what is", more than any particular view I'm dubious of anyone who's feels 100% confident in their view on the nature of conciousness
Thank you, I thought so too 😊
And yeah, case clinics have given me a lot of value. If something like it is emerging naturally amoung your friends, then they sound like great friends!
If you do try to expressly instantiate a case clinic with the steps I'd be curious to hear how it goes. I've been surprised at the effect setting an explicit format can have on how it feels to be in a group. Something about creating common knowledge on where we're all supposed to be directing our attention (and with what intention), can be really powerful. Thinking about it now I suppose this is how DnD works 😄
ha don't worry it basically is 😄, it's just that (for me at least) the notion I could put effort into making strong 1-1 connections with people and forming intimate small groups online wasn't really something that occurred to me to do before I started reading about microsolidarity.
May also be worth noting that the microsolidarity framework is about a bunch of other stuff beyond just crews and case clinics, notably dynamics that come into play once you try to take a bunch of crews and form a larger group of ~150 or so people out of them.
I agree with the content of your comment but the framing gives me a sense of bad faith, and makes me uncomfortable.
If I put a lot of time into a post-mortem detailing how an 8 year project I put a lot into went wrong, and then the top comment was someone summing up what I'd done in an uncharitable paragraph saying things like "making stuff up" and "no shit sherlock" I'd feel like I'd tried to do a good thing for the discourse at large and was defected against.
To echo others, thank you for putting your time and effort into this, I found it coherent and valuable. As an international rat/EA who's only context for Leverage was Zoe's post, this fleshed out my understanding of what you were trying to do in a helpful way and gave me a lot to chew on regarding my own thoughts on ideological communities.
Regarding: "Why do people seem to hate us?"
After reading Zoe's post I had a very negative view of Leverage and Geoff, after some introspection here is my best guess as to why.
Growing up religious, I'm very aware that my individuality can be radically subordinated by:
- Potent ideas
- Potent community
And when those two are mixed in the form of ideological communities it's powerful and it's intoxicating. And like most intoxicating and powerful things, there is a great potential for harm. Thus whenever I find myself moving in a group of people high on ideas and connection, there's a voice in the back of my mind constantly asking.
Is this a cult yet?
Is this a cult yet?
Is this a cult yet?
This is a voice I know for a fact is speaking in the back of several EAs and rationalists I know personally. And I'd be shocked if anyone who's had a brush with the failure modes of ideological community and finds themsevles in a reading group for The Precipice isn't thinking that to themselves.
So when I read of an insular group in the memeplex I call home getting high on ideas and each-other, and then started talking about "magic" and "demons" my strong reaction was of fear. It's happening, kill it with fire before it spreads and ruins everything.
I'm currently agnostic on whether leveraging the power of potent community and ideas is something that can be channeled safely, but I don't blame you guys for trying; and I recognise that my initial reactions to the topic of Leverage and Geoff Anders were mixed up in with a non-trivial amount of counter productive fear.
It gave me an emotional intuition for what more progress along the "distance from violence" scale might look like. If we don't even have to pull the trigger anymore and can be assured no unintended casualties, maybe it's more pressure towards the equilibrium of the state relying on violence to govern, and then to suppress the dissent that violence generates with more violence.
I see two independent ideas in this post
Insidious Inception
- People communicate thoughts into each others minds
- This can be direct *"I do not want to date you"*
- Or indirect *"Sorry I'm too busy this week" with no effort to find a different time*
- Saying A to indirectly communicate B can:
- Obscure an intention that would be obvious were B said directly
- Make it harder to refute B, because the idea that A -> B needs to first be established
- Delicately communicate B without indirectly implying something that would have been implied had you said it directly
Core thoughts
- You have ideas that are small and do not effect your base perception of reality, we call this trivia/facts/knowledge.
- You have other ideas that are big, and construct your reality in the way that's hard to appreciate without medication/psychedelics/hippie workshops. We call this worldview/identity/schemas.
Mixed to form a very third idea:
The norms of healthy communication can be especially abused by someone doing this "insidious inception" to add or alter someones "core thoughts". If someone is doing this to you (deliberately or otherwise), using the norms of healthy communication you use normally to get people to stop doing things you don't like may not work, and instead make you vulnerable.
Wait hold on, I thought this was a feature of QV that made it well suited to funding public goods 😄? (The more individuals each find the same thing beneficial, the more it must be a "public good" and thus underfunded)
Thanks for your reply :) as in many things, QRI lays out my position on this better than I'm able to 😅
https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/a-primer-on-the-symmetry-theory-of-valence
Love it! I've been thinking a lot recently about the role of hedonics in generally intelligent systems. afaik we don't currently try to induce reward or punishment in any artifically intelligent system we try to build, we simply re-jig it until it produces the output we want. It might be that "re-jigging" does induce a hedonic state, but I see no reason assume it.
I can't imagine how a meta optimiser might "create from scratch" a state which is intrinsically rewarding or adversive. In our own case I feel evolution must have recruited some property of the universe that was already lying around, something that is just axiomatically motivating to anything concious in the same way that the speed of light is just what is it.
At what age did you start trusting them do things like only crossing at approved intersections?
Out of curiosity, does all of the difference between the value of a child drowning in front of you and a child drowning far away come from uncertainty?
I enjoyed this take https://www.roote.co/wisdom-age
Agree or disagree: "There may be a pattern wherein rationalist types form an insular group to create and apply novel theories of cognition to themselves, and it gets really weird and intense leading to a rash of psychological breaks."
I empathise with the feeling of slipperyness in the OP, I feel comfortable attributing that to the subject matter rather than malice.
If I had an experience that matched zoe's to the degree jessicata's did (superficially or otherwise) I'd feel compelled to post it. I found it helpful in the question of whether "insular rationalist group gets weird and experiences rash of psychotic breaks" is a community problem, or just a problem with stray dude.
Thanks for sharing, I'm about to move into a season of more time for hobby code and this seems like good advice to keep in mind
I've never seen that feeling described quite that way, I like it!
Out of curiousity, how do you feel about the proclaimed self evidence of "the cognito", "I think therefore I am"?
You're quite welcome 🙂
For existence it's "I think therefore I am", just seems like an unavoidable axiom of experience. It feels like wherever I look I'm staring at it.
For conciousness I listened to an 80k hours podcast with David Chalmers on The Hard Problem and ever since then it's been self evident there's something that it's like to be me. It felt like something that had to be factored out of my experience and pointed at for me to see. But it seems as self evident as existing.
For wellbeing and suffering it took some extreme moments for me to start thinking about the fact that some things feel good and bad and that might be like, quite important actually. Also with the realisation that I never decided to find wellbeing good and suffering bad they just are.
For causality I admit it's not as clear cut, and I only really thought about it yesterday reading this article. But in this moment I'm running an operating system shaped by the past. In that past I experienced the phenomena of prediction and causality. This moment seems no different to that moment so it feels natural to unambiguous act as though this moment will effect the next.
Hmm that last explanation feels much more unwieldy than existence, conciousness, and valence. Perhaps it doesn't quite deserve the category of self evident, and is more like n+1 induction.
I greatly enjoyed this, thanks for writing it. I matched it to one of the questions in my own personal pantheon of mysteries.
What does it mean for a belief to be self-evident?
It seems self evidently true that I exist, that I am conscious, suffering is bad, wellbeing is good, and the next moment of experience will be the nesesary consequence of this moment.
I can point to the raw justification for these facts in my experience, and I just assume that other people have similar justifications embedded within their subjective perspective. But it's still an intellectual mystery to me why "it's self evident" feels like a satisfying justification. As you say maybe that too is self evident ad infinitum
Are the cross overs with the book "The Mind Illuminated" here coincidence? If not very excited to see a mash up of two of my favorite texts!!
Thank you for taking the time to write this, I enjoyed reading it and it made me think some interesting thoughts :)
I'm very open to the idea that I've seen something that wasn't there and or wasn't intended 😄, let me see if I can spesifically find what made me feel that way.
Okay, so I have that reaction to paragraphs like this:
White fragility is a sort of defensiveness that takes the form of a variety of strategies that white people deploy when we are confronted with how we participate in and perpetuate racismS. Whites use these strategies to deflect or avoid such a confrontation and to defend a comfortable, privileged vantage point from which race is “not an issue” (at least to us who benefit from it).
and
So if a white person should not pretend to be racially blank, and yet as DiAngelo reminds us “white identity is inherently racist,” what is a white person to do? DiAngelo’s way to thread the needle is this: “I strive to be ‘less white.’ ”
What I hear when I read this is "you are inherently white, and to be white is inheriently bad" thought it's possible I'm pattern matching this to ideas of being and judgement that I grew up with in Church i.e "you are inherently a sinner". Do you think this reading is totally unmerited?
And those first two points I'm on board with, but it's the flavour of the third point that I react to because if I gave someone a bundle of ideas that I reasonably expected to be painful to process I'd try to deliver that message with as much overt kindness and recognition of their pain as I could.
And I'd expect flat statements like "try to drop your defensiveness" or "don't take it so personally" to just make it harder to process and cause pain I guess 😅. Expecially when the receipients are disposed to think you already don't like them.
(edited to tone down a little)
This was quite painful to read, and I see the dynamic of these ideas as problematic.
First, possibly the most painful idea for any human to entertain: "A large part of your core identity is inherently very bad in ways you can't see"
and then second: "The pain and fear you feel in response to this news is a sign of inherent weakness (fragility) and further proves your guilt"
and lastly: "I'm not *trying* to make you feel bad, suppress that pain and take off your silly sack cloth and ashes"
"You are inherently bad" -> "Your pain on hearing that is weakness and proof of guilt" -> "This dynamic is not problematic you're being weird for over-reacting"
That's very harsh thing to say to someone and then act like they are weird for having an adverse reaction.
I share your frustration at the book because I'm really sympathetic to the ideas that:
- systemic racism is an issue
- confusing racismF for racismS is a problem worth exploring
- it's encumbant upon me to look for unjust ways society has been set up that benifit me
- the inherent pain majority groups face in grappling with these complex issues is a blocker to progress.
But I feel such sorrow at the idea that the solution to this dynamic is to position that pain itself as an insidious and problematic weakness. And to try and crop dust a generation of young people with that memeplex? That will lead to trouble.
If you want people to hold a painful and nuanced set of complex ideas and grapple with them they need to be held, seen, and supported.
The problem your trying to solve is not how to change your mother's beliefs. Your problem is how to communicate that she's making you feel negatively and if the two of you are going to have a relationship she needs to change her behaviour.
Trying to have a system 2 scientific discussion with your mother in this scenario is playing water polo with a lead ball. You may go in with a clear head and a scientific argument and manage to throw the ball. But 3 sentences in and you're both going to be below water, having an emotional system 1 conversation.
What is an emotional conversation? It's a conversation in which:
-
The goals of the participants are not actually to present facts or reasoning about the world (e.g "homeopathy does not do the things you claim and here's why"), but to communicate how the actions of another makes them feel ("when I say that homeopathy is not for me but you push it on me it makes me feel disrespected and frustrated")
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The skills needed to facilitate the conversation are less reasoning and language skills, and more being able to express how your feeling in realtime, communicate you boundaries, being sensitive to how the other person is feeling without taking responsibility for it, and be vulnerable if that's appropriate.
This is all easier said than done, especially when it comes to family. Some things you can do to practice a conversation like this:
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Have it in your head, and imagine your mother saying whatever would maximally trigger you and how you might respond with emotion communication and boundry setting. ("I feel disrespected" -> "it's not my fault you won't see the light of homeopathy" -> "now I'm feeling like you don't care that you're making me feel this way")
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Role play with a therapist or trusted friend. Some universities or work places offer free therapists that could help you if you're insurance won't cover it.
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Read books on the subject like "non violent communication"
Good luck my friend!
That tweet on Australia might be a little misleading. The vaccination board's official statement as far as I read is that an under 40 year old is more likley to die of an AZ vaccine than covid given the current covid prevalance and death rate in Australia, which is virtually non-existant. They released a pdf to this effect weighting the risks and their plan is to have everyone under 40 vaccinated on pfizer by the end of the year.
Betting that there won't be an outbreak before then is still likley the wrong risk to be taking, but it's less dumb than just saying AZ is more dangerous than covid full stop 😄. Indeed the Prime Minister has drawn the ire of the vacination board by opening up AZ to all ages rather than just over 40ies (apparently older people have half the risk of blood clots and obviously more risk of dying from covid).
If I was in charge of the country I'd do the same, and if I was being the game theory I wanted to see in the world I'd get the AZ now. But living in a city that has no covid and just does a 3 day lockdown until it's gone every time there's community transmission (4 or so times since march 2020 pretty evenly distributed) I'm weighing up whether to wait until either another outbreak or pfizer becomes available in a couple months.
This is my great hope also.
There is a compelling narrative to be told around coordination as the super power of humanity that uses the examples of language, printed word and the internet (which are really bundles of smaller technological steps analogous to say zero knowledge proofs in crypto) as positive examples of social technology making things better.
As an enterprising EA in my 20ies I feel the pull of this narrative when thinking about how I might spend my professional efforts, but it remains to be seen if it will survive deeper thought whatever cheap tests I can think to run.
I see landmark as entering into a symbiotic relationship with a parasitic set of memes. It's a life changing experience for a lot of people, but Landmark wants to grow and it'll attempt to drain your resources (money, volunteering time, and social capital) to do so.
I had a coworker who was obsessed with landmark, and eventually wore some of us down to attend the intro night. I too was impressed at how psychoactive the environment was, and it seemed to be really helping people! But I felt concerned for many of the same reasons as OP.
There's a lot of parallels here with psychedelic therapy. One, it's cheaper and faster than years of CBT. And two you are in essence letting someone really heat up your mind (especially your self conception) to allow you to anneal out of sticky maladaptive local maximas. As OP says, they induce this open state with:
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Exhaustion from long hours and homework
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Putting you on stage in front of a crowd and then manipulating the crowd's response to you. (i.e. manipulating social reality)
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Installing active memes with good concept handles. Whether or not these memes reflect reality the mind responds to them in powerful and predictable ways if delivered in the right context (as in Christianity)
Unfortunately while you're in this state landmark also tries to install a powerful evangelical perogative to sign-up everyone you know, and a belief that if you really cared about your continued development you would take the subsequent (also really expensive) courses.
This makes sense, as organisations who find this technology and don't do this will be out competed by ones that do. But you're still giving root access to your mind over to an organisation that wants to use your resources to grow.
My coworker is in a lot of tax debt and yet has spent tens of thousands on landmark courses. I took this as a warning and just did therapy and acid instead.
Thank you very much for taking the time to write this. Scott Alexander and Glen Wyel are two of my intellectual hero's, they've both done a lot for my thinking in economics, coordination, and just how to go about a dialectic intellectual life in general.
So I was also dismayed (to an extent I honestly found surprising) when they couldn't seem to find a good faith generative dialogue. If these two can't then what hope is there for the average Red vs Blue tribe member?
This post have me a lot of context though, so thanks again 😊
Is stock in a managed vanguard index fund cheating 😅? I guess that's assuming vanguard will last to manage it and that there's no socialist style economic reform that makes owning companies less valuable.
Government bonds maybe?
Huh, you are correct that was indeed my intention 😄 no idea how I managed that.
Is stock in a managed vanguard index fund cheating 😅? I guess that's assuming vanguard will last to manage it and that there's no socialist style economic reform that makes owning companies less valuable.
Government bonds maybe?
This is a nice metaphor in general for top down vs bottom up networks with some natural horizontal separation, I like it. Does this appear in the literature or is this just something you think about?
I find this sentiment a little confusing, as it seems to me the subjective experience of suffering is the ultimate bedrock of any idea that understands suffering as bad? If I had no personal experience of suffering or wellbeing I can't imagine how something like utilitarianism might move me.
Or are you saying while yes ultimately an abstract understanding of suffering rests on a subjective experience of it, pumping the understanding of the subjective experience won't lead to more understanding of it in the abstract in the way EA needs to?
Made me laugh out loud twice, I enjoyed this post 😊
Technology that "factors stance space" as pol.is tries to do and finds consensus excites me!
I'm very sympathetic to the idea that the ability of modern western countries to cohere / find consensus is a bottlenecked lever in progress. Finding pareto optimal sources of agreement may be a good way to help this.
Aw, she did have a friend all along!
"Performative effort is not effort at all"
I've seen people sacrafice a lot to gain the appearance effort. It looked legitimately painful and I think it was.
To me to shows a willingness to endure physical and emotional pain rather than the mental pain of grappling with uncertainty. All they can do is signal that they do care on some level
Love it!
To mirror what I got:
Institutions are structured groups of agent pulling in the same direction to gain redistributable value.
They work by aligning the incentives (especially the long term ones) of the agents with the institution through the technology of an institutional culture to provide guidance and help police detection.
An additional point I've been thinking about since I read Sapiens:
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This cultural process recruits map/territory machinery to help people make sense of it. "Journalistic Ethics" is presented as an objective value like "Honour" or "Privilege"
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From the inside "I am a valued member of a cohesive and effective institution" can feel more motivating than "I am working to provide this institution long term value that it will redistribute to me"