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Did the Ask Question type post go away?
It's still present, but the way to get to it has changed. First click "New Post". Then, at the top of your new post, there will be three tabs: POST, LINKPOST, and QUESTION. Click the QUESTION tab and you can create a question type post.
I'm glad you're enjoying the posts.
I haven't had any experiences like the one you describe. I have instead had the opposite experience; my writing usually comes from a place of tension, which meditation dissolves.
The reasons people give you for things are often fake, in the sense of not being a True Objection.
This is so true. In my experience, the reasons people give for doing things are mostly useful for determining how someone wants to be perceived. Otherwise, I dismiss them as fake and made-up on the spot.
If the decision is bad for the voters, the they will be replaced in the next election.
The central thesis of my post is that individual voters are not individually incentivized to vote well. For this reason, bad decisions by politicians do not necessarily result in them getting replaced in subsequent elections. Politicians are removed for violating mass stated preferences, which differ from good policy in predictable directions.
You awknowledge that learning about economics has costs. The same can be said about arts, literature, physics, social sciences, or ecology. It is not possible for everyone to learn all these subjects, but it is possible to select a few of our best to learn about them. The tragedy of commons would happen if everyone would need to learn about boring (for them) subjects for years.
Yes. I used economics in this post because it could perform double-duty, since this post also discusses moral hazard. The principle applies for foreign affairs, law, etc.
My favorite answer to "why 'they' didn't just print more money until everyone had enough" is that after the USA left the gold standard in 1971, the US government really did just print more money.
Meanwhile, >50% of the federal budget goes to healthcare and pensions. In this way, the US government kind of is just printing money until everyone has enough. In this way, the US government is doing what voters demand.
This is among my top two favorite things that you have written.
My understanding is that Mormons banned polygamy because the US government was cracking down on polygamy around that time. Their choice was to change their doctrine or be destroyed by the State, and they chose to change their doctrine.
I'm glad someone likes the name. Our intuitions seem to differ on this one. For me, "infectiousness" implies self-replication. Cost disease is more like cardiovascular disease.
What makes the term "cost disease" unintuitive to me is that calling cost disease a "disease" implies that it's a bad thing. But wages increasing due to increase productivity of labor is mostly a good thing. I mean, it's bad for people who want to hire the labor that didn't increase in productivity (and people who buy from them, etcetera). But it's good for basically everyone else, especially the people whose wages increased. It's only bad for non-working owners of capital in stagnant industries. I feel like the term was coined by an aristocrat.
First of all, thank you for the constructive comment.
The reason I consider journalism propaganda isn't that it's false; it's because of where the data comes from. In my experience, journalism is largely derived from press releases and similar information sources. In the extreme case, an article is effectively written by a corporation, and then laundered by a journalist. I agree that news in the AP and Reuters tends to be factually true, but what matters to me is the sampling bias caused by the economics of how they get their information.
I also agree that "a solid understanding of how wars start and progress based on many detailed examples will help us prepare and react sensibly when that happens". However, I haven't gotten this from reading the news. I've gotten this from reading history, and watching explanations by specialists such as Perun.
Thank you for filling in so many historical details.
If you really want to be "traditional" (rather than "culty" or "unchurched"), and move to Utah, arguably you should convert to Mormonism?! Arguably?
I find this hot take hilarious.
Please be polite or I will block you from commenting on my posts.
The last time I saw someone unconscious on the side of the road with a concussion due to a bicycle crash, there was bystander already attempting to render aid. I stopped to help anyway, and discovered that the bystander in question had failed both to render first aid and to call 911. In this situation, I think I did the right thing getting involved. I produced a trivially observable net positive effect.
That same year, I visited a protest against the current war in the Middle East, and tried talking to the participants. I left with the impression that their desire to act collectively and rebelliously for a righteous cause exceeded their curiosity to find out whether the cause was indeed righteous. This is a result of selection effects. The situation was morally complicated, but the people who protest are angry about it, and to be angry about it, they had to believe the situation was morally simple.
To put things another way, if you're in a situation that 10 people know about, then there's a good chance nobody is doing anything about it. However, if 10,000,000 people know about a situation, then it's statistically impossible that nobody is doing anything about it.
I'm interested in how you can convert that information [news] proactively?
This is a great question, and like many questions, there is a trick hiding in it. The thinking is backwards.
That's not how proactive thinking works. Imagine if a company handed you a coupon and your immediate thought was "how can I use this coupon to save money"? That's not you saving money. That's the company tricking you into buying their product.
Proactive thinking doesn't start by watching the news and figuring out how to make best use of it. That's reactive thinking. Proactive thinking starts totally blocking out all the news for a while, and figuring out what you want. Then go find the resources you need to accomplish that. Usually "the resources you need" won't be news because news is ephemeral garbage.
A question you can ask yourself is whether your relationship to the news is proactive or reactive.
- A proactive approach is good. I've been learning about foreign affairs for many years. When the Ukraine War started, I immediately reacted, and did so with a comparative advantage. I consider this approach proactive, because I had prepared for the events long before the hit the news. By the time they hit the news, it was too late to begin studying foreign policy.
- A reactive approach is non-agentic. If you're paying attention to things because they're in the news, then you're at the mercy of whatever fads farm the most engagement. If the top thing on your mind is the top thing in the news, then that means you're letting a propaganda machine tell you what to think about. It means you're an NPC.
Here's another one:
What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
That sounds reasonable, especially considering the limited downside.
From what age do the Mormons do this?
18-19 (formerly 18-21).
When I wrote "children", I meant "next generation descendants". Missionaries are young adults.
Welcome to the realm of the posters!
Elos are already multidimensional, in a sense, because players have different ratings on different platforms. Hikaru Nakamura, for example, has a higher Elo on chess.com than FIDE. But that's just nitpicky pedantry; I understand that you're really asking is whether chess ability for a specific version of chess has subskills.
Among chess players and chess teachers, it is common (as you note) to break chess ability into three subskills:
- Openings
- Midgame
- Endgame
Openings these days are mostly about memorizing solved lines. Openings are so well-solved and memorization-dependent, that they can be boring to top players. This boredom is a force behind the popularity of Fisher Random among top players.
Magnus Carlson (currently the world's best chess player) is famous for his endgame ability. He's less interested in openings (especially classical openings) these days. It's not uncommon for him to open with something stupid, like switching his king and queen, and then still beat a grandmaster.
Could you use these subskills to predict competition results? Absolutely. If you were placing extremely precise bets on the outcomes of games, then you shouldn't just consider Elo. In classical games, you should also consider how much time each player has prepared for the tournament by studying opening lines. You can extrapolate Elo trend lines too.
The reason nobody uses a breakdown this fine for competitions isn't because it wouldn't generate a small additional signal. It's because nobody has a strong enough motivation too. There aren't billions of dollars getting bet on chess competition results. Elo is perfectly adequate when you're choosing who to invite to a chess tournament. It's also extremely legible, too.
If you are putting that much effort into predicting outcomes, it may be cheaper to just bribe players. Bribery is especially cheap for chess variants with smaller prize pools, like Xiangqi.
That said, there does exist an organization that does analyze chess skill at extremely fine resolution: chess.com. But not to predict winners. Instead, chess.com analyzes player skill at resolutions finer than "Elo" because in order to detect cheating. Chess cheaters often exhibit telltale signs where their skill spikes really hard within a game. This signal is not detectable with mere Elo.
I think it's interesting how cults' self-imposed isolation from outside memespace inverts their error-correcting mechanisms. Their incorrect beliefs conflict with reality. Instead of admitting wrongness, they double-down and tighten their self-imposed isolation.
This feedback loop is why independently-spawned cults with different professed beliefs converge to similar phenotypes. For example, they get confused and lash out when you say something like "You are factually incorrect, but I'm going to be nice to you out of a sense of basic decency", because they've doubled-down on "outsiders are the enemy" so many times.
It makes me wonder why the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) didn't implode during their early formation. If cults self-destruct because they have an autoimmune reaction to outside ideas, then I wonder if the greatest benefit of LDS missionary service isn't recruiting new members, but instead dirtying their children with outside memespace to prevent an autoimmune reaction when they mature.
I'd like to know who you are too, if we ever meet IRL.
If you want [abstractapplic]'s feedback on anything, let me know.
I have received creative feedback from abstractapplic. It was useful and made me happy. This is an endorsement.
We all have our problems, but I believe he is well past "technical fourth path" as defined here.
Maybe the ending doesn't make sense to anybody and I'm just measuring how dadaist I can write before someone calls my bluff.
Unless that is the meta-commentary I'm attempting to make about Scott Alexander's insinuation that sophistication is mostly just shibboleths. Which would make this post truly meaningful, but only on the meta-level. That would be appropriate for a story exploring the nature of fine art.
Of course, the real heist would be to do both; to write a scissor statement, where some people extract an obvious indirect meaning, while others conclude that the Palace of Hidden Doors contains only a small, featureless room.
Is taste a priesthood, a science, or a game of poker? I call your blind and raise you one hundred and twenty-seven words.
I often spell it Lsusr because "lsusr" looks too similar to "Isusr" in certain fonts.
Yup!
Ironically, meeting you guys at Lightcone is the one place where I felt like I could use my pseudonym. It's all other rationality meetups that it's a problem.
- Attendees will introduce themselves with the username they use online.
I wish I could do this, but I quickly learned not to. If you use a pseudonym, then this only makes sense if you're likely to be recognized by your pseudonym, which means only the A-list is famous to do this.
I used the wrong link. It is fixed now. Thank you.
You are correct. I have fixed the math. Thank you!
This is correct.
This is correct.
I have significant meditative insight.
I feel that the quotes you use to describe Camp #1 and Camp #2 are both word salad. The Camp #1 quote is like this post Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote 17 years ago, except difficult to understand[1]. Camp #2 asserts the existence of something fundamental, and then follows it with "There's no agreement on what this thing is". I feel that these postulations are not well-defined enough to deserve refutation.
How have your personal experiences influenced your understanding of western philosophy of mind. Not only on the topic of qualia; that was just the example that motivated me to post the question. For example, did anyone move from Harth's camp #1 to camp #2 or vice versa after meditation experiences, or did any of your other philosophical positions shift?
I feel that the mainstream western philosophy of mind is a train wreck, and that this is obvious to anybody who is half-decent at writing clearly. This includes both Eliezer Yudkowsky and Paul Graham, neither of whom (to my knowledge) have significant meditative insight. This question is like asking "Did you stop eating garbage out of the local Safeway dumpster after you learned to cook?" I was never eating it to begin with.
To be fair, Buddhist metaphysics isn't any better. It's not uncommon for meditators with deep insight to also believe in levitation and reincarnation.
I think what you're really trying to ask is "Do you have any personal observations via insight which contradict a major philosophical school?" Yes, if you get enough meditative insight you'll transcend the concept of a self. Anything system of philosophy that begins with "I think, therefore I am" is broken at almost the axiomatic level.
When I say it is "difficult to understand", I do not mean that this is difficult to understand like math i.e. because the ideas are fundamentally difficult. I mean that it is difficult to understand because it is written badly. It uses terms like "special" without defining them. Socrates was complaining about this sort of philosophical malpractice over 2,000 years ago. ↩︎
Thankfully, most people generally age out of crime, so life sentences are rarely necessary, even for those who are generally quite violent.
More specifically, men's impulsive violent tendencies tend to decrease with age. When this is the case, "lock up violent men until they grow out of it" can be pragmatically humane, especially compared to corporal punishment.
If we have ≫100% economic growth in this hypothetical economy, then it is possible for both Principle (A) [human labor price stays high] and Principle (B) [human labor price falls very low] to be satisfied simultaneously. This is possible because "high" and "low" are not absolutes. They are measured relative to the price of other goods. I am interpreting "AGI not taking over" to imply that the owners of capital remain human.
Given the continued rule of current law, human beings will continue to have value to other human beings through status games (entourages, buying poor-quality artisanal products, paying muscular dudes to sing you Happy Birthday), capital-owning rich perverts (prostitution, OnlyFans) and legal requirements (jury duty, notaries), if nothing else. This is because "being a human" has conceptual value the way Comedian is more valuable than any other banana taped to the wall. If the owners of capital care about Coherent Extrapolated Volition, then they can hire humans to use as ground truth for that too. The criterion "rule of law" does a lot of work here. If humans cannot be turned into slaves, then that puts a regulatory constraint on how little the human owners of capital can pay to keep other people around as retainers and entertainers. In this way, humans could provide value the way horses do today. Not because horses provide cheap physical labor, but because riding a horse is a fun status symbol, and because horses are lovable pets. Human corpses could even be used as a store of value to diversity against the volatility of other assets, since the production of human corpses would be limited by rule of law in a way that the transmutation of gold is not. Surely many rich people want a throne room built out of real human skulls, and not fake ones. In addition, many laws make it valuable to be a human being to e.g. file paperwork at a consulate in California. In today's 2025 world, chess tournaments are dominated by human players, despite computers being unbeatable at chess.
Meanwhile, the production of manufacturable assets like artificial sushi becomes extremely cheap.
The equilibrium is a situation where the price of human labor (measured in something like FLOPs, chocolate cake or procedurally-generated MrBeast video knockoffs) plummets, but the price of manufactured goods relative to that same reference point decreases even faster, due to lower regulatory barriers. Humans on Earth live lives that are luxurious by today's standards (exclusing industries like housing, the price of which is driven by government regulation), but insignificantly poor compared to the owners of capital, who are limited only by how close they can get to building Von Neumann probes.
The final solution to this tension between law and economics is to invent something like a Blade Runner replicant that looks and functions like a human slave, but is legally non-human property.
It seems like you're saying "I meditated, and while at first that made sensory issues worse, eventually they just stopped."
This is accurate, though it must be understood in the appropriate context. I've been meditating for years. Then my sensory issues fixed themselves relatively suddenly, over a period of a few months. This happened after several insight cycles, and well after stream entry.
The way insight cycles work, it's like you used to be a hoarder and you're not anymore because you took to heart Marie Kondo's book. But you live in a house that's full the garbage you used to hoard. You throw out everything in the basement, and discover there's another basement below it that you'd forgotten about years ago and it's full of more garbage. Then you clean up that basement and discover there's another basement below that full of another different kind of garbage. Each process of "clean up a basement; discover another one's below it full of new, exciting garbage to throw away" is an insight cycle. This sensory issue thing was Basement #9. (The number 9 is just a guess. I don't know the exact number of basements I'm at. I've stopped counting.)
All of this garbage in the basement puts a constant low-level stress on you until you clean it up, just like real garbage in a real basement. Cleaning it up Basements #1-#8 gave me the tools and bandwidth[1] to deal with Basement #9. In this way, "dealing with my sensory disorder" constituted an insight cycle.
On Emotions
When you kill an emotion, you suppress it or distract yourself from it. In mystic practice, you listen to it without reinforcing it or getting tangled up in it, and it goes away on its own. Killing an emotion is like using your parasympathetic nervous system to neutralize your sympathetic nervous system. If you are able, it's healthier to let both of them shut off. To do this you need to be in an safe environment.
On Listening
Listening when you're at high samatha (such as after meditation) doesn't take effort. Putting effort into things reads as strain which signals low status.
Advice
Some people do use meditation as a targeted solution to things like chronic pain. I expect this works for some people and doesn't work for others.
For me, I got these effects as a side effect of mystical insight. Is that the right course of action for you? It depends what you want. Mystic insight has lots of different effects you get as a package deal.
Not just mental bandwidth. Physical capital too, like clothes made out of bamboo-rayon. ↩︎
Is anyone else on this website making YouTube videos? Less Wrong is great, but if you want to broadcast to a larger audience, video seems like the place to be. I know Rational Animations makes videos. Is there anyone else? Are you, personally, making any?
Typo fixed.
Thank you for adding the link. I think the comments are a good place for it.
This Bene Gesserit stuff is building on top of the stuff I learned in rhetorical aikedo. I got good enough at socratic dialogue that I can put those words on autopilot and focus instead on what my interlocutor's ego is doing.
Thank you for the excellent comment.
"Dualism is used as a fundamental interpretative tool" is a good way of putting it.
"When meditating, dualism gets broken down due to lack of feedback loops and an increase in neutral annealing, leading to nondual world models" ← Also yes.
What I was trying to get at with the non-cyclic graph stuff is that if all the brain did was non-causally model an external world, then it is always possible in principle to create a simulation where sensory inputs affect the simulation unidirectionally, and information flows through the simulation itself with no cycles. This is like how our weather prediction computers do not predictably affect the weather itself, or how planetariums do not affect the movement of the stars.
Embedded world optimizers are different. Your world model affect your motor outputs which affect the physical world which affects the world model. This is a cycle. In this way, non-embedded world optimizers such as chess engines (which are effectively stateless due to Minimax) differ from embedded world optimizers such as our brains, because embedded world optimizers cause cyclic causal loops when interacting with their environment. It's basically the Time Travel Paradox problem, except without any need for time travel. Your brain makes sense of this by scribbling "free will" over a link in the chain it doesn't want to look too closely at. By pretending this link is effectively random, it simplifies what appears to be an intractable self-referential problem into what appears to be (but isn't) a tractable non-self-referential one. Meditation temporarily breaks a link in the cycle by stopping the motor outputs where you make changes to the physical external world. Without that link in the cycle, the loop is cut and the causality becomes non-cyclic [while you're meditating].
Answer A: The computational intractability is a side effect of being an embedded world optimizer 𝓪 𝓫𝓪𝓵𝓵 𝓸𝓯 𝓷𝓮𝓾𝓻𝓸𝓷𝓼 that must satisfy the conflicting optimization targets of "create a simulated world that accurately models external physical reality" and "optimize the simulated world into a desired state". The Gordian knot of computational intractability is transcended by giving up trying to be an interpretible world optimizer as defined by, say, decision theory. All those abstractions that insulate your value system from your world model? You just throw them out. The computationally intractable problem is still computationally intractable. It just stops being a problem for you, because you're not trying to solve that problem anymore.
Answer B: Awakening is not limited to therevada/Samatha. I got there via Zen, for example, which is non-Therevadan. You can even detect Awakening in non-Buddhists when you know what to look for. For example, I believe Mary Baker Eddy ended up at stream entry via Christian prayer.
Is the non-cyclic graph a way of modelling causality as state transitions?
I hope I answered your question. I'm uncertain what you're trying to ask here due to an ambiguity in the word "state". The word "state", can refer to many different things in this context, including altered states of consciousness (as distinct from altered traits), the computational concept of state (vs statelessness), and also attractors (which are similar to altered traits).
This model of dissolving the self is consistent with my experience meditating.
I like that [clickbait] isn't a pressure that I'm under.
I have never clicked on a post by jefftk and then been disappointed that it was clickbait.
Meta: I think throwing up a paper of yours is good practice here when it directly addresses the point. I link to my own blog posts in the same way all the time.
By the way, there's an edit button too, which you can use to retroactively linkify your link.
Yes, Bryan Caplan is not noticeably differentiated from other libertarian economists.
I'd be curious to hear if you see something deeper or more totalising in these people?
My answer might contain a frustratingly small amount of detail, because answering your question properly would require a top-level post for each person just to summarize the main ideas, as you thoroughly understand.
Paul Graham is special because he has a proven track record of accurately calibrated confidence. He has an entire system for making progress at unknown unknowns. Much of that system is about knowing what you don't know, which results in him carefully restricting claims about his narrow domain of specialization. However, because that domain of specialization is "startups", its lightcone has already had (what I consider to be) a totalising impact.
Asimov's turned The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire into his first popular novel. He eventually extended the whole thing into a future competition between different visions of the future. [I'm being extra vague to avoid spoilers.] He didn't just create one Dath Ilan. He created two of them (albeit at much lower resolution). Plus a dystopian one for them to compete with, because the Galactic Empire (his sci-fi version of humanity's current system at the time of his writing) wasn't adequate competition.
As to the other authors you mention:
- I haven't read enough Greg Egan or Vernor Vinge to comment on them.
- Heinlein absolutely has "his own totalising and self-consistent worldview/philosophy". I love his writing, but I just don't agree with him enough for him to make the list. I prefer Saturn's Children (and especially Neptune's Brood) by Charles Stross. Saturn's Children is basically Heinlein + Asimov fanfiction that takes their work in a different direction. Neptune's Brood is its sequel about interstellar cryptocoin markets.
- Clarke was mostly boring to me, except for 3001: The Final Odyssey.
- Neal Stephenson is definitely smart, but I never got the feeling he was trying to mind control me. Maybe that's just because he's so good at it.
to hate something is the origin of my work
I like that quote.
Yes! 100%. I too have noticed that stating these outright doesn't work at all. It's also bad for developing one too.
When I'm trying to sell ideas I do so more indirectly than this. The reason I wrote this post is because I felt I did have one, and wanted to verify to myself that this was true.
Regarding genocide and factory farms, my point was just that abusing others for your self-benefit is an adaptive behavior. That's all. Nothing deeper than that.
By the way, I appreciate you trying to answer the crux of my question to the extent that makes sense. This is exactly the kind of thinking I was hoping to provoke.
As for being attuned with your own taste, it is an especially necessary component of a totalizing worldview for artists e.g. Leonardo, Miyazaki, Eiichiro Oda.
I really like your post. Good how-to manuals like yours are rare and precious.
I think there’s a mild anticorrelation between [Steven Byrnes'] posts’ karma and how objectively good and important they are...
I agree that this is true of posts that deviate from trendy topics and/or introduce new ideas, in a way that is especially true of your posts.
For long-time power users like me, I can benefit from the best possible “reputation system”, which is actually knowing most of the commenters.
As another power user, I feel this benefit too.
There are no better opportunities to change the world than here at Effective Evil.
―Morbus in To Change the World
If you use Linux, I trust you can manage on your own.
Personally, I put the line exec --no-startup-id setxkbmap -option ctrl:swapcaps in my .config/i3/config file. Of course, this only works if you're using the i3 tiling window manager. And if you unplug your keyboard you'll have to re-run the command manually.