Update: Just yesterday, I did a gentler version of “pulling someone’s head up from their phone” to Eli Tyre. It was mostly wordless, and involved no action on my part that would be really perceivable to an outside observer. He said he would describe his experience here; hopefully he’ll do so while the experience is still fresh in his mind.
ialdabaoth
Karma: 4,810
Actually, there absolutely can be mistaking the impressiveness of pictures drawn by a person with the ‘visual Looking’ skill. If you get certain stylistic aspects wrong, or come from the wrong class/race/etc., it gets called “degenerate” instead of impressive.
My specific problem, is that the people who are awesome, who actively support me in my projects, associate with people who WANT THEM TO STOP SUPPORTING ME.
As a motivational hack towards any kind of project, it really helps to set yourself up to have recurrent social interactions with people who support you in that project.
I’m curious what you believe one should do when others explicitly fight one’s attempt to set themselves up to have recurrent social interactions with people who support them.
Okay. What is a “mathematical description”? What does it mean that “your brain is governed by mathematical laws”? How and where are those facts encoded, such that you emit those words?
Ohhhh. Okay.
THAT I tried to cut off her hair isn’t the “unusual thing”. HOW I tried to cut of her hair is the “unusual thing”. Specifically, the non-verbal signals of intent, dominance, objectification, and raw power, pointed directly at her, while threatening something she cared about, are the “unusual thing”.
I’m starting to think you were accusing me of believing in something supernatural?
I DID describe that thing! “Physically moving, with intent, to cut off the girl’s hair” is EXACTLY what “whispering in someone’s ear and making them twitch” is! EXACTLY. It’s not a different situation! But you seemed to want something more salacious, so I refused to give it to you. I want you to understand, but I’m not here to amuse you.
Nope! Maybe some other time.
Here’s a concrete thing that actually happened once! (More or less. Small details have been modified to extract pith.)
A girl came to me for dance lessons. One of the things that she wanted was to understand how to “push through” things that she knew her body could do, but her mind couldn’t.
We talked a lot about agency, about CARING. About how, when you know you really care, you can always find a way to push through. She wasn’t getting it.
Finally, I looked at her hair. It was strawberry-blonde, down to her knees, and always meticulously brushed, conditioned, and perfumed.
Then I asked her, “what will you let me do, to explain to you what CARING feels like?”
She looked at me and said something like “at this point, do whatever you have to.”
So I said, “watch this. This is what caring feels like.”
And I picked up a hair clipper and turned it on, and with my other hand I grabbed a fistful of her hair...
And she freaked, and screamed at me, and I let go, and she pulled away, and she stormed out. And the next week, she came back and we had a long, intense conversation about CARING.
And I would never, EVER have actually cut her hair. But if I hadn’t aggressively reached for it, and turned on the clippers, she would have seen through it. She had to get, in her gut, what was at stake.
The relationship was pretty strained after that, but she finally understood CARING.
Brother, you ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie.
twitch I really REALLY want to explain why this is a bad idea, but explaining why it is a bad idea is currently a bad idea. Some local sociopolitcal stuff will need to calm down first, and then I can explain.
EDIT: No, wait. I think I can gesture at it, even if I can’t explain fully yet.
There is something about … concepts that I’m going to call “sovereignty” and “agency”, which seem deeply connected with Looking.
Something I’ve learned to do, occasionally, is sit down with someone and say “Hey. You’ve been taught that you’re not allowed to use your sovereignty and agency to Look. I really think you should Look.” And then they flail a bit, like someone who doesn’t know how to wiggle their ears trying to learn, and I sigh and say “hey. If I deliberately fuck with your agency, in a way that causes you to feel your sovereignty being attacked, you’ll actually notice what your sovereignty feels like, and then you can learn to play around in that space. May I do that? It feels kind of scary and violating, so I don’t want to do it without your permission.”
And then they say “umm no?”, and I go away.
But sometimes they look at me suspiciously, then say “okay go for it”, and I do it.
And sometimes they react by saying “oh wow! THAT’S my agency! THAT’S my sovereingty! holy shit!” and then they take off like a rocket, and then I (or someone else) can start showing them how to use it to Look.
But sometimes they freak the fuck out and say “HOW DARE YOU TOUCH THAT I DID NOT GIVE YOU PERMISSION TO DO THAT I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT YOU’D BE TOUCHING NEVER DO THAT TO ANYONE EVER AGAIN!!”
But the thing is, people are touching them like that—pulling subliminally on their sovereignty—all the time, constantly. It’s just below the threshold of their conscious noticing; most of the overt attacks on people’s sovereignty in the West happen during childhood, when we’re being trained to get used to the local incentives. So it’s hard for them to notice that the attacks are happening at all, unless you do something pretty overt to knock them out of where their perception has settled.
I dunno, did any of that make sense?
Oh man, I’d LOVE to hear what comes of this.
Hi there. I think I understand Val’s thing. (Specifically, I think I understand Val’s thing enough that I am imagine Val being wryly amused by my saying “I think I understand Val’s thing”.)
Let’s talk about the cellphone analogy for a minute.
Say you see someone who is looking down at their phone, instead of Looking around them. You’re trying to explain Looking to them, and they keep staring at their phone and typing “yeah yeah okay, but how do you know I’m not Looking right now?”
And you type “I’m watching you stare at your phone. If your Looking, your head would be up and your eyes would be pointed at me.”
And they type, “my eyes ARE pointed at you. I’m looking RIGHT AT YOU”, as they look intently at your chat icon on their screen.
And you sigh, stop typing, and gently speak right into their ear, “no. LOOK AT ME.”
They twitch uncomfortably and type, “I don’t know what you did, but that was deeply uncomfortable. Please don’t do that again.”
And then you sigh and shrug, and they type “so anyway, how do you know I’m not Looking?”
And then you shrug and go look for someone else who’s head is up, because trying to raise this person’s head made them uncomfortable and you don’t want to try any further.
I AM SUMMONED.
It seemed like there was a very clear pecking order, where a couple folks I interacted with who claimed to be above such status games quite evidently practiced them regularly.
I would have liked to believe this was only a small subset of the Rationalists, and that most people weren’t like this. This may be the case. However, I am quite confident that said Rationalists are or were considered high-status in the community, whether people admit this or otherwise.
Can we please start taking this seriously?
Oh. OHHHH.
I now understand MUCH better when to, and when not to, second-guess myself. I’ve been using my status module to second-guess myself, instead of my prediction module. And I hadn’t even noticed that there was a difference I could feel.
Well, fuck that.
If you want to find hidden inefficiencies to exploit, don’t look for unknown slopes; look for pixelation along the boundaries of well-worn maps.
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.
I’m pretty sure there’s no good answer to this, yet. I have my own intuitions, which are vastly different from everyone else’s—but the general pattern of what actually happens seems to be “keep going until some kind of cultural tipping point happens, the current regime loses the Mandate of Heaven, and a revolution puts them all up against the wall.”
Some people are really good at telling when to foment a revolution, but this seems regrettably uncorrelated with being good at telling whether the revolution is justified, or will lead to better results.
Or to get them to do that in the politician’s (and his in-group’s) favor.
Who do you think is a better director of MIRI: Nate Soares, or Luke Muelhauser?