I've only tried your standard western teas, are there more exotic brands with more exotic effects? And how do they compare with coffee?

That's fascinating, does Stage 8 feel like caffeine / nootropics on it's own or was it more of an enhancement to those effects?

If you don't mind me asking, how long did it take you to reach Stage 8 with what level of daily practice / dedication? And if it took years as many claim how did you think about the risk / reward of that kind of time investment VS whether or not the people reporting those effects were deluded?

Your kind words made my day, thankyou 😊. And now that you mention it I suppose that has been my side avenue of approach, tuning my health and schedule to make it easier to enter flow.

The "sexiness'" of the hard problem of Consciousness to me is mainly in it's relationship with morality and meaning.

For any hypothetical I can think of, whether or not the entities involved have a subjective experience (along with the concept of a valence/preferences) dominates any other consideration. In a way it seems like "Hard Problem" aspect of Consciousness is the only thing that would give anything meaning, thus pointing to the hard problem as one of the most pressing questions for anyone trying to understand what's going on.

Makes you wonder if training and embedding an army of altruistic rationalist in politics would be a worthwhile endeavour. Although now that I type this that's probably not too far off what 80000 hours is attempting 😄

Ha, I never would have thought of just messaging a bunch of politians to sate my curiosity. That reply is fascinating though.

I suppose in the ordinary situation where it doesn't happen suddenly you're also (ideally) running on some kind of policy platform so the gathering of advisors would have to happen well in advance. In that case you don't have the power of the office to summon whoever you want, and maybe there's se kind of loyalty thing to the existing team like you mentioned.

Still curious if you've got thoughts on the top of your head, who's on your list and through what process would you bootstrap to organisation?

As we all do from time to time, I imagined what I'd do if through some impossible vagary I was made president of the USA all of a sudden. What would one do differently? How would you perform the kind of rapid sense making needed in such a situation?

The obvious immediate step to me would be to use my presidential powers to assemble a room of people that seem smart, sane, practical, easy to work with and it got me thinking about who would be on that emergency list for you?

One might expect the who's who of the rat-sphere, your Eliezer, Scotst, Zvi's, etc. But who else does your mind immediately go to in this thought experiment? And what qualities are you looking for? And how would you organise them?

I definately identify with that description of neutral experience. I suspect removing ", positive and negative" might make it read a little easier.

And yeah, it's an interesting balance between a straight forward sentence, and one that still fully beings forward the the idea in my mind. I'd like to include Perception, Memory, and an experience of Time also but I either don't have an intuitive enough abstraction of them or can't think of a sentence that brings it forward.

For what it's worth this perfectly mirrors my own experience. My performance increases with caffeine, I've not yet found a ceiling to the dose - performance relationship but I starting getting anxious and sleepless if I take it too consistently.