Does anyone have any other recommended easy practice questions? I feel like dissolving free will produced useful insights (notably, it seems I found a small portion of ideas not already present in posted solutions to free will), and I'd like to attempt more such problems at which it is suspected I'm likely to succeed.

I figured Harry himself was just aro/ace and it was showing through even at a young age. I admit this was a bit of typical mind fallacious reasoning; people could tell I was unusual like that when I was 10.

Yeah, feels like it's at a similar difficulty level as I've been experiencing trying to transcribe my own thought process as pseudocode. And I get the impression that few insights would be readily transferrable across different egregores, in which case each and every one might need its own individual effort.

Reminds me of the work that was done which caused the decline of the Ku Klux Klan: someone infiltrated, learned all the rituals and coded language used, then published that information -- and that was all it took to cripple their power.

I wish you all the luck re: human enhancement.

Interesting, and thanks for taking the time!

That's a very new-to-me take on getting AGI efforts to stop: understand and intervene directly on the egregore, rather than like, trying to influence individuals.

I'll have to think about this. 

It's a pet cause of mine, to get as many people as I can off of the harmful social media platforms (which in my view is nearly all of them, weighted by readership). Possibly [considering "social media use" as an egregore, and considering how to interact with the egregore] might be more effective than my past efforts.

Your list of coded movements really rings-relevant to me - "second-order norm enforcement" made me immediately think of how people will vocally remark that you're strange or ask why, if they learn you're not on any social media that they've heard of. I suspect this mostly does not influence social-media-nonusers, but rather affects bystanders, erecting an additional barrier to exiting the egregore.

Thanks for the new mental model. Even if I end up not adopting it wholesale, it seems obviously full of useful parts!

Would you be willing to elaborate on what you meant by "decoding" egregores? I'm semi-familliar with the term (checking my impression of understanding: egregore = self-sustaining semi-agentic meme running on the computational substrate of more than one human brain, for example a corporation) but I'm not clear on what decoding means here. Like trying to transcribe the egregore's algorithm into something easily human-readable?

Do you have a reference for information on the compute graph of the brain? I'd love to read about that.

I've been trying to reverse-engineer my own brain's high-level algorithm into code, via introspection, and had non-zero success. Knowing more about brain anatomy in general sounds like the kind of thing likely to bump my guesses in useful directions.

I started from the same place as:

I spent years trying to come up with a mental strategy that would reliably generate willpower, all to no avail.

I have had some limited success with the Decision Theorist method. Noticing that my decision process (in this example, regarding whether to go to bed yet) is basically the same computation at 10pm, 1am, 3am, etc. I calculate the limit of this behavior (e.g. computation not meaningfully altered until the birds outside start chirping, or the sun comes up, or I get so tired it makes me nauseous), notice my local choice is using a false option: not [stay up 5 more minutes] versus [sleep now], but rather [stay up until the sun comes up] versus [sleep now]. Having noticed the true form of my options, the correct choice becomes easy to act upon.

Of course, I'm posting this at 6am local time. My results have been inconsistent. This plan typically fails when I don't notice myself deciding, or don't remember to do that "what's the limit" calculation.

Thanks for the tip on Dextroamphetamine. Hopefully I'll act on it.

I also have reason to believe my color perception is pretty abnormal, both before and after estradiol supplementation. Thus, not having heard of [anything relating to my vision] with relation to estradiol should perhaps not be considered surprising. My eye doctors have labelled it as "mild protanomaly", though both offices remarked that the label doesn't quite fit.

If still interested in more detail, see: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NyiFLzSrkfkDW4S7o/?commentId=tQaoxSgMteZnaWWee

I'm pretty certain that even if we figure out how to halt or reverse "aging" as in "the (set of) root cause(s) of the progressive syndrome of morbidities and heighten d disease risk universal among 80+ year old people today", that there would be other forms of long-term accumulating damage to understand and reverse on longer time scales than a single century.

Some examples of long-term accumulating damage that we'll eventually need to address, but not before people are reliably living to 100+: lead ion accumulation over a lifetime, ditto a bunch of other long-lived poisons, scar tissue accumulation, accumulation of various "dusts" (ex: asbestos) in the lungs, etc.

I think we're currently, as a civilization, hunting for whatever lifespan/heathspan low-hanging fruit might exist, and will eventually shift to more systematic approaches as our civilization further understands aging and learns to do nanotech.

In the mean time, I'm basically keeping my eyes open for preventable permanent damage sources to avoid, to make my personal time limit less urgent. I take dust inhalation very seriously, ditto trace heavy metal exposure, ditto sunburn.

I have a pet theory that... I don't see a way to implement *in vivo*, but I'd like to float in case it has any value.

The gist is the notion of self-copying genes that progressively pollute each cell lineage's genome over decades. (And the explanation for why this doesn't just accumulate across generations and end the species would be some combination of polluted sperm failing to outcompete surrounding healthier sperm on average, and polluted embryos being sufficiently more likely to miscarry.)

And the related solution (and experiment) would be editing gametes or zygotes to lack all copies of the self-copying gene, so that there'd be none of them to initiate the process of runaway self-copying gene accumulation. In the worlds where this idea leads to longevity escape velocity, it'd need to be upstream of the other pieces of aging, which... I'm guessing not all of them, but maybe enough? It's based on the "retrotransposons" idea, from the literature.

I... have neither the knowledge nor the resources to go looking myself, yet, but it felt worth pointing out that hypothetically there might be avenues left to explore, if cellular reprogramming isn't enough.