I think I can replicate all of these just fine? What’s so unteachable about these? Where do people actually run into problems trying to adopt these?
> This sense—which I might call, genre-savviness about the genre of real life—is historically where I began; it is where I began, somewhere around age nine, to choose not to become the boringly obvious dramatic version of Eliezer Yudkowsky that a cliche author would instantly pattern-complete about a literary character facing my experiences.
If I look around at my life and try to apply it, a lot of problems immediately jump out at me like ‘for that really hard problem you have, go ask people for advice instead of struggling alone like you usually do’ or ‘instead of coming up with Yet Another Analysis, just straight forwardly do all of the things already on your todo list’, etc.
Seems to mostly be pattern matching. Noticing the pattern I am in, and willfully deciding to act orthogonal to it, or otherwise interrupt the pattern directly.
I suppose I already do this with relationships a lot, actually. I notice myself starting to not talk about something, notice ‘this is the setup to a drawn out TV episode of stupid drama’ and then just talk about the thing with the person instead.
I also do this when writing characters relatively straight forwardly—as soon as I notice where I want to be going with something, I question whether the character would actually do that, or what they would do that would maximally benefit them instead given what they know. This usually leads to very strange situations such as ‘realize oneself is about to do more supervillain things → willingly turn self in, instead of hiding from the heroes’ which completely blows up the ‘plot’. Although I also do tend to emulate characters step by step instead of actually structuring things anyway. So there’s not as much large scale direction. There’s a lot of setting up the environment so that it is natural for characters to behave in the ways I want.
Maybe this one comes from just writing a lot and being unhappy with how characters act in stories, and I guess I already had it? May be the influence of consuming rationalist fiction, actually. Constantly thinking about how characters can do better in stories?
Mostly this feels like the motion ‘be anti-inductive’ and ‘consider the situation afresh, what would you want yourself to be doing?‘. This is perhaps because I read the Cognitive Trope Therapy post years ago and internalized it? I guess I do think about it every now and then. I apparently ENTIRELY MISSED the rest of the ‘intelligent characters’ posts you made though!
> Don’t make the end of the world be about you.
Was hard to find a pithy section that generated the pointer, but somewhere along reading this I was able to recognize what you meant here and how to manipulate it. Seems relatively straight forward? To the point where I’m not really sure what to even say about it. Some events are not about you, even if you were a part of them. Pay attention to what is happening, still have emotions about what is happening, but keep the focus on the actual thing instead of on yourself? It’s sort of like “you are not a belief, you are the judge” so your emotions don’t have to be caught up in whether the outcome goes one way or another? You are still allowed to be sad, of course. But it is a sadness for the world instead of for yourself.
> With that said: The getting-out-of-bed trick involves looking into the part of my cognition where my action plan is stored, and loading an image into it; and because the human brain’s type system is a mess, this has the native type-feeling of an expectation or prediction that in a few seconds I will execute the motor-plan and get out of bed.
This section by itself is sufficient for me to have a pointer to what I think you’re talking about and be able to put things in there. Load data → motor plan executes. Can do it at various levels of preparation although plugging in ‘pick up my phone’ instantly leads to my hand doing it autonomously even without my involvement. I can also set a time delay and be surprised when it happens when my focus genuinely went to something else.
This is sort of new to me, in that I haven’t really bothered to access direct ‘low level motion plan’ and didn’t really have a reason to, but I sometimes load long term habits I want to make there from a layer or two of indirection up. Usually I just direct my attention at what I want to happen and something puts it there. But neat that one can access it directly.
> The third way I stay sane is a fiat decision to stay sane.
It is a little bit harder to find this one, and I feel like I’m guessing a bit, but it feels like just setting up what I call a ‘generative seed’ (sort of a goal directed action-generator ongoing feedback loop that does stuff in the subconscious for me—comes up with plans/actions and puts them into motion) in the specific shape of ‘notice ways to be more sane’ + ‘do that’? I am inferring that you have a very specific anchor to the entire category-axis of ‘sane’/‘insane’ things as a very tight emotional-data cluster and can therefore point at it as a direction to move along. With many examples ‘under the hood’ which just get wrapped up in the abstraction. So even though I cannot take all your exact ‘internal function calls’ due to not having the exact motions/ideas/data you associate with it, it seems that one could build an equivalent of this by just looking at all of your posts and collecting examples of ‘sane’ versus ‘insane’ behavior-examples-clusters and constructing an approximation of the specific thing you mean that way. So not quite actionable to replicate yours, but possible to do for an arbitrary cluster-axis that is available in one’s own mind, and so just use one’s own ‘sanity’ cluster-axis. Not quite ‘the same thing’ but as close as one will reasonably get with the goal ‘perform the same motion as described’.
> if there’s a clever way to overwrite pseudo-predictions of suffering and thereby achieve Buddhist indifference to bad things, I don’t have it as a simple obvious surface lever to pull.
Near as I can tell this is possible from previous investigations, but my subconscious says not to do it when I start directing my attention there. And it says that I would have to override multiple internal safety mechanisms to do it. And also modify some internal values. Which I don’t want to do because like you said, it sounds dangerous and also I care about caring about things.
-- So yes, as far as I can tell these are completely teachable mental motions and you have laid down them in sufficient detail for me to see them and use them if I wanted. They don’t appear to have any real dependencies. ‘Look at it and notice how to do it’ is sufficient given the descriptions.
Are there any other motions you think other people aren’t able to get? These seem entirely legible to me.
I think I can replicate all of these just fine? What’s so unteachable about these? Where do people actually run into problems trying to adopt these?
> This sense—which I might call, genre-savviness about the genre of real life—is historically where I began; it is where I began, somewhere around age nine, to choose not to become the boringly obvious dramatic version of Eliezer Yudkowsky that a cliche author would instantly pattern-complete about a literary character facing my experiences.
If I look around at my life and try to apply it, a lot of problems immediately jump out at me like ‘for that really hard problem you have, go ask people for advice instead of struggling alone like you usually do’ or ‘instead of coming up with Yet Another Analysis, just straight forwardly do all of the things already on your todo list’, etc.
Seems to mostly be pattern matching. Noticing the pattern I am in, and willfully deciding to act orthogonal to it, or otherwise interrupt the pattern directly.
I suppose I already do this with relationships a lot, actually. I notice myself starting to not talk about something, notice ‘this is the setup to a drawn out TV episode of stupid drama’ and then just talk about the thing with the person instead.
I also do this when writing characters relatively straight forwardly—as soon as I notice where I want to be going with something, I question whether the character would actually do that, or what they would do that would maximally benefit them instead given what they know. This usually leads to very strange situations such as ‘realize oneself is about to do more supervillain things → willingly turn self in, instead of hiding from the heroes’ which completely blows up the ‘plot’. Although I also do tend to emulate characters step by step instead of actually structuring things anyway. So there’s not as much large scale direction. There’s a lot of setting up the environment so that it is natural for characters to behave in the ways I want.
Maybe this one comes from just writing a lot and being unhappy with how characters act in stories, and I guess I already had it? May be the influence of consuming rationalist fiction, actually. Constantly thinking about how characters can do better in stories?
Mostly this feels like the motion ‘be anti-inductive’ and ‘consider the situation afresh, what would you want yourself to be doing?‘. This is perhaps because I read the Cognitive Trope Therapy post years ago and internalized it? I guess I do think about it every now and then. I apparently ENTIRELY MISSED the rest of the ‘intelligent characters’ posts you made though!
> Don’t make the end of the world be about you.
Was hard to find a pithy section that generated the pointer, but somewhere along reading this I was able to recognize what you meant here and how to manipulate it. Seems relatively straight forward? To the point where I’m not really sure what to even say about it. Some events are not about you, even if you were a part of them. Pay attention to what is happening, still have emotions about what is happening, but keep the focus on the actual thing instead of on yourself? It’s sort of like “you are not a belief, you are the judge” so your emotions don’t have to be caught up in whether the outcome goes one way or another? You are still allowed to be sad, of course. But it is a sadness for the world instead of for yourself.
> With that said: The getting-out-of-bed trick involves looking into the part of my cognition where my action plan is stored, and loading an image into it; and because the human brain’s type system is a mess, this has the native type-feeling of an expectation or prediction that in a few seconds I will execute the motor-plan and get out of bed.
This section by itself is sufficient for me to have a pointer to what I think you’re talking about and be able to put things in there. Load data → motor plan executes. Can do it at various levels of preparation although plugging in ‘pick up my phone’ instantly leads to my hand doing it autonomously even without my involvement. I can also set a time delay and be surprised when it happens when my focus genuinely went to something else.
This is sort of new to me, in that I haven’t really bothered to access direct ‘low level motion plan’ and didn’t really have a reason to, but I sometimes load long term habits I want to make there from a layer or two of indirection up. Usually I just direct my attention at what I want to happen and something puts it there. But neat that one can access it directly.
> The third way I stay sane is a fiat decision to stay sane.
It is a little bit harder to find this one, and I feel like I’m guessing a bit, but it feels like just setting up what I call a ‘generative seed’ (sort of a goal directed action-generator ongoing feedback loop that does stuff in the subconscious for me—comes up with plans/actions and puts them into motion) in the specific shape of ‘notice ways to be more sane’ + ‘do that’?
I am inferring that you have a very specific anchor to the entire category-axis of ‘sane’/‘insane’ things as a very tight emotional-data cluster and can therefore point at it as a direction to move along. With many examples ‘under the hood’ which just get wrapped up in the abstraction.
So even though I cannot take all your exact ‘internal function calls’ due to not having the exact motions/ideas/data you associate with it, it seems that one could build an equivalent of this by just looking at all of your posts and collecting examples of ‘sane’ versus ‘insane’ behavior-examples-clusters and constructing an approximation of the specific thing you mean that way.
So not quite actionable to replicate yours, but possible to do for an arbitrary cluster-axis that is available in one’s own mind, and so just use one’s own ‘sanity’ cluster-axis. Not quite ‘the same thing’ but as close as one will reasonably get with the goal ‘perform the same motion as described’.
> if there’s a clever way to overwrite pseudo-predictions of suffering and thereby achieve Buddhist indifference to bad things, I don’t have it as a simple obvious surface lever to pull.
Near as I can tell this is possible from previous investigations, but my subconscious says not to do it when I start directing my attention there. And it says that I would have to override multiple internal safety mechanisms to do it. And also modify some internal values. Which I don’t want to do because like you said, it sounds dangerous and also I care about caring about things.
--
So yes, as far as I can tell these are completely teachable mental motions and you have laid down them in sufficient detail for me to see them and use them if I wanted. They don’t appear to have any real dependencies. ‘Look at it and notice how to do it’ is sufficient given the descriptions.
Are there any other motions you think other people aren’t able to get? These seem entirely legible to me.