First, to confirm that you have correctly understood the points I was trying to make. I intended “Dancing with the Gods” to be a rationalist essay, in the strictest Yudkowskian-reformation sense of the term “rationalist”, even though the beginnings of the reformation were seven years in the future when I wrote it.
<insert timeless-decision-theory joke here>
Second, that I 100% agree with your analysis of why “Meditations on Moloch” was important.
Third and most importantly, to say that I like your use of the term “sandbox” a lot, and I’m going to adopt it. Maintaining a hard distinction between inside the sandbox and outside really is an important tactic for dealing with mythic mode in general, and magic/theurgy in particular.
You got it from infosec jargon, of course, and I’m going to emphasize its use as a verb. A lot of people have damaged themselves through not understanding that they need to sandbox, and a lot of other people (including, as you imply, many rationalists) fear mythic mode unnecessarily because they don’t know that sandboxing is possible.
Author of “Dancing with the Gods” checks in.
First, to confirm that you have correctly understood the points I was trying to make. I intended “Dancing with the Gods” to be a rationalist essay, in the strictest Yudkowskian-reformation sense of the term “rationalist”, even though the beginnings of the reformation were seven years in the future when I wrote it.
<insert timeless-decision-theory joke here>
Second, that I 100% agree with your analysis of why “Meditations on Moloch” was important.
Third and most importantly, to say that I like your use of the term “sandbox” a lot, and I’m going to adopt it. Maintaining a hard distinction between inside the sandbox and outside really is an important tactic for dealing with mythic mode in general, and magic/theurgy in particular.
You got it from infosec jargon, of course, and I’m going to emphasize its use as a verb. A lot of people have damaged themselves through not understanding that they need to sandbox, and a lot of other people (including, as you imply, many rationalists) fear mythic mode unnecessarily because they don’t know that sandboxing is possible.