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For people who like guided meditations: there's a small YouTube channel providing a bunch of secular AI-generated guided meditations of various lengths and topics. More are to come, and the creator (whom I know) is happy about suggestions. Three examples:

They are also available in podcast form here.

I wouldn't say these meditations are necessarily better or worse than any others, but they're free and provide some variety. Personally, I avoid apps like Waking Up and Headspace due to both their imho outrageous pricing model and their surprising degree of monotony. Insight Timer is a good alternative, but the quality varies a lot and I keep running into overly spiritual content there. Plus there's obviously thousands and thousands of guided meditations on YouTube, but there too it's hit and miss. So personally I'm happy about this extra source of a good-enough-for-me standard.

Also, in case you ever wanted to hear a guided meditation on any particular subject or in any particular style, I guess you can contact the YouTube channel directly, or tell me and I'll forward your request.

I'm a bit torn regarding the "predicting how others react to what you say or do, and adjust accordingly" part. On the one hand this is very normal and human and makes sense. It's kind of predictive empathy in a way. On the other hand, thinking so very explicitly about it and trying to steer your behavior in a way so as to get the desired reaction out of another person also feels a bit manipulative and inauthentic. If I knew another person would think that way and plan exactly how they interacted with me, I would find that quite off-putting. But maybe the solution is just "don't overdo it", and/or "only use it in ways the other person would likely consent to" (such as avoiding to accidentally say something hurtful).

My take on this is that patching the more "obvious" types of jailbreaking and obfuscation already makes a difference and is probably worth it (as long as it comes at no notable cost to the general usefulness of the system). Sure, some people will put in the effort to find other ways, but the harder it is, and the fewer little moments of success you have when first trying it, the fewer people will get into it. Of course one could argue that the worst outcomes come from the most highly motivated bad actors, and they surely won't be deterred by such measures. But I think even for them there may be some path dependencies involved where they only ended up in their position because over the years, while interacting with LLMs, they ended up running into a bunch of just ready enough jailbreaking scenarios that kept their interest up. Of course that's an empirical question though.

Some other comments already discussed the issue that often neither A nor B are necessarily correct. I'd like to add that there are many cases where the truth, if existent in any meaningful way, depends on many hidden variables, and hence A may be true in some circumstances, and B in some other circumstances, and it's a mistake to look for "the one static answer". Of course the question "when are A or B correct?" / "What does it depend on?" are similarly hard questions. But it's possible that this different framing can already help, as inquiring why the two sides believe what they believe can sometimes uncover these hidden variables, and it becomes apparent that the two sides' "why"s are not always opposite sides of a single axis.

An argument against may be that for some people there's probably a risk of getting addicted / losing control. I'm not familiar with to what degree it's possible to predict such tendencies in advance, but for some people that risk may well outweigh any benefits of arbitrate opportunities or improvements to their calibration.

Note from the future: I asked a bunch of LLMs for Terry Pratchett quotes on the human stomach, and while there's no guarantee any of them are actual non-hallucinated quotes (in different conversations I got many different ones while no single one came up twice), I think they're all pretty good:

"All he knew was that his stomach had just started investigating some of the more revolutionary options available to it."

"The stomach is smarter than the mind, which is why it likes to make all the important decisions."

"His stomach was making the kind of noises that normally precede the arrival of a self-propelled meal."

"His stomach felt like it was trying to digest a live weasel while attempting to escape through his boots."

"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. And the trouble with having an empty stomach is that it wants food all the time."

“The stomach is an essential part of the nervous system. It tells the brain what it wants far more clearly than the brain manages to tell it.”

"The human stomach is an amazing thing. It can stretch to accommodate all sorts of things. In theory, anyway. It just doesn’t appreciate it when you try to prove it."

Bonus Example: The Game Codenames

There’s a nice boardonline game called Codenames. The basic idea is: you have two teams, each team split into two roles, the spymaster and the operatives. All players see an array of 25 cards with a single word on each of them. Everybody sees the words, but only the spymasters see the color of these cards. They can be blue or red, for the two teams, or white for neutral. The teams then take turns. Each time, the spymaster tries to come up with a single freely chosen word that would then allow their operatives to select, by association to that word, as large as possible a number of cards of their team’s color. The spymaster hence communicates that word, as well as the number of cards to be associated with that word, to the rest of their team. The operatives then discuss amongst each other which cards are most likely to fit that provided word[1].

I’ve played this game with a number of people, and noticed that many seem to play this in “forward” mode: spymasters often just try to find some plausible word that matches some of their team’s cards, almost as if they were trying to solve the problem: if somebody saw what I saw, they should agree this word makes sense. Whereas the better question would be: which word, if my team heard it, would make them choose the cards that have our team’s color? And the operatives on the other hand usually just check plainly which cards fit this word best? But almost nobody asks themselves if the selection of cards I’ve picked now really is the one the spymaster had in mind, would they have picked the word that they did?

To name a concrete example of the latter point, let’s say the spymaster said the word “transportation” and the number 2, so you know you’re looking for exactly two cards with some word on them that relates to transportation. And after looking at all available cards, there are three candidates: “wheel”, “windshield” and “boat”. Forward reasoning would allow basically any 2 out of these 3 cards, so you basically had to guess. But with inverse reasoning you would at least notice that, if “wheel” and “windshield” were the two words the spymaster was hinting at, they would most certainly have used “car” rather than “transportation”. But as they did not, in fact, choose “car”, you can be pretty sure that “boat” should be among your selection, so you can at least be pretty sure about that one word.

Of course one explanation for all of this may be that Codenames is, after all, just a game, and doing all this inverse reasoning is a bit effortful. Still it made me realize how rarely people naturally go into “inverse mode”, even in such a toy setting where it would be comparably clean and easy to apply.

  1. ^

    I guess explaining the rules of a game is another problem that can be approached in forward or inverse ways. The forward way would just be to explain the rules in whichever way seems reasonable to you as someone familiar with the game. Whereas the inverse way would be to think about how you can best explain things in a way such that somebody who has no clue about the game will quickly get an idea of what’s going on. I certainly tried to do the latter, but, ehhh, who knows if I succeeded.

Without having thought much about it, I would think that it's a) pretty addictive and b) "scales well". Many forms of consumption have some ~natural limit, e.g. you can only eat so much food, going to the movies or concerts or whatever takes some energy and you probably wouldn't want to do this every day. Even addictive activities like smoking tend to have at least somewhat of a cap on how much you spend on it. Whereas gambling (which sports betting probably basically is to many people) potentially can just eat up all your savings if you let it.

So it would at least seem that it has much more potential to be catastrophic for individuals with low self control, even though that's a different story than the average effect on household investment, I guess.

While much of this can surely happen to varying degrees, I think an important aspect in music is also recognition (listening to the same great song you know and like many times with some anticipation), as well as sharing your appreciation of certain songs with others. E.g. when hosting parties, I usually try to create a playlist where for each guest there are a few songs in there that they will recognize and be happy to hear, because it has some connection to both of us. Similarly, couples often have this meme of "this is our song!", which throws them back into nostalgic memories of how they first met.

None of this is to disagree with the post though. I mostly just wanted to point out that novelty and "personal fit" are just two important aspects in any person's music listening experience, and I think it's unlikely these two aspects will dominate the future of music that much.

I once had kind of the opposite experience: I was at a friend's place, and we watched the recording of a System of a Down concert from a festival that we both had considered attending but didn't. I thought it was terrific and was quite disappointed not to have attended in person. He however got to the conclusion that the whole thing was so full of flaws that he was glad he hadn't wasted money on a ticket. 

Just like you, I was baffled, and to be honest just kind of assumed he was just trying to signal his high standards or something but surely didn't actually mean that.

Given that he was quite the musician himself, playing multiple instruments, and I'm quite the opposite, I now for the first time seriously consider whether he really did dislike that concert as much as he said.

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