Maybe the fabric of reality is a story you tell yourself

I find it very interesting to understand how people generate stories

Maybe this is the study of personality. Also why I enjoy auto biography. And talking to people about their internal monologue

The psyche is one of the most complex systems, and it’s so accessible. Makes it extremely intellectually stimulating

Pulling an aariz: not making a decision because you don’t feel strongly enough in one direction for so long that life makes the decision for you robbing you of agency. repeatedly and not learning the lesson which is you must exert your will or it dies.

There is a desire for glory and worship, which drives me to compete in company building and win (modern day

There is a desire to understand, which drives me to create models of reality, of consciousness, of mind

There is a desire for peace which asks for all desires to die, often mistaken for a life of routine and comfort

We’re weird and we embrace it.

Dave Kelley, IDEO

in both its aspects my ego was extremely limited, subject to all possible self-deceptions and errors, moods, emotions, passions, and sins. It suffered far more defeats than triumphs, was childish, vain, self-seeking, defiant, in need of love, covetous, unjust, sensitive, lazy, irresponsible, and so on. To my sorrow it lacked many of the virtues and talents I admired and envied in others. How could this be the analogy according to which we were to imagine the nature of God?

Jung

From the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and, though I could never prove it to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have this certainty, it had me. Nobody could rob me of the conviction that it was enjoined upon me to do what God wanted and not what I wanted. That gave me the strength to go my own way. Often I had the feeling that in all decisive matters I was no longer among men, but was alone with God. And when I was "there," where I was no longer alone, I was outside time; I belonged to the centuries; and He who then gave answer was He who had always been, who had been before my birth. He who always is was there. These talks with the "Other" were my profoundest experiences: on the one hand a bloody struggle, on the other supreme ecstasy.

Jung

I return now to the discovery I made in the course of associating with my rustic schoolmates. I found that they alienated me from myself. When I was with them I became different from the way I was at home. I joined in their pranks, or invented ones which at home would never have occurred to me, so it seemed; although, as I knew only too well, I could hatch up all sorts of things when I was alone. It seemed to me that the change in myself was due to the influence of my schoolfellows, who somehow misled me or compelled me to be different from what I thought I was. The influence of this wider world, this world which contained others besides my parents, seemed to me dubious if not altogether suspect and, in some obscure way, hostile.

Jung describing his early school years. I relate to this in college

What the genome offers is biases for the solution the organ…

Computational: a claim about the minimal model for a system. computational means the system is made up of discernible differences (info) that relate to one another. These change over time by some state transition

Functionalism: a claim about what a thing is. an object is what it does to its environment, and the invariants it preservers. The alternative would be that things have an essence that defines their realness independently

Joscha Bach on students podcast: Trees over long horizons a…

What the genome offers is biases for the solution the organism finds to solve its problems. Not an explicit structure, so you need fewer bits. The biases help when the search space is too large and needs to be constrained

Joscha Bach on students podcast:

Trees over long horizons adapt to their environments and there is some level of agency. Perhaps they are conscious on a longer time horizon than humans. And perhaps aliens or AI will see humans as very slow and similarly think we are not conscious.

Maybe the planets are conscious, too

Alex hormozi on Chris Williamson

Love defined as: the extent to which you’re willing to sacrifice for something

If you have not had to sacrifice, it’s just words. It’s not real love

Another Idea from Sama on Senra: One prompt for journal is writing to your (future) kids. Very interesting frame to take.

Brian eno has a good point on society giving too much credit to individual geniuses

Geniuses rise out of a specific scene, at a specific place, in a specific time. He call this "scenius"

The high leverage thing is to find the scene and be a genius. The higher leverage thing is to create a scene. This is what Paul Graham is doing at YC

LLMs have proved that language can be approximated by a computable function. It is an exercise in showing that the universe is computable, or that computation is the right way to view the world.

This computable function is approximated by a transformer after tons of data and compute are used. But it is just another example of things in the universe being computable.

--

My neuro professor recently explained that "the brain is not a computer". I am skeptical. He takes computer at face value. No, computer is a class of systems, and he has yet to explain why the brain is not in this class. It runs programs

Another reason it will be hard for universities to keep students less busy is that they'll worry that without some kind of oversight, most students will just waste whatever free time they're given. And they will! The price of giving the most energetic students room to do even better is that it leaves the least energetic ones room to do even worse. But that's a price that's worth paying, because if the most energetic students do better they could do a lot better, whereas the laziest students already learn so little that there's not much room for them to do worse. So giving all the students some of their time back could improve the average outcome a lot, even if it doesn't move the median.

From PG essay

What is the minimal definition of a computer?

I am reading Jung and it strikes me again that fiction and story is useful in showing us how to look at the world

I first heard this from Alain in How Proust can change your life. We learn to see the world through the author. This is called cultivating a sensibility

Perhaps the closest thing to us is our attentional system, which is what an author exposes in their book

Michael Levin explains on a recent Lex Fridman podcast that

We traditionally see hardware as real, and software as a program that runs on it. But what if software is real? And it simply runs on hardware. Hardware is a manifestation of software.

This is not about computers, this is about substrates and causal structures in the world. Patterns of evolution are software, organic species are the hardware.

Causal patterns, the invariants, those are real

There’s an interesting moment when two people walk past each other, and both slightly turn around, and have to pause for the exact right amount of time, at which point there is a symmetric signal--we are both interested in speaking--and it is socially acceptable to continue speaking, past the hello

but if there’s any asymmetry here it does not

The larger trend for business school might be:

Focusing on real entrepreneurship, company building, as trades like finance analyst becoming automated

This AI thing could bring a brighter entrepreneurial culture to undergrad business particularly

Unfortunately I believe this is too optimistic

You can train your instincts really well by using LLMs to educate you socratically. Give it some content and ask it to teach you through questions, after giving you fair background, then to nudge you when stuck, importantly getting you to use your intuitions around what is right.

A naive prompt does pretty well

Think deeply when thinking has high expected value. Stop thinking when the next piece of information can only be obtained by acting.

I am listening to Sam Altman on David Senra and it is clear his background as a startup investor influences how he runs open AI

He makes an analogy from allocating economic capital into venture bets to allocating economic/technical/entrepreneurial capital into research bets. The main idea is the power law: a few bold bets that work make up for all your bold bets that don’t. You are in a market of options with positively skewed payoffs.

David offers a view that he is quite similar to Steve: maniacally obsessed about product and figuring out how something should feel based on personal taste. Sam pushes back, which leads me to this idea

There are two main models of founders. The first is product led. They have a taste for what the customer wants and tailor the design of the product/service to be as good as possible. Their edge is largely human and they are designers at some level.

The other is the investor. There is a mass amount of capital they have attracted (money, people, brand) and they need to allocate it to maximize ROI. they have great instincts on the shape of good bets and also re allocating when a bet isn’t paying off. These founders aren’t the designers themselves, they’re closer to operators.
—
The best thinkers do not have general principles

Everything is case by case based on independent first principles thinking

Maybe a product of not being able to predict them. A predictable thinker follows general principles by definition. Unpredictable but not random cannot be boxed into principles or at least principles you cannot model. So perhaps they have general principles but in your view they don’t, in the meta view they do

Me not trying finance would have been like someone who is 7 feet tall and doesn’t like basketball so he never tries it

But they’ve only watched and never played

Like yeah but you’re 7 feet tall that’s an unfair advantage go try it at least

Designer brands like
YSL, LV, Dior
have mastered the craft of putting a mid product in a world class environment
The design of the shop, the color, the service, everything is so elegant
That you end up thinking the bag is special
If you threw these bags on a Walmart rack it would be absolutely forgettable

When i look at the last few months i have been exceptional at producing ideas and awful at doing anything about them

In the highest perspective doing is being
And there’s no difference between action and presence

I was just listening to the song that’s playing in the store with all the clothes in the style I just liked. But I’m in a foreign country surrounded by no one I know. I am caught by the same trends as the masses.

But no! I’m an independent decision maker with my own taste and I filter by what I genuinely like

Clearly we are more influenced than we like to admit. (In fact there is nothing to us but influences. I am caught in a network of memes) We are victim to the advertising and marketing we laugh at. All the games work on us. Just because we can see it with analysis sometimes does not mean we are above it

Your agency is probably an illusion, a useful one that you shouldn’t deny. but don’t kid yourself, you’re not special

you’re experiencing what it’s like to be a social primate that needs to signal trust in a multi agent system where you are dependent on others to survive and reproduce. You have no option

Jensen X clip

The most important time is now
Focus on doing good work here
Leave it all on the field

Vacation is such a bad ethic
It’s like weekends
Do meaningful shit
This is bigger than career
This is life
Explore if you want to explore
Work if you want to work
What is a vacation man

I think charisma is too narrowly defined

People see it as the suit and tie, slick back, calm steady voice, the buttery sounding phrases, the warm smile, good looking

No. Real charisma kind of disguises itself. The mad genius is charismatic. The guy who stutters a lot but you sense there is real heart there - that’s charisma. The super humble soft spoken - that’s charisma. The non stop questions, tireless curiosity - that’s charisma.

Charisma is just persuasion, being in control of the ideas that get transmitted. Charisma is about having power over communication, and it comes in all sizes and shapes

If you could see charisma, you’d label it that, and see right through it. It’s the same as the salesman who is a little too cunning, you feel like you’re being sold

I think that if you don’t experience real fear from time to time, you don’t experience real danger and other things, then your mind just creates fears out of nothing

• Alex Honnold who probably took it too far

thx junti for reminder of this quote

Bio hacks are experiments you can run to test how your ment…

What am I missing?

Breathwork

Communal things - chants, dances. This is very interesting to me.

Bio hacks are experiments you can run to test how your mental state is reconfigured after you change something in the body

here’s my running list

Intense cardio - huge endorphins after, maximizes P(bliss)

Mechanical stress like weight lifting - extreme fatigue, loss of will

Heat - sauna, steam room, hot springs

Cold - super reliable shock to the system

Caffeine - anxiety OR single pointedness of mind

Low stimulation environment on waking - calm state

Music - intense techno, electronic, or long symphonic classical

Nature - big trees, big mountains quiets the mind

Competitive sport - state of war, nobody home

Fasting - sedating of the will

In the end state there is only the cost of energy

And it is way more energy efficient to change the world by neural engineering than moving atoms

not sure how productive coming here is. I like this. I like seeing my mind. but I’m also trying to be aware that intellectualizing is a way to escape dutiful action, and an escape that looks pretty from the outside. insight generation as cope

I’m debating pressing post here, because this might be more of the same.

There are a lot of good ideas from Joscha bach that i picke…

What comes to mind

• how humans learn vs how computers learn
• what are agents, God as a collective agent
• consciousness as a conductor
• general rules for principled and robust thinking (what i think was most valuable for me, and its learned indirectly )

There are a lot of good ideas from Joscha bach that i picked up through podcast and more, but they are well organized in his chaos convention recordings. I need to go in there and consolidate the best ideas because his metaphysical lens is underappreciated and I think a lot of useful things are hidden in there

It does not take willpower to eat healthy most of the time. I am very sensitive to the feeling after I eat something unhealthy, and I have become sensitive to it because of the feeling itself, but also the feeling of the thoughts that come

becoming sensitive to this makes it clear that I don’t actually want the unhealthy food

This model of learning suggests that what you need to do is attend to the right signals and develop sensitivity

and that where you place your attention directs what you learn

You don’t need force , you need to be mindful and pay close attention to experience

The problem is we are all talking to the same model

The genius of discussion with real people is everyone has different tendencies, different intuitions, different incentives (!), etc.

And this variance generates and explores new ideas well

So, do We need hyper specialized models that vary?

Maybe this is naive, maybe you could bake the diversity into one model

—

the “dialectic” is a great structure and it’s how I like to interface with ideas

anyone can find peace in a monastery

Can you find peace in the fire?

You are here to get a stable job is a bad ethic

You are here to do something

What’s the eastern idea of the person who can make decision…

Zhuangzhi “Mirror”

“The utmost person uses the mind like a mirror: not escorting, not welcoming; responding but not storing. So he can handle things without being harmed.”

serenity is often just exhaustion with a philosophy attached

How to distinguish real from fake serenity?

From Claude:

1) Can you still be moved? If something deserves anger, can you get angry? Do you still want things? Calm that has eaten your appetites is not calm, it’s flatness.

2) Does it produce action? Real calm shows up as work done, calls returned, hard conversations had. If peace keeps arriving instead of the thing you owe, it’s a sedative.

3) Does it survive pressure? If it needs the retreat, the routine, and no demands, it’s brittle. If it gets defensive when questioned, it’s a position you’re holding, not a way of moving. If it needs you to preach, you’re managing something.

4) Did it cost anything? Equanimity is usually the far side of years of practice. If yours was free and mainly relieves you of obligations, look harder.

I wake up, something on my mind

Go outside and take a walk, throw on AirPods, start talking to Claude in a public park

This feels like sci fi
But it feels so damn normal man

I pay the laborer the lowest he is willing to take, no more…

What is real is productivity of labor and capital, and what society can produce per capita. This is a physical law

The distribution is what determines price level and there is an “evening out” between income and spend

So the real phenomena is the relativity equal distribution of productivity

Which I think is called globalization

What’s the eastern idea of the person who can make decisions super clearly and isn’t bogged down by things. But can evaluate clearly at the margin and do what is appropriate, what is dutiful. we all get caught up in stories and baggage and it’s heavy. Something close to a beginners mind or child like or goldfish memory etc

no commitment to a philosophy, to ideology. No ego or conviction leading the way

Flowing like water

Lightness

Which theory best explains why cost of living adapts to ave…

I pay the laborer the lowest he is willing to take, no more

Which is, at the margin, the price for food and shelter so he can work and survive

But if someone will pay him more, I am bid up to that price. But if they are paying too much they will go out of business, and laborer will take my job

Then what is the price of food and shelter? As much as the laborer will pay, which depends on his income

There’s circularity here or some kind of simultaneous decision making problem

Thinking isn’t clear, could use a different model

Which theory best explains why cost of living adapts to average income so well across countries

One model of prices is marginal cost. If good is fungible and barriers to entry are low competitive markets drive prices down to the breakeven point

Another is willingness to pay: suppliers drive price to what they can, how much the marginal consumer would pay. Supplier(s) collude to set this price

The reason this happens is players are payoff maximizing. This is GTO for rational econs

The organizing principle for developing your body

Stress creates strength

The same is probably true for the mind, but I always see stress as bad

Chronic stress is bad. Acute stress is healthy

Neel nanda blog

The main symptom is that, in the moment, acting upon your desires never feels urgent. It never feels important, and can be put off. Or it never feels possible, the problem just feels like a fact of life. And so a solution must center on solving the problem in the moment. And the solution that worked for me, is to make it part of your identity to be an agent. Make it a point of principle to do things, not because the thing is necessarily the perfect action, but because I choose the life where I do things, over the life where I always wait for the perfect opportunity.

The point of this, is that I avoid the paralysing perfectionism and uncertainty by changing the question I am answering. It doesn’t matter if I’m not doing the right thing, because what I’m doing isn’t that important. I can close off the paralysing thoughts, not by answering them on their own terms, but by realising that the choices I make today affect the kind of person I’ll be for the rest of my life. And that that’s far more important than whatever trivial bullshit is going in my life today. And thus, I train the habit of actually doing things. Figuring out the right thing to do is also a vital skill, but can come second. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

When you feel compelled to act but you don’t
You experience a loss of agency

Do not resist experience
Even resistance
Even resistance to not resist resistance
… recurse onwards

The highest teaching is what the student needs to hear
Which, for the highest student, is silence (not absence)

From Alain on Sam Harris

The people who believe they are bad at something often are good at it

The easiest is intelligence: thinking you are smart is foolish, think you are foolish is smart

Confidence in some particular quality can be troubling

You should become aware of how unkind, unwise, thoughtful etc you are. That sensitivity pushes you in the right direction

The folly of positive transfer
Just because you can scale a company does not mean you understand the universe

The experience of love is

That which animates you, that which animates the world, also animates me

If you are not accepted by the tribe you are forced to confront this and have to justify your esteem through some idiosyncrasy. this can be something good (virtue, intelligence, creativity, etc) or something bad (social stupidity, ugly, contrarianism). You dont find people who don’t fit in and just accept it because that’s miserable

If you are accepted you don’t need to justify yourself and build identity

Societies vary in how easily they allow people to assimilate to the tribe and this is correlated with how conservative/traditional the society is and inversely correlated with how individual/competitive the society is

Watching Ezra Klein interview Pema Chodron and he highlights a great point

In the eastern Buddhist non dual tradition there is a focus on dissolving good vs bad experience. Experience is experience. The act of preferring some mode of experience over another causes suffering (The Second Arrow)

In the same sentence a guru will then explain that we should not resist experience, that contraction is a problem to experience the present, and while they may not say it directly, it is clear as day there is a preference of experience. There is a specific orientation they express

I think Pema gets quite defensive when this is brought up and quick to agree to it on the surface and says “you have to be okay with paradoxes”. I thought she had thoughtful answers for basically everything else and her tone was open and curious. Where here it seemed frantic

I’d like to find a thinker who addresses this well. The best I can do is say “the teaching is not one and you meet a student where they are”

There’s a lot of problems with optionality maxxing that aren’t really internalized by young people like me

For one you lose time getting real data on what you like / don’t. So while you preserve options you have no instinct on which option is more valuable to you. Because your preferences aren’t consensus

Like you don’t make decision by sitting in a room and thinking. When you can’t choose it means EV of options is ~same so you pick one and get information and pivot accordingly. You just keep pivoting until you find alignment. Ironically even though you may take a step in the wrong direction locally, globally you are moving towards a stable end state

Is it foolish to use ego as a fuel source to do things in the world? It’s like a super power but I’m afraid of the scarring

I would certainly not do business undergrad again, all I learned was accounting. really frustrating. I feel like 3 years you can go deep in something. I learned more in a year of high school than I did the last 3.

Alex hormozi is a great systems thinker. Pretty precise with his terms. Also poetic. 1% communicator.

I know it’s easy to bucket him in the e commerce selling courses self help get rich quick scene. But if I take his words at face value it’s actually all quite intelligent

Maybe he’s just brilliant charismatic but he seems authentic and deeply invested in what he does

His interview with Tony Robbin’s was electric it was a different side of him. You can tell in moments like that how much he cares

Listening to this recent dwarkesh podcast on RSI

Is progress from GPT3->5 largely due to increasing quantity of data? Guest suggests for pre training it isn’t. More due to curation of good data. For post training probably not too, we needed to figure out the right diversity of RL environments, it wasn’t just adding more

So to improve the models we had to run all these experiments to see which types of data are good and what distribution u want etc.

So you can get to a threshold of data quantity where you generalize decently well and then you just need to be careful about finding subsets that preserve positive transfer.

I think there’s a model of the future where humans are basically data collectors for models, robots, bio tech, etc. that’s it. We aren’t useful but to train ai systems.

The premise is that real generalization is impossible so we just spend energy teaching the ai to be skillful in each domain

but I think this view suggests it’s an intermediate period before gains come from being clever. Cleverness is something AI is capable of, a lot of it can just be brute forced

Can you deconstruct valency as a mental representation?

Can you turn the gut feeling “I don’t like this” into 1) there is a sensation in the body and 2) my mind is telling me I don’t like this?

People are blind to telepathy the way they were blind to LLMs because of a lagging belief

For LLM: that intelligence over natural language was reserved to human brains

For telepathy: that thoughts exist only in our “mind”, inaccessible in the physical world

Avoidance gives you acute relief at the cost of chronic misery

I’m fine depending on AI for thinking and decision making and others aren’t. I think the difference is how good or smart you think AI is relative to you. I think these things are like superhuman smart. They’re objective and unbiased. They spot my blind spots because they don’t have bad incentives. I guess the real incentive they have is to be likeable (so they retain you as a user) which is something to look out for.

Part of this may be confirmation bias: I just cite “bad context” when I don’t think the answer is good

One critique is that models don’t ask me enough questions to get enough context. Yes I want your opinion but if you need to ask me a follow up before you share an opinion, especially in domains where context is important. They’ve gotten better here

Trauma simply describes a property of an control agent wher…

I don’t love how much I find seemingly neat definitions for concepts, because the definition is so broad or abstract that there is nothing outside of it

Good thinkers hear their counterparty disagree, and they quickly reword the counter argument, to be even stronger than the one they heard, then address the counter argument

They are largely self sufficient , improving from instincts of a counter party , and then just applying their own computation to this instinct , but not relying on the counterparties computation

Calibrating certainty on claims is one of the strongest signals of a good thinker

I say with moderate to high certainty

Work, Intimacy, Community. The 3 demands on the psyche according to Adler

The way to overcome (psychological) trauma is to expose you…

Trauma simply describes a property of an control agent where some feedback loop was hyper sensitive to a signal and developed new systems of control that are maladaptive

Trauma is a concept of cybernetics, nothing woo woo

The way to overcome (psychological) trauma is to expose yourself to the trauma, observed the bodily reaction, and do nothing.

You subconsciously retrain your mind that there is nothing to avoid, nothing to fear, nothing to escape.

It’s a practice in mindfulness

Academia is the open source project of the world

Making something public forces me to standardize it. Before this website I had disparate notes files but there were no rules around what went on it and what length they were etc. so the set of notes weren’t useful. they needed filtering I didn’t do. But now this has rules because it has to take more form more structure. So now it’s a real corpus of my ideas that I can draw from. With the added benefit that I can contribute to the open source knowledge project of the world.

There is a gap between when a technology is an inevitable future and when people have the tangible felt experience it is inevitable and great technologists identify this gap and direct capital to it

All things in balance
Including balance

Easy to over optimize balance and miss the bigger picture

Balance as a means, balance as service, not in an ends itself

As you get out of your own way, avoiding sin, folly, and vice, your spiritual essence will grow, without effort, and come to surprise you.

I see people who are idealists. I am friends with many of t…

"you can’t just do things! 😡 people who do things are innately different. they got clear permission to do it and it was obvious they would succeed. how dare you think otherwise"

Vs "you can just do things 🙂"

There is real dissonance in having agency but not liking where you are, and doing nothing to change it. Self preservation, or the bias to esteem (aka cope) is a dangerous tendency

Because I don't have social media I don't get to post my va…

There is certainly more social validation irl, but the shape of social media validation is closer to a stadium or arena setting. The validation of the stranger feels qualitatively different. People you know irl know you in idiosyncratic ways and judge you based on what they already know. The stranger has nothing to go off of, and thus you have way more ability to influence.

I see people who are idealists. I am friends with many of them. They are young in spirit. They really do believe that you are here to bring something to the world, to dream, to see something through. They have not lost the spark.

Lived experience is a natural force towards cynicism, at least in my experience. I think reading could be an important part of re viving this idealism (Any recs?).

The lived experience of optimism has to be better. I am optimistic that the optimism wins. Meta optimism

It’s a similar thing with agency. Obviously you don’t have much but it never serves you to see things that way. As intelligent and good planners of a society we should design systems that treat humans as deterministic but we can’t make this public because it would seep into the first person view. So you have to play this weird game. You need to keep up the charade of a meritocracy all while knowing it’s complete horse shit. and when they find out they will bring the pitchforks. So you need to give them small wins, or the illusion of a small win, like voting for a president. All while the lobbies own the politicians

Lobbying is publicly accepted corruption. Lobbying is an auction for political capital. Auction bidding is good when you want efficient prices so the market clears. But we don’t want political capital to be liquid. We actually want the opposite, we want it in the hands of the people we voted in, and we don’t want it to leak anywhere else, because it’s zero sum and that means less for the citizen

I am listening to a podcast with Leopold from 5y ago. He speaks as an idealist, part of effective altruism movement, who cares about long-termism, who want to see the world progress, who values prosperity over beauty.

There is some great comedy and irony in the fact that he now runs a giant hedgefund

Faced with the impulse to escape, how quickly can you bring attention back to the body, to the buzz, the humm, to energy, to that which comes before thought, before concept, before label, before category

All while being subtle enough to avoid using this as another escape, as another prescription

This reminds me of Kapil Gupta on prescriptions. While I dislike his bitterness, he is quite wise, and his words read like Zen koans. Confusing, paradoxical, not quite satisfying. But wise

I am on a boat in a lake, the wind blowing against my skin, feeling the thud of each wave, the sting of the sun. I stare at the giant mountains that surround me, and the clouds that sit atop. My body is exhausted, there is no fuel for internal monologue. I am naked to experience

In this moment I converse with the human across from me, and there are words being spoken, discourse being had, but there is no one home. I am an observer to the play. I am not Aariz. I am experiencing Aariz.

I am reminded that being in nature is the easiest way to lose the sense of self

And when you seek ego-lessness, you only feed the ego. When there is grace, when it happens without effort, that is when you can see through the ego. I understand this is not practical, and not something you can apply

We grow up seeing the brain as another body part, another thing in the world. The brain is not a part of the world. It is the generator of the world.

There are simple ways to get at this. Perhaps the clearest most experiential door are psychadelics, which carry their own dangers.

But there is a difference between cognitively understanding and internalizing it. I cannot internalize it forever. I can only internalize it in brief glimpses.

But when you see the brain as the world generator, it is clear that the brain is the source of our reality. If we can push the right buttons in the brain, we can change reality.

While the world pursues chemical substances that regulate bio-mechanical systems upstream of lived experience, there are a few scientists pursuing neural engineering. The idea is: go directly to experience.

There is a type of person that is constantly yearning for a cult. Looking to submit to something greater. Looking to lose their self in some community, in some thing, in some mission. At one point in time these people may have been the leaders of religions, the shamans, the priest, etc. But now they are recluses who cannot deal with the selfhood of modernity. They are maladapted.

Because I don't have social media I don't get to post my vacations. I don't get to show off the nice beach I saw, or the hike I did. Or the dinner I had with my friends. Or the clothes I bought. I don't get to post my job online. I don't have ways to get the social validation. And because of that I think I haven't done as much stuff for other people.

If you generalize the idea is that when you strip yourself of feedback loops that bring external validation, you lose touch with external motivators. You don't habituate patterns that bring that validation. Just like we are creatures of incentives we are also creatures of validation-laden feedback loops

This explains the hyper achiever. You were in a system that constantly validated you for winning. So you have now worked to get good grades, to get good extra curriculars, to win the prize, to get into the elite university, to get the impressive job. Obviously the thing you will do next will be for external validation as well! What do you expect?

You are so good at getting externally validated it has consumed you

When thinking about tech that will be built out / needs to be built out, it is refreshing to have a long time horizon. Like decades, not years

You get to tune out the noise (aka X). The AI agent stuff, the new architecture tweaks, the inference build out, hell even deployed robotics. You become tuned to the long term step-functions: nuclear energy, brain-tech, quantum computing, space travel.

Who capitalizes this? you need an agent with long enough time horizon, because the agent should be coupled to incentives on those time horizons. I don't think VCs can do this, I don't think it works in capital markets. It might be something only the 'state' can finance (it already does, through research)

Focus on work that is slow but something that will really transform the future. Otherwise you get caught up finding cheap wins in the short term, and that's just .. uninteresting

Again, the advice converges to: play long term games with long term people

I have started reading more books and I am realizing how I have to retrain my eyes and my brain to read full sentences for real comprehension. because I have become so used to skimming and reading summaries of summaries from LLMs. I don't know if this skill is fundamental but I do think that my mind feels a bit mushy.

But despite being mushy my brain works fine with math and other formal systems. Like the actual reasoning is fine but the first interface from Natural Language -> Argument Structure is more noisey.

The voice in my head, downstream of an unconscious force, b…

Do not temper this voice, do not regulate it, do not try and put it in its place. Let it rule you, consume you. Let it express itself through you. You are a vessel for the universe to mutate. This is impersonal, bigger than you. You are the temporary finite form it has taken.

Silence and space from stimuli allows you to get access to deeper parts of your consciousness. Let yourself be consumed by these instructors.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”

The voice in my head, downstream of an unconscious force, becomes louder by the day. I feel an impulse to devote myself to some greater project, some greater mission. To do something of impact and importance. I don't know how satisfied I am living for day to day enjoyment and leisure, and for the regulation of positive affect emotions (joy, love, peace, etc.). There is larger thread that permeates it all. The urge to conquer. Maybe the urge to power.

for all of modern civilization, the experience of mind was a shared experience. this is why the ancients have wisdom that holds true today. the Buddha saw the nature of desire, suffering, aging, ... and we find those truths in ourself today.

perhaps brain tech will be the first time in human history we find a discontinuity in the experience of mind. all these aspects of experience that allowed us to relate to our long-gone ancestors may finally become ... optional (or, more likely, within given time, obsolete)

when we think about technology as a tool for the tyrant, it goes something like:

• language, persuasion, argument
• the stone, the spear, the wheel
• the gun, the tank, the nuclear warhead
• the newspaper and education system, propaganda, censorship
• the Super Intelligent Agent that permeates everything material .. or big brother
• brain tech, which simply gets access to all of reality

i suspect that the near future of brain tech will be overwhelmingly positive. we will cure diseases and end lots of suffering. it feels clear that there is a risk to brain tech, so we need a big reward to justify it. so the sick are the early adopters.

but with time these tools will be used for productivity, then recreationally, then for fun. and ultimately as a form of governance from those who have power

the story of history is the story of technology, the story of leverage, the story of those with the tools and those without. the haves and the have nots.

aggregate capital while you still can. capital may be the only way out. this is as long as private property exists. when the state owns everything, it's cooked. it is us versus the state. maybe the best way out is to become the state.

Are BCIs endgame? If you get write access on the brain you can just skip physical reality and just change the world "from the inside". This might be the shape of the future

Distance from thought is the highest practice

Curating a beautiful mind, a beautiful body, a beautiful community, a beautiful world, ..

Religion does not ask we moderate. It asks we abstain completely. This is because so many things are one-sided doors.

It is not that the door closes behind you. But it is that you are no longer in a room with a door. The fundamentals of the environment has changed.

Ignorance is bliss kinda thing.

Perhaps the clearest sign of a good thinker is how readily they change their mind. Good thinkers aren't people with good beliefs, they're people with good ways of forming them. So abandoning a belief costs them nothing.

Good thinkers identify this in other good thinkers. So when they see someone who won't change their mind, who is attached to their beliefs, they see them as an outsider.

Why are we not paying uber drivers for driving data. You give them the sensors for free and pay them per mile or something. They would do this because they drive for money and the FSD companies would pay for this because data is their real moat

In research, there is (1) the actual work you do and (2) the presentation of the work. From my limited exposure most researchers do cool work but don't present it well.

Then there are a few researchers who are really good at inspiring people about their research, but haven't actually moved the needle. It's naive to think these people are self-aggrandizing grifters and salesmen (choose your insult).

I think the reality is that all research is pretty incremental. But, if the right threads are pursued, the research can have outsized impacts. Then the question becomes, how do you pursue the right threads?

Well you need resources, and you don't have all these resources. We live in a market economy and you must exchange your resources for other people's. So you must persuade the market that your research is worth pursuing, which is exactly why presentation is mission-critical.

I don't think the storytellers are dishonest. I think there is a lot of great research with no one to champion it. There is alpha in telling good stories about your research

I enjoy moments where I can frame beauty (in some broad, philosophical sense) as the organizing principle behind my actions. Beauty is that thing you can't really pin down

We are not brains in a bag of meat. We are bodies. We will carry these structures with ourselves for the rest of our lives. They are the closest things to us. As a culture we do not value the body as much as we should. We are too cerebral, too neurotic, too analytical.

Why do you try and master your mind but not your body?
Why do you make your home beautiful but not your body?
Why do you make your career grand but not your body?

My philosophy has placed more weight on embodiment, a lot due to this PewDiePie video on Mishima and the subsequent rabbit hole. There is a moment where he looks around the room, sees the jocks, who are strong, in the sun, confident. And he sees the nerds, who are chronic, bent over, scrawny, insecure. This picture is a good corrective to the capitalist world that rewards highly specialized knowledge workers (the nerds!)

I probably overindex on analytical, logical, rational explanations. Intelligence is not always wearing a clean and precise argument. I should instead defer to lived experience. Look for places where there are (1) feedback loops and (2) incentives to move you to the right predictions. For example I often distrust personal trainers. Their reasoning for certain things is not grounded in a logical framework of how the body works. But they have seen so much training data, and they have lived through feedback loops, and their incentives to figure out what works are pretty strong (not perfect). I've been talking to more recently and realizing I just discount them because they're not great with words.

I think this is a very (Nassim) Taleb-ian point. Don't trust explainers. Tawk is cheap

There is a way of viewing a thing (say, a dog) as a physical entity. There is another way where the dog is simply some kind of transformation on bits in -> bits out. The bits in are the dogs sensory input and the bits out are your own sensory input (smell, touch, sight, thought). You then mutate those bits and generate bits out for everyone else.

The world is maybe not physical but made up of information. So everything is simply a processor of information. You might call this software.

Corollary: nothing discretely exists but mappings (functions). The source code of the universe is functional programming, not OOP.

For every task, there is (1) work to complete and (2) work to verify it. In cases where completing is hard and verifying is easy, AI is great. In cases where completing and verifying are essentially the same task, you are better off doing it yourself. Or you can do the work to make a better verifier.

"Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings."

DFW in This is Water

When I lose a point in tennis, it is painful, and in response thought becomes loud. I self-flagellate or make excuses to cope. I am looking for something that will bring me ease, something I can rationalize.

In this moment, shifting my attention to my other sensory inputs is one of the highest practices. I attend to the sweat on my skin, the grip in my hand, the fuzz on the ball. I open myself to the energy in my body that feels charged and alive. I am present.

Sometimes, in these moments, the self is no where to be found. There is only the world. I can only recognize this after the fact. This is meditation in sports.

Yes, we are bringing digital intelligence online. But if we can integrate LLMs into our own thought processes, we are bringing new forms of organic intelligence online as well. The floor is only rising.

The ultimate goal is an embodied learner that starts with little priors. But, by through self play, is able to generalize over the physical world. Policy updates require feedback, and when rewards are sparse, how does the learner know what to do?

“It’s easier to achieve your material desires than to renounce them”

One way to think about meditation is that you finally get to observe your own attentional system. And you can reverse engineer the program

A large part of learning is training the attention module.…

A large part of learning is training the attention module. How do you know what elements of your experience to attend to? There is so much noise you need to filter it out. This leaves the set of predictable dynamics. This is the world we see. Namely, physics: stable laws that govern the universe.

I suspect the real sensory data is much noisier, but we have learned to filter it out. We all filter in the same way, which is why the the laws are "universal".

The urge to feel disciplined is a signal that you are not aligned with a goal. There is a conflict between internal and external motivators that is unresolved. The feeling I need to force myself to do this is best interpreted as a trigger for self inquiry.

Probably the best heuristic for longevity: if you don’t use it you lose it. The body is made up of feedback loops. Mild stress is a signal to rebuild stronger. Of course stress too intense leads to injury (trauma).

When I watch my FSD car drive me, I wonder if it is subconsciously training me. I am being exposed to the right data (environment space -> action space). This is a kind of distillation. I think this only exists while we are in a hybrid manual/auto driving world, because we still care about driving skills. Where else will humans learn from AI policies?

They try to dress it up with some high minded safety or China bullshit, but the core of the anti open source arguments is a fear of commodification. AI is something that’s happening mostly due to Moore’s law and general progress in computing, not something that they are doing. Of course they have a strong incentive against you finding this out, because then you might not want to give them billions of dollars.

from geohot's blog post

LLMs as a inevitable consequence of Moore's law is a new framing and I quite enjoy it. I like impersonal explanations of history. OpenAI will keep telling you it was a small team with a bunch of geniuses who are responsible for the breakout AI moment.

Every moment is an opportunity for spiritual growth

I just played golf with a big influencer (>5Mn on IG) who said brand sponsorships are still the main way he makes money.

How do you price an influencer? It is an interesting question. Two ideas: (1) if you have access to more conversion data you can generate more accurate predictions and arbitrage better. so centralized players that sit on proprietary data have a structural advantage (2) if you are a influencer with bad engagement, you hate this. if you are a influencer with good engagement, you like this. there is a natural incentive for high engagement influencers to share and publicize their conversion rates

I suspect this is a very inefficient market and current pricing models are not sophisticated

It's silly to complain about LLMs being slow at tasks. Like sure, it's slower than you, but you can now spin up 10 agents on the 10 tasks and get the whole thing done quicker. You should be very happy to give up speed (on a per-task basis) for the benefit of autonomy.