the phrase about ‘adversaries’ sounds like you’re talking about theoretical ghosts to me. But maybe you have real people in mind.
I’m talking about optimizing processes coordinating with copies of themselves, distributed over many people. My blog post Civil Law and Political Drama is a technically precise description of this, though Towards optimal play as Villager in a mixed game adds some color that might be helpful. I don’t think my interests are opposed to the autonomous agency of almost anyone. I do think that some common trigger/trauma behavior patterns are coordinating against autonomous human agency.
The gaming detail helps me understand where you’re coming from here. I don’t think the right way to manage my resource constraints looks very much like playing a game of MtG. I am in a much higher-dimensional environment where most of my time should be spent playing/exploring, or resolving tension patterns that impede me from playing/exploring. My endorsed behavior pattern looks a little more like the process of becoming a good MtG player, or discovering that MtG is the sort of thing I want to get good at. (Though empirically that’s not a game it made sense to me to invest in becoming good at—I chose Tai Chi instead for reasons!)
rather, I have an objection to the seeming endorsement of acting from a fear-aligned place.
I endorse using the capacities I already have, even when those capacities are imperfect.
When responding to social conflict, it would almost always be more efficient and effective for me to try to clarify things out of a sense of open opportunity, than from a fear-based motive. This can be true even when a proper decision-theoretic model the situation would describe it as an adversarial one with time pressure; I might still protect my interests better by thinking in a free and relaxed way about the problem, than tensing up like a monkey facing a physical threat.
But a relaxed attitude is not always immediately available to me, and I don’t think I want to endorse always taking the time to detrigger before responding to something in the social domain.
Part of loving and accepting human beings as they are, without giving up on intention to make things better, is appreciating and working with the benefits people produce out of mixed motives. There’s probably some irrational fear-based motivation in Elon Musk’s and Jeff Bezos’s work ethic, and maybe they’d have found more efficient and effective ways to help the world if their mental health were better, but I’m really, really glad I get to use Amazon, and that Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink exist, and it’s not clear to me that I’d want to advise younger versions of them to spend a lot of time working on themselves first. That seems like making purity the enemy of the good.
optimizing processes coordinating with copies of themselves, distributed over many people
Question about balance: how do you not end up reifying these in your mind, creating a paranoid sense of ‘there be ghosts lurking in shadows’ ?
This question seems central to me because the poison I detect in Vassar-esque-speak is
a) Memetically more contagious stories seem to include lurking ghosts / demons / shadows because adding a sense of danger or creating paranoia is sticky and salient. Vassar seems to like inserting a sense of ‘hidden danger’ or ‘large demonic forces’ into his theories and way of speaking about things. I’m worried this is done for memetic intrigue, viability, and stickiness, not necessarily because it’s more true. It makes people want to listen to him for long periods of time, but I don’t sense it being an openly curious kind of listening but a more addicted / hungry type of listening. (I can detect this in myself.)
I guess I’m claiming Vassar has an imbalance between the wisdom/truth of his words and the power/memetic viability of his words. With too much on the side of power.
b) Reifying these “optimizing processes coordinating” together, maybe “against autonomous human agency” or whatever… seems toxic and harmful for a human mind that takes these very seriously. Unless it comes with ample antidote in the form of (in my world anyway) a deep spiritual compassion / faith and a wisdom-oriented understanding of everyone’s true nature, among other things in this vein. But I don’t detect Vassar is offering this antidote, so it just feels like poison to me. One might call this poison a deep cynicism, lack of faith / trust, a flavor of nihilism, or “giving into the dark side.”
I do believe Vassar might, in an important sense, have a lot of faith in humanity… but nonetheless, his way of expressing gives off a big stench of everything being somehow tainted and bad. And the faith is not immediately detectable from listening to him, nor do I sense his love.
I kind of suspect that there’s some kind of (adversarial) optimization process operating through his expression, and he seems to have submitted to this willingly? And I am curious about what’s up with that / whether I’m wrong about this.
Question about balance: how do you not end up reifying these in your mind, creating a paranoid sense of ‘there be ghosts lurking in shadows’ ?
Mostly just by trying to think about this stuff carefully, and check whether my responses to it add up & seem constructive. I seem to have been brought up somehow with a deep implicit faith that any internal problem I have, I can solve by thinking about—i.e. that I don’t have any internal infohazards. So, once I consciously notice the opportunity, it feels safe to be curious about my own fear, aggression, etc. It seems like many other people don’t have this faith, which would make it harder for them to solve this class of problem; they seem to think that knowing about conflicts they’re engaged in would get them hurt by making them blameworthy; that looking the thing in the face would mark them for destruction.
My impression is that insofar as I’m paranoid, this is part of the adversarial process I described, which seems to believe in something like ontologically fundamental threats that can’t be reduced to specific mechanisms by which I might be harmed, and have to be submitted to absolutely. This model doesn’t stand up to a serious examination, so examining it honestly tends to dissolve it.
I’ve found psychedelics helpful here. Psilocybin seems to increase the conscious salience of fear responses, which allows me to analyze them. In one of my most productive shrooms trips, I noticed that I was spending most of my time pretending to be a reasonable person, under the impression that an abstract dominator wouldn’t allow me to connect with other people unless I passed as a simulacrum of a rational agent. I noticed that it didn’t feel available to just go to the other room and ask my friends for cuddles because I wanted to, and I considered maybe just huddling under the blankets scared in my bedroom until the trip ended and I became a simulacrum again. Then I decided I had no real incentive do to this, and plenty of incentive to go try to interact with my friends without pretending to be a person, so I did that and it worked.
THC seems to make paranoid thoughts more conscious, which allows me to consciously work through their implications and decide whether I believe them.
I agree that stories with a dramatic villain seem more memetically fit and less helpful, and I avoid them when I notice the option to.
Thanks for your level-headed responses. At this point, I have nothing further to talk about on the object-level conversation (but open to anything else you want to discuss).
For information value, I do want to flag that…
I’m noticing an odd effect from talking with you. It feels like being under a weighted blanket or a ‘numbing’ effect. It’s neither pleasant nor unpleasant.
My sketchpad sense of it is: Leaning on the support of Reason. Something wants me to be soothed, to be reassured, that there is Reasonableness and Order, and it can handle things. That most things can be Solved with … correct thinking or conceptualization or model-building or something.
So, it’s a projection and all, but I don’t trust this “thing” whatever it is, much. It also seems to have many advantages. And it may make it pretty hard for me to have a fully alive and embodied conversation with you.
Curious if any of this resonates with you or with anyone else’s sense of you, or if I’m off the mark. But um also this can be ignored or taken offline as well, since it’s not adding to the overall conversation and is just an interpersonal thing.
I did feel inhibited from having as much fun as I’d have liked to in this exchange because it seemed like while you were on the whole trying to make a good thing happen, you were somewhat scared in a triggered and triggerable way. This might have caused the distortion you’re describing. Helpful and encouraging to hear that you picked up on that and it bothered you enough to mention.
Your response here is really perplexing to me and didn’t go in the direction I expected at all. I am guessing there’s some weird communication breakdown happening. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I guess all I have left is: I care about you, I like you, and I wish well for you. <3
It seems like you’re having difficulty imagining that I’m responding to my situation as I understand it, and I don’t know what else you might think I’m doing.
I read the comment you’re responding to as suggesting something like “your impression of Unreal’s internal state was so different from her own experience of her internal state that she’s very confused”.
I’m talking about optimizing processes coordinating with copies of themselves, distributed over many people. My blog post Civil Law and Political Drama is a technically precise description of this, though Towards optimal play as Villager in a mixed game adds some color that might be helpful. I don’t think my interests are opposed to the autonomous agency of almost anyone. I do think that some common trigger/trauma behavior patterns are coordinating against autonomous human agency.
The gaming detail helps me understand where you’re coming from here. I don’t think the right way to manage my resource constraints looks very much like playing a game of MtG. I am in a much higher-dimensional environment where most of my time should be spent playing/exploring, or resolving tension patterns that impede me from playing/exploring. My endorsed behavior pattern looks a little more like the process of becoming a good MtG player, or discovering that MtG is the sort of thing I want to get good at. (Though empirically that’s not a game it made sense to me to invest in becoming good at—I chose Tai Chi instead for reasons!)
I endorse using the capacities I already have, even when those capacities are imperfect.
When responding to social conflict, it would almost always be more efficient and effective for me to try to clarify things out of a sense of open opportunity, than from a fear-based motive. This can be true even when a proper decision-theoretic model the situation would describe it as an adversarial one with time pressure; I might still protect my interests better by thinking in a free and relaxed way about the problem, than tensing up like a monkey facing a physical threat.
But a relaxed attitude is not always immediately available to me, and I don’t think I want to endorse always taking the time to detrigger before responding to something in the social domain.
Part of loving and accepting human beings as they are, without giving up on intention to make things better, is appreciating and working with the benefits people produce out of mixed motives. There’s probably some irrational fear-based motivation in Elon Musk’s and Jeff Bezos’s work ethic, and maybe they’d have found more efficient and effective ways to help the world if their mental health were better, but I’m really, really glad I get to use Amazon, and that Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink exist, and it’s not clear to me that I’d want to advise younger versions of them to spend a lot of time working on themselves first. That seems like making purity the enemy of the good.
Question about balance: how do you not end up reifying these in your mind, creating a paranoid sense of ‘there be ghosts lurking in shadows’ ?
This question seems central to me because the poison I detect in Vassar-esque-speak is
a) Memetically more contagious stories seem to include lurking ghosts / demons / shadows because adding a sense of danger or creating paranoia is sticky and salient. Vassar seems to like inserting a sense of ‘hidden danger’ or ‘large demonic forces’ into his theories and way of speaking about things. I’m worried this is done for memetic intrigue, viability, and stickiness, not necessarily because it’s more true. It makes people want to listen to him for long periods of time, but I don’t sense it being an openly curious kind of listening but a more addicted / hungry type of listening. (I can detect this in myself.)
I guess I’m claiming Vassar has an imbalance between the wisdom/truth of his words and the power/memetic viability of his words. With too much on the side of power.
b) Reifying these “optimizing processes coordinating” together, maybe “against autonomous human agency” or whatever… seems toxic and harmful for a human mind that takes these very seriously. Unless it comes with ample antidote in the form of (in my world anyway) a deep spiritual compassion / faith and a wisdom-oriented understanding of everyone’s true nature, among other things in this vein. But I don’t detect Vassar is offering this antidote, so it just feels like poison to me. One might call this poison a deep cynicism, lack of faith / trust, a flavor of nihilism, or “giving into the dark side.”
I do believe Vassar might, in an important sense, have a lot of faith in humanity… but nonetheless, his way of expressing gives off a big stench of everything being somehow tainted and bad. And the faith is not immediately detectable from listening to him, nor do I sense his love.
I kind of suspect that there’s some kind of (adversarial) optimization process operating through his expression, and he seems to have submitted to this willingly? And I am curious about what’s up with that / whether I’m wrong about this.
Mostly just by trying to think about this stuff carefully, and check whether my responses to it add up & seem constructive. I seem to have been brought up somehow with a deep implicit faith that any internal problem I have, I can solve by thinking about—i.e. that I don’t have any internal infohazards. So, once I consciously notice the opportunity, it feels safe to be curious about my own fear, aggression, etc. It seems like many other people don’t have this faith, which would make it harder for them to solve this class of problem; they seem to think that knowing about conflicts they’re engaged in would get them hurt by making them blameworthy; that looking the thing in the face would mark them for destruction.
My impression is that insofar as I’m paranoid, this is part of the adversarial process I described, which seems to believe in something like ontologically fundamental threats that can’t be reduced to specific mechanisms by which I might be harmed, and have to be submitted to absolutely. This model doesn’t stand up to a serious examination, so examining it honestly tends to dissolve it.
I’ve found psychedelics helpful here. Psilocybin seems to increase the conscious salience of fear responses, which allows me to analyze them. In one of my most productive shrooms trips, I noticed that I was spending most of my time pretending to be a reasonable person, under the impression that an abstract dominator wouldn’t allow me to connect with other people unless I passed as a simulacrum of a rational agent. I noticed that it didn’t feel available to just go to the other room and ask my friends for cuddles because I wanted to, and I considered maybe just huddling under the blankets scared in my bedroom until the trip ended and I became a simulacrum again. Then I decided I had no real incentive do to this, and plenty of incentive to go try to interact with my friends without pretending to be a person, so I did that and it worked.
THC seems to make paranoid thoughts more conscious, which allows me to consciously work through their implications and decide whether I believe them.
I agree that stories with a dramatic villain seem more memetically fit and less helpful, and I avoid them when I notice the option to.
Thanks for your level-headed responses. At this point, I have nothing further to talk about on the object-level conversation (but open to anything else you want to discuss).
For information value, I do want to flag that…
I’m noticing an odd effect from talking with you. It feels like being under a weighted blanket or a ‘numbing’ effect. It’s neither pleasant nor unpleasant.
My sketchpad sense of it is: Leaning on the support of Reason. Something wants me to be soothed, to be reassured, that there is Reasonableness and Order, and it can handle things. That most things can be Solved with … correct thinking or conceptualization or model-building or something.
So, it’s a projection and all, but I don’t trust this “thing” whatever it is, much. It also seems to have many advantages. And it may make it pretty hard for me to have a fully alive and embodied conversation with you.
Curious if any of this resonates with you or with anyone else’s sense of you, or if I’m off the mark. But um also this can be ignored or taken offline as well, since it’s not adding to the overall conversation and is just an interpersonal thing.
I did feel inhibited from having as much fun as I’d have liked to in this exchange because it seemed like while you were on the whole trying to make a good thing happen, you were somewhat scared in a triggered and triggerable way. This might have caused the distortion you’re describing. Helpful and encouraging to hear that you picked up on that and it bothered you enough to mention.
Your response here is really perplexing to me and didn’t go in the direction I expected at all. I am guessing there’s some weird communication breakdown happening. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I guess all I have left is: I care about you, I like you, and I wish well for you. <3
It seems like you’re having difficulty imagining that I’m responding to my situation as I understand it, and I don’t know what else you might think I’m doing.
I read the comment you’re responding to as suggesting something like “your impression of Unreal’s internal state was so different from her own experience of her internal state that she’s very confused”.
I was relying on her self-reports, like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe#g9vLjj7rpGDH99adj