I’m getting strong DarqqWolf vibes to this whole saga
Although I’ve been that guy like 15 yrs ago, so I don’t fault him for it that much
And at least he’s pushing a fairly novel idea and taking it seriously
R S
Karma: 7
Everyone is more likely to move to cities
I vaguely remember that some physicist calculated that the density of everything you want increases by 15% every time a city doubles in size
So there’s essentially a gravitational pull to cities
Not unlike how (unconstrained by gravity) sea creatures continue to grow in mass because it’s more heat energy efficient due to the difference in scaling of volume to surface area
I agree with this insofar as this has always been my default / 60% case
Selfishly I also hope this is how it plays out (for sake of my career)
I also believe that it is the mainstream view
But independently I think there’s a 20 to 30% chance that this is it, singularity hits very soon
And I have to be prepared for that
Yeah I like that approach
Part of it’s probably that I work very long hours often 7 days a week (blah blah stash money before ASI kills my differentiator)
The biggest thing is not having a goal of being able to prove a solution to myself
Like stop the search early basically
Don’t need to formalize or document everything or remember every finding
I think most of the time the brain actually does a pretty good job of gradually solving problems over time without conscious thought
We don’t think of it as thought because it’s not conscious or subtitled by our auditory processing system
But it still thought & learning
Relying on that implicit system instead often gets me better results than logically formalized versions
I guess now I’m kind of debating the core premise of the post—that it’s even possible or useful overall to discover or learn in that way, or that it’s real learning
But it probably is helpful for some % of people who are less tunnely / tic-prone
Maybe I’m just jealous that it works for some people after devoting (and largely wasting) so much time on it myself
Not sure
I basically discovered the same form of thinking after I learned the concept of amplification and distillation
The long-term results of this was severe OCD that took me 1.5-2 years to cut back
This is not to say that it’s a bad idea, or a bad idea for everyone
But it’s a very, very bad idea for some people
Basically I would spend so many hours every day just thinking, stuck in thought loops, stuck trying to gain some value out of generalizing
Trying to compress mental models that are impossible to learn implicitly into simplified models/memonics and then learn how to use them reflectively
Etc etc
It’s a fucking mess if you go too far
And it’s hard to know if you’ve gone too far
At least it was for me, until I was slowly working through it through months of therapy
And then realized oh this is really all because of that stupid fucking thought pattern thing I’m obsessed with
Especially the idea of trying to think it faster the FIRST time
That in particular can be paralyzing, this sense that you should be able to think it the right way the first time
Very slippery slope
It’s like mindfulness, generally good up to a point, but it’s absolutely possible to go too far and have it cripple your life
I agree with this although it makes me think about company culture
There is huge emergent value to some of the.. let’s call them “softer” communication approaches
It becomes possible to get out of random suboptimal Nash equilibriums almost immediately
People can give more to each other, and better receive feedback
But I think the only way to do this is by having the type of people who already think in those terms and prefer them
There’s not a lot you can do to enforce it
But it’s still a thing, and in my opinion it’s still a thing worth moving spaces for (to the extent that you have the luxury to do so)
I don’t know that it scales very well, but at a certain scale it’s an incredible thing
I’m currently leaving a job over this
There are still some people who I know are capable of engaging in this way
But we’ve kind of lost the battle, we lost too many critical people in our management chain
So everyone is kind of reverting to these shittier communication styles
It’s a bummer, and it just slows everything down so much