I’ve never met this in the Russian math Olympiad tradition, would be glad to give you something similar, but I don’t believe it exists… Журнал «Квантик» could be of interest if you by chance know Russian
Selfmaker662
Karma: 96
Very cool post, even if a bit lengthy! I’d suggest adding a small “Level 0”: sleeping well, staying physically healthy, and getting at least some support from other people. These basics often dissolve a surprising number of problems before anything deeper is needed.
I’d also emphasize that Levels 2–4 blend together quite a lot. If I’m understanding correctly, Level 2 resembles working with protectors in IFS, while Level 3 is closer to working with exiles. But in practice the boundaries blur: treating protectors with care often brings you into contact with exiles, which in turn requires the skill of “just being with” and to noticing Buddhist hindrances—something very similar to Levels 3 and 4, Healing exiles tends to clarify awareness, without which insight, steadier samadhi, and more authentic brahmavihāra practice are impossible. Those practices, in turn, necessarily involve meeting whatever emotions arise and transforming them in the process. So it’s not only that the levels reinforce one another; in some respects they’re almost facets of the same process.
I suppose it’s obvious I belong to the “emotional work” fan club 😁
It’s different: sometimes it’s spacious calmness of being able to sit in silence together; sometimes warm feelings of seeing and being seen, when discussing something private with a good friend; or just listening to a really good story. IIRC I also included dates into conversations back then, they have a different dynamic, where a lot of pleasure is feeling a young beautiful woman being with me.
— this is a very particular feeling you have and those differ a lot in where they appear for different people, how they feel and what they’re about. Not having seen other people’s answers I‘d bet your hypothesis to be wrong.
I don’t think happiness is a real catch-22. A catch-22 is a structural deadlock; here it’s more a matter of skill. People often get less happy when they pursue happiness because they use counterproductive methods — constant self-checking, chasing novelty, or looking only to external fixes, instead of, say, finding a therapist or working out what’s actually making them unhappy. Theravāda Buddhism frames this well: Right Effort uses wholesome desire (chanda) early on to let go of attachments and build skill, and only later releases even that desire. Likewise, early pursuit of happiness can work if guided by good methods and awareness of failure modes — and rationality also shouldn’t backfire if you read about those failure modes and know why you’re doing it.
Rare to see something heartwarming on LW, thanks!
As said by @Mateusz Bagiński , normal smalltalk is +epsilon, but some more comparisons:
a short smile with a stranger or acquaintance is like eating a very tasty fruit.
90% percentile conversations are all with good friends and leave me high for a few hours. As good as a very good date. No non-social activities come close.
I don’t actually remember any best particular ones, but the best ones i can recall aren’t about conversations anymore but about presence, which isn’t conversation anymore, I think. They feel extremely nourishing and meaningful and my only comparison is a really, really good IFS or therapy session.
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t escalate those signs above a rather low threshold given any observers, and my intuition tells me other people would be similar in this regard. So not observing flirting could just imply people don’t flirt if you’re in the conversation with them. As an extreme example, I’ve never seen anyone having sex, but it seems as if people do that all the time.
Lately I’ve been trying to use Bayes’ Theorem in daily life — quick guesses, like someone’s nationality from a glance.
What I’ve noticed: my intuition does better when I don’t adjust for general priors. Corrections like “most people in Germany aren’t Russian” when someone looks vaguely Slavic often pull me further from the truth.
After five minutes of reflection, my best guess: explicit Bayes only really helps out-of-distribution, when we lack feedback loops — new domains, big decisions, reasoning about AI. That’s when 5 minutes of googling or reading a paper can give you better intuition than your System 1.
Is this roughly in line with the Sequences?
https://realityisdharma.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/focusing-eugene-t-gendlin.pdf
2nd part of the book
Or get a therapist if it’s bad enough.
As a black tea enjoyer I would argue it’s practically non existent, no decaf black tea I’d ever tried even comes close to the best “normal” black tea sorts.
There is “normal” love (with attachment)
There is higher (Christian / lovingkindness—like) love.
I think we still misunderstood each other on (3) - I was pushing back only on the part saying “some amount of negative feelings create a positive feedback loop making you more agentic”. I’m saying, less negative feelings, more intrinsic motivation, by any amount, is, up to sacrificing impact for personal happiness, always better.
1) I don’t know what kind of meditation you did, but for me, inner work and meditation tend to unlock more capacity for love. I can clearly see that I’d feel less pain if one of my closest friends left or died—and yet, I love them more than ever, with fewer contractions of insecurity or clinging, less of that sense that they’re the only thing standing between me and the abyss. That kind of love just feels better to me.
2) I love that you acknowledge feeling bad is okay. But one reads in III that you are still striving to not feel bad by considering stuff not going your way as a problem. I think, you’re walking along the same path as the Pali Canon, except solving your problems in an external way. Letting your inner desires out is undeniably great, at any rate, so I support not actively repressing your agentic side.
3) Where I’d also push back is on the assumption that feeling less bad when things go wrong would necessarily make you apathetic. My experience has been the opposite: intrinsic motivation works better for me, and Nate Soares makes a similar case somewhere in Replacing Guilt—that caring from a place other than guilt or pain can actually be more sustainable and energizing.
part 2 of “Focusing” by Eugene Gendlin is very good to read and it helps to start.
This next article is my favourite one on all of the internet:
The key is to approach Focusing with the mindset of relaxing, having fun, playing around and experimenting. It’s emphasised in the talks on this website: https://hermesamara.org/teachings/metta. That particular series about loving kindness is very good.
I think there’s enough material in my head about it for a whole post, so I might write one eventually.
I think this post being on LW calls for remembering the law of equal and opposite advice.
A good, concise one, still! Upvoted.
Ouch, you beat me to my answer, but I’m always glad to see fellow practitioners :)
I want to suggest a long-term approach: learning to work with the emotions behind such persistent problems. Methods like IFS, Focusing, lovingkindness meditations are the right tools.
They *can* lead to practical improvements fairly quickly—once you get the hang of them. But learning to do them even right enough takes months of effort, curiosity, support from a community or a mentor. These things are basically meditations, subject to standard difficulties like overeffort, subtle wrong mindsets etc. They also tend to focus first on whatever feels most urgent to your subconscious system—like relationship stress or background anxiety you’ve gotten used to—so the email issue might not be the first thing that shifts.
Still, this is the only thing that really worked for me. And once it started working, it *really* worked.
If you’re interested, I can send my favourite links.
Thanks, from a very short wikipedia skim, it seems very relevant indeed!
Sometimes, when rating a film on IMDb, I give either 1 or 10 stars—not my honest rating—to maximally steer the average toward what I think it should be. Has anyone explored the dynamics of what happens if everyone always votes maximally or minimally to steer the average toward their desired value? Does this behavior have a name? I couldn’t find anything in a quick search.
I’ve done some thinking myself, and Monte Carlo[1] simulations show a low average deviation (around 0.6/10 stars) between the steering equilibrium and the honest average when the population is split into a few distinct groups with different preferences, and then a stochastic generator spits out a new voter with probabilities ~ sizes of groups. It’s relatively straightforward to calculate where the vote would settle mathematically in this case.If the groups appear in some order instead of being evenly mixed, this strategy favors the last group extremely heavily.
But even in an evenly mixed population, 0.6 isn’t 0, and I wonder if the golden rule would imply I should never do this for stable ratings (e.g., films). For dynamic things like restaurants, though, steering seems reasonable since their quality changes over time, and faster convergence to the “true” value might help everyone.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
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GPT-o1 generated code without unit testing or reviewing the code
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Cool quadrant, I’ll remember it! Thanks!