A lot of things have you confused the territory being the map.

For example, that you exist, is a map.

That there is a being there, creature of some kind, it's a map.

That you have a brain.

Every. Single. Word. Is A Map.

What is the territory?

Become silent of all thoughts, without using thoughts to manipulate or lie, neither using thoughts not to manipulate or lie.

You think you are in control, thus the flow of life doesn't flow effortlessly. :)

But it's fine to let go, and be present in this moment, where there, you are, the territory, which is arational.

There will be no reason for reasoning or understanding, it is arational.

It is always the case, whether you think about it or not. I can welcome you in to see for yourself, there's a lot of beauty to be had.

Please don't be dogmatic. Try and see for yourself the possible truth which is right before your eyes, the possible truth that you do not exist, that you, and the possibility that everything else is a fiction. The fiction of the mind.

But you will still be to function, to be able to go to AI conferences and talk about the latest improvements, or talk decision theory or whatever else you have going on in your life. Because the belief that you will lose these things, by becoming more aware, is a trick of the ego. It's highly improbable.

So go ahead, and see for yourself. Likely though you need to work on yourself, there's nothing which is more important than the machine which does not come with an instruction manual. That is you. What you think is you. What I mean is the practical you.

Being around here has made me think that I know everything interesting about the world and suppressed my excitement and joy from many minor things I could do. I also feel like my sense of wonder diminished. As I write this, I am a little unhappy, and in a period of depression, but I had similar feelings, if less intense, even before this period.

I was wondering whether you have any advice on how to restore this; or even better, how to "forget" as much rationality and transhumanism as possible (if not actually forgetting, then at least "to think and feel as I did before I read the Sequences")?

Will check out, sounds like I would like it.

Extreme ownership is also great for confidence. Healthy extreme ownership looks like a person who does something about their situation instead of complaining about it, it doesn't mean to endure toxic situations because it's your fault. If you're in an abusive relationship confronting the abuser or leaving the relationship is ownership. Accepting the abuse because it's "your fault" is not ownership. Sorry if very obvious advice, but I would imagine there are people-pleasers here that would take this extreme ownership advice detrimentally.

So,

1. Make the decision and strongly commit to being a mentally strong person

2. Continuously monitor your actions to ensure they are the actions of a mentally strong person

3. Maintain this (for weeks/months/years?) until a new self-identity is formed.

If I've misrepresented something point it out, but this looks to me like a recipe for failure. It's missing fundamental parts of the human experience. People most often fail at their goals because of conflicting short and long term desires, forgetfulness and existing habits. Jocko doesn't adequately take that into account. Making a decision is useful - you start preparing for the new challenge, (e.g. If I'm going to wake up at 5AM I better get breakfast ready the night before...) and there'll be some self consistency effect with the newly formed intention. There's two obvious problems,

a) It's massively mentally energy intensive. It's hard to choose the kale over the donut or work over reddit. Temptations don't disappear after you've decided not to pursue them. You have to decide over and over again throughout the day not to chase them. Decision fatigue is a thing.

b) Humans forget. Anyone that has done any meditation will be familiar with the experience of not being able to sustain attention on an object for more than a few moments despite the most earnest effort. Even if we didn't have all the other things we need to think about every day to occupy our minds, maintaining consistent attention is an impossible goal.

Jocko's framing that discipline is a decision represents an incremental improvement over Nike's 'Just do It'.

...it is valuable to have an example of somebody who reliably executes on his the philosophy of "Decide to do it, then do it." If you find that you didn't do it, then you didn't truly decide to do it. In any case, your own choice or lack thereof is the only factor. "Discipline is freedom." If you adopt this habit as your reality, it become true.

It's possible I'm getting to confused with the language here but I've struggled to apply this advice in my own life. I'll decide that I'm not going to snack at work anymore and then find myself snacking anyway once the time comes. It seems to reflect a naivete in regards to how willpower and habits work.

It sounds good and I've listened to 4 episodes now and Jocko doesn't seem to elaborate on how exactly this process is supposed to work. What is the difference between deciding and truly deciding? What is the habit of 'discipline is freedom' and how does one adopt it as their reality?

I come away from the podcast inspired for a few hours but with no lasting change.

Is it even possible to have a perfectly aligned AI?

If you teach an AI to model the function f(x) = sin(x), it will only be "aligned" with your goal of computing sin(x) to the point of computational accuracy. You either accept some arithmetic cutoff or the AI turns the universe to computronium in order to better approximate Pi.

If you try to teach an AI something like handwritten digit classification, it'll come across examples that even a human wouldn't be able to identify accurately. There is no "truth" to whether a given image is a 6 or a very badly drawn 5, other than the intent of the person who wrote it. The AI's map can't really be absolutely correct because the notion of correctness is not unambiguously defined in the territory. Is it a 5 because the person who wrote it intended it to be a 5? What if 75% of humans say it's a 6?

Since there will always be both computational imprecision and epistemological uncertainty from the territory, the best you can ever do is probably an approximate solution that captures what is important to the degree of confidence we ultimately decide is sufficient.

Companies want to construct a better game where the optimal choice for them and their competitors is one that doesn't destroy value.

Didn't you mean to write

Companies want to construct a better game where they get more profitable and doing business is hard for the competitors.

..?

It's nice to see that someone else has thought about this.

It's a popular rationalist pastime to try coming up with munchkin solutions to social dilemmas. A friend posed one such munchkin solution to me, and I thought he had an unrealistic idea of why regulations work, so I said to him:

Even though it's what you really want, I don't think the fact that you know everyone else will cooperate is the interesting thing per se about regulations, but that this is a consequence of the fact that you have decreased what was once the temptation payoff and thus constructed a different game. You have functionally reduced the expected payoff of the option "Don't pay taxes," by law. If you don't pay taxes, then you get fined or jailed. Now all players are playing a game where the Nash equilibrium is also Pareto optimal: Pay taxes or be fined or jailed. Clearly, one should pay taxes.

Now, ironically, this is good news if we want to cause better outcomes with less or no coercion, because it suggests that it is not coercion in itself that does the good work, but the fact that we have changed the payoffs to construct a different game; we can interpret coercion as just one instantiation of the general process by which 'inefficient games' become 'efficient games'. Coercion is perhaps a simple way to do the thing that all possible solutions to this problem seem to have in common, but there may be others that we can assume to syntactically change the payoffs in the way that coercion does, but which we may semantically interpret as something other than coercion.

A different time, a friend noticed that people building up trust seemed qualitatively similar to a Prisoner's Dilemma but couldn't see exactly how. I was like, "Have you heard of Stag Hunt? That's the whole reason Rousseau came up with it!" PD is just one kind of coordination game.

More generally, isn't it weird that the central objects of study in game theory, despite all of the formalization that has taken place since the beginning of the field, are remembered in the form of anecdotes?! You learn about the Stag Hunt and the Prisoner's Dilemma and Chicken and all other sorts of game, but there doesn't really seem to be any systematic notion of how different games are connected, or if any games are 'closer' to others in some sense (as our intuitions might suggest).

Meditations on Moloch was pretty but in the audience I coughed the words 'mechanism design'. It just seems like pointing out the mainstream academic work makes you boring when you're commenting on something poetic. You also might like Robinson and Goforth's Topology of the 2x2 Games. The math isn't that complex and it provides more insight than a barrage of anecdotes. Note that to my knowledge this is not taught in traditional game theory courses but probably should be one day. They refer to this general class of games as the 'social dilemmas', if I recall correctly.

Note that DeepMind's two big successes (Atari and Go) come from scenarios that are perfectly simulable in a computer. That means they can generate an arbitrarily large number of data points to train their massive neural networks. Real world ML problems almost all have strict limitations on the amount of training data that is available.