If you try to have conversations about things that actually matter, many humans immediately become exactly that unlikeable. It’s through social conditioning that we mostly learn to stop talking about things that matter because it goes so poorly.
romeostevensit
Karma: 10,346
Feels like more shades of error vs conflict theory. It doesn’t matter if the ceos of ai companies are making mistakes if they are selected for being the sort of person who refuses to evaluate certain shapes of argument.
Instant pot makes preparing barley or millet and lentils with vegetables incredibly easy. Many different recipes online depending on which vegetables and spice combinations you prefer.
One proposal for a useful handle: The more extreme an idea, the rarer the person who knows enough to argue intelligently. Suggestion from LLM: At the edges of thought, the crowd thins out
Had a facepalm moment the other day. Realized that to-do items were split between two reference classes, unambiguous tasks and ambiguous tasks. Unambiguous tasks have some combination of known next action, known time envelope, known what ‘finished’ looks like concretely, while ambiguous tasks have below threshold levels of some or all of these. Realized life can be as simple as notating ambiguous items with a capital A, at which point its default next action is to disambiguate the above.
Something I don’t always see mentioned: one of the effects of meditation, like psychedelics, can be getting crystal clear feedback about your life situation. If you’re in a bad situation that you have a limited ability to do anything about, kicking out the supports for some of your coping strategies can go very badly. I’ve witnessed this first hand. An intensive practice is best undertaken when life conditions are good, with plenty of slack.
Often related to maneuver warfare as well, ie making you expend more energy than you opponent does by putting the onus of refutation on you.
Storytelling as serving a similar purpose (in some conceptions) to dreams: synthetic training data on when things go wrong.
Yeah, I think I misremembered that point. I think it might have been that there was a SFF convention held in Salem that LeGuin regularly attended because she lived in Portland. Conventions are funnels where content creators interact with fans, so some sexual grooming happens for scenes that involve children fans. MZB and Breen were the case where it was widely known among other authors what was going on, and people were downplaying it instead of exposing it. Major pedophilia issues among golden age authors eg Heinlein and Clarke.
Spoke with an older sff enthusiast about it at one point, so, hearsay.
Consistency is super important for wicked problems that sap the motivational power needed to engage with them, like chronic pain or fatigue.
Referencing mainly Marion Zimmer Bradley and her husband Walter Breen, but the scuttlebutt is that they were not the only problem in the scene at the time. Including enablement by other authors who knew about it being a problem.
It’s also about literal child molesters living in Salem Oregon.
Edit: see below, not living there.
Also, it may not be intuitive for people one possible takeaway from this if this interpretation is correct: LeGuin commenting on SFF authors giving a pass to the abuse on the justification that they create such good art that it is overall net positive for the world that the abuse continue.
Props to Christopher Nolan for trying to use the vehicle of an entire movie to bridge the closest available intuition of ‘if you think you have a one in a million chance of igniting the earths atmosphere maybe don’t do that.’
Lately I’ve been taking a slice like this: there are two possible object problems and a meta problem
Several parts think they already know things, but these knowings conflict. So they deadlock. The situation is overdetermined.
Several things that are directly or perceived to be directly in the path have substantial ambiguity. The situation is undetermined. Ambiguity avoidance kicks in.
Meta: parts don’t update on the fact that all previous direct engagements with problems of these shapes went basically fine.
I’ve been working with it by noticing when problems fall into this pattern and feeling good about the ambiguity reduction and creating space for deadlocked parts.
Specifically: humanely raised often indicates only that they were fed vegetarian feed. This made me so angry when I read the fine print and I think everyone involved should be sued into oblivion.
Psycho cybernetics shares an observation that people who failed at growth mindset typically seemed to be trying to apply it to outcomes directly rather than inputs to those outcomes.
Cool potential feature doable with just a prompt: guide two users through determining fair sharing via shapley value calculations
These mostly sound like good things to me. Especially if, as somewhat implied iirc, they are outputs of some high level equilibria defenses.
One of the most important things I’ve learned from therapy and contemplative practice for pragmatic interactions is that people will usually dig their heels in if they detect you have a bottom line written first. This effect is so strong that it activates even when people agree with you on the bottom line (but they have any level of conflict about it). I think this is one of the overwhelming considerations for why Eliezer gets the results he does. It cuts against another effect public intellectuals are subject to, which is that the easiest way to get popular is to become ‘The X Guy’ where X is a particular thing that the public has room in their heads for. But if you’re the X guy people also associate you with a particular bottom line, so good luck getting any truth finding interactions. Instead, you wind up as a piece that gets moved around the board for conflict/spectacle purposes.