All of Grayson Chao's Comments + Replies

Agreed with respect to better way to teach maths. However, noting that teaching like this requires students who want to learn like this which is almost always going to be the minority. For folks interested/enjoy this perspective, I encourage you to read A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart. 

Given how spectacularly harmful psychedelic drugs can often be, I think we’d better hope that there isn’t any such “sensory-input-only” method of inducing psychedelic states.

edit: uh, well, short answer: there totally is! idk if they're the psychedelic states you wanted, but they should do for a lot of relevant purposes, seems pretty hard to match meds though. original longer version: there's a huge space of psychedelic states, I think the subspace reachable with adding chemicals is a large volume that's hard to get to by walking state space with only external pushes - I doubt the kind of scraping a hole in the wall from a distance you can do with external input can achieve, eg, globally reversing the function of SERT (I think this paper I just found on google may show this - I forget where I first encountered the claim, not double checking it properly now), that MDMA apparently induces! you can probably induce various kinds of serotonin release, though. but the premise of my argument here in the first place - where you can sometimes overwhelm human output behavior via well crafted input - is that that probably doesn't matter too much. human computational output bitrate seems to be on order ten bits per second across all modalities,[1] and input bitrate is way above that, so my guess is that update bitrate (forming memories, etc) is much higher than natural output bitrate[2], probably yeah you can do most of the weird targeted interventions you were previously getting via psychedelics instead from like, getting some emotional/tempo sorts of things to push into the attractor where neurons have similar functionality already. I just doubt you can go all the way to fixing neurological dysfunctions so severe that to even have a hope of doing it from external input, you'd need to be looking for these crazy brain hacking approaches we were talking about. I guess what we'd need to measure is like, bitrate of self-correction internally within neurons, some FEP thing. not sure off the top of my head quite how to resolve that to something reasonable. 1. ^ of course, like, actually I'm pretty dang sure you can get way above 10bit/s by

I doubt the level of inhuman behavior we see in this story is remotely close to easy to achieve and probably not tractable given only hand motions as shown - given human output bandwidth, sounds seem needed, especially surprisingly loud ones. for the sky, I think it would start out beautiful, end up superstimulating, and then seep in via longer exposure. I think there's probably a combination of properties of hypnosis, cult brainwashing, inducing psychedelic states, etc, which could get a human's thinking to end up in crashed attractors, even if it's only one-way transmission. then from a crashed attractor it seems a lot more possible to get a foothold of coherence for the attacker.

I think most things that hit your brain have some percentage of leaking out of the data plane, some on the lower end, some fairly high, and it seems like for current levels of manipulative optimization towards higher-data-plane-leaking media, looking for the leaks and deciding how to handle them seems to me like maybe it can help if you have to encounter the thing. it's just that, normally, the bitrate of control back towards the space of behavior that the organism prefers is high enough that the incoming manipulation can't strongly persist. but we do see this fail even just with human level manipulation - cults! I personally have policies like "if someone is saying cults good, point out healthy religion can be good but cult indoctrination techniques are actually bad, please do religion and please check that you're not making yourself subservient". because it keeps showing up around me that people do that shit in particular. even at pretty large scales, even at pretty small ones. and I think a lot of the problem is that, eh, if the control plane isn't watching properly, the data plane leaks. so I'd expect you just need high enough bitrate into the brain, and ability to map out enough of the brain's state space to do phenotype reprogramming by vision, michael levin sorts of things - get enough properly targeted changes into cells, and you can convince the gene networks to flip to different parts of their state space you'd normally never see. (I suspect that in the higher fluency regime, that's a thing that happens especially related to intense emotional activations, where they can push you into activating genetically pretrained patterns over a fairly long timescale, I particularly tend to think about this in terms of ways people try to get each other into more defection-prone interaction patterns.)