One of the most important things I've learned from therapy and contemplative practice for pragmatic interactions is that people will usually dig their heels in if they detect you have a bottom line written first. This effect is so strong that it activates even when people agree with you on the bottom line (but they have any level of conflict about it). I think this is one of the overwhelming considerations for why Eliezer gets the results he does. It cuts against another effect public intellectuals are subject to, which is that the easiest way to get popular is to become 'The X Guy' where X is a particular thing that the public has room in their heads for. But if you're the X guy people also associate you with a particular bottom line, so good luck getting any truth finding interactions. Instead, you wind up as a piece that gets moved around the board for conflict/spectacle purposes.

If you try to have conversations about things that actually matter, many humans immediately become exactly that unlikeable. It's through social conditioning that we mostly learn to stop talking about things that matter because it goes so poorly.

Feels like more shades of error vs conflict theory. It doesn't matter if the ceos of ai companies are making mistakes if they are selected for being the sort of person who refuses to evaluate certain shapes of argument.

Instant pot makes preparing barley or millet and lentils with vegetables incredibly easy. Many different recipes online depending on which vegetables and spice combinations you prefer.

One proposal for a useful handle: The more extreme an idea, the rarer the person who knows enough to argue intelligently. Suggestion from LLM: At the edges of thought, the crowd thins out

Had a facepalm moment the other day. Realized that to-do items were split between two reference classes, unambiguous tasks and ambiguous tasks. Unambiguous tasks have some combination of known next action, known time envelope, known what 'finished' looks like concretely, while ambiguous tasks have below threshold levels of some or all of these. Realized life can be as simple as notating ambiguous items with a capital A, at which point its default next action is to disambiguate the above.

Something I don't always see mentioned: one of the effects of meditation, like psychedelics, can be getting crystal clear feedback about your life situation. If you're in a bad situation that you have a limited ability to do anything about, kicking out the supports for some of your coping strategies can go very badly. I've witnessed this first hand. An intensive practice is best undertaken when life conditions are good, with plenty of slack.

Often related to maneuver warfare as well, ie making you expend more energy than you opponent does by putting the onus of refutation on you.

Storytelling as serving a similar purpose (in some conceptions) to dreams: synthetic training data on when things go wrong.

Yeah, I think I misremembered that point. I think it might have been that there was a SFF convention held in Salem that LeGuin regularly attended because she lived in Portland. Conventions are funnels where content creators interact with fans, so some sexual grooming happens for scenes that involve children fans. MZB and Breen were the case where it was widely known among other authors what was going on, and people were downplaying it instead of exposing it. Major pedophilia issues among golden age authors eg Heinlein and Clarke.