It generally had to do with me trying to navigate a part of me that really wanted to just have a nice village, and be a humble village priest who helped their local community be nice. And a part of me that felt "man, the village is not safe. I can't in good conscious just stay here having a nice life. The spirit of the village compels me to leave the village and figure out how to help protect the village. But man something about that feels really sad/bad."
OOF.
Had a similar realization recently. It sucks. I was really lucky¹ to have access to competent emotional support when I did.
¹ not in fact luck, but skilled organizers who were prepared-in-advance for an increased likelihood of such events AT their event.
1"an easy lever might be a guide to obvious failure modes of supplements and medications"
I desire to see more things like this.. Especially if they're presented not as a list of "gotchas", but as specifics of a general moving-parts model of how naive models/strategies operate in a complex space. Should be lots of base rates being thrown around.
A system for recognizing when things are helping and hurting, and phasing treatments out if they don’t justify the mental load
This part has been a historical blocker to me using luck/exploration based medicine. If one is dissociated, alexythmic, or has an experience completely dominated by one sensation like pain or anxiety, then it's going to be pretty hard to notice fine gradations in how well they're doing. Not having precision really narrows the possible paths to success; effect has to be almost overdetermined before one actually updates on the evidence.
An extension of the noticeable risks and helping/hurting points I think is worth separating out: how to identify and avoid literal poisons. Not risky bets, per se, but things that are likely to directly harm the objective (health) and the other conditions necessary to make your strategy viable (kill your liver, mind, ability to move under your own power).I think it's a useful comparison point to know what it takes to figure out what is safe to eat in an unfamiliar environment. There's a protocol for slow steps of Graduated exposure and Waiting to see how well it's tolerated. Accumulated culture and the FDA are so very cheating technique. It's worth understanding how much work it otherwise takes to narrow down what world you are in without leaning on them.
I wanna offer feedback on the READING.
at "Off the cuff I’d give something like 10%, 3%, 1% for these respectively (conditioned on the previous premises) which multiplies to .003%", the verbal version doubled back to remind what the referents for each percentage we're, then read the sentence again.
that was PERFECT. high value add. made sure the actual point was gotten across, when it would have been very easy to just mentally tune out numerical information.
In TEAM, the therapist takes on a different role: instead of trying to convince the patient to change his or her thoughts, the therapist tries to find reasons that the patient should not change.
I recognize this model! The book "Immunity to Change" goes into great detail on a similar process.
Applying that specifically in a therapeutic context, to clear the path for treatment to really work, is SO BRIILLIANT!
scalable decentralized currency/contract/communication systems
Oh? Do say more
THIS. THIS IS THE REASON FOR THE HOLIDAY --
"Anyways. The reasons I wouldn't expect that particular attack angle to work on me if I thought anything more careful than a pure snap decision is, second of all, that I'm explicitly aware of contrasts between easily commensurable quantities and how those can distort my cognition by calling attention to themselves. First, that I'm constantly putting a quantity on how much I want things. In Civilization I could easily have translated that quantity to unskilled-labor-hours or, more usual for myself, the minutes or hours of my time that I'd spend to get something - including by working to buy it, if it was something that could be bought directly with money."
"The fact that I don't actually have a bank account full of unskilled-labor-hours, anymore, and instead have a completely unfamiliar currency called 'gold pieces', is contributing to a constant state of disorientation in the back of my mind. I'll seem less timid and hesitant once I actually know how much everything around me costs and this core process of all of my cognition is able to actually run again."
written by Yudkowsky in Mad Investor Chaos
So... what I'm getting is that prediction markets will be just as annoying but necessary to police for insider trading as the stock market? Alas.
This... is that experiment?
Winning the fight for control over the steering wheel is a very powerful visual metaphor, I'm glad to have it in my arsenal now. Thank you for writing this.