All of Valentine's Comments + Replies

Ah, cool, this sounds like maybe the right kind of thing. Your step 4 particularly jumps out at me: it highlights the self-reference in the answer, which makes it sound plausible as a path to an answer.

Thank you!

"Realityfluid" - terrible name by the way, lets call it "fundamentals"

I don't think that quite captures what I was pointing at. I'll buy there are better words for it, but I don't just mean "fundamentals". Or at least that phrasing feels meaningfully inaccurate to me.

I picked up the phrase "magical reality fluid" from a friend who was deep into mathematical physics. He used it the same way rationalists use (or at least used to use?) "magic": "By some magic cognitive process…." The idea being to name it in a silly & mysterious-sounding way to emphasize ... (read more)

1Ape in the coat7d
I think fundamentals = realityfluid in this definition, in case that realityfluid  doesn't consist of even simpler elements which is possible but we do not need to commit to it forthe sake of this discussion.  I don't like the term "realityfluid" being used for the most fundamental elements of the universe because 1) its made from two words which is a terrible fit for something that by definiton isn't made from anything else; 2) it has "real" in it and "real/unreal" distinction is a confusing and strictly inferrior to "map/territory". I don't mind preserving the reminder that we do not know much about actual fundamental stuff. Lets call it "mages" instead of "fundamentals" then. A short world, and the idea that wizards are the fundamental elements of reality sounds even more ridiculous than some kind of magical fluid.

Also, my being a cofounder of CFAR doesn't mean I'm immune to sufficiently complex basic confusions! This might be simple to clear up. But my mind is organized right now such that just saying "map vs. territory" just moves the articulation around. It doesn't address the core issue whatsoever from what I can tell.

3Ape in the coat7d
Sure.  The part about me being weirded out is me noticing my own confusion that someone who I expect to know and understand what I know and understand to be confused about a thing that I'm not. Which can very well mean that it's me who is missing some crucial detail and the clarity that I experience is false. And I'm mentally preparing myself for it. On a reread I noticed that  can be interpreted as a status-related reproach. I don't remember having intended it and I'm sorry it turned out to be this way.

Yep. The trouble is that all maps are in the territory. Even "territory" in "map vs. territory" is actually a map embedded in… something. ("The referent of 'territory'", although saying it this way just recurses the problem. Like reference itself is a more fundamental reality than either maps or the referent of "territory".)

So solving this by clearing up the map/territory distinction is about creating a map within which you can have "map" separate from a "territory". The true territory (whatever that is) doesn't seem to me to make such a distinction.

The is... (read more)

6Ape in the coat7d
This recursion itself is the artifact of the fact that we can comprehend territory only through maps. And it exists only in our map, not in the territory. Try reasoning on a fixed level, carefully noticing which elements are part of a map and which are part of a territory for this level. And then you can generalise this reasoning for every level of recursion. I think you did a wrong turn here. By "reference" do you mean the ability of a map to correspond to a territory? Territory is just a lot of fundamentals. The properties of these fundamentals turned out to allow specific configurantions of fundamentals that we call "brains" to arrange themselves in patterns that we call "having a map of a territory". Which properties of the fundamentals exactly do allow it? - is an interesting question which we do not know the answer yet. We can speculate in terms of laws of physics that are part of our map  - probably has something to do with "locality". Likewise, we can't exactly specify the principle of what it means to "be a brain" or "have a map representing a territory" in terms of configurations of fundamentals. But we can understand the principle that every referent of our map is some configuration of fundamentals.

I don't know if it does. It's not that kind of shift AFAICT. It strikes me as more like the shift from epicycles to heliocentrism. If I recall right, at the time the point wasn't that heliocentrism made better predictions. I think it might have made exactly the same predictions at first IIRC. The real impact was something more like the mythic reframe on humanity's role in the cosmos. It just turned out to generalize better too.

Post-reductionism (as I understand it) is an invitation to not be locked in the paradigm of reductionism. To view reductionism as a... (read more)

2Viliam5d
This sounds to me like: "I believe the same things as you do, but on top of that I also believe that you are wrong (but I am not)." Which in turn sounds like: "I do not want to be associated with you, regardless of how much our specific beliefs match".

Post-reductionist: ...well, I don't know what to write here to pass the ITT.

I can't speak for the post-reductionist view in general. But I can name one angle:

Atoms aren't any more real than apples. What you're observing is that in theory the map using atoms can derive apples, but not the other way around. Which is to say, the world you build out of atoms (plus other stuff) is a strictly richer ontology — in theory.

But in a subtle way, even that claim about richer ontology is false.

In an important way, atoms are made of apples (plus other stuff). We use met... (read more)

6Viliam8d
What are the new predictions that post-reductionism makes?

In fact, as we get better sensors, the UFOs move out to the edge of our new sensor ranges.

 

That's actually just false, just FYI. By reports, fairly often they show up specifically as though they're trying to be seen.

There's also a whole set of incidences where UFOs showed up to fuck with nuclear machinery, demonstrating that (a) they knew exactly where the "hidden" bases were and (b) they could control the launch process better than the people at the control panels. Understandably, this isn't something that gets advertised very much and can be explain... (read more)

Assuming, just for the sake of argument, that these entities were "real". How could these events happen?

 

One possibility:

Suppose that our 3D-ish reality is actually a tiny part of something much, much larger.

And when I say "larger", I don't mean just "more dimensions" or "parallel universes". It's worth remembering that our impressions of space, time, object, etc. are basically bits of software interface that let us interact with… something… in ways that seem to be relevant to our survival. That doesn't mean they represent reality as it actually is, a... (read more)

In which case their behavior makes absolutely no sense to me, either completely hiding themselves, or full outright reveal would make sense to me, but this weird "let humans have sneak-peaks but never any actual proof" is just weird.

 

For whatever it's worth: Jacques Vallée highlighted how the baffling & seemingly nonsensical nature of these encounters is one of the few constants. One I recall (off the top of my head — I was told this one, I have no idea how to offer references here) was a report of some ship landing in a farmer's field and then pe... (read more)

2Gerald Monroe2mo
Assuming, just for the sake of argument, that these entities were "real". How could these events happen? Physical aliens would be grabby, we wouldn't see stars next to us lacking Dyson swarms, if the aliens arrived recently you would expect to have seen their starship decelerating in a flare of gamma rays. (Assuming propulsion methods we know of, most high isp high thrust engines emit such a flare). When I brainstormed this I thought of one kinda unsatisfying idea. In parallel universe theories, the earth may be an attractor for parallel earths, and we could be seeing bleedover from these parallel realities. Simulator glitches would also explain this. Neither is a satisfying explanation and not obviously exploitable or reproducible, this is just me trying to understand what could do this. If real, we could be seeing the ghosts of other flying machines from other timelines or corrupt memory from a simulator showing essentially the same. (I think pReal is small, less than 5 percent)
2Charlie Steiner2mo
Indeed, the category "UFO," so named because it's the bin into which we put the things we can't identify, seems to have the common property that all the things in it are hard to identify. In fact, as we get better sensors, the UFOs move out to the edge of our new sensor ranges. It's as if they're watching us. Adapting.

Interestingly, in European folklore demonic spirits are afraid of salt. 

Is anything uniformly praised in the rationalist community? IME having over half the community think something is between "awesome" and "probably correct" is about as uniform as it gets.

1Noosphere893mo
That answer is arguably no as to uniform praise or booing, but while the majority of the community is supporting it, there's still some significant factions, though the rationalist community is tentatively semi united here.

That… makes a lot of sense actually. A lot. PT Barnum style advertising. I had not considered that. Thank you.

What would be a form of right-messaging that would be less alienating to the public than left-messaging?

How about pride in America? An expression of the nobility of the country we built, our resilience, the Pax Americana, the fact that we ended WWII, etc.

It doesn't strike me as too strange or difficult to do this.

But that's after about 20 seconds of thought. I'm sure I'm missing something important here.

3andrew sauer3mo
A good old "America fuck yeah" movie would certainly be cool now that I think about it. The most recent movie that pops into my mind is "Top Gun: Maverick". Though I haven't seen it, I imagine it's largely about American airmen being tough, brave and heroic and taking down the bad guys. I haven't seen anybody getting into culture-war arguments over that movie though. I'm sure there are some people on Twitter saying it's too "American exceptionalist" or whatever but it certainly is nowhere near the same level of conflict prompted by, say, She-Hulk or Rings of Power or anything like that. My guess is that for both the left and the right, there are values they prioritize which are pretty uncontroversial (among normal people) and having pride in America and, say, our role in WW2 is one of those for the right (and being proud of MLK and the civil rights movement would be one for the left) Then there's the more controversial stuff each side believes, the kinds of things said by weird and crazy people on the Internet. I don't have quantitative data on this and I'm just going off vibes, but when it's between someone talking about "the intersectional oppression of bipoclgbtqiaxy+ folx" and someone talking about "the decline of Western Civilization spurred on by the (((anti-white Hollywood)))", to a lot of people the first one just seems strange and disconnected from real issues, while the second one throws up serious red flags reminiscent of a certain destructive ideology which America helped defeat in WW2. You want something that's not too alienating overall, but which will reliably stir up the same old debate on the Internet. In summary it seems to me that it's much easier to signal left-wing politics in a way which starts a big argument which most normies will see as meaningless and will not take a side on. If you try to do the same with right-wing politics, you run more risk of the normies siding with the "wokists" in the ensuing argument because the controversial ri

What tendencies specifically would you classify as "woke"? Having an intentionally diverse cast? Progressive messaging? Other things? And which of these tendencies do you think would alienate a significant portion of the consumer base, and why?

 

By "woke" I'm referring to a pretty specific memeplex. I don't know how to name memeplexes with precision, but I can gesture at some of its key features:

  • Intersectionalist social justice theory. There's systemic oppression, and there are beneficiaries of systemic oppression. This is folded in a basic way into th
... (read more)

You're right, I could have been clearer about what structure was confusing me.

I keep encountering these detailed claims & explanations about how the movement toward "woke" (for lack of a better word — apparently the left has tagged what was once their word as now strongly right-coded) is having negative effects on viewership and profit. Not overwhelmingly like a lot of the right insists ("Get woke, go broke"), but still pretty significantly.

Like apparently in the Disney+ show where the Falcon became the new Captain America, there was a pretty dramatic ... (read more)

1andrew sauer3mo
Perhaps both of these groups are broadly right about the size of their direct opposition? I don't think most people are super invested in the culture war, whatever their leanings at the ballot box. Few people decline to consume media they consider broadly interesting because of whatever minor differences from media of the past are being called "woke" these days. I think what's going on profit-wise is, most people don't care about the politics, there are a few who love it and a few who hate it. So the companies want to primarily sell to the majority who don't care. They do this by drumming up attention. Whenever one of these "woke" properties comes out, there is inevitably a huge culture war battle over it on Twitter, and everywhere else on the Internet where most of it is written by insane people [https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/]. It's free advertising. Normies see that crap, and they don't care much about what people are arguing about, but the property they're arguing over sticks in their minds. So if it's all about being controversial, why is it always left-messaging? This I'm less sure of. But I suspect as you say any political messaging will alienate some people, including normies. It's just that left-politics tends to alienate normies less since the culture has been mandating anti-racism for decades, and anti-wokism is a new thing that mainly only online culture warriors care about. What would be a form of right-messaging that would be less alienating to the public than left-messaging? Suppose your example of the racial profiling scene were reversed to be a right-leaning message about racial profiling, what would it look like? A policeman stops a black man, who complains about racial profiling, and then the policeman finds evidence of a crime, and says something like "police go where the crime is"? Maybe I'm biased, but I think the general culture would be far more alienated by that t

If someone feels resonance with what I'm pointing out but needs more, they're welcome to comment and/or PM me to ask for more.

Glad you liked it!

No, I hadn't encountered these folk. Thanks for the referral!

You might like Perri Chase's breakdown of what's wrong with modern business and how to do business differently. (That's a Facebook Live replay link.) That video was what gave me the missing piece of the puzzle to work out how to build actually effective training spaces.

(I then went on to take her courses in "Magic Led Business" — but (a) I don't advise most LWers to go that route and (b) I don't think a Beisutsu dojo needs to be a business to work really well.)

This strikes me as a core application of rationality. Learning to notice implicit "should"s and tabooing them. The example set is great.

Some of the richness is in the comments. Raemon's in particular highlights an element that strikes me as missing: The point is to notice the feeling of judging part of the territory as inherently good or bad, as opposed to recognizing the judgment as about your assessment of how you and/or others relate to the territory.

But it's an awful lot to ask of a rationality technique to cover all cases related to its domain.

If all ... (read more)

I just really like the clarity of this example. Noticing concrete lived experience at this level of detail. It highlights the feeling in my own experience and makes me more likely to notice it in real time when it's happening in my own life.

As a 2021 "best of" post, the call for people to share their experiences doesn't make as much sense, particularly should this post end up included in book form. I'm not sure how that fits with the overall process though. I don't wish Anna hadn't asked for more examples!

I really, really liked this idea. In some sense it's just reframing the idea of trade-offs. But it's a really helpful (for me) reframe that makes it feel concrete and real to me.

I'd long been familiar with "the expert blind spot" — the issue where experts will forget what it's like to see like a non-expert and will try to teach from there. Like when aikido teachers would tell me to "just relax, act natural, and let the technique just happen on its own." That makes sense if you've been practicing that technique for a decade! But it's awful advice to give a ... (read more)

Partly I just want to signal-boost this kind of message.

But I also just really like the way this post covers the topic. I didn't have words for some of these effects before, like how your goals and strategies might change even if your values stay the same.

The whole post feels like a great invitation to the topic IMO.

I didn't reread it in detail just now. I might have more thoughts were I to do so. I just want this to have a shot at inclusion in final voting. Getting unconfused about self-love is, IMO, way more important than most models people discuss on this site.

I suppose, with one day left to review 2021 posts, I can add my 2¢ to my own here.

Overall I still like this post. I still think it points at true things and says them pretty well.

I had intended it as a kind of guide or instruction manual for anyone who felt inspired to create a truly potent rationality dojo. I'm a bit saddened that, to the best of my knowledge, no one seems to have taken what I named here and made it their own enough to build a Beisutsu dojo. I would really have liked to see that.

But this post wasn't meant to persuade anyone to do it. It w... (read more)

I'm just not familiar with snare traps. A quick search doesn't give me the sense that it's a better analogy than entropy or technical debt. But maybe I'm just not gleaning its nature.

In any case, not an intentional omission.

The thing that this post doesn't really do, which I do think is important, is actually work some (metaphorical) math on "does this actually add up to 'stop trying to directly accomplish things'?" in aggregate?

I like your inquiry.

A nitpick: I'm not saying to stop trying to directly accomplish things (in highly adaptive-entropic domains). I'm saying that trying to directly accomplish things instead of orienting to adaptive entropy is a fool's errand. It'll at best leave the net problem-ness unaffected.

I have very little idea how someone would orient to syste... (read more)

Just curious:

Do you mean "Do the impossible, which is to listen"?

Or "Do the impossible, and then listen"?

Or something else?

3tamgent5mo
Ha! I meant the former, but I like your second interpretation too!

Ah. Yeah, I'd prefer people don't feel bad about any of this. My ideal would be that people receive all this as a purely pressure-free description of what simply is. That will result in some changes, but kind of like nudging a rock off a cliff results in it falling. Or maybe more like noticing a truck barreling down the road causes people to move off the road. There's truly no reason to feel defective or like a failure here even if one can't "move".

3Celarix5mo
You know, in a weird sort of way, I think your comment actually makes this more helpful for people who have this impairment in ability. We try so damn hard to "fix" what's wrong with us and are so quick to self-judgment when something doesn't work. By framing this as a description of what is, I think it helps reinforce the idea of not just trying harder via application of more force, more self-hatred, etc. (p.s. I saw your reply to my comment about subagents which want bad things and really appreciate it. I'm still trying to process it; you should see a reply soon)

I'm about to give up on this branch of conversation. I'm having trouble parsing what you're saying. It's feeling weirdly abstract to me.

If you have an example of something humans actually do that is more of this "positive addiction" thing, in a way that isn't rooted in the "negative addiction" pattern I describe, I'm open to learning about that.

You gave a hypothetical example type. I noted that in practice when that actually happens it strikes me as always rooted in the "negative addiction" thing. So it doesn't (yet) work for me as an example.

If there's so... (read more)

3Slider5mo
I disagree that that examples need to be verbally accessible (but undestand making a scheme where rare data types can be utilised require a lot of good will). By Aumann agreement style reasoning, if we are both sane and differ in our judgement/perception then somebody got some updating to do. Even if we can't explicate the opining. I am doing so bad in this discussion that I am kind of orienting being the insane one here. So I consider to have abandoned the thing except for few select threads that seem can be positive. Alternative word that in some contexts has been a near synonym: compulsiveness Example of positive addiction: people being on their phones and conversing less face-to-face. (ocurred to me why the search might have special character, positive addiction might not be a problem or concieved as a problem, pure occurrence vs forming a problem). People do not need to find face-to-face time negative for it to occur or hurry to end when it happens. I think I am curious about how the classifying of the previous two examples were found to not be an instance (Aumann crux). (from here danger zone whether this is constructive enough to write) <edit moved to another post for known to be in its own karma bucket>

Yep. These seem like true statements. I'm missing why you're saying them or how they're a response to the part you're quoting. Clarify?

2Celarix5mo
That, uh, is a good question. Now I'm not sure myself. I think what I was going for is the idea that, yes, subagents matter, but no, you're not always going to be able to use these methods to get better at dealing with them. So don't feel too bad if you have a condition that renders this more difficult or even impossible.

I'm not interested in this branch of conversation. Just letting you know that I see this and am choosing not to continue the exchange.

I like this question.

I have an in-practice answer. I don't have a universal theoretical answer though. I'll offer what I see, but not to override your question. Just putting this forward for consideration.

In practice, every time I've identified a subagent that wants something "actually bad" for me, it's because of a kind of communication gap (which I'm partly maintaining with my judgment). It's not like the subagent has a terminal value that's intrinsically bad. It's more that the goal is the only way it can see to achieve something it cares about, but I c... (read more)

Well, I mean that there's something like a "more closed" to "more entangled with larger systems" spectrum for adaptive systems, and that untangling adaptive entropy seems to be possible along the whole spectrum in roughly the same way. Easier with high entanglement with low-entropy environments obviously! But if the entropy doesn't crush the system into a complete shutdown spiral, it seems to often be possible for said system to rearrange itself and end up net less entropic.

I don't know how that relates to things like thermodynamic energy, other than that all adaptive systems require it to function.

The main distinction I wanted to get across is while many behaviors fall under the "addiction from" umbrella, there is a whole spectrum of how more or less productive they are, both on their own terms and with respect to the original root cause.

Yep. I'm receiving that. Thank you. That update is still propagating and will do so for a while.

 

I think, but am not sure, I understand what you mean by [let go of the outcome], and my interpretation is different from how the words are received by default. At least for me I cannot actually let go of the outcome

... (read more)

If you have a mental algorithm that seeks deeper until the instance of a pet idea is encountered and then stops, in an area where things are multifaceted and many layerered that is going to favour finding the pet idea usefull.

This lands for me like a fully general counterargument. If I'm just describing something real that's the underlying cause of a cluster of phenomena, of course I'm going to keep seeing it. Calling it a "pet idea" seems to devalue this possibility without orienting to it.

4Slider6mo
I felt like "If anybody sees a scottsman, please tell" and when providing a scottman getting a reception of "The kilt is a bit short for a scottsman". Being clueless is one thing and announcing a million dollar prize pool for an effect that you are never going to consider granting is another. The argument is not general as digging into each candidate the same set amount does not apply to it or having any kind of scheme where you can justify the scrutinity given. I though that part of the function was "I hope I have understood this correctly" or "this seems to be a thing" where "is this real?" is kind of the question being asked. If your lenses are working, more power to you. If your lenses do not catch the things that my lenses make illusions of to me, I am not particularly selling my lenses or particularly explaining the cracks in my lenses to you.

it feels like [the OP] implicitly and automatically rejects that something like a coffee habit can be the correct move even if you look several levels up.

Ah. Got it.

That's not what I mean whatsoever.

I don't think it's a mistake to incur adaptive entropy. When it happens, it's because that's literally the best move the system in question (person, culture, whatever) can make, given its constraints.

Like, incurring technical debt isn't a mistake. It's literally the best move available at the time given the constraints. There's no blame in my saying that whatso... (read more)

3rpglover645mo
This was poor wording on my part; I think there's both a narrow sense of "adaptation" and a broader sense in play, and I mistakenly invoked the narrow sense to disagree. Like, continuing with the convenient fictional example of an at-birth dopamine set-point, the body cannot adapt to increase the set-point, but this is qualitatively different than a set-point that's controllable through diet; the latter has the potential to adapt, while the former cannot, so it's not a "failure" in some sense. I feel like there's another relevant bit, though: whenever we talk of systems, a lot depends on where we draw the boundaries, and it's inherently somewhat arbitrary. The "need" for caffeine may be a failure of adaptation in the subsystem (my body), but a habit of caffeine intake is an example of adaptation in the supersystem (my body + my agency + the modern supply chain) I think I can summarize the connection I made. In "out to get you", Zvi points out an adversarial dynamic when interacting with almost all human-created systems, in that they are designed to extract something from you, often without limit (the article also suggests that there are broadly four strategies for dealing with this). The idea of something intelligent being after your resources reminds me of your description of adaptive entropy. In "refactored agency", Venkatesh Rao describes a cognitive reframing that I find particularly useful in which you ascribe agency to different parts of a system. It's not descriptive of a phenomenon (unlike, say, an egregore, or autopoesis) but of a lens through which to view a system. This is particularly useful for seeking novel insights or solutions; for example, how would problems and solutions differ if you view yourself as a "cog in the machine" vs "the hero", or your coworkers as "Moloch's pawns" rather than as "player characters, making choices" (these specific examples are my own extrapolations, not direct from the text). Again, ascribing agency/intelligence to t

The text can be taken in a way where the need of coffee is because of a unreasonable demand or previous screwup.

Ah. To me that interpretation misses the core point, so it didn't cross my mind.

Judgments like "unreasonable" and "screwup" are coming from inside an adaptive-entropic system. That doesn't define how that kind of entropy works. The mechanism is just true. It's neutral, the way reality is neutral.

The need for coffee (in the example I gave) arises because of a tension between two adaptive systems: the one being identified with, and the one being im... (read more)

4Joachim Bartosik5mo
  I think this answers a question / request for clarification I had. So now I don't have to ask. (The question was something like "But sometimes I use caffeine because I don't want to fall asleep while I'm driving (and things outside my controll made it so that doing a few hundred of driving km now-ish is the best option I can see)").
0Slider6mo
I believe your goal is not to blame. But having good intentions does not mean you have good effects (pavements and all). It does ward off malicioussness but does not guarantee that the assistance helps [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnwantedAssistance]. Being curious about the effects of you actions helps. But rare side effects might not be obvious at all. Rejecting feedback with "I couldn't have known" can prevent knowing the bits for the future. With this the intention probably is not to disinclude people living in equatorial areas. But if winter gets as much light as summer this kind of D-vitamin pattern would not make sense. So even if we do not intend to and even if we are aware what is going on this kind of analog does disinclude equatorial people. If you lived in constant shade then it could make sense to take D-vitamin both in summer and winter. In an important way the coffee is like vitamin-D for (some of) ADHD situations. So largely for "If so: cool." indeed that way. (stickler for possibility claims: If one thinks that AGI can make biological immortality and that meditation can lead to a working AGI scheme then meditation can lead to biological immortality (but I know what that passage gets at)) If standard lectures last for 2 hours and a anomalous lecture lasts for 4 hours and in the last hour nobody can follow anything, it tends to be that the diagnosis is that the lecture is too long. If a student can only pay attention for the first hour of a 2 hour lecture the diagnosis tends to be that the student is too impatient. I would not say that if somebody has low muscle mass that their capacity to change their muscle mass is impaired (that there is some problem of them using a weightlifting gym). "Do you even lift?" implies that (all) humans should lift. Not everything is worth changing and possible to change. I don't have great pointers on more neboulous feeling where I think others are based in their reactions. I know the thing was mean

I found this super helpful. Thank you.

 

I think what the OP is referring to, why they raised ADHD specifically in this context, is because this habitualized conscious forcing/manipulation of our internal state (i.e. dopamine) is a crutch we can't afford to relinquish - without it we fall down, and we don't get back up.

Gotcha. I don't claim to fully understand — I have trouble imagining the experience you're describing from the inside — but this gives me a hint.

FWIW, I interpret this as "Oh, so this kind of ADHD is a condition where your adaptive capacity is too low to avoid incurring adaptive entropy from the culture."

1rpglover645mo
This is actually confounded when using ADHD as an example because there's two dynamics at play: * Any "disability" (construed broadly, under the social model of disability) is, almost by definition, a case where your adaptive capacity is lower than expected (by society) * ADHD specifically affects executive function and impulse control, leading to a reduced ability to force, or do anything that isn't basically effortless.

I think you're missing an important piece of the picture. One path (and the path most likely to succeed in my experience) out of these traps is to shimmy towards addictive avoidance behaviors which optimize you out of the hole in a roundabout way. E.g. addictively work out to avoid dealing with relationship issues => accidentally improve energy levels, confidence, and mood, creating slack to solve relationship issues. E.g. obsessively work on proving theorems to procrastinate on grant applications => accidentally solve famous problem that renders gra

... (read more)
7alkjash6mo
Two further comments:  (a) The main distinction I wanted to get across is while many behaviors fall under the "addiction from" umbrella, there is a whole spectrum of how more or less productive they are, both on their own terms and with respect to the original root cause. (b) I think, but am not sure, I understand what you mean by [let go of the outcome], and my interpretation is different from how the words are received by default. At least for me I cannot actually let go of the outcome psychologically, but what I can do is [expect direct efforts to fail miserably and indirect efforts to be surprisingly fruitful].  Sure, seems like the issue is not a substantive disagreement, but some combination of a rhetorical tic of yours and the topic itself being hard to talk about.

Hmm. I guess I just disagree when I look at concrete cases. Inspired from them, I zoom in on this spot in your hypothetical example:

a high schooler dropping out in order to "become a pro" on a recent new video game thinks he is improving their life but could be starting a tailspin. Doing 0 friendship upkeep towards anybody else while pursuing an infactuation has its downsides.

My attention immediately goes to: Why the infatuation? Why does this seem more important to him than friendship upkeep? What's driving that?

If it's a calculated move… well, first off,... (read more)

2Slider6mo
Even bothering to do a risk assesment seems we are already out of the actual addiction phase. If you have a mental algorithm that seeks deeper until the instance of a pet idea is encountered and then stops, in an area where things are multifaceted and many layerered that is going to favour finding the pet idea usefull. If I had the pet idea that all addictions were positive I could latch on that the used definition of what is going on in a negative addiction has an unavoidable "relief" step which can be thought as a positive force. To be somewhat artifically motivated to find a more satisfying abstraction layer. If one has multiple antidotes to bad feelings and somewhat often they all get used then it would make sense to favour those that get the least stuck. So it is not until the last remaining antidote where we run out of options and addiction proper kicks in.

I agree. I was being fast and loose there. But I think it's possible for, say, someone to sit in meditation and undo a bunch of entropic physical tension without just moving the problem-ness around.

2MalcolmOcean6mo
Right, yeah. And that (eventually) requires input of food into the person, but in principle they could be in a physically closed system that already has food & air in it... although that's sort of beside the point. And isn't that different from someone meditating for a few hours between meals. The energy is already in the system for now, and it can use that to untangle adaptive entropy.

I like this.

I know you know the following, but sharing for the sake of the public conversation here:

I wrote an essay about this several years ago, but aimed mostly at a yoga community. "The coming age of prayer". It's not quite the same thing but it's awfully close.

I guess I kind of disagree with the "do the impossible" part too! It's more like "Listen, and do the emergently obvious."

It seems you’re saying “everything is psychology; nothing is neurology”

I like the rest of your example, but this line confuses me. I don't think I'm saying this, I don't agree with the statement even if I somehow said it, and either way I don't see how it connects to what you're saying about ADHD.

 

…ADHD exists, and for someone with it to a significant degree, there is a real lack of slack (e.g. inability to engage in long-term preparations that require consistent boring effort, brought about by chronically low dopamine), and coffee (or other stimulant

... (read more)
4stavros6mo
Thanks for your post, just wanted to contribute by deconfusing ADHD a little (hopefully). I agree that you and OP seem to be agreeing more than disagreeing. Correct. However that problem-ness is often a matter of survival/highly non-optional. ADHD can be an economic (and thus kinda literal) death sentence - if it wasn't for the support of my family I'd be homeless. I think what the OP is referring to, why they raised ADHD specifically in this context, is because this habitualized conscious forcing/manipulation of our internal state (i.e. dopamine) is a crutch we can't afford to relinquish - without it we fall down, and we don't get back up. I'm speaking as someone only recently (last year) diagnosed with (and medicated for) ADHD. I am easily twice as functional now as I was before I had medication (and I am still nowhere near as functional as the average person, let alone most of this crowd xD) And, quite tidily, ADHD is one of the primary reasons I learned to develop slack - why I'm capable of grokking your position. ADHD is a neverending lesson in the necessity of slack, in learning to let go.  ADHD is basically an extreme version of slack philosophy hardwired into your brain - it's great from a certain perspective, but it kinda gives us a healthy appreciation for the value of being able to force outcomes - in a 'you don't know what you've got til its gone' sense.
4rpglover646mo
It was just a handle that came to mind for the concept that I'm trying to warn against. Reading your post I get a sense that it's implicitly claiming that everything is mutable and nothing is fixed; eh... that's not right either. Like, it feels like it implicitly and automatically rejects that something like a coffee habit can be the correct move even if you look several levels up. More specifically, that coffee may be part of a healthy strategy for managing your own biochemistry. I don't think you say otherwise in the post, but it felt strongly suggested. I think this is something I'm pushing back (lightly) against; I do not, on priors, expect every "problem" to be a failure of adaptation. Like, there might be a congenital set point, and you might have it in the bottom decile (note, I'm not saying that's actually the way it works). 👍 Makes sense; consider it something between "feedback on the article as written" and "breadcrumbs for others reading". I think... that I glimpse the dynamic you're talking about, and that I'm generally aware of it's simplest version and try to employ conditions/consequences reasoning [https://tasshin.com/blog/means-ends-conditions-consequences-and-the-game-of-risk/], but I do not consistently see it more generally. [EDIT] Sleeping on it, I also see connections to [patterns of refactored agency](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/11/27/patterns-of-refactored-agency/) (specifically pervasiveness) and [out to get you](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/23/out-to-get-you/). The difference is that while you're describing something like a physical principle, from "out to get you" more of a social principle, and "refactored agency" is describing a useful thinking perspective.
4Slider6mo
The text can be taken in a way where the need of coffee is because of a unreasonable demand or previous screwup. This can feel like there is some (typical)neurologial balance state and all deviation is a "definement of nature". For ADHD it might be apt to say that the brain can not be as stimulated as it would like to be. It would actually really agree to be more stimulated. I found it a bit surprising but instruction booklet for ADHD included a line to the effect of "ADHD persons find it hard to focus. This is not their fault that they can not deal with these kinds of situations", so the mitigation of the stigma must be real important when it is included alongside the most technical information of what medicines you should not mix etc. A quesiton like has an actual proper answer with ADHD in that executive function parts of the brain are too weak/tired. Here it is kinda implied that there is no proper reason to end up in this conclusion. Everybody does not have an (totally) able brain. Everybody not having their stats in the same configuration can be fine neurodiversity. But the low stats are a thing and they have real effects. I do think that ADHD per se does not mean one can't prepare. But preparing can't rely on the standard memes and knicks. It can look like more post-it notes and more diligent calendar use.

In the condition of "engagement makes it worse" lurking is seriously potent. The outcome of "doesn't do anything to the problem" is a massive win of keeping it level instead of spiraling further.

Agreed.

 

I can see a minor reason why letting for of the problemness is not trivial. You have to consider or be new things so your sense of identity can become undermined. Atleast in the suffering loop you know and are comfortable suffering that way.

Yep. Exactly.

 

Instead of negative avoidance, positive attraction addiction is quite a big cluster. If you ha

... (read more)
4Slider6mo
There can be a be an effect where if all you do is nail with a hammer, you do not know how to participate or appriciate other things. a high schooler dropping out in order to "become a pro" on a recent new video game thinks he is improving their life but could be starting a tailspin. Doing 0 friendship upkeep towards anybody else while pursuing an infactuation has its downsides. Setting up a situation where one breakup turns your life from exctatic to purposeless is dangerous. I think the emotional roots are important but the interesting quesiton is why the person is hypohedonic about all the little things that make life worth living? It is an issue of disengament with the positive. If the peers are living a life essentially the same why one feels ok/happy and one is miserable in it? The issue is not the avoidance of the negative but the formation of it.

If this wasn't a useful distinction for you, then why comment on it? To tell me not to have made it at all?

1NicholasKross6mo
Good point, just something I noticed, but now that you mention it it's not very useful. EDIT: wait, no, I was commenting on it to point out that you don't seem to have made the distinction yourself in the post proper.

I'm not available for critiques of how I've said what I've said here.

You're welcome to translate it into your preferred frame. I might even like that, and might learn from it.

But I'm not going to engage with challenges to how I speak.

2Ben Pace6mo
Very cool. I look forward to reading it.

Well, I found her request surprising. I was kind of stunned. After a moment I kind of fumbled out words like "Uh, I'm not sure how to do that. I'll… try?" But that was well outside the purview of dream powers I was used to.

I've done my best by remembering this story. One day I hope to get deep enough into lucid dreaming skill again that I can resurrect her.

And yeah, I remember roughly what she looked like and how she felt. I don't think she was high on details. But if I went back to that apartment with intent to encounter her, I'm sure the dreaming would r... (read more)

I don't really have an answer per se. Just a related story:

In a lucid dream many years ago, I was having trouble sort of clicking into my dream powers (flight, making objects levitate, etc.). It occurred to me that I wasn't conscious of creating the young woman who was standing next to me, which meant she had access to parts of my mind that I didn't.

So I turned to her and asked

"I'm having trouble getting my dream powers to work. Could you help me?"

She gave me some instructions (which I no longer remember) and walked into the next room while I tried to foll... (read more)

4Raemon6mo
Well, did you?  Do you remember any additional facts about the woman?

Yep, agreed. I thought it was a very clever point!

I like the reframe. The part I best like is the removal of the illusion of certainty.

I don't know if describing proofs as just evidence really captures it though. In many cases the point of a proof isn't just to know that the statement is one you can rely on. It's also to show you why you can rely on it. The process of understanding a proof can teach you something about how math works. The effect is stronger if you produce a proof.

4adamShimi6mo
Agreed! That's definitely and important point, and one reason why it's still interesting to try to prove P \neq NP. The point I was making here was only that when proofs are used for the "certainty" that they give, then strong evidence from other ways is also enough to rely on the proposition.

Yep. I don't like your proposed test (what's going to define "progress"?), but yes.

My main purpose for this post wasn't to make amazing AI safety researchers though. It was to offer people who want out of the inner doomsday trap a way of exiting. That part is a little more tricky to test. But if someone wants to test it and wants to put in the effort of designing such a test, I think it's probably doable.

1NicholasKross6mo
Yeah, the test has to be set up with all the normal caveats in advance (including being specific enough to measure, but broad enough to avoid people having good excuses to ignore whatever its conclusions turn out to be).

I like the spirit with which you're meeting me here.

In all honesty I'm probably not going to respond in detail. That's just a matter of respecting my time & energy.

But thank you for this. This feels quite good to me. And I'm grateful for you meeting me this way.

RE "no command validity": Basically just… yes? I totally agree with where I think you're pointing there as a guideline. I'm gonna post something soon that'll add the detail that I'd otherwise add here. (Not in response to you. It just so happens to be related and relevant.)

2the gears to ascension6mo
Understandable! No worries at all. I'll take your message as a fin, and this message as a fin-ack; before, I thought we were headed towards connection timeout, so it's very pleasing to have a mutually acknowledged friendly interaction ending. Glad we had this talk, sorry to have amplified the fight. FWIW, for your thinking, if it's useful - I think the very problem we ran into here is inherently the biggest issue in distributed systems safety for humans itself: how do you explain yourself to a group that is severely divided, to the point that the fight has started leading to beings choosing to disconnect their meanings. Would love to talk through distributed systems safety with you at some point, though probably not now in this thread, for various reasons; but I'm hopeful that my ideas are shortly obvious enough that I simply won't even have to, it seems like deepmind may yet again scoop me, and if deepmind can scoop me on how ai can help solve social issues, I don't think there's any way I'd be happier to be disappointed; I claim you may be surprised by being scooped on your human friendliness work by ai friendliness researchers shortly too. The general gist of my hunch is, agentic coprotection is reachable, and consent-to-have-shared-meaning may itself be a fundamental component of ai safety - that is, something along the lines of consent to establish mutual information. Or something. it's a research project because I'm pretty sure that's not enough to specify it. Anyway, have a good one!

Yeah, this was a meaningful update for me in this area. The importance of concrete examples in areas where the info commons have become a memetic battleground. It seems kind of obvious once said but I'd never thought about it this way before. I just wanted to point and ask "Why does that thing move the way it's moving?"

 

…especially since you've used the word "woke" which is in fact generally a pejorative in current usage as far as I'm aware.

I think I said this somewhere else, but you might find it a helpful aside anyway:

I originally learned the term "... (read more)

2the gears to ascension6mo
Huh! I had heard it in passing before the past 6 years, but over the past 6 years is when I started hearing it enough to get a binding for "wokism", which I think is a keyword that had a strong binding for me. My intuition wants to round it off to "I hadn't heard it until the recent definition", which I think is technically wrong, but still matches my perceptual data fairly well. Shrug, it's not actually that important; one could add some connecting words that would make it clearly a description of something bad, even as someone who strongly approves of large swaths of what the right would label "woke" I do think that there's a kind of performative wokeness that fails to be actually awake in the ways I care about and thereby fails to implement the coprotection of beings that I'd want people to wake up to in the first place.
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