There’s a specific subskill of meditation that I call “not getting swept away by the content”, that I think is generally valuable.

It goes like this. You sit down to meditate and focus on your breath or whatever, and then a worrying thought comes to your mind. And it’s a real worry, something important. And you are tempted to start thinking about ( Read more... )

I had three new papers either published or accepted into publication last year; all of them are now available online:

• How Feasible is the Rapid Development of Artificial Superintelligence? Physica Scripta 92 (11), 113001.
  • Abstract: What kinds of fundamental limits are there in how capable artificial intelligence (AI) systems might become? Two ( Read more... )

I ran across Ed Hagen’s article “Academic success is either a crapshoot or a scam”, which pointed out that all the methodological discussion about science’s replication crisis is kinda missing the point: yes, all of the methodological stuff like p-hacking is something that would be valuable to fix, but the real problem is in the incentives created ( Read more... )

The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self-Not Just Your “Good” Self-Drives Success and Fulfillment. By Todd Kashdan & Robert Biswas-Diener. Avery, 2014.

This book was written by a pair of psychologists who thought that the excessive focus on good and positive feelings in positive psychology was a little overblown, and that the value ( Read more... )

One effect that I often notice after my meditation practice has been interrupted and I then manage to resume it again, is an increase in a kind of mental resilience.

That is, when I have a lower resilience, feeling bad for any reason feels much more like an emergency. It’s something that forces itself into my consciousness, takes over, and refuses ( Read more... )

I think that tribalism is one of the biggest problems with humanity today, and that even small reductions of it could cause a massive boost to well-being.

By tribalism, I basically mean the phenomenon where arguments and actions are primarily evaluated based on who makes them and which group they seem to support, not anything else. E.g. if a group ( Read more... )

A discussion about the article “We Don’t Do That Here” (h/t siderea) raised the question about the tension between having inclusive social norms on the one hand, and restricting some behaviors on the other hand.

At least, that was the way the discussion was initially framed. The thing is, inclusivity is a bit of a bad term, since you can never ( Read more... )

If everyone found out for sure that the world would end in five years, what would happen?
My guess is that it would take time before anything big happened. Finding out about the end of the world, that’s the kind of a thing that you need to digest for a while. For the first couple of days, people might go “huh”, and then carry on with their old ( Read more... )

I find that the extent to which I find life meaningful, seems strongly influenced by my scope of experience [1, 2].

Say that I have a day off, and there’s nothing in particular that I need to get done or think about. This makes it easy for the spatial scope of my experience to become close. My attention is most strongly drawn to the sensations of ( Read more... )

I feel like one of the most important lessons I’ve had about How the World Works, which has taken quite a bit of time to sink in, is:

In general, neither organizations nor individual people do the thing that their supposed role says they should do. Rather they tend to do the things that align with their incentives (which may sometimes be economic, ( Read more... )