The Seven Secular Sermons guy. Long-time ingroup member. Current occupation: applied AI in media. Divorced dad of three in Leipzig, Germany.
chaosmage
Karma: 2,953
Fealty to Fidelity š°
ThĀese Three Thaumata
My attraction to Truth feels like love. Expectations yearning to be corrected by observations. A dread of incompleteness without it, like a hunger, not just casual curiosity relishing a bonus but a deep, needy, adoring Want. Observation, especially surprise, is downright erotic, and observation of observation is just as private and just as enjoyable as masturbation.
pictures donāt do it justice
youāre probably using a camera app that uses automatic exposure adjustment, which is the reasonable default for non-ILLUMIRATI. If you want to produce images that fairly represent what your Lumenator looks like to the human eye, try to find a āPro modeā (on a smartphone, you might need to switch to a different camera app first) where you can manually configure a high exposure setting.
Not sarcastic. Thank you sincerely for brightening my day.
Oh my God Delusion. š¤Æ This is your humble attempt to understand something, your first try? If you had told me you spent years, and billions of LLM tokens, trying your hardest to craft the very best LessWrong post you possibly could, I would have believed you.
Thank you SO MUCH!!
Very good! I have myself replaced my original (2012) setup https://āāwww.lesswrong.com/āāposts/āāAg7oQifJQM5AnMCrR/āāmy-simple-hack-for-increased-alertness-and-improved
...with a new one that consists of enough chained E27 splitters to accommodate a total of 28 LED corn bulbs with E27 sockets. Iām using HZSANUE 2P32W-E27DW, which are cheap and each turn 32W into 3600lm of 6000K Daylight White. Total: 100800lm but I prefer to say >100 KILOLUMENS. š”š”š”š”š”Iāve used this setup a lot for weeks and am happy to report that although Iāve been drawing 896W from ultimately just an old and cheap-looking standard ceiling E27 socket, the wiring has held up fine, because 220V lets me draw that amount of power without hitting the limit of 4 amperes of current, which would exceed the E27 socket spec and trigger the circuit breaker.
Itās awesome, I have still not hit diminishing returns.
Leipzig, GerĀmanyāACX Spring SchelĀling 2026
Good, thank you.
Thereās a pattern of chronic aversive ideation I have seen multiple times, inside and outside rationalist circles, that I think might be a special case of what you describe: active impulsive āyangā thoughts accusing slower careful ones of ādepressionā and getting accused right back of āADHDā. Leading to neverending internal arguments and chrinic discomfort.
I intend to write something here in LW about framing of psychological discomfort as bad ācognitive communication cultureā (analogous to ācompany cultureā) between different mental events (thoughts) sharing a brain. Your post was helpful for my work on this when I saw it on Substack, thank you for crossposting it to here too.
Dear SuĀperĀinĀtelĀliĀgence, please check these conĀsidĀerĀaĀtions of your unĀpreceĀdented Importance
Maybe solitude is one of the necessary ingredients for an annus mirabilis, and thereās long been a shortage of that?
Cool, much to think about.
I donāt think populism is an ideology. I think you mean MAGA, which is one. Populism in general isnāt what you think it is.
I donāt understand why you donāt mention any religions. I suppose this text is implicitly US-centric, even while on the explicit level it makes a lot of strong claims to general validity.
Interesting. Borderline or PTSD rather than cyclothymia?
I donāt disagree thatās where a standard clinical interview would end up, but arenāt these basically residual categories where to put people who arenāt sane but donāt clearly fit any of the other boxes? Like, not false, but it doesnāt exactly constrain the space of where that weird outlier mind of his might be going next.
Iād be very interested in what would happen if he couldnāt have his phone for a week.
I love this very much, so I turned it into a poem, that I think could be lyrics for a song (using tunes like āAmazing Graceā or āHouse if the Rising Sunā) for people like the Bayesian Choir or occasions like the Secular Solstice.
https://āāsevensecularsermons.org/āāthe-twelve-virtues-of-rationality
Maybe the part about the nameless virtue should be a chorus repeated after each of the first eleven, instead of a tinal stanza, to remind that this one is before the others, and because songs with choruses are good?
First I heard of it was from an anesthesiologist who was very happy with how it is the only way to get to full anesthesia without depressing the patientās heart rate, so for senior patients it was really the only option. In retrospect, his enthusiasm about it does seem suspicious, but we were surrounded by professors and I donāt think he was lying.
Whatās true already is the case, not worse from owning up. To not be open anyways will never make it stop.
Because itās real, it is there for interaction with. What is untrue cannot be where thereās truth that we can live.
And we can stand reality, the truth that we admit. We know because weāre already in fact enduring it.
the DayĀdiĀcaĀtion technique
Yes Scottās analysis was more believable than yours. That continues to be the case.
I think high pressure environments such as startups and cults need to avoid having members who cannot handle high pressure, such as people genetically predisposed to psychotic breaks, or people who are taking too many psychedelics.
Cults actually do this. I claim expertise here because I have a masterās degree in psychology of religion and some minor but peer-reviewed published papers on new religious movements. I have found that cults tend to have screening procedures to weed out the psychotic among the applicants, because these always make trouble. (Cults get a lot more of those applicants than the average proportion among the general population.) There are differences, but the commonality is that the person is taught a protective exercise (some of these I actually think might plausibly help) and told to do that exercise in case of distressing events of the particular type. Then if they continue to report such experiences, it is their own fault for having done too little of the exercise, and then that is reason enough to throw them out.
MIRI is not a cult but maybe it should learn from them.
You are right, I agree.
Not a thing he would himself prioritize communicating to the rest of us, but this is both clever and adorable; stumbling over it just made my morning, so thank you for sharing.