Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak:

Finally found a single actual screenshot of the DARPA Digital Tutor (sort of—a later commercial adaptation). Crazy-making that there were zero figures in any of the papers about its design, and not enough details to imagine one.

Some observations:
* An instructional interface is presented alongside a live machine.
* Student presented with a concrete task to achieve in the live system.
* The training system begins by “discussing the situation”, probing the student’s understanding with q's, and responding with appropriate feedback and follow-up tasks.
* It can observe the student’s actions in the live system and respond appropriately.
* The instructional interface uses a text-conversational modality.
* I see strong influence from Graesser's AutoTutor, and some from Anderson's Cognitive Tutors.

(from https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-06-09-how-learning-engineering-hopes-to-speed-up-education )

https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/1782095737096167917 

This all seems very teleological. Do you have thoughts on what the teleology of the universe could be under this model? 

Thanks for asking. This is the intention of Mathematical Boundaries Workshop which is running now. Let me know if you'd like to come on Sunday

New better link: https://www.aria.org.uk/programme-safeguarded-ai/ 

yea

right, yeah, i think precisely formalizing boundaries is less useful for the cyborgism angle

Personal anecdote:

Ever since reading George's post, I've been noticing ways in which I have been (subconsciously) tensing muscles in my neck-- and possibly around my vagus nerve and inside my head. I wonder if by tensing these muscles, I'm reducing blood flow.  

(I can think of reasons why someone might learn to do this on purpose actually, eg in response to some social stress.)

So now I'm experimenting with relaxing those muscles whenever I notice myself tensing them. Maybe this increases blood flow, idk. It maybe feels a little like that.

re Q2- 

So I don't doubt that improvements in subjective wellbeing are reported essentially unanimously. 

But, to give a sense of the kind of thing I'm expecting here, consider that a child who doesn't learn to be emotionally insecure around their parents is probably much worse off. In some societies, parents who dislike a child starve/kill them, and emotional insecurity can be one way to predict and therefore avoid others disliking you.

In which case, I wonder, if you don't have these common delusions about the mind (or you're ~enlightened), does this put you in a worse place physically or socially? 

(Probably not in all possible environments, but maybe this is true in some [social] environments that are common today.)

Some various questions:

Q1: To what extent do you think ~unenlightenment in an individual is caused by the need to fit in socially?

Ie: In order to get other people to take care of you or not kill you (especially when you're a vulnerable child), you contort your mind in all sorts of ways and construct an ego (very much in the Elephant in the Brain way) and adopt all sorts of delusions. 

For example, you might want to be able to control other people, and one way to do that is to exile your emotional emotions so you can tell them "You made me so angry! Stop doing that!"   (Then later, if that doesn't work, you can say, "I'm so sorry, my emotions got the best of me" -- as if your emotions are separate from you, lol. Have your cake and eat it too.)

I write a little bit about how my experience of depression seems like this here.

Q1.b: To what extent do you think become more spiritually skilled is just about learning how to integrate with other people safely, but without having those common-but-helpful-but-wrong delusions about how your own mind works?

Q2: Do you think people benefit from being ~unenlightened or spiritually unskilled? Precisely how so?