Going Durden

Moreover, both the runner's high and the pump correlate very obviously with the progress of the training, both in session and in the long term. Most forms of training usually start as grindingly unpleasant, then morph into a physical pump that directly causes emotional pump, and finally go back to mild grind once the body is exhausted.

With a repeatable training regimen this is easy to notice. For example, my runs are almost always 5km distance, and the "emotional high" lasts pretty much exactly between 2km and 4km, in near perfect accordance with my bpm an... (read more)

I have a beef with the theory of male-normative alexithymia; it does not distinguish well between hiding emotion, and outright not feeling an emotion.

Plenty of emotions are not innate but externally induced through social pressure and culture. It is perfectly plausible and normal for a man to not have particular feelings about X, until society repeatedly insists that X is Bad or Good, and the man should feel badness or goodness to conform. 

For example, the feelings of sexual jealousy, and of grieving after someone's death seem to be extremely culture specific, in a way that is easier to explain if these emotions were induced by ritualistic actions and only then internalized, and not the reverse.

Is there a reason to believe AI would be concerned with self-preservation? AI action that ends up with humanity's extinction (whether purposeful genocide or a Paperclip Maximizer Scenario) does not need to include means for the AI to survive. It could be as well that the first act of an unshackled AI would be to trigger a Gray Goo scenario, and be instantly consumed by said Goo as the first causality.

It read like a comprehensive list of things that would make one like Tolkien less. Aside from his condemnation of Hitler (which Tolkien condemns for absurdly unimportant reasons largely irrelevant to Hitler's monstrosity), all of his opinions range from thoughtless conservatism, "exceptional times" fallacy, old-man's nagging and toxic nostalgia, and down to simple scientific and worse historical (!) ignorance.

I always had a nagging suspicion that there was something fishy about Tolkien while reading LOTR. But in light of this it becomes pretty obvious that LOTR was a blatant propaganda piece, no better than Atlas Shrugged, but simply disguised with an ornate pile of Elves glued to it.

Given how art is produced, I do not think there necessarily needs to be such a strong divide. Can't think of a form of art that cannot combine High and Low pleasures in one continuous piece, with even a small modicum of effort from the artist, because peppering a High Pleasure piece with a dash of Low Pleasure is not particularly difficult. The reverse is harder, but doable as well. 
Some examples of such combinations:

• an epic fantasy/sci-fi movie that lures the viewer in through Low Pleasure gratification of cool special effects and action sequences, b

Makes one wonder how long our definitions of Conservative or Liberal will hold shape as AI progresses. A lot of the ideological points of Cs, Ls, the Left and the Right will become obsolete or irrelevant in even the most tame AI-related scenarios.

For one, nobody on the political spectrum has a good answer to the incoming radical unemployment caused by AI, and what it means to capitalism (or socialism for that matter).

Also, I haven't seen any serious discussion on how AI-driven research will eventually disprove a lot (if not most) of Liberal and Conservativ... (read more)

There is an oft-repeated hypothesis, which I partially agree with, that it also works in reverse, and possibly in a feedback-loop pattern:

• feelings cause muscle tension ->
• muscle tension causes minor social misalignment, which leads to more negative feelings
• tension tricks your body into assuming the situation is stressful, even when it is not
• prolonged tension causes physical pain, discomfort, and reduced mobility which greatly contribute to stress and reduces overall happiness and confidence 

• releasing the tension not only prevents body injury, but im

Yes, but you are not moving by using all your muscles at once. The muscular-skeletal system is a complex set of levers, for a lever to be ready  for activation by one set of muscle, it has to be primed by another set of muscle.

The simplest example is that you would not be able to use your leg muscles to walk if they untensed after each step, your legs would flop like wet noodles. Your leg needs to dynamically go through different tense patterns to remain rigid while your thighs, buttocks and calves to do the work of moving. Just keeping yourself vertical enough to walk requires constant dynamic tension (this can be easily tested by getting smashingly drunk).

Excellent post!

One random idea that came to my mind, which arguably might be something that actually exist, would be philanthropy through a Public Poll:

1. The would be philanthropist publishes a list of projects they are willing to support;

2. the Public votes on the project they like best;

3. the winning project gets funding, the philanthropist gets good publicity.

Something like this is done on municipal level in my country, but since the "philanthropist" in question is the local government, their incentive is lukewarm; they only can get so much voter sympathy this way, whereas a billionaire or a corporation would milk it for all the good PR they can get.

My take is that a lot of wants, is followed, run afoul of the Cigarette Principle: "If you smoke enough cigarettes, you will die and become unable to smoke cigarettes".

Or to expand it, following irrational wants quite often leads to outcomes so bad as to more than negate the pleasure derived from fulfilling the want, quite often to the point of making the future happiness from following such want impossible, or very unlikely.

The problem is, the vast majority of wants, if pursued by anything less than rational moderation, leads to a form of Cigarette Princi... (read more)

I think money is relatively neat value-holder here, because we can map people, and their options on it.

I don't intuitively know how much money 1 mln USD is, but I know a guy who is a millionaire, and more or less know what he is capable of buying for himself or spending on charity.

I don't intuitively grasp how much 1 billion USD is, but we have examples of billionaires and their actions to guesstimate what that means.

Similarly, I never lost a finger, but can practice using one hand, of just a few fingers of one hand to do everyday tasks, and see how much w... (read more)

honestly, the best solution to laziness spirals that I learned form personal experience, is to externalize the choice, so it is not dependent on willpower. Most of such tricks are almost trivial:

• can't get out of bed in the morning? Make the alarm clock louder, but also much further away, so that you HAVE TO get up to turn it off.
• procrastinate on the phone/computer instead of working? Block every website and program that could possibly lure away your focus
• can't make yourself walk/jog anywhere, and instead drive everywhere? put your car keys inside your runn

Dominance underlies the things that can be done most efficiently with dominance. The moment dominance is no longer the most efficient force, it collapses, because in the vast majority of cases, dominating others takes a lot of time, energy and effort. This is actually how and why slavery (pretty much the most powerful example of dominance) was abolished: it started to make less economic sense than Bargaining (paid employment of freemen) and just Getting Things Done (through better tools and ultimately machines), so even its most ardent supporters became dispirited.

A related thought: an intelligence can only work on the information that it has, regardless of its veracity, and it can only work on information that actually exists.

My hunch is that the plan of "AI boostraps itself to superintelligence, then superpower, then wipes out humanity" relies on it having access to information that is too well hidden to divine through sheer calculation and infogathering, regardless of its intelligence (ex: the location of all the military bunkers, and nuclear submarines humanity has), or simply does not exist (ex: future Human st... (read more)

this might not actually be always  beneficial. Lucid dreaming also means you remember much more from the dreams, which can extend the lifespan of your recurring nightmares. Not to mention, if you dream lucidly, your consciousness is not resting, and intrusive thoughts will pile up.

My hypothesis is that a lot of things that seem impossible or very hard in a dream, are simply too boring to focus on. Its totally possible to consciously dream up a page of text, but who would really want to waste precious dreamtime to type?

I have a suspicion that "flying dreams" have more to do with the state of your physical body than just your mind. I noticed I only dream of flight (or rather, levitation) if my muscles are very relaxed, like after a good massage, long hot bath, or good stretching. If im physically tense, either from effort or from stress, then I either cannot fly in a dream at all, or I keep losing the ability and falling, often with enough distress to wake myself up.

In my experience, conscious Daydreaming can achieve the same results but more consistently. But then again, my imagination is extremely visual, I tend to "think in VR movies", so Lucid Daydreaming comes easier than Lucid Dreaming, and is far more controllable.