Here is a list of all my public writings and videos (from before February 2025).
If you want to do a dialogue with me, but I didn’t check your name, just send me a message instead. Ask for what you want!
lsusr
Karma: 18,324
“Why Aren’t Rationalists Winning” is quite a broad question. I prefer to ask myself “Why Aren’t Rationalists Winning at Chess”. I believe it has to do with insufficient education in openings and endgames.
I had a many similar experiences when I started writing on this website. Eventually, I learned to predict what people tend to get triggered by, and how to get my point across while evading those triggers.
If this is your first post, I am curious what your 100th post will look like, should you get that far.
And yet “when you encounter a different way of thinking, judge it open-mindedly and then steal only the good parts” is directly contradicted by some modern software that seems to be memetically hypercompetitive.
I love this take on the villanization of cultural appropriation.
It sounds to me like you maybe should take up mountain biking. ⛰️🚲
Bicycling isn’t just great for your physical health. It’s also great for your mental health. I don’t know any avid bicyclists who are stressed and unhappy.
but English is not my first language.
This surprises me, given the writing quality of your longform comments.
The original title in Russian is “Насколько сложно менять(ся)”. This is a great title. “Насколько сложно” means “How difficult/hard is it” and “менять(ся)” means “to change (onesself)”.
Translated directly into English, the title should be “How difficult is it to change (onesself)”. This is a worse title than the original Russian, but not a terrible title.
The title you posted, “The Structure of the Pain of Change”, is awful. It’s unclear to me [from the title alone] what the post is supposed to be about. It gives Literary Theory vibes, and not in a good way.
Good titles are really important. I don’t know if this title was LLM-generated, and I cannot tell just from the title itself. To me, the problem isn’t that the post smells of LLM generation. The problem is that the title is mush.
what should I do next time?
If you are relying heavily on LLM-aided translation, then there should be a disclaimer at the top. This wouldn’t necessarily turn readers off. I’m often curious what’s happening in other languages. “Here is the Russian intellectual dialogue you’re missing out on” is a good hook.
Assuming you’re proficient at English, you should review the output and check its standalone quality.
Don’t worry about the tags. They rarely make or break a post.
That happens? Nobody has ever accused me of strawmanning them in my entire life. To the contrary, they usually agree with the strawman, so I give them a cowardly lion too and they journey together along the Yellow Brick Road down to the Wizard of Oz.
There’s definitely an interest. Like many subjects, the limiting factor is people who are good writers, good at business (or at least knowledgeable about it) and have the slack to post. Pseudonyms are fine.
I’m glad you’re making progress. Focusing on the spoken language at first is a much better better for your pronuncuation. In the long run, learning written Chinese will eventually be necessary to building a large vocabulary. But until you feel that holding you back, there’s nothing wrong with focusing on the spoken language.
Differentiating accents is not important. You are correct to deprioritize it.
For more video immersion resources, I recommend Douyin. Getting it onto your phone can be tricky, but once you do it’s a great source of video immersion.
Is there any particular Anki deck you’d recommend (with pinyin and audio)? Should I just use the probability table and generate it myself?
It has been many years since I have used Anki for Chinese, so I don’t know which deck is currently the best. There aren’t a huge number of Chinese decks on ankiweb, so you can just try out the top rated ones and pick whichever one you like. (Or generate it yourself. The last time I checked on ankiweb, the decks there were from created before computer voice got good.)
Is there any particular video or podcast channel you’d recommend at a beginner level (100-500 words vocabulary)?
This is probably too hard for your right now, but my favorite beginner-level podcast is 慢速中文 - Slow Chinese.
Would you recommend I try generating my own video?
No. The video part is basically a waste of compute. What matters is the audio. Generating audio and text can be useful.
In particular, I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode and it’s fantastic for language immersion. I give it the following instructions: “Always speak to me in Japanese [or, in your case, Chinese], unless I ask you ‘How do you say ___ in Japanese’ or ‘What does ___ mean in English’?” Actually getting it to follow those instructions is finicky, but when I get it to work, the result is basically an on-demand personal immersion tutor that never gets bored.
Hey, an illustration! Image generation that good didn’t exist when I wrote the original. If it had, I would have used it in Part 10.
Is this something you have achieved?
Months? Maybe. But I failed the year-and-a-day test today. I have a headache right now because I’m sick. It is causing me pain. Daniel Ingram has reported many of his attainments going out the window too when he was much more seriously sick.
Could you give more details about what this means?
Here’s an analogy: When you meditate in full lotus position, it’s common for your legs to fall asleep, which produces pain. It is not uncommon for meditators who concentrate their attention on the pain in their legs to “dissolve their pain into vibrations”. The criteria I stated has this become one’s default state, instead of a just special altered state of consciousness.
If you touch a hot stove will you reflexively remove your hand?
Yes. I recently accidentally touched the handle of a cast iron pot I had left in the oven. It was this experience that caused me to list that the hot stove example. For the instant before I reflexively removed my hand, I felt the raw sensation of the skin on my finger(s) burning, instead of the abstraction layer of pain blocking it out.
If I inflict on you what to most people would be extreme physical pain (that is not physically damaging) (capsaicin?) would this be at worst a mild annoyance to you?
It was eating a spicy meal that I noticed something weird was going on. My eyes were tearing and I was too incapacitated to do anything productive, but I didn’t notice any suffering attached to my sensory inputs—at least in the course sense that such an experience would neurotypically produce suffering. That abstraction layer of pain wasn’t blocking my direct perception of my sensory inputs. I just sat down on my big beanbag chair until it was over, but the sensations didn’t cause me suffering the way pain might. It was an inconvenience.
Do you ever take painkillers?
Sometimes. I haven’t for a while, but that has nothing to do with meditation. I have just been in good health and the side effects of painkillers scare me, so I don’t take them unless necessary.
Would you [take painkillers] in an extreme situation like a medical operation?
Probably.
My story was posted before James_Miller’s. Does this mean I invented a (sub-sub-)genre of science fiction?
I have heard anecdotal data about this. I like that you are crunching the numbers.
Yessssss.
You’re too late. Lightcone converted LW karma into USD at a rate of $1 USD per karma on April 1, 2022.
In a perfect world I’d explain how moral hazard affects political memetics, but I feel it’s beyond my current skill level to fit that into TikTok’s attention span. Therefore I think it’d be more effective to copy this excellent post by lc. I’d start by explaining how the computer industry’s epistemics work, and then generalize those models to AI.
Perhaps they’re not as effective at fostering a sense of pride and accomplishment in their playerbase.
This made my day. I’m glad to be helpful! It’s so hard to measure indirect impact.
Can you tell me more about your practice?
Do you have a teacher?
What type of meditation do you do / have you done?
How long have you been doing it for (both time per sit and calendar time)?
What books and other material have you read?
What have you tried that you like and dislike?
Until then, here are a few tips. Please consider this comment to be general guidelines, as mystic insights are easy to miscommunicate.
Set up a video call with this teacher. He is legit. You can set up a video call with me too, if you like.
Don’t attempt to consciously shut down your DMN. Don’t even worry about it. Getting into a state where the DMN is shut down by default temporarily feels like a side effect of concentration. Changing the DMN’s default state comes from insight and/or mindful living practice, not mere concentration. Even people with normal DMNs feel like thoughts are running galore when they begin meditation. This is normal.
Did a teacher you respect give you the koan? If not, I recommend against koan practice entirely. (If you like koan practice and feel koan practice is working for you, then disregard this bullet point.)
If you have a mystic experience and then it goes away due to something like “I could not stay there long as ego reappeared”, that isn’t a failure of the practice. It actually means things are going correctly, because it is giving you insight into what your ego is and how it operates.
If possible, find a local community of good practitioners who do lots of sitting (not too many trappings of religion) and who don’t ring any culty[1] alarm bells. They can be any denomination.
Here are some good books to read.
The Three Pillars of Zen: Teaching, Practice, and Enlightenment by Philip Kapleau Roshi
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki
Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf: Zen Poems of Ryokan translated by John Stevens
Your description of access concentration seems correct to me.
When I was starting (first few years) I could hit it after about 30 minutes of sitting. I sit in my best approximation of full lotus position (moving my legs if I was worried about joint damage) and gently bring my attention to my breath at the base of my nostrils. When my attention drifts, I bring it back. I get my best results in Zendo and in a quiet park on a nice day, but can do whenever just to get the hours in. Meditating on the lightrail (when I was going somewhere anywhere) has been helpful too, even though it is difficult to achieve access concentration on it.
It also helps to do few days of meditation in a row. If I did 45 minutes of meditation every day, then access concentration might show up around the 30 minute mark of the third day.
If you’re having trouble with access concentration, then I recommend doing your meditation with eyes open. Pick a point to look at and don’t divert your eyes from there.
Finally, a warning: This meditation stuff can make sensory overload worse [for months] before it makes it better.
Here are some culty alarm bells I have encountered. ① A glass case with the leader’s book on a stand inside to best display his photogenic face on the cover and a photo of that same leader on the wall that you literally look up to for inspiration like Kim Il Sung. ② Claims that the leader has special insight you can’t find elsewhere.