Ah, I forgot to emphasize that these were things to look into to get better. I don’t claim to know EY’s lineage. That said, how many people do you think are well versed in cryptography? If someone said, “I am one of very few people who is well versed in cryptography” that doesn’t sound particularly wrong to me (if they are indeed well versed). I guess I don’t know exactly how many people EY thinks is in this category with him, but people versed enough in cryptography to, say, make their own novel and robust scheme is probably on the order of 1,000-10,000 worldwide. His phrasing would make sense to me for any fraction of the population lower than 1 in 1,000, and I think he’s probably referring to a category at the size of or less than 1 in 10,000. That said, I would like to emphasize that I don’t think cryptography is especially useful to this ends, rather, the reason it was mentioned above was to bring up the security mindset.
Zen/mindfulness meditation generally has an emphasis on noticing concrete sensations. In particular, it might help you interject your attention at the proper level of abstraction to reroute concrete observations and sensations into your language. Also, with all of these examples, I do not claim that any individual one will be enough, but I do believe that experience with these things can help.
One fun way to learn concreteness is something I tried to exercise in this reply: use actual numbers. Fermi estimation is a skill that’s relatively easy to pick up and makes you exercise your ability to think concretely about actual numbers that you are aware of to predict numbers you that are not. The process of actually referencing the concrete observations into a concrete prediction is a pattern that I have found to produce concrete thoughts which get verbalized in concrete language. :)
If being versed in cryptography was enough, then I wouldn’t expect Eliezer to claim being one of the last living descendents of this lineage.
Why would Zen help (and why do you think that)?
Ah, I forgot to emphasize that these were things to look into to get better. I don’t claim to know EY’s lineage. That said, how many people do you think are well versed in cryptography? If someone said, “I am one of very few people who is well versed in cryptography” that doesn’t sound particularly wrong to me (if they are indeed well versed). I guess I don’t know exactly how many people EY thinks is in this category with him, but people versed enough in cryptography to, say, make their own novel and robust scheme is probably on the order of 1,000-10,000 worldwide. His phrasing would make sense to me for any fraction of the population lower than 1 in 1,000, and I think he’s probably referring to a category at the size of or less than 1 in 10,000. That said, I would like to emphasize that I don’t think cryptography is especially useful to this ends, rather, the reason it was mentioned above was to bring up the security mindset.
Zen/mindfulness meditation generally has an emphasis on noticing concrete sensations. In particular, it might help you interject your attention at the proper level of abstraction to reroute concrete observations and sensations into your language. Also, with all of these examples, I do not claim that any individual one will be enough, but I do believe that experience with these things can help.
One fun way to learn concreteness is something I tried to exercise in this reply: use actual numbers. Fermi estimation is a skill that’s relatively easy to pick up and makes you exercise your ability to think concretely about actual numbers that you are aware of to predict numbers you that are not. The process of actually referencing the concrete observations into a concrete prediction is a pattern that I have found to produce concrete thoughts which get verbalized in concrete language. :)