Overall, I think this is a much better way to teach math - in some sense it's similar to removing date memorization from history classes, which I also agree with. I do have an issue with the phrase "a triangle has the same area as itself." A more user-friendly intuition for me is "if you describe the same thing two ways, it's still the same thing." This seems more generalizable and also gets more directly at the point that sin(A)/a is a complete description of a triangle's proportions.

It's thought that having a higher VO2Max can improve various 'quality of life' markers like cognitive functioning (particularly sustained attention and working memory) and sleep quality.

Man, I really hope there's a way to induce psychedelic states through sensory inputs. That could be hugely beneficial if harnessed for pro-human goals (for example, scaling therapeutic interventions like MDMA or ketamine therapy.)

I'm not following how the cult example relates to something like achieving remote code execution in the human brain via the visual cortex. While cult manipulation techniques do elicit specific behavior via psychological manipulation, it seems like the brain of a cult member is still operating 'in human mode', which is why people influenced by a cult act like human beings with unusual priorities and incentives instead of like zombies.

Intuitively, I see a qualitative difference between adversarial inputs like the ones in the story and merely pathological ones, such as manipulative advertising or dopamine-scrolling-inducing content. The intuition comes from cybersecurity, where it's generally accepted that the control plane (roughly, the stream of inputs deciding what the system does and how it does it) should be isolated from the data plane (roughly, the stream of inputs defining what the system operates on.) In the examples of advertising and memetics, the input is still processed in the 'data plane', where the brain integrates sensory information on its own terms, in the pursuit of its own goals. "Screensnakes"/etc seem to have the ability to break the isolation and interact directly with the control plane (e.g a snake's coloration is no longer processed as 'a snake's coloration' at all.)

That said, there are natural examples which are less clear-cut, such as the documented phenomenon where infrasound around 19Hz produces a feeling of dread. It's not clear to me that this is 'control plane hacking' per se (for example, perhaps this is an evolved response to sounds that would have been associated with caves or big predators in the past) but it does blur the intuitive boundary between the control plane and data plane.

Are you aware of any phenomena that are very 'control plane-y' in this sense? If they existed, it would seem to me to be a positive confirmation that I'm wrong and your idea of the adversarial search resulting in a 'Glitcher protocol' would have some legs.