I guess I don't really understand what you're asking. I meant my comment as an answer to this bit in the OP:

I think it's common on LessWrong to think of evolution's selection target as inclusive genetic fitness - that evolution tries to create organisms which make as many organisms with similar DNA to themselves as possible. But what exactly does this select for? 

In that evolution selecting for "inclusive genetic fitness" doesn't really mean selecting for anything in particular; what exactly that ends up selecting for is completely dependent on the environment (where "the environment" also includes the species itself, which is relevant for things like sexual selection or frequency-dependent selection). 

If you fix the environment, assuming for the sake of argument that it's possible to do that, then the exact thing it selects for are just the traits that are useful in that environment.

Do humans have high inclusive genetic fitness?

I think it's a bit of a category mistake to ask about the inclusive fitness of a species. You could calculate the average fitness of an individual within the species, but at least to my knowledge (caveat: I'm not a biologist) that's not very useful. Usually it's individual genotypes or phenotypes within the species that are assigned a fitness.

I've previously argued that genetic fitness is a measure of selection strength, not the selection target. What evolution selects for are traits that happen to be useful in the organism's current environment. The extent to which a trait is useful in the organism's current environment can be quantified as fitness, but fitness is specific to a particular environment and the same trait might have a very different fitness in some other environment.

I think if you have access to a group interested in doing social events with plausible deniability, that group is probably already a place where you should be able to be honest about your beliefs without fear of "cancellation."

You may not know exactly who belongs to that group before going to the event and seeing who shows up.

• Somehow people who are in good physical health wake up each day with a certain amount of restored willpower.  (This is inconsistent with the toy model in the OP, but is still my real / more-complicated model.)

This fits in with opportunity cost-centered and exploration-exploitation -based views of willpower. Excessive focus on any one task implies that you are probably hitting diminishing returns while accumulating opportunity costs for not doing anything else. It also implies that you are probably strongly in "exploit" mode and not doing much exploring. Under those models, accumulating mental fatigue acts to force some of your focus to go to tasks that feel more intrinsically enjoyable rather than duty-based, which tends to correlate with things like exploration and e.g. social resource-building. And your willpower gets reset during the night so that you could then go back to working on those high-opportunity cost exploit tasks again.

I think those models fit together with yours.

(I believe @Kaj_Sotala has written about this somewhere wrt Global Workspace Theory? I found this tweet in the meantime.) 

There's at least this bit from "Subagents, akrasia, and coherence in humans":

One model (e.g. Redgrave 2007, McHaffie 2005) is that the basal ganglia receives inputs from many different brain systems; each of those systems can send different “bids” supporting or opposing a specific course of action to the basal ganglia. A bid submitted by one subsystem may, through looped connections going back from the basal ganglia, inhibit other subsystems, until one of the proposed actions becomes sufficiently dominant to be taken.

The above image from Redgrave 2007 has a conceptual image of the model, with two example subsystems shown. Suppose that you are eating at a restaurant in Jurassic Park when two velociraptors charge in through the window. Previously, your hunger system was submitting successful bids for the “let’s keep eating” action, which then caused inhibitory impulses to be sent to the threat system. This inhibition prevented the threat system from making bids for silly things like jumping up from the table and running away in a panic. However, as your brain registers the new situation, the threat system gets significantly more strongly activated, sending a strong bid for the “let’s run away” action. As a result of the basal ganglia receiving that bid, an inhibitory impulse is routed from the basal ganglia to the subsystem which was previously submitting bids for the “let’s keep eating” actions. This makes the threat system’s bids even stronger relative to the (inhibited) eating system’s bids.

Soon the basal ganglia, which was previously inhibiting the threat subsystem’s access to the motor system while allowing the eating system access, withdraws that inhibition and starts inhibiting the eating system’s access instead. The result is that you jump up from your chair and begin to run away. Unfortunately, this is hopeless since the velociraptor is faster than you. A few moments later, the velociraptor’s basal ganglia gives the raptor’s “eating” subsystem access to the raptor’s motor system, letting it happily munch down its latest meal.

But let’s leave velociraptors behind and go back to our original example with the phone. Suppose that you have been trying to replace the habit of looking at your phone when bored, to instead smiling and directing your attention to pleasant sensations in your body, and then letting your mind wander.

Until the new habit establishes itself, the two habits will compete for control. Frequently, the old habit will be stronger, and you will just automatically check your phone without even remembering that you were supposed to do something different. For this reason, behavioral change programs may first spend several weeks just practicing noticing the situations in which you engage in the old habit. When you do notice what you are about to do, then more goal-directed subsystems may send bids towards the “smile and look for nice sensations” action. If this happens and you pay attention to your experience, you may notice that long-term it actually feels more pleasant than looking at the phone, reinforcing the new habit until it becomes prevalent.

To put this in terms of the subagent model, we might drastically simplify things by saying that the neural pattern corresponding to the old habit is a subagent reacting to a specific sensation (boredom) in the consciousness workspace: its reaction is to generate an intention to look at the phone. At first, you might train the subagent responsible for monitoring the contents of your consciousness, to output moments of introspective awareness highlighting when that intention appears. That introspective awareness helps alert a goal-directed subagent to try to trigger the new habit instead. Gradually, a neural circuit corresponding to the new habit gets trained up, which starts sending its own bids when it detects boredom. Over time, reinforcement learning in the basal ganglia starts giving that subagent’s bids more weight relative to the old habit’s, until it no longer needs the goal-directed subagent’s support in order to win.

Now this model helps incorporate things like the role of having a vivid emotional motivation, a sense of hope, or psyching yourself up when trying to achieve habit change. Doing things like imagining an outcome that you wish the habit to lead to, may activate additional subsystems which care about those kinds of outcomes, causing them to submit additional bids in favor of the new habit. The extent to which you succeed at doing so, depends on the extent to which your mind-system considers it plausible that the new habit leads to the new outcome. For instance, if you imagine your exercise habit making you strong and healthy, then subagents which care about strength and health might activate to the extent that you believe this to be a likely outcome, sending bids in favor of the exercise action.

On this view, one way for the mind to maintain coherence and readjust its behaviors, is its ability to re-evaluate old habits in light of which subsystems get activated when reflecting on the possible consequences of new habits. An old habit having been strongly reinforced reflects that a great deal of evidence has accumulated in favor of it being beneficial, but the behavior in question can still be overridden if enough influential subsystems weigh in with their evaluation that a new behavior would be more beneficial in expectation.

Some subsystems having concerns (e.g. immediate survival) which are ranked more highly than others (e.g. creative exploration) means that the decision-making process ends up carrying out an implicit expected utility calculation. The strengths of bids submitted by different systems do not just reflect the probability that those subsystems put on an action being the most beneficial. There are also different mechanisms giving the bids from different subsystems varying amounts of weight, depending on how important the concerns represented by that subsystem happen to be in that situation. This ends up doing something like weighting the probabilities by utility, with the kinds of utility calculations that are chosen by evolution and culture in a way to maximize genetic fitness on average. Protectors, of course, are subsystems whose bids are weighted particularly strongly, since the system puts high utility on avoiding the kinds of outcomes they are trying to avoid.

The original question which motivated this section was: why are we sometimes incapable of adopting a new habit or abandoning an old one, despite knowing that to be a good idea? And the answer is: because we don’t know that such a change would be a good idea. Rather, some subsystems think that it would be a good idea, but other subsystems remain unconvinced. Thus the system’s overall judgment is that the old behavior should be maintained.

your psyche’s conscious verbal planner “earns” willpower

This seems to assume that there's 1) exactly one planner and 2) it's verbal. I think there are probably different parts that enforce top-down control, some verbal and some maybe not.

For example, exerting willpower to study boring academic material seems like a very different process than exerting willpower to lift weights at the gym.

I think that there is something like:

• Local beliefs about the usefulness of exerting willpower in a particular context (e.g. someone might not believe that willpower is useful in school but is useful in the gym, or vice versa, and correspondingly have more willpower available in one context than the other)
• To the extent that one has internalized a concept about "willpower" being a single thing, broader beliefs about willpower being useful in general
• Various neurological and biological variables that determine how strong one's top-down processes are in general, relative to their bottom-up processes (e.g. someone with ADHD will have their bottom-up processes be innately stronger than the top-down ones; medication may then strengthen the amount of top-down control they have).
• Various neurological and biological variables that determine which of one's processes get priority in any given situation (e.g. top-down control tends to be inhibited when hungry or tired; various emotional states may either reduce or increase the strength of top-down control)

My model of burnout roughly agrees with both your and @Matt Goldenberg . To add to Matt's "burnout as revolt" model, my hunch is that burnout often involves not only a loss of belief that top-down control is beneficial. I think it also involves more biological changes to the neural variables that determine the effectiveness of top-down versus bottom-up control. Something in the physical ability of the top-down processes to control the bottom-up ones is damaged, possibly permanently. 

Metaphorically, it's like the revolting parts don't just refuse to collaborate anymore; they also blow up some of the infrastructure that was previously used to control them.

Sounds plausible to me. Alternatively, telling you that they didn't over-apologize still communicates that they would have over-apologized in different circumstances, so it can be a covert way of still delivering that apology.

A crucial part of every IFS session is to ask the protector what age they think you are (often, at least in examples, it would say something like 5-12) and then you could reveal to it that actually you're 30 (or whatever).

I wouldn't put it as strongly as to say that it's a crucial part of every IFS session. It can sometimes be a very useful question and approach, sure, but I've had/facilitated plenty of great sessions that didn't use that question at all. And there are people who that question just doesn't resonate with.

As far as I know, the latest representative expert survey on the topic is "Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI", in which the median time for a 50% chance of AGI was either in 23 or 92 years, depending on how the question was phrased:

If science continues undisrupted, the chance of unaided machines outperforming humans in every possible task was estimated at 10% by 2027, and 50% by 2047. [...] However, the chance of all human occupations becoming fully automatable was forecast to reach 10% by 2037, and 50% as late as 2116 (compared to 2164 in the 2022 survey).

Not that these numbers would mean much because AI experts aren't experts on forecasting, but it still suggests a substantial possibility for AGI to take quite a while yet.

Hmm... let me rephrase: it doesn't seem to me like we would actually have a clear community norm for this, at least not one strong enough to ensure that the median community member would actually be familiar with stats and econ.

community norms which require basically everyone to be familiar with statistics and economics,

I think this is too strong. There are quite a few posts that don't require knowledge of either one to write, read, or comment on. I'm certain that one could easily accumulate lots of karma and become a well-respected poster without knowing either.

I had the thought while reading the original post that I recall speaking to at least one researcher who, pre-replication crisis, was like "my work is built on a pretty shaky foundation as is most of the research in this field, but what can you do, this is the way the game is played". So that suggested to me that plenty of median researchers might have recognized the issue but not been incentivized to change it.

Lab leaders aren't necessarily in a much better position. If they feel responsibility toward their staff, they might feel even more pressured to keep gaming the metrics so that the lab can keep getting grants and its researchers good CVs.

I've seen one paper arguing against Planck's claim:

Unquestionably, there are scientists in every generation who tenaciously cling to knowledge they learned in their youth, and who refuse to consider new theories that challenge fundamental beliefs. The life-long resistance of Joseph Priestley to oxygen theory, Louis Agassiz to evolutionary theory, and Harold Jeffreys to continental drift are among the notable cases. It is virtually a truism that the last adherents to a fading scientific tradition will be elderly scientists. Yet documented episodes where resistance of isolated individuals crystallizes into generational disputes, or where an ageing scientific elite actually delays community-wide adoption of a new idea, are exceedingly rare. A review of the historical record suggests, on the contrary, that the period of active dissemination and adoption of scientific innovations - even those of revolutionary proportion - is typically shorter than that required for one generation of scientists to replace another. [...]

Curiously, the episode which prompted Planck's observation - the 'controversy' surrounding his youthful reformulation of the second law of thermodynamics - seems a poor illustration of the 'fact' Planck claims to have learned. According to Planck's own sketchy chronology (he provides few dates), not much more than ten years seems to have elapsed between his first unsuccessful attempts at gaining recognition, and the 'universal acceptance' of his dissertation thesis on the irreversible process of heat conduction. Nor does it appear that age was an important factor influencing adoption of the theory. Wilhelm Ostwald, one of the leaders of the opposition 'Energetics' school prominently mentioned by Planck, was only five years older than Planck, whereas Ludwig Boltzmann, whose theoretical work on entropy, in no small measure (as Planck grudgingly concedes) helped bring the scientific community around to Planck's view, was fourteen years Planck's senior.

Some quantitative data permit more systematic examination of age differences in receptivity, for both Lavoisier's and Darwin's landmark contributions. In a study of the Chemical Revolution, McCann reports a negative correlation between author's age and the use of the oxygen paradigm in scientific papers written between 1760 and 1795. On closer inspection of the data, he finds that the earliest group of converts to the oxygen paradigm (between 1772 and 1777) were middle-aged men with close ties to Lavoisier; the inverse age effect became manifest only after 1785, during the ten-year period of 'major conversion and consolidation'. McCann also contends that the age structure of the British community during the latter half of the eighteenth century impeded acceptance of the new theory. In contrast to the declining age of French scientists during this period, the increasing average age of British scientists held back the pace of acceptance of oxygen theory among British scientists of all age strata.

As for evolutionary theory, Hull and his colleagues find weak support for 'Planck's Principle' among nineteenth-century British scientists. The small minority of scientists who held out against the theory after 1869 were, on average, almost ten years older than earlier adopters. Age in 1859 (the year the Origin of Species was published) was unrelated, however, to speed of acceptance for the great majority of those converting to evolutionary theory by 1869. [...]

... we can distinguish high- risk and low-risk contexts for theory choices of individual scientists. A high-risk context is one in which there is substantial resistance to the new theory. Prevailing scientific opinion views it as controversial, a heretical assault on existing knowledge, or even being beyond the pale of serious scientific discourse. Adoption of a new theory in a high-risk context presumably exacts some perceived or actual professional costs. Given such a social setting, structural constraints of life-course position would be hypothesized to be more important than motivational factors in determining theory-choice behaviour. This implies, for example, that the earliest adopters of controversial theories should be disproportionately composed of middle-career and senior scientists and a corresponding deficit of young scientists.

In a low-risk context, a new theory is generally regarded as a legitimate claimant to knowledge, or one which has already attracted a sizeable following; consequently its adoption exposes one to only minimal professional costs. The social patterning of theory-choice behaviour in this context is hypothesized to be dominated by motivational factors, tending to reinforce more rapid adoption by younger scientists. [...]

During the early stages in the adoption of a new theory, age differences between supporters of the new theory and defenders of the status quo are expected to be either relatively small or (particularly if the new idea is perceived as being unusually controversial) tending toward older age for the first supporters. With the passage of time and greater acceptance of the new theory, we expect the influx of new converts to be increasingly drawn from the ranks of younger scientists. Such a correspondence between changes in the context of appraisal and age-based differences in theory choice is evident in McCann's data on French scientists' reception of the oxygen paradigm during the different subperiods of his study. It will be recalled that the earliest followers of oxygen theory were middle-aged scientists, and the greater propensity of younger scientists only became manifest several years later, at the point when community-wide conversion was well under way.

In the remainder of this paper, I present a rigorous test of the expanded age hypothesis proposed above. It is based upon new findings from a study of the reception of plate tectonics in the earth sciences during the 1960s. Compared with earlier studies, it permits a more precise delineation of the historical stages in prevailing scientific opinion, and introduces into the analysis controls on possible confounding factors correlated with age, such as foci of research interest and professional eminence. [...]

Development of the theory of plate tectonics ranks among the stellar scientific achievements of this century. General acceptance of this conceptual framework necessitated the abandonment of a communal belief in the horizontal immobility of the earth's crust which had guided geological research since the middle of the nineteenth century. Plate tectonics theory substituted the diametrically opposed premise that the earth's crus is divided into large crustal plates which move slowly over the upper mantle.

The swift adoption of plate tectonics during the late 1960s stands in stark contrast to the extremely bitter controversy encountered by earlier proponents of a 'mobile' earth. Alfred Wegener's continental drift theory, the forerunner of present-day mobilist theory, was subjected to extremely hostile attacks during the 1920s and fell into nearly universal disrepute. British geophysicists working on reconstruction of the ancient configurations of the earth's magnetic field rekindled interest in continental drift during the middle 1950s. [...] Despite the advocacy by Hess and a few other distinguished earth scientists, large-scale horizontal displacement of the crust remained an anathema for most earth scientists well into the 1960s. Then, in 1966-67, a confluence of empirical discoveries in marine geology, geomagnetic studies and seismology provided for many geologists incontrovertible proof favouring the seafloor spreading model, and the mobilist perspective more generally. [...] By the early 1970s, the great majority of earth scientists had adopted plate tectonics, and the theory was well on its way to becoming the dominant theoretical orientation in many fields of the earth sciences. [...]

To obtain data on the dynamics of individual theory choice that under earth scientists' shifts from the stabilist to the mobilist programme research, I examined the publications of ninety-six North American eart scientists actively engaged in pertinent research during the 1960s a early 1970s. I also gathered biographical information for each scientis including their training, research interests and career histories. [...]

The dependent variable for this study is the year in which a scientist decided to adopt the mobilist programme of research rather than to continue working within a stabilist programme. [...] Before 1966, when prevailing scientific opinion still ran strongly against the mobilist perspective, the small number of scientists adopting the programme were considerably older (in terms of career age) than other scientists active during this early period. Thus, scientists adopting the programme through 1963 were on average nineteen years 'older' than non-adopters. [...] Adopters in 1964 were twenty-three years older than non-adopters. [...] Only with the shift in scientific opinion favourable to mobilist concepts beginning in 1966, do we start to see a progressive narrowing, and then reversal, in the age differentials between adopters and non-adopters.

True, though I think that judgment tends to be hard to effectively mask in this kind of context (though maybe psychopaths would be able to fake it; I don't know). At least my own experience inclines me to agree with this person:

I’ve worked with and/or done swaps with a lot of different practitioners (IFS, aletheia, VIEW, regular talk therapy, bodywork, voice work etc), and what I found to be the most effective element of their skill set (for me) is: non-judgmental, loving presence… 

many times I have explored the same topic with two different practitioners within a few days of each other; and it’s in those cases that the impact of the difference in the quality of non-judgmental loving presence is most noticeable.

the degree to which the quality of the presence is non-judgmental can be VERY subtle, but the system can pick up on it. it might not even be a strong enough signal to notice it consciously, but it will greatly impact how the session unfolds.

On Windows the font feels actively unpleasant right away, on Android it's not quite as bad but feels like I might develop eyestrain if I read comments for a longer time.

Seeing strange artifacts on some of the article titles on Chrome for Android (but not on desktop)

Yeah it feels uncomfortably small to read to me now

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 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 ): 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.

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.

So in many cases, "trauma processing" can basically mean noticing you're not a child anymore. You have power. So you don't have to appease the hostile telepaths just because they're adults.

Yes, definitely. And this is also why it's often so important for the therapist - if this is done in the context of therapy - to exhibit unconditional positive regard toward the client. If the therapist is genuinely accepting of any thoughts and feelings that the client brings up, then that opens the door for the client's parts to start considering the possibility that maybe they can tell the truth and still be accepted. And once it has become possible to tell the truth to at least one person, it becomes possible to tell it to yourself as well.

(Though maybe I should say that the therapist needs to either experience unconditional positive regard toward the client, or successfully deceive themselves and the client into thinking that they do. Heh.)

One additional tangle is that often the client's issue is less about needing to act in a certain way, and more about needing to be a certain way. At some point, one frequently goes from "it's bad to break something and not be genuinely sorry on that particular instance" to "it's bad to be the kind of person who wouldn't automatically feel sorry and who needed to fake being sorry". 

This makes it harder to get to the point where the therapist could provide evidence that they are fine with you not being sorry in that particular instance, because getting there would require you to reveal that it's possible for you to not automatically feel sorry, and that feels dangerous by itself!

And what you've written also gets to the limitations of therapy - that no matter how much positive regard the therapist might have toward their client, if they are still e.g. living with an abusive partner, just the therapist's warmth and support may not be enough to produce a shift. (I haven't had clients with situations that extreme, but I've certainly noticed times when we started making much more progress once they broke up with a partner or quit a job that they had been trying to force themselves to do, and then suddenly new parts of them came to awareness that could now be convinced they were safe.)

I bet something similar could work for getting kids to appologize.

Also, for getting them to say thank you. When kids are at a certain age, adults frequently seem to be reminding them to say thank you for gifts and such; I have a vague memory of adults also reminding me of this, when I was at that age. But these days I automatically say thank you for various things, and mean it.

But the Summoned Heroine doesn't know that until the end, and it's stated that she specifically set up the market to "help them anticipate and counter the Demon King’s next moves".

Oh nice observation! I hadn't thought of complaining as a way to externalize the detection of blindspots, but that makes a lot of sense.

This also reminds me of "You should complain about it", which also talked about complaining as a way of creating common knowledge about problems, but for a group:

Complaining often feels like unloading a burden, and it allows us to achieve shared feeling: Before complaining, you knew that the situation was bad, and you assumed that the others around you also knew that but you weren’t sure. After complaining together, you know that they think it’s bad too, and they know that you know, and you know that they know, etc. The object of complaint has reached shared understanding in a way that it wasn’t before. You know you’re not alone in feeling bad about it.

Sharing your pain this way is a bonding activity. When you complain to each other, you increase the social ties between you, because you each know and trust each other a little bit more than you did before. You’ve shared feeling, and you’ve demonstrated that you are someone who it is safe to share feelings with. [...]

Complaining, in and of itself, is unlikely to ever fix anything… other than your mood, your social relationships with your coworkers, and your shared understanding of the problems that everyone is facing. Little things like that.

Also, it turns out, those are all really useful things to have if you are going to fix anything else.

If you are one person with a problem, you have very little leverage. If you are ten people with the same problem, you have rather a lot more leverage… unless you don’t know that you are ten people with the same problem, in which case you are ten people who are not doing anything about it because you don’t think you have the leverage to fix the problem.

Complaining does not make much of a difference, but it creates the conditions in which you can all work together to make a difference.

I would generally expect that an organization's ability to execute on things unrelated on their core competency would be only weakly correlated to their ability to execute on their actual core competency.

IMO, soft/smooth/gradual still convey wrong impressions. They still sound like "slow takeoff", they sound like the progress would be steady enough that normal people would have time to orient to what's happening, keep track, and exert control.

That is exactly the meaning that I'd thought was standard for "soft takeoff" (and which I assumed was synonymous with "slow takeoff"), e.g. as I wrote in 2012:

Bugaj and Goertzel (2007) consider three kinds of AGI scenarios: capped intelligence, soft takeoff, and hard takeoff. In a capped intelligence scenario, all AGIs are prevented from exceeding a predetermined level of intelligence and remain at a level roughly comparable with humans. In a soft takeoff scenario, AGIs become far more powerful than humans, but on a timescale which permits ongoing human interaction during the ascent. Time is not of the essence, and learning proceeds at a relatively human-like pace. In a hard takeoff scenario, an AGI will undergo an extraordinarily fast increase in power, taking effective control of the world within a few years or less. [Footnote: Bugaj and Goertzel defined hard takeoff to refer to a period of months or less. We have chosen a somewhat longer time period, as even a few years might easily turn out to be too little time for society to properly react.] In this scenario, there is little time for error correction or a gradual tuning of the AGI’s goals.

(B&G didn't actually invent soft/hard takeoff, but it was the most formal-looking cite we could find.)

For example, I'd expect many strands to incorporate something like the negation

Some yes, though the strands that I personally like the most lean strongly into those statements. The interpretation of Buddhism that makes the most sense to me sees much of the aim of practice as first becoming aware of, and then dropping, various mental mechanisms that cause motivated reasoning and denial of what's actually true.

It says to avoid suffering by dismantling your motives.

Worth noting that this is more true about some strands of Buddhism than others. I think most true for Theravada, least true for some Western strands such as Pragmatic Dharma; I believe Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism are somewhere in between, though I'm not an expert on either. Not sure where to place Zen.

On the topic of bistable perception, this is one of my favorite examples:

(Animated version)

Hmm I don't recall no longer noticing things that I care about while on them. Of course, since I was less anxious, then having less anxiety also meant noticing less anxiety. But I think that either the anxiety just felt content-less and not associated with anything that I cared about, or to the extent that it was tracking things I cared about, I was able to track those even without it.

Terry Tao on o1:

I have played a little bit with OpenAI's new iteration of GPT, GPT-o1, which performs an initial reasoning step before running the LLM. It is certainly a more capable tool than previous iterations, though still struggling with the most advanced research mathematical tasks.

Here are some concrete experiments (with a prototype version of the model that I was granted access to). In https://chatgpt.com/share/2ecd7b73-3607-46b3-b855-b29003333b87 I repeated an experiment from https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/109948249160170335 in which I asked GPT to answer a vaguely worded mathematical query which could be solved by identifying a suitable theorem (Cramer's theorem) from the literature. Previously, GPT was able to mention some relevant concepts but the details were hallucinated nonsense. This time around, Cramer's theorem was identified and a perfectly satisfactory answer was given.

In https://chatgpt.com/share/94152e76-7511-4943-9d99-1118267f4b2b I gave the new model a challenging complex analysis problem (which I had previously asked GPT4 to assist in writing up a proof of in https://chatgpt.com/share/63c5774a-d58a-47c2-9149-362b05e268b4 ). Here the results were better than previous models, but still slightly disappointing: the new model could work its way to a correct (and well-written) solution *if* provided a lot of hints and prodding, but did not generate the key conceptual ideas on its own, and did make some non-trivial mistakes. The experience seemed roughly on par with trying to advise a mediocre, but not completely incompetent, graduate student. However, this was an improvement over previous models, whose capability was closer to an actually incompetent graduate student. It may only take one or two further iterations of improved capability (and integration with other tools, such as computer algebra packages and proof assistants) until the level of "competent graduate student" is reached, at which point I could see this tool being of significant use in research level tasks.

As a third experiment, I asked (in https://chatgpt.com/share/bb0b1cfa-63f6-44bb-805e-8c224f8b9205) the new model to begin the task of formalizing a result in Lean (specifically, to establish one form of the prime number theorem as a consequence of another) by breaking it up into sublemmas which it would formalize the statement of, but not the proof. Here, the results were promising in that the model understood the task well and performed a sensible initial breakdown of the problem, but was inhibited by the lack of up-to-date information on Lean and its math library in its training, with its code containing several mistakes. However, I could imagine a model of this capability that was specifically finetuned on Lean and Mathlib, and integrated into an IDE, being extremely useful in formalization projects. 

Great post!

2. AI systems developed today are instead created by machine learning. This means that the computer learns to produce certain desired outputs, but humans do not tell the system how it should produce the outputs. We often have no idea how or why an AI behaves in the way that it does. [...]

2. The AI systems made in 2024 are different. Instead of being carefully built piece by piece, they're created by repeatedly tweaking random systems until they do what we want. This means the people who make these AIs don't fully understand how they work on the inside.

I think Claude's version of this point is better, mainly due to it not using the word "output"; that's a programming/computer science term that I expect the average person to not understand (at least not in this kind of a context). "Do what we want" is much clearer.

Ah. Yeah, I agree with your point that if someone is claiming that the secular interpretation of Buddhism is The True Interpretation and you can see that even in the original sources, that's a reason to be doubtful of them. They are, as you say, laundering their own ideas with the reputation of Buddhism.

I think the difference is that I don't think I ever put sources like MCTB in the category of writers who make claims about the original meaning of the suttas. Though it's certainly possible that those claims were there and I just glossed over them. (And okay, admittedly the whole name of the book is reasonable to read as making a claim about what the original meaning of the teachings was.) But I read you to be saying something like "treat these modern secular writers as people who might be drawing inspiration from some Buddhist sources but are fundamentally doing their own new thing", and I think that I was already reading many of them as doing exactly that. 

With regard to MCTB specifically, this felt especially clear with Ingram including a chapter trashing the whole traditional Theravada conception of enlightenment and then following it up with a chapter presenting his own revised model as a replacement. That felt like him basically saying "yeah fuck those original religious guys, let's do something different, here's a model based on my own personal experience instead". 

Anyway I agree that it's good to point that out for anyone who missed that, or who interpreted books like MCTB differently.

Oh oops, it wasn't. Fixed, thanks for pointing it out.

Some time back, Julia Wise published the results of a survey asking parents what they had expected parenthood to be like and to what extent their experience matched those expectations. I found those results really interesting and have often referred to them in conversation, and they were also useful to me when I was thinking about whether I wanted to have children myself.

However, that survey was based on only 12 people's responses, so I thought it would be valuable to get more data. So I'm replicating Julia's survey, with a few optional quantitative questions added. If you have children, you're welcome to answer here: https://forms.gle/uETxvX45u3ebDECy5

I'll publish the results at some point when it looks like there won't be many more responses.

However, my understanding of the life review experience is that it's the phenomenological correlate of stopping a bunch of the active cognitive processing we employ to dissociate. In order to "unsee" something (i.e., dissociate from it), you still have to see it enough to recognize that it's something you're supposed to unsee, and then perform the actual work of "unseeing". What I'm proposing is that all the work that goes into "unseeing" halts during a life review, and all the stuff that would originally have gotten seen-enough-to-get-unseen now just gets seen directly, experienced in a decentralized and massively parallel fashion. 

That doesn't seem to match the account in the trip report you linked, though, which seems to involve processing a lot of things in a time-consuming linear fashion. E.g.:

It took me through my best friend’s passing something like 20 times. First person. Just relive it and rewind it and relive it and rewind it and relive it and rewind it again. And the Teafaerie is screaming “How many times do I have to do this?!”

To which the voice did not hesitate for a moment before replying, “Until you can stay present.”

It took me a few more rounds. I never lost sight of the feeling that it was trying to help me, though.

I don't know if this was what the people had in mind, but one consideration is that being poor is often stressful, e.g. if you're constantly worried about whether you'll be able to afford the month's rent. And chronic stress is bad for your health.

I also tried to outline a model of tanha in my posts about explaining suffering in Buddhist context [1, 2].

I generally liked the "Goodness of Reality" section quite a bit, and this part especially made me go "oh, of course!":

I think Christianity’s emphasis on forgiving all, Taoism’s emphasis on not resisting anything, Buddhism’s emphasis on being equanimous with everything, and Islam’s emphasis on submitting to all aspects of God’s will are different ways of talking about the same general thing.

I was less convinced about several of the other sections. I agree that there's a loose sense in which we reap what we sow, in that actions that are derived from tanha tend to create more tanha, whereas non-tanha-based motivation tends to create more non-tanha-based motivation. But I thought the suggestion that everyone inevitably experiences a life review felt unconvincing (largely due to similar reasons as habryka). 

It also felt to me like the post was trying to argue for everyone's morality converging in the end, which I'm skeptical of. I do think that there are some paths that do converge, but also others that do not. One big example would be the ideological difference between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism, where Theravada tends to lean toward just ending your own personal suffering and "noping out" of reality, whereas Mahayana tends to have more of a "get enlightened and remain around to help all sentient beings" ideal. A meditation teacher I recently spoke with mentioned that this divergence tends to be reflected in his students. Some of them become increasingly dedicated to helping everyone else as a result of their practice, while others take more of a "well if everything is just arbitrary sensations, I might as well spend the rest of my life just playing video games" type approach (even if he actively tries to nudge them toward the more compassionate route). He speculated that the divergence seems to be driven by personality factors, but he hadn't identified which ones exactly.

I've now read about one-third of "In the Words of the Buddha". I personally appreciated getting the additional sociological and historical background so I'm happy that you recommended it and that I got it. However, its talk about reincarnation and realms of divine beings and so on doesn't really do much to convince me differently about this:

monks in robes teaching Buddhism, who accept religious and supernatural elements, are dismissed as religious men.

I think the book is, if anything, dissuading me from the idea that modern Western practitioners would benefit from spending time familiarizing themselves with the Pali Canon. (Assuming that they don't have, like me, an interest in its history for its own sake.)

I had previously been somewhat influenced by some of the Western apologetics and meditation teachers who said things like "no, Buddhism is really a philosophy rather than a religion, you can read it secularly and interpret all the stuff about rebirth etc. metaphorically". Whereas the impression I get from the book is that it really is a religion complete with all the supernaturalness and superstition, and that even the more secular parts like the moral advice contain bits we'd rather ignore, such as the Buddha mentioning that one good type of wife is the one who's like a slave (with even the editor of the book including a footnote that says it's a good thing later Buddhists have ignored this recommendation). I now think the people saying that you can really just read the stuff metaphorically are cherry-picking the bits that happen to fit the framework they're in favor of.

Now there were some pieces of advice I liked there too, but overall the task of figuring out what can be trusted seems hard enough that one would be better off by just ignoring the whole thing and going with what we've learned about meditation in more secular contexts, as reported by people with more reliable epistemics. Of course such people aren't completely trustworthy either, as you point out by e.g. Culadasa's sex scandal. But then nobody is and the fact that we can witness the way their practice goes wrong when embedded in the context of Western householder life seems like a good way of refining our models further, whereas the Pali Canon is fitted into a very different cultural and historical context that we don't actively observe.

Is there something that I'm missing?

a friend shared this illustrative trip report.

From the report:

I could move the little thumbnails around. I also remember trying to decide if it was safe to drag a memory into the Trash folder, and intending to do this with something that I deemed to be relatively inconsequential. But now I honestly don’t remember what it was.

😅

The Goodness of Reality hypothesis does imply that if you want to defend yourself, feeling tanha about being attacked is suboptimal because it biases your judgments about the most effective ways to respond.

A bias only makes your responses suboptimal if the bias is wrong for the situation; if it biases you toward good responses, it makes your behavior more optimal. I touched upon this in my old post on insight meditation:

Cognitive fusion is a term from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which refers to a person “fusing together” with the content of a thought or emotion, so that the content is experienced as an objective fact about the world rather than as a mental construct. The most obvious example of this might be if you get really upset with someone else and become convinced that something was all their fault (even if you had actually done something blameworthy too).

In this example, your anger isn’t letting you see clearly, and you can’t step back from your anger to question it, because you have become “fused together” with it and experience everything in terms of the anger’s internal logic. [...]

Cognitive fusion isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you suddenly notice a car driving towards you at a high speed, you don’t want to get stuck pondering about how the feeling of danger is actually a mental construct produced by your brain. You want to get out of the way as fast as possible, with minimal mental clutter interfering with your actions. [...] 

Cognitive fusion trades flexibility for focus. You will be strongly driven and capable of focusing on just the thing that’s your in mind, at the cost of being less likely to notice when that thing is actually wrong.

Tanha seems to cause cognitive fusion/fixation on narrow aspects of the situation, and it seems probable to me that it evolved to do that because there are many situations where that's beneficial. If you get attacked, the tanha may help focus your attention on the need to defend yourself and how to best do that.

Of course, a lot of the ways we're attacked today are a poor fit to the kinds of situations tanha evolved to be adaptive for (e.g. getting very upset when someone verbally assaults you on social media is probably not the optimal response). But there are still quite a few purely physical fights happening in the world, and in those I'd guess tanha to be more likely to be adaptive than not.

Tried it, felt like it worked! However I remembered that I don't like the taste of cottage cheese that much. 😅

Totally coincidentally a friend posted that a nutritionist had told him that this may be caused by some people's digestive systems not processing fiber properly if they don't get protein at the same time. Cottage cheese has protein... the nutritionist's advise had been to cook the oats with milk or to add an egg. Hmm.

My problem with oatmeal is that I seem to very quickly go back to being hungry after eating it (I guess I could just go with MORE DAKKA OATMEAL but I don't want to consume an enormous amount). I haven't actually measured this but my intuitive sense is that once I've had a normal or even large-ish portion of oatmeal, I'll be hungry in about two hours again.

I was telling one of the Catholic priests there about my experience of Jesus during an ayahuasca ceremony and he was just like, "I don't know what ayahuasca is, but the story you told sounds super legit and you are super lucky to have had that experience at such a young age. I've only had this experience after decades and decades of going deep into Catholicism and all the rites and rituals. All the doctrines of Catholicism are really about having that kind of experience. And you just had it directly." And another one who heard it was just like, "Whatever you're doing, Alex, keep doing it. It sounds like you're on the right track."

Reminded me of this:

In the early 1980’s Father Thomas Keating, a Catholic priest, sponsored a meeting of contemplatives from many different religions. The group represented a few Christian denominations as well as Zen, Tibetan, Islam, Judaism, Native American & Nonaligned. They found the meeting very productive and decided to have annual meetings. Each year they have a meeting at a monastery of a different tradition, and share the daily practice of that tradition as a part of the meetings. The purpose of the meetings was to establish what common understandings they had achieved as a result of their diverse practices. The group has become known as the Snowmass Contemplative Group because the first of these meetings was held in the Trappist monastery in Snowmass, Colorado.

When scholars from different religious traditions meet, they argue endlessly about their different beliefs. When contemplatives from different religious traditions meet, they celebrate their common understandings. Because of their direct personal understanding, they were able to comprehend experiences which in words are described in many different ways. The Snowmass Contemplative Group has established seven Points of Agreement that they have been refining over the years:

1. The potential for enlightenment is in every person.
2. The human mind cannot comprehend ultimate reality, but ultimate reality can be experienced.
3. The ultimate reality is the source of all existence.
4. Faith is opening, accepting & responding to ultimate reality.
5. Confidence in oneself as rooted in the ultimate reality is the necessary corollary to faith in the ultimate reality.
6. As long as the human experience is experienced as separate from the ultimate realty it is subject to ignorance, illusion, weakness and suffering.
7. Disciplined practice is essential to the spiritual journey, yet spiritual attainment is not the result of one’s effort but the experience of oneness with ultimate reality. [...]

Contemplatives from different traditions generally agree that there is a transforming experience they agree to call enlightenment. They agree that enlightenment is attained as a result of controlling the mind with various forms of practice.

 

I think this might also have been mentioned in Unlocking the Emotional Brain, though I'm not entirely sure if it was or if I just figured it out after reading it. Namely, that if one's fear is "doing X will inevitably cause Y to happen", then finding counterevidence can be relatively easy. You just need to find a single instance where it doesn't happen. But if the fear is "doing X might cause Y to happen", then Y simply failing to happen won't trigger reconsolidation.

Great description. This sounds very similar to some of my experiences with non-dual states.

The "universal" part of UBI is an important difference.

That is true, but note that relative to the current day, a UBI (at least in the form of the UBI schemes I'm most familiar with) would also only go to a relatively limited number of people. For people already earning a decent income, their taxation would be increased to eliminate the gain from the UBI; and a lot of the people who would income-wise be in a position where their UBI wouldn't just be taxed out, are already on some form of social security that might be paying them the same as the UBI or more. (More, because the sum for the UBI would be chosen on the assumption that it would provide an income that was enough to make by but was still meager enough to incentivize work; whereas people who are e.g. on a disability pension because they are genuinely incapable of working and can't be incentivized into it are thought to deserve more than just the bare basic minimum for living.)

I haven't seen anyone run the numbers on this, and it of course also depends on the details of the exact scheme, but I guess that the number of people whose income would increase due to getting a UBI would be smaller than the number of people who are already getting the same amount or more through some other form of social security.

There's also the consideration that there might be some people who'd like to quit their jobs, which currently pay them more than a UBI would, but are afraid to do that because they're concerned that they couldn't find another job or qualify for social security if they did. But with a UBI and a guaranteed income they would be more willing to quit, even if it meant a cut in their overall income. So there are some people who might move from medium-income to low-income, and have overall less money. Probably not a huge fraction but still something that would somewhat counterbalance the "inflationary on the lowest incomes" effect.

Doesn't this argument also apply to any form of social security or monetary wealth redistribution whatsoever and e.g. imply that giving people an unemployment benefit of X dollars would give them zero benefit compared to a counterfactual world where they got 0 dollars?

One confounder here is that if meditation really does give you vastly increased well-being, then one of the most useful things one can do is to help others learn to meditate, but probably "they had a long and successful career as a meditation teacher afterward" wouldn't be something that you'd recognize as both good and impressive.

Do you read that report to suggest that Chapin is getting less done now? He mentions in it having three jobs, and my impression from the kinds of things he posts on Twitter has been that he seems productive, though of course one that can be fake (but if so he seems at least productive at faking productivity).