All of hunterglenn's Comments + Replies

Help us gather a group of people (possibly some seeded from Limicon?) who each have a unique bag of tricks for altering their own or others' consciousness.

Have them try all their methods on each other in the ways they think will cultivate wholesome increases in consciousness and insightful information-processing.

Ask this unprecedented group-consciousness-dynamic for its unique take on how we can increase humanity's coordination by 1 skill level, avert the AI/meta-crisis, or use your resources to help with the same.

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 requ... (read more)

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 ... (read more)

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 paralyze... (read more)

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 mathe... (read more)

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?

Have you got it yet?

The "Wife" can refer to one's years AS a wife or one's years of HAVING a wife

I'm finding lots of useful stuff in this. Trying it out now, thank you!

Thank you for your post, it's great to see people getting excited about TEAM therapy and you are rekindling my interest in it! I was listening to many episodes of this podcast as well, and I bought Dr. Burns's new book, Feeling Great. 

However, I've been having trouble finding a comprehensive anatomy of a standard therapy session. Have you come across anything like that, which shows step-by-step a session from beginning to end?

Isn't this just "Humans are adaptation-executors, not utility-maximizers", but applied to AI to say that an AI using heuristics that successfully hit a target in environment X may not continue that target if the environment changes?

What's that SSC post where Scott talks about how he didn't think he terminally valued punishment, but then he was able to think of some sufficiently bad actions, and then he felt what seemed like a terminal value for the punishment of the bad actors?

I went through the titles of his posts over the last year and googled around a bit, but couldn't find it.

Litany of Gendlin

"What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.

"And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it."

There are a few problems with the litanies, but in this case, it's just embarrassing. We have a straightforward equivocation fallacy here, no frills, no subtle twists. Just unclear thinking.

People are already enduring the... (read more)

There are two kinds of great writing.

One is the type where as you work your way through its palatial paragraphs, you find yourself thinking and feeling over and over, "Wow, this is great writing."
Interestingly, the simultaneous sentiment seems always to be "Wow, I read really great writing," which comes accompanied with the sensual pleasure that the beautiful enjoy in mirrors. The pleasure in having arrayed before you the evidence of your greatness. That alone justifies a mirror, and it justifies reading the kind of writing that proves ... (read more)

When you are in a situation, there are too many true facts about that situation for you to think about all of them at the same time. Whether you do it on purpose or not, you will inevitably end up thinking about some truths more than others.

From a truth measure, this is fine, so long as you stick to true statements. From a truth perspective, you could also change which true facts you are thinking about, without sacrificing any truth. Truth doesn't care.

But happiness cares, and utility cares. Which truths you happen to focus on may not affect how true ... (read more)