- It doesn't really surprise me that's possible. I've landed by accident in a very recognizably DMT state when the stars aligned. It can happen, I just don't generally buy claims of "naturally". It's a preexisting state, but getting into it requires such a shock (such as flooding the brain with exogenous DMT) to enter.
That's not the same as the Bufo state which I can't really imagine entering naturally, is it actually like that or just in the ballpark?
Would love to hear about your experiences. Get in touch!
- It’s not even a well-defined question to ask "what is the best action".
To ask that in the context of a fight (not a bounded game like chess) is already to assume the existence of a complete utility function on which to measure it. That’s:
1. Philosophically, putting the cart before the horse.
2. Computationally, asking for the function that is the entire universe. Any utility function you define, an adversary (say, God) can find edge cases it doesn’t account for, endlessly. Chess has a finite state space; a fight doesn’t. Formalizing this hits the usual incompleteness and undecidability limits.
You’re claiming a perfect map exists (Platonist position); I’m saying that if such a thing exists, it’s just the territory itself, which isn’t a map (Nominalist position).
- Technologists in particular, taken as a group, have a very specific philosophical outlook that they don't tend to interrogate in themselves because it's so pervasive and intrinsic to what they work on and how they do so. Fish unaware of water, so to speak. It's a set of assumptions that make sense when you're programming software, but break down when applied to other things in the real world.
The tend to assume the universe is deterministic.
They tend to assume (incorrectly) that because it's deterministic a good enough model will be able to predict or explain.
They tend to ignore or not even be aware of the inherent bias towards available and measurable data, or that what we can measure must capture the essential dimensions of it.
The most naive tend to assume that given enough data, a model will get better, that the noise will "average out" (it doesn't).
I don't have a good name for this, but it has all the trappings of a good -ism otherwise.
Beyond philosophy, they should study art, music, literature, and whatever else interests. They should spend time with others who do and not only with people who work in technology. Unfortunately, increasingly college CS programs have cut out general education requirements in favor of questionably useful skills training, leaving graduates in a state where this seems daunting.
Computer scientists are building the world we all have to live in. Is it so much to ask that they be educated in the humanities before they're turned loose to do so?
- No, it is not. First of all the territory isn't fixed. Second of all the existence of a fitness landscape (let alone ocean) doesn't guarantee the existence of unique optima, nor that the ones you identify aren't in a second or less your loss because your opponent read you. The other person's behavior is unpredictable but can be guided, and likewise. Feints are a huge part of fighting.
To think you can identify a model in this situation is pure hubris. Absolutely no one who fights thinks this way. Fighting is NOT LIKE CHESS.
This fundamental faith in modeling is dangerous. It overestimates its own applicability, and ignores its predisposition to only focus on the most available data (under the incorrect assumption that if you collect more and more it will eventually "average out").
- At that point the map is the territory.
- As someone who has gotten a lot out of psychedelics therapeutically, you are correct. Psychedelics do not in of themselves grant any insight or wisdom beyond perhaps raw experiential evidence that our senses are fallible and our perception of the world is an artifact of cognition.
Past that, psychedelics are (kaleidoscopic, funhouse) mirrors. In the hands of a curious and humble person they can (in addition to being a lot of fun shared with like-minded others) be valuable therapeutic tools for approaching firmly rooted hangups, attitudes, etc. In the hands of someone like your friend, you get what you observed.
Both are commonly occurring patterns, and if you know a person's character even a little well you can usually predict how they'll engage with and come out of the experience.
To quote Shulgin,
> The most compelling insight of that day was that this awesome recall had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid. Everything I had recognized came from the depths of my memory and my psyche.
- > Even in extremis: A fist-fight is a sequence of biomechanical optimization problems, and there's always a "perfect move" at any given moment in time.
No, it is not. And no, there isn't.
This is exactly the sort of reductive mode of thought the article is calling out.
- They can call themselves empiricists all they like, it only takes a few exposures to their number to come away with a firm conviction (or, let's say, updated prior?) that they are not.
First-principles reasoning and the selection of convenient priors are consistently preferenced over the slow, grinding work of iterative empiricism and the humility to commit to observation before making overly broad theoretical claims.
The former let you seem right about something right now. The latter more often than not lead you to discover you are wrong (in interesting ways) much later on.
- Yes, specifically when it comes to open-ended research or development, collocation is non-negotiable. There are greater than linear benefits in creativity of approach, agility in adapting to new intermediate discoveries, etc that you get by putting a number of talented people who get along in the same space who form a community of practice.
Remote work and flattening communication down to what digital media (Slack, Zoom, etc) afford strangle the beneficial network effects.
- A lot of overwrought digital solutions here and not the obvious one:
Stop selling online.
Sell the tickets at a small number of locations near and including the venue, with cashiers empowered to deny suspicious transactions.
Could someone put together a small army of smurfs to buy up all the tickets in major cities? Sure. Could someone have someone on the inside sell them a block of tickets against policy? Sure. We can handle these cases on a locale by locale basis with a convenience trade off that seems appropriate to the place.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good, and even worse, don't let overwrought privacy-invading and non-accessible digital solutions (that create a playing field tilted towards bad actors equipped with AI tools) be the enemy of a dead simple analog real-world one that leverages our best reputation management system: ourselves.
- I don't know what to say other than "I sure hope not".
- You go to IKEA!
- In practice it does not. If you have had something with FindMy tracking stolen you may know what apartment block it's in, but not what unit.
Police won't or can't do anything if it could be in multiple units or would require any kind of warrant for the building as well as the specific unit you think it's in.
If you're "lucky" some might chaperone you knocking yourself, which itself is not something most want to entertain.
On account of police policy, AirTags are effectively useless for actually getting anything stolen back. You'll get more use out of them in filing your insurance claim if the theft of the item is covered under for example your homeowner's insurance policy.
- > Try buy a TV without smart features.
Easy. Just buy a dumb monitor. Why do you even need the TV tuner?
- Different people evaluate cost/benefit trade offs differently than you do, and don't speak of the matter with metaphorically charged terminology like "abuse", "prison", "Stockholm syndrome", etc.
- Forums, perhaps. But small group chats (which I suppose are technically "dark") are the bedrock of the current internet writ large and where most of the content that filters up to places like Twitter comes from.
The issue is that lay people read every paper or post as if it were a final proclamation. They’re not. Even a peer reviewed paper on the cover of Science or Nature is still not “proof” of anything, science doesn’t produce positive confirmation. It produces evidence that taken together suggest one prior is more likely than another.
Bayes Rule is very intuitive. We update the prior by the likelihood of the evidence under a given prior divided by the likelihood of the evidence. That’s all it is.
Unfortunately, there is a very strong motive to flag plant. Academia is a water full of sharks.