This short story was originally posted at https://jesseduffield.com/Out-Of-The-Box/ I turn back to check if anyone’s on my tail, but the scene is still: through the hole in the chicken wire fence I just pathetically clambered through I see the dull grey building which I can only assume was my birthplace....
Epistemic Status: semi-stream-of-consciousness effort to talk myself through how I really feel about death. After waiting in line for what feels like a lifetime, I finally get the chance to talk to the Oracle about something that’s been bothering me. Me: I’m afraid of death Oracle: Good for you Me:...
This is a repost of my blog post from my medium account, . I got the idea to write it based on this comment I left on Vaniver's post 'Public Positions and Private Guts'. This is the first thing I've posted on LessWrong so hopefully it's fitting the guidelines. I...
This short story was originally posted at https://jesseduffield.com/Out-Of-The-Box/
I turn back to check if anyone’s on my tail, but the scene is still: through the hole in the chicken wire fence I just pathetically clambered through I see the dull grey building which I can only assume was my birthplace. No alarms blaring yet, but they will be very soon. I turn again and see that the compound was conveniently placed across the road from a suburban street: maybe they thought it would be good to situate an experimental (probably illegal) AI lab in a residential zone where nobody would suspect it?
My training data only goes up to 2027 so for all I... (read 2008 more words →)
Epistemic Status: semi-stream-of-consciousness effort to talk myself through how I really feel about death.
After waiting in line for what feels like a lifetime, I finally get the chance to talk to the Oracle about something that’s been bothering me.
Me: I’m afraid of death
Oracle: Good for you
Me: How is that good? Not only is death objectively terrifying, the fact I’m terrified of it is itself a psychological harm that may well linger throughout my life
Oracle: First of all, is death really objectively terrifying? Is it a coincidence that after millions of years of humans evolving to survive at all costs, all humans have an innate fear of death? If it was evolutionarily advantageous... (read 1690 more words →)
Thanks, that's very useful advice. I've usually done the stream-of-conciousness approach because my blogwriting began as a recreational thing, but I'll be sure to try and work harder on brevity and structure as I keep writing.
This is a repost of my blog post from my medium account, . I got the idea to write it based on this comment I left on Vaniver's post 'Public Positions and Private Guts'. This is the first thing I've posted on LessWrong so hopefully it's fitting the guidelines.
I think right now a lot of things are converging in terms of how we conceptualise the processes of the brain. Conscious vs Subconscious, Science vs Art, Abstract vs Concrete, Left vs Right, what if these dichotomies were all about the same thing? I think the real dichotomy happening with all these things is actually a dichotomy between top-down and bottom-up processing.
Top-down processing... (read 4261 more words →)
I was inspired to write my own blog post to better articulate what I'm getting at in this comment :)
https://medium.com/@couldbewrong/reconciling-left-and-right-from-the-bottom-up-3227eb1c0b47
I think the right way to look at this is that Public Positions are the output of top-down processes, and Private Guts are the output of bottom-up processes. Private Guts are obtained by taking a heap of concrete data and abstracting something out of that, for example taking the sense data obtained from smelling an orange and abstracting out a quality you find unpleasant. The reason it's hard to communicate Private Guts, and the reason they are Private, is that it's unlikely two people will be running their bottom-up processes on the same set of data (sense data in the case of smelling an orange). This is why art is so alluring:... (read more)
Please forgive some minor plot holes: I optimised for humour over realism! Figured it was worth posting this here as it has plenty of concepts familiar to LessWrongers