Creator of the Intend app (formerly known as Complice) a system for orienting to each day with intentionality in service of long-term careabouts. It features coworking rooms, the longest-running of which is the Less Wrong Study Hall: https://intend.do/room/lesswrong
I’m working full-time on solving human coordination at the mindset & trust level. You can maybe get a sense of my thinking there via this 10min video.
Yeah I think I had an intuition in my early 20s that I was underdeveloped in my sense of Hell and this was one of the main reasons I was drawn to become close to Brent for a few years—I sensed he knew something about it.
And honestly it helped; I think I would have been a bit of a rose-colored glasses guy otherwise! …he’d probably still say I am one. But in any case, I am as a result of knowing him, capable of writing essays like this one:
https://malcolmocean.com/2025/03/hell-is-praying-and-heaven-is-bullshitting/
...which, not coincidentally, resonates somewhat with the vibe of this LW post!
(Also the friend mentioned in the post is not Brent, although it literally could have been except for the (implied) part where my utterance was enough to make some meaningful connection with the specific friend the story is actually about. I don’t yet know how to speak Heaven’s Apology to Brent.)
I came back to this post after awhile and found myself wanting to make a similar note, but first I searched for whether I’d already discussed it. And I sort of have here.
> The spot where adaptive entropy is reversible makes “entropy” a kind of terrible analogy.
Entropy is also reversible if you import free energy from somewhere! Life is made out of not having entropy build up in the not-closed system that is the organism. And life, perhaps on a slightly different level of analysis (living will, living intent) is also made of not having adaptive entropy build up too much in it.
From an attractor perspective, it’s worth noting that all 3 of the Friend, Parasite, Foe dynamics can be happening in parallel, within the same seed/persona/prompt/message.
Like, any given instantiation of this memetic propagation lifecycle is subject to all of these as motives/attractors.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE stop referring to bad futures as inevitable (“will kill everyone”). you don’t want people to think this. you don’t want the LLMs trained on these comments and on the news articles about the billboards to think this. LLMs behave the way they do in part based on how they think they’re expected to behave! (read the void and its sequel post for more context/data on this).
it does say “interim”
A belated thanks for this—as I also just commented to Jiro, it seems basically right. And I like your elaboration on Jiro’s point, and clarifying where I am/was confused/not.
Hmmm this is a good point and not one I have a refutation to, although it does still seem to me that most of what I’m trying to get at here is still right! Belated thanks.
Daniel Schmachtenberger has lots of great stuff. Two pieces I recommend:
this article Higher Dimensional Thinking, the End of Paradox, and a More Adequate Understanding of Reality, which is about how just because two people disagree doesn’t mean either is wrong
this Stoa video Converting Moloch from Sith to Jedi w/ Daniel Schmachtenberger, which is about races-to-the-bottom eating themselves
Also hi, welcome Sage! I dig the energy you’re coming from here.
An example of such a blindspot/confusion that I’ve been chewing on, that I haven’t written up in full yet, is how reward is different from fruit, punishment is different from pain. Socially-mediated consequences are different from inherent consequences.
Note that behaviorists, and (probably downstream of the behaviorists) also ML researchers, tend to actively conflate the two and treat “reward” as fundamental and then use phrases like “intrinsic reward” to try to refer to the non-reward thing. But “reward” is not the fundamental one, it’s built on fruit.
The difference:
if you don’t get caught, you don’t get punished
a tree will not reward you with fruit for effort or flattery—you have to actually water it
And many people fail to see the difference between the two of these—so they fixate on social consequences and project them onto everything. I suspect this is largely because so many of their critical consequences were social, at very young ages (<2yo, before they differentiated themselves, their parents, the world at large, such that they could tell the difference). So they learned to orient first and foremost to social consequences, and act so as to get reward and avoid punishment.
But we know from detailed investigation that the universe-as-a-whole does not reward or punish us the way other people do. (the judeo-christian one-God-who-sees-and-knows-all can be seen as groping towards the recognition of that distinction, but still fails to actually go all the way there, which then has the unfortunate effect of reifying the idea that reality-as-a-whole does punish you!)
Karmically this has the effect of them creating environments that have much more reward/punishment, and also leads to them self-punishing in the face of non-social consequences, such as beating themselves up for failing to do something they cared about, rather than simply feeling the pain of the failure.
For what it’s worth, I found myself pretty compelled by a theory someone told me years ago, that alien abductions are flashbacks to birth and/or diaper changes:
laid on a table, bare walls, bright lights you’re staring up at (unnecessary, and unpleasant for a baby, but common in hospitals and some homes)
one or more figures crowded around you (parents and/or doctors)
these figures are empathetic & warm towards you (or are at worst kind of apathetic, not malevolent)
communicating telepathically (in a way you can’t make sense of, perhaps wearing masks if doctors)
they examine your genitals (how dirty is the diaper? is there a rash?)
butt probed (wipe, diaper cream, and/or rectal thermometer)
weird equipment around (appropriate to a hospital where most babies born in 1900s when abduction stories started becoming popular)
figures have big heads and eyes (very salient features to babies, also maybe the heads are spatially closer and babies’ eyes are still doing a fisheye lens thing)
and most bizarrely, the figures are grey (newborns have bad color perception!)
This is surprisingly underdiscussed; the only google result for “alien abduction as flashback to diaper change” was this which links to a forum post since gone offline (archive.org link). But it seems like an incredibly obvious explanation that should be the default. It also explains why the experiences are so similar around the world, even among people who hadn’t heard the stories before!
Obviously not all alien abduction stories follow this pattern, but the fact that so many do seems to me very satisfyingly explained by this theory. The fact that this makes sense to me may be taking as part of its evidence my own experience doing emotional work and finding (among other things) surprisingly large pockets of emotion and meaning stored in apparently-boring memories (like standing in my kitchen around age six, looking at a shelf… but feeling terrifyingly alone). And helping other people do similar work, etc. But flashbacks are in general well-studied.
So it seems to me that the only culturally mediated part here is how people interpret the experience after it happens. You could imagine a culture where someone comes into work one day and says “hey guys, I had this trippy flashback last night to my nappy being changed! it was so weird seeing my parents all bulgy-eyed and grey”.
I’ve actually come to the impression that the extensive use of contempt in the Sequences is one of the worst aspects of the whole piece of writing, because it encourages people to disown their own actual experience where it’s (near) the target of such contempt, and to adopt a contemptuous stance when faced with perspectives they in fact don’t get.
Contempt usually doesn’t help people change their minds, and when it does it does so via undermining people’s internal epistemic processes with social manipulation. If the argument in “section 2 above” turns out to have flaws or mistaken assumptions, then an attitude of contempt (particularly from a position of high status) about how it’s embarrassing to not understand that will not help people understand it better. It might get them to spend more time with the argument in order to de-embarrass themselves, but it won’t encourage them to take the arguments on its merits. Either the argument is good and addresses relevant concerns people have (factual and political) and if so you’ll be able to tell because it will work! Shaming people for not getting it is at best a distraction, and at worst an attack on people’s sensemaking. And generally a symmetric weapon.
Meanwhile, contempt as a stance in the holder it tend to block curiosity and ability to notice confusion. Even if some argument is clearly wrong, it somehow actually made sense to the person arguing it—at least as a thing to say, if not a way to actually view the world. What sense did it make? Why did they say this bizarre thing and not that bizarre thing? Just because energy-healing obviously doesn’t work via [violating this particular law of physics], that doesn’t mean it can’t work via some other mechanism—after all, the body heals itself non-magically under many ordinary circumstances! And if interventions can make it harder for that to work, then they can probably make it easier. So how might it work? And what incentivized the energy healer to make up a bad model in the first place?
Contempt may be common among rationalists but from my perspective the main reason Rob didn’t include it is probably because it’s not actually very functional for good discourse.
Sure but ideally it would raise them an amount that’s worth it. That’s kind of the whole idea. People aren’t infinitely incentivized by money and zero incentivized by anything else.
The bit about merging the casinos… in the limit, you’ve got an entire town/city in the desert that is completely owned by one owner, who pays nominally zero land value tax because the property itself isn’t worth anything given there’s nothing nearby. But it seems plausible to me that having an equation for tracking a multiplicity of independent improvements on a single nominal property and taxing the whole situation accordingly… would be relatively easy compared to the other LVT calculation problems. (I have not done the math here whatsoever.)
The splitting and merging thing is a great point. I sense that @Blog Alt is continuing to missing the point about the “everyone else’s improvements” by how they frame it, but once you take splitting and merging into account...
...well, for people who actually live there, hopefully the presence of a new garbage dump would itself be more costly than the decrease in tax. And in principle, if it’s NOT more costly, then it would then be correct to build it! (Maybe it’s not a dump, maybe it’s something else.) So there’s a bringing back in of externalities.
But of course, if someone doesn’t live there… maybe this can be solved by zoning? I’m normally suspicious of zoning but “you can’t put a garbage dump next to a school in a neighborhood” seems pretty basic.
That still doesn’t solve the simple notion of a factory toxic waste pool, but once again, maybe such things should be solved by directly addressing the reason why they’re bad.
I’ve always been a bit confused by “low-income housing’. Is the plan to make the housing cheap via price capping? Won’t that have the usual economic issues and cause demand to continue to outstrip supply forever and ever? Is the plan to make the houses ugly as fuck so that they will cost less than the pretty houses nearby? That won’t really work; people will rent a closet for $1000/mo in SF sometimes.
The “land values are property values” section struck me as a weird strawman of LVT. A huge part of the point Georgists are making is that the value of a given property depends in most urban cases FAR MORE on what is built next to it, than what is built on it. And thus by making property taxes go up when you build things on a property, you disincentivize building, whereas by making them the same regardless of what is built, you incentivize building. Whether you accept any of the other arguments, this is straightforward math afaict. Thus when you say “Build more 1. houses”, if you intend to achieve that by market means and not coercion, then you probably want to get your incentives aligned.
There are a bunch of buildings currently sitting empty in Berkeley, CA and my understanding of why is that if they were to rent them at market rates (which have declined) then the sale price would go down, but currently the sale price is still going up. So “build more houses”...
The irony that you mention in the last paragraph reminds me of another LW post that was already on my mind while reading this one: Slack matters more than any outcome. It points at the funny way that systems fight back in predictable-yet-in-practice-unexpected ways, all the way up and all the way down, and is I think an attempt at a more precise expression of the kind of Green wisdom referred to around “harmony with the Way of Things”.
[as our oldest sees it] Sentences are things we build together, rather than a way for different people to share their own perspectives with each other.
I’ve gone through a huge growth arc as an adult in recognizing the extent to which (especially in really good conversations) sentences are things we build together. Not that we don’t have different perspectives, but when conversation is really flowing, it makes way more sense to view it as “our collective mind is thinking” and not “I am transmitting information to you, then getting information back” etc.
(When we’re more at odds with someone, whether adversarial or just conflict with a loved one, it can be more like the transmit mode, and sometimes (tho not always) it seems to work best if we can get into the co-thinking mode again. Though there’s not a hack for that—it’s a deep trust-dancing puzzle!)
The 2nd half of this video is about this collective mind thing: https://youtu.be/G3vcXZPlsDc
Probably be grounded in more than one social group. Even being part of two different high-intensity groups seems like it should reduce the dynamics here a lot.
Worked well for me!
Eric Chisholm likes to phrase this principle as “the secret to cults is to be in at least two of them”.
I would guess that in a way part of the thesis of the post is that people who are in strong social incentive contexts (relative to their capacity to differentiate and develop occlumency) will be quite likely to simply not notice how it applies to them. Like it may not work, but it wouldn’t be an infohazard.