This is testable. It predicts that improved skill with occlumency and/or gaining power should sometimes cause a release of chronic tension.

That wouldn’t be a test of the theory that hostile telepaths use muscle cues, since those things could cause muscle release for other reasons (as per Popper: tests can only be disproving, and they require a rival theory to decide between).

If gaining power never causes a release of tension, that still doesn’t disprove the theory, since again they could be tracking other things as well.

A more direct question would be something like: Can hostile telepaths in fact read people who are physically rigid better than people who have low muscle tension? Do their reads get better or worse when tension is added? Does it change the type of information they can read (and perhaps give more information for some axes and less for others)?

My impression is muscle tension gives a big sign on your back that you are hiding something, but makes it more muddy to non-trained people what exactly is being hidden.

It reminds me of Mark Lippmann’s blog post on virtual machines, and how we often have layers of virtual machines. Or in plain language: if you close your eyes and imagine your environment, and imagine making an escape within that imaginary environment, real-you might not tighten your muscles in such a way that you’d be readable.

I remember hearing that when we are seriously thinking about standing up, our heart rate and blood pressure rise in anticipation, but if we just hypothesise that we might stand up and keep it very abstract, the body doesn’t start those physical processes.

But it’s very obvious when someone has gone into their head! So hostile telepaths often want some kind of emoting or ‘really listening’ or ‘paying attention’ or ‘be present with me’.

So, yeah it conceals some information, but then it adds other information (such as meta information about concealment).

Actors might be interesting to study, here.

Update: I’ve disabled public access by request. Geoff said (here) he’s going to post the recording to his website.

Based on the fact Twitch is counter-intuitive about recording (it's caught me out before too) and the technical issues at the start, I made a backup recording just in case – only audio but hope it helps!:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Af1dl-v7Q7uJhdX8Al9FsrJDBc4BqM_f/view?usp=sharing

At a very fundamental (but perhaps not useful) level, it's to communicate with people how to treat you and what to expect of you.

This might happen in some ways inside one mind (for example, if you have a self-image of being "a reliable person", that might help you think about how to be on time). But I suspect that usually happens when something is going wrong, because usually you can just think about the ideas themselves without needing to go meta.

What are the rival ideas about why we adopt identities? (I assume there's some background here I'm unfamiliar with.)

Great description of the Summon Sapience Spell.

Taking inspiration from this post after failing to set one up during the workshop, I've now attached a Sapience Spell to a freckle on my hand (which I always used to think was unnecessary visual clutter), with the imagery/sense of expanding my peripheral vision and seeing everything (think: clear sight, sensing everything at once, 'whole-universe comprehension' kinda feels), and the incantation simply: "Notice."

This may not answer your question directly, but:

Why would one have a different way of dealing with information inside one's mind vs the same kind of information outside it? What's the mechanism that prevents leak between these two cases?

One potential crux is that it IS the same kind of information, and that different parts of you have very similar logic to different individual humans.

What are the alternatives -- how would someone deal with information inside their mind differently from information outside it?

(There's a cliché saying, "you have to love yourself before you can love others". I think this is drawing on the same idea.)

An argument is:

One needs ways of dealing with the world, and ways of dealing with oneself. Both of these are pretty difficult tasks. If the logic of how you deal with one can apply to the other, that would save a lot of time and energy -- it'd mean you don't have to start from scratch. So there's an incentive to re-use ideas.

Good point. In hindsight, I somewhat wish I had described a more broad version of the hyper-attentive strategy (rather than saying what people do is directly try to model the minds of other people).

Now that you mention it, I think hyper-attentive people usually use the model-free reinforcement learning version of it. Or the model they use is some kind of 'average person' or 'what the culture says the model should be'.

And if they did stop to model the real individual (rather than an average or cultural version of them), they'd deal much better. (I've noticed this in myself: I'll be modelling the social version of a person, but if I stop to think what that individual is like, it's much less scary and easier to think about.)

If people enjoy demon threads, it may not be strictly true that the 'Someone is wrong on the internet' feeling (noticeably) feels bad.

When reading the OP, I thought, "I recognise that feeling, but my main (noticed) 'someone is wrong on the internet'-response is a positive, inspired motivational one."

Perhaps these feelings do get jumbled, and distinguishing how much is 'inspired' vs 'this is wrong' is part of the skill of avoiding demon threads.

I still sense that there's two different feelings here:

Type 1. Clearly negative – "This can't stand" or "That person needs to be corrected" or "If other people see that person's post, they will become wrong too – I need to save them."

Type 2. Positive(?) –"There's some interesting ideas to be corrected" or "Wow, this person thinks really differently from me, how did that happen?"

The second type might have shock and incredulity, but the core feels like surprised curiosity.

The first type feels more uncomfortable, as if tribal honour has been breached.