I liked this book too and I just wanted to share a graphic that was implied in the book between guidance and expertise. It's a pretty obvious idea but for me it was just one of those things you don't think about. The lower context someone has the more guidance they need and vice versa (the trend is not necessarily linear though):

Okay (if possible), I want you to imagine I'm an AI system or similar and that you can give me resources in the context window that increase the probability of me making progress on problems you care about in the next 5 years. Do you have a reading list or similar for this sort of thing? (It seems hard to specify and so it might be easier to mention what resources can bring the ideas forth. I also recognize that this might be one of those applied knowledge things rather than a set of knowledge things.)

Also, if we take the cryptography lens seriously here, an implication might be that I should learn the existing off the shelf solutions in order to "not invent my own". I do believe that there is no such thing as being truly agnostic to a meta-philosophy since you're somehow implicitly projecting your own biases on to the world. 

I'm gonna make this personally applicable to myself as that feels more skin in the game and less like a general exercise.

There are a couple of contexts to draw from here:

1. Traditional philosophy. (I've read the following):
   1. A history of western philosophy
   2. (Plato, Aristotles, Hume, Foucault, Spinoza, Russell, John Rawls, Dennett, Chalmers and a bunch of other non continental philosophers)
2. Eastern philosophy (I've read the following):
   1. Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism (Mainly tibetan buddhism here)
3. Modern more AI related philosophy (I've read the following):
   1. Yudkowsky, Bostrom
   2. (Not at first glance philosophy but): Michael Levin (Diverse Intelligence), Some Category Theory (Composition), 

Which one is the one to double down on? How do they relate to learning more about meta ethics? Where am I missing things within my philosophy education?

(I'm not sure this is a productive road to go down but I would love to learn more about how to learn more about this.)

Okay, this is quite interesting. I'll try to parse this by mentioning a potential instantiation of this and maybe you could let me know if I got it wrong or right/somewhere in between?

The scenario is that I'm trying to figure out what I should do when I wake up in the morning and I'm on a walk. What do I is that I then listen to the world in some way, I try to figure out some good way to take actions. One way to do this is somato sensory experiencing, I listen into my sub-parts. Yet a problem with this is that there's a egree o fpassivity here. Yes my stomach is saying go away and hide and my shoulders are saying that I'm carrying weight whilst maybe my face is smiling and is curious. This listening has some sort of lack of integration within it? I now know this but that doesn't mean that my sub-parts have had a good conversation. 

We can extend this even further for why is the best basis something like emotions? Why can't we sense things like a degree of extended cognition within our social circles and with different things that we do? 

The practice is then somehow figure out how to listen and do good bargaining and to come up with good solutions for the combined agency that you have, whatever that might be? And the more extended and open you can make that cognition, the better it is? 

Yet, you shouldn't fully identify with your social network or the world, neither should you identify with nothing, you should identify with something in between (non-duality from buddhism?). You should try to find the most (causally?) relevant actor to identify with and this is situation dependent and an art? 

So that is the process to engage in and the answer is different for each person? (Let me know if I'm off the mark or if this is kind of what you mean)

n=1 evidence but I thought I would share from a random external perspective who enjoys doing some writing and who's in the potential audience for a future version (if run) of inkhaven.

For this version, I had no clue how it would be and so I thought it was too high risk to gamble on it being good. Given what I've seen of the setup this year I would basically be a guaranteed sign up if it was less than 15-20% of my cash reserve to go next year. Potentially upwards of 30-40% (reference class: currently doing more or less independent work and getting by with money for going to uni from the swedish state).

(For some reason I feel a bit weird about making this comment but I also want to practice sending unfinished comments that are more random feedback as it is often useful for the individuals involved given the assumption that my perspective is somewhat indicative of a larger audience.)

Could you elaborate here? 

Is there a specific example of the difference between just somatic sensing and having it being intuitively reflected through your thoughts? I feel like you're saying something important but I'm not fully sure how it manifests more concretely and I might want to work on this skill. 

I do feel like there's something to be said for a more integrated emotion system not being as somatic but being more implicit in the system, like your thoughts and feelings are more one-pointed which is kind of where my experience has shifted to over time, I don't know if this is what you mean?

Also, don't listen to me, listen to this successful person!: https://youtube.com/shorts/QEsc1ObYeFk?si=X-3PicapZqJ16DHg

(Ethos guru argument successfully applied!)

(This take is like literaly a copy paste from Dr.K validated through my own experience.)

Firstly, that is a pretty amazing data gathering exercise and I'm really impressed. From the frame of the data I would completely agree with you that it doesn't seem to help. 

I think my frame here is slightly different and specifically about non-cold approaches? 

(I want to acknowledge the lack of skin in the game that this view has created for me, I do not care as much about relationships as I find myself quite peaceful and happy without it.)

It is for repeated interactions more? It's also something that kind of changes the approach vector a bit? I don't think I could go through the amount of cold approaches that you have here as I don't care enough for it?

Let me try to give you a mental model of how I think about it and let me know if it makes sense:

Analogously, I would want to imagine that everytime you have a conversation with someone else you create a space, a room. This room can either be cozy with a bunch of nice cushions, maybe it is quite sterile like an operating hall or if it is a more nerdy relationship it might be filled with whiteboards or whatever, there's a vibe. Meditation (or more specifically awareness + metta meditation) is a bit like creating an openness for that room? You're allowing the other person space to place their own things in that room and you can more meet them where they're at and so the conversations become a lot more natural and enjoyable as a consequence. "Oh, you really really want that specific lamp, I guess it doesn't matter to me but that's good to know as I can then place my couch here, instead of where the lamp would be".

When I'm in a warm, open and concentrated state I'm a lot better at conversations. 

Do you have any concrete measurable predictions for what would happen in that case?

What I would track is my personal enjoyment of conversations that I have with people, if I did that sort of meditation I would expect myself to enjoy conversations with others more. (With the caveat of adding some sort of metta practice on top). 

More statistically, If we model relationship probability as a markov chain we get something like (first meeting -> date -> date 2 -> dating -> relationship) and I think your transition probability from first meeting to date to anything beyond that goes up by quite a lot. I think the problem here is that it is more of a poission distribution so it is a bit difficult to do linear prediction on it? (unless you're poly?) It's more like a heuristic optimisation problem where the more warmth you have, the easier it is to have giving conversations with other people? 

Also, it seems to me that long-term relationships seem to more naturally mature from activities with longer time horizons where you meet people repeatedly? (I could find some stats on this but the basic intuition here is that one of the main criteria for women wanting a long-term relationship is safety which is hard to build without repeated interactions. An optimisation setup is then to repeatedly show up at the right sort of events such as interesting book clubs, dance, meditation or other dependent on your preferences for the base person who shows up at such an event.)

Fair warning is that there's some unsolicited armchair psychologist advice below but I want to give a meta comment on the "relationship John arc".

I find it fun, interesting, and sometimes useful to read through these as an underlying investigation of what is true when it comes to dating. (Starting a year ago or so)

So I used to do this cognitive understanding and analysis of relationships a lot but that all changed when the meditation nation attacked? There was this underlying need for love and recognition through a relationship and this underlying want and need for that to feel whole or similar. It's just kind of gone away more and more and I just generally feel happier in life as a consequence? It kind of feels like you're looking to resolve that need through relationships and my brain is like "Why doesn't he just meditate?"

Given the goal is happiness and well-being from this (which it might not be), are there any specific reasons here why you're going the relationship route? From my own research, all (not all) the cool people (QRI & happiness researchers) agree that meditation gives you better vibes than the courtship stuff? 

Finally a weird claim that I'll make is that the relationship stuff is a lot easier when I'm in a good place when it comes to meditation as I find it a lot easier to read and understand people from this place. I like to go salsa dancing and I feel a lot more relaxed and playful when doing it compared to when I was "looking" for romance? I just bring a different more secure energy and I just stop worrying and start vibing? I agree with you that people's signals are extremely unclear but it kind of doesn't matter from that perspective? (You might also already be doing this but meditation probably can make you do this more.)

Therefore, part of me is like, "man he should really stop thinking and start to just sharpen his awareness and attention based systems and he's gonna be a lot better off in these skills compared to the current investigation".

So start meditating for an hour a day for 3 months using the mind illuminated as an experiment (getting some of the cool skills mentioned in Kaj Sotala's sequence?) and see what happens? 

I'm however very much enjoying the series of John applying his intelligence to relationships. So uh, do what you want and have fun!

I really like this direction of work, I think it is quite important to elucidate the connection between power-seeking systems and RL and a more generalised version of variational inference that can be applied to collectives. 

It feels a bit like you did what the following post is pointing at in a better and more formal way, I thought it might be interesting to share it (to potentially help with some framings of how to explain it intuitively?): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KYxpkoh8ppnPfmuF3/power-seeking-minimising-free-energy

Looking forward to more in this area!

I think it's a fair suggestion that is adjacent, I do think the mechanisms are different enough that it's wrong though. Some of what we know of the mechanisms of dreaming and emotional regulation through sleep are gone through here (Dreams, Emotional regulation) and one of the questions there is to what extent yogic sleep is similar to REM sleep. 

For your lucid dreaming angle, I would say the main dangerous thing is the inhibition of bodily action that leads to this spiral of anxiety when you can't move? (Sleep paralysis)

I'm like ~70% (50-90%) certain that this does not occur during yoga nidra and that yoga nidra is a technique that actually helps you if you've had these problems before. 

I also read this book to get the vibe of it, it doesn't have the best epistemic rigour but the person writing it has a psychiatry practice specifically focused on yoga nidra and one of the main things that this person claims it helps with is PTSD and sleep related problems. I think it has a specific activation pattern that can be very healing if done correctly, if you're worried you can probably find a ACT psychologist or similar to do the practice with but I do think it is one of the safer practices you can do.