romeostevensit
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I notice that I never really state one of the central theses motivating this for me: positive-normative (or is-ought, or belief-value) errors are present in sub-conscious processing. Meditative practice is capable of bringing deeper levels of processing into consciousness at which point those conflations can be disentangled. This leads to a more dramatic decrease in suffering than is intuitive. I find it compelling to share this model with rationalists in particular because for me it represents how contemplative practice is continuous with other forms of rationalist inquiry into beliefs.
exactly this! Thanks.
Right. As several commenters have pointed out, I might be giving too much benefit of the doubt with the complicated explanation given that most people’s empirical and inferential engines aren’t exactly v8′s. That said, I hope the network refactoring angle is helpful to those who do have decent epistemic standards.
this is helpful, thanks!
This is awesome. I still have a ways to go on clarity obviously.
Edit: on further reflection, this is pointing to a very useful heuristic that I haven’t been employing in my off the cuff writing method but probably can be rolled in with some effort and I predict will improve clarity. Much much appreciated.
Why do Contemplative Practitioners Make so Many Metaphysical Claims?
Besides energy production and demographics, what other large scale slow moving trends dominate long term prediction more so than smaller, more local, quickly changing and thus attention grabbing trends?
ambiguous wording, the optimization they’re doing over the space is convex. Also I don’t think choice of optimization function is super important for the metaphor. Just to give the flavor.
I agree with all of this.
*And*
I think that thinking of people as wanting happiness is similar to trying to understand speedrunning through the eyes of a child who is still at the stage of identifying with the video game character. They can’t think rationally about strategies that decrease hit points too much, because that means your character is getting *hurt.* To the speedrunner, health points are just one more dimension of tradeoff in a convex optimization space.
Number 4 is even worse than that. Physical health is deeply entangled with mental health. Many never get the generator spinning because the first 6-18 months can have fairly illegible feedback loops depending on where you start. And it can be stupid stuff. I only managed to start running once I got really frustrated and tried 12 pairs of shoes to find some that didn’t bother my feet. It was a hassle, but it permanently solved the problem since I now know what parameters to look for. Compounding small permanent wins doesn’t look all that impressive until you hit the knee of the curve and then it goes from famine to feast. Getting those success spirals ramping up is why Peterson is telling people to clean their room and why Marie Kondo’s book bills it as Life Changing Magic. If you internalize the meta pattern instead of thinking it’s just about cleaning your room you’re off to the races. (IFS is KonMarie for the inside of your head)
I’ve also referred to this as instantiating the spoon reinvestment act. Determining to reinvest a portion of any gained spoons in spoon generating activities. See also, slack: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/30/slack/
Sorry to hear you are experiencing a limiter on output. Happy to serve (via voice chat) as proxy note taker and cognitive offloading to help map out the space of possible treatments and an experimental protocol for ordering them to alleviate the issue. If it’s RSI I’m under the impression that it is significantly more treatable than common sources lead one to believe.
neuroticism is from the big 5. Shrug. Working memory tests are available online in a variety of formats. I’d probably just pick the 2-3 that seemed good then retake them later. I did Ravens and the one with number of boxes. Showed slight improvement 6 months apart, within test retest variation though. To date there have been a couple studies that showed implausibly large effect size on working memory. Someone should really follow up on them with more funding.
I don’t know of a good survey paper.
I feel frustration when people don’t measure the two things that have shown the largest effect in studies to date: working memory and neuroticism.
Ease of imagining yes, I’d also suggest that the dysfunction comes about when the ease of imagining the result gets separated from the ease of imagining/charting the causal path. Leads to envy, entitlement, victimhood like areas of mindspace.
Humans who won typically just choose harder goals and don’t spend a lot of time patting themselves on the back online. Fwiw superforecasters were disproportionately ssc readers, I interviewed four of them. Also, lw, like most self help communities, attracts the walking wounded. See mental health incidence in the ssc survey. Going from well below average in several metrics to slightly above doesn’t look impressive from the outside but is very large from the inside.
Internalizing generators has been a super useful frame. It’s somewhat surprising from the inside how often we fail, upon finding some useful l query, to not abstract out and see if it produces other useful stuff. In short, sure, we often fail to explore, but we also fail to exploit!
Related: don’t use the few moments of agency you have to do object level things. Use them to alter your environment such that the object level thing gets done even by low agency you.
KonMarie is a good example of this.
I think about Gendlin’s ‘blank that knows what it is looking for’ a lot. The sharpest feeling as when you have a word on the tip of your tongue. Gendlin’s point being that you can use such a blank with image and felt sense in addition to words.