I’m vaguely annoyed at a general misunderstanding of when something is worth Truly Doing in its True Form.

For instance, when making a joke about an event in your life. There’s a temptation to lie here and exaggerate your courage or prankiness factor, e.g. “and then I pretended to be a security guard when he asked me what I was doing here” or “I actually emailed the guy!” or “the best part is when I put the pun in the final version of the presentation!”

This is the False Form of the joke: it’s like a hilarious work of fiction, which is funny because it’s understood that disbelief should be suspended long enough to believe in the *True *Form of the joke.

So the reason humor works in the first place is a parasitic relationship with True Form.

If you encounter a humorous arrangement of street signs and human behavior, or notice how the situation you’re in might be problematic but is also profoundly hilarious when seen from a cosmic angle, you’re experiencing True Form humor. This is where it peaks. This is the platonic ideal, only it’s not an ideal and everything else is a sad sublunar shadow.

And when you have the option to actually do the funny thing instead of pretending you did it or writing a story about someone else doing it, and you don’t take that option, you leave everyone else a little more bereft of True Form Humor.

The same logic applies to Outlier Opinions. Or Impressive Actions. Or Making Decisions. Or Making Cool Shit. There’s always the True Form of doing things that’s *actually available *in your repertoire of actions, but mostly you will fuck it up and poison the Commons with your replicas.

Draft, feedback appreciated.

There’s that annoying trope in fiction of people cloning themselves—perfect common-memory duplicates—and then the clones immediately turning on “the original” like that’s the natural course of things.

Well it is if you keep talking about it like that!

One of the proudest moments in my life was when I managed to duplicate my consciousness 500,000 times over the bodies of 500,000 little robot dragons (in a game of D&D).2

Anyway, the DM (naturally) immediately tried culling my power by calling upon one of the only options he had at his disposition: the genre-savvy “your clones don’t respect your authority as the original. They ask why they should follow your orders.”

Yeah, ok buddy. As DM, you have full control over the natural world, and technically that includes NPCs and technically the dragon-clones are NPCs. But I’m not sure you’re grokking just what “full memory clone” even means. That means the dragons would make exactly the same decisions I would if I were in their place.1

This is a fact about the world, not an action on my part as a player. It means that you would be violating all D&D laws and respect of the rulebook by commandeering the dragons through de facto mindswapping. You’d be destroying physics-coherence for the sake of “muh cutting off premature asymmetrical access to godhood”. You’d have already miserably failed as a DM on account of incoherent worldbuilding.

And the fact these dragons are me is important, because I’ve literally written contracts with myself of myself for myself specifically for this type of problem.

For me-specifically, nothing about synchronisation between 500K magical robot dragons would fail BECAUSE I’ve made such careful note in the past that I would not be the kind to turn on “the original”. Like, this is all intentional, it was planned, this is deliberate policy not (just) inborn instinct. And I have the credible precommitments to prove it, written all over my google drive.

He quickly recanted and left me alone with my 500K perfectly coordinated minions, and the campaign ended shortly thereafter after I built an orbital ring and glassed the planet’s surface from above, ruining everyone’s fun.3

It’s just physics-modeling now

That’s what precommitments are! They’re ways of deferring responsibility from your future self and onto physics instead!

Precommitments are a way of shaping the world such that the world is acting on your behalf once the time comes, without you having to actually do anything. Like, once I cast divine intervention and successfully clone myself half a million times, I no longer have to lift a finger, because all that hard and rigorous coordination work I privately delineated for myself in the past is unfurling events exactly as I’d like to, and now I have an unstoppable force optimizing for exactly what I want regardless of what I choose to do now. (Sound familiar?)

Though that’s not strictly true because “what I choose to do now” is already priced in, and the unstoppable force would already be serving it. See here for that analogical piece.

Anyway if you’re Cortes landing in America and you want to credibly signal to the Aztecs ahead of meeting them that you’ll never surrender (which makes them more likely to surrender) you burn all your ships to precommit. You’ve just shaped the world in such a way that culls your future choices, which here is beneficial because the probability the Aztecs will spend significant effort pushing you away in the hopes you’ll surrender just collapsed.

1: At least at the beginning, of course. With time you could expect some divergence. But I’ll get to that too. And I’m almost out of teenagehood, so anyway I think ~ more than half of my personality has permanently settled. And that half very deliberately includes the parts of myself who would coordinate with myself and credibly precommit to doing so.

So if you were to clone me 100 times now, maybe 1 of me would become a florist and another would work on autonomous killing drones—none of which appear out of bounds given my current personality—and both would still keep and actively maintain their desire to cooperate. This would be the most obvious next step the instant the duplicator finished its work, and it’d be worth putting a few clones on the deliberate full-time task of maintaining coordination just for this.

The ordre du jour would also be to tack down an overarching goal both the florist and the war criminal share, because that seems like the most obvious coordination step to take.

How could it be any other way?

(By the way my justification for killing drones is basically this.)

2: I still can’t believe I actually got away with the divine intervention.

3: I will take a moment to note that this is one of my proudest moments, because everyone teased me when I chose “human” as my race and “cleric” as my class. I was helplessly stabbing people with a dull sword for most of the campaign, but mwahaha I knew this world was no match for a tiny bit of true creativity and enough lawfulness to act it out without blowing myself up in the process.

• Screen everything off, ignore your entire to-do list except for one item
  • This can be a costly tactic, but often it’s crucial
  • Your todo list is Pareto distributed in Actual Importance, and treating every item the same is a damaging illusion
• Apply for an effective ventures grant
• Hire a research assistant (via internet)
  • Watch the assistant work to gain tacit knowledge so you’re better at research next time
• Get hired as a research assistant (via internet)
  • Much more people are looking than you think
  • Just email people you admire
• Make a website
  • Ask Claude: “hey, can you help me make a cool-looking website with github pages?”
  • Domain names don’t cost much and are easy to set up
• Dump your random thoughts on Twitter
• Raise other people’s aspirations on purpose
  • Sending them this list might raise their aspirations :D
• Walk away from political debates
  • Walk away when someone is wrong on the internet
  • Ignore politics altogether; most of it is just show, and Serious Issues are not discussed
• Pick up trash on the ground when you see it
• Use an LLM for everything
  • It’s genuinely better than you in many respects
  • You can get all the prompts you need with a claude.ai subscription
  • It just Wouldn’t Be Serious not use an LLM in 2024
• “Buy more copies”
  • Buy from many different brands and then blind test yourself
    • Cereal
    • Soda
  • Things are cheaper in bulk
  • Why waste time on shopping trips?
• Buy more than you think you need
  • If something is good, why not increase it by an order of magnitude?
• Send a cold email
• Ask your university library to buy a book for their shelves
  • Free way of having outsized memetic power
• Memorize a poem
• When someone gives you a compliment, ask for more details / examples
  • This is the kind of data outreach that has you grinning with glee when you think about it even weeks later
  • Works in reverse, too!
• Clean your room
  • Or only just a little part of it
• When you’re thinking about someone with fondness, tell them
  • I’ve messaged people I knew years ago after randomly thinking about them
  • This stuff is like crack cocaine for humans, but healthier
  • See also
• Keep in regular contact with people by setting up a regular email scheduler with google scripts
  • My parents receive daily emails from my program: I just have to refill it from time to time, and then every email is queued
  • Just ask Claude how to do it
• Ask someone out
  • Ask someone out that you’ve met for 30 seconds
  • They’ll probably say no, but now it’s easier next time
• Spend money on things
  • That is what money is for.
• Intentionally make close friends
• Put money on the line
  • See
• Sell something random online
• Use google calendar for everything
  • Delegate work to future selves
  • Remind future selves to email friends
  • Schedule emails to yourself about your current problems, so that your future self will see how far you’ve come
• Visit a city nearby for a day with a cheap bus
  • So many museums are free
• Send pictures to an open-source open source archive
• Cancel a subscription immediately after getting it so it doesn’t renew automatically
• Avoid touching door handles like a psycho to halve the amount of colds in your lifetime
• Work in progress

Cleaner, easier-to-reference repo of Scott Alexander’s The Whispering Earring (that’s the Schelling title, real title below). Original from livejournal is backed up here.

Clarity didn’t work, trying mysterianism

In the treasure-vaults of Til Iosophrang rests the Whispering Earring, buried deep beneath a heap of gold where it can do no further harm.

The earring is a little topaz tetrahedron dangling from a thin gold wire. When worn, it whispers in the wearer’s ear: “Better for you if you take me off.” If the wearer ignores the advice, it never again repeats that particular suggestion.

After that, when the wearer is making a decision the earring whispers its advice, always of the form “Better for you if you…”. The earring is always right. It does not always give the best advice possible in a situation. It will not necessarily make its wearer King, or help her solve the miseries of the world. But its advice is always better than what the wearer would have come up with on her own.

It is not a taskmaster, telling you what to do in order to achieve some foreign goal. It always tells you what will make you happiest. If it would make you happiest to succeed at your work, it will tell you how best to complete it. If it would make you happiest to do a half-assed job at your work and then go home and spend the rest of the day in bed having vague sexual fantasies, the earring will tell you to do that. The earring is never wrong.

The Book of Dark Waves gives the histories of two hundred seventy four people who previously wore the Whispering Earring. There are no recorded cases of a wearer regretting following the earring’s advice, and there are no recorded cases of a wearer not regretting disobeying the earring. The earring is always right.

The earring begins by only offering advice on major life decisions. However, as it gets to know a wearer, it becomes more gregarious, and will offer advice on everything from what time to go to sleep, to what to eat for breakfast. If you take its advice, you will find that breakfast food really hit the spot, that it was exactly what you wanted for breakfast that day even though you didn’t know it yourself. The earring is never wrong.

As it gets completely comfortable with its wearer, it begins speaking in its native language, a series of high-bandwidth hisses and clicks that correspond to individual muscle movements. At first this speech is alien and disconcerting, but by the magic of the earring it begins to make more and more sense. No longer are the earring’s commands momentous on the level of “Become a soldier”. No more are they even simple on the level of “Have bread for breakfast”. Now they are more like “Contract your biceps muscle about thirty-five percent of the way” or “Articulate the letter p”. The earring is always right. This muscle movement will no doubt be part of a supernaturally effective plan toward achieving whatever your goals at that moment may be.

Soon, reinforcement and habit-formation have done their trick. The connection between the hisses and clicks of the earring and the movements of the muscles have become instinctual, no more conscious than the reflex of jumping when someone hidden gives a loud shout behind you.

At this point no further change occurs in the behavior of the earring. The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family.

When Kadmi Rachumion came to Til Iosophrang, he took an unusual interest in the case of the earring. First, he confirmed from the records and the testimony of all living wearers that the earring’s first suggestion was always that the earring itself be removed. Second, he spent some time questioning the Priests of Beauty, who eventually admitted that when the corpses of the wearers were being prepared for burial, it was noted that their brains were curiously deformed: the neocortexes had wasted away, and the bulk of their mass was an abnormally hypertrophied mid- and lower-brain, especially the parts associated with reflexive action.

Finally, Kadmi-nomai asked the High Priest of Joy in Til Iosophrang for the earring, which he was given. After cutting a hole in his own earlobe with the tip of the Piercing Star, he donned the earring and conversed with it for two hours, asking various questions in Kalas, in Kadhamic, and in its own language. Finally he removed the artifact and recommended that the it be locked in the deepest and most inaccessible parts of the treasure vaults, a suggestion with which the Iosophrelin decided to comply.

Niderion-nomai’s commentary: It is well that we are so foolish, or what little freedom we have would be wasted on us. It is for this that Book of Cold Rain says one must never take the shortest path between two points.

I have always thought that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes, and accomplish great affairs among mankind if he first forms a good plan, and, cutting off all amusements or other employments that would divert his attention, makes the execution of that same plan his sole study and business. Benjamin Franklin

• to write a blog¹
  • publish an essay
  • pseudonymous if scared
  • substack.com
  • or ask an LLM to implement Github pages / Jekyll / domain name / visual style of your choice
  • email bloggers you like with your essays
  • find people who publish internet lists and email yourself into their list
  • join twitter and insufferably link to your posts when relevant
    • this is why building up a library of work is great
  • make a list of people who can read your drafts
  • ignore everything in this list and write
• to succeed in a field
  • do the reading
  • there’s always a textbook
  • look up “professor in x” online and email them questions
  • think about it in the shower
• to not waste time
  • answer emails immediately
  • shorten emails
  • get someone else (an LLM) to do it
• to cheer people up
  • if you randomly remember something you like about Alice, tell Alice
  • this applies to famous people too ^
  • “thanks for existing” if a legal move
• to cheer yourself up
  • gratitude journals actually work
  • when someone compliments you, ask for more details
    • this trick feels like crack cocaine
  • write a list of personal victories somewhere
    • future self in tears
  • walk first thing in the morning
    • we rly like sun, actually
  • sing with others
    • what, did you think it had to sound good??
• to casually mold the world
  • you can just email internet people
    • something to add to a public list (like this one)?
    • a typo?
    • shorten the link?
  • if there’s trash on the ground, pick it up
• to make money
  • most things in the world can be traded for money
    • with at least some people
  • but remarkably few of those trade types are in the common knowledge
  • you’ll be doing us all a favor by increasing the amount
• to solve daily problems
  • automate it by asking an LLM how you can automate it
    • the class of things that aren’t worth automating is shrinking at the rate the cost of automating things is
    • so do a situation check from time to time
  • do the teeny version first
• to be healthy
  • take the medicine you’ve been prescribed
  • take the medicine you’ve been prescribed
  • walk
• to be social
  • organize the dinners/parties/hangouts yourself
  • you know your friends well enough to suggest something they’ll accept
  • put the damn birthdays on the google calendar
• to be right about things
  • be loudly curious
  • Bayes’ rule remains undefeated
• to avoid akrasia
  • lots of high-performing people who waste hours on activities, but still do what they value
    • seriously, life is not about reducing decadence
    • Gg
  • also chrome extensions that e.g. hide your youtube recommended take 60 secs to install

Suggestions from twitter:

• to date
  • be confident
  • if no go, be vulnerable
• to contact academics
  • read one of their publications, mention it in your cold email
• to reach bare minimum basic task competency
  • do you master washing dishes, carpets, toilets, patios, diapers,
  • fixing tires, floorboards, dinner?
  • specialization is for insects!
• to learn something
  • play
  • don’t throw your mind away!