Valentine

Karma: 3,676

I was a co-founder of CFAR in 2012. I’d been actively trying to save the world for about a decade at that point. I left in 2018 to seriously purify my mind & being. I realized in 2020 that I’d been using the fear of the end of the world like an addictive drug and did my damnedest to quit cold-turkey. I’m now doing my best to embody an answer to the global flurry in a way that’s something like a fusion of game theory and Buddhist Tantra.

Find my non-rationalist writing, social media, and projects at my Linktree.

Valentine 29 Nov 2023 21:08 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: nim’s comment on: AGI Alignment is Absurd
I’m not sure why all the people who think harder than I do about the field aren’t testing their “how to get alignment” theories on humans first…
Some of us are!
I mean, I don’t know you, so I don’t know if I’ve thought harder about the field than you have.
But FWIW, there’s a lot of us chewing on exactly this, and running experiments of various sizes, and we have some tentative conclusions.
It just tends to drift away from LW in social flavor. A lot of this stuff you’ll find in places LW-type folk tend to label “post-rationalist”.

Valentine 17 Nov 2023 19:37 UTC
5 points
1
in reply to: Yarrow Bouchard’s comment on: Social Dark Matter
While your point is technically true, it’s not relevant here. Bezzi’s point stands even if we just talk about trans folk whom most people can readily tell are trans.

Valentine 13 Nov 2023 23:32 UTC
6 points
1
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Saying the quiet part out loud: trading off x-risk for personal immortality
…I think most decent people would be willing to sacrifice their own life to prevent their civilization from going extinct, and I think it would be a very honorable thing to do.
While I agree, I want to take the opportunity to poke at something I often see in models like this one.
I think if you ask most people about this choice, they’d answer like you predict.
I think if you gave people a choice of buttons to push, one of which is this self-sacrifice button and the other being… uh… whatever the alternative is, there’d be some more hesitance but maybe not a ton.
But I suspect most people do not in fact understand what it means to die, or what they’re agreeing to when they agree to sacrifice themselves for something.
I think this is precisely what changes when someone gets a terminal diagnosis. They come to understand in a lived way what it means that they, right there, inside that body and seeing from behind those eyes, are going to experience death. Their mortality isn’t an abstraction for them anymore. They stop thinking “I’m going to die someday” like they’re talking about a video came character and instead get that it means something way way deeper.
If you adjust the situation so that the person believes the argument that they need to die for the sake of their civilization, and then you hand them a gun with which to shoot themselves…
…I think you’d find the capacity to be “honorable” here dropping dramatically.
But not people saying they would shoot themselves in this hypothetical scenario! Because for the person thinking the thought experiment, the thought experiment doesn’t embed the thought-experimenter.
I don’t think this bears on the discussion of immortality vs. AI risk. The actions here are abstract enough to be more like the button-pushing case.
I just keep seeing this question of embedded agency getting skipped over and I think it’s deeply important.

Valentine 16 Oct 2023 13:45 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Lalartu’s comment on: The Gods of Straight Lines
…a world where individual actions don’t matter that much should be a predictable world. And ours very much isn’t.
Can you say more? My first reaction is “Huh, I didn’t think of that, that’s interesting.” My second thought is “Wait, what about ~~turbulence~~ the weather?”
RE the latter: the action of individual air molecules doesn’t really matter that much, but the net effect is still very hard to predict with much precision. We can say some things about the overall general net effect, but we miss a lot of important details.
(I’m thinking of how my family and I had a plane flight scheduled to Florida last year, and surprise! there was a hurricane that might or might not be about to hit Orlando at the time. The predictions weren’t clear even a day before the event. It wasn’t clear whether we’d be able to go at all, or when.)
Am I missing your meaning?

Valentine 2 Aug 2023 3:35 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: What is ontology?
I also agree. I was going to write a similar answer. I’ll just add my nuance as a comment to Zach’s answer.
I said a bunch about ontologies in my post on fake frameworks. There I give examples and I define reductionism in terms of comparing ontologies. The upshot is what I read Zach emphasizing here: an ontology is a collection of things you consider “real” together with some rules for how to combine them into a coherent thingie (a map, though it often won’t feel on the inside like a map).
Maybe the purest example type is an axiomatic system. The undefined terms are ontological primitives, and the axioms are the rules for combining them. We usually combine an axiomatic system with a model to create a sense of being in a space. The classic example of this sort being Euclidean geometry.
But in practice most folk use much more fuzzy and informal ontologies, and often switch between seemingly incompatible ones as needed. Your paycheck, the government, cancer, and a sandwich are all “real” in lots of folks’ worldview, but they don’t always clearly relate the kinds of “real” because how they relate doesn’t usually matter.
I think ontologies are closely related to frames. I wonder if frames are just a special kind of ontology, or maybe the term we give for a particular use of ontologies. Mentioning this in case frames feel more intuitive than ontologies do.

Valentine 1 Aug 2023 0:58 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Jonathan Claybrough’s Shortform
I really don’t know what you mean by any of this (especially the “anymore” part, but really all of it).
…
(I don’t think that it’s necessary to “orient to my tone”? In any case, generally speaking, if you assume that I mean just what I say, you won’t go far wrong.)
This is actually really clarifying. Thank you.
I now suspect there’s a dimension of communication that’s hyper-salient for me but invisible to you.
I won’t try to convey that maybe invisible-to-you dimension here. I don’t think that’d be helpful.
Instead I’ll try to assume you have no idea what you’re “saying” on that frequency. Basically that you probably don’t mean things they way they implicitly land for me, and that you almost certainly don’t consciously hold the tone I read in what you’re saying.
That’s as close as I can get to assuming that you “mean just what [you] say”. Hopefully that’ll smooth things out between us!
(ETA: I certainly don’t think that your question was absurd. If I did, I’d’ve said so, and not spent effort answering it!)
Okay, cool. Thanks for saying this!
> In case it’s not clear, the reason I asked you about the “falling in love” thing was to better understand what kind of thing “cake” as you mean it might even look like.
Indeed, that is also why I asked my counter-question; both to explain, and to understand.
I have to admit, I find this very confusing. I’m trying to understand what you mean by “cake”. Maybe you were hoping to go “Here’s ‘cake’ for falling in love. Now you try on this other topic, so I can thumbs-up or thumbs-down that you’ve understood what I mean by ‘cake’.” Is that it?
The thing is, I think I could provide a similar analysis, but I don’t think it’d help me understand at all what you mean by “cake”. That makes me pretty hesitant to spend the time and cognitive effort on producing that kind of matching analysis.

Valentine 1 Aug 2023 0:34 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Jonathan Claybrough’s Shortform
Okay! Great, thank you.
This confirms I’m very thoroughly confused about what “cake” means to you here!
I thought you were looking for tangible proof of benefits, or something you could concretely try, or something like that. But now I know I have no idea what you’re looking for!
I’ll give examples to highlight my confusion. In your “cake” for falling in love, you say:
I could say that falling in love is worthwhile for its own sake. Of course, there isn’t any way I could convince you of that, but that’s not unusual; the same applies to the experience of eating ice cream, etc. This boils down to “try it; you’ll like it!”.
I seem to recall saying very similar things about kenshō. That there’s something of deep importance, that this “insight” amounts to acknowledging it, that this is something you’d be super grateful for if it were to happen for you, and that there’s not really much of a way for me to convince you of any of this. It’s just a “Take a look and see for yourself” kind of thing.
That doesn’t seem to have satisfied you. You still asked for “cake”.
In particular, what you say here sounds to me like what I’d guess “assurances of having cake” would be.
In your second paragraph of “cake” you say:
falling in love is just the first part of a process which (summed across all instances over a person’s lifetime) is likely to account for a significant chunk of the happiness, life satisfaction, joy, pleasure, etc., that one experiences in one’s lifetime.
This lands for me as what I’d guess “allusions to kinds of cake” would be.
I could say something very similar about kenshō. I suspect I did in that monster thread five years ago. That if & when this flash of clarity comes online, there’ll be a sense of something like “Oh holy fuck, I’ve been just living on autopilot! I haven’t been alive here! I’ve been ignoring what actually goddamned matters just to tell myself some stories and live in fantasy! Whoa!!!” And it’s very much just a beginning.
(There’s a quote that goes something like “You have two lives. Your second life begins when you realize you have only one life.” Kenshō is about beginning your second life.)
But again, this doesn’t seem to have satisfied your need for “cake”.
Your third paragraph includes:
those of my friends who’ve fallen in love, and entered into (and stayed in) long-term term relationships on the basis of that love, seem to be much happier than they were previously, and in particular, seem to make one another happy, in ways observable in ordinary, everyday interactions. (Of course one can have experiences and observe things that point to the opposite conclusion—but, again, this is too well-trod a topic to productively re-tread here.)
So, on this regarding kenshō I’ve been maybe too vague. Very attuned to the ability of folk to point at evidence of the opposite conclusion.
But if I can make a similar caveat as you’ve made here, I think I can point pretty clearly at this.
The people I know who are on the other side of this are alive. Engaged. Interesting. They’re themselves much more deeply. More interested in really playing the game of life. Less willing to tolerate bullshit, especially in their for-fun social interactions.
They also almost all have war stories involving the collapse after awakening. A lot of lies people live can’t work once they admit to themselves that they’re lies. And it’s hard not to admit stuff like that in the midst of an explosion of Light, at least in my experience. Breakups, financial collapse, and physical illness are not uncommon. It’s usually temporary and most of them say that they totally wouldn’t have it any other way — at least once they’re through the other side. Some do get stuck. And there’s a potential survivorship bias here in my account.
It’d be weird to call that a benefit. It’s more like an attribute I notice over and over again. I totally had that. Arguably I still do: it feels like a deep existential allergy to all lies and bullshit turned on deep in my core, and now I’m on a lifelong journey for total and ever-perfecting alignment with… well, truth.
But as things go in terms of “What can we see this actually doing in the world?”, here are a few attributes. The Dark Night stuff can be awful to go through, but it’s like the vomiting part of food poisoning. It’s not like the point of that is to be enjoyable, but you still want to have done it.
Now, if my saying all that still doesn’t count for you as “cake”… then I have no idea how to proceed. You’re going to have to define what you’re looking for differently if you want me to have any chance of answering you on this point.

Valentine 31 Jul 2023 23:54 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Jonathan Claybrough’s Shortform
Can you give some examples of things that those places have held?
Sure. I’ll give just one for now. These take a while to name in writing, at least they way they occur to me.
Here’s a recurring one: I’ll be talking with someone in a coaching session, and I’ll pick up on how they’re “adding extra”.
This is something that’s easy to point out in live conversation or over video but I find tricky in writing. It’s a tone thing. If I look at the cup next to me and note “This is a cup”, I’m simply noting. There’s nothing extra. But I can add extra with an emotional tone of “I keep this cup next to me to hydrate myself, because I take care of myself, which is something GOOD I do.” I think this is easy to hear with some practice even if the words are identical (“This is a cup”).
Usually when someone is adding extra, they have some unrecognized pain. Most of the time this pain roots down in a universal thing — something I’ve come to call “the pain of duality”. It’s a basic split from something core. It’s roughly the same in everyone best as I can tell, but each person sort of holds and experiences it in their own way.
So when I see someone adding extra, and they’ve asked for my guidance, I’ll sometimes guide them to awareness of this core pain:
- “Here it seems to me that you’re saying XYZ [like “I need to finish my thesis”], but you’re also adding something extra. It occurs to me as a tone of ABC [usually like there’s something wrong with them, or that their value is based on something external, or that something is existentially wrong]. There’s nothing wrong with that. I just imagine it’s uncomfortable. Do you see what I’m pointing at?”
  - We do some calibration, and I adjust based on their feedback (like if I was missing them in some key way). Then if I still see this core pain in them and they agree I’m seeing them clearly, on to the next step:
- “Okay. Now, for me, in this spot I tend to feel PQR [something like “afraid something will go wrong if I don’t take care of this task”]. But that’s how the energy feels when it hits my thinking. Underneath that is something wordless. More like a creeping feeling, like reality itself is unsafe or unreliable.”
  - The point here is to give an example of what it means to feel the energy behind something in consciousness. If my first example doesn’t click for them, I’ll give a few others.
Usually they either notice the core pain or adjust my perception of them. More often the former. It tends to result in a direct kind of seeing, the same way you can directly “see” the feeling of your tongue in your mouth: it’s somehow more unmediated than thoughts about the thing are.
When I wrote Kenshō I might have called this “Looking at your soul pain”. It’s about seeing more directly instead of just thinking about mental models of the thing.
I just think that reifying Looking does something odd to this process. It’s just noticing what you experience when you look where someone is pointing. Even if that someone is yourself.
Hopefully that’s somewhat clear. With more time & effort I might have come up with a simpler example. (“Sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.”)

Valentine 27 Jul 2023 2:09 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Jonathan Claybrough’s Shortform
Now, all of that having been said, here’s a counter-question, before we get to kenshō: can you provide an analogous sort of answer, for “having a paranoid delusion” in place of “falling in love”? Does it exist? Does it have any value?
How on Earth is this relevant? I’m really not following you here. What do you hope to gain by having me try to grapple with this weird thing?
Maybe you’re trying to… I don’t know, get even with me for asking something you find absurd? Trying to defeat me in some kind of dual where you think I issued the first challenge? I really don’t know.
In case it’s not clear, the reason I asked you about the “falling in love” thing was to better understand what kind of thing “cake” as you mean it might even look like. It really does land as a type error to me. But if you could say “Oh, for falling in love, thus-and-such would be ‘cake’”, then I could go “Oh! Okay. Cool! So I think the analogy for kenshō might be XYZ. Does that work for you?” Then we could communicate.
The feel — and I could easily be misreading you here — but the feel I get from you here is like intellectual one-upmanship. Mental fencing.
If that’s the case, please understand that I’m just not available for that. I will not engage with you at that level anymore.
If I’ve misread you, then please clarify what you’re doing. I don’t know how to orient to your tone here. If you meant it collaboratively, then please help me see how. I’d very much like to.

Valentine 27 Jul 2023 1:47 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Jonathan Claybrough’s Shortform
What part of this do you consider to be having “given me cake”?

Valentine 26 Jul 2023 23:26 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Jonathan Claybrough’s Shortform
I don’t think so. Not in terms that would satisfy you, best as I can tell.
Although… I wonder if we can translate a bit. If you were trying to convey this whole “falling in love” thing to me, while I’m suspicious about whether it exists or that if it exists that it has any value, and I were pressing you for “cake” about “falling in love”, what would you offer?
I mean that sincerely. Those two feel like similar type errors to me. If you can offer a few examples of “cake” for falling in love then I might be able to figure out how to offer you “cake” for kenshō.
(I’m not too particular about “falling in love” per se. It’s just the most fitting example that popped into mind.)

Valentine 26 Jul 2023 22:18 UTC
7 points
1
in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: Jonathan Claybrough’s Shortform
do you have an example of: “getting better at attending to what matters to you, instead of attending to what you think matters to you, when there’s a difference”.
Would a central example be someone focusing on trying to become popular, not realising that it is only instrumental towards feeling positive about themselves?
I wouldn’t say that’s a central example. But I think it’s a good one. Simple, clear, easy to access.
A much bigger and more central example to me is death. Most people don’t seem to have clearly seen their own mortality. They’re thinking about their own deaths like a Cartesian agent (i.e., not embedded — like the Alexei robot in this post). They know death happens to everyone eventually, and that it’ll happen to “them”, but it’s almost like they’re talking about a video game character from the outside. Like “Yep, at some point my little Mario figure there will stop when we turn off the gaming console.”
Something really big shifts when folk get a terminal diagnosis. It’s not just “Oh, I thought I had years, but now I have months/weeks/etc.” There’s a grappling-with that’s hard to convey to non-terminal folk. “The end” becomes subjectively real. Like “Oh shit, I’m going to experience this from behind my eyes, inside this skin.” It can feel very lonely and alienating, both because of the existential horror of the situation, but also because it becomes super clear how others are running strange scripts that just don’t make sense.
I include most immortalists and transhumanists in this. I’m not talking just about “Are you taking practical actions to deal with your mortality?” I mean that there’s a deep existential thing to grapple with. Even true immortals would have to orient to it: If you never ever die, then that means you’re facing eternity. That’s like something from behind your eyes.
(This is something even the literalist Christian mythos doesn’t properly address AFAICT: Great, you go to Heaven. Then what? Do you feel time passing? What’s that like? Goes on literally forever? Or does it… fade away at some point? Or do you leave time when you enter Heaven — in which case what’s the subjective experience of that? This isn’t just abstract philosophy. It’s a damn meaningful question!)
It turns out that most things don’t matter in the face of this. The whole thing with deathbed regrets amounts to “I’m sorry I didn’t see this sooner and take it seriously while I still had time.”
But it’s not something you’re likely to really get just by listening to elders and taking their advice. “Work less, connect with family more.” That’s good, and you’ll be grateful for that in the end! But you won’t understand why until you’ve really truly seen your own death clearly.
To the degree you do, it just won’t be tempting anymore to work instead of connect (for instance).
But that’s a really huge example. Maybe one of the biggest. Maybe maybe the biggest.
I do think the “Oh, I don’t actually care about being popular” thing you suggest is pretty good. It has the right quality of “Now that I’ve seen it, I can’t un-see it, and I’ve been seriously wasting my time on this.”
I just wanted to flesh this out a bit, to hint at the scope.
Hopefully that made some sense.

Valentine 26 Jul 2023 21:58 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: Jonathan Claybrough’s Shortform
Why don’t you care for the “looking” framing anymore?
I’m honestly not sure. Something sits wrong about it. Some initial stabs at the intuition are:
- It feels too binary. Like you’re either Looking or you’re not. That doesn’t seem right.
- I think it might be several skills/senses folded into one. Or maybe something like a sense generator. (Lots of folk have trouble with conscious interoception, and that can be changed over time via a move I might have called “Looking” before.)
- In practice, the relevant thing to develop seems to be something like capacity to receive the information rather than forcing oneself to seek it. I think intentionally seeing something beyond the usual ontology (“Looking”) emerges naturally from being both willing and capable, once you know what direction to point your attention in.
But the overall feel is something like… the whole thing makes it sound pompous. Like “Oho! Here’s this special magical skill!”
I mean, it is. It’s quite potent. I’ll sometimes mythically refer to this as “Mage Sight”, or break it down into subtypes of Sight (like Spirit Sight or Prime Sight).
But I think something screwy happens when there’s a social tone along the lines of “I see something you don’t! ’Cause I’m bothering to look at all!”
Even when there’s some truth to that, it’s unkind. It doesn’t honor the reason why the person hasn’t pointed their attention there yet.
Also, in many cases I can just say “You want to see? Okay. Look here, then here, then here.” And something clicks for my listener. Sometimes.
So, no reason to make the act of looking there something special. It’s just perception.

Valentine 26 Jul 2023 15:27 UTC
11 points
2
in reply to: Jonathan Claybrough’s comment on: Jonathan Claybrough’s Shortform
I don’t know how to answer the general query. But I can say something maybe helpful about that Kenshō post and “Looking”:
The insight was too new. I wrote the post just 4 months after the insight. I think I could answer questions like this way, way more clearly today.
(…although my experience with Said in particular has always been very challenging. I don’t know that I could help him any better today than I could in 2018. Maybe? He seems to use a mind type that I’ve never found a bridge for.)
The issue is that the skill needed to convey an insight or skill is often significantly different from the insight/skill itself. And in many cases, getting quite good at something can make you worse at teaching it because you can come to forget what it’s like to be a beginner.
IME it’s necessary to reconstruct (literally “re-member”) various beginners’ minds after gaining expertise. Otherwise you can’t meet beginners where they are. This is the essence of PCK.
I hadn’t done basically any of that when I wrote Kenshō.
So I don’t think the issue is that meditation or whatever borked my ability to talk clearly. It’s more that I had a massive shift and then tried to talk about it right away. This challenge is a pretty general one IMO.
I suspect the issue is that the kind of massive insight that can happen from meditation, psychedelics, & related experiences can result in pretty huge shifts, making this “I’m talking gibberish for a while” thing way more common and enduring than with (say) mathematical insights.
A simple example with Kenshō:
One benefit of learning to Look (though I don’t care for this framing anymore) is getting better at attending to what matters to you, instead of attending to what you think matters to you, when there’s a difference.
Naturally many mind designs will think there’s no difference, or that if there is one it’s pretty small. But it’s often — I daresay usually — massively larger than we tend to notice. The shift can feel a bit like suddenly remembering that you have a beloved child, and realizing you’ve been neglecting them and even forgetting they exist because you were distracted. It’s not pleasant to realize! It might make you “less functional” according to your earlier standards. But you absolutely would not want to reverse the revelation!
One challenge I was grappling with in 2018 is that many minds will insist that (a) there’s no reason to trust that such an insight is valid as opposed to being a delusion and (b) even if it were valid, that maybe it’s better not to have the revelation in the first place since it borks metrics you can tell are useful.
In 2018 I didn’t know how to orient to that while holding my clarity. All I could do is flail my arms and say “Epistemic puzzle!” Very, very poor PCK.
I wouldn’t say my PCK is pristine now. But I could have a much more clear and kind conversation about it today than I could five years ago. It just took a while to develop.

Valentine 25 Jul 2023 14:49 UTC
2 points
2
in reply to: df fd’s comment on: Rationality !== Winning
By the way, I think you should consider rewriting the side note re autistic nerd. I am still a bit confused reading that.
FWIW, I found the comment crystal clear.
CFAR’s very first workshops had a section on fashion. LukeProg gave a presentation on why fashion was worth caring about, and then folk were taken to go shopping for upgrades to their wardrobe. Part of the point was to create a visible & tangible upgrade in “awesomeness”.
At some point — maybe in those first workshops, I don’t quite recall — there was a lot of focus on practicing rejection therapy. Folk were taken out to a place with strangers and given the task of getting rejected for something. This later morphed into Comfort Zone Expansion (CoZE) and, finally, into Comfort Zone Exploration. The point here was to help folk cultivate courage.
By the June 2012 workshop I’d introduced Againstness, which amounted to my martial arts derived reinvention of applied polyvagal theory. Part of my intent at the time was to help people get more into their bodies and to notice that yes, your physiological responses actually very much do matter for your thinking.
Each of these interventions, and many many others, were aimed specifically at helping fill in the autistic blindspots that we kept seeing with people in the social scene of rationalists. We weren’t particular about supporting people with autism per se. It was just clear that autistic traits tended to synergize in the community, and that this led to points of systematic incompetence that mattered for thinking about stuff like AI. Things on par with not noticing how “In theory, theory and practice are the same” is a joke.
CFAR was responsible for quite a lot of people moving to the Bay Area. And by around 2016 it was perfectly normal for folk to show up at a CFAR workshop not having read the Sequences. HPMOR was more common — and at the time HPMOR encouraged people toward CFAR more than the Sequences IIRC.
So I think the “smart person self-help” tone ended up defining a lot of rationalist culture at least for Berkeley/SF/etc.
…which in turn I think kind of gave the impression that rationality is smart person self-help.
I think we did meaningfully help a lot of people this way. I got a lot of private feedback on Againstness, for instance, from participants months later saying that it had changed their lives (turning around depression, resolving burnout, etc.). Rejection therapy was a game-changer for some folk. I think these things were mostly net good.
But I’m with Raemon on this: For good rationality, it’s super important to move past that paradigm to something deeper. Living a better life is great. But lots of stuff can do that. Not as many places have the vision of rationality.

Valentine 25 Jul 2023 5:29 UTC
10 points
4
on: Cryonics and Regret
My heart aches to read this. I wish you freedom from self-blame. But I do understand.
I grew up in cryonics. My parents signed me up when I was a child. The ache of “If only I’d brought this up sooner, better, the right way” stayed with me a very long time. For every friend and relative who shrugged these things off. Especially for the handful already in graves now. So, so young.
I used to frequently imagine how, some decades or centuries from now, I’d be standing on a colony of the Moon looking up at our ancient cradle, the Earth. Standing there with the friends & family who’d made it. And younger folk too who love us and whom we love, hearing our stories of Ancient Earth when the chances were so slim.
And then we would sing the names. Those who could only continue as whispers on our lips. The beloved who did not make it.
I often find myself reciting Eliezer’s ode to Terry Pratchett:
Even if the stars should die in heaven,
Our sins can never be undone.
No single death will be forgiven
When fades at last the last lit sun.
Then in the cold and silent black
As light and matter end,
We’ll have ourselves a last look back
And toast an absent friend.
I am deeply sorry for your loss.
All the more aching for what might have been, had things been different.
We are all doing the best we can.
Even you, in your failures.
And me, in mine.
And it is heartbreaking, the cost of our learning. That sometimes it comes at the eternal loss of a beloved.
But all we can ever do is our best.
Setting aside our anger and self-blame,
out of deep heartfelt caring
we shall build a kinder world.
Or we shall die trying.

Valentine 24 Jul 2023 3:50 UTC
13 points
2
on: Rationality !== Winning
I find this refreshing. It rings true. It feels like the kind of North Star we were groping toward in early CFAR but never landed on.
This in particular feels clarifying:
Rationality is the study (and applied skill) of finding cognitive algorithms that form better beliefs and make better decisions. Sometimes this is the appropriate tool for the job, and sometimes it’s not.
I find myself breathing with relief reading this. It has the flavor of a definition that could use some iterations. But as it stands, it strikes me as (a) honoring the spirit of the discipline while (b) not overblowing what it can do or is for. Like part of the clarity is in what the Art isn’t for.
Thank you for writing this.

Valentine 20 Jul 2023 1:45 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Sapient Algorithms
…I’m a bit suspicious based on the use of stimulants to treat a broad range of conditions like ADHD…
Just to be clear, I was describing my experience as a case study, and my impression is that I can pretty directly read how caffeine affects my body’s energy reserves. And I don’t have ADHD or anything like that.
The things I observe sure seem to have clear mechanisms behind them, like adenosine sensitization. Between that and what I observe about how people act around caffeine, I get the impression that what I’m seeing in myself is pretty general.
But I don’t know. And I definitely don’t know if ADHD brains are meaningfully different in some relevant way. (Do they not sensitize to adenosine? I don’t get how chronic caffeine use can fix a chemical imbalance unless there’s too little caffeine adaptation!)
Hopefully it’s clear that for the purposes of the example in the OP, it doesn’t matter if ADHD and other conditions happen to be cases where caffeine works differently.
But maybe you mean to suggest that things like ADHD hint at caffeine working meaningfully differently in everyone than I’m suggesting…? Including in myself? In which case you mean this to challenge whether the example of using sapient algorithms is a relevant one?

Valentine 20 Jul 2023 1:38 UTC
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in reply to: evoth’s comment on: Sapient Algorithms
So, even if the outcome of the sapient algorithm is more unpleasant than the autopilot alternative (like in your caffeine example), perhaps the extra agency gained in the process (and recognition of the value of this agency) is a reward in itself.
Hmm. Maybe? I’m puzzling with you here on this one.
I’d lean toward agency not being intrinsically rewarding enough to override that kind of discomfort. I’m guessing, but my gut says that isn’t how it works.
My impression is, the capacity to be and stay present acts as a kind of anchor that stabilizes consciousness in the storm of painful emotion-memories (“traumas”). Like, when I get behind in emailing people, I tend to get a kind of sinking and scared feeling. If I let that drive, I keep avoiding the email in favor of… watching YouTube. Why? Because YouTube drowns out the sinking/scared sensation from conscious awareness! If I just sit there and feel it… well, the prospect can feel at first boring, then weirdly scary.
But if I’m stably here, in this embodied experience, then those feelings can come and grow and even threaten to overwhelm me and I’m fine. I’m just experiencing overwhelm. It’s okay!
…and then the emotion sort of washes over me, and “digests” (whatever that means). It loses its power. My emotional orientation changes. It’s easier for me to think clearly about the whole topic.
Locally, this is harder than watching YouTube. And slower!
But it also gets me more in touch with the awareness of longer-term benefits. I care more about building my capacity to weather whatever arises in me than I do about being comfortable in most moments.
(Though I might have a different opinion if it were neverending discomfort to be present!)
I’m rambling some related thoughts as I think about this. In short, I think you might be on to something. I just wonder if the nature of the reward is based on perspective rather than on agency being immediately more rewarding to experience as a sensation.

Valentine 20 Jul 2023 1:28 UTC
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in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: Sapient Algorithms
I like your exploration here.
I wondered about the global workspace thing too. I kind of wonder if the auto-generalization thing happens nicely because the “summon sapience” thing puts more of what’s going on into global workspace, meaning it’s integrating more context, so whatever it is that does strategic stuff is accounting for more of what’s relevant.
I’m just making stuff up there. But it’s a fun story. It’s at least consistent with what I’ve noticed of my experience with these algorithms!