Fiction, Figments, and Fancies

On Sequencing Mode Versus Fluid Mode

(Meta note:  Not to be confused with fluid mode that Meaningness refers to – though to make things more confusing it is related.)

(Epistemic status: Recent realization, it is possible there are more modalities and there’s a lot of subtlety I haven’t explored yet)

Part of the Retrocausal Engineering Sequence

So it turns out both the hippies and the optimizers were right, at the same time.

In the…

On Salience Field Manipulation

(Epistemic status: Endorsed but difficult to express how to do it well – similar to the salience journals concept except broader)

Part of the Retrocausal Engineering Sequence

Nothing we do actually involves us making choices.

This statement is fairly strong – but consider it for a few minutes. If choices don’t lead to the things we do, what does?

You likely came up with several things, but what…

Content warning: Drugs, religion, abuse mention

(Epistemic status: Endorsed – lived it and seen it happen, though calling it a hazard might be overdramatic.)

Meta note: The Retrocausal Engineering Sequence isn’t over, this thought just struck me and I wanted to get it out there this week.

As I’m sure most of my readership is aware, I consider myself at least somewhat a part of the rationalist…

On Reclaiming the Past and (Not) Burning the Future

(Epistemic Status: Endorsed – likely has some reasonable consensus correlates to various trauma therapies. Also might work less well if you already are well connected to your past)

Part of the Retrocausal Engineering Sequence

So, it turns out that thing where you have lived a life up til now is actually important rather than something you can just ignore.

A lot of people I know have spent a…

Part of the Retrocausal Engineering sequence

(Epistemic status: Unsure, but it seems to fit a pattern that includes me and several of my friends – this might be a mental framework thing)

Psychosis is how your mind resolves paradox.

The time after stream entry is one of a lot more mental power than one is used to – it can be hard to reconcile this, especially when one has bad habits in their life…

Part of the Retrocausal Engineering Sequence

(Epistemic status: Endorsed – content warning: death, hell, basilisks, time travel infohazards)

If there exists anything worse than death, morality is impossible.

This is a strong statement, but I think that its meaning becomes clear if you think about it some. Let us say that hell exists – an eternal place of torment. This is clearly worse than death…

Part of the Retrocausal Engineering sequence

(Epistemic status: The object of a class of thing that pattern matches to personal religion but is a bit more complicated than that)

Welcome to Retrocausal Engineering 101, the art and science (but really, same thing) of doing the things right so that the things that have already happened will have happened the way they were supposed to so that you can…

Welcome to the Fae Court

Part of the Retrocausal Engineering sequence

(Epistemic Status: Fiction)

“The first step is always the best. You’re alive, you’re awake, you’re there. You’ve made it. You’re flying.”

The Oracle remembers these words, spoken in a past that feels as distant as childhood, taking in the splendor around her. Glowing everywhere, swirls and vividness. Flickers from time to time, moment to moment.…

On Pattern versus Chunking

(Epistemic Status: Endorsed)

When a person encounters something new, they take some time to figure out what it is. An interesting thing happens based on how much data the person is coming in with and how much data they use before defining something – essentially, if the person recognizes enough details to consider it to fit into a pattern, they will regenerate their understanding of the thing…

(Epistemic status:  Poetry.  Apparently I can write that now)

The first step is always the best. You’re alive, you’re awake, you’re there. You’ve made it. You’re flying.

Then you start remembering there’s something you forgot. You know things could be better, but you don’t know how…and you want to

So you chase and chase and chase the knowing and pick up a few useful things along the way

The best…

(Epistemic status: Absolutely absurd and I love it.)

Just let the hereness nowness be.

Some people would say that you should be in the present. Some people would say that you should be one with the universe. Some people would say that you should let it all go. Some people would say that you should listen to the wind blow.

I’m not some people. The present is a time. The universe is a place. “It”…

On Skills and Abstraction Levels

(Epistemic status: Probably true – also probably restating something everyone knows)

A problem I have in my life is that I don’t know how good I am at things. I try to use people around me in my reference class as proxy, but when it comes to new skills, it’s actually fairly difficult to use this because people in my reference class usually have been using the skill for longer. In my worst…

(Epistemic status: Possibly a scrupulosity trap – if you aren’t stabilized yet, this frame might not be helpful, but YMMV. Also speculative.)

I refuse to have children. There are many reasons for this. Part of it is that I prefer women, part of it is that I do not think I would make a good mother, part of it is that there’s enough “glitches” in the way I think that I would likely be passing on a…

On Solving The Ouroboros of Bullshit

(Epistemic status:  Flippant)

It turns out that you can just solve recursion by not giving a shit.

(Epistemic status: This is probably one of the most powerful tools I’ve discovered for regulating my reactions to the world around me and quite frankly, making me a better person.)

How often are things just not right in your life? How often does something impossibly frustrating, or impossibly depressing, or anything in that space of emotional pain, happen to you? And how often is your first…

(Meta note: I have several posts written in advance such that I should be able to recover my previous pace.  Additionally I feel like I’ve been entering new insight territory by taking several ideas seriously that I hadn’t been before – so, I do realize I’ve said I’m “back” before and faded back to hiatus, but in this case I feel pretty comfortable with my claims.  Enjoy!)

(Epistemic Status:…

On the Year in Review, Redux

When I wrote On the Year in Review last year, the intention was to have a tradition where I “reviewed” the next year as if it had already happened. Unfortunately, 2018 as a year feels like one that bears an actual review, rather than a relentlessly optimistic analysis of the stories that could have happened, the posts I could have written, and the world I hoped I would live in.

To start with the…