The Seven Secular Sermons guy. Long-time ingroup member. Current occupation: applied AI in media. Divorced dad of three in Leipzig, Germany.
chaosmage
Karma: 2,877
I love this very much, so I turned it into a poem, that I think could be lyrics for a song (using tunes like “Amazing Grace” or “House if the Rising Sun”) for people like the Bayesian Choir or occasions like the Secular Solstice.
https://sevensecularsermons.org/the-twelve-virtues-of-rationality
Maybe the part about the nameless virtue should be a chorus repeated after each of the first eleven, instead of a tinal stanza, to remind that this one is before the others, and because songs with choruses are good?
First I heard of it was from an anesthesiologist who was very happy with how it is the only way to get to full anesthesia without depressing the patient’s heart rate, so for senior patients it was really the only option. In retrospect, his enthusiasm about it does seem suspicious, but we were surrounded by professors and I don’t think he was lying.
What’s true already is the case, not worse from owning up. To not be open anyways will never make it stop.
Because it’s real, it is there for interaction with. What is untrue cannot be where there’s truth that we can live.
And we can stand reality, the truth that we admit. We know because we’re already in fact enduring it.
the Daydication technique
Yes Scott’s analysis was more believable than yours. That continues to be the case.
I think high pressure environments such as startups and cults need to avoid having members who cannot handle high pressure, such as people genetically predisposed to psychotic breaks, or people who are taking too many psychedelics.
Cults actually do this. I claim expertise here because I have a master’s degree in psychology of religion and some minor but peer-reviewed published papers on new religious movements. I have found that cults tend to have screening procedures to weed out the psychotic among the applicants, because these always make trouble. (Cults get a lot more of those applicants than the average proportion among the general population.) There are differences, but the commonality is that the person is taught a protective exercise (some of these I actually think might plausibly help) and told to do that exercise in case of distressing events of the particular type. Then if they continue to report such experiences, it is their own fault for having done too little of the exercise, and then that is reason enough to throw them out.
MIRI is not a cult but maybe it should learn from them.
You are right, I agree.
It seems to me that some types of highly hierarchical organizations rely on this propsed “mindless follower switch” more heavily than others: religions, militaries, political parties come to mind. These all lean male. And they all used to be entirely male, until they were reformed during evolutionarily recent trends against gender inequality.
Thank you for your excellent work. It is much more extensive than I knew. I have much enjoyed your ACX Podcast and will definitely check out some of the other things you linked here.
Please kindly consider narrating my Seven Secular Sermons at https://www.sevensecularsermons.org . I have made my own recordings, but on poor equipment and with faint a German accent. I’m sure you could far surpass those if you wanted.
“The Social Leap” by William von Hippel. He basically says we diverged from chimps when we left the forests for the savannah not only by becoming more cooperative (standard example: sclera that make our focus of attention common knowledge) but also by becoming much more flexible in our social behaviors, cooperating or competing much more dependent on context, over the last six million years.
I have tried and failed to find a short quote in it to paste here. It’s a long and occasionally meandering book, much more alike the anthropological than the rationalist literature.
Are most personality disorders really trust disorders?
I didn’t say the risk was “very high” (which would indeed be nonsense), I said it is non-zero. And I personally know two men who were tricked into becomng fathers.
And the thing with average intelligence is that only 50% of the population has it. For both partners to have it has to be (slightly) less likely than that.
PSA: you have less control over whether you have kids, or how many you get, than people generally believe. There are biological problems you might not know you have, there are women who lie about contraception, there are hormonal pressures you won’t feel till you reach a certain age, there are twins and stillbirth, and most of all there are super horny split second decisions in the literal heat of the moment that your system 2 is too slow to stop.
I understand this doesn’t answer the question, I just took the opportunity to share a piece of information that I consider not well-understood enough. Please have a plan for the scenario where your reproductive strategy doesn’t work out.
This is the other, more in-depth post I was preparing.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5SbwfQgHCoGRG9LQ9/inside-view-outside-view-and-opposing-view
Inside View, Outside View… And Opposing View
I continue to stand by this post.
I believe that in our studies of human cognition, we have relatively neglected the aggressive parts of it. We understand they’re there, but they’re kind of yucky and unpleasant, so they get relatively little attention. We can and should go into more detail, try to understand, harness and optimize aggression, because it is part of the brains that we’re trying to run rationality on.
I am preparing another post to do this in more depth.
None
Leipzig, Germany
You should just smile at strangers a lot
I’d like to complain that the original post popularizing really bright lights was mine in 2013: My simple hack for increased alertness and improved cognitive functioning: very bright light — LessWrong . This was immediately adopted at MIRI and (I think obviously) led to the Lumenator described by Eliezer three years later.
I suspect it is creation of memories. You don’t experience time when you’re not creating memories, and they’re some kind of very subtle object that lasts from one moment to (at least) the next so they leave a very subtle trace in causality, and the input that goes into them is correlated in time, because it is (some small selection from) the perceptions and representations you had simultaneously when you formed the memory.
I even believe you experience a present moment particularly intensely when you’re creating a long-term memory—I use this to consciously choose to create long-term memories, and it subjectively seems to work.
Interesting. Borderline or PTSD rather than cyclothymia?
I don’t disagree that’s where a standard clinical interview would end up, but aren’t these basically residual categories where to put people who aren’t sane but don’t clearly fit any of the other boxes? Like, not false, but it doesn’t exactly constrain the space of where that weird outlier mind of his might be going next.
I’d be very interested in what would happen if he couldn’t have his phone for a week.