This is testable. It predicts that improved skill with occlumency and/or gaining power should sometimes cause a release of chronic tension.

That wouldn’t be a test of the theory that hostile telepaths use muscle cues, since those things could cause muscle release for other reasons (as per Popper: tests can only be disproving, and they require a rival theory to decide between).

If gaining power never causes a release of tension, that still doesn’t disprove the theory, since again they could be tracking other things as well.

A more direct question would be s... (read more)

Update: I’ve disabled public access by request. Geoff said (here) he’s going to post the recording to his website.

Based on the fact Twitch is counter-intuitive about recording (it's caught me out before too) and the technical issues at the start, I made a backup recording just in case – only audio but hope it helps!:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Af1dl-v7Q7uJhdX8Al9FsrJDBc4BqM_f/view?usp=sharing

HPMOR house connections

As a first approximation --

Maladaptive Hufflepuff: Hyper-attentive tracking

Maladaptive Ravenclaw: Avoiding

I suspect there are different forms of maladaptive Slytherin, which could result in either coping strategy.

One could imagine a con man either having a jumpy trying-to-fix-the-social-dynamic personality (attentive), or having sociopathic disregard for people (avoidant).

Likewise, either of them could come out of maladaptive Gryffindor:

1. Attentive: Try to get everyone to do the Right thing! Keep a careful watch on people, and get

At a very fundamental (but perhaps not useful) level, it's to communicate with people how to treat you and what to expect of you.

This might happen in some ways inside one mind (for example, if you have a self-image of being "a reliable person", that might help you think about how to be on time). But I suspect that usually happens when something is going wrong, because usually you can just think about the ideas themselves without needing to go meta.

What are the rival ideas about why we adopt identities? (I assume there's some background here I'm unfamiliar with.)

Great description of the Summon Sapience Spell.

Taking inspiration from this post after failing to set one up during the workshop, I've now attached a Sapience Spell to a freckle on my hand (which I always used to think was unnecessary visual clutter), with the imagery/sense of expanding my peripheral vision and seeing everything (think: clear sight, sensing everything at once, 'whole-universe comprehension' kinda feels), and the incantation simply: "Notice."

... a strong sense based off both research and personal experience that physical proximity matters, and that you can't build the correct kind of strength and flexibility and trust into your relationships without actually spending significant amounts of time with one another in meatspace on a regular basis, regardless of whether that makes tactical sense given your object-level projects and goals.
But I'm going to hold off on going into those in detail until people insist on hearing about them or ask questions/pose hesitations that could be answere... (read more)

This may not answer your question directly, but:

Why would one have a different way of dealing with information inside one's mind vs the same kind of information outside it? What's the mechanism that prevents leak between these two cases?

One potential crux is that it IS the same kind of information, and that different parts of you have very similar logic to different individual humans.

What are the alternatives -- how would someone deal with information inside their mind differently from information outside it?

(There's a cliché saying, "y... (read more)

Good point. In hindsight, I somewhat wish I had described a more broad version of the hyper-attentive strategy (rather than saying what people do is directly try to model the minds of other people).

Now that you mention it, I think hyper-attentive people usually use the model-free reinforcement learning version of it. Or the model they use is some kind of 'average person' or 'what the culture says the model should be'.

And if they did stop to model the real individual (rather than an average or cultural version of them), they'd deal ... (read more)

If people enjoy demon threads, it may not be strictly true that the 'Someone is wrong on the internet' feeling (noticeably) feels bad.

When reading the OP, I thought, "I recognise that feeling, but my main (noticed) 'someone is wrong on the internet'-response is a positive, inspired motivational one."

Perhaps these feelings do get jumbled, and distinguishing how much is 'inspired' vs 'this is wrong' is part of the skill of avoiding demon threads.

I still sense that there's two different feelings here:

Type... (read more)

Yeah, it happens from time to time. Sometimes these mistakes cause errors in basic things to be taught. I think schools especially are quite slow on the uptake of new ideas -- they have syllabuses and courses and textbooks, and it's quite a lot of trouble to change them, so they usually only get updated every couple years at best.

For example, schools often teach that light is both a particle and a wave, or that it's sometimes a particle and sometimes a wave, or that it has 'particle-wave duality'. They do this because in order to explain that light is just... (read more)

Reference class forecasting might be an OK way to criticise an idea (that is, in situations where you've done something a bunch of times, and you're doing the exact same thing and expect a different outcome despite not having any explanations that say there should be a different outcome), but the idea of using it in all situations is problematic, and it's easy to misapply:

It's basically saying 'the future will be like the past'. Which isn't always true. In cases like cryonics -- cases that depend on new knowledge being created (which is inherently unpredic... (read more)