Hiding in a shrubbery
hamnox
Karma: 1,304
It’s quite a conversation. Deep topics, but touched with a lightness as two similar but different people feel each other out.
The art too. /chefs kiss🤌/. There’s something beautiful about the subtle lineart of interaction behind the text, the cup passing hands and their true-to-character sitting postures. I didn’t notice it consciously on the first read through, just felt its seamless effect. Brilliant how it all slowly goes dark, til the sun rises in the end—mirroring the solstice I imagine they met to celebrate.
The premise intrigued me. That was lovely to read. I’m glad I did.
It feels like this exposed something important, a crux that always lived in my head and relationships, but in such a way that stays deeply integrated. If that makes any sense. No part of it stood out as a quotable or author tract; I stayed in emotional connection rather than jumping out and up a meta level to intellectualize. I want to share this.
In disagreements where both sides want the same outcome, and disagree on what’s going to happen, then either side might win a tussle over the steering wheel, but all must win or lose the real game together. The real game is played against reality.
Winning the fight for control over the steering wheel is a very powerful visual metaphor, I’m glad to have it in my arsenal now. Thank you for writing this.
It generally had to do with me trying to navigate a part of me that really wanted to just have a nice village, and be a humble village priest who helped their local community be nice. And a part of me that felt “man, the village is not safe. I can’t in good conscious just stay here having a nice life. The spirit of the village compels me to leave the village and figure out how to help protect the village. But man something about that feels really sad/bad.”
OOF.
Had a similar realization recently. It sucks. I was really lucky¹ to have access to competent emotional support when I did.
¹ not in fact luck, but skilled organizers who were prepared-in-advance for an increased likelihood of such events AT their event.
“an easy lever might be a guide to obvious failure modes of supplements and medications”
I desire to see more things like this.. Especially if they’re presented not as a list of “gotchas”, but as specifics of a general moving-parts model of how naive models/strategies operate in a complex space. Should be lots of base rates being thrown around.
A system for recognizing when things are helping and hurting, and phasing treatments out if they don’t justify the mental load
This part has been a historical blocker to me using luck/exploration based medicine. If one is dissociated, alexythmic, or has an experience completely dominated by one sensation like pain or anxiety, then it’s going to be pretty hard to notice fine gradations in how well they’re doing. Not having precision really narrows the possible paths to success; effect has to be almost overdetermined before one actually updates on the evidence.
An extension of the noticeable risks and helping/hurting points I think is worth separating out: how to identify and avoid literal poisons. Not risky bets, per se, but things that are likely to directly harm the objective (health) and the other conditions necessary to make your strategy viable (kill your liver, mind, ability to move under your own power).I think it’s a useful comparison point to know what it takes to figure out what is safe to eat in an unfamiliar environment. There’s a protocol for slow steps of Graduated exposure and Waiting to see how well it’s tolerated. Accumulated culture and the FDA are so very
cheatingtechnique. It’s worth understanding how much work it otherwise takes to narrow down what world you are in without leaning on them.
I wanna offer feedback on the READING.
at “Off the cuff I’d give something like 10%, 3%, 1% for these respectively (conditioned on the previous premises) which multiplies to .003%”, the verbal version doubled back to remind what the referents for each percentage we’re, then read the sentence again.
that was PERFECT. high value add. made sure the actual point was gotten across, when it would have been very easy to just mentally tune out numerical information.
In TEAM, the therapist takes on a different role: instead of trying to convince the patient to change his or her thoughts, the therapist tries to find reasons that the patient should not change.
I recognize this model! The book “Immunity to Change” goes into great detail on a similar process.
Applying that specifically in a therapeutic context, to clear the path for treatment to really work, is SO BRIILLIANT!
I see it as morally wrong to create a AGI at our current human development
This.. this statement really bugs me. It seems floating. What does it being morally right or wrong cash out to in terms of anticipations? Being morally wrong wouldn’t stop it from happening! It wouldn’t stop AI from having terrible effects if pursued unsafely!
I wish you luck but don’t see an easy entry point. I’ve been struggling to create one for a while. Reading Rationality A-Z all the way through has historically worked to some degree, but very inefficiently.
scalable decentralized currency/contract/communication systems
Oh? Do say more
THIS. THIS IS THE REASON FOR THE HOLIDAY --
“Anyways. The reasons I wouldn’t expect that particular attack angle to work on me if I thought anything more careful than a pure snap decision is, second of all, that I’m explicitly aware of contrasts between easily commensurable quantities and how those can distort my cognition by calling attention to themselves. First, that I’m constantly putting a quantity on how much I want things. In Civilization I could easily have translated that quantity to unskilled-labor-hours or, more usual for myself, the minutes or hours of my time that I’d spend to get something—including by working to buy it, if it was something that could be bought directly with money.”
“The fact that I don’t actually have a bank account full of unskilled-labor-hours, anymore, and instead have a completely unfamiliar currency called ‘gold pieces’, is contributing to a constant state of disorientation in the back of my mind. I’ll seem less timid and hesitant once I actually know how much everything around me costs and this core process of all of my cognition is able to actually run again.”
written by Yudkowsky in Mad Investor Chaos
So… what I’m getting is that prediction markets will be just as annoying but necessary to police for insider trading as the stock market? Alas.
This… is that experiment?
I also want to know the answer to this question
When you say that consciousness is vague and people look to cues from others for how to interpret it, I think you’re onto something very important.
Some parenting books treat that as trivially true for kids. It’s a bit the basis of CBT. And yet I have an intuitive sense that its implications are critically under-explored. It feels like a nagging intensity in my perceived environment that i reflexively try to focus my eyes on and rising unease when i can’t.
Is that the same or different to your reasoning? When that criticality is communicated, what happens next?
Thank you lightcone team for continuing to make these happen. I expect I owe several of you a free gratitude coffee.
Epistemic Status: groping around at an event idea I hope others are interested in
I don’t know how to communicate this yet, but there’s a ritual I want to do with friends this summer. The following describes some inspirations and gestures toward the general aesthestic.
It was part of my step-family’s lore to learn camping skills and wilderness survival, at one point even giving little “merit badges” for demonstrating mastery. With a similar spirit they would also host summer ‘art shows’ where’d we’d learn about a different culture and put things we made that year (or day) on display for the family to see.
Judaism has this week-long celebration that involves building a simple outdoor shelter which one eats in, sometimes sleeps. The shelter itself symbolizes the fragility and transience of life and one’s dependence on God.
Burning Man is a temporary Art-themed city that springs up for a week in the middle of the nowhere and gets torn down cleanly at the end. The standard middle of nowhere happens to be in a freaking desert, so it’s got this strong ethos of pushing one’s limits individually but also looking out for each other. It emphasizes raw experiences and co-creation, eschews symbols of consumerism. Whole lot of drugs, music, sex, and weirdness.
Midsummer bonfires or maypoles. For drinking, dancing, singing around. Associated with “fertility”, aka event of the year for flirting and/or hookups.
How To Make Everything youtube series: “Everything we use comes from 8,000 generations of collective innovation and discovery. But could an average person figure it all out themselves and work their way from the stone age to today?”.
snippets from the sequences
Making History Available—“I should immerse myself in history, imagine living through eras I only saw as ink on paper. … I had to overcome the false amnesia of being born at a particular time. I had to recall—make available— all the memories, not just the memories which, by mere coincidence, belonged to myself and my own era. … So many mistakes, made over and over and over again, because I did not remember making them, in every era I never lived . . .”
What is Evidence, Entangled Truth, Contagious Lies—rationality as entangling oneself with truths, and truths being heavily entangled with each other.
Truly Part of You—“How much of your knowledge could you regenerate? From how deep a deletion? … A shepherd builds a counting system that works by throwing a pebble into a bucket whenever a sheep leaves the fold, and taking a pebble out whenever a sheep returns. If you, the apprentice, do not understand this system—if it is magic that works for no apparent reason—then you will not know what to do if you accidentally drop an extra pebble into the bucket. That which you cannot make yourself, you cannot remake when the situation calls for it.”
Doing stuff badly and having fun with it, like a child. Your work is going to suck. But it’s yours in a way many hyper-optimized alternatives are not.
Hackerspace/Makerspace: Community-operated work spaces where people with common interests (often in technology, science, and digital art) can meet, socialize, shbrare infrastructure, and collaborate.
Am stalled on figuring out what the minimum viable parts are
Not a literal culture, rather In My Culture.
uncomfortable squirm
In my culture, one is to be super wary of lionizing martyrs.
I want to be excited about cool new holiday ideas. I think trying a fast in a coordinated group is a splendid idea. I want to celebrate the amazing capacity of humans to care about others and to do hard things for good reasons.
but pain is not the unit of effort.
dying for the cause is not a success.
not every cost is avoidable, but i never, ever want to become the kind of person
who mistakes the price sacrificed for a value bought
In my culture there’s a meta-tradition around ritual hardships or labors: you are to set aside at least 5 minutes, by the very clock, for considering how you might cheat. If you find you could get results without the hardship, you are expected to cheat for the results and then go find some other way to challenge yourself.
epistemic status: felt sense poetry
Think about a tree. A tree with roots going deep into the ground, and leaves spread out to catch as much sun as it can. Hold that tree in mind.
We often dream of leaving the earth and solar system under our own power. It’s an important goal. It’s not, however, immediately achievable. We are, for now, tied to this pale blue dot. Sol III, Terra, the world that birthed us. And when we do leave, we will take much of it with us. Some of it we will take intentionally, because we’re sentimental like that. But some we will take in the marks of growing up on this pale blue dog, in *what kind of beings our first world made us*.
I want to dedicate a time of the year to think about the environment that we live in, how it shapes us and how we shape it. We ought to know the soil we grow in, and know it well. A general purpose rationality must produce local knowledge, specialized to the time and space and life we are living. We must dig our roots deep, and spread our leaves wide.
We talk a lot about the general theory of rational agents. It informs how you learn true things and make good choices. But, you are not the general example of an agent. Your mind did not spring up from first principals. Evolutionary history, cultural memetics, and human institutions also play a role in the way you learn true things and make good choices. That which is at your roots effected what the truth to be found and good choices to be made even are, thousands of years later.
The tree is a metaphor. Grand forces of optimization have existed before you, and will likely exist after you. Seek them out. Use what they can give you. Dig your roots deep.
And spread your leaves wide. Plants are often portrayed as passive; that’s incorrect. They move. They move a great deal, efficiently and slowly, in order to catch the sun. In the spirit of a plant, you need not chase after every opportunity. You can position yourself well, and take the chances as they come to you. Have patience, not passivity. And spread your leaves wide. Catch every ray of sunlight and harness it. Drink in the present moment, and turn it into something awesome.
What’s something you know about the environments that you live in, or that shaped you? Your city. Your ecosystem. Your history. Your economy. Your community. What don’t you know about them that you would like to?
What serendipitous chance might you hope to catch, this month? What would you be prepared to act on if it happened?
Wait wait hold on a moment.
This is far from the most important thing to discuss about your post, but I have to say it. Your project’s git repo has a list of archived characters, with no explanation for why they were passed over—I’m interested in knowing the reasoning for why they each weren’t picked, but my lack of insight there is not why I’m posting now.
I want to talk about how there’s one named Tim, who’s psychotically convinced he’s an AI alignment genius.
Had to put my phone down for a moment to process this level of irony. I don’t have to ask why you didn’t use that one—I can think of several reasons—but why even make it? How dare you be so funny in a github repo, where I least expected it?