1propionyl (u/1propionyl)

1propionyl commented on Altered states of consciousness induced by breathwork accompanied by music journals.plos.org/plosone... · Posted by u/gnabgib

temp0826 · 3 days ago

Holotropic breathwork style sessions are known to go for 3 hours and can result in some pretty wild physiological responses. In the ballpark of a 5-meo-dmt/bufo experience.

1propionyl · 3 days ago

It doesn't really surprise me that's possible. I've landed by accident in a very recognizably DMT state when the stars aligned. It can happen, I just don't generally buy claims of "naturally". It's a preexisting state, but getting into it requires such a shock (such as flooding the brain with exogenous DMT) to enter.

That's not the same as the Bufo state which I can't really imagine entering naturally, is it actually like that or just in the ballpark?

Would love to hear about your experiences. Get in touch!

1propionyl commented on The Perils of 'Design Thinking' theatlantic.com/books/arc... · Posted by u/Petiver

jstanley · 2 months ago

The entire universe is like chess.

Yes your opponent can make a move and you don't know what move they'll make. Chess is like that too.

I'm not saying this is in fact a good way to win a physical fight.

I'm also not saying the optimal move is unique. If 2 moves have the same utility then they can both be optimal.

What I'm saying is that just because you don't know what is the best move doesn't mean a best move exists.

1propionyl · 2 months ago

It’s not even a well-defined question to ask "what is the best action".

To ask that in the context of a fight (not a bounded game like chess) is already to assume the existence of a complete utility function on which to measure it. That’s:

1. Philosophically, putting the cart before the horse.

2. Computationally, asking for the function that is the entire universe. Any utility function you define, an adversary (say, God) can find edge cases it doesn’t account for, endlessly. Chess has a finite state space; a fight doesn’t. Formalizing this hits the usual incompleteness and undecidability limits.

You’re claiming a perfect map exists (Platonist position); I’m saying that if such a thing exists, it’s just the territory itself, which isn’t a map (Nominalist position).

1propionyl commented on The Perils of 'Design Thinking' theatlantic.com/books/arc... · Posted by u/Petiver

abc123abc123 · 2 months ago

This is the truth! Added to the purely mechanical process, is an enormous psychological aspect. But... we can do even better! The above _assumes_ that fist fighting is indeed what we want to do, but perhaps the best (TM) solution is to avoid the fist fight alltogether?

Since ultimately, living, and living well, is about values, how do I choose to live, according to which values, science will never be able to capture that dimension.

I feel that scientists and technologists, and designers for that matter, should study more philosophy. It will open up their eyes to the fact that not every question is solvable by science.

1propionyl · 2 months ago

Technologists in particular, taken as a group, have a very specific philosophical outlook that they don't tend to interrogate in themselves because it's so pervasive and intrinsic to what they work on and how they do so. Fish unaware of water, so to speak. It's a set of assumptions that make sense when you're programming software, but break down when applied to other things in the real world.

The tend to assume the universe is deterministic.

They tend to assume (incorrectly) that because it's deterministic a good enough model will be able to predict or explain.

They tend to ignore or not even be aware of the inherent bias towards available and measurable data, or that what we can measure must capture the essential dimensions of it.

The most naive tend to assume that given enough data, a model will get better, that the noise will "average out" (it doesn't).

I don't have a good name for this, but it has all the trappings of a good -ism otherwise.

Beyond philosophy, they should study art, music, literature, and whatever else interests. They should spend time with others who do and not only with people who work in technology. Unfortunately, increasingly college CS programs have cut out general education requirements in favor of questionably useful skills training, leaving graduates in a state where this seems daunting.

Computer scientists are building the world we all have to live in. Is it so much to ask that they be educated in the humanities before they're turned loose to do so?

1propionyl commented on The Perils of 'Design Thinking' theatlantic.com/books/arc... · Posted by u/Petiver

jstanley · 2 months ago

Yes. The territory has an optimal move. If your map is not good enough to identify it, that's a property of your map not of the territory.

1propionyl · 2 months ago

No, it is not. First of all the territory isn't fixed. Second of all the existence of a fitness landscape (let alone ocean) doesn't guarantee the existence of unique optima, nor that the ones you identify aren't in a second or less your loss because your opponent read you. The other person's behavior is unpredictable but can be guided, and likewise. Feints are a huge part of fighting.

To think you can identify a model in this situation is pure hubris. Absolutely no one who fights thinks this way. Fighting is NOT LIKE CHESS.

This fundamental faith in modeling is dangerous. It overestimates its own applicability, and ignores its predisposition to only focus on the most available data (under the incorrect assumption that if you collect more and more it will eventually "average out").

1propionyl commented on The Perils of 'Design Thinking' theatlantic.com/books/arc... · Posted by u/Petiver

jstanley · 2 months ago

Enumerate your possible moves.

Evaluate your personal utility function over all possible future timelines of the universe, conditional on each of your possible moves.

The move that has the highest score is the best move.

1propionyl · 2 months ago

At that point the map is the territory.

1propionyl commented on Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff psychiatrymargins.com/p/s... · Posted by u/Anon84

roarcher · 2 months ago

> whenever I see wellness healers and the like extolling the virtues of psilocybin, I want to point out that there could be a downside

Anecdotally, I had a friend once who was very into psilocybin for its mind-expanding properties. He certainly thought he was enlightened and loved to brag about the great understanding he'd gained from his trips, but he was one of the more selfish and un-curious people I've ever known. It seems to me that these drugs create a feeling of having accessed great knowledge, but the "knowledge" is just whatever nonsense your brain conjures up on the fly, like a dream world that makes sense while you're asleep but whose logic falls apart the moment you wake up.

1propionyl · 2 months ago

As someone who has gotten a lot out of psychedelics therapeutically, you are correct. Psychedelics do not in of themselves grant any insight or wisdom beyond perhaps raw experiential evidence that our senses are fallible and our perception of the world is an artifact of cognition.

Past that, psychedelics are (kaleidoscopic, funhouse) mirrors. In the hands of a curious and humble person they can (in addition to being a lot of fun shared with like-minded others) be valuable therapeutic tools for approaching firmly rooted hangups, attitudes, etc. In the hands of someone like your friend, you get what you observed.

Both are commonly occurring patterns, and if you know a person's character even a little well you can usually predict how they'll engage with and come out of the experience.

To quote Shulgin,

> The most compelling insight of that day was that this awesome recall had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid. Everything I had recognized came from the depths of my memory and my psyche.

1propionyl commented on The Perils of 'Design Thinking' theatlantic.com/books/arc... · Posted by u/Petiver

A_D_E_P_T · 2 months ago

If you look at how humans move and interact with their environments, you'll find that it can mostly be reduced to biomechanical optimization problems. Even in extremis: A fist-fight is a sequence of biomechanical optimization problems, and there's always a "perfect move" at any given moment in time.

There are many architects, establishers or followers of certain doctrines, who feel the same way about built structures: That they're designed to solve issues related to human movement, and that there's one right way to build them. That if you build things in that correct way, and ignore the kitsch opinions of the proletariat, people will grow happier or be more effective. (Sometimes despite themselves.)

I don't necessarily agree with these views, but a quick glance at popular American suburban "architecture" -- possibly the worst of all worlds -- is enough to lend it serious weight.

1propionyl · 2 months ago

> Even in extremis: A fist-fight is a sequence of biomechanical optimization problems, and there's always a "perfect move" at any given moment in time.

No, it is not. And no, there isn't.

This is exactly the sort of reductive mode of thought the article is calling out.

1propionyl commented on Guess I'm a rationalist now scottaaronson.blog/?p=890... · Posted by u/nsoonhui

kragen · 2 months ago

The ‘rationalist’ group being discussed here aren't Cartesian rationalists, who dismissed empiricism; rather, they're Bayesian empiricists. Bayesian probability turns out to be precisely the unique extension of Boolean logic to continuous real probability that Aristotle (nominally an empiricist!) was lacking. (I think they call themselves “rationalists” because of the ideal of a “rational Bayesian agent” in economics.)

However, they have a slogan, “One does not simply reason over the joint conditional probability distribution of the universe.” Which is to say, AIXI is uncomputable, and even AIXI can only reason over computable probability distributions!

1propionyl · 2 months ago

They can call themselves empiricists all they like, it only takes a few exposures to their number to come away with a firm conviction (or, let's say, updated prior?) that they are not.

First-principles reasoning and the selection of convenient priors are consistently preferenced over the slow, grinding work of iterative empiricism and the humility to commit to observation before making overly broad theoretical claims.

The former let you seem right about something right now. The latter more often than not lead you to discover you are wrong (in interesting ways) much later on.

1propionyl commented on Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI mistral.ai/news/magistral... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

8n4vidtmkvmk · 3 months ago

Are we sure more time butt in office equates to more productivity?

1propionyl · 3 months ago

Yes, specifically when it comes to open-ended research or development, collocation is non-negotiable. There are greater than linear benefits in creativity of approach, agility in adapting to new intermediate discoveries, etc that you get by putting a number of talented people who get along in the same space who form a community of practice.

Remote work and flattening communication down to what digital media (Slack, Zoom, etc) afford strangle the beneficial network effects.