Related to: Half-assing it with everything you've got; Wasted motion; Say it Loud.

Once upon a time (true story), I was on my way to a hotel in a new city.  I knew the hotel was many miles down this long, branchless road.  So I drove for a long while.

After a while, I began to worry I had passed the hotel.

So, instead of proceeding at 60 miles per hour the way I had been, I continued in the same direction for several more minutes at 30 miles per hour, wondering if I should keep going or turn around.

If you are a person who finds it difficult to tell "no" to their friends, this one weird trick may save you a lot of time!

Scenario 1

Alice: "Hi Bob! You are a programmer, right?"

Bob: "Hi Alice! Yes, I am."

Alice: "I have this cool idea, but I need someone to help me. I am not good with computers, and I need someone smart whom I could trust, so they wouldn't steal my idea. Would you have a moment to listen to me?"

Alice explains to Bob her idea that would completely change the world. Well, at the least the world of bicycle shopping.

Instead of having many shops for bicycles, there could be one huge e-shop that would collect all the information about bicycles from all the existing shops. The customers would specify what kind of a bike they want (and where they live), and the system would find all bikes that fit the specification, and display them ordered by lowest price, including the price of delivery; then it would redirect them to the specific page of the specific vendor. Customers would love to use this one website, instead of having to visit multiple shops and compare. And the vendors would have to use this shop, because that's where the customers would be. Taking a fraction of a percent from the sales could make Alice (and also Bob, if he helps her) incredibly rich.

Bob is skeptical about it. The project suffers from the obvious chicken-and-egg problem: without vendors already there, the customers will not come (and if they come by accident, they will quickly leave, never to return again); and without customers already there, there is no reason for the vendors to cooperate. There are a few ways how to approach this problem, but the fact that Alice didn't even think about it is a red flag. She also has no idea who are the big players in the world of bicycle selling; and generally she didn't do her homework. But after pointing out all these objections, Alice still remains super enthusiastic about the project. She promises she will take care about everything -- she just cannot write code, and she needs Bob's help for this part.

Bob believes strongly in the division of labor, and that friends should help each other. He considers Alice his friend, and he will likely need some help from her in the future. Fact is, with perfect specification, he could make the webpage in a week or two. But he considers bicycles to be an extremely boring topic, so he wants to spend as little time as possible on this project. Finally, he has an idea:

"Okay, Alice, I will make the website for you. But first I need to know exactly how the page will look like, so that I don't have to keep changing it over and over again. So here is the homework for you -- take a pen and paper, and make a sketch of how exactly the web will look like. All the dialogs, all the buttons. Don't forget logging in and logging out, editing the customer profile, and everything else that is necessary for the website to work as intended. Just look at the papers and imagine that you are the customer: where exactly would you click to register, and to find the bicycle you want? Same for the vendor. And possibly a site administrator. Also give me the list of criteria people will use to find the bike they want. Size, weight, color, radius of wheels, what else? And when you have it all ready, I will make the first version of the website. But until then, I am not writing any code."

Alice leaves, satisfied with the outcome.

This happened a year ago.

No, Alice doesn't have the design ready, yet. Once in a while, when she meets Bob, she smiles at him and apologizes that she didn't have the time to start working on the design. Bob smiles back and says it's okay, he'll wait. Then they change the topic.

Scenario 2

Cyril: "Hi Diana! You speak Spanish, right?"

Diana: "Hi Cyril! Yes, I do."

Cyril: "You know, I think Spanish is the most cool language ever, and I would really love to learn it! Could you please give me some Spanish lessons, once in a while? I totally want to become fluent in Spanish, so I could travel to Spanish-speaking countries and experience their culture and food. Would you please help me?"

Diana is happy that someone takes interest in her favorite hobby. It would be nice to have someone around she could practice Spanish conversation with. The first instinct is to say yes.

But then she remembers (she knows Cyril for some time; they have a lot of friends in common, so they meet quite regularly) that Cyril is always super enthusiastic about something he is totally going to do... but when she meets him next time, he is super enthusiastic about something completely different; and she never heard about him doing anything serious about his previous dreams.

Also, Cyril seems to seriously underestimate how much time does it take to learn a foreign language fluently. Some lessons, once in a while will not do it. He also needs to study on his own. Preferably every day, but twice a week is probably a minimum, if he hopes to speak the language fluently within a year. Diana would be happy to teach someone Spanish, but not if her effort will most likely be wasted.

Diana: "Cyril, there is this great website called Duolingo, where you can learn Spanish online completely free. If you give it about ten minutes every day, maybe after a few months you will be able to speak fluently. And anytime we meet, we can practice the vocabulary you have already learned."

This would be the best option for Diana. No work, and another opportunity to practice. But Cyril insists:

"It's not the same without the live teacher. When I read something from the textbook, I cannot ask additional questions. The words that are taught are often unrelated to the topics I am interested in. I am afraid I will just get stuck with the... whatever was the website that you mentioned."

For Diana this feels like a red flag. Sure, textbooks are not optimal. They contain many words that the student will not use frequently, and will soon forget them. On the other hand, the grammar is always useful; and Diana doesn't want to waste her time explaining the basic grammar that any textbook could explain instead. If Cyril learns the grammar and some basic vocabulary, then she can teach him all the specialized vocabulary he is interested in. But now it feels like Cyril wants to avoid all work. She has to draw a line:

"Cyril, this is the address of the website." She takes his notebook and writes 'www.duolingo.com'. "You register there, choose Spanish, and click on the first lesson. It is interactive, and it will not take you more than ten minutes. If you get stuck there, write here what exactly it was that you didn't understand; I will explain it when we meet. If there is no problem, continue with the second lesson, and so on. When we meet next time, tell me which lessons you have completed, and we will talk about them. Okay?"

Cyril nods reluctantly.

This happened a year ago.

Cyril and Diana have met repeatedly during the year, but Cyril never brought up the topic of Spanish language again.

Scenario 3

Erika: "Filip, would you give me a massage?"

Filip: "Yeah, sure. The lotion is in the next room; bring it to me!"

Erika brings the massage lotion and lies on the bed. Filip massages her back. Then they make out and have sex.

This happened a year ago. Erika and Filip are still a happy couple.

Filip's previous relationships didn't work well, in long term. In retrospect, they all followed a similar scenario. At the beginning, everything seemed great. Then at some moment the girl started acting... unreasonably?... asking Filip to do various things for her, and then acting annoyed when Filip did exactly what he was asked to do. This happened more and more frequently, and at some moment she broke up with him. Sometimes she provided explanation for breaking up that Filip was unable to decipher.

Filip has a friend who is a successful salesman. Successful both professionally and with women. When Filip admitted to himself that he is unable to solve the problem on his own, he asked his friend for advice.

"It's because you're a f***ing doormat," said the friend. "The moment a woman asks you to do anything, you immediately jump and do it, like a well-trained puppy. Puppies are cute, but not attractive. Have you ready any of those books I sent you, like, ten years ago? I bet you didn't. Well, it's all there."

Filip sighed: "Look, I'm not trying to become a pick-up artist. Or a salesman. Or anything. No offense, but I'm not like you, personality-wise, I never have been, and I don't want to become your - or anyone else's - copy. Even if it would mean greater success in anything. I prefer to treat other people just like I would want them to treat me. Most people reciprocate nice behavior; and those who don't, well, I avoid them as much as possible. This works well with my friends. It also works with the girls... at the beginning... but then somehow... uhm... Anyway, all your books are about manipulating people, which is ethically unacceptable for me. Isn't there some other way?"

"All human interaction is manipulation; the choice is between doing it right or wrong, acting consciously or driven by your old habits..." started the friend, but then he gave up. "Okay, I see you're not interested. Just let me show you the most obvious mistake you make. You believe that when you are nice to people, they will perceive you as nice, and most of them will reciprocate. And when you act like an asshole, it's the other way round. That's correct, on some level; and in a perfect world this would be the whole truth. But on a different level, people also perceive nice behavior as weakness; especially if you do it habitually, as if you don't have any other option. And being an asshole obviously signals strength: you are not afraid to make other people angry. Also, in long term, people become used to your behavior, good or bad. The nice people don't seem so nice anymore, but they still seem weak. Then, ironicaly, if the person well-known to be nice refuses to do something once, people become really angry, because their expectations were violated. And if the asshole decides to do something nice once, they will praise him, because he surprised them pleasantly. You should be an asshole once in a while, to make people see that you have a choice, so they won't take your niceness for granted. Or if your girlfriend wants something from you, sometimes just say no, even if you could have done it. She will respect you more, and then she will enjoy more the things you do for her."

Filip: "Well, I... probably couldn't do that. I mean, what you say seems to make sense, however much I hate to admit it. But I can't imagine doing it myself, especially to a person I love. It's just... uhm... wrong."

"Then, I guess, the very least you could do is to ask her to do something for you first. Even if it's symbolic, that doesn't matter; human relationships are mostly about role-playing anyway. Don't jump immediately when you are told to; always make her jump first, if only a little. That will demonstrate strength without hurting anyone. Could you do that?"

Filip wasn't sure, but at the next opportunity he tried it, and it worked. And it kept working. Maybe it was all just a coincidence, maybe it was a placebo effect, but Filip doesn't mind. At first it felt kinda artificial, but then it became natural. And later, to his surprise, Filip realized that practicing these symbolic demands actually makes it easier to ask when he really needed something. (In which case sometimes he was asked to do something first, because his girlfriend -- knowingly or not? he never had the courage to ask -- copied the pattern; or maybe she has already known it long before. But he didn't mind that either.)

The lesson is: If you find yourself repeatedly in situations where people ask you to do something for them, but at the end they don't seem to appreciate what you did for them, or don't even care about the thing they asked you to do... and yet you find it difficult to say "no"... ask them to contribute to the project first.

This will help you get rid of the projects they don't care about (including the ones they think they care about in far mode, but do not care about enough to actually work on them in near mode) without being the one who refuses cooperation. Also, the act of asking the other person to contribute, after being asked to do something for them, mitigates the status loss inherent in working for them.

Accounts "The_Lion" and "The_Lion2" are banned now. Here is some background, mostly for the users who weren't here two years ago:

User "Eugine_Nier" was banned for retributive downvoting in July 2014. He keeps returning to the website using new accounts, such as "Azathoth123", "Voiceofra", "The_Lion", and he keeps repeating the behavior that got him banned originally.

The original ban was permanent. It will be enforced on all future known accounts of Eugine. (At random moments, because moderators sometimes feel too tired to play whack-a-mole.) This decision is not open to discussion.

Please note that the moderators of LW are the opposite of trigger-happy. Not counting spam, there is on average less than one account per year banned. I am writing this explicitly, to avoid possible misunderstanding among the new users. Just because you have read about someone being banned, it doesn't mean that you are now at risk.

Most of the time, LW discourse is regulated by the community voting on articles and comments. Stupid or offensive comments get downvoted; you lose some karma, then everyone moves on. In rare cases, moderators may remove specific content that goes against the rules. The account ban is only used in the extreme cases (plus for obvious spam accounts). Specifically, on LW people don't get banned for merely not understanding something or disagreeing with someone.

What does "retributive downvoting" mean? Imagine that in a discussion you write a comment that someone disagrees with. Then in a few hours you will find that your karma has dropped by hundreds of points, because someone went through your entire comment history and downvoted all comments you ever wrote on LW; most of them completely unrelated to the debate that "triggered" the downvoter.

Such behavior is damaging to the debate and the community. Unlike downvoting a specific comment, this kind of mass downvoting isn't used to correct a faux pas, but to drive a person away from the website. It has especially strong impact on new users, who don't know what is going on, so they may mistake it for a reaction of the whole community. But even in experienced users it creates an "ugh field" around certain topics known to invoke the reaction. Thus a single user has achieved disproportional control over the content and the user base of the website. This is not desired, and will be punished by the site owners and the moderators.

To avoid rules lawyering, there is no exact definition of how much downvoting breaks the rules. The rule of thumb is that you should upvote or downvote each comment based on the value of that specific comment. You shouldn't vote on the comments regardless of their content merely because they were written by a specific user.

Thanks to the reaction to this article and some conversations, I'm convinced that it's worth trying to renovate and restore LW. Eliezer, Nate, and Matt Fallshaw are all on board and have empowered me as an editor to see what we can do about reshaping LW to meet what the community currently needs. This involves a combination of technical changes and social changes, which we'll try to make transparently and non-intrusively.

A few months ago, Vaniver wrote a really long post speculating about potential futures for Less Wrong, with a focus on the idea that the spread of the Less Wrong diaspora has left the site weak and fragmented. I wasn't here for our high water mark, so I don't really have an informed opinion on what has socially changed since then. But a number of complaints are technical, and as an IT person, I thought I had some useful things to say.

I argued at the time that many of the technical challenges of the diaspora were solved problems, and that the solution was NNTP -- an ancient, yet still extant, discussion protocol. I am something of a crank on the subject and didn't expect much of a reception. I was pleasantly surprised by the 18 karma it generated, and tried to write up a full post arguing the point.

I failed. I was trying to write a manifesto, didn't really know how to do it right, and kept running into a vast inferential distance I couldn't seem to cross. I'm a product of a prior age of the Internet, from before the http prefix assumed its imperial crown; I kept wanting to say things that I knew would make no sense to anyone who came of age this millennium. I got bogged down in irrelevant technical minutia about how to implement features X, Y, and Z. Eventually I decided I was attacking the wrong problem; I was thinking about 'how do I promote NNTP', when really I should have been going after 'what would an ideal discussion platform look like and how does NNTP get us there, if it does?'

So I'm going to go after that first, and work on the inferential distance problem, and then I'm going to talk about NNTP, and see where that goes and what could be done better. I still believe it's the closest thing to a good, available technological schelling point, but it's going to take a lot of words to get there from here, and I might change my mind under persuasive argument. We'll see.

Fortunately, this is Less Wrong, and sequences are a thing here. This is the first post in an intended sequence on mechanisms of discussion. I know it's a bit off the beaten track of Less Wrong subject matter. I posit that it's both relevant to our difficulties and probably more useful and/or interesting than most of what comes through these days. I just took the 2016 survey and it has a couple of sections on the effects of the diaspora, so I'm guessing it's on topic for meta purposes if not for site-subject purposes.

Less Than Ideal Discussion

To solve a problem you must first define it. Looking at the LessWrong 2.0 post, I see the following technical problems, at a minimum; I'll edit this with suggestions from comments.

1. Aggregation of posts. Our best authors have formed their own fiefdoms and their work is not terribly visible here. We currently have limited support for this via the sidebar, but that's it.
2. Aggregation of comments. You can see diaspora authors in the sidebar, but you can't comment from here.
3. Aggregation of community. This sounds like a social problem but it isn't. You can start a new blog, but unless you plan on also going out of your way to market it then your chances of starting a discussion boil down to "hope it catches the attention of Yvain or someone else similarly prominent in the community." Non-prominent individuals can theoretically post here; yet this is the place we are decrying as moribund.
4. Incomplete and poor curation. We currently do this via Promoted, badly, and via the diaspora sidebar, also badly.
5. Pitiful interface feature set. This is not so much a Less Wrong-specific problem as a 2010s-internet problem; people who inhabit SSC have probably seen me respond to feature complaints with "they had something that did that in the 90s, but nobody uses it." (my own bugbear is searching for comments by author-plus-content).
6. Changes are hamstrung by the existing architecture, which gets you volunteer reactions like this one.

I see these meta-technical problems:

1. Expertise is scarce. Few people are in a position to technically improve the site, and those that are, have other demands on their time.
2. The Trivial Inconvenience Problem limits the scope of proposed changes to those that are not inconvenient to commenters or authors.
3. Getting cooperation from diaspora authors is a coordination problem. Are we better than average at handling those? I don't know.

Slightly Less Horrible Discussion

"Solving" community maintenance is a hard problem, but to the extent that pieces of it can be solved technologically, the solution might include these ultra-high-level elements:

1. Centralized from the user perspective. A reader should be able to interact with the entire community in one place, and it should be recognizable as a community.
2. Decentralized from the author perspective. Diaspora authors seem to like having their own fiefdoms, and the social problem of "all the best posters went elsewhere" can't be solved without their cooperation. Therefore any technical solution must allow for it.
3. Proper division of labor. Scott Alexander probably should not have to concern himself with user feature requests; that's not his comparative advantage and I'd rather he spend his time inventing moral cosmologies. I suspect he would prefer the same. The same goes for Eliezer Yudkowski or any of our still-writing-elsewhere folks.
4. Really good moderation tools.
5. Easy entrance. New users should be able to join the discussion without a lot of hassle. Old authors that want to return should be able to do so and, preferably, bring their existing content with them.
6. Easy exit. Authors who don't like the way the community is heading should be able to jump ship -- and, crucially, bring their content with them to their new ship. Conveniently. This is essentially what has happened, except old content is hostage here.
7. Separate policy and mechanism within the site architecture. Let this one pass for now if you don't know what it means; it's the first big inferential hurdle I need to cross and I'll be starting soon enough.

As with the previous, I'll update this from the comments if necessary.

Getting There From Here

As I said at the start, I feel on firmer ground talking about technical issues than social ones. But I have to acknowledge one strong social opinion: I believe the greatest factor in Less Wrong's decline is the departure of our best authors for personal blogs. Any plan for revitalization has to provide an improved substitute for a personal blog, because that's where everyone seems to end up going. You need something that looks and behaves like a blog to the author or casual readers, but integrates seamlessly into a community discussion gateway.

I argue that this can be achieved. I argue that the technical challenges are solvable and the inherent coordination problem is also solvable, provided the people involved still have an interest in solving it.

And I argue that it can be done -- and done better than what we have now -- using technology that has existed since the '90s.

I don't argue that this actually will be achieved in anything like the way I think it ought to be. As mentioned up top, I am a crank, and I have no access whatsoever to anybody with any community pull. My odds of pushing through this agenda are basically nil. But we're all about crazy thought experiments, right?

This topic is something I've wanted to write about for a long time. Since it's not typical Less Wrong fare, I'll take the karma on this post as a referendum on whether the community would like to see it here.

Assuming there's interest, the sequence will look something like this (subject to reorganization as I go along, since I'm pulling this from some lengthy but horribly disorganized notes; in particular I might swap subsequences 2 and 3):

1. Technical Architecture
   1. Your Web Browser Is Not Your Client
   2. Specialized Protocols: or, NNTP and its Bastard Children
   3. Moderation, Personal Gardens, and Public Parks
   4. Content, Presentation, and the Division of Labor
   5. The Proper Placement of User Features
   6. Hard Things that are Suddenly Easy: or, what does client control gain us?
   7. Your Web Browser Is Still Not Your Client (but you don't need to know that)
2. Meta-Technical Conflicts (or, obstacles to adoption)
   1. Never Bet Against Convenience
   2. Conflicting Commenter, Author, and Admin Preferences
   3. Lipstick on the Configuration Pig
   4. Incremental Implementation and the Coordination Problem.
   5. Lowering Barriers to Entry and Exit
3. Technical and Social Interoperability
   1. Benefits and Drawbacks of Standards
   2. Input Formats and Quoting Conventions
   3. Faking Functionality
   4. Why Reddit Makes Me Cry
   5. What NNTP Can't Do
4. Implementation of Nonstandard Features
   1. Some desirable feature #1
   2. Some desirable feature #2
   3. ...etc. This subsequence is only necessary if someone actually wants to try and do what I'm arguing for, which I think unlikely.

(Meta-meta: This post was written in Markdown, converted to HTML for posting using Pandoc, and took around four hours to write. I can often be found lurking on #lesswrong or #slatestarcodex on workday afternoons if anyone wants to discuss it, but I don't promise to answer quickly because, well, workday)

[Edited to add: At +10/92% karma I figure continuing is probably worth it. After reading comments I'm going to try to slim it down a lot from the outline above, though. I still want to hit all those points but they probably don't all need a full post's space. Note that I'm not Scott or Eliezer, I write like I bleed, so what I do post will likely be spaced out]

The Brain Preservation Foundation’s Small Mammalian Brain Prize has been won with fantastic preservation of a whole rabbit brain using a new fixative+slow-vitrification process.

• BPF announcement (21CM’s announcement)
• evaluation

• The process was published as “Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation”, McIntyre & Fahy 2015 (mirror)

  We describe here a new cryobiological and neurobiological technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC), which demonstrates the relevance and utility of advanced cryopreservation science for the neurobiological research community. ASC is a new brain-banking technique designed to facilitate neuroanatomic research such as connectomics research, and has the unique ability to combine stable long term ice-free sample storage with excellent anatomical resolution. To demonstrate the feasibility of ASC, we perfuse-fixed rabbit and pig brains with a glutaraldehyde-based fixative, then slowly perfused increasing concentrations of ethylene glycol over several hours in a manner similar to techniques used for whole organ cryopreservation. Once 65% w/v ethylene glycol was reached, we vitrified brains at −135 °C for indefinite long-term storage. Vitrified brains were rewarmed and the cryoprotectant removed either by perfusion or gradual diffusion from brain slices. We evaluated ASC-processed brains by electron microscopy of multiple regions across the whole brain and by Focused Ion Beam Milling and Scanning Electron Microscopy (FIB-SEM) imaging of selected brain volumes. Preservation was uniformly excellent: processes were easily traceable and synapses were crisp in both species. Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation has many advantages over other brain-banking techniques: chemicals are delivered via perfusion, which enables easy scaling to brains of any size; vitrification ensures that the ultrastructure of the brain will not degrade even over very long storage times; and the cryoprotectant can be removed, yielding a perfusable aldehyde-preserved brain which is suitable for a wide variety of brain assays…We have shown that both rabbit brains (10 g) and pig brains (80 g) can be preserved equally well. We do not anticipate that there will be significant barriers to preserving even larger brains such as bovine, canine, or primate brains using ASC.

  (They had problems with 2 pigs and got 1 pig brain successfully cryopreserved but it wasn’t part of the entry. I’m not sure why: is that because the Large Mammalian Brain Prize is not yet set up?)
• previous discussion: Mikula’s plastination came close but ultimately didn’t seem to preserve the whole brain when applied.
• commentary: Alcor, Robin Hanson, John Smart, Evidence-Based Cryonics, Vice, Pop Sci
  

• donation link

To summarize it, you might say that this is a hybrid of current plastination and vitrification methods, where instead of allowing slow plastination (with unknown decay & loss) or forcing fast cooling (with unknown damage and loss), a staged approach is taking: a fixative is injected into the brain first to immediately lock down all proteins and stop all decay/change, and then it is leisurely cooled down to be vitrified.

This is exciting progress because the new method may wind up preserving better than either of the parent methods, but also because it gives much greater visibility into the end-results: the aldehyde-vitrified brains can be easily scanned with electron microscopes and the results seen in high detail, showing fantastic preservation of structure, unlike regular vitrification where the scans leave opaque how good the preservation was. This opacity is one reason that as Mike Darwin has pointed out at length on his blog and jkaufman has also noted that we cannot be confident in how well ALCOR or CI’s vitrification works - because if it didn’t, we have little way of knowing.

EDIT: BPF’s founder Ken Hayworth (Reddit account) has posted a piece, arguing that ALCOR & CI cannot be trusted to do procedures well and that future work should be done via rigorous clinical trials and only then rolled out. “Opinion: The prize win is a vindication of the idea of cryonics, not of unaccountable cryonics service organizations”

…“Should cryonics service organizations immediately start offering this new ASC procedure to their ‘patients’?” My personal answer (speaking for myself, not on behalf of the BPF) has been a steadfast NO. It should be remembered that these same cryonics service organizations have been offering a different procedure for years. A procedure that was not able to demonstrate, to even my minimal expectations, preservation of the brain’s neural circuitry. This result, I must say, surprised and disappointed me personally, leading me to give up my membership in one such organization and to become extremely skeptical of all since. Again, I stress, current cryonics procedures were NOT able to meet our challenge EVEN UNDER IDEAL LABORATORY CONDITIONS despite being offered to paying customers for years[1]. Should we really expect that these same organizations can now be trusted to further develop and properly implement such a new, independently-invented technique for use under non-ideal conditions?

Let’s step back for a moment. A single, independently-researched, scientific publication has come out that demonstrates a method of structural brain preservation (ASC) compatible with long-term cryogenic storage in animal models (rabbit and pig) under ideal laboratory conditions (i.e. a healthy living animal immediately being perfused with fixative). Should this one paper instantly open the floodgates to human application? Under untested real-world conditions where the ‘patient’ is either terminally ill or already declared legally dead? Should it be performed by unlicensed persons, in unaccountable organizations, operating outside of the traditional medical establishment with its checks and balances designed to ensure high standards of quality and ethics? To me, the clear answer is NO. If this was a new drug for cancer therapy, or a new type of heart surgery, many additional steps would be expected before even clinical trials could start. Why should our expectations be any lower for this?

The fact that the ASC procedure has won the brain preservation prize should rightly be seen as a vindication of the central idea of cryonics –the brain’s delicate circuitry underlying memory and personality CAN in fact be preserved indefinitely, potentially serving as a lifesaving bridge to future revival technologies. But, this milestone should certainly not be interpreted as a vindication of the very different cryonics procedures that are practiced on human patients today. And it should not be seen as a mandate for more of the same but with an aldehyde stabilization step casually tacked on. …

[This is one post I've written in an upcoming sequence on what I call "yin". Yin, in short, is the sub-art of giving perception of truth absolutely no resistance as it updates your implicit world-model. Said differently, it's the sub-art of subconsciously seeking out and eliminating ugh fields and also eliminating the inclination to form them in the first place. This is the first piece I wrote, and I think it stands on its own, but it probably won't be the first post in the final sequence. My plan is to flesh out the sequence and then post a guide to yin giving the proper order. I'm posting the originals on my blog, and you can view the original of this post here, but my aim is to post a final sequence here on Less Wrong.]

In this post, I'm going to talk about grief. And sorrow. And the pain of loss.

I imagine this won't be easy for you, my dear reader. And I wish I could say that I'm sorry for that.

…but I'm not.

I think there's a skill to seeing horror clearly. And I think we need to learn how to see horror clearly if we want to end it.

This means that in order to point at the skill, I need to also point at real horror, to show how it works.

So, I'm not sorry that I will make you uncomfortable if I succeed at conveying my thoughts here. I imagine I have to.

Instead, I'm sorry that we live in a universe where this is necessary.

If you Google around, you'll find all kinds of lists of what to say and avoid saying to a grieving person. For reasons I'll aim to make clear later on, I want to focus for a moment on some of the things not to say. Here are a few from Grief.com:

• "He is in a better place."
• "There is a reason for everything."
• "I know how you feel."
• "Be strong."

I can easily imagine someone saying things like this with the best of intentions. They see someone they care about who is suffering greatly, and they want to help.

But to the person who has experienced a loss, these are very unpleasant to hear. The discomfort is often pre-verbal and can be difficult to articulate, especially when in so much pain. But a fairly common theme is something like:

"Don't heave your needs on me. I'm too tired and in too much pain to help you."

If you've never experienced agonizing loss, this might seem really confusing at first — which is why it seems tempting to say those things in the first place, I think. But try assuming that the grieving person sees the situation more clearly, and see if you can make sense of this reaction before reading on.

…

…

…

If you look at the bulleted statements above, there's a way of reading them that says "You're suffering. Maybe try this, to stop your suffering." There's an imposition there, telling the grieving person to add more burden to how they are in the moment. In many cases, the implicit request to stop suffering comes from the speaker's discomfort with the griever's pain, so an uncharitable (but sometimes accurate) read of those statements is "I don't like it when you hurt, so stop hurting."

Notice that the person who lost someone doesn't have to think through all this. They just see it, directly, and emotionally respond. They might not even be able to say why others' comments feel like impositions, but there's very little doubt that they do. It's just that social expectations take so much energy, and the grief is already so much to carry, that it's hard not to notice.

There's only energy for what really, actually matters.

And, it turns out, not much matters when you hurt that much.

I'd like to suggest that grieving is how we experience the process of a very, very deep part of our psyches becoming familiar with a painful truth. It doesn't happen only when someone dies. For instance, people go through a very similar process when mourning the loss of a romantic relationship, or when struck with an injury or illness that takes away something they hold dear (e.g., quadriplegia). I think we even see smaller versions of it when people break a precious and sentimental object, or when they fail to get a job or into a school they had really hoped for, or even sometimes when getting rid of a piece of clothing they've had for a few years.

In general, I think familiarization looks like tracing over all the facets of the thing in question until we intuitively expect what we find. I'm particularly fond of the example of arriving in a city for the first time: At first all I know is the part of the street right in front of where I'm staying. Then, as I wander around, I start to notice a few places I want to remember: the train station, a nice coffee shop, etc. After a while of exploring different alleyways, I might make a few connections and notice that the coffee shop is actually just around the corner from that nice restaurant I went to on my second night there. Eventually the city (or at least those parts of it) start to feel smaller to me, like the distances between familiar locations are shorter than I had first thought, and the areas I can easily think of now include several blocks rather than just parts of streets.

I'm under the impression that grief is doing a similar kind of rehearsal, but specifically of pain. When we lose someone or something precious to us, it hurts, and we have to practice anticipating the lack of the preciousness where it had been before. We have to familiarize ourselves with the absence.

When I watch myself grieve, I typically don't find myself just thinking "This person is gone." Instead, my grief wants me to call up specific images of recurring events — holding the person while watching a show, texting them a funny picture & getting a smiley back, etc. — and then add to that image a feeling of pain that might say "…and that will never happen again." My mind goes to the feeling of wanting to watch a show with that person and remembering they're not there, or knowing that if I send a text they'll never see it and won't ever respond. My mind seems to want to rehearse the pain that will happen, until it becomes familiar and known and eventually a little smaller.

I think grieving is how we experience the process of changing our emotional sense of what's true to something worse than where we started.

Unfortunately, that can feel on the inside a little like moving to the worse world, rather than recognizing that we're already here.

It looks to me like it's possible to resist grief, at least to some extent. I think people do it all the time. And I think it's an error to do so.

If I'm carrying something really heavy and it slips and drops on my foot, I'm likely to yelp. My initial instinct once I yank my foot free might be to clutch my foot and grit my teeth and swear. But in doing so, even though it seems I'm focusing on the pain, I think it's more accurate to say that I'm distracting myself from the pain. I'm too busy yelling and hopping around to really experience exactly what the pain feels like.

I could instead turn my mind to the pain, and look at it in exquisite detail. Where exactly do I feel it? Is it hot or cold? Is it throbbing or sharp or something else? What exactly is the most aversive aspect of it? This doesn't stop the experience of pain, but it does stop most of my inclination to jump and yell and get mad at myself for dropping the object in the first place.

I think the first three so-called "stages of grief" — denial, anger, and bargaining — are avoidance behaviors. They're attempts to distract oneself from the painful emotional update. Denial is like trying to focus on anything other than the hurt foot, anger is like clutching and yelling and getting mad at the situation, and bargaining is like trying to rush around and bandage the foot and clean up the blood. In each case, there's an attempt to keep the mind preoccupied so that it can't start the process of tracing the pain and letting the agonizing-but-true world come to feel true. It's as though there's a part of the psyche that believes it can prevent the horror from being real by avoiding coming to feel as though it's real.

The above might seem kind of abstract, so let me list a very few examples that I think do in fact apply to resisting grief:

• After a breakup, someone might refuse to talk about their ex and insist that no one around them bring up their ex. They might even start dating a lot more right away (the "rebound" phenomenon, or dismissive-avoidant dating patterns). They might insist on acting like their ex doesn't exist, for months, and show flashes of intense anger when they find a lost sweater under their bed that had belonged to the ex.
• While trying to finish a project for a major client (or an important class assignment, if a student), a person might realize that they simply don't have the time they need, and start to panic. They might pour all their time into it, even while knowing on some level that they can't finish on time, but trying desperately anyway as though to avoid looking at the inevitability of their meaningful failure.
• The homophobia of the stereotypical gay man in denial looks to me like a kind of distraction. The painful truth for him here is that he is something he thinks it is wrong to be, so either his morals or his sense of who he is must die a little. Both are agonizing, too much for him to handle, so instead he clutches his metaphorical foot and screams.

In every case, the part of the psyche driving the behavior seems to think that it can hold the horror at bay by preventing the emotional update that the horror is real. The problem is, success requires severely distorting your ability to see what is real, and also your desire to see what's real. This is a cognitive black hole — what I sometimes call a "metacognitive blindspot" — from which it is enormously difficult to return.

This means that if we want to see reality clearly, we have to develop some kind of skill that lets us grieve well — without resistance, without flinching, without screaming to the sky with declarations of war as a distraction from our pain.

We have to be willing to look directly and unwaveringly at horror.

In 2014, my marriage died.

A friend warned me that I might go through two stages of grief: one for the loss of the relationship, and one for the loss of our hoped-for future together.

She was exactly right.

The second one hit me really abruptly. I had been feeling solemn and glum since the previous night, and while riding public transit I found myself crying. Specific imagined futures — of children, of holidays, of traveling together — would come up, as though raising the parts that hurt the most and saying "See this, and wish it farewell."

The pain was so much. I spent most of that entire week just moving around slowly, staring off into space, mostly not caring about things like email or regular meetings.

Two things really stand out for me from that experience.

First, there were still impulses to flinch away. I wanted to cry about how the pain was too much to bear and curl up in a corner — but I could tell that impulse came from a different place in my psyche than the grief did. It felt easier to do that, like I was trading some of my pain for suffering instead and could avoid being present to my own misery. I had worked enough with grief at that point to intuit that I needed to process or digest the pain, and that this slow process would go even more slowly if I tried not to experience it. It required a choice, every moment, to keep my focus on what hurt rather than on how much it hurt or how unfair things were or any other story that decreased the pain I felt in that moment. And it was tiring to make that decision continuously.

Second, there were some things I did feel were important, even in that state. At the start of this post I referenced how mourners can sometimes see others' motives more plainly than those others can. What I imagine is the same thing gave me a clear sense of how much nonsense I waste my time on — how most emails don't matter, most meetings are pointless, most curriculum design thoughts amount to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I also vividly saw how much nonsense I project about who I am and what my personal story is — including the illusions I would cast on myself. Things like how I thought I needed people to admire me to feel motivated, or how I felt most powerful when championing the idea of ending aging. These stories looked embarrassingly false, and I just didn't have the energy to keep lying to myself about them.

What was left, after tearing away the dross, was simple and plain and beautiful in its nakedness. I felt like I was just me, and there were a very few things that still really mattered. And, even while drained and mourning for the lovely future that would never be, I found myself working on those core things. I could send emails, but they had to matter, and they couldn't be full of blather. They were richly honest and plain and simply directed at making the actually important things happen.

It seems to me that grieving well isn't just a matter of learning to look at horror without flinching. It also lets us see through certain kinds of illusion, where we think things matter but at some level have always known they don't.

I think skillful grief can bring us more into touch with our faculty of seeing the world plainly as we already know it to be.

I think we, as a species, dearly need to learn to see the world clearly.

A humanity that makes global warming a politicized debate, with name-calling and suspicion of data fabrication, is a humanity that does not understand what is at stake.

A world that waits until its baby boomers are doomed to die of aging before taking aging seriously has not understood the scope of the problem and is probably still approaching it with distorted thinking.

A species that has great reason to fear human-level artificial intelligence and does not pause to seriously figure out what if anything is correct to do about it (because "that's silly" or "the Terminator is just fiction") has not understood just how easily it can go horribly wrong.

Each one of these cases is bad enough — but these are just examples of the result of collectively distorted thinking. We will make mistakes this bad, and possibly worse, again and again as long as we are willing to let ourselves turn our awareness away from our own pain. As long as the world feels safer to us than it actually is, we will risk obliterating everything we care about.

There is hope for immense joy in our future. We have conquered darkness before, and I think we can do so again.

But doing so requires that we see the world clearly.

And the world has devastatingly more horror in it than most people seem willing to acknowledge.

The path of clear seeing is agonizing — but that is because of the truth, not because of the path. We are in a kind of hell, and avoiding seeing that won't make it less true.

But maybe, if we see it clearly, we can do something about it.

Grieve well, and awaken.