I enjoyed this essay, especially the addition to the standard story whereby the monkey has levers with things like “no real man would back down from this” attached. If your goal was to write an explanation of the standard narrative of Lizard/Monkey/Executive then I quite liked it (unsolicited editorial remarks from me would be that it’s a bit lengthy/wordy and more examples of situations and which levers the monkey pulls would be persoanlly appreciated).
I felt though that you were trying to build to a deeper insight at the end, and while I think I agree with the generator of these words:
But all this takes work. And the biggest obstacle is the illusion that this work is unnecessary—that in reality, we are already a cohesive whole that operates naturally in an efficient harmony, when nothing could be further from the truth.
There are many life experiences that could cause you to say them, so I’m not sure what you have in mind—it would be helpful to have examples of times when you/someone you know was like “Yeah, I know the implications of being made of sub-agents” and then made mistakes and realised that they hadn’t properly internalised it at all.
But I guess you’ll do that with future posts, which I’m excited to read.
Also, this made me chuckle:
[Ed. note: large chunks of this paper were taken from a writing assignment on Plato. I make no apologies.]
If this works, it will serve as a kind of introduction to a series
Yeah, this seemed like a good introduction.
It doesn’t seem like it’s yet gotten to the part where we (generic hypothetical reader “we”) know if the sequence was going anywhere new yet. So I’d hope to see one or two posts exploring the further ramifications that I assume you’re building towards before evaluating whether this post worked in isolation.
Mild aesthetic note: I felt like it apologized a bit too much for the outlandish metaphors. I think a single apology in the beginning and then just owning it would probably be better.
I enjoyed this essay, especially the addition to the standard story whereby the monkey has levers with things like “no real man would back down from this” attached. If your goal was to write an explanation of the standard narrative of Lizard/Monkey/Executive then I quite liked it (unsolicited editorial remarks from me would be that it’s a bit lengthy/wordy and more examples of situations and which levers the monkey pulls would be persoanlly appreciated).
I felt though that you were trying to build to a deeper insight at the end, and while I think I agree with the generator of these words:
There are many life experiences that could cause you to say them, so I’m not sure what you have in mind—it would be helpful to have examples of times when you/someone you know was like “Yeah, I know the implications of being made of sub-agents” and then made mistakes and realised that they hadn’t properly internalised it at all.
But I guess you’ll do that with future posts, which I’m excited to read.
Also, this made me chuckle:
Yup. At this stage I’m just describing a thing. I’m going to build up to how to work with it in much more detail, in later episodes.
Yeah, this seemed like a good introduction.
It doesn’t seem like it’s yet gotten to the part where we (generic hypothetical reader “we”) know if the sequence was going anywhere new yet. So I’d hope to see one or two posts exploring the further ramifications that I assume you’re building towards before evaluating whether this post worked in isolation.
Mild aesthetic note: I felt like it apologized a bit too much for the outlandish metaphors. I think a single apology in the beginning and then just owning it would probably be better.