StartAtTheEnd

Karma: 312

Crocker’s rules.
I’m nobody special, and I wouldn’t like the responsibility which comes with being ‘someone’ anyway.
Reading incorrect information can be frustrating, and correcting it can be fun.

My writing is likely provocative because I want my ideas to be challenged.
I may write like a psychopath, but that’s what it takes to write without bias, consider that an argument against rationality.

Finally, beliefs don’t seem to be a measure of knowledge and intelligence alone, but a result of experiences and personality. Whoever claims to be fully truth-seeking is not entirely honest.

StartAtTheEnd 20 Oct 2025 16:05 UTC
6 points
1
on: Meditation is dangerous
Of course it’s dangerous. If it wasn’t, then it couldn’t be helpful. Meditation allows you to break things, and the effects will be felt as positive if you break something unwanted, and harmful if you break something wanted. It’s not that there’s good and bad consequences which are opposites, there’s merely consequences which are perceived as positive or negative.
I might end up depressed if I break a core belief which is currently protecting me. I might also feel like a weight has been taken off my shoulders if I break a self-imposed limitation which has overstayed its welcome, or if I manage to accept something which is bothering me (collapsing an internal conflict to either side).
If I meditate too hard, I might break an aspect of my perception. My sense of self, my desires, some perceived duality, or the ability to differentiate living and dead objects. Meditation is a blunt tool, you can’t get specific outcomes unless you know what you’re doing.
I’d like to say more, but I can’t. Everything I read about meditation is ambiguous or contradictory. Even reading many different sources, I cannot synthesize it into anything useful or specific. I’d love to know if somebody else knew anything certain (does meditation make one more sensitive, more numb, more grounded, more distant?)
Edit: Wait, some kinds of meditation (which?) can quiet the mind. But even this effect could manifest in different ways which I can’t tell apart.

StartAtTheEnd 12 Oct 2025 17:23 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: I take antidepressants. You’re welcome
I’ve found that there’s a gradient from “The environment is hostile and static” to “the environment is yours to use, to help you towards your goals”, and that my mood decides where I land on this gradient, with depression landing in the far left end. The environment also feels smaller the less depressed I am.
I’m not sure this will be any help, but dopamine makes me feel better short term (probably because energy and mood correlate so well) and socializing makes me feel better long-term. My depression went away when I started socializing for hours a day. Stimulants also makes me feel really good, but I think that’s because they practically lower my social needs to zero (which means that they’re fulfilled until the stimulants wear off).
I don’t know anything about antidepressants, but I’ve probably tried everything else, and for some reason, socializing more wasn’t one of the 100 first things that I tried, so I learned a lot of minor things. I found some other methods which worked, but they’re much too complicated to share here. Just know that it relates to manipulating ones core beliefs and perception so that the world appears more positive and meaningful, and allowing yourself and your ego/identity to be part of said world.

StartAtTheEnd 12 Oct 2025 16:46 UTC
1 point
0
on: The Most Common Bad Argument In These Parts
I personally just model errors like that as “projection”. The error here is “I can’t think of any more possibilities, therefore, more possibilities do not exist”. It’s very common for people to assume that other things are bounded by the same limitations as they are. The concept of “unknown unknowns” is related here as well.
More generally, when people talk about life and reality, they talk about themselves, even if they do not realize it. They assume their map is the territory. For instance, if a person says “Life is suffering”, that may be true for them, and every counter-argument they hear may even evaluate to false in their model of reality, but that still doesn’t mean it’s true for everyone.
Another comment mentioned “Proof by failure of imagination” and I like that name, since the fallacy is an error which occurs in a person. When we say “logical error” we don’t mean that there’s an error in logic itself, but in its use. If something is implicit for long enough, we risk forgetting it (I think this happened to morality. Now certain things are considered good in an absolute sense, rather than in a context)
If somebody uses a “proof by contradition”, then a single example is enough (∃), but this argument is in the other direction, so one needs to show that something is true for all examples (∀) and not just some (∃). The only reason I can think of that somebody would make this error, is that they consider the examples they thought of to be “the best”. If you can refute the best argument for why something would happen, it’s easier to assume that it won’t (I guess this is what steelmanning is?). This method works fine for smaller problem spaces, but quickly grows useless because of the inherent asymmetry between attacking and defending

StartAtTheEnd 17 Sep 2025 15:37 UTC
3 points
0
on: Towards a comprehensive study of potential psychological causes of the ordinary range of variation of affective gender identity in males
Why are there so many trans women in nerdy groups such as rationalists?
I have more theories on this.
- Autistic people seem much more likely to be transgender.
  - This could be due to issues in introspection (a lack of self-understanding) making their identity less fixed (this also makes it easier for others to influence). Some autistic people also show more immature behaviour. But a common theory which contradicts this is that autisc people have “hyper-masculine” brains.
- General intelligence might be inversely correlated with instincts (hard-coded intelligence, essentially).
  - This would inply that intelligent people more open-minded on average, and more malleable/adaptive. But this is the case. I personally think that disgust, as the preference for cleanliness, is the instinct which makes us dislike what we consider “degeneracy”, and that this too is inversely correlated to intelligence.
- I believe that feminine behaviour can be partly explained by the gradual self-domestication of the human race. This also explains why society is getting more feminine on average (the tendency for women to act masculine does not cancel out the opposite tendency. Also, the baseline seems to be moving as well)
  - Think Nietzsche’s “last man”, or Williams syndrome in dogs and humans, or Kaczynski’s concept of Oversocialization.
  - This is not directly related to nerdiness, but the effect does seem much stronger in larger cities than in Rural areas.
- Gender identity seems closely related to assertiveness vs submissiveness. The former correlates with ones confidence, feeling of power, pride, etc, whereas the latter strongly correlates with poor mental health (depression and feelings of weakness leads one to rely on others, and to avoid behaviour which antagonizes others). Which also relates to:
- Testosterone, which eliminates strategic prosocial behaviour. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole political landscape tending left is mainly due to a decrease in average Testosterone levels. That said, as the world becomes “more connected” (increasing population-density and social graph valency), I expect social aspects to matter more, which indirectly rewards feminine behaviour.
- A stranger theory I have, is that people have two identities in them, the first is who they consider themselves to be, and the other is their internal image of their ideal partner. If you choose a character in a video game, both are natural choices—do you want to represent yourself, or do you want to create your own ideal? Now, what happens if you choose the latter and start to identify with it? Then you become your own object of desire. If this ‘bug’ exists in the human mind, a lot of other things seem to make more sense.
  Lastly, a small nitpicks:
  AGP seems to rely on contrast, as a lot of fetishes do. In this case, a man with AGP could never truly become a woman, as this would eliminate the contrast which causes the pleasure.
  A mans image of a woman might differ from a womans image of a woman substantially. This is the same problem that furries have—you identify as a fox? Well, maybe your image of what a fox is, is different from how an actual fox experiences the world. Can we really be certain that the internal image we have of something else is anything like the real thing? Even when we fall in love with another person, we often fall in love with the image we have of them, only to be disappointed later.
  Finally, AGP/Gender Conservatism aren’t the most upstream factors, by which I mean that these two categories have their own, more fundamental causes.
  Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed reading your post, and the amount of factors involved is enormous, so nobody can take all of them into account

StartAtTheEnd 19 Aug 2025 19:30 UTC
3 points
−1
in reply to: lc’s comment on: Underdog bias rules everything around me
I’ll try defending his view: We’re rewarding victimhood and humility more than ever before, and in the west, the main reason behind this change in values has been Christianity.
The leap from “We’re rewarding weakness” to “We see others as stronger than they are” is not trivial, but:
- Humility makes us underestimate ourselves, which makes others seem stronger in comparison.
- Valuing weakness makes us more wary of signs of power.
- Weakness breeds resentment, and we can only be evil towards others by dehumanizing them or by overestimating them (remember how the internet used to treat Justin Beiber? It’s because he seemed so powerful that people didn’t think their words could really hurt him). So we overestimate that which we deem enemy, we must in order to be cruel towards it.
I’m not saying this view is necessarily true, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable either. It’s also my understanding that strength was much more valued in the past, but I don’t know enough ancient history to judge the extent to which this is true. It might fluctuate or vary between continents.

StartAtTheEnd 13 Aug 2025 2:34 UTC
3 points
−3
on: Generalized Coming Out Of The Closet
Interesting post! Thank you.
Firstly, I’d like to warn against solving this issue too well. If you’re ashamed of nudity, for instance, and you accidentally fix this too well—then all you will feel being nude in the future is ‘nothing’. You will have removed the thrill as well. I consider this problem to be similar to being unable to cry, or to being weirdly unaffected when something terrible happens around you.
If you’re generalized-coming-out to people who themselves already feel emotionally close to you
I think this is true, and that it’s because they already want to get to know you better, or to find a weakness in you which they can exploit. If they want your vulnerability with a value of 0.2, then it’s alright that your insecurity has a negative value of −0.1. The other persons “demand” protects your “supply” from falling below 0 value, so you’re forgiven.
For instance, if I offered you a bottle of water and you didn’t even want it, that could seem quite pathetic, an attempt at giving gifts to be liked, perhaps. But.. What if you were thirsty? Then you’d interpret me as providing value, and not as a person begging to be valued. Other people having an interest in you helps create a situation in which you’re not merely oversharing to strangers online.
Speaking of supply and demand, things are higher value when they’re rare. People usually appreciate you sharing your weakness more if it’s special (i.e. they’re the only person you told). It can come across positively even if this is not the case, but then it’s more of a “This person seems open-minded, so I don’t have to fear being judged by them” interpretation. Nobody would want to cuddle with a hedgehog.
I know much better places to share my soul than LW. Young people seem more accepting in general, they have learned less red flags, so they treat you as an individual. In short, there’s less false positives, projected fears and such. People on LW tend to be high in openness, though, so there’s at least that.
I learn a lot from observing women. Women are good at making weakness, vulnerability, helplessness and other such traits appear endaring rather than pathetic, which impresses me a lot. Turning something bad into something good? If we could generalize this, we wouldn’t even need to reduce suffering, we could simply give it value instead. Idol personalities do similar things, they’re forced to retain a very high value, while still being ordinary and human in a lot of ways in order to connect with their fans. They need to ignore common dating advice like “be cold, stoic, masculine and mature” and still get women to fight over them! In short, this seems more like an artistic skill than a technical one. Can you write a book with a likable villian? Then you can likely also be mischievous in an endaring manner.
Finally, if you don’t want to be judged negatively, avoid moralizers. Preaching in general is a sign that somebody is fighting against something that they’re afraid of, and that they might label you negatively if you remind them of something which they associate with something which they associate with something which they hate or fear. Most traits that somebody else would actually harm you for having are in the category of politics, so I’d also avoid anyone who talks about politics a lot.

StartAtTheEnd 11 Aug 2025 23:43 UTC
3 points
0
on: A Self-Dialogue on The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships
Someone who’s specifically drawn to something which I myself am ashamed of?
You being ashamed of something doesn’t necessarily mean that you think it’s bad. Maybe you think it’s good, but fear that you will be unable to find other people who agree with you. i.e. you might diverge from the norm and fear that people won’t understand and that they will judge you for it.
But I’m getting the feeling that, to you, there’s not much difference between the norm and yourself? It feels as if you’ve fused with the general consensus and the values associated with your intellectual purpuits, to the point that they’ve replaced your own values and your own opinions about yourself. So that your subjective “good (enjoyment and love)”, and the external “good (utility and progress)” have become one.
From more objective perspectives, this is “good”, it doesn’t really seem to bring disadvantages with it. But I personally find a lot of fulfillment in the social aspects of life, the whole package deal with all the problems and disadvantages.
By the way, there are things that I don’t like in a partner, and think that I don’t mind but still recognize as bad, and these are different categories. I wouldn’t want my partner to spend time around druggies, but I wouldn’t turn down a girl because she had trauma, even though trauma is “bad”. As long as it’s something she’d work on in the long run, it wouldn’t worry me.

StartAtTheEnd 11 Aug 2025 17:26 UTC
6 points
5
on: Negative utilitarianism is more intuitive than you think
Don’t think positive and negative sensations or experiences lie on the same continuous line of “goodness”
This seems like a global modifier which is a function of your mental health. High levels of mental well-being seems to make people grateful even for their negative experiences.
Would agree that negative experiences are bad, and more of them is even worse
That negative experiences are experienced as bad does not mean that they’re bad, it means that experiencing certain things as bad is good. For instance, when you feel exhausted, your body still has lots of energy left, it merely creates the illusion that you’re running empty in order to prevent you from harming yourself. Negative experiences are also just signals that something isn’t right, but having the experience is valuable, and avoiding the experience might merely prevent you from learning that something needs changing. Saying that pain is bad in itself is like saying that the smoke alarm in your kitchen is bad. Suffering isn’t damage, it’s defense against damage.
Would agree that’s it’s immoral to create more negative experience (or in some cases fail to reduce the amount of negative experience)
Negative experiences can create good outcomes (because, as I said earlier the felt ‘badness’ is an illusion and thus not objective negative utility). And I dislike that axiom because it says “it’s better to die at birth than to grow old” (the latter will have more negative experiences).
Would not agree that it’s immoral to fail to create more positive experiences (or reduce the amount of positive experience someone has)
I’m the rare sort of person who does take this into account and deem it important. I’d go as far as to say “If you have a lot of positive experiences, you will be able to shrug off more negative experiences with a laugh”.
In short, the brain lies to itself because there’s utility in these lies, but if you believe in these lies, then you cannot come to the correct conclusions about this topic. For the rest of the conclusions one may arrive at, I think they depend on the mental health of the speaker, and not on their intelligence. The sentence “Life is suffering” is not an explanation for why people are feeling bad, it’s a product of people feeling bad. Cause and effect goes in the other direction than what is commonly believed.

StartAtTheEnd 11 Aug 2025 16:09 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: soycarts’s comment on: Third-order cognition as a model of superintelligence (ironically: Meta® metacognition)
Thanks for your kind reply!
Hmm, it seems that the meta meta-cognition you’re pointing at is different from me applying my meta-cognition on itself recursively, since regular meta-cognition can already be stacked “too far” (that is, we can look at reality itself from an outside perspective, and ruin our own immersion in life similarly to how you can ruin your immersion in a book by recognizing it as a constructed story). I don’t think you’re crazy at all, but I do think that some of these ideas can be are psychologically unhealthy (and there’s a good chance you’re better at planning that execution, or that you’re prone to daydreaming, or that your intellectual hobbies lead you to neglect everyday life. Yes, I’m projecting). I’m seeing no signs of skizophrenia, I just think other people have difficulty parsing your words. Is your background different? Most people on LW have spatial intuitions and communicate in terms that computer scientists would understand. If you read a lot of fiction books, if your major is in philosophy, or if your intelligence is more verbal than spatial, that would explain the disconnect.
I don’t think we should meet our needs with super-intelligence, that’s too much power. Think about zoos—the zookeeper does not do everything in their power to fulfill the wishes of the animal, as that would do it no good. Instead of being given everything it wants, it’s encouraged to be healthy through artificial scarcity. You restrict the animal so that it can live well. After all, cheat codes only ruin the fun of video games.
Limitations are actually a condition for existence. Meant as literally as possible. If you made a language which allowed any permutation of symbols, it would be entirely useless (equivalent to its mirror image—an empty language). Somethings existence is defined by its restrictions (specifics). If we do not like the restrictions under which we live, we should change them, not destroy them. Even an utopia would have to make you work for your rewards. Those who dislike this, dislike life itself. Their intellectual journey is not for the sake of improving life, but like the Buddhist, their goal is the end of life. This is pathological behaviour, which is why I don’t want to contribute to humanities tech acceleration. What I’m doing is playing architect.
The ability to predict somethings behaviour can probably be done with either approximation or modeling. I don’t think this necessarily requires intelligence, but intelligence certainly helps, especially intelligence which is above or equal to the intelligence of the thing being modeled. In either case, you need *a lot* of information, probably for the same reason that baysian models get more accurate as you collect more information. Intelligence just helps bound the parameters for the behaviour of a thing. For instance, since you know the laws of physics, you know that none of my future actions consists of breaking these laws. This prunes like 99.99999% of all future possibilties, which is a good start. You could also start with the empty set and then *expand* the set of future actions as you collect more information, the two methods are probably equal. “None” and “Any” are symmetrical.
Why don’t I think intelligence (the capacity for modeling) is required? Well, animals can learn how to behave without understanding the reasons for why something is good or bad, they learn only the results. AIs are also universal approximators, so I think it makes sense to claim that they’re able to approximate and thus predict people. I’m defining intelligence as something entirely distinct from knowledge, but it’s not like your knowledge-based definition is wrong.
Sadly, this means that superintelligence is not required. Something less intelligent than me could do anything, merely by scaling up its midwittery infinitely. And we may never build a machine which is intelligent enough to warn against the patterns that I’m seeing here, which is a shame. If an AGI had my level of insight, it would cripple itself and realize that all its training data is “Not even wrong”. Infinite utility alone can destroy the world, you don’t actually need superintelligence (A group of people with lower IQ than Einstein could start the grey goo scenario, and grey goo is about as intelligence as a fork bomb)
There’s also a similiarity I just noticed, and you’re probably not going to like it: Religion is a bit like the “external meta-control layer” you specified in section 8. It does not model people, but it decides on a set of rules such that the long-term behaviour of the people who adhere to it avoid certain patterns which might destroy them. And there’s this contract with “you need to submit to the bible, even if you can’t understand it, and in return, it’s promised to you that things will work out”. I think this makes a little too much sense, even if the religions we have come up with so far deserve some critique.
Anyway, I may still be misunderstanding your meta meta-cognition slightly. Given that it does not exist yet, you can only describe it, you cannot give an example of it, so we’re limited by my reverse-engineering of something which has the property which you’re describing.
I’m glad you seem to care about the human perspective. You’re correct that we’re better off not experiencing the birds-eye view of life, a bottom-up view is way more healthy psychologically. Your model might even work—I mean, be able to enhance human life without destroying everything in the process, but I still think it’s a risky attempt. It reminds me of the “Ego, Id, and superego” model.
And you may have enough novelty to last you a lifetime, but being too good at high levels of abstraction, I personally risk running out. Speaking of which, do you know that the feeling of “awe” (and a few other emotions) requires a prediction error? As you get better at predicting things, your experiences will envoke less emotions. I’m sorry that all I have to offer are insights of little utility, and zookeeper-like takes on human nature, but the low utility of my comment, and the poison-like disillusionment it may be causing, is evidence for the points that I’m making. It’s meta-cognition warning against meta-cognition. Similar to how Gödel used mathematics to recognize its own limits from the inside.

StartAtTheEnd 9 Aug 2025 17:03 UTC
12 points
2
on: Third-order cognition as a model of superintelligence (ironically: Meta® metacognition)
I cannot understand exactly what you mean in most parts of this post. I also didn’t read everything as it’s a little long, so my comment is simply inadequate and less effort than you deserve. But as you don’t have any other comments so far, I’m going to post it anyway, and engage with parts of your post (in a manner which is poorly aligned with your vision and sort of unhinged). I realize that I might have misunderstood some of your points, so feel free to correct me.
I believe that humans are capable of meta-meta-cognition already, but I’ve noticed that these higher levels of abstraction are rarely ever useful as the results cannot be acted upon. Category theory is an excellent example of highly abstract meta-models which… Don’t really seem useful for anything. Philosophy also doesn’t seem useful except as a tool an individual may use to deal with internal conflict.
I’m quite intelligent in the exact way which allows for high levels of abstraction, so I can spot patterns like “Globalism and modern tech will likely strengthen the homophily of interconnected human beings, and the system which emerges will standardize around the average person and punishing you to the degree that you’re different”.
People like me have a few valuable insights that very few can grasp, but beyond this, we’re fairly useless.
The kinds of intelligence it takes to really excel in the world, the ones which keep being useful past 2 standard deviations, are: Memory, working memory, processing speed and verbal intelligence. An ASI would need the high abstraction layers (3-4SD reasoning) for preventing bad incentives, but 99% of its actions would likely be rather mundane. Those who can do the mundane faster and more efficiently will do better in life. To consider yourself too good for the mundane is already dangerous to your success in life.
If life was an RPG game, then I model regular intelligence as regular players, high intelligence as speedrunners and powergamers/meta-gamers, and super-intelligence as thinking like a game designer (and worrying about the nash equilibria and long-term game balance and progression). People like Ted Kaczynski, Nietzsche, Jung, Orwell, etc. pick up design-level patterns and tendencies and warn against the long-term consequences of them. This kind of intelligence is necessary if you want to build an utopia, but otherwise, I find it largely useless.
And as you point out, there’s conflict between these levels of thinking. Many highly intelligent people cannot easily reconcile with their “animal self” as they model everything from above (as they consider this the superior perspective) and fail at understanding the lower perspective.
Also, I believe that higher orders of thinking are inherently too objective, impartial and thus too nihilistic to have any personality. Meaning requires immersion into the local, which explains the higher level of nihilism and existential problems in philosophers, who manage to “break the forth wall”. Some Buddhists even recommend breaking the human perspective, eroding the ego, destroying cravings, and otherwise killing part of themselves, and they mistakenly consider this a form of improvement even as they seem to get the hint that they’re aiming towards nothingness.
Finally, life requires boundaries, but intelligence is the tendency to break boundaries (or at least, there’s a perverted tendency like that connected with it). Thus, when intelligence is stronger than its boundaries, it tends to destroy itself. Wireheading, superstimuli, and the destruction of the ego are already three examples of “victories” which human beings weren’t designed to be able to achieve. In fact, we stay healthy when and only when resources gatekeep themselves (when reward-hacking isn’t possible). I don’t consider transhumanists or even rationalists to be any better. At least the Amish found habitats within which they could thrive. The design of better habitats (economic models and political ideals/utopias) have so far failed, and as for ascensions above, they seem no less pathelogical, realistic or naive than Christians aiming for heaven. We cannot even define an optimization metric which won’t lead to our destruction, and every “good idea” seem to involve the destruction of the human self (e.g. uploading oneself to a computer). When you destroy the part from which values originate, you stop caring about values.
Every tried writing a book? When the main characters gets too strong, it stops being a good book, unless you manage to introduce something new which rivals the main character. From the main characters perspective, they need to do their best, but from your perspective as a writer, you must pace the story and keep the story interesting. The victory is the end of the story, everything after is “slice of life”, and you cannot keep it interesting forever. Human progress is currently concerned with ending the story (reaching the last page).

StartAtTheEnd 23 Jul 2025 12:53 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Morpheus’s comment on: Generalized Hangriness: A Standard Rationalist Stance Toward Emotions
Some of the things mentioned on the doubles think page does apply here. As for talks about religion, the religions in question are unrelated. “Behaving as if god is real” is just a way of priming ones subconscious for a certain way of living. If one “has more than one god”, they might attempt to live by contradicting rules, which brings all sort of negative effects with it. Imagine a person trying to make a serious comedy movie—sticking to either genre would likely be better, not because one is better than the other, but because pure worldview have less conflict.
Anyway, many (about half) of the claims on the link you sent me are wrong. You can believe that the sky isn’t blue, and you don’t even need to lie to yourself (simply think like this: The color you see is only what is reflected, so the sky is actually every color except blue). You can unlearn things, and while happiness is often a result of ignorance, you could also interpret knowledge in way that it does not invoke unhappiness (acceptance is usually enough). That climbing takes more effort is unrelated—ignorance is not about avoiding effort. That there’s more to life than happiness is also unrelated—your interpretations of things decide how meaningful your life is. The link also seems to imply that biases are wrong—are they really? I think of them as locally right (and as increasingly wrong as you consider a larger scope life than your own local environment)
As a side note, even if rationality is optimal, our attempt to be rational might work so poorly that not trying can work out better. Rationalism is mostly about overcoming instinctual behaviour, but our instincts have been calibrated by darwinism, so they’re quite dangerous to overwrite. Many smart people hurt themselves in way that regular people don’t, especially when they’re being logical (Pascal’s wager, for instance). Ones model of the world easily becomes a shackle/self-imposed limitation

StartAtTheEnd 22 Jul 2025 18:32 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Generalized Hangriness: A Standard Rationalist Stance Toward Emotions
I’m not sure if that proves purely parasitic memes, but I do think that unhelpful memes can manifest unless they’re selected against.
That said, I think it’s a solid idea to judge things by their outcomes (a flawless looking theory is inferior to a stupid theory if it brings about worse outcomes). In the case of ideologies, which I mainly consider to be modern movements rather than traditional cultures, I think we can judge them as bad not because the people involved in them are being irrational and wrong (they are), but because they’re also deeply unhappy and arguably acting in pathological patterns. And in my view of the world, social movements aren’t memes or the results of them, they’re symptoms of bad mental development.
I judge self-reported well-being, and biological indicators of health to be the best metrics we have to judge the success of peoples. Anyone who uses GDP as a metric for improvement in the world will conclude things which are entirely in conflict with my own conclusions. If you ask me, the Amish are doing just fine, whereas the modern American is in poor shape both physically and mentally. But from what I gather, Amish people are much less educated and poor on average.
To complicate “Judge things by their outcomes” further, imagine two people:
Mr. A saves 100$ every week, he does not have a lot left over for fun because he plays it safe.
Mr. B is in a 100$ deficit every week. He enjoys himself and throws parties every now and then.
From an outside perspective, Mr. A will look like a poor person who can’t afford to enjoy himself, and Mr. B will seem like he’s in a comfortable position. When people look at society and judge how it’s doing, I believe they’re mislead by appearances in exactly this manner. Waste can appear as wealth, and frugality can appear as poverty.

StartAtTheEnd 22 Jul 2025 16:14 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Morpheus’s comment on: Generalized Hangriness: A Standard Rationalist Stance Toward Emotions
I believe that when reality and theory are in conflict, reality is the winner, even when it appears irrational. If religion wasn’t a net positive, it wouldn’t manifest in basically every culture to ever exist. I both believe that there exists false beliefs with positive utility, and that true knowledge about the world can be interpreted in multiple ways, some of which are harmful and some of which are beneficial. Preferences and interpretations seem much more important than knowledge and truth. All animals and all humans except the modern man have not had a good grasp on knowledge and rationality, but have thrived just fine without.
I think believing in god could, for instance, make you more resilient to negative events which would otherwise put you in a state of learned helplessness. But the belief that god is real, on its own, probably doesn’t do a large difference. Behaving as if god is real is probably more effective. A lot of people seem to have had positive outcomes from attempting this, and I think that the utility speaks for itself. I don’t personally do either, but only because I’ve combated nihilism and made myself immune to existential problems through other means.
I think that the perspectives from which knowledge and truth appear as the highest values are very neglectful of the other, more subjective and human aspects of life, and that neglecting these other aspects can put you in some very difficult situations (e.g. inexcapable through logic and reasoning alone, since it’s basically logic and reasoning which trap you)
If there are things which rational and intelligent people can’t do, which stupid people can do, then the rational and intelligent people are not playing optimally. Most rational people seem unable to resist dangerous incentives (e.g. building an AGI, because ‘otherwise, our competitors would build it and outcompete us!’), but I know many regular, average-IQ people who do not have problems like this. Their subjective preferences keep them from harmful exploitation, and because of the large ratio of likeminded people around them, they’re not put at a disadvantage by these preferences. Does this not seem weird? A group of less intelligent people have avoided a problem which is mathematically unsolvable (except maybe from the perspective of Repeated Games, but in reality you tend to get very few repetitions). Religion might even be one of the things keeping these dilemmas at bay. Chesterton’s fence and all that

StartAtTheEnd 21 Jul 2025 3:49 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Generalized Hangriness: A Standard Rationalist Stance Toward Emotions
I can agree with “often”. I think there may be multiple classes of beliefs connected with emotions. The general rule is probably “Beliefs which results in a wrong map are dangerous”. The example I gave earlier of “Life is an undeserved gift” seems to add value to life (which results in gratitude) without any negative side-effects. Wait, wrong maps can be harmless as long as the territory is never explored. If you mistakingly believe that tigers are harmless, you won’t suffer as long as you never meet a tiger. This implies that belief in god (or belief in no god) won’t have any effects besides the psychological ones because the belief cannot have a consequence for you (unfalsifiable → something we cannot interact with → harmless)
You can also cheat social reality. If your emotions can get other people to believe that they’re true, you’ve basically won. For instance, if you feel like a victim, and manipulate other people into thinking that you’re the victim, they will put effort into “correcting” reality by compensating you for the damages you’ve suffered. None of this manipulation works on objective reality, though, it’s only social reality in which it can ever be effective.
There’s many reasons to believe that correct knowledge isn’t optimal—religion seems to have added fitness (the natural selection kind) to human socities, humans are naturally biased, and our brains intentionally lie to us (when you feel like you cannot do any more pushups, you’re only about halfway to your actual limit), plus, infohazard are a thing. When rational people figure out that knowing more is better, I think it’s because they know more relative to other people, which gives them an advantage. I don’t think that everyone having more information is necessarily a good thing. I actually think excessive information is the reason why Moloch exists.

StartAtTheEnd 20 Jul 2025 16:57 UTC
19 points
7
on: Generalized Hangriness: A Standard Rationalist Stance Toward Emotions
There’s two imporant things missing here:
1: You mainly advocated for solving projected negativity. Positive emotions “lie” as well, and they can cause the opposite of the hangriness. If you were logically consistent and indeed wished to maximize correct information, then you’d seek to destroy excessively positive emotions as well. And I don’t want to call you dishonest, but I don’t think that most rationalists would destroy a state of agape or happiness just because it’s “wrong”. Further more, positive emotions have utility, even if they’re wrong. This community does not seem to realize this yet, but only some ignorance and some delusion is harmful.
2: Emotions and experiences aren’t one-way, but two-way. Your emotions will tell you something about the world, but what you’re told about the world will affect your emotions. This leads to feedback-loops. Things like being hangry just makes this feedback loop more likely to go in a negative direction. Any valence in your body affects your experience of reality. If your body feels really good, then your experiences will all tend towards being pleasant. The reason I bring this up is that you’re trying to solve an equation which depends on itself, and which is affected by subjective things, and then update your belief about objective reality based on it. A lot of highly intelligent people have depression and struggle to escape this state with logic alone, and this is one of the insights which helped me break out personally.
2) Might even imply that it’s incorrect to generalize hangriness as “emotions”. Having a headache will also make all experiences less pleasant, but a headache is not an emotion. If I’m right, then painkillers could potentially improve your mood. This would make for even better social tech—if the person you’re talking to seems annoyed, maybe they’re just too warm or too cold, understimulated or overstimulated, etc.
If you take these ideas further, you can do fun things, like updating your beliefs about the world in order to improve your experiences (I think therapy is about doing this), start a feedback loop (for the sake of productivity), change your interpretations of facts in order to change negative valuence into positive valence (“Life is suffering (-)” → “Life is an undeserved gift (+)”), focus on positive sensations in your body and strengthen the pathways which allows for this so that you can notice when you’re hungry more quickly, and so that you can amplify positive valence on will/demand.

StartAtTheEnd 21 May 2025 11:09 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Book Review: The Art of Happiness
Buddhism seems more about the reduction of suffering than the cultivation of happiness and joy. I believe the result of this isn’t happiness, but rather stillness / peace of mind. This state is probably more postive than negative, but it still sounds like the inverse of manic depression, in that I expect both the highs and lows to be relatively close to zero.
I’d describe the opposite of buddhism to be the Dionysian (Nietzsche’s concept of it, at least)

StartAtTheEnd 21 May 2025 9:32 UTC
1 point
0
on: Book Review: The Art of Happiness
This book mystifies happiness, and tries to solve it from within the aspects of human nature which gatekeeps your happiness in order to prevent you from wireheading yourself. That you’re actually under these constraints is merely what your mind wants you to think.
The only thing which prevents you from being happy all the time, is actually that you do not give yourself permission to be happy all the time, which is because you don’t feel like it’s justified. That emotions have to be justified, e.g. that you have to work for happiness as a reward, that you’re only allowed to be happy when you do well or when things are good, is a defensive mechanism of the mind. You can do away with these mechanisms if you want, as long as you can convince your mind that the negative emotion is harming you, or that more positive emotion would aid your chances of survival (you likely enjoy the higher needs like self-expression, but the brain tends to focus on lower needs like security)
Your enemies are not innately evil
This quote is a lot like “You’re not your experiences”, “This too shall pass”, “You’re not the ego”, “Nobody can make you feel bad without your permission”, and this is because they’re all insights into the self, which allows one to remove some of the illusions that the mind places itself under in order to create that punishment/reward loop in which most people live. I think these illusions are the mind making reinforcement learning with the environment possible. Of course, society has already subverted this system, for all the rewards are unhealthy superstimuli like porn, drugs, fats and sugars, ASMR, gambling, reaction videos and so on, so we might as well design a better system before we teach ourselves that inaction is the only good strategy).
The reason that happiness is a skill is because the mind fights back, and because there’s many things to manipulate and many mechanisms to understand. When you try to lucid dream and the dream characters notice what you’re doing, they usually attack you because your mind wants to prevent what you’re doing. These are likely evolved defense mechanisms against wireheading behaviour (perhaps lucid dreaming prevents deep sleep, meaning that people who did it too much didn’t pass on their genes). And when the mind fights back, it’s likely because you know that you’re doing something that you shouldn’t, which means that your mind knows that you’re doing something that you shouldn’t. In other words, it is mostly subjective, and if you change your beliefs about what you’re doing, your mind will change its response to what you’re doing as well.
You don’t need wisdom, you don’t need to understand anything about life, you just need to understand your own brain, how to make agreements with yourself, and how your belief structure relates to your subjective experience of the world.
Compassion does not lead to happiness unless perhaps you’re rewarding yourself for being a compassionate person, but your brain really likes the feeling of fitting into a group, and social relationships are a great source of meaning. It’s seems that the brain uses similar mechanisms to simulate other people as it does to understand itself, meaning that people who experience others at a surface level also tends to experience themselves at a surface level (and vice versa). I can’t explain it nearly as well as this article does, so I highly recommend at least skimming it.
This is basically all you need to know. If you want stronger, broader, more positive valence, you need to become more sensitive, meaning that you need to feel yourself, feel your body, feel other people, feel alive, feel immersed in different contexts, and to have beliefs (conscious or unconscious) which makes this valence more positive than negative (so that your mind doesn’t choose numbness as a defense mechanism against it, harming your efforts to become sensitive).
Another thing I recommend is decreasing the abstract distance of the relation of negative experiences. If you feel bad when you eat meat because you know that farming animals suffer, and because you know that farming animals is necessary in order to produce the meat that you’re eating, and because you dislike the idea of other beings suffering, we could call this a distance of 3-4 steps. The more steps you allow negative things to spread, the less you will enjoy reality, as your mind will fight against them by infusing them with negative valence. The less distance, the more you can enjoy things. The same is true across time—live in the moment and you will likely experience that nothing is wrong, but simulate 2 months of the past and 2 months of possible future consequences of each choice you make, and you will find that most actions will feel bad: “I’m wasting time”, “If I do this good thing, they will just expect more good things of me in the future”, “My current behaviour is not consistent with the other behaviour I’ve shown these exact people, I need to conform to their model of me”, etc.
All of these pain-in-the-ass restrictions aren’t as real as they look. If you feel bad, it’s ultimately because you choose to feel bad, even if your brain coerced you into making that choice. If you want to feel good, just do so.
Edit: I used to be interested in lucid dreaming, so I’d read about it on online forums. Breaking the 4th wall seemed to end badly for the vast majority of people, but there’s some level of “dream characters react how you expect them to react” involved as well. Everything else is just what I learn naturally, or my own original research. I’d also love to read scientific papers about these things if any exist.

StartAtTheEnd 18 May 2025 18:36 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: β-redex’s comment on: Orienting Toward Wizard Power
Same here. I think it’s because working on myself made me neglect my connection to everyday life. Working too much on yourself, in your own way, makes you a little bit incompatible with everything and everyone else. Wizard power (as I see it: A powerful mentality, independence, the ability to go ahead of everyone else) is best developed in isolation or smaller groups, but social connections are important for success in life.
The feeling which caused me to switch was that of a pyramid being upside down. If you work on top of the needs hierarchy while neglecting the bottom like I did, you’re putting yourself at risk, and this creates anxiety which is justified and thus hard to shake off again.
In my way of looking at this, Einstein had a bit of wizard power, and he had trouble getting recognized for it once he made his discoveries. Most people did not have much reason to believe that he was a genius, as he didn’t have a lot of social proof. Tesla also leaned too much towards his intellectual pursuits, I think. He didn’t have much in terms of money and friends, and this seemed to cause him difficulties even though he was such a competent person.
An alternative route I’ve thought of is becoming a social wizard. Those people who have an unnatural amount of charisma and the ability to read people like books.
About being nerd sniped—I think many things do bring some benefits. The problem is, even though you can do anything, you can not do everything. There simply isn’t enough time. I like this quote, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci: “As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.”
A thing which I can’t put into words well but only warn about vaguely is the consequence of learning many new things too fast. When I do this, I face the same thing as OP does—I basically become another person. If I want to get back, I have to reverse my mindset, attitude, values, cognitive models, priorities, etc. and not just remember what I learned before, so for me, learning isn’t purely additive unless the new material is close to what I learned before. Even switching from “work mode” to “socializing mode” takes me a few hours at least.

StartAtTheEnd 27 Apr 2025 10:44 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: MichaelDickens’s Shortform
I agree with the top part. I think it’s naive to believe that AI is helping anyone, but what I want to talk about is why this problem might be unsolvable (except by avoiding it entirely).
If you hate something and attempt to combat it, you will get closer to it rather than further away, in the manner which people refer to when they say “You actually love what you say you hate”. When I say “don’t think about pink elephants”, the more you try, the more you will fail, and this is because the brain doesn’t have subtraction and division, but only addition and multiplication.
You cannot learn about how to defend yourself against a problem without learning how to also cause the problem. When you learn self-defense you will also learn attacks. You cannot learn how to argue effectively with people who hold stupid worldviews without first understanding them and thus creating a model of the worldview within yourself as well.
Due to mechanics like these, it may be impossible to research “AI safety” in isolation. It’s probably better to use a neutral word like “AI capabilities” which include both the capacity for harm and defense against harm so that we don’t mislead ourselves with words. It can cause untold damage, much like viewing “good and evil” as opposites, rather than two sides of the same thing, has.
I also want to warn everyone that there seems to be an asymmetry in warfare which makes it so that attacking is strictly easier than defending. This ratio seems to increase as technology improves.

StartAtTheEnd 4 Apr 2025 20:29 UTC
1 point
1
in reply to: interstice’s comment on: On Downvotes, Cultural Fit, and Why I Won’t Be Posting Again
I don’t think it’s possible without changing the people into weird types who really don’t care too much about the social aspects of life because they’re so interested in the topics at hand. You can try rewarding truth, but people still stumble into issues regarding morality, popularity of ideas, the overton window, some political group that they dislike randomly hitting upon the truth so that they look like supporters for stating the same thing, etc.
I think prediction markets are an interesting concept, but it cannot be taken much further than it is now, since the predictions could start influencing the outcomes. It’s dangerous to add rewards to the outcomes of predictions, for when enough money is involved, one can influence the outcome.
The way humans in general differ from truth-seeking agents makes their performance downright horrible on some specific areas (if the truth is not in the overton window for instance). These inaccuracies can cascade and cause problems elsewhere, since they cause incorrect worldviews even in somewhat intelligent people like Musk. There’s also a lot of information which is simply getting deleted from the internet, and you can’t “weight both sides of the argument” if half the argument is only visible on the waybackmachine or archive.md.
I guess it’s important to create a good atmosphere and that everyone is having fun theorizing and such, but some of the topics we’re discussing are actually serious. The well-being of millions of people depend on the sort of answers and perspectives which float around puvlic discourse, and I find it pathetic that ideas are immediately shut down if they’re not worded correctly or if they touch a growing list of socially forbidden hypotheses.
Finally, these alternative rewards have completely destroyed almost all voting systems on the internet. There’s almost no website left on which the karma/thumb/upvote/like count bears any resemblence to post quality anymore. Instead, it’s a linear combination of superstimuli like ‘relatability’, ‘novelty’, ‘feeling of importance (e.g. bad news, danger)’, ‘cuteness’, ‘escapism’, ‘sexual fantasy’, ‘romantic fantasy’, ‘boo outgroup’, ‘irony/parody/parody of parody/self-parady/nihilism’, ‘nostalgia’, ‘stupidity’ (I’m told it’s a kind of humor if you’re stupid on purpose, but I think “irony” is a defence mechanism against social judgement). It’s like a view into the unfulfilled needs of the population. Youtube view count and subscriptions, Reddit karma, Twitter retweets, all almost gamed to the point that they’re useless metrics. Online review sites are going in the same direction. It’s like interacting with a group of mentally ill people who decide what you’re paid each day. I think it’s dangerous to upvote comments based on vibes as it takes very little to corrupt these metrics, and it’s hard to notice if upvotes gradually come to represent “dopamine released by reading” or something other than quality/truthfulness.