Try replacing "meaning" with "purpose" and see if it starts to make sense. Meaning is about orientation towards, salience, importance, and a sense of why things matter.

Nihilism is the idea that nothing matters, so there is no purpose to things, it's just stuff happening.

Essentialism is the idea that purpose exists somewhere else other than here and now.

Meaning is embodied in our lives as we live them, just as they are, with nothing added or taken away.

Does that help?

There are patterns of muscle tension and slackness that fairly reliably create changes in the brain and the rest of the nervous system.

For example, if you're slumped too much, you'll tend to get sleepy easier. If you're sitting too upright and stiffly by creating tension to hold yourself up, it blocks the nervous system from getting in sync with breathing.

We teach people to sit in an upright, relaxed posture, and traditionally this involves sitting on a cushion cross-legged because it forces the hips into a position that makes sitting upright require relatively little effort (most possible postures heavily engage the core, requiring a lot of tension to sit upright, while we sit in a way that is designed to minimize that effort by "locking" the torso into a position where it doesn't have to work very hard to maintain posture).

When we teach people zazen meditation, we teach them posture first. And the traditional instruction is to observe breathing at the hara (the diaphragm). The theory is that this regulates attention by regulating the whole nervous system by getting everything in sync with breathing.

Bad posture makes it harder for people to meditate, and the usual prescription for various problems like sleepiness or daydreaming is postural changes (as in, fix your posture to conform to the norm).

I think this would be really interesting to look into, and I guess it depends on the level of disfunction. There's lots of people who lose conscious control of parts of their bodies but seem to retain some control in that they don't need to be put on a ventilator or have a pace maker. This suggests that some signals may still be coming through, even if they can't be accessed via awareness.

But in other cases the signals are totally lost, in which case we should predict some sort of alternation of mental state, and if there's not that would be both surprising relative to this theory and would require explanation to make sense of both that evidence and the evidence in favor of the theory.

That's fair. I know there are programmers who actually like writing code for it's own sake rather than as a way to achieve a goal. I think you are right that the profession will change to be less about writing code and more about achieving goals (and it already is, so I just mean it will more be like this), since AI will be cheap enough to make humans writing code too expensive.

Yes? I'm not objecting directly to the results of the study, which are contained to what the study can show, but to the inference that many people seem to be drawing from the study.

I'm not going to argue the study doesn't show what it shows, but based on personal experience, I have a hard time believing the inferred claim that AI slows down programmers (vs. the more narrow claim that the study proves, which is that AI slows down programmers in situations that match the study).

I have a hard time believing this because I have seen the increased productivity on my own team.

Here's my best theory for what's going on:

• AI makes programming slower when the programmer otherwise knows what they're doing
  • AI makes more mistakes and regresses to the mean, requiring human fixes on top of waiting for the AI to run
• AI helps most when a programmer doesn't know exactly what to do, so it saves them time researching (reading and understanding code other people wrote, looking through docs for how to do things, reading through bug reports and questions to find answer to issues they encounter, etc.)
• And then obviously if someone's not a programmer and vibe coding AI helps them move infinitely faster than they would have otherwise because they couldn't code at all

This would explain the results the METR team got, but also explain why it seems so obvious to everyone that we should be paying a lot of money for AI tools to help programmers write code.

(I'll admit, there's another reason for programmers to want to use AI even if it did make them worse at their jobs: it outsources some of the most unpleasant programming labor, so even if it's slower, it's worth it in the eyes of a programmer because their experience of programming feels better when they use AI because they didn't spend a lot of time doing tasks they didn't enjoy doing, like typing out the code changes they already figured out in their head.)

Maybe "warfare" is the wrong metaphor here, but there's a kind of constant competition for idea salience since policy makers can only know or care about so many possible ideas. Out of all the stuff they could think about, they will maybe consider 3 options max to respond to a crisis, not 10 or 100, so the question becomes how does an idea get to become one of those 3.

Some quick thoughts:

• there's value in diversified positions (including ones that lead to the same outcomes)
  • arguably the PNAC position got a foothold because its case generalized in one logical step from the events, and importantly another position could have taken its place if it had generalized in one step in the same way
  • similarly, you can imagine that multiple cases were being made for regime change in Iraq; the PNAC one just happens to offer a theory for why regime change was necessary that seemed plausible in a way that other theories maybe didn't (even though they advocated for the same thing)
• there's value in being close to power (makes the position more accessible as an option for response)
• the most important thing is to get your position taken as the obvious next step. the most important thing is also to make sure the policy gets implemented in a sensible way if you think it's sensible
• there's likely a kind of "position warfare" going on in policy circles to make sure your position is the one that's primed to win if the conditions for its enactment are suddenly met