There are so many frameworks and approaches to understand self and take care of human pet—and this popped up into my head as maybe a helpful, shortcut, simplification to regulate oneself. Does your mind need quicker or slower waves?

to do slower

• slow down

• read something longer

• do something boring

• do physiological sigh: (very slow inhale and normal exhale with audible sigh)

• there is this beautiful qi gong exercise i like to do which quick description is: do the crawl hand movement except one hand goes opposite direction and you always look at the palm of one hand and, switch to the other hand at the bottom of the movement, do it for a few minutes and switch direction of arm movement

slowing down is maybe like connecting to longer processes, it feels like peacefulness, acceptance, inter-connectivity. Other things that work here are:

• focus meditation (take one sensation and just attempt to keep your focus on it, you will fail billion times, so just be okay with it and keep coming back)(or be with your body parts, put your attention into feet)

• slow breath

• do nothing meditation (Practice nothing, the most profound of all practices)

• listening to very slow music

I often benefit from slowing down my mind. My brain waves run excitable, they jolt, jump around, here I let them be more peaceful, stay grounded in one spot or slow movement

• also there are these other qigong exercises, like just standing still, or holding belly

• do a deliberately slow movement, or a movement in slow motion (i just poured my tea in morocco very slowly from considerable height, it was awesome)

to do quicker

sometimes i also may benefit from recognizing when my system needs speeding up, maybe it’s hard to recognize it when it is in slow mode or one it is slow and feels something “difficultish”, in the is moment of sadness, loneliness… no no no… maybe this is a wrong model. Mark Brackett has a couple of great lectures and a great app How we feel—where he lays out emotions on two axes. positive/negative, high energy/low energy—so let’s not mix this app, pawel… we are just focusing here on recognizing slow/fast, and slow doesn’t mean even low energy, there can be a lot of energy and focus, but channeled differently, maybe channel into inter connectedness or focus on what is rn

to have quicker:

• drink coffee

• do excitable body movement (sprints, something as quickly as possible)

• expressing bolt: jump excitedly, shout, murmur, do the weirdest noises and poses your body wants to do, or your mind is curious about trying

• energetic music (plus dancing)

• publish something online where your friends are

honestly examples for quicker waves are way harder for me, maybe bc my system is there more by default, other things

• therapy (connection w therapist makes me often feel excited, like i am my most sociable afterwards and I need to call a friend and laugh and be silly)

I am sure there is more, i may add more later. If you have any, please let me know what works for you. But maybe my biggest takeaway is that, even rn writing this, i feel how much my system needs the slower waves, it loves l o v e s s l o w n e s s

What is the best book you ever read? What’s your fav writer, artist, intellectual? I used to create these lists and ask this type of questions. It’s funny to find oneself on the opposite side of the spectrum here.

(here is one of my lists from my art years, plus i just added papyrus rn :). I really felt that sharing these was important. Like if these things transformed my world so much, I want you to have a chance to transform yours)

I see a spectrum here between two points of relating to how we think influence works in culture, and I think the way we answer this question has quite a lot of consequences on how we create culture and relate to it. So I think there are two points like (A) you are the important artist, capitalized letters, a unique talent, often creating alone, genius, your work is transformative, distinguished etc.

Or you are (B) a diffused node in a network. The creative act comes from a confluence of forces, and it’s hard to pin-point from where exactly. Your impact heavily depends on your context and the context of the recepient, on who are they, their experiences, developmental stage, current sensitivities, preferences etc.

Okay, quick reveal, no need to wait until the end of the article. If this spectrum is A and B I have been somewhere around 16% (towards left) and now I think a lot more accurate how influence in culture work it’s more like 63% (towards the right).

We are in this acute labyrinth of knowledge. Communication is much more context dependent than i thought. We are each on different heights of a knowledge ladder in each of knowledge areas. Things that are epiphanies, that break my mind, may be obvious to people on steps above, not understandable or not even graspable why they seem important to people below—and maybe there are very few people on similar ladder height, with similar contexts, for whom this may be also important.

Like let me give you a tiny, non-exahaustive example recently i created this mental model Weak ties — no strong tie gets you to wellbeing like one big epiphany, but large amount of weak ties I was a little embarrassed to put it on my wiki. I expect this won’t be particularly helpful to anybody. But I was like I want to be true to what feels important to me and weirdly this definition helps me. This may be a small bit that at the current stage of my knowledge, in my current tensions with reality, is helpful. But I don’t think its helpful to a lot of people nor will be important to me in ten years.

Antithesis

Okay but there are strong differences in strength of impact, length of impact and qualities of outputs. Yes, I don’t want to deny this. On both axis, impact and quality, there are orders of magnitude differences. There are some really great movies, books, buildings, essays, poems that transformed disciplines and are engaging for centuries.

Falling for a great creator

That, said there is also an effect of falling for a great creator. One side of it makes sense as a mechanism that is just pretty universal. Something is good, and because it’s good it becomes popular, like say 98 percentile popular. Then it becomes even more popular because of its popularity. So one mechanism is people will go see a thing because it’s high quality, and the second is they will go see a thing because people are talking about it.

And there is another mechanism that is… plain stupid 😤. I think there is this need to have heroes, gods or equivalents. We want to idealize things and people, and put them on a pedestal. And I think this is another mechanism that’s working here. Oh, artist? I am not talented enough to be that. This person is a great master. This is a masterpiece. This may be one of the largest motivations for creating, to try to be that loved one. We want to be as desirable and impactful.

Updates

So my long-term shift is that the more correct model of influence is a much more diffused, multi-player game. For example, Edison the great inventor of a lightbulb, right? No, expect in cases like this, and in fact what have been the case here, some thing like twenty different attempts, some already working (Joseph Swan had a bulb running in London around the same time), and some that succeeded but haven’t been as well known and celebrated (Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans patented one in Canada in 1874). The great lone creator probably had less unique influence than default culture assumes.

At the end, my epiphany

I see monuments as a society delusion, a want to find the ideal, to preserve it. It’s a misrepresentation of reality and a distortion of the more correct (B) multi-point model. All monuments will fade at some point, literally decompose. We will understand it’s a misrepresentation of where the love comes from, who really deserves it, where its real channels are, ready to be unclogged. Sending love to people of the b-sort, weak, poor, shy, uncool, unconnected, sending it to animals on the factory farms, forgotten in their numbers, and bugs who can be easily squeezed or shrimps killed inhumanely

Even if you are Adam Mickiewicz type (an influential Polish poet from romanticism) please agree that Adam Mickiewicz from a pedestal is a distortion. Accepting this feels like abandoning something, abandoning this want to be great, desirable, original. But I also feel a little ecstasy there. That I am in contact with something truer. Model (B) shows me I am finite. All my actions will be forgotten. (do u even remember all names of your great-grandparents?). Sure, I can still create a cultural wave, but this wave isn’t coalescing into remembrance, but into a big emptiness around. We are just mortal nodes in the network of something larger, exchanging things, doing things in the now. It is unremarkable, unglamorous, unmonumental. But after agreeing to it, it feels more beautiful, maybe because it feels like connecting to something larger, to emptiness, or maybe because it feels like more true to what is.

when i think about it i literally have a mini-spark of ecstasy

I aspire to be a little unhinged (oops… scary). I admire people who express themselves courageously in life. That said, I also want to do so with respect to others and love for creation. Saying truth regardless seems to me like one of the most important qualities in the idea space.

The truth doesn’t lie in the middle, truth lies where it lies.
(from Polish: Prawda nie leży pośrodku, prawda leży tam, gdzie leży.)
—Władysław Bartoszewski

I think we have an elephant in the brain. There is a lot of stuck knowledge, or a lot of people with beliefs that are stuck (me included, hello!)—fundamentally stuck around our identities and around what we perceive will bring us love and resources (these are often not conscious processes, again read this fantastic book Elephant in the Brain). I believe burning witches for the wrong beliefs is not a thing of the past but a design of our minds, and feature of our discourse all around the political spectrum. And this is also an emergent force: our networks, peer groups exert pressure to think in a certain way. What I will say here may sound weird to some. I want to be inclusive in the way I write, inviting to people who think differently or come from different contexts, but I am also okay if what I think will auto-select off some people (oops… scary)

I intend not to use LLMs aside from spell/grammar check. See my Sophie txt prompt that I use often.

The main unburdening that I want from this, alongside a couple of others, is to be able to post something quite complex, and if I have uncertainty around it, if I don’t know fully how to phrase it, describe it, if things don’t fully glue together, I will just work around it by describing my IFs. And maybe I will just say, Oh, yep, something doesn’t fully square here, but it seems important, my mind somehow comes back to this, please let me know how to think better around it? So treat all of my word vomits as drafts. I also may improve some posts after publishing or repost them later.

Word vomits is a sub-section of “Pawel world” Substack and at least for now I am not subscribing anybody to it. Hello zero readers :) :) :) Also, people who subscribe to my Substack won’t be automatically added to it. That said, feel free to subscribe to it, but lowest-of-low-quality warning! hihi

Also, another intention is to write as freely as I write to a few close friends on iMessage. Like stylistically there is a fire there. I know that when I don’t think this is going to be a big write-up, my style is better, lighter, fresher, quicker, clearer.

Lately, my writing has been influenced by Kaj Sotala’s piece proposing to write the way people do Ultraspeaking. Let’s see where it takes me.

Oh and the name “word vomits” is from Visa. I am inspired by his creative process, by the way he partakes in the idea exchange: lightly but with high commitment and high volume. Read more here Compelling projects or in his fantastic spell FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD v1.0. I want more of Visa energy in my creative lajf.

I am creating this to connect to people interested in similar things, so disagree, ask questions, say hallo, or post links!

Nature of things is śūnyatā (emptiness). Things have no fixed, inherent nature, which is precisely whymultiple perspectives on the same thing can each be genuinely true (even opposite ones). A thing isn’t locked into one description. And this may apply to teaching. For example a jhanna teacher might tell one student to effort more and another to relax completely. The teaching has no single right form, it’s empty too.
~ Rob Burbea said something like this in Introduction to Jhanna (1st or 2nd lecture)

Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously
– via

The best guiding question in life is, “Who do you want to share this life with?”… My ethics is derived from my desire for good peers
–

Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.
– General Omar Bradley

Wants are infinite, the reality is constraints
– via Eliezer Yudkowsky

Internet as a self-destructing paper
~

People don’t want you to be perfect, what they want is to feel connected to you
– via Joe Hudson

Enlightenment feels like correctness, that every passing second feels correct
– via interview with Spencer Greenberg on Clearer Thinking podcast (28:29)

Why would I trust opinion bc its my own?
– via Rationally Speaking #143

I don’t see much of a difference between deeply accepting yourself and deeply accepting others. You can’t really accept yourself *conditionally—*if you’re okay only as long as you aren’t “X”, then you’re like the Catholics trying to get into heaven by being good enough
– Link

If you have a plan B means you are failing at plan A
– a friend

Beliefs persevere even without any social pressure. … The belief will not change when the reasons are defeated. The causality is reversed. People believe the reasons because they believe in the conclusion … We believe what the people we love and trust believe. This is not a conscious decision to conform by hiding one’s true beliefs. It’s the truth, this is how we believe.
– Daniel Kahneman

I am trying to be the dumbest person in the room

Had a lot of occasions lately to wonder what truths about myself people are trying to avoid telling me.
– link

You don’t have a brain with a body, you have a body with a brain
– Ido Portal

I want to be as publicly vulnerable as possible, because I want to broadcast acceptance towards others. As in, one of the first times I felt deep acceptance from someone else was when I watched them name an unflattering thing about themselves with openness and grace
–

Flirt with abandon
– ceo link

Don’t look what people are saying. Look what people are doing.

Locate an animal, mimic its expression and movement for two minutes. If there are no other lives around, observe an object and be it for two minutes. Do it regularly
– Apichatpong Weerasethakul via Hans Urlich Obrist

We seem to be so important that it breaks our minds and makes us wonder if the universe is real
–

Ours is the era of inadequate AI alignment theory. Any other facts about this era are relatively unimportant
–

The truth doesn’t lie in the middle, truth lies where it lies
– Władysław Bartoszewski (original in Polish: Prawda nie leży pośrodku, prawda leży tam, gdzie leży”)

Intelligence is did you achieved things you wanted in life
–

I have felt it myself—the glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.
– Freeman Dyson Link

Start where you are
– Pema Chödrön

The world can never own a man who wants nothing
– Wu Hsin via Naval Ravikant

Trusted third parties are security holes
– Nick Szabo in crypto context

It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking, than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting
–

If fixing or saving and trying to rescue [other people] is futile, radical self-care is quantum and it radiates out from you into the atmosphere. Like a little fresh air. It’s a huge gift to the world. One people say: isn’t she full of herself? – just smile obliquely like Monalisa and make both of you a nice cup of tea. Being full of affection to self-goofy, self-centered, cranky, annoying self is home. Is where world piece begins
– Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Life’s work is like building castles from the sand or painting pictures on the water
–

If you hesitate whether to become a participant, take part
– Paweł Althamer

A secret of getting ahead is getting started.

Don’t focus on outputs. Focus on inputs. And then score will take care of itself.
– Bill Walsh

Science is the quantification of doubt. Facts are f words in science.
– Lisa Feldman Barrett

Love is the most important force in the universe
–

Everything is on the spectrum of love. Everything can be explained by identifying where it lies on the spectrum of love

It’s a lot harder to create something constructive than destructive. First was dynamite then was a combustion engine. First was the atomic bomb, then was a nuclear electricity plant. In order to make something constructive one need to make it safe, control many moving parts, sync a variety of processes together.
~

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
– Seneca

It’s less important to improve how you play on a good day, and more to find a slight better ways how you play on a bad day
~ Alex Ferguson, a highly successful coach of Manchester United

What you do on your bad days matters more than what you do on your good days
–

We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are
– Anaïs Nin

I wake up every day thinking that I don’t understand. How to live in a world that I don’t understand?
~

99% of all effort is wasted. Focus on 1%
–

The ongoing experience that I have is a feeling of, I never know how to express this, but that things are neutral in a way. Things are more neutral than they seem. One person hears something and they say it’s bad and the other person hears the same thing and says it’s good. It has its influence depending on whatever your background is, where you come from and your interpretation. But actually things are in a sense neutral.
– Pema Chödrön Link

How to become smarter? Take care of your body. Your head is an organ too.
–

If you cannot do what you asked yourself to do for a long time you are probably not a good kindergarten teacher to yourself. Our brain is ancient. It’s sub–divided in many ancient, animalistic parts. In order to be a functional human being you need treat yourself like a kindergarten teacher controlling a group of children.
–

I suspend judgement
– Montaigne via Anthony Bourdain tatoo

Wisdom is just covering blind spots in one’s mental model map of knowledge … Eighty or ninety important mental models will carry about 90 percent of the freight in making you a worldly wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.
~ Charlie Munger

Find source of the discipline, study for the rest of your life
–

Focus on important, neglected, and tractable
– via Open Philanthropy

Don’t trust individual papers, trust literatures –
–

In primatology, when we talk about primates, almost everything is viewed through a perspective of a hierarchy in the group. In social sciences, when we talk about humans, hierarchy is rarely ever mentioned
~ Frans de Wall

The more you know, the easier is to know more

I love sharing IFS with a wide variety of people, so below I created IFS 101, a resource for beginners, and IFS 102, a resource for super pros (like me, hihi). Much of what’s most useful here probably comes from my work with , or was sparked by it, thank you! You can find other great practitioners I worked with and recommend at the end of this post.

IFS 101

IFS is a therapeutic modality that views the mind as composed of “parts” (everybody remembers this bit better) and a core “Self” (which most people miss at first).

What are parts?

A part can be any internal experience (emotion, tension, want) that you give an identity to, in whatever form feels most appropriate. It can really be anything.

If you feel tiny rage because you didn’t buy a delicious cupcake, for example, you can feel the feeling and notice that the most appropriate form might be a hairy, furious, rainbow-colored bear. What matters is that it feels like an accurate portrayal of the essence of the feeling. When you summon it, you can relate to it, comfort it, or have it communicate with your other parts, like maybe a health-yoda who really wants what’s best for you but, you discover, that it does in a “shouldy” way.

Putting identities on sensations may sound silly, and some people bounce off IFS because of it, but it’s actually optional. You can stay with raw sensation and do IFS on it directly. For me, though, putting identities works great, and I think for two reasons. One, our mind works really well with characters. It’s easier to imagine, relate, remember, and do all sorts of mental operations with a character than with a raw sensation. Second, it helps you stop treating a sensation like an object and gives you the option to start treating it like a subject (thanks Kant for the distinction): a conscious, independent ‘piece of consciousness’ that may want weird, arbitrary, random-seeming things. In my practice, I often default to experiencing sensations as things. But when I shift and can truly treat it as a subject, like an independent consciousness with its own wants and preferences, my IFS sessions are better.

A key thing in IFS is that there are no bad parts. It’s a non-pathologizing therapeutic modality (I personally think it makes sense to stay away from pathologizing ones). Every part has a positive intent, but some may get stuck in strategies that don’t work well anymore, and you may need some time to connect to them and untangle their motivations.

What is Self?

Self in IFS is the core essence beneath all parts. It’s where healing occurs. Not a part itself, but the innate healing, compassionate spacious field within everyone. When parts “step back,” Self naturally emerges. It’s described as a “field” larger than the individual—felt as love, trust, presence and 8 C’s: Calm, Curiosity, Clarity, Compassion, Confidence, Courage, Creativity, Connectedness.

Self heals by compassionately witnessing parts, without managing, fixing, or wanting any outcome. Self has parallel concepts in many spiritual traditions: Buddha-nature—the inherent awakened quality in all beings, Atman in Hinduism—the true self beyond ego, Christianity: the “Christ within”, Taoism: connection to the Tao

My favorite exercise to feel Self is “22: The Path Exercise,” an audio meditation in Greater than the sum of our parts (but you’ll probably need to do the previous exercises to really appreciate it)

How to start?

Greater than the sum of our parts is my favorite introduction to IFS, by its creator. It’s an audiobook where half the chapters are guided IFS practice and half discuss IFS. Richard Schwartz was asked what’s the best introduction to IFS and out of many things he wrote he pointed to this resource. I think you can go really far just by listening to it on loop. (It’s audiobook format only.) Or just set up a session with an IFS guide

IFS 102

Notes / heuristics

• The goal is harmony and ease of the system. Conflicted parts may block the flow of information in the mind. Because of this tension, other parts may not be getting information they need. Open the flow and you may be more attuned to self and others, and better able to read complex situations, or make better decisions.

• Good guiding questions: How can conflicted parts understand each other? How to resolve internal conflict in a cooperative way?

• How to distinguish if you’re in a part or in Self? Self often doesn’t have a mental image; it just feels like it is. If there’s a subtle flavor, that’s not Self. Say hello to it and see what happens. Does it have a positive or negative vibe? If positive, most likely in Self; if negative, probably not.

• How to share from parts? You (Self) are the leader of the system. It’s often helpful, especially when experiencing difficult emotions, to let Self speak on behalf of parts. You may ask where the negative feelings come from and first develop compassion to parts experiencing them, and communicate them on behalf of parts.

• Often parts disappear when you solve certain tension. Some may stay with you for a long time. Some parts may have formed long ago, for example in childhood, and it can be hard to access them and release their tension.

• Cognitive fusion is when you fuse with a thought or emotion and perceive it as yourself or as objective reality. This fusion can lead to suffering, because you may perceive the thought as you and get trapped in its narrative. Through practices like IFS (but also for example meditation), you can learn to “defuse” from these narratives, resulting in better understanding of oneself and reduced suffering (more about it in Kaj’s article)

• Kaj also has a great in-depth resource: Kaj's answers to IFS questions

Questions to parts

The goal is to get to know, understand a part, and build compassion. I think this part comes intuitively, questions like:

• How are you? What do you need? What do you want to express? What would you like to do/achieve?

And there are questions that do the same but are harder to think of:

• What are you afraid will happen if you don’t do what you’re doing?

• If you could act exactly as you want, if nothing held you back, what would that look like?

• When you look at me, what do you see?

• How old are you?

• I invite you to share whatever needs to be shared.

• What exactly creates this reaction in you?

• Ask yourself: How do you feel toward the part? Ask the part: How do you feel toward me? (if you feel tension towards a part OR a part is feeling tension towards you—you may be in part and not in Self. Talk to the part, witness it or try to understand who the part is speaking to?)

• How well do you feel understood? Is there anything else you want me to know?

• (when you stumble on a particular belief worth investigating) Where does the belief come from?

• How would you like to be shared? (be attuned to nonverbal answers) via Michael Tong

• What’s wrong about the wrong thing?

• If that what you protect would be healed what role you want to perform? What do you protect? (parts may get scared of not having a role)

• (if the part feels scared) How to approach/contact/relate to you that feels safe?

• What’s a proper distance between me and you?

Witness over manage

IFS healing comes from being in Self, not managing, but compassionately witnessingw parts and others. The below fragment comes from Derek’s Goodbye (timestamped to 12:44) via ‘s tweet: “watch … the core of IFS, which is also the core of unfolding, and circling, and love”

the key element in the healing of IFS is not from mapping parts … recognizing the protector parts and recognizing the exile parts—that's very important, that's a road map of the psyche—but the healing the magic comes from our capacity to hold our self energy, who you are at your core, to hold that in the presence of somebody else …. to hold our Self energy with another person. By fully trusting the client’s system, you communicate: I fully trust you—and how rarely do we hear that in life? This Self energy feels like the foundation of everything and it feels like love. Many practitioners operate from manager parts … they figure out the model, they figure out the interventions—but the felt sense of it on the other side is that I’m being managed. What people actually want is to be witnessed, seen, felt—receive compassion so that I can feel compassion for my parts that are suffering, so they don’t suffer alone.

— Derek Scott, Derek’s Goodbye

Witnessing without an agenda

If I find some stuck energy in my body that doesn’t want to talk (eg sadness) to me or work through it I’ll go inside and try to reconstruct a center next to it and empty myself out of as much as I can (desire to fix etc) and ask if it’s okay with me feeling what it does, than I just sit with it and the energy flows into me and I’ll let it pass without clenching and usually this dissolves the energy quickly without having to do any ifs kind of thing

importantly it’s not “can I have your energy” or “can I have the feeling instead of you to fix you” it’s “can it be with you and just sit here also feeling what you’re feeling” and I think that togetherness and visceral understand is enough to heal the contracted part/energy

as a ballpark range we’re talking 30 seconds by the way, it can surely take longer but ime it’s usually pretty fast

last ~2yrs this ~replaced “parts work” for me. few words in the system anymore (no inner voice, no reified parts), more manipulation of energies, decentralized, flowing together, each area specialized (eg heart=connection) like a non-dual/decentralized liquid computing system

feels something like this, diff energies with diff type signatures flowing together, causing eddies that block flow then unblock, diff “centers” (eg heart, gut) with diff specialties, like diff types of computers. I promise you I wanted the chakras to be woo bs but here we are

— Nick Cammarata, Tweet

Practicing prioritizing parts’ needs

I give full freedom to any one part to stop me, I am just supporting them, if I feel off I will ditch whatever I am doing, put my eye mask on and get inside me to process …

Since I’ve already been obscenely open, a month ago I was doing a sexual thing that nearly all my parts were for but one was against (it was scared and disgusted). So I immediately stopped and apologized to my partner and said I couldn’t do it, which was hard and embarrassing

— Nick Cammarata, Tweet

Every “should” is two parts pulling

If you both “want to get good at running” and also never want to get up off the couch ... one part of your belief set has concluded that running will help achieve your goals, and another has concluded that it doesn’t. ... Rather than summarizing this situation as “I’m just lazy,” it’s instead productive to think “in addition to my belief that it’s good to run, I apparently also have a belief that it’s good to watch Netflix.” This isn’t just a cute, permissive reframe; it’s what’s actually going on. Some part of you believes that Netflix is exactly the Thing To Be Doing. ...

The part of you that is generating pressure-toward-Netflix is doing so because it thinks that staying on the couch will make for a better life, and bring you closer to your goals. It’s not lazy or stupid, it’s tunnel visioned, failing to take into account things like long-term health, or the value of following through on your self-commitments

(Just as the part of you that’s clamoring to get off the couch also has tunnel vision, and is discounting the value of relaxation or hedonism.)

At CFAR, we often characterize these internal disagreements as “shoulds.” Given any default action, a should is an urge or a pressure to do something else instead

— , Internal Double Crux

In this view a “should” is a signal that parts are in tension. Instead of overriding one with willpower, you may find it helpful to feel into what each part needs and what’s most unburdening for the whole system.

Thanks / practitioners

A big chunk of the knowledge in this doc comes from my work with Kaj Sotala. I also learned a lot from, and recommend, other practitioners I worked with: theo, Amanda Ngo, Eliot Red, and Marta Hankiewicz. There is also the IFS Institute’s list of guides and their level of training.

Good luck! You are the one you've been waiting for.

This essay introduces a new framework explaining why, as we learn, our knowledge tends to disconnect from other disciplines, accumulate errors, and become increasingly corrupt. I map how several established cognitive biases combine into a broader mechanism I call the expert trap.

I see it as a major reason why knowledge in our civilization is often corrupted. At higher levels, this manifests as scientists compromising research through p-hacking, importance hacking, and confirmation bias, directly contributing to the replication crisis. This dynamic explains why experts cling to false beliefs and resist changing their minds even when presented with contradictory evidence, and why most well-meaning expert collaborations like adversarial collaborations often fail. At lower levels, this corruption manifests as groupish conspiracy theories, binary thinking, rigid "never-changed-my-mind" attitudes, and inflexible partisan positions. It also explains why important knowledge spreads slowly through society, and why our civilization's methods for encoding and sharing knowledge are often faulty, inefficient, and make that knowledge hard to use.

The first part of this essay explains the mechanics of the expert trap: how expertise creates silos that prevent us from explaining concepts to novices (The Curse of Knowledge); how we overestimate our communication clarity while listeners receive something entirely different (Epistemic overconfidence); how we selectively filter evidence to reinforce existing beliefs, allowing errors to compound (Confirmation/my-side bias); and how genuine truth-seeking gradually degrades into status-seeking behavior (Hierarchy bias).

In the second part, I'll present practical countermeasures: techniques to understand what audiences actually "hear" (User research); methods for verifying knowledge from first principles (Minimal-trust investigations); strategies for testing beliefs against intelligent opposition (Adversarial collaborations); practices for identifying mismatches between expectations and reality (Noticing surprise); and approaches for revisiting ideas until we can explain them simply across various contexts (Feynman learning).

This article isn't meant to be anti-expertise, but rather about understanding and countering expert bias. In writing this essay, I hope to shift attitudes in following ways: first, to recognize that "expert knowledge" is often more corrupted than we typically assume; second, to encourage the verification of knowledge firsthand; and third, to develop robust methods for counteracting the effects of the expert trap.

I am not absolutely certain about all of this. The argument rests on a mix of well-established findings from psychology, a couple of more speculative ones, and a few of my own observations. It is a large and a bit speculative frame, but I will indicate my level of certainty and how strong the sources were so you can shape your opinion on your own...

I’m also adding a skippable section—flagging which bits you can skip without losing the main argument.

What is Expert Trap?

The curse of knowledge and the expert trap

Certainty: the curse of knowledge bias is well-established, expert trap is my take | Skippable: no

The curse of knowledge bias occurs when experts find themselves unable to effectively teach or communicate with those who know less, creating a gap between what the expert knows and what they can successfully convey. I view the expert trap as a broader and more pervasive phenomenon, with the curse of knowledge being just one component of it. It’s a good place to start because the curse of knowledge has a very similar shape and dynamic to the expert trap.

The phrase "curse of knowledge" was first coined in 1989 by Camerer and Loewenstein. They recognized its close relationship to hindsight bias and earlier research by Baruch Fischhoff. In 1975, they demonstrated in their paper “Hindsight is not equal to foresight”that once people learn an outcome, they falsely believe they would have predicted it correctly.1 They theorized that this poor reconstruction happens because participants become "anchored in the hindsightful state of mind created by receipt of knowledge". Study participants couldn't accurately reconstruct their previous, less knowledgeable states of mind—which connects to the curse of knowledge. When people acquire expertise, their knowledge becomes increasingly inaccessible to those at earlier stages of understanding. It's like a one-way knowledge ladder where you can climb up and increase the complexity of your knowledge, but your ability to explain that knowledge down the ladder is inhibited.

I propose the name expert trap because I believe there’s a larger phenomenon at play than typically assumed when discussing the curse of knowledge—especially because my-side bias, confirmation bias and status seeking behaviors are at play. After explaining the expert trap, I hope it will be intuitive to see it as a much more widespread dynamic, and to spot the ways knowledge often becomes corrupted as we develop expertise. Following I will showcase four major mechanisms driving this dynamic. Mechanisms one and two (forgetting and epistemic overconfidence) are more closely connected to what people typically associate with the curse of knowledge, while mechanisms three and four (confirmation and hierarchy biases) expand this concept and connect to what I see as the expert trap.

Dynamic 1: Forgetting

Certainty: this topic is my observation, a bit speculative, but i am fairly certain its at least directionally correct | Skippable: no

We are in a constant process of forming new memories and forgetting old ones. Our brains prioritize certain memories over others, especially those most relevant to our ongoing process of gaining further understanding. We tend to forget the state of how was it not to understand it, what is the less knowledgable state of mind. We tend to forget what are necessary intellectual breakthroughs or mental models that from the space of all possibilities are actually moving you to a higher level.

As soon as we learn something more complex, it may seem more important, and we tend to deprioritize remembering why it was initially difficult to understand. It's as if out of the entire space of possible answers to an initial question, we collapse into the correct one without paying attention to why we were confused in the first place. Perhaps these early struggles seem redundant to our brain since the goal is to keep ascending further up the knowledge ladder. This process also mirrors the hindsight bias, discussed earlier. As soon as the more complex version starts to make sense, it feels like that’s what we thought all along—of course that was the answer—and we collapse onto the “correct” path, erasing the memory of the branches that didn’t make sense (or ones that still don’t).

Dynamic 2: Epistemic overconfidence—tapping experiment

Certainty: tested, well-established | Skippable: no

Another dynamic involves our overconfidence about how effectively we communicate our internal mental models to others. We consistently overestimate how well others understand what we're trying to convey. In 1990, a tapping experiment at Stanford2 demonstrated this phenomenon. Participants were asked to finger-tap a well-known tune and predict how many listeners would identify it. The results were striking: tappers estimated about 50% of listeners would recognize their song, but in reality, only 1.33% did. This illustrates the expert trap perfectly—in the tapper's mind, they heard the complete song with melody, rhythm, and lyrics, while listeners heard only disconnected taps. The expert (tapper) couldn't separate their rich internal experience from what they were actually communicating. They projected their knowledge onto the audience, not seing how little was actually being transmitted.

Dynamic 3: Confirmation bias and my-side bias

Certainty: tested, well-established | Skippable: no

Another dynamic causing the expert trap is confirmation bias. It points to the tendency that the more specialized knowledge becomes, the more corrupt it becomes. To really understand confirmation bias, I want to start with what I see as its parent category—my-side bias. This is a bias that’s very close to what others often call motivated reasoning.

In short, my-side bias shows that we fundamentally distort our self-image. Our ego distorts facts, manufactures impressions and memories to create the best possible self-image The dynamic is described at length by Daniel Kahneman, Daniel Gilbert, Julia Galef among others.

A deeper look at my-side bias can clarify the core dynamics of the expert trap. Below are examples of research studies from Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert:

• The majority of people think they are above average. In one study, 96 percent of cancer patients claimed to be in better health than the average cancer patient.

• We select positive and filter out negative information about ourselves. In one study, researchers found that when someone receives praise, they actively search for evidence of the praiser's competence. Conversely, when someone receives criticism, they look for reasons to question the critic's competence.

• We evaluate things more positively once they become our own. Consumers evaluate kitchen appliances more positively after they buy them. Racetrack gamblers evaluate their horses more positively when they are leaving the betting window than when they are approaching it, and voters evaluate their candidates more positively when they are exiting the voting booth than when they are entering it.

• We look for positive explanations of things we are already doing. If we are eating ice cream we will think it’s not as bad as if we weren’t eating it.

• We evaluate actions higher when we realize they were done by us. We will find more mistakes in our own work if we were tricked to think it wasn’t done by us.

I believe confirmation bias is a sub-effect of my-side bias, but specifically in the context of opinions we already hold. From the vast ocean of available data, we filter for information that strengthens our existing views. Here are two studies that show how this works:

In one study researchers juxtaposed two groups. One was for the death penalty and another was against it. Researchers fabricated two studies with the same strength of evidence, with one supporting the death penalty and the other opposing it. Both groups read both texts, after which they became even more polarized, believing more strongly in their original positions than they did before.3

When we do something ourselves, we become less critical of it and overestimate its quality. In a study on selective laziness in reasoning, participants were asked to evaluate reasoning exercises. The results were striking: when reviewing their own work, participants rarely made corrections—less than 15% revised their answers. However, when the same answers were presented as someone else's work, approximately 60% rejected arguments that were in fact their own. People were able to distinguish valid from invalid arguments when they belong to others rather than themselves.4

Returning to the one-way ladder concept, when learning, confirmation bias leads us to strengthen theories we already believe in while showing less interest in alternative explanations or ideas that challenge our existing knowledge. Knowledge acquisition becomes less about discovering, validating, evaluating what’s true and how it connects to other areas of knowledge and more about selecting information that aligns with what we already believe. By chance, you might confirm your way into a correct idea, but more likely, given the vast space of possible answers, you'll confirm yourself into an incorrect one. This dynamic suggest that the more knowledge one acquires, the more potentially corrupted that knowledge becomes.

Dynamic 4: Hierarchy bias

Certainty: not-well established, but I put a strong credence on this hypothesis | Skippable: no

Another dynamic causing the expert trap is what I call hierarchy bias—being interested in ideas because they bring us status rather than because we're trying to figure out the truth.

I've created the term hierarchy bias as a shortcut for the dynamic explained in Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler. The main thesis of the book is that we are deeply hierarchical creatures and at the same time don’t view ourselves this way. The hierarchies in our world aren’t completely overlooked, but Hanson and Simler assert a significantly broader influence they have on human motivations.

They say humans are “ultrasocial apes” who evolved to compete for status and allies. To keep the peace and be better at deception, the brain “actively hides our motives—especially from ourselves,”. Many cherished institutions, conversation, laughter, consumption, charity, education, medicine, religion, and politics—“are less about their stated goals and more about signaling” qualities like intelligence, loyalty, or wealth—means of our status in the group5. Primatologist Frans de Waal has also wondered why in primatology, when we discuss primates, almost everything is viewed through the perspective of hierarchy in the group. Yet in social sciences, when we talk about humans, hierarchy is rarely mentioned.

The research from Elephant in the Brain helps explain ways we approach learning and why we strive to be perceived as experts. One of the main motivations to acquire knowledge seems to be a need to impress others and climb social hierarchies. In another article Robin Hanson sees three main functions of academia. Alongside preserving and teaching, “Academia functions to create and confer prestige to associated researchers, students, firms, cities, and nations.”6

This may help explain our drive to use jargon. Sometimes more complex vocabulary is a shortcut to create a more specific definition. However, it more often may be used for signaling—complex-sounding word that only insider or experts use—and be used because people want to be viewed as more knowledgeable and higher status. Again this is most likely a subconscious force. So people who use jargon are not only confusing others but also themselves. And it’s another way—next to confirmation bias—how, when knowledge climbs the ladders of complexity, it tends to become corrupt, because what’s optimized isn’t truth but the perception of being smart, sophisticated, and high status.

Expert trap in reality

Certainty: Tetlock and Kahneman are firm, the rest is more anecdotal | Skippable: can be skipped

I think the expert trap influences a lot around us. It corrupts the way we share and acquire knowledge—from scientists compromising research through statistical manipulation to everyday people clinging to disproven beliefs despite contradictory evidence.

Studies have found that deep expertise in a subject does not positively correlate with accuracy in judgment. As part of his research on forecasting, professor Phillip Tetlock conducted a study with 284 political experts, that generated over 80,000 informed (where the estimate matched the area of expertise of the individual) and uninformed predictions over the course of twenty years. Surprisingly, Tetlock discovered that specialists are less reliable than non-experts, even within their specific area of study. In fact, the study concludes that after a certain point, deepening one's knowledge about a specific topic is affected by the law of diminishing returns and can hinder the ability to accurately predict a certain outcome.7

In the same book Tetlock also suggests that experts often make less accurate predictions because as they’re more vulnerable to confirmation bias and more sensitive to reputational pressures—both of which can distort judgment.

The expert trap is also abundantly visible in our educational system. It's often structured around memorization rather than understanding. We think we understand something, but what we’ve actually done is just familiarized ourselves with the area and memorized the terminology. Memorized names often function as covers—conveniently obscuring the parts that are still fuzzy. Eliezer Yudkowsky highlights this phenomenon in his essay "Guessing the Teacher's Password".

Suppose the teacher asks you why the far side of a metal plate feels warmer than the side next to the radiator. If you say “I don’t know,” you have no chance of getting a gold star—it won’t even count as class participation. But, during the current semester, this teacher has used the phrases “because of heat convection,” “because of heat conduction,” and “because of radiant heat.” One of these is probably what the teacher wants. You say, “Eh, maybe because of heat conduction?” This is not a hypothesis about the metal plate. This is not even a proper belief. It is an attempt to guess the teacher’s password. […] “What remains is not a belief, but a verbal behavior.”

Eliezer points out, that real learning that escapes the constraints of expert trap, is about being aware of the difference between an explanation and a password. Learning is about finding knowledge that is in close contact with how we anticipate it will show up in reality. It's about asking: If this hypothesis is true, what should I and shouldn't I encounter in reality?

The expert trap seems to be also underpinning replication crisis, which may not be an aberration of scientific process. It may be an effect of our norms around learning, our biases and status seeking behavior. Daniel Kahneman, who spoke widely on this subject, sees my-side bias and confirmation biases as the main drivers. To put it simply—scientists may be subconsciously finding ways to prove theories that will make them more highly acclaimed in their field.8

Ways out

In this section, I explore practical approaches for moving beyond the constraints of the expert trap.

Noticing surprise

Certainty: Anecdotal | Skippable: can be skipped

We are in constant confirmation loop. To counteract this, one of my favorite questions I like to ask people is what they found surprising about our experience together. It is interesting how often people have a hard time answering. I ask this question also to evoke it for myself. I want to get myself out of the common trance—I am right and everything is as it should be.

As described earlier, I think we are often overriding memories to our own advantage or selecting information that confirms beliefs we previously held. To simplify this dynamic, if we believe that x is 2 and then we see that x is 3 we will override our memory to perceive that we always thought x was 3. We are in this constant confirmation tunnel. Despite how often our perceptions are wrong, we rarely experience feelings of surprise. We continuously bend reality to match our expectations. But when one pays attention to the feeling of surprise or confusion I think one can slightly rapture this dynamic. Perhaps there is this tiny moment, a short opening between thinking that x is 2 and seeing that x is 3 when we can register that we were wrong, that this result is surprising. Perhaps, if we keep doing that we can calibrate our thinking. We can build better intuitions on how we reason and where we are imprecise, wrong, and mistaken.

Noticing surprise is a high-frequency, low-effort practice that, while challenging to develop as a habit, but with enough repetition, it can gradually shift our confirmation bias machinery, and could help slowly break the cycle of reinforcing incorrect beliefs.

Minimal trust investigations

Certainty: Anecdotal | Skippable: can be skipped

Knowledge often travels through chains of recommendation that hinge on esteem and expertise status—people often validate knowledge through recommendations from experts they trust. As this essay tries to showcase, we can expect that a significant portion of expert knowledge is corrupted—through experts' loops toward self-confirmation or status-seeking. That's why it may be so valuable to try to verify knowledge on your own. "Take no one's word for it" was the motto of the Royal Society during the Enlightenment, and as David Deutsch explains, figuring things out from frist-principles and being anti-authority was one of the driving forces of the Enlightenment.

In Minimal Trust Investigations, Holden Karnofsky outlines his process for independently verifying knowledge from first principles. He gives an example of how he approached the first evaluation of Against Malaria Foundation. The primary goal of this exercise was to defer to the knowledge of others as little as possible. Holden explains how he, all by himself, delved into the research, checked calculations, explored counterfactuals, and verified all other variables influencing the topic.

Ideally all knowledge would be approached from first principles but it’s both impractical and impossible to verify everything on our own. Any question when examined deeply actually very quickly becomes too complex and one can needs to defer to the knowledge of others, but verifying even just a few steps seems worthwhile. Holden admitted this is a laborious and intensive process, and throughout his life he has completed only a handful of minimal-trust investigations. Nevertheless, he believes that approaching learning this way, despite being extremely time-consuming, provided significant value because it influenced his broader analytical process. Even completing just a couple of these investigations gave him new intuitions for evaluating ideas more accurately. For example, he now has a habit of quickly checking research citations in texts he reads. He found that spotting low-quality research could be done quickly with minimal effort.

Manually checking knowledge, especially when you feel confused, and verifying it yourself, even against expert or established sources, may feel slow, boring or inefficient, but it may be one of the most important practices for countering hierarchy bias in our tree of knowledge.

Adversarial collaborations

Certainty: Anecdotal | Skippable: can be skipped

Similarly in order to help counter confirmation bias and expert trap, create better antithesis to your work is do what Daniel Kahneman described as Adversarial Collaboration. In this approach, a person with a hypothesis finds a competent individual who holds an opposing view. Together, they collaborate to identify the core points of disagreement and establish common ground. A neutral arbiter oversees the process, and before beginning the experiment, both parties discuss what specific results would convince them to change their positions.

Kahneman himself conducted several workshops to stress-test his own ideas. Interestingly, he found changing his mind was more difficult than he had anticipated. From what I understand, Kahneman still values the process and believes it improved his thinking, though he never shifted his fundamental positions9. Others have had more success with this approach. Scott Alexander encouraged people to engage in adversarial collaborations and published the results as articles on his blog. I believe that difficult tasks like identifying flaws in my own thinking may be better solved socially—working with a well-meaning a person who knows a lot but disagree with you may be one of the best ways to counter expert trap. While adversarial collaborations may not frequently change deeply held opinions, they serve as a valuable approach to counteracting confirmation bias, my-side bias, and hierarchy bias—potentially laying groundwork for even more effective methods yet to be developed.

User research

Certainty: creator’s bias is my framing, user-research is well-established | Skippable: can be skipped

When we create something, we become experts on our own creation. Whether it's a hypothesis, article, press release, painting, short story, or film narration—we spend vastly more time with the piece than those who eventually view it. I call this the creator's bias. Creators attempt to communicate their message clearly, but cognitive distortions like my-side-bias, confirmation bias, hierarchy bias distort what is actually communicated.

There are several ways to counter this distortion. First, pay attention to your initial impressions of what you create. Remember the feeling when you first create something or when you look at it again after taking a break. This impression will be soon distorted or gone. Secondly, it helps to look for opportunities to find distance from your own work. It helps to take frequent and long breaks—when you proactively try not to look at your work. Your job is to find ways to forget your own intentions and see work as far removed from you as possible. Find ways to see it like a person who sees it for the first time.

Lastly, it helps to be extremely skeptical about the contents of your communication and clarity of your point of view. The most effective way to do that is to do user-research or more ask other people how they perceive it. But it’s crucial to find the right audience and not to fall into sampling bias. Pick people who are unaffiliated with you or don’t have stakes in the work. Try not to ask leading questions. Gathering quality feedback is a skill. You can just as easily end up with misleading information. However, it doesn't need to be overcomplicated—the most effective methodology I've found and regularly use is the Design Sprint approach, particularly the user-research chapters written by Michael Margolis. I am surprised that user research methods rarely spread beyond the tech industry. These methodologies were originally developed for testing apps and websites, but they're perfectly suited for a much wider range of disciplines including writing, sociology, urban planning, art, and virtually any form of communication. Their widespread adoption could substantially reduce the prevalence of the expert trap.

Feynman learning

Certainty: Anecdotal, Richard Feynman perspective | Skippable: no

But perhaps the most powerful way to counteract the expert trap was practiced by Richard Feynman, one of the most accomplished physicists of the twentieth century. If you were to take one idea from all this writing take this one. Feynman followed:

"If I cannot explain it simply, I don't understand it well enough”.

When Feynman tackled complex physics concepts, he would approach freshman students and try to explain the ideas in the simplest possible way. If he couldn't explain successfully, he would go back to studying. He repeated this process until he understood the topic thoroughly enough to explain it clearly to someone with less knowledge.

This method may, in a large way, break the constraints of the expert trap. Whenever Feynman deepened his knowledge he also was forced to explain it at the more basic level. This approach prevents falling into an expertise silo by requiring you to explain complex knowledge using language, metaphors, and ideas from more basic levels and other knowledge areas. Learning things this way makes one see how things connect. Rather than just climbing up expertise levels making narrow connections, one builds links to a broader knowledge base—continually validating ideas across varied disciplines and creating multiple knowledge pathways.

Feynman learning also means progressing toward more complex ideas while revisiting your earlier less-knowledgeable states. If the expert trap is affected by disconnecting contexts—when you are at the higher level of expertise you forget what you didn’t get previously—then this method forces you to keep your “cables plugged” into the prior contexts—continuously linking each idea to a wider range of disciplines, contexts, and ways of thinking.

One of my absolute favorite validations of this approach is “Fun to Imagine”, where Feynman casually explains all sorts of concepts from physics and chemistry. While school taught these subjects as separate domains, Feynman integrates matter, heat, magnetism, and electricity into one cohesive framework. It is one of these interpretations that is impossible to unsee. Whenever I learn anything new on these topics—I come back to it to reference, expand on, visualize, or verify new knowledge.

Summary

Certainty: Anecdotal | Skippable: no

So to summarize, the Expert Trap is a dynamic in which expertise gradually distorts how knowledge is understood and communicated. It’s driven by four main forces: forgetting what it was like not to know something, becoming overconfident in how well we communicate, filtering evidence to support what strengthen our own image or what we already believe, and being driven more by status-seeking rather than truth-seeking. These forces often lead to larger problems—replication crisis, false beliefs that persist even in the face of evidence, increasing polarization, and expert knowledge becoming inaccessible or misleading. Its effects can be minimized by adopting several practices

• noticing surprise – deliberately noting when reality contradicts our expectations

• minimal-trust investigations – verifying knowledge from first principles

• adversarial collaborations – joined work with people who disagree with us

• user research for all disciplines – getting feedback from people who sees our work for the first time

• Feynman approach to learning – learning by iteratively taking complex ideas and explaining them in the simplest possible way

But maybe one of the biggest first obstacles to tackling biases like the expert trap is the bias blind spot—our conviction that while biases may affect others, they somehow don't influence our own judgment. And it’s a hard one to tackle—for example, while writing this, I can feel the active force of confirmation bias within myself—I have a preexisting idea and feel compelled to find justifications for it. On the other hand, this makes sense, as I must eventually limit how thoroughly I examine any single idea. I think this is a common pattern when communicating ideas—whether during casual conversation at a party or while crafting a formal article. First, you recall a belief, and then you start collecting the arguments for it—which often turns into full-on confirmation bias or status-seeking-through-knowledge, where you’re forcing arguments onto a memorized, sometimes vague belief. But sometimes, there’s a little more space. Maybe you include some uncertainty. Maybe you examine more. Maybe you stay curious about whether the definition you’re working with is the right shape, force, or influence. Maybe you simply think out loud and weigh the pros and cons.

There are tradeoffs with this approach. It takes more time and it may result in a less aesthetically pleasing narrative. But as Cate Hall points out

Many social dynamics are paradoxical — social acts that seem weak from the inside, when undertaken without apology, actually read as very strong. For example, being willing to say “I’m wrong” or “I don’t know.”10

I think that counteracting the expert trap and its underlying biases like my-side bias, confirmation bias, hierarchy bias, and the expert trap (if that’s possible at scale) could have world-repairing consequences. In the age of accelerating technology and transformative AI, during what some call “the most important century,” when our tools have wider and wider scope and influence, our ability to overcome these biases might determine whether we end up adrift or actually manage to steer public discourse, democratic decision-making, and collective coordination.

So, in the dry land of questions discourse, I created this resource for myself to always have a meaningful question at hand for meetings, parties, and one-on-ones. They’re sorted by frequency—so at the top, you’ll find the ones I find most useful or universally applicable. I often forget a text within a week of writing it—so you’ll probably forget this one within an hour of reading it. But you can save this easy URL pawel.world/q now to never have a conversation depleted of fun or meaning again.

Relationship with X

• What’s your relationship with X?

There is a colossal difference between the answers to “How is your fitness?” and “What is your relationship with fitness?”. Try it and then ask about almost anything “What is your relationship with food? With the internet? What is the history of your relationship with music? With travel? With leadership? With taking responsibility? Strength? Vulnerability? Fashion? Self-expression? Optimism? Being a public figure? Privacy? Intimacy? via Visa in Friendly Ambitious Nerd

Surprise about X

• What most surprised you in X?

Maybe my favorite question ever—and I use it to ask about anything. But then people are often like: “Nothing!”. But wait… there’s always some delta between your expectations and reality, yo. And then people start sharing the most interesting takes on their trip, book, or someone they met. And learning to notice surprise is such a great muscle to train—a real world-opener, world-discerner.)

If you die

• If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why? #19 from The 36 Questions to connect

• If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet? #33 from The 36 Questions to connect

Rose

I use this framing very often when catching up with friends. Something about the rose makes it memorable. Why rose? Petal = best part, thorn = worst part, bud = growth. via Nasimeh friend.

• What was a moment of joy?

• What broke your heart?

• How did you grow?

Questions for self inquiry

Use these questions to journal about your life, or to guide conversations or deepen your understanding of others. Below is a set from Speaking for the dead, a book sparked by the need to be in truth when talking about our lives. The author wrote it because he grew dissatisfied with how funerals distort the lives of the dead—telling stories so far from who they really were, effectively making them even more dead. So he invented the Speaker for the dead: someone who would investigate the life of a dead person and give a speech “with full candor, hiding no faults and pretending no virtues.” This, in turn, had an untangling effect—not just for the memory of the person, but for the entire communities.

• Who the person really was?

• What their life really meant?

• What they wanted to do — what they actually did?

• What they regretted — what they rejoiced in?

Askhole

Askhole is an amazing question card game co-created by Aella. Here are my fav ones.

• Have you been loved enough?

• Have you ever had (what you consider to be) a spiritual experience? If so, what was it like and what effects did it have on you?

• What unusual trait do you find most attractive in a romantic partner?

• In what ways do you tend to fail at communication?

• Of all the beliefs you hold, which is most likely to be considered barbaric in 150 years?

• If you could have one but not the other, would you rather love someone or be loved by someone?

• If you could press a button that would instantly erase every single false belief you have, would you do it?

The 36 Questions to connect

If I could, I’d rename *The 36 Questions That Lead to Love to* 36 Questions to Connect—to drop the one-directional agenda. A few of the questions aren’t great, but as a set, it works—and there are definitely some great ones in there. It’s a solid framework for getting to know someone, not just in romantic settings. This set helped popularize question sets and holds a solid spot in the history of questions discourse. A few questions I like:

• If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?

• Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.

• How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?

Questions to destroy a relationship

How direct do you want to be when asking questions? How far do you want to tread? My low-confidence, low-committal guess is: as far as the question renders judgment. Duncan Sabien created the following set that makes you ponder this. In his own words “in the spirit of the classic 36 Questions to Fall In Love “here are some high variance, negative expectation value questions to answer with your loved one.” Here are a few questions that may, with the right attitude, help grow within a relationship.

• #11 Imagine your partner could change to be much more like the kind of person they wanted to be. Are there ways in which you think they would become worse from doing this?

• #12 To what extent does your partner's success make your relationship better or worse?

• #6 If your partner was dating someone else and that person broke up with them, what would you guess was the reason why?

• #14 What true statement has the maximum probability of causing you to break up right now?

To unlock agency

Questions to unlock agency can work surprisingly well…

• if i had 10x the agency i have what would i do?

Nick Cammarata: “i hate how well asking myself `if i had 10x the agency i have what would i do` works. just an immediate list of solutions to like half the problems in my life appearing out of the ether. if i had more agency i'd ask myself about 100x but i'm too scared to see what it produces”.

Tyler Alterman also has a group of agency unlocking questions. Fav ones:

• What would you work on if you had no fear?

• Describe your ideal day. what you do, what your environment looks like, who are you interacting with. anything you imagine. it doesn’t have to be grounded in any of your present circumstances

Top-idea in your mind

“What is the top-idea in your mind?” is a great question from Paul Graham's essay. But I think people often feel put on the spot when asked what’s your “top” anything. Here are some fun reframes that get at a similar idea:

• What is under-valued or under-discussed?

• What does your mind naturally gravitate toward exploring?

• What should I start thinking more about or doing more of?

Other brainy questions:

• What did you recently change your mind on?

• What should be thought at schools that currently isn’t?

There are a few people who maintain great content–question pages—here are some: Patrick Collison, Alexey Guzey, Gwern

Question on questions

And finally, a meta-question:

• What are your favorite questions?

And pointing this back at you—what are your favorite questions (or sets of questions)? Which of the above feel most useful or alive to you? What did I miss? How do you like to ask—in ways that actually build connection, help you understand better, or get you out of the box?

Context: There are two key dynamics in AI development that many researchers have explored and considered, but that don’t seem to fully reach other audiences. I think understanding these is crucial to grasping where AI is headed and what that means for the world. I remember seeing this topic differently, and then something finally shifted after reading this article. This is my attempt to explain these ideas in a way that feels intuitive to people across different backgrounds, levels of technical expertise, and perspectives on AI. My hope is that more people will start thinking about these dynamics and recognize the work needed to steer AI toward a safer, more coordinated future. I’m fairly certain this is the general direction we’re headed, but there are still assumptions and uncertainties. I discuss these more detail in the Epistemic Status and Antithesis page.

So to wrap it in one paragraph… People are gonna build AIs that are agentic—ai that will run autonomously and exhibit goal-directed, purposeful behavior. We are after this simply because it free up human time and attention. Well… this work is very much underway examples:

• AI Digests lets you use an agent to demo buying items from a website

• Anthropic is enabling agents to interact with computers directly

• Open AI’s Operator agent can use its own browser to perform tasks for you

• Open AI’s Deep Research completes multi-step research tasks

• Hypothetical Minds research on developing agent's theory of mind to collaborate and compete with other agents

• Metta AI training agents to care in socially complex environments

• METR research on when AI systems will be able to independently complete long-horizon projects

• Manus is building an AI agent that “bridges minds and actions”.

At the same time, AIs will exhibit what I call a stubborn property. Through trial and error, these agents will try to overcome obstacles and continuously attempt to expand the set of tasks they can autonomously fulfill. We want this because the most profit and value is in solving automation in ever new areas—think moving beyond AI helping with writing emails to having AI systems that autonomously run businesses.

As tasks become more complex, they increasingly require engagement with aspects of reality not yet integrated into digital processes, forcing AI to bridge gaps where no digital infrastructure or pipelines exist. To expand into these complex areas, AIs must actively figure out how to accomplish tasks despite various constraints, stubbornly trying different approaches until they succeed. As Nate Soares writes:

Because the way to achieve long-horizon targets in a large, unobserved, surprising world that keeps throwing wrenches into one's plans, is probably to become a robust generalist wrench-remover that keeps stubbornly reorienting towards some particular target no matter what wrench reality throws into its plans … so you've built a generalized obstacle-surmounting engine. You've built a thing that excels at noticing when a wrench has been thrown in its plans, and at understanding the wrench, and at removing the wrench or finding some other way to proceed with its plans. – Nate Soares, Ability to solve long-horizon tasks correlates with wanting things in the behaviorist sense

If AIs are autonomous, bring value, and the prices of them will be similar as today there will be an enormous number of AI agents, perhaps an order of magnitude more than humans today. What can be consequences of large number of AIs trying to autonomously expand the automation frontier, trying to bridge gaps of reality not yet automated?

This doesn’t necessarily imply subjective experience or will—that’s a different and more speculative discussion. However, in practice, it may not matter much since these systems will behave as if they are self-directed. This is because there will be a vast number of autonomous AI agents run by different actors and algorithms, each motivated by different things, with conflicting goals and competing for limited resources. Their sheer scale will make monitoring and control difficult, and their owners may be unwilling to deactivate them or fail to recognize when doing so is necessary.

At this scale, we won't be noticing AIs working as intended—instead we'll be seeing one’s that are stubborn — constantly finding and exploiting niches, figuring out how to automate more effectively. The automation of any field will involve a lot of trial and error, with systems persistently working toward their goals. Given the sheer number of attempts, some will push forward even when their actions cause harm, create vulnerabilities, or exploit systems.

Crucially, by default, artificial systems are not attuned to all human values, preferences, and not understanding of different ecosystems and interdependencies. This remains true even if the majority of actors have good intentions. First it’s an ambiguous task because human needs, values, and preferences change over time and some conflict across different countries, cultures, companies and social groups. Second, there is this tricky dynamic. An AI's primary goal—pursuing its core objective—is much simpler than considering its broader impacts. Think of the primary goal as a single point in space evolving as AI explores through trial and error, searching for strategies to reach it. In contrast, understanding how AIs actions influence reality is the entire space around it. It’s a much more complex thing to understand and control as the AI's actions (be it running a businesses, persuading people to buy or do something) go through our established realities, ecosystems, cultures, organisms, and interconnected world with all its dependencies.

There is also a crucial asymmetry — it's a lot harder to create something constructive than destructive. In the history of technology first was dynamite then was a combustion engine. First was the atomic bomb, then was a nuclear electricity plant. In order to make something constructive one need to make it safe, control many moving parts, sync a variety of processes together. This is especially concerning when AI can be used in vulnerable fields such as: synthetic biology, social persuasion, weapons development, financial systems, or cybersecurity. If we scale autonomous technology and broaden its influence, we also increase the chances that some agent will do something both harmful and highly impactful.

There will certainly be countermeasures, control systems, and regulations put in place. Most creators will likely make their best efforts—or be incentivized—to implement guardrails and safety protocols. However, the fragility and complexity of our systems, combined with the vast space of possibilities AI will operate in, will make maintaining a stability challenging.

All of this may radically transform the world as we know it. It could take many forms and manifest in various ways, but here are some speculative ideas illustrating what it may look like:

• Widespread automated phone calls and messaging systems

• Fully autonomous companies and businesses. Eventually, launching an app or startup becomes so effortless that VC firms simply convert capital into countless ventures rapidly chasing new opportunities and niche markets.

• Advanced authentication systems verifying not just human identities but also AI agent provenances, permissions, and behavioral histories

• Rebuilt internet infrastructure optimized for speed of AI operations. New protocols designed specifically for AI-to-AI communication

• New regulations may establish guardrails by requiring unique identifiers for AIs, with other AIs monitoring and enforcing compliance. Legislation could specify permitted and prohibited activities, especially limiting AI access to sensitive domains such as synthetic biology, social manipulation, nuclear technology, and financial markets.

• Professional relationships increasingly managed by AI agents handling end-to-end communication, scheduling, resource allocation, team coordination, and negotiations—while humans focus on setting high-level preferences and boundaries. Over time, human roles shift toward AI oversight and moderation.

• Cities developing specialized infrastructure for AI operations—including networks of sensors, automated maintenance systems, and spaces designed for human-AI interaction

• AI agents interfacing with physical reality through robotics, sensors, and IoT devices—operating autonomous vehicles, drones, carriers, boats, drillers.

• Sophisticated containment and control systems—digital equivalents of airlocks and quarantine zones may be needed for testing and deploying new AI capabilities. Critical infrastructure might need to operate on isolated networks with strictly controlled AI access. Specialized "AI safety zones" could be established where experimental or potentially risky AI systems operate under careful monitoring.

• Automated governance systems - AI agents designed to oversee and regulate other AI systems, providing real-time monitoring and mediating between human needs and AI operations.

• Meta layer – the emergence of AI systems specifically designed to help humans understand and navigate this new world. These could serve as interface layers that translate between human intentions and complex AI activities, helping humans maintain control and understanding of what's being created and what's happening.

The rise of AI systems that are “stubborn” and autonomous may require rethinking of our institutions, coordination mechanisms, incentive structures, and risk assessment methods. This could be a critical inflection point—where our ability to design effective coordination and alignment frameworks determines whether AI enhances humanity’s capabilities or destabilizes the systems we rely on. The outcome may also depend on how well we model this future and share knowledge across disciplines and perspectives.

I’d appreciate any insights on potential blind spots, differing perspectives, or ways this projection might be inaccurate

New in 💁 Wow ideas

Enlightenment feels like correctness, like every passing second feels correct.
– Aella via interview with Spencer Greenberg on Clearer Thinking podcast (28:29)

Why would I trust opinion bc its my own?
– Julia Galef via Rationally Speaking #143

You’re like the Catholics who are trying to get into heaven by being good enough
– Anon

New in ✍️ Notes

Overfitting or underfitting – as a useful self-calibration question?

Do you tend to overfit or underfit? It’s a valuable self-calibration question. Asking it myself I realized I have a habit of overfitting—I tend to apply a theory to a wide range of observations, sometimes too generously. I let the idea frame stretch too far, allowing it to absorb more than it probably should. If I have a theory, I’ll just keep shoving different inputs into it, without being critical enough about how specific or distinct their properties actually are.

Asking this question can also help calibrate thinking on any specific topic. For example if you try to teach me a concept of emergence

Overfitting is assuming all biological processes must involve emergence - like claiming cell division is emergent when it's actually a well-defined mechanical process. Treating any collective behavior as emergence (misses that emergence requires new properties not present in individual components)

Underfitting is assuming emergence only occurs in specific phenomena like consciousness emerging from neural connections. This view fails to recognize that emergence is a broader concept that can occur across many different types of systems

December 30, 2024

Canalization of psychopathological traits

I really like the metaphor of canalization—both as a potent concept and as a hypothesis for why all mental illnesses are correlated. That is, people with depression also tend to be correlated with higher levels of anxiety, psychosis, and attention problems. I pulled some excerpts from The Canal Papers | Astral Codex Ten to illustrate this.

First, let's understand gradient descent—an algorithm commonly used in machine learning. Picture an uneven terrain where a ball will naturally roll toward the nearest low point. As the ball moves downhill, it can change direction at any point. If you were guiding this ball, you'd consider: What's the optimal path downward? Which route provides the most efficient descent? And could small uphill movements lead to finding an even better low point? The same mechanism was used in this research

you can model the brain as an energy landscape with various peaks and valleys in some multidimensional space. Situations and stimuli plant “you” at some point on the landscape, and then you “roll down” towards some local minimum. If you’re the sort of person who repeats “I hate myself, I hate myself” in a lot of different situations, then you can think of the action of saying “I hate myself” as an attractor - a particularly steep, deep valley which it’s easy to fall into and hard to get out of. Many situations are close to the slopes of the “I hate myself” valley, so it’s easy to roll down and get caught there … What are examples of valleys other than saying “I hate myself”? The authors suggest habits.

or another examples

Walking normally is a valley; there’s a certain correct sequence of muscle movements, and you don’t want to start rotating your ligaments in some weird direction halfway through. … Given that you’ve started moving your leg to walk, you have a high prior (or an “extremely precise belief”) that you should bend your knee a certain way … a steep valley can also represent a very persistent belief - either very obvious beliefs like that the sky is blue, or very deeply-held beliefs like one’s religion. When a zealot person refuses to reconsider their religious beliefs, we can think of them being at the bottom of a very steep valley which is hard to move up. … What I call a trapped prior - a belief with such a strong gravity well that no evidence can shift you out of it - the authors call canalization, based on the metaphor of a canal having very steep walls and railroading you to a specific destination.

But how this connects to psychopathology?

You usually hear about general factors in the context of IQ. All intellectual tasks are correlated; people who are skilled at math also tend to be skilled at reading, or chess, or solving analogies … Recent research has suggested a similar “general factor of psychopathology”. All mental illnesses are correlated; people with depression also tend to have more anxiety, psychosis, attention problems, etc. As with intelligence, the statistical structure doesn’t look like a bunch of pairwise correlations, it looks like a single underlying cause. The authors suggest that deeper thing is canalization. If psychiatric conditions are learning mishaps that stick you in dysfunctional patterns, then maybe the tendency to canalize contributes to all of these problems… This doesn’t mean canalization is necessarily bad. Having habits/priors/tendencies is useful; without them you could never learn to edge-detect or walk or do anything at all. But go too far and you get . . . well, the authors suggest you get an increased tendency towards every psychiatric disease. … The paper does some good work suggesting a biological basis; canalization seems correlated with less synaptic growth and fewer dendritic spines. You can sort of see how this might make sense; if a “journey” through the mental “landscape” involves “traveling” from neuron to neuron, forcing potentials down a few big well-established connections is more canalized than having infinite different branches for any impulse to travel.

These two examples makes me think that with complex problems, it’s worth focusing more on how to elevate System’s potential gauge 🎨 — prioritizing a holistic approach rather than getting too caught up in the details.

December 28, 2024

Put your mind in a right wavelength as the key to good learning

The key to learning might not be about stacking as much new information as possible but about arriving at the right state of mind, a right “wavelength”?. That is, following the flow and learning at a pleasant rate, knowing there will be patches of boredom, not rushing, being calm and composed, feeling humble about the huge scope of knowledge I will not ever have.

August 7, 2024

Unconditional love to self via Anita

In this conversation Anita describes an interesting perspective on unconditional love that stayed with me. Listen yourself via this timestamped link

Here’s my reconstruction. Within myself, I feel the potential to be both the repulsive criminal and the most desirable saint. At any given moment, I perceive parts of myself as being somewhere on the spectrum between these extremes. Therefore I may experience unconditional love for myself by a) questioning why I would love myself differently based on the uncontrollable circumstances b) by feeling into other potential versions of me. In the video Anita describes this and a shift she experienced, feeling strong unconditional love for herself, love in an e even if she became a saint, there wouldn't be more of it.

May 25, 2024 – August 1, 2024

Review: Examples of barbell strategies

1 min review: Instead of doing things in the middle of distribution do things from both extremes: very bumpy, risky, extreme and then very flat, safe, mild. E.g. Instead of working full-time and doing mediocre side-project. Take 3 jobs for a half year and work full time on your project another half year.

April 23, 2024

Understanding addiction: the person had a gaping hole in their lives that (addictive activity) filled

I'm not sure if this is phrased better, or if I've just been exposed to the idea I've been pondering for a while, but when I read this, yeah, it's clear that's how addiction works:

„I’d like to think really long and hard about how popular gaming is with young boys all over the world, and how quick mainstream society has been to dismiss that as frivolous-at-best and soul-destroying at worst. I won’t pretend that it can’t be bad, I’ve personally seen friends go deep into the abyss of gaming-induced hell. But if you ask me, it’s never really the games themselves that are the root of the problem. The deeper issue is almost always that the person had a gaping hole in their lives that gaming filled. That’s an important difference. I think many addictions are like this. (Consider the rat park experiments, where rats in healthy social environments were found to consume less morphine than rats in isolated cages.)” via Are you having fun, son by Visa

March 14, 2024

New in 🌱 Wiki

Most of the text below are excerpts—click on links to expand. Ideas, definitions, or names authored by me are marked with 🎨.

Big changes are often beneficial

People may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices. … For important decisions (e.g. quitting a job or ending a relationship), Individuals who are told by the coin toss to make a change are much more likely to make a change and are happier six months later than those who were told by the coin to maintain the status quo

Focus on inputs, not outputs 🎨

Don't focus on outputs. Focus on inputs. And then score will take care of itself.
– Bill Walsh

Coordination and epistemic tools

That’s a complex document, click on the link :)

Reference class forecasting

Reference class forecasting (also called comparison class forecasting) is a method of predicting future outcomes by examining similar situations from the past.

Daniel Kahneman and Tversky found that human judgment is generally overoptimistic (See: Planning overconfidence). People often focus on the "inside view" – a perspective that concentrates on the specific details, plans, and circumstances of their situation. In contrast, the “outside view” (or reference class forecasting) involves comparing the current situation to a broader class of similar cases and using historical data to make more accurate predictions. This approach helps counter our tendency to ignore statistical and historical evidence.

Belief stuckness 🎨

A bias stemming from people being fixed in their point of view. Most conversations and exposure to new information rarely change people's minds. Philip Tetlock calls this cognitive conservatism—the tendency to maintain existing beliefs even when confronted with evidence that proves them wrong.

This concept relates to Belief as taste 🎨 and shares similar dynamics and causes with My-side bias cognitive bias family

Projection fallacies 🎨

A group of cognitive biases where one assumes that others experience the world in the same way as oneself:

• Typical mind fallacy – assuming others experience, react to, and relate to the world in the same way as you do – e.g., assuming someone must be upset by public criticism because you would be upset in that situation.

• Epistemological projection fallacy – assuming that things appear the same way to others as they do to you. Due to differences in minds, eyes, and other sensory organs, two people looking at the same thing may experience it differently – for example, a rose might appear completely different to someone with colorblindness

• Semantic projection fallacy – assuming that others interpret words the same way you do. Example: you say "tree" thinking of a leafy oak while the other person pictures a palm tree

Four simulacra levels of discussion

Level 4 - Word Salad: The discussion is incoherent or merely plays with ideas, showing no concern for affiliation, influence or truth.
Level 3 - Signaling: The focus is on showing group allegiance and loyalty.
Level 2 - Influence: The goal is to affect your beliefs or actions, or make you do something.
Level 1 - Truth: The focus is on factual accuracy and objective reality.

Beliefs as tastes 🎨

A shortcut to understanding belief formation: We adopt beliefs from the people we love and trust. Like tastes, beliefs are something people possess that aren't governed by logic. They persist even without social pressure and remain unchanged when their underlying reasons are disproven.

Guess to understand 🎨

A learning technique that involves making guesses about how something works to deepen understanding. This approach ensures that concepts don't remain in an uncertain state but instead collapses into a best guess. It’s like a quantum particle that collapses from superposition into a specific state when observed.

Singulatrons 🎨

Singulatrons refer to a dynamic present in all known comprehending systems. Minds and processors start from a single perspective or point, then gradually add more data, points, and perspectives as they attempt to grasp larger and more complex concepts. However they are ultimately limited by their understanding capacity or finite computing power.

Admittedly, we're not exactly singular or starting at "zero"—scientists can team up to tackle complex problems, computers can be connected together, and a human brain has more synapses than an ant. However, this points to the fundamental dynamic that even with a team of 10 or 10,000, we're still start on a limited side, closer to 1 than infinity, with limited understanding capacity.

Families of cognitive biases

That’s a bit more complex page, click on the link :)

System’s potential gauge 🎨

The potential gauge points to a key relationship: when our overall human system has higher potential, on average we perform better at all tasks—even seemingly unrelated ones. For example: after 30 minutes of cardio exercise, your thinking becomes clearer.

Normalcy bias

People tend to assume things will remain unchanged, often underestimating the possibility of major changes or crises. This mindset creates an "illusion of permanence"—a belief that the present situation will continue indefinitely. It resembles cognitive conservatism, where people maintain their existing beliefs despite contradicting evidence.

Most commonly, normalcy bias is used in the context of catastrophes, but I use it more broadly as a tendency to believe that what's here and normal will persist.

When catastrophes occur, people often refuse to believe or accept what is happening. 70% 9/11 survivors first talk to other people before escaping, when Vesuvio blew up a lot of peeps from Pompeii were just watching.

Prediction horizon 🎨

The longest period over which predictions about a situation remain reliable, after which outcomes become random. Example of different prediction horizons:

• finest meteorologists may not be able to predict what is gonna happen in a couple of hours

• We no exactly where Pluto will be in relation to other planets in solar system very far into the future

• deck of cards loses any information after 7 shuffles

Do things with love 🎨

The strongest people are ones who love lifting weights. The most stretched people are the ones who love stretching.

New in 💿 AI apps

🔮 Epistemic check

Evaluate any idea, claim, or fact with weighted pros, cons, and a total confidence score.

Use it

🧮 Parallel facts

Write a hypothetical scenario and I'll predict its potential outcomes with probabilities.

Use it

Liv Boerree on game theory of old-school, hustler-type poker players

Back then, no one understood game theory, no one understood the mechanics of how the game worked. And the best players in the world were typically older, kind of hustler types who would spend decades in casinos seeing a gamut of human behavior and developing really strong intuitions. Often they would make this really strange plays that would turn out to be correct and they would not even able to explain to you why they did it. It was purely  an automatic, unconscious, intuitive process going on. But then online poker and data analytics software appeared. Now all of a sudden we had data that poker pros could look at and use to analyze where they were going wrong, where there were leaks in their game. The game basically went through a scientific revolution away from this pure of just feeling, having a vibe of someone. In reality you cannot be a top professional these days without having that mathematical foundation. If you are someone who are playing game theory optimal style, even though is nome ways is it’s kind of robotic, you just can’t beat it by pure intuition alone. – Liv Boeree link

November 8, 2023

Excerpt from reading: Book Review: Legal Systems Very Different From Ours`

• The Gypsies and Amish will ostracize members who defy the court – but since everyone lives in fear of ostracization, in real life they’ll just pay the fine or make their public confession or whatever.

• The English will hang criminals at the drop of a hat – but since the threat of hanging incentivizes them to bribe prosecutors, in reality few people will need to be hanged. The

• Icelandic courts could declare offenders outlaws who can be killed without repercussion – but the threat encourages Icelanders to pay the wergeld, and nobody has to get outlawed.

• The Somalis are ready to have murderous family feuds – but the possibility of such a feud keeps people willing to go to arbitration.

• Even our own legal system works like this. The police can physically drag you to jail, kicking and screaming. But more likely you’re going to plea bargain, or agree to community service, or at least be cooperative and polite while the police take you away. Plea bargains – which are easier for prosecutors, easier for defendants, and easier for taxpayers – seem like a good example of cultural evolution in action; once someone thought them up, there was no way they weren’t going to take over everything despite their very serious costs.

November 6, 2023

Notes on reading: Decision making and decentralisation in EA by William MacAskill

I liked the following:

Assessing giving a gradient of centralization vs decentralization of different projects:

• communist dictatorships (e.g. North Korea), the US army, most companies (e.g. Apple), highly centralised religious groups (e.g. Mormonism), franchises (e.g. McDonald’s), the Scouts, mixed economies (the US, UK), registered clubs and sports groups (e.g. The United States Golf Association; USA Basketball), intergovernmental decision-making, fairly decentralised religious groups (e.g. Protestantism, Buddhism), most social movements (e.g. British Abolitionism, the American Civil Rights Movement), the scientific community, most intellectual movements (e.g. behaviourism), the US startup scene

Parsing what are different vectors of centralization vs decentralization

• Decision-making power: To what extent is what the group as a whole does determined by a small group of decision-makers?

• Ownership: Is there legal ownership of constitutive aspects of the group (e.g. intellectual property, branding)?

• Group membership: How strong is the ability to determine membership in the group: How hard is it for someone in the group to leave? How hard is it for someone outside of the group to enter? And how tightly-defined is group membership?

• Information flow: To what extent does information flow merely from decision-makers down to other group members, and to what extent does it flow back up to decision-makers, or horizontally from one non-decision-maker to another?

• Culture: Do people within the group feel empowered to think and act autonomously, or do they feel they ought to defer to the views of high-status individuals within the group, or to the majority view within the group?

This quote on how conformity can arise in a culture that is too scrupulous:

It’s centralised insofar as people are often highly scrupulous, and can feel like they’re being a “bad EA” in some way if they aren’t acting in line with the wider group, and will be negatively judged. I think the highly critical culture, especially online, contributes to pressures towards conformity as a side-effect; people worry that if they say or do something different, they’ll get attacked. Personally, at least, I think that this latter aspect is one of the threads within EA culture I’d most like to see change.

Related: Coordination

October 11, 2023

In a magic laptop I would write

What is it? If you write a press release on the “Magic Laptop,” it becomes real. You just specify who agrees to do what (org A agrees to take action B). via Spencer Greenberg more here

My answer? Vitalik Buterin, Holden Karnofsky, Nick Bostrom, Paul Graham, Philip Tetlock, Scott Alexander, and Julia Galef have launched an accelerator to pioneer innovative societal coordination mechanisms for more resilient, interconnected, and thriving future.

October 10, 2023

Local differences are exaggerated and take-off speeds

Listening to Paul Christiano and putting more weights on take-off speeds may be quicker than they seem to him (even though he beliefs on quick take-off speeds, but not as quick as Eliezer Yudkowsky) as we may be distorted around assessing human-level cognitive abilities – differences are exaggerated and the real distance is smaller in the same way they as it works in this Local differences are exaggerated

October 5, 2023

Self-wiki is the best spaced repetition software

Finding a more effective way to memorize information can be challenging, and while tools like ANKi cards have their merits, they might not be the optimal solution for everyone. I believe there's a method that's not only more efficient but also more enjoyable and less draining on one's willpower.

What I advocate for, and personally use, is creating a self-wiki. Essentially, it's a public knowledge base of information you think is worthwhile and worth remembering.

The approach is simple: Write it down in your own words. Don't just copy and paste; you need to be the author of the content.

So, why does this method work? The social aspect of our brain gets activated when we know others can see and potentially benefit from our notes. This encourages us to regularly revisit and refine our definitions.

Why might this be superior? Spaced repetition, at its core, requires us to review and repeat information regularly. But in trying to nail the "perfect" review intervals, you might be missing the point. The biggest drawback of tools like ANKi is that they can make learning feel like a chore. It's probably not a good idea to reduce something as rewarding as learning to a tedious task. Pushing oneself continuously can be counterproductive. See more on this perspective here: Bad habits: observe not restrict

Another downside? The card decks you curate in typical spaced repetition software might not stand the test of time. In contrast, a self-wiki, being a dynamic platform, can continually evolve and be built upon.

See my wiki and make me horrified something is off.

September 29, 2023

Why alternate explanations are so hard?

– Why is it so-hard to read and consider alternate explanations?
– Why is it so-hellish-hard to read and consider alternate explanations when the source is someone I respect?
– Why is it so-hellish-hellish-hard to read and consider alternate explanations when the source is someone I respect and is respected by people I respect?

May 3, 2023

New in 🌱 Knowledge pages

Gambler’s and hot-hand fallacies

Both are misinterpretations of statistical independence. They both deal with erroneous beliefs about sequences of independent or nearly independent events. The belief that independent, random events are influenced by past outcomes.

Gambler's Fallacy is about expecting a reversal in a pattern, while the hot-hand fallacy involves expecting a continuation of a pattern.

They're related in that they both deal with erroneous beliefs about sequences of independent or nearly independent events. For example, thinking a flipped coin is "due" for heads after several tails. This is a cognitive error; each coin flip is independent with a 50/50 chance. The fallacy is a misunderstanding of statistical independence and the law of large numbers.

The hot-hand fallacy is the opposite belief to Gambler's Fallacy: the conviction that a streak of successful outcomes increases the probability of future success. For example, basketball betters see certain players get the “hot-hand,” believing a basketball player who has made several shots will continue to do so, even when they are actually seeing lucky streaks that are consistent with the player’s typical scoring percentage.

October 27, 2023

Neglect of tasks with vague results

Difficulty in prioritizing actions when there's no feedback loops, immediate results or tangible results, often leading to a neglect of them.

• It's tough to stick to exercise when there's no immediate sign it's helping you avoid a heart attack.

• Overeating doesn't seem to have instant drawbacks, so it's hard to stick to a healthy diet.

October 17, 2023

Small things don’t seem to add up to large things

Many small actions that over time add up to something large may be hard to prioritize and see it real value. It’s difficult to tangibly connect each small sub-action to the bigger one.

Examples:

• Procrastination: A few moments of delay might not seem like a big deal, but they add up. After wasting hours, you end up feeling unproductive and bad about yourself.

• Health: Skipping a healthy choice one day seems harmless, but these choices add up and affect your overall health.

October 16, 2023

Planning fallacy

A tendency to underestimate the time, resources, or effort required to complete a task, despite having knowledge of past experiences where similar tasks took longer than anticipated

Examples:

“Would you care to guess how many students finished on or before their estimated 50%, 75%, and 99% probability levels? 13% of subjects finished their project by the time they had assigned a 50% probability level; 19% finished by the time assigned a 75% probability level; and only 45% (less than half!) finished by the time of their 99% probability level. … The Denver International Airport opened 16 months late, at a cost overrun of $2 billion.1 The Eurofighter Typhoon, a joint defense project of several European countries, was delivered 54 months late at a cost of $19 billion instead of $7 billion. The Sydney Opera House may be the most legendary construction overrun of all time, originally estimated to be completed in 1963 for $7 million, and finally completed in 1973 for $102 million. “ – Planning Fallacy Sequences

October 6, 2023

Disagreement curse 🎨

Disagreement is the default course of communication.

Contrary to Aumann's Agreement Theorem on any given topic seemingly honest, seemingly truth-seeking agents with seemingly common priors almost always disagree.

Examples: even in Adversarial collaboration, when collaborators set out to unify their competing theories, to find cruxes of disagreement, agreement almost never happens.

September 26, 2023

Conjunction fallacy

Conjunction fallacy occurs when people believe that the co-occurrence of two events is more likely than the occurrence of one of the events alone, despite the fact that the probability of two events occurring together is always lower than the probability of either event occurring alone.

For example there is a question and two options: something that happens rarely, 12% of the time, and something that happens often, 80% of the time. However, when the more likely option is presented, our minds become fixated on it, much like a child fixated by a glowing lollipop. We lose sight of the fact that when the less likely option is presented alongside the more likely one, it has a lower chance of occurring, at only 9.6% (12% * 80%), compared to when it is presented alone at 12%.

The conjunction fallacy also occurs when the second option associates us with the profile of what we are trying to find. For example Katy was a student, who was deeply concerned with issues of social justice, and also participated in anti-discrimination demonstrations. Which is more probable? Katy is a bank teller or Katy is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

This may be related to Binary trap 🎨. Our minds may have a preference to pick simpler answers, one that are easier to understand and process, even if a more complex answer is more accurate.

August 6, 2023

New in 📚 Summaries

Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality

May 25, 2023 Pav notes: This is one of the best articles I read in the last couple of years. Thumbnail looks a little technical, but the article is actually not that much. I promise that some (like me) will get some big ahas! there.

Excerpt explaining main idea

“But in fact many political zealots never accept reality. It's not just that they're inherently skeptical of what the other party says. It's that even when something is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, they still won't believe it. This is where we need to bring in the idea of trapped priors. …

Van der Bergh et al suggest that when experience is too intolerable, your brain will decrease bandwidth on the "raw experience" channel to protect you from the traumatic emotions. This is why some trauma victims' descriptions of their traumas are often oddly short, un-detailed, and to-the-point. This protects the victim from having to experience the scary stimuli and negative emotions in all their gory details. But it also ensures that context (and not the raw experience itself) will play the dominant role in determining their perception of an event.

I've heard some people call this "bitch eating cracker syndrome". The idea is - you're in an abusive or otherwise terrible relationship. Your partner has given you ample reason to hate them. But now you don't just hate them when they abuse you. Now even something as seemingly innocent as seeing them eating crackers makes you actively angry. In theory, an interaction with your partner where they just eat crackers and don't bother you in any way ought to produce some habituation, be a tiny piece of evidence that they're not always that bad. In reality, it will just make you hate them worse. At this point, your prior on them being bad is so high that every single interaction, regardless of how it goes, will make you hate them more. Your prior that they're bad has become trapped. And it colors every aspect of your interaction with them, so that even interactions which out-of-context are perfectly innocuous feel nightmarish from the inside.”

Excerpt on getting out of trapped priors

“If you want to get out of a trapped prior, the most promising source of hope is the psychotherapeutic tradition of treating phobias and PTSD. These people tend to recommend very gradual exposure to the phobic stimulus, sometimes with special gimmicks to prevent you from getting scared or help you "process" the information

A final possibility is other practices and lifestyle changes that cause the brain to increase the weight of experience relative to priors. Meditation probably does this; see the discussion in the van der Bergh post for more detail. Probably every mental health intervention (good diet, exercise, etc) does this a little. And this is super speculative, and you should feel free to make fun of me for even thinking about it, but sensory deprivation might do this too, for the same reason that your eyes become more sensitive in the dark.”

New in 💁 Wow ideas

Beliefs persevere even without any social pressure. … The belief will not change when the reasons are defeated. The causality is reversed. People believe the reasons because they believe in the conclusion … We believe what the people we love and trust believe. This is not a conscious decision to conform by hiding one's true beliefs. It's the truth, this is how we believe.
– Daniel Kahneman

I want to be as publicly vulnerable as possible, because I want to broadcast acceptance towards others.
– Aella As in, one of the first times I felt deep acceptance from someone else was when I watched them name an unflattering thing about themselves with openness and grace.

Flirt with abandon
– via ceo

Locate an animal, mimic its expression and movement for two minutes. If there are no other lives around, observe an object and be it for two minutes. Do it regularly
– Apichatpong Weerasethakul via Hans Urlich Obrist

Why I am doing it?

These are effects I observed after doing a couple of weeks of meditation. They probably start after like 2-3 weeks 10min a day.

• Lowering anxiety

  (various types of anxieties, both mild and deep-seated ones)

• Enhancing clarity during complex, multi-faceted problem-solving

  (e.g. it's making me a better designer, it’s helping me with difficult decisions)

• Cultivating feelings of peace, harmony, and acceptance

  (I feel more at peace; it instills a sense of correctness, grounds me in the present, and quiets the default part of homo-sapiens brain fixated on the next thing or seeking more)

• Increasing patience and reducing the lure of immediate gratification

  (For example, I find myself less drawn to minor addictions like social media or casual snacking)

• Enhancing focus

How to meditate?

Take two states of mind: being here and now and being immersed in thought.

1. Close your eyes and focus on experiencing the here and now. What are the sounds? How are the sensations of your body? How does your own consciousness feel? How a cloud of sensations like emotions feels like? Focus on any input present input. There is no way of doing it wrong.

2. Naturally, thoughts will come and take you away in the abstract space of no-time and no-place.

3. Your task is to discover that you are consumed by thoughts and come back to here and now. Be kind to yourself. Everybody fails that. Accept that you will be failing it too and keep coming back.

(In order to feel any effects commit to 10min a day for two-three weeks)

Or just play my fav guided meditations:

My fav guided meditation

Smile by Tara Brach (26 min) I am guesstimating I did that one 150 times in my life

Other I like: Calling on Your Awakened Heart by (24 min) Tara Brach

Framework to try meditation

Evaluating meditation: 20 days x 15 min

It's weirdly hard to appreciate meditation. A big part of me is convinced about its gains, another can easily skip it. I still find parts of myself confused: what might this not-doing offer that doing does not?

I also think gains from meditation are visible after two-three weeks of sustained practice.

Steps 1 and 3 are optional, but I believe including them is beneficial as they offer a comparison between two states, helping to counteract flawed memory, My-side bias and Confirmation bias

1. On day one, write a short self-evaluation (or just record a voice memo). Ask yourself where anxiety is in your life and what its intensity? How do you score on areas such as: focus, peace, experiencing a state of flow, self-wisdom (feeling internally wise and being on the right direction in your life)? You may also include a stream of consciousness on states from the last week.

2. For 20 days do at least 15 minutes of meditation every day. (You don't need to know more than: Sit and try to stay in the present moment as much as possible. Know that everybody fails at not-thinking. When you notice that you are thinking just come back to the present moment)

3. On the day 20th take ten minutes and repeat the evaluation and compare the notes.

So far I did two tests like this and saw clear gains described in “Why I am doing it” chapter above. I recommend 20 min sessions, but I also think 10 min sessions will be good. For people without previous meditation practice 20-min sessions may be too long to go through.

How to think about meditation?

• “The advantage of meditation is not that you’re suddenly going to gain the superpower to control your internal state, it’s that you will recognize just how out of control your mind is.” – Naval Ravikant

  I think most of the people who never meditated have this impression that they are in control of their thoughts. During meditation, you witness how hard it is to stay here and now and that thoughts come up on their own.

• “Staying for a minute without getting distracted is a heroic feat. The longer you meditate the easier it is to recognize this "torrent of discursivity" which is preventing you from staying focused.” – Sam Harris

• “You can uncover that consciousness itself has intrinsic quality of wellbeing. Simply paying attention to the experience is the antidote to the feeling of dissatisfaction. That what is aware of sadness isn’t truly sad.” – Sam Harris

• “All of humanity's problems stem from men's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” – Blaise Pascal

• “Meditation as a calibration chamber to avoid instant gratification urges. If one is able to be “bored for 20 min” one is more resilient in the face of any form of addiction: food, social media, substances etc.”

• “Meditation may reduce suffering via defusing state of “cognitive fusion”. Cognitive fusion happens when individuals perceive their thoughts and emotions as objective realities. This fusion can lead to suffering, as individuals perceive thoughts as them and become trapped in their narratives.” – Kaj Sotala via My attempt to explain Looking, insight meditation, and enlightenment in non-mysterious terms

  My take: Most suffering occurs in anticipation, like the anxiety felt before a doctor's visit for a vaccine. It's often a projection of an imagined future state. Meditation helps bring awareness to the present, countering these projections by diffusing the mental blending of thoughts and reality, known as "cognitive fusion."

  Direct forms of suffering, like immediate physical or emotional pain, can also be mitigated through meditation. By intently focusing on the raw sensation of the pain, it transforms into a vibration, devoid of a subject. It reveals that: “That what is aware of suffering does not suffer.

• On a psychedelic like states that are accessible for very experienced meditators:

  “If you would spend 18 hours a day meditating for a month. At the end of the month you will be noticing this white noise, this torrent of discursivity that is preventing you from staying on breath for a minute. And staying for a minute without getting distracted is a heroic feat. If you could pay attention to anything without being lost in thought for a minute at a time there would be neurophysiological correlates that are very drug like. There is immense pleasure that people get from being concentrated. There is bliss, rapture. Feeling of expansiveness in the mind, where your body disappears and consciousness feel like a vast void. And a only thing that appears might be the thing you were paying attention to. And even that might disappear and there is nothing but pure consciousness – an extraordinarily pleasurable psychedelic like experience. If you were actually concentrated as you imagine your self to be that would be very accessible to you.” – Sam Harris in conversation with Adam Grant (1:02:08)

• Nick Cammarata has an incredible tweeter feed where he talks about Dharma, Jhana and meditation

  “Jhana is extatic meditative state that’s different from enlightenment. Enlightenment changes you forever. Jhana is just a state you can enter during meditation sessions, then leave when the session is over … Best comparable I have for jhana is sex (many people compare these) bc they're surprisingly similar. Jhana killed my desire for casual sex bc it's 10-100x better … jhana made me not crave pleasure so much anymore. Cured that "addiction" via surplus. … the best analogy I have is if you're extremely thirsty you'd do anything for water but if you're barely thirsty it's kind of just nice and helpful. And you certainly wouldn't break a bone for it. Pre jhana I was always "thirsty" for feeling good, now I'm a lot less so.” – via Nick Cammarata On Jhana by Scott Alexander

  This particular twitter thread is one of the most exciting intro to meditation.

  “Let's talk about the hilariously insane power of attention. Attention was where evolution accidentally messed up and made us extremely overpowered. It doesn't want us being easily happy, and if it could redo it it would nerf us, but it can't.

  Attention like a flashlight. For most people it's an extremely broad and dim flashlight, kind of lighting everything. It also moves around and things tug at it all day and you don't really have control and you definitely can't just drop it on something and leave it there

  If you're aware of something you're giving it some attention. If your attention were fine enough, as you move it around everything else would go away completely. If you attend strongly to your breath but not your body your body is gone. You're just a nose

  With practice your flashlight gets much much better. It can get so good that nothing tugs at it. You can just drop it on whatever you want and not move it for 10 minutes and nothing is tugging at you to move. It's just there and that's all you care about right now

  The way to get better at this is to practice returning your attention to one thing over and over again. It shouldn't feel like a struggle. Just lightly return it back. Your breath works, or metta, which is returning to the feeling of loving-kindness. It should feel good

  I've been meditating regularly since ~2013 and I started with completely wasting about 500 hours on forcing myself as hard as I could to focus on my breath. Don't be like me, "concentration meditation" is a bad word bc it sounds forceful. Let it drift back to your object

  Okay fast forward a bit and you're able to control your meditation pretty well. What do you get, what's the prize?

  It builds up "samadhi" and first thing you notice is more beauty and meaning in everything, like seeing with glasses after a life of bad eyes. You can just fully do something. The world becomes shockingly gorgeous, kind of like 2cb if you've done that. It's just really nice …

  Now that you have a strong flashlight, you can decide what you want to feel by attending to it.

  It turns out if you attend fully to something, even if its small, it's all you feel, and you feel it extremely potently

  So once you've build up enough samadhi you can feel whatever you want. Just find a tiny bit of it in your awareness, a tiny dot of joy near your hand, or smile a little to create a microburst of happiness. Then attend to it 100%

  Your everything, your entire awareness of the universe will become happy. There's no more you, no more world, nothing. Just happy. This happy makes the tiny happy spot a bit stronger, making it easier to attend to, making it a bit stronger, etc until it explodes.”

  Lastly on some of the effects of these states:

  “a lot of days now I'm playing with piti and sukha while I do other things just adjusting to them to what I feel like, what my body needs right now and trying to think about how I can support it.”

• The end goal is to have a meditative state in life

  Read more on entering "meditative" states in daily activities:

  “I’m trying to turn off my monkey mind. I think, when we’re born as children, we’re pretty blank slates. We’re living very much in the moment. We’re essentially just reacting to our environment through our instincts. We’re living in, what I would call the “real world.” When puberty comes along, that’s the onset of desire, it’s the first time you really, really want something and you start long-range planning for it. Because of that, you start thinking a lot and start building an identity and an ego to go and get what you want.

  This is all normal and healthy. It’s part of being the human animal. I think at some point it gets out of control and then we are constantly talking to ourselves in our head. We’re playing little movies in our heads, walking down the street, but no one’s actually there. Of course, if we started voicing this thought in your head that you’re always having, you’d be a madman and they’d lock you up.

  The reality is if you walk down the street and there are a thousand people in the street, I think all thousand are talking to themselves in their head at any given point. They’re constantly judging everything that they see. They’re playing back movies of things that happened to them yesterday. They’re living in fantasy worlds of what’s going to happen tomorrow. They’re just pulled out of base reality.

  That could be good when you’re doing long-range planning. It can be good when you’re solving problems. It’s good for the survival and replication machines that we are. I think it’s actually very bad for your happiness. In my mind, the mind should be a servant and a tool, not a master. It’s not something that should be controlling me and driving me 24/7.

  I’ve taken on this idea that I want to break the habit of uncontrolled thinking, which is hard. If I say to you, “Don’t think of a pink elephant”, I just put a pink elephant in your head. It’s an almost impossible problem. It’s more something that has to be guided by feel, than guided by actual thinking or thought process. I’m deliberately cultivating experiences, states of mind, locations, activities, that will help me get out of my mind.

  All of society does that to some extent. In some sense, the people chasing thrills in action sports or flow states or orgasm or any of these states that people really strive to get to, a lot of these are basically just trying to get out of your own head. They’re trying to get away from that voice in your head and this overdeveloped sense of self. At the very least, I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and become stronger as I get older. I want it to be weaker and more muted so that I can live much more in present every day and accept nature and the world for what it is and appreciate it very much as a child would.”

  – Naval Ravikant on Shane Parrish Podcast (start 20:51) Link

• Scott Alexander’s guess that meditation may help with Bias correction:

  If you want to get out of a trapped prior, is … A final possibility is other practices and lifestyle changes that cause the brain to increase the weight of experience relative to priors. Meditation probably does this; see the discussion in the van der Bergh post for more detail.

• Naval Ravikant ‘s approach:

  “What it really is, is the art of doing nothing. All you do for meditation is sit down, close your eyes. Whatever happens, happens. If you think – think. If you don't think – don't think. Don't put effort into it. Don't put effort against it ... Every meditation technique is leading you to the same thing which is witnessing. And concentration is a technique to steal your mind enough so you can then drop the object of concentration. So you could also just try going straight to the endgame ... Happiness comes from peace. Peace comes from indifference. Indifference is the ultimate super power – this works in negotiation, relationships, and business opportunities. The place that I want to end up the most is just peace. Peace to me is happiness at rest ... The way we think we get peace is resolving all the external problems. There are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get piece is on the inside – by giving up this idea of problems.” – via Naval Ravikant on Joe Rogan's Show Listen on YouTube 1:19:50

Links

• Mastering the core teaching of Buddha by Daniel Ingram via Peter Hroššo – I read first 15% of this book and it had a large impact on me. I need to dose it slowly.

• Best pro-argument: How to Master Your Mind? by Sam Harris on Tim Ferriss Show

• Best counter-argument: Listen to Adam Grant talking why he doesn't meditate on Sam Harris's Podcast (link to 50:30)

• Waking Up Course meditation course by Sam Harriss (paid)

How to read it? Feel free to treat it like a Q&A page. All chapters make sense on their own so feel free to jump around.

Hello

My name is Paweł. I try to distill the most impactful knowledge over a long time. I also design products, wrote AI Revolution 101 and have a background in art. I am scheming how to improve epistemics and collective coordination using technology. I don’t normal write. But I care about being simple and precise.

Approach

Weird writing and non-linguistic brain

By origin, my mind is not very linguistic. For example, when I think, I rarely experience myself talking in my head. It’s more like sparkling-jumps between different thoughts. A long time ago I have been diagnosed as being on the verge of dyslexia. I believe dyslexia is not a hindrance but a different brain wiring. Dyslexic brains are organized in a way that maximizes strength in making big-picture connections at the expense of weaknesses in processing speed and parsing fine details from Dyslexic Advantage.

I see the strengths of my mind in the same way. I think I have high skills at gist detection, evaluating uncertain knowledge with analogies from different disciplines, having “aha” moments on how to more efficiently reinterpret things.

All that is to say, linguistically things may feel off. There may be lots of grammatical mistakes. English is not my native language and sometimes I break it intentionally. That is when grammar rules are blocking my precision, a proper weighing of arguments, or when grammar makes expressing ideas longer or less direct. Please bare with me through this non-standard narration.

Short, but rendering through a human

I deeply care to distill knowledge into a form that is as short as possible. I want to max out on the words per meaning ratio. But at the same time, you are human and you render things through human experiences. So I will be also injecting my weird, personal, subjective experiences and relations to things.

Centipede approach

I want to be like a centipede with one long leg. Which is to say I see a large potential in going broad but developing expertise in one area.

Why generalist?

This may be especially productive in a time of specialization. Holden Karnofsky describes a hypothesis that ideas naturally get harder to find over time (see Where’s today’s Beethoven? and chapters on: “The innovation as mining hypothesis” and “Data on innovation stagnation”). That’s why there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in the overlaps between different areas.

Perhaps if one goes broadly, thinks precisely, and tries to out-maneuver cognitive biases there is a chance of stumbling upon view quakes. I believe one can deduct quite a lot from own experience. What may be more important are not fancy tools but brevity to question things from the ground up. Back in the day, realizing that Geocentrism wasn’t true didn’t really require any equipment. One could deduct it with only their senses. I have a sense there may be a lot more view quakes around us.

But learning can be also a form of procrastination. I think in order to find impact it makes sense to develop expertise in one or two narrower fields and then try to find some overlaps.

So what is your one long leg?

I try to understand the algorithms and distortions of the human brain.

And what are your other ninety-nine legs?

Okay, there is a lot and it is helpful for me to track them so I created this page:

Unique areas

Unique areas

Values living

Doing good

I feel the most meaning and fulfillment when I feel I am in the process, however wiggly, of doing good, going after the most positive impact on the world. I don’t know why, but I then imagine myself as this huge handsome tree and the sun is shining on leaves, making thousands of green glowy fires. I did some testing and this appeared to be my top intrinsic value. I also wonder if love may be one of the most important forces in the universe, more on this soon.

I think one of the most impactful actions for me now is to learn and improve my thinking. Straight the best way to improve thinking is to write and keep creating this thinking-helping machine.

Being brave

I may suck at it, k? But this is my value and I admire people who bravely reveal themselves in the world.

Values thinking

Overcoming bias

One of the main efforts of my learning is to overcome all the cognitive biases we are subjected to. I am sure I suffer from many, especially from the mother of all biases my-side bias and her children confirmation bias, hindsight bias, expert trap, typical mind fallacy, creator’s bias. So pleasssse send feedback. What truths about myself people are trying to avoid telling me?

Being precise and accurately uncertain

I will prioritize precision over persuasion. I think the form and the flow of writing is important but should never compromise the precision of arguments. I aim to include epistemic status in my writing and state my certainty with confidence tags.

Least amount of words possible

“I am sorry that I didn’t have time to write a shorter letter” – Pascal. I try to distill knowledge into as few words as possible. I think this is one of the most important and neglected ideas about knowledge. The shorter the more valuable the message is (while simultaneously preserving its depth and quality).

Long-term

New knowledge is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing when you compare medieval to contemporary findings in medicine, ethics, physics. It is also a curse because we have a newness bias. I try to resist the new and select the knowledge that has a long expiry date.

Through a peasant's reasoning

This is a Polish expression meaning to communicate without jargon, in the simplest possible terms. Knowledge is often a signaling tool – a vehicle for climbing a homo sapiens hierarchy ladder. "I am capable of using complex vocabulary", "I belong to this type of people", "I am smart". I feel this force is largely active in our culture and in my hunter-gatherer's brain. I try to recognize it and cut it out. What out of my thinking is there because it’s good to think this way? How to say it simpler? What is the dumbest and most revealing question here? On this website, I attempt to take complex ideas and transform them into the most simple form. My north star is what Richard Feynman lived by "If you can't explain it simply you don't understand it well enough".

I write a lot and post a little. I'm currently planning to make some changes and would like to share a few principles I've discovered. I think these ideas can help anyone dealing with creator's block, whether they have trouble creating consistently or find it hard to show their work to others.

Organic creative process

I want to transition from my previous, neater, more structured format to make my publishing process lighter. I believe it's essential to find a way to create easily and publish easily in order to benefit from the publishing effect. Our minds are highly social. After hitting the publish button and imagining potential viewers, we get better at finding mistakes, spotting weaknesses, and seeing things more clearly. Ideally, creating should be as straightforward as an orchard tree bearing its apples.

In the creative process, I believe better outcomes arise when we are precise about direction and more relaxed about quality. In the long run, it's vital to stay true to your values, not compromise on key aspects, and keep refining your approach. This may involve incorporating ideas that initially feel awkward but seem worthwhile, and envisioning the end goal without obsessing over the quality of your work. When exploring unfamiliar territory, it's natural for things to be a bit fuzzy around the edges at first. However, with enough repetitions, the quality will improve over time.

I'm looking for a way to reduce the resistance of hitting the "publish" button. You can't be good at something if you don't publish a lot, but publishing in any medium is hard. Ideally, writing should be similar to how one text a friend, using words that come naturally without being forced or blocked by overthinking. As a content creator, it is incredibly valuable to muster the courage to press the publish button, to reveal oneself, and be more accepting with mistakes. Initially, the outcomes may feel disappointing, but I believe that focusing on creating content easily and frequently testing it through publishing will ultimately lead to the highest quality output.

Creating and hierarchies

As stated in "The Elephant in the Brain," humans possess a deeply ingrained hierarchical nature, which often remains hidden from our own awareness. I believe art (when I say "art," I mean any creative task) is largely about climbing hierarchies and finding ways for others to think highly of us. I believe that any form of creation is largely about shouting "please love me."

On the flip side of this dynamic, there is a fear of not being enough, often expressed as excuses like, "I'm not talented enough to draw, write, paint, or play music.” I call this the high brow bias, which relates to hierarchy bias in the context of creating.

I, too, have inner "animals" worrying about these things. I often find myself concerned about imaginary readers who might critique my syntax or critics who could disapprove of my epistemics. These concerns are valid, but I also need to keep moving forward, revealing myself, testing my creations, and therefore gradually improving. I enjoy the form of this text, and I believe that this format, as a message to readers, helps to tone down the highbrow culture in me.

Love and negativity bias

I believe there's a more effective remedy, though. A friend once told me that the strongest people he knows are the ones who love lifting weights, and the most flexible people are those who love stretching (he has friends who can do the splits and even fall asleep at parties in that position). This is reminiscent of Michael Pollan's psychedelic journey, during which he experienced ego death and realized that love is the most fundamental force in the universe. Naval Ravikant shares a similar approach when it comes to reading. If you love learning, don't force yourself to read books; instead, cultivate a habit of enjoying reading.

I believe there's something universal about this approach. It counters our hierarchical brains, our negativity bias, and our evolutionary inclination to focus on the negative. I try to make a habit of doing everything with love. By love, I mean being caring and attentive when performing any task. I often forget about this mindset, but when I remember it, it helps me when I'm struggling or feeling discontented with myself. The past is in the past, and the only thing I can do is start from where I am. It's especially hard when feeling guilty, worried about how I'll be received, or disappointed with a chain of events. The only thing I can do is start where I am, accept it, and put care, attention and love into this moment. This applies to writing and the everlasting struggle of culture and questions like, "Can I publish this?" or "Is this enough?"

Summary

In summary, high-brow biases and the fears surrounding them are very likely at the core of culture. I'll try to counteract these forces by betting on an organic creative process and approaching things with love. I would like this to become something like a journal of my becoming. I'm okay if my texts will feel more temporary. I'll just share my process, struggle with ideas, and simply show where I am right now.

Love,
Paweł

Epistemology

Alas, belief is easier than disbelief; we believe instinctively, but disbelief requires a conscious effort. So instead, by dint of mighty straining, I forced my model of reality to explain an anomaly that never actually happened. And I knew how embarrassing this was. I knew that the usefulness of a model is not what it can explain, but what it can’t. A hypothesis that forbids nothing, permits everything, and thereby fails to constrain anticipation.Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.
– Eliezer Youdkowsky from Your Strength as a Rationalist

Read the full note

Questions

My fav questions: What is your top-idea of your mind?
This could be answered with A) What solution, or definition you are anxious to bring to the world? Or B) What is under-valued or under-discussed? What problems your mind goes to automatically to explore? What overlapping concepts or intersections of disciplines do you think about? What should we start thinking more about or what should we start doing more of?

My fav Askhole questions:

• Have you ever had (what you consider to be) a spiritual experience? If so, what was it like and what effects did it have on you?

• If you could have one but not the other, would you rather love someone or be loved by someone?

• What unusual trait do you find most attractive in a romantic partner?

• Which life lessons that you’ve learned would be most important for the people in this room to hear?

• Of all the beliefs you hold, which is most likely to be considered barbaric in 150 years?

• In what ways do you tend to fail at communication?

• If you could press a button that would instantly erase every single false belief you have, would you do it?

• Have you been loved enough?

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Death

Why do we fear death? You’re essentially dead every night during sleep, same thing if you’re under anesthesia, so why do we fear death so much? – Naval Ravikant

What's "small stuff?". Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary – Paul Graham

The longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose. – Marcus Aurelius

Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love. – Rainer Maria Rilke

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Writing

Quotes

When you write you complete your ideas. If you don’t write at all you don’t even realize you have incomplete ideas. You have an illusion that all of your ideas are complete.
– Paul Graham from Putting Ideas into words

Writers recognize in much higher resolution that there is a difference in how they think about certain subjects before and after writing. Non-writers don’t even realize this delta exists

Use the first word that comes to your mind
– Stephen King

This one feels important because every word in the sentence can be substituted with any other. I could have written: this one feels meaningful, significant, crucial, vital, consequential, pivotal, etc. Each of these words has a different meaning network, and connects to slightly different contexts. An animal inside you does a roughly good job picking the right words. And when writing, it needs to pick a couple of words every second. If you don’t trust the first word that comes to mind, you can only overthink it and become a victim of distortions, rationalizations, and false aspirations.

Learn how to ruthlessly edit out
– Michael Schur describes process of creating Saturday Night Live sketches on Tim Ferriss Show

Writing warm-up

When I write I focus on not stopping writing. What helps me to do it well is a writing warm-up. I heard this from A. J. Jacobs . on Tim Ferriss's Podcast. He said that the writing process is very hard for most writers. And he admitted that it can be also very painful for him. He is a pro writer, an editor of Esquire, a publisher of many widely read books.

The writing warm-up is simply putting a timer on (I do it from 10–60 min) with the only goal of not stopping writing. During this time I usually process emotions, speculate on things, sketch first drafts, or describe how the present moment feels. I think what happens during this time is my mind slowly getting used to the mode of writing – a process of thoughts being translated into words. Maybe the transitory period is needed as writing has a peculiar rhythm. It needs to tap into some specific mind abilities. (People may need to slow down, be more precise with the words, browse words for more precise ones etc.)

I highly recommend it. It feels a lot less effortful to write later on. I actually took this idea further. Probably a majority of writers struggle with writer’s block. I want all my writing to be as dynamic as describing an idea to a friend. I don't want to overthink how to describe a thing. I want just to keep trying. I also use this method when editing. Whenever I think a sentence or paragraph is off I hit enter and mark it with "\" and then rewrite it again and again until it feels right.

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TLDR: Guessing the Teacher's Password

by Eliezer Yudkowsky

TLDR

The way knowledge is often tought at school is through memorizing and guessing correct answers AKA teacher’s “passwords”. In school teachers hands you a gold star for saying the answers that teacher heard a physicist emit. It leaves people with the impression that they have knowledge but what they mostly have are memorized words.

Real learning is about finding knowledge that controls anticipation. The key skill is about being aware of the difference between an explanation and a password.

And a little deeper with some quotes:

What remains is not a belief, but a verbal behavior.

Explaining the guessing password process:

Suppose the teacher asks you why the far side of a metal plate feels warmer than the side next to the radiator. If you say “I don’t know,” you have no chance of getting a gold star—it won’t even count as class participation. But, during the current semester, this teacher has used the phrases “because of heat convection,” “because of heat conduction,” and “because of radiant heat.” One of these is probably what the teacher wants. You say, “Eh, maybe because of heat conduction?” This is not a hypothesis about the metal plate. This is not even a proper belief. It is an attempt to guess the teacher’s password.

Knowledge should be about controlling what you anticipate:

Part of unlearning this bad habit is becoming consciously aware of the difference between an explanation and a password.

Even visualizing the symbols of the diffusion equation (the math governing heat conduction) doesn’t mean you’ve formed a hypothesis about the metal plate. This is not school; we are not testing your memory to see if you can write down the diffusion equation. This is Bayescraft; we are scoring your anticipations of experience. If you use the diffusion equation, by measuring a few points with a thermometer and then trying to predict what the thermometer will say on the next measurement, then it is definitely connected to experience. Even if the student just visualizes something flowing, and therefore holds a match near the cooler side of the plate to try to measure where the heat goes, then this mental image of flowing-ness connects to experience; it controls anticipation. If you aren’t using the diffusion equation—putting in numbers and getting out results that control your anticipation of particular experiences—then the connection between map and territory is severed as though by a knife. What remains is not a belief, but a verbal behavior.

Maybe, if we drill students that words don’t count, only anticipation-controllers, the student will not get stuck on “Heat conduction? No? Maybe heat convection? That’s not it either?”

Read Eliezer Yudkowsky’s article

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Intro

Hi there! You got this message because I died. I would love to invite you to my going away party. Everybody is invited! Even if we weren’t close and you feel like coming please do. If you can’t come to Warsaw you can join via video call.

Setup

I would like my passing to be a celebration. I would like to ask people to dress joyfully. Think birthday. Pick the weirdest, most colorful clothes you feel comfortable in. Masks and costumes are welcome.

Wait for a sunny and warm day, and find a beautiful meadow in a park in Warsaw. Perhaps Park Skaryszewski? This is a party. If people want they should be able to stay until sunrise.

There will be a lot of blankets. Set them next to one another to create a large blanket patch. Things brought by guests should be scattered on them. There will be plenty of drinks lying around: green tea in thermoses, coffee, and bottles, and bottles of stinky Polish mineral water.

There will be good speakers with music and a microphone. A hired man will read the knowledge bits every couple of songs. There will be a laptop with a video call so people can join from afar.

At some point just order food delivery from a couple of places I liked in Warsaw: e.g. Prasowy, Jaskółka, Vegan Ramen, Ósma Kolonia.

Collab

To everybody:

It would be nice if everybody could bring a snippet of knowledge. This could be anything that seems relevant, a fragment from a book, a favorite idea, something from my website, the funniest story, something absurd, or a personal note. Please limit to around one minute reading time and either send it via email or print it out on the simplest possible paper.

Also, please bring a blanket. This is a party, if you are into it, bring alcohol or a drug of choice.

To specific people (the names will be visible after my death):

It would be nice if * could pick music from my playlists on Spotify.
It would be nice if * could bring an object representing BIIAA syndrome.
It would be nice if * could bring a photo of grandma Zosia.
It would be nice if * could bake me my fav cheesecake.
It would be nice if * could bring something representing cosmic awe.
It would be nice if * could bring a fav scent.
It would be nice if * could bring an object representing Poland.
It would be nice if * could bring a middle-eastern treat.
It would be nice if * could bring our favorite game.
It would be nice if * could bring a picture of grandma Zosia, Danusia, Staszek being together.
It would be nice if * something of the highest quality.
It would be nice if * could bring an object representing the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
It would be nice if * could print out a favorite meme.
It would be nice if * could bake my fav birthday cake!
It would be nice if * could bring a photo of the Biedronki house.
It would be nice if * could bring a picture of our great-grandparents.
It would be nice if * could bring a photo of grandpa Staszek.
It would be nice if * could bring his favorite album on a CD.
It would be nice if * could bring something that has the most beautiful color.
It would be nice if * could bring an object that is funniest, weirdest, and out of place.
It would be nice if * could bring our favorite book about art.
It would be nice if * could bring a drawing of a Pokemon riding with me on a tractor.
It would be nice if * could bring something representing Jewish heritage.
It would be nice if * could bring something to exercise.
It would be nice if * could bring her favorite plant.
It would be nice if * could bring a photo of grandma Matylda.
It would be nice if * could bring something representing Seattle.
It would be nice if * could bring an object that represents joy.
It would be nice if * could bring his favorite book.
It would be nice if * could bring some a photo from our trips.
It would be nice if * could bring an object representing grandma Zosia.
It would be nice if * could bring something fun about the biology world.
It would be nice if * could bring a photo of Kraków.
It would be nice if * could bring something representing Olympic National Park.
It would be nice if * could bring a soccer ball.
It would be nice if * could bring a script for a simple group game.
It would be nice if * could bring a book about natural history.
It would be nice if * could bring his favorite book about design.
It would be nice if * could bring an object representing SF Bay.
It would be nice if * could bring something representing having fun being in-between categories.
It would be nice if * could bring her favorite poem.
It would be nice if * could bring two badminton rockets and a birdy.
It would be nice if * could bring a photo of grandpa Marian.
It would be nice if * could bring an object representing Wrocław.

I am sorry if I didn’t include you on this list. I would love it if you could bring something that seems relevant to us or pick from the ideas listed above.

Thank you! It brings light to my life thinking this is how my farewell will look like.

✋
Love,
Paweł

Algorithms – when concepts have more potential phrased as statement or action
Descriptors – when objects have a function of describing things or updating meaning
Buttons – when I can imagine simple actions as buttons to quickly recall and use

On the top of each group you will find mental models that are the most active in my life or are relevant to me. Some fun ones you may like to check out: Foundation-Paralysis Effect 🎨, Automatic opposite 🎨, Competitive lock-in 🎨, Publishing effect 🎨 Algorithms: Over and under reaction to a group think , Trying, failing, making mistakes is growing, Editing takes more energy than creating 🎨 Descriptors: Organic knowledge Buttons: Simplify

Read all mental models

Most of our tasks work like a wave. We need to do them at a certain interval. I need to pee and pay taxes every sometime.

To-do waves have different lengths. There are small waves like I need to pee, eat, and drink. There are daily waves like clean teeth, dress up, move my body. Couple of days long waves like socializing, grocery shopping, and bringing the trash out. And a week, year, or longer waves like cutting nails, refueling a car, renewing a passport, doing a checkup at the doctor, filing taxes. There is a high probability that each day there will be waves from all lengths buckets.

And there are so many different categories of tasks. Taking care of a human pet – an expression from the Wait But Why blog, meaning all the little things you need to do to take care of yourself, essential things for survival, and chores. There are things you simply like and gonna do: internet addictions, watch/read cool things in a save folder, go for ice cream. There are things that are super urgent “I run out of time with a parking meter” or agenda you feel is right to do like helping a friend or going to a protest. There are straight procrastination items – when you pick a thing of least resistance not to tackle a more demanding item. And there are tasks tiny but abundant like attaching a charging cable to devices, refilling a water bottle, or eating a snack. We usually underestimate how many things we need to-do in our lives.

By default, my expectation is that I have this open plane of time when I can work on the important to-do. The reality looks completely different. My life is full of to-do items that it is hard to foresee. In practice I am left with is shuttered timeline and slivers of time where I can try to accomplish something important

FAQ / what to do about it?

💡 Feel free to treat the below section like an FAQ – delve into sections that interest you.

Why this is important? Uninterrupted time as a foundation of productivity

I think we tend to underestimate to what extent context switching is demanding on our cognition. Paul Graham in his text on Good and bad procrastination sees that one of the most overlooked properties of productivity is the number of interruptions one has. I think it works this way because every time we do something complex we need time to load all the variables into our short-term memory. It’s like keeping all the dynamics influencing the outcome in one strain of thought. If we approach the task with many attempts we end up loading the complexities over and over again.

Rest and to-do waves

Breaks are counterintuitive. You are on a full-day hike, 100 km bike ride, or on a weekend silent retreat, and part of your brain is like: “What am I doing here? I have more things to do than the time available. How this not doing can be helpful?”

Not doing, time away is critical to being productive. When you learn something new synapses are formed during sleep. The more immersive your time away the higher quality of the break, and the more creative insights one will stumble upon. More on this in Breaks.

It’s counterintuitive to schedule breaks. Why would I need to do this when they happen automatically when not doing? But then given the hundreds of to-do waves that are coming it’s easy to get sucked in doing, in being distracted, in a state of half-break half-work – resulting in a work that is not focused and break that is not restorative. Breaks are like a master task that first turns off other tasks and then helps to realign – double down on what’s important and decrease the frequency of things that aren’t.

Fix: Limit, group, wrap the unimportant

To counteract the to-do flood is to discern it is happening. When I realize how many tasks I have and how scattered they will be throughout the day I get motivated. There is this tiny bit of anger arising. I am better at prioritizing, clearing my schedule and avoiding the less important. If I need to do something anyway I batch it or attempt to wrap it quickly. When I realize how little time I have it’s easier for me, as Paul Graham says it, to leave the right things undone 🔗.

Fix: Be okay with the wavy nature of reality

Sometimes I feel frustrated when I have to repeat something over and over again. Say when making a bed in the mornings, cleaning dishes after each meal, brushing teeth twice a day. There are dozens of tasks like this every day. Being frustrated about it can, little by little, drain my emotional energy. Whenever I see this emotion coming up I remind myself that tasks are waves. They are gonna keep repeating. And I switch into meditation mode. I am gonna treat this moment as a vehicle to be more here and now. It is not arbitral. It is an essential part of life. I am gonna treat whatever thing I am doing with care, attention, and love. This seems like a tiny switch but in practice, it feels a lot more consequential. It transforms all these moments from scraps, margins, and unnecessary parts to feeling as if they are the center of life.

Fix: First things first

As Paul Graham once noted, you are more likely to accomplish things you do first in a day. Earlier in the day brain is fresh and works better. You also avoid the situation when you cannot work on the more important because you forgot about something urgent or you don’t have time left because you are surprised with a flood of tiny to-dos.

Fix: Closing the loops

If I am doing one type of activity I want to wrap all the things related to it. When I come back from soccer I want to unpack dirty clothes from the backpack. So next time I wash clothes I don’t need to find my dirty clothes or if I want to use a backpack I don’t need to unpack it first.

Check out my website

I think immersive environments are universally therapeutical. I found this conclusion in the research about environments that are the most conducive to learning as explained in the Learning how to learn course 🔗. This is also why I think psychedelic therapies are effective. This is my own hypothesis and it comes mostly from reading How to change your mind 🔗. It is perhaps because immersive environments are taking one away from their default mode network. Away from being eternally stuck in our egotic, repetitive, distortion-producing selves.

Alex, who practically lives on Cocles beach in Costa Rica, was teaching me surfing. It feels like the ocean touched him. He seemed like one of the calmest, yet full-of-energy people I met. It’s hard to imagine a situation that could disturb him. Alex said that if he could, he would prescribe surfing to every criminal, sad, traumatized, addicted, and depressed. Hearing this from him and after a surf session felt so obviously true.

Being where the waves crush is maybe the most immersive environment I can think of. Sitting on an ocean, that with each cycle elevates one by the volumes of buildings, on this alien, collapsible form of matter, on a surface in a constant change. And then being tumbled by this soft, yet, when adding all the particles together, overwhelming force. Being where the waves crush simplifies and untangles my head. After 1.5 hours there I don’t care about any petty problems my hunter-gatherer's brain was caught up with before.

Read it on my website

Updates

New favs Ideas that keep coming back

Start where you are
– Pema Chödrön

Locate an animal, mimic its expression and movement for two minutes. If there are no other lives around, observe an object and be it for two minutes. Do it regularly. \
– Apichatpong Weerasethakul via Hans Urlich Obrist

The truth doesn’t lie in the middle, truth lies where it lies (original in Polish: Prawda nie leży pośrodku, prawda leży tam, gdzie leży”)
– via Władysław Bartoszewski

The world can never own a man who wants nothing
– Wu Hsin

See all Ideas that keep coming back

Lecture I loved: How change happens?

This is an excellent lecture on the unpredictability of social change and the theory of how it happens. See my summary of the findings: How change happens. From unleashing to nudging to social cascades.

Where I am currently?

Waialua, O’ahu, Hawaii. It’s a place that used to be all about sugar and now is all about surfing. I work remotely, write, and learn how to surf. The north shore of O’ahu feels like the surfing capital of the world. The stretch of beaches here is called seven miles miracle because the reef on the bottom of the ocean creates ideal surf conditions during winters of the northern hemisphere. It’s hard not to surf here because everything is about surfing. It’s interesting to experience the gravity of the scene. You go surfing to hang out with people. I live or lived with pro surfers. If I go to a cafe there are surfing videos on the wall. At one party, I realized that almost everybody is a surfer. People come to Oahu from all over the US and the world to do that. A person in the knows told me that during winter if you are an aspiring surfer you either are here or perhaps struggle financially. Out of a tight group of friends I know there is maybe one out of ten people who don’t surf. There are some people who came here not because of surfing. Most of them surf a couple of times a week now. It reminds me of how Marc Andressen talks about collision spaces and the power of inserting oneself into a scene. “If you are into film go to Los Angeles, if into code San Francisco, if into arts or finance New York City” and if into surfing go to O’ahu, North Shore. I think it’s so true. Not that it is a motion everybody should follow. What’s interesting is that observing and experiencing this is such visceral evidence that we are just a socially motivated gravity-pulp. It is so much easier to be supported, excited, and skilled in the things that also people around you are.