That makes sense. I read somewhere that in hunter gatherer contexts we evolved in, being shunned from the tribe could be life or death. I think to a certain extent that's still true, but less so than in the past. In any case, it feels like a compelling reason that we would be hard coded to find interpersonal conflict really innately compelling.
(1) Future Ability to Remember Things
I don't have this one! My ADHD in my youth and throughout my life has painfully and eternally etched into my mind that I do not have the ability to insert things into my future contexts through the will of my mind alone, and often physical interventions like notes can still fail. A classic example is writing a note that I fail to ever reference in the relevant context. So afaik I basically never think "I can let this detail leave my current context knowing I can remember it." I can't. Instead what I think is "I can keep this in my current context from now until it's relevant" or "the amount of effort to return this to my future context is more expensive than what I hope to gain by having this detail in my future context". I am still regularly blindsided by unforeseen failures in my strategy to insert details into future contexts. For example, setting three reminders on my phone, then turning off my phone for an exam and forgetting to turn it back on after.
(2) Local Optima of Comfort
I definitely have this one! I noticed one I called "sleepiness in the morning is because you are coming out of sleep, not because you didn't get enough sleep" but "local optima of comfort" is a really good generalization.
Recently I've started swimming in the ocean again (about 9℃ where I live). I feel really good after, but always have an aversion to going in. Interestingly, I find myself motivated by eating a granola bar after as a motivation. It seems like the pre-swim version of myself still requires the future granola bar to motivate swimming even though the post-swim version of myself that actually eats the granola bar enjoys the feeling of being capable of regulating my temperature and the relaxed calming feeling of having swum much more than eating the granola bar.
(3) Interpersonal Conflict
I'm not sure about this one. I think in conflict I'm somewhat likely to try to depersonalize and describe myself and the people I'm in conflict with in 3rd person... but I think I do experience similar effects around stubbornness and feeling like people owe me communication, for example, when people downvote without saying why I get irritated, like, how am I supposed to understand why you are downvoting if you don't say anything! But of course taking the time to put things into words is a scarce resource that strangers on the internet are in fact, not obligated to spend on me.
(4) Bonus: Recognizing I'm in a Dream
I really like lucid dreaming and dream incubation. One strategy I used to use is regularly "trying to teleport to a predetermined location". If I fail to actually teleport there, I conclude I'm awake. If I do teleport there, I conclude I'm dreaming and start doing whatever dream exploration I wanted to do in that location. A very fun one I used to do is teleporting to an open field and increasing the amount of force I can jump with to the point I can jump a hundred feet in the air and try to do flips and focus on the feeling of my legs pushing against the ground and the way the world seems to spin around me as I am in the air.
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This was a fun post. Thanks for writing it.
Being responsible for the blinding was annoying for my girlfriend, and it would be better to find ways to either do it myself in future experiments, or at least streamline the process to not have her involved every day of the experiment
I like this sort of thing. I think you could get a small lazy susan, and 3 shot glasses. Fill and dose each glass placing a note card under each one specifying the date and dose or placebo. Then close your eyes and spin the lazy susan. Choose a cup from the randomized lazy susan and add it to a larger drink to dilute the taste. Take the card from that glass and store it for reference. Pour out the other glasses and destroy their cards.
I think that would get you self administered blind testing at the cost of wasting some melatonin and note cards.
I end up mentally exhausted and resistant to demands.
I relate to this, but it makes me wonder if progressive overload / antifragile dynamics apply here. In resistance training you (1) expose your musculoskeletal system to stress, (2) consume nutrition for recovery, (3) rest to allow recovery beyond the initial setpoint, and (4) repeat step 1 with progressively increasing stress. So I wonder if mental stress works the same way.
I've tried looking into kinds of brain training such as dual-n-back and it seems like research is generally pessimistic about skill transfer. It seems if you practice one cognitively demanding task it makes you better at that task, but that doesn't transfer to dissimilar tasks.
But I wonder if those trials have been misunderstanding mental effort. At first starting dual-n-back it feels effortful, but once you have practice, it no longer feels effortful, even as n increases, so what would be required for progressive overload would be a better model of mental effort. It seems like silentbob's procrastination drill would come closer than any fixed cognitive test practice, but in general I would think it is the switching to cognitively dissimilar tasks that causes the cognitive stress. Feeling like you've been thrown in the deep end without knowing how to swim, so to speak. Once you figure out how to swim you can't use swimming to practice figuring out how to swim anymore, then you're just practicing swimming.
Indeed. Thank you 🙏 I'll edit the post based on this. I think "injective" is most correct for the claim, although I don't know of any commonly used discontinuous activation functions.
You might also be interested in the second half of this comment.
Before engaging more I should note I don't really know what the "sceptic" stance is, other than just being dubious of things. If you think I should be more informed please point me at resources.
From your linked post:
In the end the illusion that demon creates has to be all-encompasing.
I like this. This is a good point. I think there's still unstated nuance but I like noticing the way the scope of demonic illusions must creep far outside of any capability we are aware of.
At which point... what is the actual difference between the "reality" and such "illusion"? They work according to the same rules and produce all the same observations.
Not so.
In the world model of the "naturalistic universe", it feels right to assume the existence of a past and future that give my memories, past experiments, and future plans real context. A reality illusion demon would provide no such assurances. Perhaps it dreamed of this single moment, having fully fabricated the past and with no plan of further exploring the future. In this case, my plans to perform future tests and make a nice cup of tea gain me no real utility since the demon will not be emulating me in the future where I can see the results of those tests or enjoy that tea. That is the sort of demon to which I say "ok, whatever, I'm just gonna assume you don't exist because if you do you clearly break and control all my attempts to influence reality in any way."
I'll be talking more about Münchhausen trilemma in future posts.
I wasn't aware of the term "Munchhausen trilemma". It's a good term. Thanks!
This feels similar to what I was exploring in this post.
A few thoughts on dispelling illusions imposed by evil demons:
Thanks : )
ToW: Exploration of what the space is that semantics map references into. Since a statement can be false, it can't be reality. But since we can talk about true or false, reality must be involved somehow.