This is the kind of thing I want to see more of in the world, and I look forward to seeing you this long weekend.

To redteam, and in brief - what's the tale of why this won't have lead to a few very coordinated, very internally peaceful, mostly epistemically clean factions, each of which is kind of an echo chamber and almost all of which are wrong about something (or even just importantly mutually disagree on frames) in some crucial way, and which are at each other's throats?

Reporting back in after having laid hands on some bupropion. I'm two days in and:

• it's definitely doing anything helpful with respect to my senses of opportunity, pointfulness, allowedness/permission, and task initiation/switching/completion, among other subtle senses
• it meshes just fine with my focus meds so far
• the increase in anxiety has been real but thus far manageable
• but also there's some weird effect where it's making me way more forgetful/absent-minded by way of that massively improved power at task-initiation and task-switching and sharpness of task-completion? I've already nearly mislaid things like pens, a pocket knife, my phone, assorted drinks.... and such because I set it down, finished a task, and then moved on to the next task
• weak improvement to hedonic tone mostly flavored like ~internal burning/dynamoness? in a good way 

More to come, maybe.

I am going to signpost the fact that in the absence of a scheduled event I would totally just jump in and pick some stuff for us to read and discuss tomorrow and post an event but I don't have a list of everything you've read so far.

Got it. See you Tuesday!

There is in fact a next event, right? I assume yes because event-chain description, but that still leaves me without knowledge of the reading.

Thank you for writing this! A lot of it felt "obviously true" to me in a way that I find pleasant and at this point consider a mark of quality explication of everyday topics which are easy to misconstrue badly. There were maybe half a dozen points where I went "yup that absolutely tracks with my own experience and what I know of others' ".

Most notably, the way in which some behaviors/frames/flinches propagate themselves by bending people along their creases; I saw the gears-level punchline for "why do people develop and dissimulate like this" coming a couple of sections in; and there were at least a few points where on having read them, if somehow that article were the course of a conversation between us, I'd have piped up with some probably-nontrivial extension. (I'll bring a couple of those up below.) 

I'm also delighted to see that my question about your cherry-blossom hoodie made it in here. (Maybe I'll talk to you about what my favorite hoodie means to me sometime.)

There were at least three importantly adjacent things that I think you missed here, likely because of the tenor of your life experiences:

First off, I think a major missing piece was a treatment of what Truth Or Dare looks like if the ceiling looks high, the floor looks to be far enough down that it'd maybe break your ankle to fall into it, and the median is unbound. Maybe that's just what it looks like, when you're long out of a Dark World and you're headtilting and squinting curiously-but-dubiously at Maybe A Light World? Something about that specific case where the floor is very low but the ceiling is promisingly high seems importantly noncentral to me.

Another notably missing piece: a straightforward "hold concept A up to the light next to concept B and see what happens", where "concept A" is [gestures vaguely to all of the ~20k words above] and "concept B" is something like "predictive mental modeling and felt-senses that arise from poking that model". Roughly: "the morning after the Truth or Dare, how do(es your felt-predictive-model expect that) the information and memories from it get used?" The answer to that is strongly dependent on the symmetry-breaking process you spotlight and also on how much ambient Shit is in the environment, and is probably part of how the Dark World cascades get started in Shit-naive environments. That dynamic seems like an important part of the equilibrium-to-be-solved-for here!

Yet another is something about banter and countersignaling?

When you have ten thousand points in the bank, you can sort of tell yourself that you’re wealthy by gambling with fifty of them without a lot of anxiety or caution.

I claim this rhymes-boringly-well with "When you have ten thousand points of credit in the Bank Of Someone Else, you can point out that you're wealthy by setting fifty of them on fire without a lot of anxiety or caution." (My mental image is that the Credit Points are sparkly when set on fire or maybe just perfumed, like incense.) Something about this also rhymes (if perhaps less well) with the (in)famously showy destruction of wealth at potlatches - "look how much wealth I have, that I can trivially afford to give a lot of it away, or even destroy it altogether!". Actually, thinking about it more, it feels like it has to do with ~everything to do with - plenty/(over?)abundance, construed broadly? Material plenty leading to psychological/social plenty and it all loops back on itself as long as it can, and then you have Too Much Plenty but that's alright because you can give it away or even set it on fire, just to prove a valuable point. Seems kinda fragile, though, all that relying on ambient plenty! (...then again, so few valuable things aren't fragile thus.)

As a final larger speculation, I wonder to what extent the aphorism that "if a community isn't growing, it's dying" comes down to symmetry-breaking mechanisms like the one(s) you detailed here. People leave a Light World community at some constant rate-per-person, while the larger environment the community sits in determines a lot about what happens with new people entering: both whether people trust this supposed Light World community (which might, from outside view, be a scam at best) and also whether the people who feel up to putting a foot in will then immediately step in something (and how everyone then responds).

Fabricate suggests otherwise. What if you just feel like maxing out mundane economicmagic of which Prestidigitation is the example par excellence?

I read this pretty soon after you posted it and have been thinking about it a lot about it in snatches ever since. I think it's pointing at something important. Here's a few things adjacent to it, or important components of it, or something like that. I think you will find them useful, @johnswentworth .

• A belief in a Tomorrow which is worth living in, such that set-up actions are worth taking that wouldn't otherwise be worth at all.
• A belief that you can, in fact, just do things - do new things, do things that play off of old things, do things for yourself that other people don't care enough about to go do themselves.
  • "This thing did not exist, and I needed it to. No one else was going to make it do, so I did it myself (or maybe got someone else to help or follow my plans)."
  • I think this is where people are coming from when they recommend makerspaces. I, too, recommend makerspaces, but also see later on about the League of Nondark Evil
• "What happened to that guy? Where’s the part of me which did that sort of thing?"
  • Is this about personal augmentation and power? About maniacal scientific self-experimentation? About planning and enacting? Which of those feels right? (Or some secret fourth thing.)
  • All of these have different overlapping sets of things-to-try.
• A desire to be part of a community, some kind of League of Evil-but-not-Dark, of other people taking unilateral actions that they think best, and somehow still getting along with each other and spurring each other on, to grander Evil Schemes
  • Evil here should be best understood in the sense of "self-centered, unilateral, directed towards empowerment (with others' potential suffering treated as an externality/side-effect/out-of-scope rather than a desideratum, which would instead be Dark).
• Something about depression and mental health, and having the link between desire and fulfillment have atrophied or been cut
  • I think this is where people are coming from when they recommend buproprion. I can't recommend it out of a lack of experience but asking a psych about it is on the top of that particular to-do sublist's stack.
  • More expressively and precisely, less neatly: Having your brain's predictive-engine+mental-effort-budgeter be negatively-biased regarding the predicted outcomes of plans and thus clamp down on your precious supply of Gumption, and being horrified and sad about that, and wanting to do something about that, and being trapped by that very same piss-trickle of Gumption you're now limited to.

• A desire for personal empowerment/enrichment/?command?; a syntonia related to resourcefulness and curiosity and clean planning/execution/development loops?

   

  Anyway: I like the vibe. It's something that I feel pretty strongly and to some extent I think it's what a lot of my hobbies are pointed at pursuing, in a variety of ways. Wizard Power seems like an important spiritual vitamin, and both one that it can be hard and finnicky to get and also not one it seems like everyone really needs. I need it, and it sounds like you need it.

  I endorse cooking being one of a handful of workable sources of standout-seeming magic wizard power in this way. I think it's worthwhile to try and I am happy to help you and maybe other people who I know and who ask me to, to do some interesting/fun cooking projects. At some points in my life, getting to play around experimenting with foods has been my main source of that felt sense of soul-nourishment, or at least a pica-replacement for it. Cloning recipes is one option; for a cantrip, if you don't already tinker with technically-prepared food (canned soups, say, or ramen), you can start. I could talk about cooking projects I've done in the past, if that helped?

  I also really like the idea of "let's do a thing-you-can-in-fact-just-do and become more capable/powerful/knowledgeable, in a fairly fun and lighthearted way, rather than just while away this period of time in dissipated enjoyment". If you end up seriously doing something of this type during the Lighthaven Festival Season or something, I will very likely participate seriously. Sewing would be a good one - I don't really know how and I value tailoring and the fabric arts all the more for it; loved ones like @WhatsTrueKittycat and both grandmothers have won my heart with the Wizard Power of their enduring fiber arts and ongoing repairs thereto. I'll keep an eye out for if you end up doing that.

Say more about "ray-tracing"? What does that look like? And do you have a bullshit-but-useful PCA-flavored breakdown of those few dimensions of variation?