What if we all just stayed at home and didn't get covid for two weeks? Jan 22, 2021

I keep thinking about how if at any point we were all able to actually quarantine for two weeks¹ at the same time, the pandemic would be over.

Like, if instead of everyone being more or less cautious over a year, we all agreed on single a two week period to hard quarantine. With plenty of warning, so that people had time to stock up on groceries and do anything important ahead of time. And with massive financial redistribution in advance, so that everyone could afford two weeks without work. And with some planning to equip the few essential-every-week-without-delay workers (e.g. nurses, people keeping the power on) with unsustainably excessive PPE.

This wouldn’t require less total risky activity. If we just managed to move all of the risky activity from one fortnight to the one before it, then that would destroy the virus (and everyone could do as many previously risky activities as they liked in the following fortnight!). It could be kind of like the Christmas week except twice as long and the government would pay most people to stay at home and watch movies or play games or whatever. Maybe the TV channels and celebrities could cooperate and try to put together an especially entertaining lineup.

How unrealistic is this? It sounds pretty unrealistic, but what goes wrong?

Thoughts on the inner ring Jan 21, 2021

I enjoyed C. S. Lewis’ The Inner Ring, and recommend you read it. It basically claims that much of human effort is directed at being admitted to whatever the local in-group is, that this happens easily to people, and that it is a bad thing to be drawn in to.

Some quotes, though I also recommend reading the whole thing:

In the passage I have just read from Tolstoy, the young second lieutenant Boris Dubretskoi discovers that there exist in the army two different systems or hierarchies. The one is printed in some little red book and anyone can easily read it up. It also remains constant. A general is always superior to a colonel, and a colonel to a captain. The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.

On fundamental solitude Jan 20, 2021

A quote from Aldous Huxley that has stuck in my mind more than perhaps any other over the years:

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

I used to be fairly troubled by this kind of thought. These days I’m more inclined to think of memories of myself, my own writing from yesterday, my sense of a person in my arms, words vibrating my inner ears as light bounces between someone’s eyes and mine, words reaching me across the internet from a stranger, barely understandable lines from thousand year old pages, as more of a piece—physical communications between scattered consciousness. All interpreted with more or less insight and confidence and detail and sense of being an ‘experience’ and not just ‘information’, depending on the quality and nature of the message. But my ‘imagining’ of your mental state, and my ‘knowing’ of my own are both guesses. The sense that they are different is a pragmatic, superficial, quantitative one, not the symptom of a deep metaphysical separation.

Public selves Jan 18, 2021

A question that I return to in life strategy is whether to lean heavily on ‘spending one’s weirdness points wisely’—otherwise put, cowering lonely behind a cardboard cutout of the most forgettable person while proffering optimized propaganda through carefully selected slots—or whether to offer the world a fuller view of oneself.

A few arguments as I see them:

• Hiding allows you to be strategic, showing anything that is good to show, hiding anything that is not. Surely that is better then than any alternative, that must involve showing things that are bad to show, or not showing things that are good to show?
• Not necessarily! People can tell which strategy you are using, and usually the things that are ‘bad to show’ are bad for you to show, but other people would be perfectly interested to see them. So it is less cooperative, and people may respond to that, which may on a longer term view be bad for you.
• Also, which strategy you are enacting overall, or what you are doing in the past or future, can change whether something is good or bad to share. For instance, maybe you have personal problems that it would be both nice to have in the open, and helpful for others to know that you also face. If you are usually open about things, mentioning these might be no big deal, and so worth it on net. Whereas if you tend to be private, then suddenly announcing a personal problem will seem like a bigger deal, so the costs might outweigh the benefits.
• There is something good about actually knowing other people - being part of a global intellectual society of real people, not of robotic fictions created by people. Being open contributes to this world being actual.

There are intermediate options too, of course. Are there good principled ones?

What considerations am I missing?

Are the consequences of groups usually highly contingent on their details? Jan 17, 2021

How much of the impact of an organization is covered by it being ‘a group of size M working on X’, relative to the specifics of how and what they do in working on X? What if we also include a single scale of how functional they are?

What is going on in the world? Jan 17, 2021

Here’s a list of alternative high level narratives about what is importantly going on in the world—the central plot, as it were—for the purpose of thinking about what role in a plot to take:

Meditative thinking Jan 16, 2021

I got fairly into meditation in 2018. Not in a way where you do a huge amount of meditation, or seek guidance on how to do meditation well, or on whether what you are doing is meditation at all. I don’t think I even graduated from doing meditation largely in five minute bouts. I just really dug a set of mental things which seemed related to meditation. I was riding an ethos. I suppose meditation was a particularly namable point in the space, but not obviously the most exciting part of it, so I ended up being pretty excited about ‘meditation…?’ while not actually meditating that much.

I also remained so ignorant about meditation traditions and previous human meditation experience that you might doubt that I’m talking about the same thing. (I did talk to other people a little, and did about five guided meditations, which seemed like a different kind of thing anyway, but also very awesome.)

With that said, here’s a kind of meditation I made up. I call it, ‘meditative thinking’. In it, you do all the stuff you would usually do while meditating: be in a meditation-conducive position (I do lying on my back, which I hear is a bad idea, but it is very comfy); set a meditation timer with bells at the start and end (mine also makes water sounds between them, but this probably isn’t crucial); close your eyes; be aware of your breathing; then just go on being aware of stuff in a conspicuously conscious way. But before all this, choose a question to think about. And then, once meditating, think about the question. Maintain the same mental stance as you normally would meditating, insofar as that makes sense. Be aware of your breathing, and your awareness, and your thinking. If you stop thinking about the question, gently bring your awareness back to it.

I still find this good. Though it’s possible that it gets much of its benefit from being a ritualistic way to actually think about a question for five or ten minutes without reflexively opening Facebook because thinking doesn’t correspond to a tab or occupy one’s hands.

San Francisco outing Jan 15, 2021

Discussion on the choice of concepts Jan 14, 2021

“The reason that you can currently make toast without doing great damage is just that your toaster is stupid.”

“Can ‘stupid’ be correctly applied to toasters?”

“Yes”

“What if I say no?”

“Well, if you have a conception of stupidity that can’t be applied to toasters, and one that can, why would you choose the one that can’t?”

“But I don’t have two—I’m talking about the actual concept”

“There isn’t an actual concept, there are a bajillion concepts, and you can use whichever one you want.”

“There’s one that people mean”

“Not really—each person has a slightly different usage, and probably hasn’t pinned it down. For instance if you ask them if toasters are stupid, they might be unsure.”

“Yes! They are unsure because they are trying to guess what the real concept is, from their limited collection of exposures to it. If it were about making one up, why would they be uncertain?”

“They might be uncertain which one they want to make up”

What's good about haikus? Jan 13, 2021

Fiction often asks its readers to get through a whole list of evocative scenery to imagine before telling them anything about the situation that might induce an interest in what the fields and the flies looked like, or what color stuff was. I assume that this is fun if you are somehow more sophisticated than me, but I admit that I don’t enjoy it (yet).