Posts
Wiki Contributions
Comments
I've long ascribed to (and felt) that people are existentially isolated
There's a pair of conjoined craniopagus twins in Canada, the Hogan twins, who are conjoined at the head and have fused brains connected by a thalamic bridge. They're separate individuals who still receive some sensory awareness of what the other is feeling, and they can even communicate in their thoughts. When one was crying as a child, you could put a pacifier in the other's mouth and they would both calm down. When you cover one's eyes and show an image to the other, the blindfolded one can see it.
To the best of my knowledge, neither one of them has ever once said that anything was particularly different about how the other sensed something. Tatiana's red is still Krista's red, and so on.
The claim of existential isolation is a bit like claims from centuries ago about how it fundamentally couldn't be known whether a person blind from birth, if given the gift of sight, would be able to look at things they've only touched up until then and identify them. If you think of a clever enough situation, or if a sufficiently serendipitous medical oddity arises, seemingly intractable problems of that sort can be defeated rather anticlimactically.
1Not that I have any current betting plans (we already talked previously), but what odds would you allow for someone willing to put their money in escrow? Just asking out of curiosity.
That’s understandable. Supposing I went with some form of verification, what odds would you be feeling right now?
Hey, this might be a little bit "last minute" considering the stuff tomorrow, but are you willing to do transfers with regular money instead of crypto?
Regarding a drug-based solution, I recommend Silexan. Scott Alexander wrote about this not that long ago on ACX, and anecdotally, it's been shockingly effective for anxiety issues that arose for me a year ago.
Regarding an entirely psychological, but still clinical solution? Consider starting online therapy with a psychologist/psychiatrist. This has helped me as well- not to the same extent as the Silexan, I think, but it still helped just because it was a dedicated hour per week of thinking about it and voicing those thoughts to someone. Almost every breakthrough came from me just rationally talking it out, but that was 10 times easier in therapy than on my own because I had nothing else to get distracted by or be doing during that period. That, and talking about one's problems to another party has been proven to improve problem-solving effectiveness as compared to thinking them through internally, even if the other party is doing nothing but listening (or even if they're a literal inanimate object like a rubber ducky).
Finally, for my own anecdotal "folk" solution that I completely made up, but which helped me at one point and might be helpful to you as well: try to imagine two selves inside of you in a dialogue, one of them completely calm and rational, and the other embodying whatever your emotions and impulsive thoughts are (so during a panic attack, this would mean picturing one of you who's having the panic attack and another who's calmly thinking about what to do next to resolve the situation). Then, in the dialogue, picture the rational one consoling the emotional one (which is a perfectly rational thing to do for someone who's stressed or anxious).
That last one, I used for a week or two with moderate effectiveness, and then I transitioned from that to standard self-compassion. I'd heard about self-compassion before, but I didn't really get how to actually do it until I'd gotten some practice with that toy model of the rational and emotional selves.
If the purpose of this betting is to reward those who bet on the truth, though, then allowing a spike in credulity to count for it works against that purpose, and turns it into more of a combined bet of “Odds that the true evidence available to the public and LW suggests >50% likelihood or that substantial false evidence comes out for a very short period within the longer time period”.
In his comment reply to me, OP mentioned he would be fine with a window of a month for things to settle and considered it a reasonable concern, which suggests that he is (rightly) focused more on betting about actual UFO likelihood, rather than the hybrid likelihood that includes hypothetical instances of massive short-term misinformation.
While you are correct that the probability of that misinformation should theoretically be factored in on the better’s end, that’s not what the OP is really wanting to bet on in the first place; as such, I don’t think it was a mistake to point it out.
That sounds reasonable enough.
Did you ever end up making a Part 2?