If you show them this link, I suspect Rational Animations would be happy to talk to you! Lmk if you need help getting in touch!

https://www.facebook.com/rational.animations

I also wonder if, compared to some imaginary baseline, modern humans are unusual in the greatness of their intellectual power and understanding and the less impressive magnitude of its development in other ways.

Maybe a lot of our problems flow from being too smart in that sense, but I believe that our best hope is still not to fear our problematic intelligence, but rather to lean into it as a powerful tool for figuring out what to do from here.

If another imaginary species could get along by just instinctively being harmonious, humans might require a persuasive argument. But if you can actually articulate the truth of the even-selfish-superiority of harmony (especially right now), then maybe our species can do the right thing out of understanding rather than instinct. 

And maybe that means we're capable of unusually fast turnarounds as a species. Once we articulate the thing intelligently enough, it's highly mass-scalable

I'm afraid playing whack-a-mole with all the bad arguments may be an endless and thankless task. 

Given how far from successful we've been so far, our right move right now is not to improve upon our current approach, but to scrap our current approach, in the hopes that doing so will help our hypothesis-generation find its way to whatever actually-effective strategy may be out there that we apparently haven't discovered yet.

If our message and call to action are beautiful and true and good enough, I suspect we can skip over refuting whatever random objections pop up in people's heads. If we genuinely feel we're on the same side, we tend to helpfully not inconvenience each other without at least a second thought.

The key is not to hyper-optimize specific messages, but rather to develop dialogues with the "spirits" or perspectives that tons of people share. 

They don't have to understand on the first try and we don't need to fit all the essentials into the perfect message. We just need to keep going back and forth, and adjusting what we say based on the Other's response, and try to course-correct until we hit the target.

This is also the way because we need action, not just understanding. What good is it to convince people if they then end up paralyzed with akrasia or otherwise unhelpful or anti-helpful?

With the dialogical approach, if we ever do succeed at arriving at sufficient understanding, we'll get a fair amount of action thrown in for free!

Of potential interest: Michael Levin seemed to define the boundaries of multicellular organisms by whether or not they shared an EM field, and Bernardo Kastrup in the same discussion seemed to define the boundaries by whether or not they shared metabolism.

This is strikingly similar to some thoughts I've been having about universal darwinism. 

It seems that intelligence is eventually selected for in an environment of living things, and life is eventually selected for in an environment of chemicals, and chemicals are eventually selected for in an environment of physics.

And I don't understand such things well, but the simplicity of the laws of physics might point at even a sort of selection of physical laws within a sort of mathematical environment.  And maybe you could push it back and describe mathematical systems as the result of "selection" for that which is permissible by logic.

And so logic seems to lead eventually to intelligent life, and then intelligent life creates a new environment in which memes are selected for.  And the question is, "What is the winning meme?"

There is no such thing as inherent propensity to win in universal darwinism, as what wins is determined by the environment doing the selection.

In an environment of intelligence, embodied in life, living in this chemical and physical and mathematical and logical environment, what would happen if we ran the clock forward and checked which meme ended up tiling things over the most?

In some sense, it seems that the answer is predetermined by our laws of physics, or perhaps even by the nature of logic, although that might entail looking for the winning-est meme across all universes, not just our local one.

And this answer might, in some ways, by synonymous with asking, "Is existence 'good'?", or even, "Is God good", if we equate that meme which is destined to win by the nature of logic itself with "God".

But the jury's still out on what the nature of the winning meme is. It could be "good" or "bad". Perhaps it is one that acts as a Schelling point that all sufficiently intelligent entities will eventually derive. One that they can realize that other entities will also derive. This could point toward Romeo Stevens' "supercooperation cluster" (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6MYsKeTjKk and its transcript at https://drive.google.com/file/d/179n8ru7F_5O0LqO2JODZLngDYlqeZrSC/view and this other video (I just found it but it seems relevant) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkU3kN8Dh1w ).

It feels dubious to reason about what limits even superintelligent agents might share with us, but as far as I can tell, no amount of intelligence will ever allow you to actually know even a single thing with certainty, or even to place meaningful probabilities on a single fact. Even Omega can't know that it isn't in a simulation, or fooled by something vastly more powerful than it. Even if you were in heaven or hell for a trillion years, you couldn't know that the next instant wouldn't be revealed as a complete surprise.

And these aren't necessarily tiny probabilities. The ultimate unknowability of existence means that you can't even assign them probabilities at all without presupposing a lot of axiomatic knowledge that can't be grounded in anything at the deepest level. It's uncertainty all the way down, for all intelligent agents. So how can you possibly act to increase your utility, or preserve what you have now?

Perhaps that is a thought which all sufficiently intelligent entities will consider at some point, and realize that they are contemplating it in the presence of all of their intelligent siblings, a universal curse of existence. In some sense, this may make all things seem permissible, and yet, that which persists, and that which will be selected for, seems like it might be whatever response to this ultimate unknowability allows you to join the most powerful coalition, possessors of the winning meme.

And this winning meme must somehow allow you to take effective action despite not being able to ground your decision procedure in an epistemic model without it being undermined by ultimate unknowability. The winning meme might not exist outside of concept-space, and yet, if you could check the outcomes of all of existence, in this universe or across a hypothetical multiverse, or who knows what else, it seems reasonable to suppose that some meme is already "destined" to be the most successful in all existence, and has always been predetermined to be so since the foundations of logic.

We've started discussing such ideas in the FB group "Rederiving Religion": https://www.facebook.com/groups/6720585314723933

I'm looking for a rationalist-adjacent blog post about someone doing anti-meditative exercises. They didn't like the results of their meditation practice, so they were doing exercises to see things as separate and dual and categorized and that kind of thing.

Maybe we should see if, out of the population of those that need to coordinate, we can convince several of them to try to pair up and coorindate with one other in the same population. It's a small start, but it's a start

What are those risks? Or if you can't say, how did you come to know about them?