Shinzen Young's Five Ways to Know Yourself https://www.shinzen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/FiveWaystoKnowYourself_ver1.6.pdf uses the words "spacey" and "racy" instead of "hazy" and "crazy", but they might be talking about the same thing. He has specific antidotes for each. There are YouTube videos in addition to the document I just cited. He has a newer book out that is probably about the same topics, but I haven't read it.

Would you be willing to share the koan?

I generally don't believe that dreams or omens come from a place with some special connection to the truth, but if following a clue from a mysterious source is cheap, I generally follow it. If one doesn't accept prompts to go on an adventure, one cannot reasonably claim disappointment if life has too few adventures.

I have known these people personally with broken bones from bicycling: two people each with a broken collarbone from mountain biking, one broken arm, one minor skull fracture that would only have been considered a bump if it were not observed with modern imaging equipment, and one broken pelvis. It also killed Steven Covey but I never met him.

The minor skull fracture was interesting because I knew the person to be successful at a job that required mostly conscientiousness. He fell during his work commute and was riding a bike that had no clear purpose other than being safe. He went back to the place he fell and tried to find some mistake he made so he could prevent a reoccurrence, and he couldn't find anything he could have done differently given that he was commuting to work on a bike.

For context, I do not ride a bike, there is nothing about my life that would tend to make me meet bicyclists, and not I am not especially friendly, so there is no unusually large number of bicyclists passing through my life who chat about their injuries.

So I'm not sure I agree that bicycling is great for your physical health. I could easily believe is is good for the health of people who don't fall.

I liked the story. I could imagine a sequel where Maya persuades Jun to say something true about where he grew up, and maybe visit his peers or family there. He already leaked enough information about the place that perhaps disclosing its existence to Maya would not be a problem.

It is unreasonable to expect an output from biological evolution to do something reasonable in a situation vastly different from the situations it evolved in. In this case, you aren't going to learn much from the state of mind of a human who has been tortured more than his ancestors could have been tortured.

Trying to extract guidance from that story seems like an example of generalizing from fiction.

I'm not sure how the rest of the article is connected to the fiction at the beginning. Given that people tend to generalize from fiction and get to false conclusions, I'm uncomfortable with taking it seriously.

My reading of the EMDR section was that the patient had panic attacks, did EMDR, then had a panic attack, and then either the patient ran out of money or it was time to write the paper, so we don't know about the presence or absence of panic attacks after that.

On rereading that section, it is clear that there is no claimed period of time when the patient was observed not to have a panic attack during that period of time. The last panic attack was labelled as "mild". I didn't bother to read back to see if any of the other panic attacks were "mild" before success was declared.

There is such a thing as a symptom pool. Some people who are having a difficult time instinctively acquire symptoms that are fashionable and signal their difficulty, but the symptoms are not related to the actual problem. The prototypical example for this, IIRC, is incidence of anorexia in some specific country (Hong Kong?). An anorexia awareness campaign caused that symptom to become fashionable and increased the apparent incidence much more than can be explained as an increased ability to observe the cases that were present before.

This applies to some but not all of the social dark matter being discussed in the OP. Like cosmological dark matter, there is room for debate about whether some instances of social dark matter are real or not.

I would not categorize you as Christian. In my conversations with Christians, the unifying themes have been:

• God is good
• Heaven exists as a desirable place to go after you die.
• Jesus exists and has some significant role in getting you into Heaven.

You didn't mention Heaven at all and you seem to regard Jesus as another iteration in the general improvement of moral examples instead of as someone special.

I don't mean to imply that there is any reason for me to regard you as Christian. I'm just a little surprised, or maybe I have misunderstood you.

But to get back to the original question. My original question was indeed about what happens after death. I can clarify the question by pointing at these Bible verses:

2 Th 1:8-20: [Jesus or God] will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed.

John 14:6 has Jesus saying "No one comes to the Father except through me."

These resemble 'the downside of not being Christian is "demons eat your guts"'.

So, how do you deal with living in a world where these verses exist in the Bible, God is good, and God communicates in the way we discussed that limits the ability of many to come to the Father and avoid everlasting destruction?

Be aware that 2 Th is commonly considered to be a forgery. However, it is canonical according to Catholics and all the other Christian groups I know of.

If you are Catholic, or remember being Catholic, and you're here, maybe you can explain something for me.

How do you reconcile God's benevolence and omnipotence with His communication patterns? Specifically: I assume you believe that the Good News was delivered at one specific place and time in the world, and then allowed to spread by natural means. God could have given everyone decent evidence that Jesus existed and was important, and God could have spread that information by some reliable means. I could imagine a trickster God playing games with an important message like that, but the Christian God is assumed to be good, not a trickster. How do you deal with this?

In response to "The real problem is humanity's lack of rationalist skills. We have bad epistemology, bad meta-ethics, and we don't update our beliefs based on evidence.":

Another missing rationalist skill is having some sensible way to decide who to trust. This is necessary because there isn't time to be rational about all topics. At best you can dig at the truth of a few important issues and trust friends to give you accurate beliefs about the rest. This failure has many ramifications:

• The SBF/FTX fiasco.
• I quit LessWrong for some years in part because there were people there who were arguing in bad faith and the existing mechanisms to control my exposure to such people were ineffective.
• Automata and professional trolls lie freely on social media with no effective means to stop them.
• On a larger scale, bad decisions about who to trust lead to perpetuation of religion, bad decisionmaking around Covid, and many other beliefs held mostly by people who haven't taken the time to attempt to be rational about them.