Harjas Sandhu

Har­jas Sandhu’s Shortform

• Harjas Sandhu 14 Jun 2025 15:55 UTC

  11 points

  0

  on: Har­jas Sandhu’s Shortform

  Has anyone written an essay about how to fight against/​correct for Trapped Priors? I would like to do something like that, but I want to make sure that I’m not reinventing the wheel here. Thank you!

• Harjas Sandhu 5 Jun 2025 17:44 UTC

  2 points

  1

  on: “Flaky break­throughs” per­vade coach­ing — but no one tracks them

  This is a great point. Making the “breakthrough” from that poster’s meditation retreat last is less about maintaining a single realization and paradigm shift, and more about distilling the 8+ hours of daily meditation into a single 5-30 minute daily practice that still confers the majority of the benefits. Instead, as you point out, people end up chasing the feeling of finding a revelation over actual progress.

  Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

  After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water

• Harjas Sandhu 4 Jun 2025 17:28 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: Frank Her­bert’s great in­sight into hu­man agency—Muad’Dib the tool?

  As I understood it, Paul’s initial role in the story during Dune and Dune: Messiah was one of being coopted by all the great forces playing out around him. It’s a very sneaky framing—Herbert makes him seem like one of the Great Men of History, but as he futilely realizes towards the end of the first Dune novel, his life or death during the final fight in the throne room would not have changed anything. Had he died, he would’ve been the martyr who sacrificed himself to free Arrakis from the Harkonnens, and the Jihad would be carried out in his name. Since he lived, the same thing happened (save for the martyring).

  Dune 1 and Dune: Messiah are a deconstruction of the hero and his “agency” in a world that is governed not by individual choices but by sociology. Religion, the Bene Gesserit, Herbert’s views on genetics, the Landsraad and the wars of the Great Houses. All of these factors drove the story into being what it was. The superhuman power of prescience allows one to see possible futures, but there are still only very few things that are possible. Despite Paul’s superhuman capabilities as the pinnacle of the human species, he was still subject to the forces of history. Other timelines involved him maintaining the status quo by dying before becoming Muad’Dib, and some other highly ignoble ways of preventing the Jihad, but none of them gave him the revenge he wanted—and he could not find a way to exact revenge on the Harkonnens without unleashing Holy War on the universe.

  And so he did.

  By Children of Dune, Herbert changes his mind a little. Paul himself was unable to forge the course of history, because he was still so very human. The peak of the human species was still subject to our limitations. Leto II, on the other hand, is the only member of any truly alien species in the Dune series, because he merged with the worms. Doing so allowed him to break free from the chains that bound the rest of us. At this point, Paul was also retconned into having seen the Golden Path but simply lacking the strength to pursue it (which I was also fine with tbh given the previous statements on Dune 1 and Messiah—Paul’s character trait of lacking the will to undertake truly horrific decisions is not a retcon, but the existence of the Golden Path is). Leto II was willing to unleash the forces of Jihad at his own command, and reshaped the world as God Emperor.

  And yet, the God Emperor was not really free either. Just like Paul after the Stone Burner, he saw a vision, assumed it to be the only way, and fully gave into it, and from then on outward simply walked the path laid out for him by himself. Ironically, his choice to eradicate the very concept of prescience freed every other future Kwisatz Haderach from the burden he and Paul carried: a false total understanding. I can’t remember where this happens, but Herbert likened prescience as collapsing the wavefunction of the future a la the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, but cautioned that doing so also meant eradicating other possible futures that were as of yet unseen (truly Herbert was the GOAT this shit ruled). Prescience was the very thing Paul warned against:

  “And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning ’That path leads ever down into stagnation.”

  But it seems that all the great prescience-users fell victim to the trap. One could argue that Leto II did this on purpose, forcing humans into 3,500 years of stagnation in order to teach them “a lesson their bones would remember.”

  I give them enduring eons of enforced tranquility which plods on and on despite their every effort to escape into chaos. Belleve me, the memory of Leto’s Peace shall abide with them forever. They will seek their quiet security thereafter only with extreme caution and steadfast preparation.

  And yet, Leto’s peace never seemed quite right to me. This comment is long enough, though, so I’ll leave it here.

  ___________________________________________________________________________________________

  Also, I forget what happens after God Emperor. I have barely any recollection what goes on in Heretics and Chapterhouse and have very little desire to read them again. I have never read Brian Herbert’s sequel books and never plan to.

• Harjas Sandhu 3 Jun 2025 16:04 UTC

  1 point

  1

  in reply to: lesswronguser123’s comment on: In defense of memes (and thought-ter­mi­nat­ing clichés)

  I think your distinction makes a lot of sense here. IIRC Kitten argued somewhere else that the dunk was self-evident—taking morality too literally leads you to strange places and unintuitive conclusions, which I don’t necessarily agree with—but I agree with you in that it was more of a semantic stopsign (what a nice term) than a proper laconic takedown of an idea (which is really hard to do).

  Funnily enough, politicalcompassmemes is the literally epitome of Scott’s bingo card idea, but it hasn’t seemed to result in the full Ostrich effect “head in sand” phenomenon he was worried about. Instead, it’s sort of fragmented into an inside joke community, which was sort of my point about memes serving the purpose of communicating humor/​in-jokes.

In defense of memes (and thought-ter­mi­nat­ing clichés)

• Harjas Sandhu 2 Jun 2025 14:45 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Alex_Altair’s comment on: Alex_Al­tair’s Shortform

  It definitely is trading off with comprehension, if only because time spent thinking about and processing ideas roughly correlates with how well they cement themselves in your brain and worldview (note: this is just intuition). I can speedread for pure information very quickly, but I often force myself to slow down and read every word when reading content that I actually want to think about and process, which is an extra pain and chore because I have ADHD. But if I don’t do this, I can end up in a state where I technically “know” what I just read, but haven’t let it actually change anything in my brain—it’s as if I just shoved it into storage. This is fine for reading instruction manuals or skimming end-user agreements. This is not fine for reading LessWrong posts or particularly information-dense books.

  If you are interested in reading quicker, one thing that might slow your reading pace is subvocalizing or audiating the words you are reading (I unfortunately don’t have a proper word for this). This is when you “sound out” what you’re reading as if someone is speaking to you inside your head. If you can learn to disengage this habit at will, you can start skimming over words in sentences like “the” or “and” that don’t really enhance semantic meaning, and eventually be able to only focus in on the words or meaning you care about. This still comes with the comprehension tradeoff and somewhat increases your risk for misreading, which will paradoxically decrease your reading speed (similar to taking typing speed tests: if you make a typo somewhere you’re gonna have to go back and redo the whole thing and at that point you may as well have just read slower in the first place.)

  Hope this helps!