Could you say more about the unviability of IDA?

I really like this post! My intuition about the proximate future is the same, and this captures it really well.

My intuition goes a little further. Once AI is making AI, I think there will be a period where it feels like everything is crazy, new tech is developed really fast, powerful humans who can keep up with it are able to make enormous power grabs. Then after a few months or weeks there will be one day that the world explodes, all humans die or get uploaded, and everything is completely different.

(I guess this is to say that the singularity feels in the genre of reality to me.)

I just met someone recently who has this! They said they have always visualized the months of the year as on a slanted treadmill, unevenly distributed. They described it as a form of synesthesia, which is conceptually consistent with how I experience grapheme-color associative synesthesia.

Cool, thanks!

You mean this substance? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesembrine

Do you have a recommended brand, or places to read more about it?

I would love to hear the principal’s take on your conversation.

Interesting, I can see why that would be a feature. I don't mind the taste at all actually. Before, I had some of their smaller citrus flavored kind, and they dissolved super quick and made me a little nauseous. I can see these ones being better in that respect. 

I ordered some of the Life Extension lozenges you said you were using; they are very large and take a long time to dissolve. It's not super unpleasant or anything, I'm just wondering if you would count this against them?

Thank you for your extended engagement on this! I understand your point of view much better now.

Oh, I think I get what you’re asking now. Within-lifetime learning is a process that includes something like a training process for the brain, where we learn to do things that feel good (a kind of training reward). That’s what you’re asking about if I understand correctly?

I would say no, we aren’t schemers relative to this process, because we don’t gain power by succeeding at it. I agree this is subtle and confusing question, and I don’t know if Joe Carlsmith would agree, but the subtlety to me seems to belong more to the nuances of the situation & analogy and not to the imprecision of the definition.

(Ordinary mental development includes something like a training process, but it also includes other stuff more analogous to building out a blueprint, so I wouldn’t overall consider it a kind of training process.)