2018-02-12 RRG Notes
- There appear to be two kind of social reality
- Type that fixates on dark manipulative aspects - unseelie
- Brazenness
- Manipulation
- "Acceptance of the cesspool of human communication"
- Type that fixates on light conversational, flow aspects - seelie
- Niceness
- Community
- Civilization
- Willfully blind to the concept that their passive moves have consequences
- Neither side contains good people, but both contain good intentions
- When Seelie and Unseelie meet, there's an implicit unacknowledged struggle
- The stronger suffocates or stabs the weaker
- There is a sensation of tongue-tiedness and a change in the conversational flow
- Do you feel that you are seelie or unseelie
- My Thoughts
- Is it possible to be both?
- I'm willing to be manipulative if it's necessary, but if the other person is willing to cooperate, I'm equally willing to cooperate in return
- In the game Stellaris, there are technologies that are considered "dangerous technologies"
- Researching these technologies is dangerous because
- They anger other civilizations
- They can provoke crises within one's own civilization
- Mindhacking and trying weird things is relatively similar to researching dangerous technologies
- Example: "sparkliness"
- Mix of hypomania and introspection
- Can be directed outwards
- Combined with an understanding of narrative and social reality
- Starts to feel like a real thing if other people start validating the intuitions fostered by this practice
- Drawback: hypomania is pushed to full-blown mania and you lose touch with reality
- Dangerous technologies are generally defined by high-variance interventions
- Meditation can be a dangerous technology if you pursue it far enough
- Some nootropics are dangerous technologies
- The power of belief is an up-and coming dangerous technology
- Placebo effect exists and you can do cool things with it
- Belief in bulletproofing (i.e. bulletproofing charms made by traditional priests in Africa)
- Conviction charisma - i.e. "reality distortion field"
- Not all mindhacks are dangerous
- Double cruxing
- Developing normal charisma through practice
- Various techniques for overcoming bias
- Most "traditional" rationalist techniques are safe whereas "dangerous technologies" are mostly in the post-rationalist canon
- Dangerous technologies are appealing because they create outcomes quickly without a lot of effort
- The problem is that the outcome can be either good or bad
- They're unproven enough that using them too blatantly tends to alienate the more grounded people around you
- Discussion questions
- How does one approach a risk/benefit analysis when one of the risks is going insane?
- Are nondangerous technologies powerful/proven enough to be worth the additional effort?
- How do you keep a conversation going and make it seem fun?
- Strive to generate responses that give you things to hook into
- These things are often little tangents in the other person's story or conversation
- But instead of bringing up the tangent right away, remember it, and then ask a question about it when the conversation lulls
- Example story
- Friend gets on the wrong train
- Ends up in the wrong train entirely
- Gets off, lost and despairing
- Goes to Waffle House to collect themselves
- Approached by strange man in a trenchcoat, who offers tickets to the right destination
- Tickets work out
- Friend ends up at their destination only a day late
- 5 example tangents
- How did she learn to sleep that deeply on the train
- What part of North Carolina did she end up in
- How did she find a Waffle House so fast
- How did the trenchcoat man make her feel
- What was the actual destination like
- All of these tangents can generate further tangents, which can be used to keep the conversation going even longer
- Simple concept that plays to strengths of working memory
- Not helpful when telling stories, as opposed to asking questions
- Doesn't give you a way to wind down the conversation when it's time to leave
- Discussion questions
- How much of a tangent stack can you maintain
- What does it feel like to have a tangent stack applied to you?
- Do you ever have problems with too much conversational flow?
- Conversations often fall into scripts
- Example: "Hi, how are you" "Fine, thank you"
- Most conversation are script-based
- Even if the words aren't literally scripted, the responses are often from a set of pre-determined categories
- Scripts happen because it's socially risky and takes a lot of conversation to break out of a script
- While scripts are comfortable, it can be profitable to break out of scripts
- So when looking for a script breaker, what should you keep in mind?
- Goal
- Unsualness
- Accessibility
- Specificity
- Audience
- Playfulness
- Goal
- What are you actually after by asking a weird question and controlling the conversational frame?
- Whenever you do anything deliberate in a conversation, keep in mind your goals
- Generate tangents to fill your tangent stack
- Learn about how the person thinks
- By knowing your goal, you can efficiently turn initial responses into an enjoyable conversation
- Unusualness
- How do you make your question a little weird
- A script-breaker should be unusual enough to not map to an existing question with a cached answer
- If you were asked the question, would you be able to answer it instantly or would you need to think about it?
- Accessibility
- How do you make sure that the person can answer the question?
- If the question is too esoteric, the other person won't be able to answer your question
- Specificity
- Is the question specific enough to be answerable?
- If you make your question too broad, people will either spit out a rehearsed answer or will freeze up
- Adding some constraints helps
- Audience
- Where are you trying to control the conversational frame?
- Knowing who you're talking to, changes which questions you ask
- Consider what other person would find most fun
- Playfulness
- Don't forget to have fun and seem fun
- The point of script breaking is to be fun and spontaneous
- If people think you're being strategic or attempting to gain an advantage, they'll refuse the question
- Additional things to pay attention to
- Delivery
- Context
- Consider the guidelines, but don't be tied by them
- The commonality between all depictions of hypnosis is focus
- Hypnosis can be modeled as a focus hijack
- You're taking someone's focus and directing in one direction, which leaves openings for suggestions to take hold
- Computers and phones can be seen as a form of hypnosis - hypnotize you to keep clicking and scrolling
- This view of hypnosis as focus hijack opnes up a lot of possibilities in terms of how to set the space for hypnosis, how to create inductions, and how to awaken
- Inductions
- Start even before you start talking about hypnosis
- Starts with your subject being comfortable with you and being open to put in a trance
- Any hesitance on the part of the subject is stealing your focus
- Need absolute trust to allow focus to be yielded fully
- Once the hypnosis conversation starts, go gradually, and build the structure of being put in a trance in their mind
- Be clear and honest
- Make sure they're physically comfortable
- The actual induction is relatively trivial - give them someone to concentrate on and reinforce natural bodily responses
- Awakeners
- Opposite of inductions
- Release someone's attention and allow it to become theirs again
- Hypnosis can be seen as the opposite of meditation
- Meditation is about managing your focus yourself
- Hypnosis is about outsourcing your focus to someone else
- A good awakener is gentle, slowly raising the subject from their trance
- Awakeners work well to break screen trances as well
- The model of hypnosis as focus hijack allows a deeper exploration of what attention is, and how it acts as a resource in modern society
- This model removes much of the esoterica from hypnosis
- No magic words
- No scripts
- Just guide the subject's focus
- Don't make suggestions that increase uneasiness
- Inductions: narrow focus and allow the subject to outsource attention
- Awakeners: diffuse focus and give the subject their attention back
- Discussion questions
- How much does the focus hijack model resonate with your hypnotic experiences
- If you have been a subject, do they resonate with your experience of a hypnotic trance
- if you're a hypnotist, do they align with the conscious and subconscious decisions you make during a session?
- What are the gaps and flaws in this model?
