Josh Smith-Brennan

Karma: 52

Josh Smith-Brennan 14 Jun 2021 0:05 UTC
4 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Why do patients in mental institutions get so little attention in the public discourse?
Short answer:
Policy regarding research needs to be changed before making policy changes in distribution of care will make much of a difference overall IMHO. There is already a ton of infrastructure—human, physical and financial—in place to offer the services that are available; many types of policy changes to the offerings of care itself can be made. However there are serious areas of need not being met, and it still seems regardless of who’s in power at this point in time, strides in this regard are unlikely to be made without serious reconsideration of societies approach to it’s priorities.
Longer answer:
One of the main reasons has little to do with the Mental Health Care system per se, but rather how it is integrated (or not) into the broader society. The concept of Community Mental Health Care sounds good in theory, but in practice it still focuses primarily on individuals with ‘mental disorders’ as being the problem instead of understanding and making changes to how the community (or society) functions when it fails these people.
In my opinion Mental Disorder is a problem caused by something like a misaligned community and/or society, and people with mental health disorders are victims of neglectful or harmful aspects of their Communities or Society. Treating their symptoms does nothing to fix the underlying systemic issues causing the symptoms or problems in the first place. Without knowing where or how to make the changes, the problems are just shifted from one part of society to another.
Another aspect of this issue involves the distribution of goods and services both in this country and around the world, as Public Health Care becomes a reinvigorated topic of consideration domestically. Consider the fact there are serious differences between Public and Private Mental Health Care. Should Public Mental Health Care be as good as Private Mental Health Care even though it’s clients are poor and the government is paying for it? Or should Public care be less effective because it is provided ″for free” by the government? Or is it possible like many things in this country, we pay way more for goods and services than other countries do?
Pharmaceuticals are an easily accessible case in point. For example: If we can afford to give half a billion doses of COVID vaccine to poor countries, why can’t I as an American Citizen in the Public System, get the type of mental health care I need? The money to buy those doses going to other countries could fund the type of therapy I need to heal my severe PTSD, but instead I don’t receive appropriate care because the money isn’t available. Why is it the needs of poor people in other countries are often times prioritized over the needs of poor Americans?
This is the type of political reality many people with ill intentions latch onto, and weaponize in political discussions. Which makes having rational conversations about issues like that difficult and tends to have the effect of focusing on that one aspect to the detriment of the rest of the conversation that should be taking place. It can become a ‘can’t see the forest for the tree’ problem. So many people with good intentions avoid the conversations altogether in the belief it’s a Pandoras Box.
That doesn’t change the fact that there are a lot of conversations not happening at high levels I’m sure, that should, because they involve what would be considered unpopular opinions. These topics are ignored and backgrounded because they don’t test well with the audience, but this doesn’t change the fact that they are real issues. It just means it’s taboo to talk about them or attempt to find solutions to the problems they are associated with. Politics is the mind killer.
The fact is the Mental Health Care Culture is in crisis because it is overloaded and under-equipped to deal with the overwhelming nature of the issues.
More workers won’t make a significant difference if they aren’t trained well and good training is hard to get because many of the old models don’t work like we were told they do; this is where too often things like over reliance on medication leaves clients/patients without access to any type of effective counseling, therapy or support. While medication can improve counseling and therapy, it is not a replacement for counseling and/or therapy, yet in an overwhelming number of cases this is the reality. The thinking goes along the lines “Something is better than nothing.” I’ve often found this results later on in “Too little too late.”
Some old models work but need updated or potentially rolled back; this is where I believe alcohol and drug addiction treatment needs to be separated from mental health care treatment, as they are both 2 very different treatment modalities (or should be) yet in the name of government ‘efficiency’ they were collapsed into one department within many state governments a few decades back. What used to be treated as 2 separate issues by 2 different departments with 2 different treatment modalities became 1 badly integrated governmental department with a ‘1 size fits all’ approach to whatever ails you. Add in the further unskillfull integration of the Criminal Justice and Public Legal Systems into this community which is in constant crisis, and what we have is a horrific tragedy which keeps unfolding over time which no one takes responsibility for or is able to effectively influence in a positive way.
Additionally, some models of treatment need to be dropped entirely while others need to be created to repair the damage done by the models which did more harm than good. Gay conversion therapy is an example of what I’m talking about here; programs like these functioned with government oversight and federal funding and the amount of damage caused was and is tremendous. Treating the victims of treatment like this is a specialty service that didn’t exist until there was a recognized need for it.
There are still programs in this vein that need to be terminated and replaced with effective treatments, and there are many victims who still suffer because their suffering isn’t yet recognized. Quite often these are men and boys, and in a Schizophrenic society like the US, society can’t figure out whether they are victims or perpetrators. If we try to consider them both, and even think about affording them the care and support they need to heal from their victimization, we’re afraid our heads will explode because we’re also trying to punish them for being perpetrators at the same time. Our system is a punitive system, and is the major underlying flaw of Western Tradition from my current perspective. Still trying to write about this.
Given the pace of change across the board, from changing peoples minds, to changing their habits, to changing the physical environment they inhabit, making bad calls in policy changes has the result of wasting massive amounts of resources and causing massive amounts of suffering. I won’t go into why now, but, comprehensive re-examination of the research done in the decades leading up to our current time needs to be done using better tools and methods with our newer understandings before things will change much for the better. I’m not offering quick solutions, just more comprehensive and potentially effective ones.
This process would be complicated and multi layered, but necessary to re-frame and re-integrate new understandings into older but correct models and scientific frameworks, and to create new frameworks based on better understanding of the consequences of the mistakes of the past. Outdated, polluted and biased data can lead to polluted information, polluted information can lead to polluted knowledge bases, these in turn lead to polluted decisions regarding policy changes which muddy the waters instead of clearing them up.
We’re at a cross roads in Western Society; we are laying a new technologically advanced foundation for the future on a shaky foundation of pre-digital knowledge, wisdom and understanding. I’m suggesting we shore up the foundations of Western Society culturally before we attempt to keep building upwards. The Psycho-Socio-Econo-Tectonic plate system of the world wide cultural subconscious is full of faults, and the if we don’t understand them well, they’ll be our downfall whether we do it ourselves or engineer AGI to do it for us intentionally or unintentionally.
This is why my money is on better research being the key. Getting politicians to pay attention to these concerns is another matter, and as we’ve seen with the public response to the COVID Pandemic, even when the research is done, and the majority of the government is on board, disseminating and assimilating good solutions into society in a positive way is often a huge struggle. This issue of Cultural Lag is a constant thread that runs throughout any type of positive change in society. Which is why I’m still working on a model of Social Physics.

Josh Smith-Brennan 13 Jun 2021 2:31 UTC
7 points
on: Why do patients in mental institutions get so little attention in the public discourse?
Mental health in general in the US (and around the world) is poorly understood. Pop-psychology spreads myth, misinformation, and disinformation and Big Pharma preaches advancements in medication over advancements in therapy and counseling models. Money talks, and no one can argue with Big Pharma in this arena. Unless you are a professional in the field of mental health or a client or friend or family member of one, most people don’t care to know how the sausage gets made in terms of keeping ‘mentally ill’ people under control, and even fewer people care whether keeping them under control is an actual solution to the very real problems they face.
I’ve been living in a mental health institution for the last 2 years, and have been in the public mental health system practically from birth. We’re deemed scapegoats of the society, like criminals and often treated just as bad or worse. This society only knows itself by creating false dichotomies: classifying ‘these people’ as mentally ill, and ‘these people’ as not, based on a somewhat circular logic which allows for the unfair division of resources and diversion of those resources to those who are deemed ‘able’ to use them.
The way the authorities tell the difference between the 2 groups is way too often archaic and systemically discriminatory, and mental health has become so enmeshed with the criminal justice system so as to almost become indistinguishable from it at the Public level. Society needs people on the bottom so that others can be on top. Wish it were otherwise.

Josh Smith-Brennan 5 Jun 2021 3:02 UTC
2 points
on: Tracey Davis and the Prisoner of Azkaban—Part 1
This is so good. For simplicities sake, I will refrain from making suggestions about some of the aspects of the combat though, unless you ask. You paint a picture though!

Josh Smith-Brennan 5 Jun 2021 2:58 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: Challenge: know everything that the best go bot knows about go
Sorry Daniel, I really didn’t mean any offense, in fact I was maybe a bit too eager to jump into an area I have interest in, but don’t really understand at a technical level. While I am pretty familiar with Go, not so much with ML or AI. In fact I really appreciated the discussion, even though I am conflicted about AI’s impact on the Go community.
It’s funny though, I recently had the opportunity to talk a very little bit with a 9 dan professional about his experience with AI, and I was a bit surprised by his response. I value his opinion very much, and so have attempted to try and change my attitude about Go playing AI slightly.

Josh Smith-Brennan 5 Jun 2021 2:27 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: A non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence: introduction and preamble
I also don’t think it was really caused by meditation; rather it was an emotional wound (or a form of craving) masquerading as a noble intention.
I would offer the following in an attempt to provide you with some benefit and urge a bit more compassion for yourself along this line of thought, although I can relate to your comment about craving masquerading as noble intention. I’m a lay buddhist, although I have thought about becoming a Monk at certain points in my life. My point is I can’t lay claim to an explanation of why I put it the way I did as being ‘the correct way’, with any strong appeal to credibility due to perfect lineage transmission.
But I can give you my thinking based on my studies and experience, and try to explain why I think it is both the meditation practice and the ‘wound’ you were referring to, but that it is the meditation practice that may be “at fault” for lack of a better phrase. A great thing about Buddhism is that in many ways it allows us to place the blame for our problems within the world instead of within ourselves, thereby removing a lot of unhelpful guilt in a Moral sense.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t work to correct our faults, only that they aren’t really our fault despite being in us. They are ours because they are in us, but we didn’t cause them, the world did. This is my opinion, but it is what I like about Buddhism in comparison to say Christiantiy, in which it is the original sin or Adam and Eve which caused all of humanities downfall, and it is my sinful nature (strong emphasis on appealing to a very subjective Moral authority) which is my problem. Without Jesus I’m lost, and the ideas about Good and Evil are very black and white. Plus, there is a strong correlation in many churches between Moral Superiority and Financial Wellbeing. If you are poor or out of work, it’s implied you are a moral failure, and either lazy or too stupid to know how to pull your self out of poverty. The moral status of the individual is the anchor point around which the entire world orbits, whether you are at the top of the heap or the bottom.
In Buddhism I find there is less of a correlation between ‘Goodness’ and ‘money.’ If you have money you can still be a horrible person, and if you are poor, you can still be a good person. From my perspective having lived in the shelter system for around 4 years now, and having grown up in poverty, Western tradition really seems to revolve around this tight relationship between Goodness and financial prosperity being divinely linked. I think this is a flaw in society. Without going into it too much, Eastern culture also equates money with Goodness in many ways, but I think there is more acceptance that poverty isn’t necessarily caused by poor people making immoral choices, society is just a corrupting force.
One of the great things, from a Buddhist perspective, about being a human is the ability to come into contact with the Dharma. As a rock, or an animal, we couldn’t benefit from the Dharma really, as we wouldn’t have the facilities to understand it or practice it, but as humans we can. In this day and age it is even easier to come into contact with it, it’s all over the Internet, and many more communities today have some sort of Buddhist center. It’s gotten so much simpler to come into contact with it today than it was when I was a kid, before the Internet. I had to ride an hour and a half each way to get to a library which may or may not have a 20 year old book on Buddhism on the shelf. Most of my books early on I got from Borders or from academic libraries because there was no where else to get them. I had to spend a huge amount of time and energy to find Dharma, but these days it’s a completely different story.
Being a human allows us to understand the causes of suffering, and to learn to practice to alleviate it, as long as we have access to the Dharma. Animals and people without access to the Dharma are unlikely to understand the causes of suffering and be able to learn to practice to alleviate it, so by being human and having access to it, we are very lucky. At least according to Buddhist thinking. I tend to agree, otherwise I wouldn’t practice or study it.
A downside to having all this access to Dharma through mediums like the Internet and academic institutions though, is that in addition to presenting wisdom and knowledge from the entire spectrum of Buddhist traditions, there is all the information from all the non-Buddhists who have pulled ideas, concepts and practices from Buddhist tradition and attempted to ‘translate’ them into more modern and more ‘effective’ versions. There’s a lot of mis and disinformation about the Dharma floating around out there.
So maybe closer to the point, finding and developing a healthy relationship with an experienced teacher isn’t as easy as finding the Dharma. This is also not our fault. So while we might have it at our finger tips, without a good guide, we won’t know what have or how to use it well. Even if we read and learn on our own, we are likely to make a lot of mistakes because we are flawed in our perceptions—not necessarily in a moral way though. We aren’t ‘bad’, just confused and ignorant, blinded by illusion.
But the Dharma isn’t as easy to use as something like Netflix on the Internet. We can’t download it or stream it and expect it to work similarly. We can’t read about it and expect to understand it without help. We can’t practice it and expect not to make mistakes. We can’t pass on what we don’t have either. Which is why a teacher is so important. If we want to benefit from Yoga, we have to practice it, not just study it. If we don’t have a good teacher, we may practice it wrong and hurt ourselves.
Academic institutes can be a mixed bag. Surveys of ‘all’ Buddhist teachings and practices I think, like most aggregate sets of diverse information, tend to want a one size fits all solution to whatever ails you. Practicing based on selecting for benefits while avoiding as much of the ‘downsides’ as possible, isn’t really possible in reality. Hoping to come up with a lowest common denominator approach to utilizing the ‘strengths of a diverse selection’ of practices tends to remove most cultural, social and historic context which I jokingly refer to as a sort of ‘American Cheesination’ of non american cultural practices.
American cheese is probably the most unhealthy and bad tasting of all cheeses, simply because it is so heavily processed. Corporate America (and therefore the average American) loves this approach of trying to create benefit while trying to avoid side effects for instance. This has lead to a number of issues with consumer health, and is the concern of the FDA and how it regulates/misregulates food and drugs. The fallacy goes like this: ‘we’ want the flavor Fat offers in our foods without the actual Fat—which is what created Olestra—and we want the sweetness and energy of sugar without the calories—which created a whole slew of artificial sweetenters and sugar substitutes.
These attempts to scientifically synthesize a desirable product without the associated ‘down sides’ simply led to a shift in the types of ‘down sides’ the new product has. The disgusting and painful side effects of Olestra meant it was pulled from the market, and personally I can’t stand artificial sugar, I won’t buy a product if it contains it, and I’m pretty sure most people who say they like the taste are lying.
All joking aside, specific Buddhist traditions and practices tend to have a consistency to them, that allows you to check your own experience of your practice against a long history of other practitioners experiences. Basically the practices have been around a long long time, which is something modern versions of meditation and psychotherapies which incorporate it, or modern highly processed foods tend to lack; Cultureless Culture, Fatless Fats and Sugarless Sugars just don’t have a long history of successful benefit to humanity.
That’s not to say modern science doesn’t have a lot of data to pull from, only that most of the data doesn’t go back all that far, maybe a few hundred years at most concerning issues like consciousness and the assorted phenomenon. And despite the fact, or possibly because, there is so much data to sort through—of varying quality and often incredibly sparse distribution across the entire spectrum of human experience—modern regulatory bodies and scientific communities don’t seem to be able to come to many decent conclusions about what the ‘truth’ is regarding healthy diet, healthy lifestyles, or healthy psychological makeup or cultural practice.
Which brings us back to mental health and any possible benefits to meditation. Everybody has ‘wounds’ of the type I think you are referring—after all a central tenet to most if not all Buddhist practice and thinking is that “life is suffering” and wounds whether physical, emotional or psychological represent a type of suffering—so this is not really the solvable problem IMO. To just not have any ‘wounds’ is impossible, even the most well adjusted person in the world experiences suffering, so simply living life unwounded isn’t a reality.
But since we all suffer from ‘the illusion of self’- the compounded wounds, biases, and limitations of perception and understanding which make us human and not omniscient gods—it is this which is ‘the barrier’ to knowing the truth. Having ‘wounds’ (suffering) is a universal characteristic of all life, as all life suffers; it is the selection and practice of solutions which is the area Buddhist practice focus on, not necessarily the belief that our ‘wounds’ are the problem. Wounds are a fact of life, not an optional factor of life. If it were optional, none of us would probably choose to be wounded or to have biases or emotional or psychological issues, but then we wouldn’t be human either.
So it’s the lack of, and/or incorrect selection of ‘correct’ ways to deal with our ‘wounds’ where real progress can be made or abandoned. Different types of meditations have different effects, and different people have different ‘wounds’, or what others might term cognitive distortions, or still others might term biases, beliefs, habits,etc. There are many many ways people are deluded from ‘truth’, many ways that ‘life is an illusion’ so this should not be the point of contention I think.
“But there is a path to cessation of suffering” which means there are solutions, and “it is the Dharma.” means knowing and practicing ‘the truth’ is the solution. The question is actually then, “what is the Dharma and how do we practice it?” (This is the concern of many Buddhist traditions and practices, of which meditation is part.) So the ‘problem’ becomes how to choose which practices to select, of which meditation is just one type of practice, and how to know if we are practicing them correctly. This is where a qualified teacher becomes invaluable.
Most people want to meditate, because they believe this is where the true benefit comes from. I believe there are many benefits to meditation, but there are other practices as well. In some cases though, there are advanced types of meditation. Like advanced classes in college, Advanced Meditations have prerequisites. These meditations are many of the meditations that involve culturally specific ideas, concepts and practices and can vary widely from sect to sect. This is where mistranslations can have negative effects, and where attempts to gain the benefits of these practices without accruing the associated ‘down sides’ simply results in the shifting of the downsides to some other facet of your personality or identity, not the elimination of the downsides.
These are just some examples of a model of Social Physics I’m working on, as it appears to be the case that in modern attempts to derive benefit without downsides from processed products and practices, the downsides are simply shifted - the benefits and downsides are entangled such that you can’t have one without the other. For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction—for every benefit you create, there is an equal but opposite downside created. (Also I think this involves the conservation of energy and mass—if you replace energy with benefit, and mass with downside. So the conservation of benefit and downside. But this is still a theory in development.)
I think the same is true of understanding our minds, and trying to put those understandings into action. Our actions have consequences for ourselves and others—and I think humans are particularly bad at understanding the ‘correct way’ of applying those filters to our lives. Often when I have concern for myself, it would be more ‘correct’ to have more concern for others, and vice versa. So that the type of emotional wound you are referring to has an affect on how we perceive our relationship to the world around us, including other people, and the ‘distorting’ effect those ‘flaws’ in our perception have is actually more complicated than most people consider when responding to the world viewed through a lens with such a compounded wound.
Not only is there ‘distortion’ in the ways we perceive the world through the lens that contains the emotional wound or bias, there is distortion in the way that experience is encoded into our neurology in the form of different types of ideas and concepts about the world being ‘modeled’ in our minds, which are in turn consolidated into ‘flawed’ memories. The longer we rely on these ‘flawed’ neural loops, the more they influence the growth and construction of our central nervous system, and consequently our peripheral nervous system, so that they get ‘encoded’ into our emotional ‘brains’ and into our muscle memory, resulting in emotional and physical and/or behavioral ‘disorders.’ I study trauma as well, and it’s the physicality of the source of the these disturbances which I think is sometimes counterintuitive to people who think ‘it’s all in their heads.’ It’s not, it’s all throughout our bodies.
These distortions can become particularly problematic when we start examining our selves through lenses that come from other cultures, like Buddhist type meditations as they spread through non-buddhist communities. The traditional eastern approaches to dealing with the common disturbances to the practitioners ‘system’, typically involve frameworks which develop to help explain what’s going on (chakras, Chi, Qi, etc. etc) but become wild cards of sorts if there isn’t anyone in the non-buddhist practitioners community with the social, cultural and historical practice or experience to make cross cultural interpretations of the ‘mystic, esoteric’ stuff in the non-Buddhist community.
These frameworks are often meant to be ‘safety valves’ designed to create literal neural structure along ‘correct’ neural loops, through repeated adherence to rules of conduct: right thought, right action, right speech, or any of the other practices meant to train the practitioners Peripheral Nervous System/Central Nervous System to be able to safely handle the possible disruptions to the practitioners sense of self, community, and conceptual relationship to the real world. This can often result from the changing of thoughts, actions, and speech caused by attempts to ‘polish the flaws out of our lenses of perception’ through practices like meditation. A bit like having a new pair of powerful glasses, it takes us awhile to get used to new ways of seeing the world.
In particular Insight meditation can cause exactly this type of change in perception, because it introduces us to new, sometimes alien concepts which might cause paradigm shifts in our thinking. These concepts like ‘no self’, ‘illusion of self’, ‘enlightenment’, ‘nirvana’, ‘karma’ and so on, tend to be integral parts of Insight meditation and by integrating them into our understanding of ourselves and our world, we run the risk of misunderstanding them, and so ‘scratching the lens’ and making the flaws worse instead of ‘polishing them’ and making our perceptions more accurate.
IMO the Universe as perceived by humans is flawed, but despite the fact that the flaws are in our perception of the Universe and not in the Universe itself, it is not our faults that we misperceive it. If we have access to the Dharma, but don’t practice it, then I think it is possible to accept more of the blame for our faults and how we negatively effect the world. And this is where the guilt trip comes in. Once you know the truth, if you don’t act on it, you better have a good reason. If you don’t know the truth though, it’s difficult to assume responsibility for not working for it or towards it. However, if you actively hide from or ignore the truth, that’s where some real problems start I think.

Josh Smith-Brennan 4 Jun 2021 2:40 UTC
0 points
on: Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence announces 1,75 trillion parameters model, Wu Dao 2.0
I don’t think I could even imagine what kinds of Deep Fakes could be made using this system. Maybe used for propaganda first to develop the tech further? I’m usually just a little suspicious of new tech coming from anywhere though, not just China.

Josh Smith-Brennan 4 Jun 2021 1:52 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Site Recommendations for articles to read
I think what you guys have going on here is interesting in part because you are trying to keep the focus on “timeless” posts and discussions, very unlike Twitter or FB. While it makes it a little more difficult to quickly insert yourself into the discussions, it makes sense in terms of keeping the discussions that are happening more focused, but I imagine a lot more people who interact with the site read without commenting or posting. I’m curious whether that’s true, and what you think about it if it is true?

Josh Smith-Brennan 4 Jun 2021 1:33 UTC
−2 points
on: Finite Factored Sets
I don’t follow the math completely, but think I understand a little about how a couple of adjustments to the framework you’ve been using seems to point to the entanglement of the different values in the sets, and the ability to infer space/time relationships between them with a smaller subset of the data than would ‘normally’ be required. What caused me to comment was that a fair amount of my work has involved a few of the same topics and at least a few of the same trains of thought you deal with in this presentation. That is to say, I can see that what you’re doing looks a bit like what I’m doing, and for some of the same reasons, but I don’t know the language very well yet, and I would like to know more.
The reason being there were a few of the applications for this framework you mentioned near the end of the lecture that coincide with what I’ve been working on and I’d like to get some of your feedback. I understand people have time constraints and I’m honestly a little nervous about sharing what I’ve made considering I come at it from more of an intuitive approach, although I do attempt to come up with proofs of sorts. Having said that though, would you mind if I reached out to you to show you some of what I’ve done and get some of your thoughts on it?

Josh Smith-Brennan 3 Jun 2021 6:36 UTC
1 point
on: If You Want to Find Truth You Need to Step Into Cringe
I think it’s possible to say in a somewhat sarcastic fashion, that when Galileo proposed the idea that the Sun was actually at the center of the solar system and that the Earth orbited around it, he was cringe. At the time, making pronouncements that went contrary to the Churches stated beliefs by anyone was considered cringe. He was deprived of his freedom until he recanted his theory, and so fell in line with the accepted ‘truth’ of mainstream society, thereby (somewhat) having his reputation and social status restored (but not.)
I’m a firm believer that there are “ugly truths”, “beautiful truths”, and “inconvenient truths” among others, and you are more than likely going to find more social status by discovering and proselytizing for “beautiful truths” than the other 2; find more sympathy and support for discovering and sharing “inconvenient truths” than “ugly” ones; and potentially be stigmatized and ostracized for discovering and insisting people see the “ugly truths.”
Of course these are all fads in typical human form; yesterday’s beautiful discovery of atomic science and all the scientific benefits thereof, as well as the codification of the modern and efficient “Nuclear Family” Model and suburban sprawl, becomes today’s terror of Nuclear Weapons, Radiation induced Zombification, the overflowing Nursing and Retirement home system where Moms and Dads have hidden their parents away for decades after abandoning inter-generational households, and the plethora of abandoned suburbs, strip malls and roadways as the younger generations attempt to move back to ‘revitalized’ inner cities through gentrification.
This makes me wonder what horrific unintended consequences will come about tomorrow because of the Quantum age we’ve entered. I’m steady trying to figure out how Quantum science will destroy humanity, what the “Quantum Family” Model looks like, and how it’ll screw up society even more, and how quantum understandings will negatively affect city planning for the foreseeable future. What I see is an interrelated series of “ugly truths” about societies inability to learn from our past mistakes.
So do I step into cringe and tell the truth I see there, hoping that people will see my contributions as valuable, and therefore raise my social (financial status), or do I let someone else do it, someone with more social status to start with so that they can do it in a more ‘socially acceptable’ way, and thereby devalue my own social status by passing up an opportunity to point to an issue and take a stab at trying to come up with solutions?
Truth is subjective—Beauty is in the eye of the beholder—When in Rome, do as the Romans do—But, Nero did fiddle...and I don’t want to be rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Some people get to spend their lives surrounded by beautiful truths, and nothing but the purest gold falls from their lips whenever they speak. Some people spend their lives surrounded by ugly truths, and can’t speak of their lives for the gag in their mouths, and when they do pull it from their jaws, people run away screaming and clutching their ears after only a few words. The inconvenient truth is that people surrounded by beauty can only speak about beauty, and people surrounded by ugliness can only speak about ugliness, and most people would much rather hear about beauty.
I think that’s pretty cringe myself.

Josh Smith-Brennan 3 Jun 2021 4:24 UTC
4 points
on: A non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence: introduction and preamble
Epistemic Status: I’ve spent a couple decades attempting to understand Buddhism from a non-mystical, scientific perspective, so I can appreciate a lot of the work you’ve put into this post. I don’t have much to add at this point in discussion of the science behind it all, but I do have some personal thoughts. I took refuge back around 2012, and my practice mostly centers around attempting to practice right speech, right thought, and right action. I am also trying to be somewhat non-chalant in my writing style, I’m still learning to develop it.
There isn’t much here to disagree with in my opinion, but I often wonder these days what it is that people who want to study Buddhism without practicing it are looking for. I fully admit as a child in the 80′s I fell in love with Japanese cartoons, martial arts, asian food and the esoteric mysticism of the East.
As a half jewish, half white male who came from a strong catholic and jewish background, living in the protestant midwest, I was looking for something different in terms of understanding my place in the world and the meaning of life anyway.
For various reasons, I came to Buddhism through the culture and media I immersed myself in at a time before the Internet; It came as part of a package deal along with training in and studying martial arts, appreciating asian food, culture and history and aspiring to learn Japanese. These all helped me to put Buddhism into an historical and social context, and I think this is a very important point.
I’m often offended at pop culture ideas surrounding ‘esoteric’ or ‘mystical’ things, or even just half baked attempts to integrate different cultures and ideas. My mom studied Anthropology, Photography and Film studies/Media Critique and Women’s Studies in College as I was growing up, so I grew up with a healthy respect for other cultures, and how media is used to influence people. I think the Internet has really warped peoples ideas about how to ‘best’ or ‘respectfully’ integrate other peoples cultures into our own. Buddhism is a prime example to me.
As a teenager in the 90′s, I read more about Buddhism, and saw how it presented the world (mostly from a Tibetan Buddhist perspective through books by the Dalai Lama) and I wanted the happiness I thought was there. Through a life filled with counseling I also learned about and practiced CBT and psychotherapy, which I continue to engage with, study and research to this day, because of issues with Depression, PTSD, and ADD which still take up a fair amount of my time.
I developed interests in Cognitive/Neuro Psychology/Biology, Psychology, Theoretical Physics, Art, Computer Graphics, Media Studies and Sociology and they all paired well with an introspective approach to understanding myself and other people, but I still didn’t “get it.” I read a lot and thought a lot about Buddhism and what concepts like enlightenment meant. I meditated some, but did so without supervision and looking back, trying to do insight meditation without a teacher wasn’t responsible.
As someone who was very young at the time, I liked the idea of becoming “enlightened” and “letting go of my ego.” I believed I could learn to use my time and energy for the benefit of other people and put away my ‘selfish’ desires to help myself, and even thought this was desirable. This backfired as I became a people-pleaser, and still find it hard to put my needs ahead of other peoples to this day.
I can’t put this fully at the feet of my lone and ill advised forays into meditation, but it’s only much later I learned the idea that in order to let go of something, you have to have it first. I don’t think I had fully developed my ego at the point I started learning to “let it go” and healthy formation of identity is a crucial step to a happy life I think.
So I think the warning against meditating without a responsible guiding framework is particularly important. Personally, I also think having an actual teacher who comes from a Buddhist tradition is important, in order to put things into social and cultural perspective. While I see benefit to understanding the underlying structure and functions of the brain and consciousness—after all I have spent a fair amount of time reading and studying about it—I do think it’s possible to get so caught up in trying to understand it, that it ceases to become useful. I fully endorse the idea of a ‘middle way’ and ‘everything in moderation.’
Epistemic Statement: My opinion, based on slightly more than superficial study of Asian culture, but done over a long period of time. I’m not a teacher, so don’t take my word for it, but I’m fairly certain I’ve got at least a rough handle on some of these issues.
And I am unimpressed with ‘stealing’ other peoples cultures, and ignoring ideas we think are strange out of hand, as we tend to want the benefits without the responsibilities associated with them. My mom spent some time on a Navajo reservation as a young woman in the late 60′s, and at first wanted to put cameras into the hands of traditional people so that they could record their own cultures without the taint of mainstream prejudice (I’m paraphrasing badly.)
But she used to tell me as a kid the same story again and again, about the aboriginal tribes people who refused to have their pictures taken when photographers first started exploring tribal areas around the world. They believed that cameras ‘stole your soul’, and didn’t want to have anything to do with cameras. How silly is that?
She realized that not all cultures can benefit equally from technological advances, and just because you can make some cultural exchanges, certainly doesn’t mean the trades offs are fair. Native people have lost their cultures and their land, but we sure do have some interesting documentation of what their cultures looked like before modern society destroyed them. I think the same is potentially true of Buddhist practices and beliefs (and other traditional cultures being decimated as we speak.)
So issues like being able to put current concerns into historical context is sobering for me. Do I think everyone should learn to mediate? No, I don’t. Meditation, especially the type associated with Buddhism comes from a sort of horrible tradition in my opinion. Ascetics are generally people who have either been rejected by society, or have become disillusioned with it to the point they separate themselves from society.
By removing themselves from society and taking the time to explore their minds, they come to understand things about themselves and society, most people aren’t interested in knowing. Society has a hierarchy, some people get to ‘live’ life, while others suffer from poverty and scarcity. This is the way it is, not the way it should be in my opinion.
From my understanding, many religious orders—nuns and priesthoods—first develop out of a scarcity of resources within a society, so that by taking vows of chastity they avoid bringing new life into a world that can’t support more life, by taking vows of poverty they pull themselves out of the competition for money, food and other resources. By pulling themselves out of society, they stop contributing to the problems associated with over population and scarcity of resources, but they find they still have the rest of their lives to do something with. Why not sit in a corner, still, for hours on end every single day and then eat small healthy portions of food, get some good sleep and do it all over again the next day for the rest of your life?
They develop the introspective ability to ‘become happy’ with not having anything, with rejecting worldly pleasures (what most of us think of as ‘living our lives’) and they train themselves and other nuns or priests, to be able to live their lives in a way that reduces the stress on the communities they come from, but live apart from. Meditation wasn’t a path to happiness and peace and prosperity, it was in many ways a practice of self denial sometimes just short of committing suicide. How these initial traditions developed over time varied from country to country, but the main take away was learning to be happy without living life like ‘normal’ people.
This type of tradition stands in stark contrast to how most people want to benefit from Buddhist ideas and traditions today. People want to have their cake and eat it too, but many of the associate ideas, like Karma and Nirvana and Reincarnation, that come from Buddhist practices, often become distorted. Karma was what you exchanged your ability to ‘live’ your life for as a priest or nun. In this exchange, you hoped for either Nirvana, or being reborn at a higher level in your next life; this is what was supposed to motivate you to ‘right action, right thought, right speech’ as you denied yourself the ability to live like other people. There were a whole host of responsibilities that came along with the ‘benefits’ of meditation, which is why in some ways I think the study of Buddhism with out practicing it is much less ‘beneficial’ for the world at large.
Many of the problems associated with Religion in general can be attributed to Buddhism as well. That is to say that a reason many people offer for not wanting to practice Buddhism, is that it is an organized religion in the same vein as Christianity. But unlike Christianity, many of the practices, like meditation, which developed through non-western Religious traditions like Buddhism, continue to grow in popularity and gain traction in places like Scientific communities, whereas religions like Christianity tend to be considered an impedance to scientific inquiry and seem to be waning in popularity. As western society continues to develop socially and culturally, why is it we’re drawn to Buddhism, but don’t want to practice it?
I’ve heard of a lot of christian churches beginning to incorporate things like meditation and yoga and asian martial arts into their cultures, but I believe they tend to do it in a way that completely ignores the social and cultural heritages the practices come from. They don’t like the cultural connotations of the practices, and they get around this by removing the cultural aspects of the practice and just teach the ‘core principles’. So while they gain the benefits of the practices, they lose sight of the responsibilities that come along with them, by abandoning the ‘esoteric’ and ‘questionable’ aspects of them.
I’m not suggesting that ‘mysticism’ should be taught along side these practices. As rational people, considering pop culture ideas of ‘magic’ as fact should be hard to accept. But people who benefit from these practices do a disservice to all of us, when the traditions which balance out the benefits of a practice with the responsibility of the knowledge that comes with it, are put aside. In this Digital Age it’s too easy for some people to get ‘it’ all without giving back, and I think this understanding is somewhere near the heart of all that ‘mysticism’ and ‘esoteric’ and ‘mysterious’ stuff.

Josh Smith-Brennan 1 Jun 2021 23:43 UTC
12 points
in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: What are your personal (public) Hamming questions?
I grew up in poverty, so I’ve been a client of the Public System from birth. What this means is that I’ve been coordinating with all kinds of professionals to attempt to meet my needs for a long time. Like most domains/games/systems, the longer you are involved in/with them, the more you understand the limitations and problems of them. This is the case for me in trying to get out of poverty and homelessness.
So while I can appreciate the concern for my safety, I can assure you I’ve been connecting with health professionals and their support systems for decades.
This is also one of the main reasons why for the past 7 years I’ve been attempting to create and study a conceptual model of what I call “Cultural Lag” in a sort of “Social Physics” system, in order to better help myself help the people trying to help me. For example, the amount and variety of technical and scientific knowledge generated by academia and the like is amazing, and the amounts, varieties and quality of the knowledge is only increasing as time goes by.
But why it is that it takes so long for those cutting edge insights to make their way downstream into places like the Social Sciences and Social Services? What is it that is causing this lag in the dissemination and integration of the worlds best science (or money, or dispelling of myths and stereotypes, etc. etc.) into certain parts of society? I’m not satisfied anymore with the answer I keep getting from the people who are supposed to be helping me, namely that “The system is broken.”
This is the crux of my concern personally, socially and intellectually at this point. I seem to be in a position such that in order for me to make progress in those areas, I have to fix the parts of the system I’m ‘connecting’ with. I spend way too much time explaining to the people who are supposed to be helping me, why what they are doing hasn’t worked in the past, isn’t working now, and trying to suggest avenues for them to take.
It’s usually a year to two later that they start to actually take my suggestions, at which point I’ve wasted a couple years trying to work with someone who wasn’t equipped to help me in the first place, and in the meantime I’ve already moved onto to trying to understand my issues myself in a way which means I’m still not getting much ‘help’ from the professionals I work with. I often think I should be getting paid to teach these people an hour at a time, instead of paying them by the hour to ‘try’ to help me using outdated information.
So I understand the concept of a Hamming Question better, but I think where I’m having issues in general, is trying to understand my work (what I do—ALOT of—even though I don’t get paid to do it) and how better to define it so I can adjust my approach to doing it, and can speak more authoritatively about it.
From an Epistemic Statement perspective, I would consider myself an Independent Researcher of sorts, as I research, diagram, write and think about issues I find resonate with me. But I’m not allied with an institute of learning or research, so a lot of the resources which would be helpful aren’t available to me. Going back to school isn’t an option, and I can read all the books in the world, but it’s not my lack of curiousity or lack of motivation keeping me from being more successful. What I think I need is to be able to find some people who might be able to give me some insight into how my work can be leveraged to become something I can do to make a living.
This is why I originally came to LW after doing some research after reading an article in the New York Mag about Julia Galef and her new book. Somehow I was unable to connect with a community like LessWrong until recently despite having many of the same ideas and interests the LW community posts about. So I was heartened to find such a thriving community I somehow missed out on.
So with the aim of trying to take part in the community here online, and hopefully, maybe make some connections in the real world, I’m taking the site and people on it seriously in the belief that working for rational solutions to issues is better than the alternative.
I hope you are able to use some of the ideas here to leverage what resources are on offer from the professional providers in your area to make some progress!
Thanks. Unfortunately I am coming to LW trying to figure out how I can leverage the resources here to help the professional providers in my area. This is the paradox of my situation. There is a cultural myth that states that when most people fall into homelessness, there is some sort of a moral reason for it—they did something ‘wrong’ to cause their ostracization from society. This is a prevalent bias (in my opinion) of most providers in my area, if not everywhere.
It usually takes me about a year to two years to sufficiently explain to the professionals I work with that it’s not me that is the problem, that it is in fact a systemic problem. At which point I hear “The system is broken, there’s nothing I can do.” This is not the answer anyone wants to hear, but I have heard it enough to know that it’s an unacceptable answer for me. Which is why I try to study why the system is broken.
Professionals tend to only want to work with other ‘professionals’, and don’t like the idea that maybe it is them that is part of the problem. So that not having another piece of paper on my wall is both keeping me from being taken seriously by them, but in some ways is the only thing that keeps me from falling into the same irrational logic loops they’ve been educated and trained to inhabit professionally.
Which is why I came here, hoping to find some people who might take my crazy ideas seriously enough to help me prove them. I understand into everyone’s life a little shade must fall, but in my situation, considering how long I’ve been trying to solve the same problems over and over again, I’ve come to the conclusion the problem isn’t me.
So I suppose my Hamming Question is “How do I get people in positions to be helpful to take me seriously enough to help?”

Josh Smith-Brennan 31 May 2021 17:40 UTC
0 points
on: How concerned are you about LW reputation management?
I’m curious at this point, considering I have a post now at −34 karma, what the limits are of the set [upper bound, lower bound] for Karma on LW. Also, coming at this from a different angle, for me at this point the reputation system here is a good example of Inaccessible information.
There is accessible information about the posts, in the form of the Karma, but in cases of relatively large numbers of votes with no comments, the real meaning of the accessible information is sometimes lost as inaccessible information. Usually I would assume this is more the case with down votes than with upvotes.
But if in a system not run by AI, where we can easily ask for feedback about things like downvotes, through the comments system, if we still have issues with inaccessible information despite the ease of commenting, I don’t think this bodes well for cases in the future where it’s not as easy to ask for feedback.
Especially in a community of Rationalists who pride themselves on confronting and attempting to understand and overcome bias, I have to admit to some confusion still about what this actually means.

Josh Smith-Brennan 31 May 2021 17:14 UTC
6 points
in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: What are your personal (public) Hamming questions?
Maybe it would help if I understood a little better what a ‘Hamming Problem’ was. It looks a bit to me like it has to do with issues of Communication Complexity (the Gap-Hamming Problem?), so I’m assuming in the context of this post a Hamming Problem is one concerning inadequate understanding of (and so inadequate problem solving approaches to) a personal issue due to issues of complexity that can potentially be overcome by breaking the more complicated problem down into smaller, easier to tackle tasks? Although from the other posts there seems to be some consideration of adjacent or tertiary problems in relation to a Hamming Problem too.
Overall, my life goal currently is to find some happiness and some long term financial and social stability. How that comes about is up in the air, but what I’ve been attempting to do is to take my experience and use it in conjunction with UX research/design skills to find some solutions to my problems. I was hoping to apply that work towards other issues besides personal ones, but circumstances caused me to start having to analyze the Public Health/Assistance system in the US from a client perspective.
As a result, I started to develop a catalog of concerning issues—and began trying to design some countering solutions—with the Public System and how it interfaces with the Private System in order to create some sort of a social safety net. Turns out, at a certain point, the support these systems offer change dramatically, and the fall into homelessness is pretty quick, pretty complete, and pretty devastating, depending on where you started in life.
So while trying to solve my own issues, I ended up attempting to understand the entire system, and some of the Systemic Biases and resulting problems. I would dearly love to separate out my issues from those of the ‘system’ so that I could work only on my personal problems to a satisfactory resolution, but because of the systemic biases in the system I believe I’ve discovered, my personal issues may be inseparable from the ‘systems’ problems.
Getting into a better environment given my circumstances is optimistically, a year to 2 year long process at this point, probably longer given the complications of the continued traumatization of being in this system for so long. Getting into a better environment more than likely means getting steady, gainful employment, which has been an issue ever since I graduated from College in 2007, and into a severely depressed economy.
Adding PTSD into the equation, which has been worsened because of the extended existence in the shelter system, makes getting gainful work even more difficult, and because the Public System deals so badly with PTSD, the progress I make on this front is limited. It was rough enough living here trying to complete a 15 week IT training class when I first moved in, but I earned my A+ and Network+ certificates despite constantly being woken in the middle of the night by screaming and pounding on the walls.
But right as I was interviewing with about 6 or 7 different recruiting firms, the Pandemic hit and all my job leads dried up. The last year has seen my IT skills diminished from lack of use.
So I’m looking at a large amount of downtime, with little to do, and a catalog of potential solutions to a number of systemic issues, but as I’m writing this, I’m having to listen to an argument right outside my window between a guy threatening another guy over 2 dollars, a woman yelling at someone about some boxes, and a guy with his stereo turned up to 10 so that the entire building can hear his music.
So, in short, Yes, getting into a better environment is a somewhat long term goal, but being able to put the next year to 2 years to good purpose while I’m still living where I’m at is a more realistic goal. Finances are non-existent, so even escaping for a bit to the library isn’t possible right now as I don’t have a bus pass, and while I’d love to be illustrating and diagramming some of my ideas, my mouse recently died and I’m working with Libre Office instead of the Adobe Suite or even Power Point or the Mac equivalents. Illustrating with a track pad is way too difficult, and while I am a skilled draughtsman, the camera on my $100 phone makes it difficult to get good quality images of my drawings so I can post them.
If there is one place that could seriously use some rational thinking and approaches to problem solving, where I’m at is it. So considering the above, would finding a better living environment be considered my Hamming Problem?

Josh Smith-Brennan 31 May 2021 5:55 UTC
4 points
on: What are your personal (public) Hamming questions?
Probably getting back to organizing my journals and sketchbooks attempting to reintegrate some of the better ideas into workable projects. I was originally attempting to either get my student debt under control to enable me to go to grad school, or write a grant to create a non-profit that would allow me to tackle some specific problems by getting funding to hire people who could do the technical work instead of having to learn to do it myself.
Unfortunately I split with my ex and had no where else to go except into the homeless shelter system, where I’ve been for the last 4 years. Finally have my own place in a building with dozens of other formerly homeless people, but the drugs and violence in the neighborhood are a distraction and a drain. My goals in very general terms at this point are three-fold:
1) synthesize usable ideas from what I’ve already done (have some but I’m still not clear on what I have, as I made some forays into mathematics in an ‘artistic way’, and want to know what I can make of what I discovered);
2) make some connections with people who can help me sort through the actual work I’ve done and see if I can use what I’ve created to explore the questions I have which motivated me to come up with the work in the first place;
3) then build on the work by conducting more focused research and data analysis and producing some form of physical object, like drawings or presentations or potentially learning some programming to begin trying to prototype somethings myself. I had been doing some work with 3d modeling as well.
Thing is, this is a terrible environment to study in and to try to do online learning of some sort, but I have time on my hands I don’t want it to go to waste.

Josh Smith-Brennan 31 May 2021 5:15 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Site Recommendations for articles to read
Ah, thanks!

Josh Smith-Brennan 31 May 2021 4:58 UTC
0 points
on: Bayeswatch 5: Hivemind
Seeing references to the Matrix in terms of the hard-wiring of computing technology directly into human neurology, makes me think going all in might be good for verisimilitude.
I think the amount of glucose and neurotransmitters needed to accomplish the rewiring of a 19 year olds brain would require something like a bath of the sorts Neo woke up in when we first saw him in the real world. Or maybe something with a more compact form factor, like the helmet the main character in the Abyss used to breathe liquid for going super deep in the ocean. That scene when he first started breathing in the liquid was tense to say the least.
Issues like the amount of heat generated through the constant excitation of and creation of new neuronal connections might require active cooling, and the process of pruning old connections in the brain might require literal brain washing.
Unless this scene is happening in a simulation? If it was a simulation, that would give you some extra room to explore how some AI rely on simulations to model their ‘understanding’ of the world outside their networks and could lead to some interesting scenes.

Josh Smith-Brennan 31 May 2021 3:08 UTC
0 points
on: Now that Bill Gates has been linked to Epstein, does that mean we need to stop using Microsoft products and supporting institutions and individuals that use them?
So from the answers this post has gotten, it seems like LW is supportive of the ideas that:
1) Gates shouldn’t be linked to Epstein, and that his infidelity is a separate issue from Epsteins Abuses;
2) any ‘taint’ from that association that might remain should be confined to Gates himself, so that an ‘air gap’ of sorts should insulate Microsoft and it’s employees and customers from being reputationally and/or financially effected;
3) the reason for this ‘air gap’ is about separating the interpersonal issues involved from all the other issues over the decades (ethics of mass marketing and mass production, accusations of anti-trust issues, business issues of helping operations “streamline” by getting rid of workers who’s jobs are now done by computers or were shipped over seas, financial issues and links to government contracts (Jedi) despite the belief by some that ‘Big Tech’ is censoring important voices in Government, etc.)
4) and the impracticality of dividing up responsibility for the rest of the unethical activities mentioned above—minus the interpersonal issues—amongst the persons and institutes on the other side of the ‘air gap.’
As a result of these ideas, no further action is needed to acknowledge the ongoing conflicts between Bill, Melinda, the anonymous persons providing the details of the scandal, and Microsoft and it’s employees and customers.

Josh Smith-Brennan 31 May 2021 2:18 UTC
0 points
on: Use of GPT-3 for identifying Phishing and other email based attacks?
Google integrated their AI systems into their search and email systems a few years back, so at some level I believe it’s already been done, just not as a stand alone client side app.

Josh Smith-Brennan 29 May 2021 0:57 UTC
0 points
on: [Prediction] What war between the USA and China would look like in 2050
I know this is about the US and China, but you can’t leave India out of the picture. “the string of pearls” is another route for Chinese expansion which would bring it into conflict with India.

Josh Smith-Brennan 28 May 2021 23:22 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Kenny’s comment on: Now that Bill Gates has been linked to Epstein, does that mean we need to stop using Microsoft products and supporting institutions and individuals that use them?
I think it depends on how wide spread the acts committed were. Was the growth of the Internet and Tech over the last 2 to 3 decades fueled by illegal sex, drugs and money so that power players of all stripes were partying their brains out while pushing technology we didn’t know we needed? Why else has the gap between the haves and the have nots grown so wide than that technological push has allowed it?
What if it were proven that the technology of the Internet (created by companies like Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Netgear, AMD, Nvidia etc. etc.) was being used to facilitate an unimaginable amount of criminal and/or harmful activity? Drug dealing, Sex trafficking, Assassination, funding of terrorism, Extremist organizing and cooperative effort, corporate fraud, unethical hacking, pirating, spam, not to mention the outsourcing of tech jobs from the US overseas and the loss of jobs due to automation?
At what point (if ever) would it be deemed ethically or morally warranted to take down and dismantle the very things making so much of this misery so much easier to visit on the world? I know Wozniak likened the Internet to the Ocean, saying when pirates terrorized the sea the authorities didn’t drain the Oceans, but the Internet isn’t a natural wonder. It is a Man-made system and as fallible as the humans which made it.
Microsoft is only one company, but by numbers I think it is probably the biggest in terms of overall responsibility for the state of computing as it stands today (maybe?). Epstein aside, there are a lot more problems associated with tech then sex trafficking and I think Gates is more guilty of helping devalue the human component of society in favor of the technological components.