(I have successfully done Unbendable Arm after Valentine showed me in person, without explaining any of the biomechanics. My experience of it didn’t involve visualization, but felt like placing my fingertips on the wall across the room and resolving that they’d stay there. Contra jimmy’s comment, IIRC I initially held my arm wrong without any cueing.)
My guess is that for lack of good concepts for distinguishing “believing in” from deception, LessWrongers, EAs, and “nerds” in general are often both too harsh on folks doing positive-sum “believing in,” and too lax on folks doing deception. (The “too lax” happens because many can tell there’s a “believing in”-shaped gap in their notions of e.g. “don’t say better things about your start-up than a reasonable outside observer would,” but they can’t tell its exact shape, so they loosen their “don’t deceive” in general.)
I feel like this post is similarly too lax on, not deception, but propositional-and-false religious beliefs.
(I have successfully done Unbendable Arm after Valentine showed me in person, without explaining any of the biomechanics. My experience of it didn’t involve visualization, but felt like placing my fingertips on the wall across the room and resolving that they’d stay there. Contra jimmy’s comment, IIRC I initially held my arm wrong without any cueing.)
Strongly related: Believing In. From that post:
I feel like this post is similarly too lax on, not deception, but propositional-and-false religious beliefs.