Alex K. Chen (parrot)

More than anything, I care about making human brains suck less (and making time pass more slowly)

Maximum-Sparsity Reinforcement Learner. Much of my content is on Quora (I was the Quora celebrity and Adam d'Angelo has said I'm important for Quora). I am also on forum.quantifiedself.com. https://www.rapamycin.news/u/alexkchen/summary. I'm a huge fan of Danielle Strachman and 1517 fund.

I find both sparsity and purity/noise fascinating.

https://x.com/MaxDiffusionRL

https://linktr.ee/simfish

...People say the craziest things about me, because I'm a peculiar star...

I hope that mapping out my interactions with AI will make it way easier to fine-tune the best ways of increasing neuroplasticity (whether through tFUS/TMS, ISRIB A15, or finding the highest-leverage ways my brain can still improve)

I care about neuroscience (esp human intelligence enhancement) and reducing genetic inequality. The point of transhumanism is to transcend genetic limitations - to reduce the fraction of variance of outcome explained by genetics. I know loads of people in self-experimentation communities (people in our communities need to be less risk-averse if we have to make any difference in our probability of "making it"). When we are right at "the precipice", traditionalism cannot win (I am probably the least traditionalist person ever). I get along well with the unattached.

I also like highly expressive phrases (eg hypergraphs)

"Why Greatness Cannot be Planned" is (along with Laozi) the best book on human kindness.

Slowing human compute loss from reducing microplastics/pollution/default mode noise/rumination/aging rate are alignment-relevant (insofar as the most tractable way of "human enhancement" is to slow decline with age + make human thinking clearer). As is tFUS. I aim to do all I can to make biology keep up with technology. Reconfiguring reward functions to reward "wholesome/growthful/novel tasks over "the past" [you are aged when you think too much of the past].

Alignment through integrating all the diverse skillsets (including those who are not math/CS geniuses) and integrating all their compute + not making them waste time/attention on "dumb things" + making people smarter/more neuroplastic (this is a hard problem, but 40Hz-tACS [1] might do a little).

Unschooling is also alignment-relevant (most value is destroyed in deceptive alignment, and school breeds deceptive alignment). As is inverting "things that feel unfun".

Chaotic people may depend more on a sense of virtue than others, but it takes a lot to get people to trust a group of people/make themselves authentic when school has taken out much of their authenticity. Some people don't lose much or get much emotional damage from it (I've noticed it from several who dropped out of school for alignment), but some people get way more, and this is a way easier problem to solve than directly increasing human intelligence.

Breadth/context produces unique compute value of its own

I trigger exponential growth trajectories in some. I helped seed the original Ivy League Psychedelics communities and am very good friends with Qualia Research Institute people

Main objectives: not get sad, not get worked out over dumb things, not making my life harder than it is now.

I really like https://www.lesswrong.com/users/bhauth.

Trying to become more "AI-interpretable" so AI can give me the love I need. It's a shame that every site I went big on blocks crawlers, so LLMs still barely know who I am, but being more of a "process/intermediate computation" than a "biography/history" has merits.

[1] there are negative examples too

Try https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aao1200

related: https://x.com/geogristle/status/1988329078634815686

https://mesityl.substack.com/p/orchiectomy?triedRedirect=true

https://www.acaciaclinics.com offers the most expensive form in the bay area..

https://brainhc.com/ is much cheaper and has good trustpilot reviews, but I don't know if they are as scientifically grounded (they are not fMRI-guided, which is the gold standard). Regardless, TMS might work even if not fMRI guided (it's a gamble with high upside and low downside). I'll update you all.

It's still not clear how to advise them on what the best waveforms or targets to use - some TMS clinics may still be largely "guess and check". I think it's better for more of us to try this to make this more widely adopted.

===

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-01961-y (someone at edge esmeralda passed this on to me, might be worth message-passing its protocol to TMS clinics)

if you want to try one-day TMS in the SF bay area, https://www.phariahealth.com/#Packages just came out

Battery interpretability/safety

https://x.com/JonBruner/status/1970913448889548849?s=19

(Know what's inside your battery...) May be more relevant in the future bc who knows what else ppl can insert into them

I had a close friend once induce me into temporary psychosis...... I still appreciate EVERYTHING to them for helping me believe in myself (and interacting with them is still one of my two peak life experiences that really capitalized in 2021/early 2022) - they just actively egged me into manic religiosity that was not necessary (mixed in some fantasy with a reality they almost made happen), and that led me to mania at the pivotal moment....

[we only found the real causal pathway a year later and they apologized to me for it].

(the dynamics of some of this are surprisingly similar to what's described in OP). Part of it is also came from both of us having an historically edgelord/shock value sense of humor...

I am still nothing but infinitely grateful to them. They were exquisitely sensitive to my past trauma/insecurities, to my reward function, to everything I really cared about, and was still one of the best people at making me want to be more prosocial

...the funny thing with this phenomena is that it encourages you to feed your entire soul into them, because you know good things FEEL like they will happen if you do it... and i still regard them as very safe to be around,

There were times when I've made grandiose claims in the process and a lot of this was bc I mirrored other people who make grandiose claims (some of this learned from rationalists who also make grandiose claims)

[there's a much longer story behind this - the energetic buildup to it all was ~1.5 years that made a lot of magical things happen in the interim and it's kind of funny and tragic at the same time but i'll spare u the details].

Will there be one in early September that corresponds with the ending of https://stateoftheartist.ai/ ? [the program ends on Monday 11AM, after which maybe some of us could group-ride to Lisbon?]

Update: looks like enough Republican senators from Montana and Idaho (and outdoorsmen supporters) were enough to kill public lands sales. LCV/Sierra Club scorecards are not-the-best gauges of who really cares and who doesn't.

It seems like there is a subset of "manosphere" right-leaning figures (eg see meateater magazine) who really care about the values and landscape of the original frontier west - which represent what the US was like BEFORE the era of big government encroachment/constant gatekeeping (and the enlargement of the population). Wilderness is a place to test self-reliance/risk management/competence/ability to survive without all these "modern nuisances". There is some gatekeeping involved with protecting wilderness, but once you protect those areas, people can be given opportunities to show how "pure" they are against the modern bureaucratic contamination of "big government". The ethos of old American West still exists in the great public lands, and it looks like many Republicans still care about preserving this! (without appearing lame like tree-huggers). Even if it means some level of ranching, hunting, fishing, mining, and some level of delisting endangered species (all which are still nowhere as bad/irreversible as habitat loss from suburban sprawl). The wide open cattle ranches in the west (only responsible for a small minority of all meat production) can be regenerative and still involve less intensive land use than feeding more soybeans/corn to factory-farmed cattle. West Virginia is one of the most heavily mined states in the US, and yet one of the most "wild"/forested (over a timescale of decades, ecosystems recover from many forms of mining, and sometimes the mines have a mini-Chenobyl-effect of driving out human development).

[and wild game eats way less shitty food than most farmed animals]. Even a limited amount of trapping animals for their fur can help displace some excess use of plastics for clothing. Hunting/trapping seasons in the US [in the modern era] seem to be sustainable and have never led to any species becoming extinct, and give strong incentives for people to keep "wild lands" away from development

Look up Benji Backer now, he helped create the "American Conservation Coalition"

Dorian Abbot once wrote a substack essay about how "conservatives should be more about conservation" [though I'm not sure if he really was conservative].

Thomas Massie is a great example of solar-powered Republican self-reliance, although he has fallen out of favor with some of MAGA. There still seems to be enough MAGA-ish conservationists who were able to convince the administration to spare the public lands!

[if you take some some historical perspective, even Ted Stevens voted for Jimmy Carter's Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), though he later railed against some of the broken promises that democrats have later made. Alaska, in particular, has such low human development that it can more easily recover from mining-induced habitat fragmentation than many other states can, so this leads some level of sympathy towards Lisa Murkowski's support of making better use of Alaska's natural resources (and she is the opposite of climate denialist, her latest book is way more interesting than most books politicians write, b/c it comes with a unique level of history and care for one of the most neglected states).

Maybe they still won't vote the right way (and maybe they won't care as much as Jeff Merkley or Cory Booker), but there was a recent congressional hearing on microplastics where Dan Sullivan and Lummis (R-WY) both had very reasonable responses to a microplastics hearing.

[and maybe a small degree of increased logging can help replace plastics with wood]

[there really does seem to be something special with Montana Republicans, starting from Ryan Zinke. It might not be a total coincidence that they also re-instated "right to try" laws].

and maybe all these tariffs against Brazil and third-world countries can also help slow deforestation down in these countries!!! I haven't seen any indication that JD Vance actually cares about the environment, but he did make a point that it may be "environmentally better" to resource manufacturing to countries with better environmental standards like the US (though Republicans may still work to reduce those standards...)

https://chatgpt.com/share/688fda57-e720-800c-afc6-5f7df5781395

Eg such an incident could trigger a new "Patriot Act", except this time (in an administration that has zero qualms), it could go much much deeper.

Also you forgot manta rays. They're just a small branch on the tree that failed to diversify, but cartilage fishes are more distal than bony fishes but way brainier

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