it does say "interim"

A belated thanks for this—as I also just commented to Jiro, it seems basically right. And I like your elaboration on Jiro's point, and clarifying where I am/was confused/not.

Hmmm this is a good point and not one I have a refutation to, although it does still seem to me that most of what I'm trying to get at here is still right! Belated thanks.

Daniel Schmachtenberger has lots of great stuff.  Two pieces I recommend:

1. this article Higher Dimensional Thinking, the End of Paradox, and a More Adequate Understanding of Reality, which is about how just because two people disagree doesn't mean either is wrong
2. this Stoa video Converting Moloch from Sith to Jedi w/ Daniel Schmachtenberger, which is about races-to-the-bottom eating themselves

Also hi, welcome Sage!  I dig the energy you're coming from here.

An example of such a blindspot/confusion that I've been chewing on, that I haven't written up in full yet, is how reward is different from fruit, punishment is different from pain.  Socially-mediated consequences are different from inherent consequences.

Note that behaviorists, and (probably downstream of the behaviorists) also ML researchers, tend to actively conflate the two and treat "reward" as fundamental and then use phrases like "intrinsic reward" to try to refer to the non-reward thing.  But "reward" is not the fundamental one, it's built on fruit.

The difference:

• if you don't get caught, you don't get punished
• a tree will not reward you with fruit for effort or flattery—you have to actually water it

And many people fail to see the difference between the two of these—so they fixate on social consequences and project them onto everything.  I suspect this is largely because so many of their critical consequences were social, at very young ages (<2yo, before they differentiated themselves, their parents, the world at large, such that they could tell the difference). So they learned to orient first and foremost to social consequences, and act so as to get reward and avoid punishment.

But we know from detailed investigation that the universe-as-a-whole does not reward or punish us the way other people do.  (the judeo-christian one-God-who-sees-and-knows-all can be seen as groping towards the recognition of that distinction, but still fails to actually go all the way there, which then has the unfortunate effect of reifying the idea that reality-as-a-whole does punish you!)

Karmically this has the effect of them creating environments that have much more reward/punishment, and also leads to them self-punishing in the face of non-social consequences, such as beating themselves up for failing to do something they cared about, rather than simply feeling the pain of the failure.

For what it's worth, I found myself pretty compelled by a theory someone told me years ago, that alien abductions are flashbacks to birth and/or diaper changes:

• laid on a table, bare walls, bright lights you're staring up at (unnecessary, and unpleasant for a baby, but common in hospitals and some homes)
• one or more figures crowded around you (parents and/or doctors)
• these figures are empathetic & warm towards you (or are at worst kind of apathetic, not malevolent)
• communicating telepathically (in a way you can't make sense of, perhaps wearing masks if doctors)
• they examine your genitals (how dirty is the diaper? is there a rash?)
• butt probed (wipe, diaper cream, and/or rectal thermometer)
• weird equipment around (appropriate to a hospital where most babies born in 1900s when abduction stories started becoming popular)
• figures have big heads and eyes (very salient features to babies, also maybe the heads are spatially closer and babies' eyes are still doing a fisheye lens thing)
• and most bizarrely, the figures are grey (newborns have bad color perception!)

This is surprisingly underdiscussed; the only google result for "alien abduction as flashback to diaper change" was this which links to a forum post since gone offline (archive.org link).  But it seems like an incredibly obvious explanation that should be the default.  It also explains why the experiences are so similar around the world, even among people who hadn't heard the stories before!

Obviously not all alien abduction stories follow this pattern, but the fact that so many do seems to me very satisfyingly explained by this theory.  The fact that this makes sense to me may be taking as part of its evidence my own experience doing emotional work and finding (among other things) surprisingly large pockets of emotion and meaning stored in apparently-boring memories (like standing in my kitchen around age six, looking at a shelf... but feeling terrifyingly alone).  And helping other people do similar work, etc.  But flashbacks are in general well-studied.

So it seems to me that the only culturally mediated part here is how people interpret the experience after it happens.  You could imagine a culture where someone comes into work one day and says "hey guys, I had this trippy flashback last night to my nappy being changed! it was so weird seeing my parents all bulgy-eyed and grey".

I've actually come to the impression that the extensive use of contempt in the Sequences is one of the worst aspects of the whole piece of writing, because it encourages people to disown their own actual experience where it's (near) the target of such contempt, and to adopt a contemptuous stance when faced with perspectives they in fact don't get.

Contempt usually doesn't help people change their minds, and when it does it does so via undermining people's internal epistemic processes with social manipulation.  If the argument in "section 2 above" turns out to have flaws or mistaken assumptions, then an attitude of contempt (particularly from a position of high status) about how it's embarrassing to not understand that will not help people understand it better.  It might get them to spend more time with the argument in order to de-embarrass themselves, but it won't encourage them to take the arguments on its merits.  Either the argument is good and addresses relevant concerns people have (factual and political) and if so you'll be able to tell because it will work!  Shaming people for not getting it is at best a distraction, and at worst an attack on people's sensemaking.  And generally a symmetric weapon.

Meanwhile, contempt as a stance in the holder it tend to block curiosity and ability to notice confusion. Even if some argument is clearly wrong, it somehow actually made sense to the person arguing it—at least as a thing to say, if not a way to actually view the world.  What sense did it make?  Why did they say this bizarre thing and not that bizarre thing?  Just because energy-healing obviously doesn't work via [violating this particular law of physics], that doesn't mean it can't work via some other mechanism—after all, the body heals itself non-magically under many ordinary circumstances! And if interventions can make it harder for that to work, then they can probably make it easier.  So how might it work?  And what incentivized the energy healer to make up a bad model in the first place?

Contempt may be common among rationalists but from my perspective the main reason Rob didn't include it is probably because it's not actually very functional for good discourse.

Sure but ideally it would raise them an amount that's worth it.  That's kind of the whole idea.  People aren't infinitely incentivized by money and zero incentivized by anything else.

The bit about merging the casinos... in the limit, you've got an entire town/city in the desert that is completely owned by one owner, who pays nominally zero land value tax because the property itself isn't worth anything given there's nothing nearby. But it seems plausible to me that having an equation for tracking a multiplicity of independent improvements on a single nominal property and taxing the whole situation accordingly... would be relatively easy compared to the other LVT calculation problems. (I have not done the math here whatsoever.)