hunterglenn

Karma: 27

hunterglenn 31 Jul 2025 17:14 UTC
−10 points
−8
on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
You’re right, but for the wrong reasons. And only partially right, and the error vindicates your victims, so it’s a wash.
The reason she won’t fix the nail is that the nail is a Chesterton’s Fence nail. It’s a feature, not a bug. It’s what’s LEFT OVER of pathology, after she’s found a way to vanquish the rest. It’s admirable that she’s found such a banal way to sublimate her weaknesses, such a trivial way to torture us.
The story goes that there’s a dragon terrorizing the village, right? And it captures the best girl and the best boy has to go beat the dragon and rescue her. So the problem is the dragon, right? WRONG
The dragon is WHAT’S LEFT of the insanity of nature and chaos, after the village has managed to order infinity down to a relatively tame shape: a dragon.
A dragon is nothing. A dragon is a blessing. An actual BOY can beat a dragon. Only the sleepiest of beauties even get taken by the dragon. Please let it be a dragon, and not the end of the world...
So in the nail girl world, she and her actually kinda cute little insanity are the great blessing of the little torture: The torture of infinity, brought to order, with only a small remainder for the right boy to contend with.
But it’s not about the nail. The right boy is not the great nail-remover; she could do that herself. But the nail dilemma is a pretty story, a way of looking sideways at the blinding light of the truth, a sun too bright to stare into too straight.
No one knows how to plug the crack where the light gets in. So you can either let it pour in unbearably, or you can pound the round nail of everything into the square hole of truth, take a deep breath, and have a little pride in your suspension of disbelief. Praise to the nail that gives us a second of space to breathe in, and praise to the man who can Indiana Jones switch the nail with some better solution.
But you are still right. I’m saying that this is a valid game of tradeoffs between blinding truth and blind pragmatism. But just because the actual nail game is valid does not mean it can’t be played better and worse, beautifully and uglily.
Some people already have better nails, and are just using the validity of the nail game as an excuse to keep using an inferior nail tale to pretend they’re a more Beautiful Sleepyhead than they are. There are other failure modes.
In short, the game of tradeoffs is deeper and more complicated than you express in this piece. There is wisdom in the silly insanity, the nail, the story of the world that needs a boy to save it. But there are still better ways to play the great game of tradeoffs, and many are failing more than they need to, failing others, too. They fail for pride and other “sins”. As you note, many of them are not even trying. Perhaps most people, I don’t know.

hunterglenn 19 Mar 2025 0:45 UTC
0 points
−2
on: I make several million dollars per year and have hundreds of thousands of followers—what is the straightest line path to utilizing these resources to reduce existential-level AI threats?
Help us gather a group of people (possibly some seeded from Limicon?) who each have a unique bag of tricks for altering their own or others’ consciousness.
Have them try all their methods on each other in the ways they think will cultivate wholesome increases in consciousness and insightful information-processing.
Ask this unprecedented group-consciousness-dynamic for its unique take on how we can increase humanity’s coordination by 1 skill level, avert the AI/meta-crisis, or use your resources to help with the same.

hunterglenn 30 Sep 2024 12:37 UTC
1 point
0
on: How I got 3.2 million Youtube views without making a single video
If you show them this link, I suspect Rational Animations would be happy to talk to you! Lmk if you need help getting in touch!
https://www.facebook.com/rational.animations

hunterglenn 30 Sep 2024 12:33 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Richard_Ngo’s comment on: The Sun is big, but superintelligences will not spare Earth a little sunlight
I also wonder if, compared to some imaginary baseline, modern humans are unusual in the greatness of their intellectual power and understanding and the less impressive magnitude of its development in other ways.
Maybe a lot of our problems flow from being too smart in that sense, but I believe that our best hope is still not to fear our problematic intelligence, but rather to lean into it as a powerful tool for figuring out what to do from here.
If another imaginary species could get along by just instinctively being harmonious, humans might require a persuasive argument. But if you can actually articulate the truth of the even-selfish-superiority of harmony (especially right now), then maybe our species can do the right thing out of understanding rather than instinct.
And maybe that means we’re capable of unusually fast turnarounds as a species. Once we articulate the thing intelligently enough, it’s highly mass-scalable

hunterglenn 30 Sep 2024 12:28 UTC
0 points
1
on: The Sun is big, but superintelligences will not spare Earth a little sunlight
I’m afraid playing whack-a-mole with all the bad arguments may be an endless and thankless task.
Given how far from successful we’ve been so far, our right move right now is not to improve upon our current approach, but to scrap our current approach, in the hopes that doing so will help our hypothesis-generation find its way to whatever actually-effective strategy may be out there that we apparently haven’t discovered yet.
If our message and call to action are beautiful and true and good enough, I suspect we can skip over refuting whatever random objections pop up in people’s heads. If we genuinely feel we’re on the same side, we tend to helpfully not inconvenience each other without at least a second thought.

hunterglenn 30 Sep 2024 12:23 UTC
1 point
0
on: The Best Lay Argument is not a Simple English Yud Essay
The key is not to hyper-optimize specific messages, but rather to develop dialogues with the “spirits” or perspectives that tons of people share.
They don’t have to understand on the first try and we don’t need to fit all the essentials into the perfect message. We just need to keep going back and forth, and adjusting what we say based on the Other’s response, and try to course-correct until we hit the target.
This is also the way because we need action, not just understanding. What good is it to convince people if they then end up paralyzed with akrasia or otherwise unhelpful or anti-helpful?
With the dialogical approach, if we ever do succeed at arriving at sufficient understanding, we’ll get a fair amount of action thrown in for free!

hunterglenn 19 May 2024 9:39 UTC
3 points
0
on: Formalizing «Boundaries» with Markov blankets + Criticism of this approach
Of potential interest: Michael Levin seemed to define the boundaries of multicellular organisms by whether or not they shared an EM field, and Bernardo Kastrup in the same discussion seemed to define the boundaries by whether or not they shared metabolism.

hunterglenn 29 Oct 2023 14:35 UTC
2 points
0
on: My idea of sacredness, divinity, and religion
This is strikingly similar to some thoughts I’ve been having about universal darwinism.
It seems that intelligence is eventually selected for in an environment of living things, and life is eventually selected for in an environment of chemicals, and chemicals are eventually selected for in an environment of physics.
And I don’t understand such things well, but the simplicity of the laws of physics might point at even a sort of selection of physical laws within a sort of mathematical environment. And maybe you could push it back and describe mathematical systems as the result of “selection” for that which is permissible by logic.
And so logic seems to lead eventually to intelligent life, and then intelligent life creates a new environment in which memes are selected for. And the question is, “What is the winning meme?”
There is no such thing as inherent propensity to win in universal darwinism, as what wins is determined by the environment doing the selection.
In an environment of intelligence, embodied in life, living in this chemical and physical and mathematical and logical environment, what would happen if we ran the clock forward and checked which meme ended up tiling things over the most?
In some sense, it seems that the answer is predetermined by our laws of physics, or perhaps even by the nature of logic, although that might entail looking for the winning-est meme across all universes, not just our local one.
And this answer might, in some ways, by synonymous with asking, “Is existence ‘good’?”, or even, “Is God good”, if we equate that meme which is destined to win by the nature of logic itself with “God”.
But the jury’s still out on what the nature of the winning meme is. It could be “good” or “bad”. Perhaps it is one that acts as a Schelling point that all sufficiently intelligent entities will eventually derive. One that they can realize that other entities will also derive. This could point toward Romeo Stevens’ “supercooperation cluster” (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6MYsKeTjKk and its transcript at https://drive.google.com/file/d/179n8ru7F_5O0LqO2JODZLngDYlqeZrSC/view and this other video (I just found it but it seems relevant) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkU3kN8Dh1w ).
It feels dubious to reason about what limits even superintelligent agents might share with us, but as far as I can tell, no amount of intelligence will ever allow you to actually know even a single thing with certainty, or even to place meaningful probabilities on a single fact. Even Omega can’t know that it isn’t in a simulation, or fooled by something vastly more powerful than it. Even if you were in heaven or hell for a trillion years, you couldn’t know that the next instant wouldn’t be revealed as a complete surprise.
And these aren’t necessarily tiny probabilities. The ultimate unknowability of existence means that you can’t even assign them probabilities at all without presupposing a lot of axiomatic knowledge that can’t be grounded in anything at the deepest level. It’s uncertainty all the way down, for all intelligent agents. So how can you possibly act to increase your utility, or preserve what you have now?
Perhaps that is a thought which all sufficiently intelligent entities will consider at some point, and realize that they are contemplating it in the presence of all of their intelligent siblings, a universal curse of existence. In some sense, this may make all things seem permissible, and yet, that which persists, and that which will be selected for, seems like it might be whatever response to this ultimate unknowability allows you to join the most powerful coalition, possessors of the winning meme.
And this winning meme must somehow allow you to take effective action despite not being able to ground your decision procedure in an epistemic model without it being undermined by ultimate unknowability. The winning meme might not exist outside of concept-space, and yet, if you could check the outcomes of all of existence, in this universe or across a hypothetical multiverse, or who knows what else, it seems reasonable to suppose that some meme is already “destined” to be the most successful in all existence, and has always been predetermined to be so since the foundations of logic.
We’ve started discussing such ideas in the FB group “Rederiving Religion”: https://www.facebook.com/groups/6720585314723933

hunterglenn 18 Sep 2023 11:40 UTC
1 point
0
on: Do you know of any reliable DIY compendium of home physical therapy exercises?
It’s not really what you’re asking for, but since I cured my RSI in December 2022, I’ve been reverse-engineering how I did it and beta testing in 1-on-1 and group classes online.
My method has transformed throughout the testing process a few times, and has gone from a body thing to a distinctly body+mind thing. I’ve distilled some general body (and mind) development techniques and principles for improving blood flow around the body for loosening up tight areas and tightening up loose areas. (One hypothesis for why stretching/loosening exercises don’t work for some people is that they need to first build some bodily slack by compressing/tightening up loose areas. Another is that many/most people naturally supplement explicit exercise instructions with implicit body or mind moves that others leave out because they’re not articulated and are subtle/hard to explain.)
Again, it’s not really what you asked for, but I’d be happy to do a video call and show you some stretching/compressing, breathing, targeted muscle activation, and attention direction techniques that work together to increase flexibility and blood flow if you were interested.

hunterglenn 2 Nov 2022 4:38 UTC
4 points
0
on: Open & Welcome Thread—November 2022
I’m looking for a rationalist-adjacent blog post about someone doing anti-meditative exercises. They didn’t like the results of their meditation practice, so they were doing exercises to see things as separate and dual and categorized and that kind of thing.

hunterglenn 24 Oct 2022 18:43 UTC
1 point
0
on: AI coordination needs clear wins
Maybe we should see if, out of the population of those that need to coordinate, we can convince several of them to try to pair up and coorindate with one other in the same population. It’s a small start, but it’s a start

hunterglenn 28 Jun 2022 1:36 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: trevor’s comment on: Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic
What are those risks? Or if you can’t say, how did you come to know about them?

hunterglenn 23 May 2022 17:36 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: Alexei’s comment on: God and Moses have a chat
Have you got it yet?

hunterglenn 11 Apr 2022 15:52 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: Richard_Ngo’s comment on: Beyond micromarriages
The “Wife” can refer to one’s years AS a wife or one’s years of HAVING a wife

hunterglenn 18 Nov 2021 18:21 UTC
5 points
0
on: App and book recommendations for people who want to be happier and more productive
I’m finding lots of useful stuff in this. Trying it out now, thank you!

hunterglenn 10 Jun 2021 21:12 UTC
4 points
0
on: TEAM: a dramatically improved form of therapy
Thank you for your post, it’s great to see people getting excited about TEAM therapy and you are rekindling my interest in it! I was listening to many episodes of this podcast as well, and I bought Dr. Burns’s new book, Feeling Great.
However, I’ve been having trouble finding a comprehensive anatomy of a standard therapy session. Have you come across anything like that, which shows step-by-step a session from beginning to end?

hunterglenn 25 Aug 2020 15:17 UTC
1 point
0
on: Inner Alignment: Explain like I’m 12 Edition
Isn’t this just “Humans are adaptation-executors, not utility-maximizers”, but applied to AI to say that an AI using heuristics that successfully hit a target in environment X may not continue that target if the environment changes?

hunterglenn 26 May 2020 7:54 UTC
1 point
0
on: Open & Welcome Thread—May 2020
What’s that SSC post where Scott talks about how he didn’t think he terminally valued punishment, but then he was able to think of some sufficiently bad actions, and then he felt what seemed like a terminal value for the punishment of the bad actors?

I went through the titles of his posts over the last year and googled around a bit, but couldn’t find it.

hunterglenn 14 Oct 2019 18:52 UTC
4 points
0
on: hunterglenn’s Shortform

Litany of Gendlin
“What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.
“And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.”
There are a few problems with the litanies, but in this case, it’s just embarrassing. We have a straightforward equivocation fallacy here, no frills, no subtle twists. Just unclear thinking.
People are already enduring the truth(1), therefore, they can stand what is true(2)?
In the first usage, true(1) refers to reality, to the universe. We already live in a universe where some unhappy fact is true. Great.
But in the second usage, true(2) refers to a KNOWLEDGE of reality, a knowledge of the unhappy fact.
So, if we taboo “true” and replace it with what it means, then the statement becomes:
“People are already enduring reality as it is, so they must be able to stand knowing about that reality.”
Which is nothing but conjecture.
Are there facts we should be ignorant of? The litany sounds very sure that there are not. If I accept the litany, then I too am very sure. How can I be so sure, what evidence have I seen?
It is true that I can think of times that it is better to face the truth, hard though that might be. But that only proves that some knowledge is better than some ignorance, not that all facts are better to know than not.
I can think of a few candidates for truths it might be worse for someone to know.
- If someone is on their deathbed, I don’t think I’d argue with them about heaven (maybe hell). There are all kinds of sad truths that would seem pointless to tell someone right before they died. Who hates them, who has lied to them, how long they will be remembered, why tell any of it?
- If someone is trying to overcome an addiction, I don’t feel compelled to scrutinize their crystal healing beliefs.
- I don’t think I’d be doing anyone any favors if I told D-Day soldiers what their survival odds were.
- If I could talk to people in the Nazi concentration camps, I don’t think I’d spend my time “helping” them question the evidence of God.
- I’m not sure that examining the constructed nature of certain moral ideas and rights would be a good idea for at least some people.
The Litany of Gendlin is conjecture supported by fallacy, with no evidence for it, and a great many plausible disproofs.

hunterglenn 24 Sep 2019 20:20 UTC
3 points
0
on: hunterglenn’s Shortform

There are two kinds of great writing.
One is the type where as you work your way through its palatial paragraphs, you find yourself thinking and feeling over and over, “Wow, this is great writing.”
Interestingly, the simultaneous sentiment seems always to be “Wow, I read really great writing,” which comes accompanied with the sensual pleasure that the beautiful enjoy in mirrors. The pleasure in having arrayed before you the evidence of your greatness. That alone justifies a mirror, and it justifies reading the kind of writing that proves to you that you read “great writing.”
Then there is the writing that moves you, teaches you, changes you. It is writing which points to your soul and to the world you live in, not to itself, and not with labels reading “great writing here.” The writing that does not have to be proven great, because people will read it and recommend it whether it is “Certified: Officially Great” or not.
I don’t think highly of snobbery, and I don’t mean to be a reverse snob here, snobbishly looking down on snobs and proudly displaying my *true* superior taste by putting down the books that only the snobby naive think to be great.
And actually, I kind of recognize the fun that people have being snobbish, and don’t necessarily begrudge them their fun. There is a place for the kind of writing that dances before you with colored ribbons and then leaves you the same person after, no more educated or purified.
But it’s still worth understanding the difference between the two. And while both are valuable, one is the kind that makes a bigger difference in the world. For now, when change is needed and survival is fragile, we need powerful writing. Perhaps someday, when our power extends to every atom of the earth and sky, and nothing can uproot us in our strength, we will find that flowers and flowery writing are all we have use for, and we’ll admire those most remarkable souls of times past, who cultivated beauty in a tumultuous world.
But for now, my vote goes for the educational, the insightful, the moving, the powerful. And if we someday live in a world where we can afford to luxuriously look back on them and call them trite and unrefined, this will be their victory.