All of Neuroff's Comments + Replies

I notice the term "demon thread" feels a bit too loaded for me to actually use. It is also somewhat misleading given there is such a thing as a benign demon thread.

It's probably too late in the game to alter the term though.

6Raemon
It's been a week or two - I think there's still room to find new jargon if anyone has good suggestions.

Meta comment: It'd be nice if this post had the nice, linked footnotes, like Eliezer's sequence posts.

5habryka
Me and Ben are right now adding them manually, so adding them isn't particularly straightforward. Though it would be good to have better support for inline links in the future.
You need to have a strategy in place for dealing with MOPs before you are overrun.

I agree with this statement, but I also am interested in how you plan on dealing with Sociopaths, in the Geeks, MOPs, Sociopaths model. Or at least filtering for the ones who actually Get It, versus the ones looking to opportunistically score resources.

MIRI seems to be a particularly well-tended garden because it's led primarily by Geeks, with Sociopath skill sets. They're not, as in the default case, Geek-sympathizing Sociopaths.

Could you speak to your sense of how the model applies to this particular community? I'm interested in finding crux points.

3Bendini
I plan to deal with sociopaths the same way I deal with potential car theives - by hiding valuables out of sight. Sociopaths are mostly oppertunistic, you can prevent maybe 95% of problems in this area simply by not giving them oppertunities to exploit. A healthy amount of distrust for everyone and everything also alerts you to issues before people become embedded and expelling them would cause major community tensions. I also make heavy use of lime metrics, some of which I've tested on previous sociopaths I knew.
2c0rw1n
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/#comment-494

I have other reasons to believe they have a Zen influence that are not their webpage.

I am confused by your latter two paragraphs, as it seems like my first two paragraphs in the previous comment should have addressed those concerns. I'll put forward Val's "In praise of fake frameworks" post as further response.

It sounds like you are claiming I'm trying to draw some kind of single causal arrow that explains a bunch of things about history. This is not quite the thing I'm trying to do... although I can see how it might appear that way.

I am sad. I really wanted to see the pictures. (I don't fully get the post as it is.)

2magfrump
Edit: pictures added, though in retrospect I'm not sure that they really add that much to the post. Fair enough; if your comment is at +5 or more by Monday I'll go back and figure out the formatting.

I may have under-communicated my point.

My point is that there's a reason the West was more capitalistic, and there's a reason why European countries were such that young people felt an affordance and a pull to take daring expeditions across the Atlantic, while China was only ever going to do that IF the emperor planned it.

Of course China can do capitalism.

My point is not that there is some kind of difference in capacity between Asians and white people.

My point is that there is/was a cultural, worldview difference that has carried over time, p... (read more)

2ChristianKl
It's quite easy to claim that you understand why certain historical events happens. My first point was that China was brothering to look. Under Zhu Di ships were build. Explaining the fact that the internal Chinese politics resulted in China turning inwards after Zhu Di with general attributes of Chinese culture seems doubtful to me. The idea that Europe was the birth place of freedom of religion also illustrates a lot of picking and choosing. Europeans killed a lot more people because of religion than the Chinese and Zhu Di had religous freedom during his reign. As far as capitalism goes there are likely a lot of reasons why it happened in Europe and not in China. The geography is much difference and as a result it was easier to rule a large area as a single kingdom and a good historian can likely come up with plenty of alternative hypothesis. I don't think you have provided a good case to believe that it's because of the attributes you apply to West and East.

I'm taking a much more abstract view of "Eastern" and "Western" thinking. It's a lot like the introvert / extrovert distinction. There are correlations, and the correlations coalesce into patterns, and the patterns become concepts / buckets.

I'm not trying to talk about actual Asians here. White ppl can absolutely do the Eastern thing, and vice versa, and also all kinds of mixes. Basically, the concept of Eastern/Western is an abstract line; it's not about people.

The philosophies and teaching methods of Circling Eur

... (read more)
2ChristianKl
While I haven't been to the bigger Circling Europe events, I have learned Circling from Lucas who's in good standing with the main Circling Europe crowd. I know what it is even without having to look at the 6-figure web presence that's still wanting at explaining it. The Circling Europe page links plenty of people as influences for Circling Europe and not a single one who comes from a strict Zen perspective or even a non-Zen Buddhist background. On the other hand, there are Western phenomolgists like Nietzsche and Heidegger. I think it's a mistake to identify Western-thinking with analytical Philosophy and pretend that we didn't have many Western thinkers who also thought differently. I think it's easy to get lost in inaccurate historical narratives when speaking about West and East. Plenty of Westerns are quite capable of dialectic thinking.

This kind of thing is a "given" in certain spaces. The practices of Circling, Focusing, Nonviolent Communication, and Internal Family Systems all try to distance oneself a little from one's experiences / feelings and treat them as 'objects' or 'observations' or even 'subagents' without auto-judgment. The practicers tend to be good about not making the assumption that "I feel X" means "I endorse X," and this is obvious from the way they communicate with each other.

It is one of the things I

... (read more)

In my experience, I have a pretty strong and consistently internal locus of control and also am able to feel compelled to change systems that are wrong / suboptimal. (I.e. it feels like I avoid the caveat you describe.)

There's a blurring between (having an internal locus of control) ~ (accepting things the way they are and just changing your attitude). This feels like Bucket Error territory.

I might try going a meta level up and realizing that I can prioritize which suboptimal / unfair systems are, in fact, worth trying to fix and choosing to (at lea

... (read more)

I like the phrase "having an internal locus of control." I'm wanting more propagation of this concept of "locus of control," and I'd probably read any future posts with "Locus of Control" in its title.

(OTOH, I'm not a fan of "narrativemancy," which to me connotes magic hand-waving which further connotes trickster magic, lying, and wool-over-eyes-pulling.)

I think I was most expecting it in the graph called "How does progress in skill X tend to go usually"? There could be a curve here that basically looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/jbo2gy5.jpg

1Conor Moreton
Loren ipsum

This is fair. It was a little ambiguous to me where this post ought to go. I'd appreciate something like 'hover text' over the various checkbox options when submitting, to clarify the different types of submissions. (I also suspect 'meta' should be one of the checkbox options but am less clear on this.)

I really wanted you to represent the Dunning-Kruger effect more in here.

1Conor Moreton
Loren ipsum

The way this post "presents" to me, it feels like a "here's a list of interesting thought experiments / questions for you to ponder in your head."

It just doesn't feel like a discussion is being called for; it feels like it's calling on me to have interesting thoughts, but silently. (Like it's feeding into my shower thoughts, not the verbal-discussion thoughts.)

The post feels like a good thing to link to in the future.

and perhaps most surprisingly an individual's mind-body

Could you elaborate on this bit? Or maybe give an example of what you mean?

6Gordon Seidoh Worley
I don't know of a great way to phrase this so it doesn't get mixed up with notions of personal productivity, but the basic idea here is that you are yourself a complex system made of many distributed parts that pass information around and so you should expect if you try to operate above 60% of your maximum capacity you'll experience problems. Take physical exercise, for example. If you are doing about 60% of what you are capable of doing you'll probably be able to do it for a long time because you are staying safely below the point of exhausting energy reserves and damaging cells/fibers faster than they can be repaired. Of course this is a bit of a simplification, because different subsystems have different limits and you'll run into problems if you work any subsystem over 60% capacity, so your limiting factor is probably not respiration but something related to repair and replacement, thus you may have to operate overall at less than 60% capacity to keep the constraining subsystem from being overworked. Thus you can, say, walk 20 miles at a slow pace no problem and no need to rest but will tire out and need to rest after running 5 miles at top speed. Same sort of thing happens with mental activities, like if you concentrate too hard for too long you lose the ability to concentrate for a while but if you concentrate lightly you can do it for a long time (think trying to read in a noisy room vs. trying to read in a quiet room). It doesn't really matter how this happens (ego depletion? homeostatic regulation encouraging you to meet other needs?), the point is there is something getting overworked that needs time to clear and recover. To sneak in an extra observation here, it's notable where this doesn't happen or only rarely happens. Systems that need high uptime tend to be highly integrated such that information doesn't have to be shared but instead contain a lot of mutual information. For example, the respiration system doesn't share information between its parts

I have nearly the opposite experience, FWIW.

The posts are intuitive; I flow through the text without any jarring.

I think the trick might be (I'm making this up, I don't know what anyone is actually doing) to not try to analyze each line or try to make sure you've understood each sentence. But to let yourself read all the words and then at the end, try to notice if you feel any different about certain concepts, situations, or beliefs.

My guess is people have different default methods of absorbing or processing text. If Zvi exists on one end... (read more)