2+ day, 9+ hour ago (306+ words) Epistemic status: Figuring things out. From one perspective, this a question of how much should you be exposed to other people's crazy beliefs. Suppose that someone comes to the belief that you are evil. Perhaps they think you secretly murdered people and got away with it, or have ruined many many people's lives in legal ways, or that you're extremely power-seeking and have no morals. What should they do? But overall each piece of infrastructure should not attempt to model a full justice system. So it's a bit counterintuitive that sometimes you shouldn't do this, because you aren't good at it and might get it wrong and aren't being fair to them or cannot offer them due process. But I still want to know when (a) ends. When should you stop trying to police all the behavior around you? (One constraint…...

2+ day, 20+ hour ago (960+ words) The Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth in December 1620, badly weakened by the voyage. That first winter killed roughly half of them'disease, starvation, exposure. They were in desperate straits, lacking knowledge of the land, the climate, or the crops that would grow there. The Wampanoag, led by the sachem Massasoit, had their own recent catastrophe: a plague (likely brought by earlier European contact) had devastated their population in the years just before the Pilgrims arrived, killing perhaps 75-90% of their people. The pilgrims received an offer, for food and aid and knowledge. They discussed among themselves. "If we accept their help, we will become dependent on them. If we become dependent, we will be vulnerable, and fall under their yoke. The logic was impeccable. They ate their boot leather in proud independence. "To accept aid is to receive proof that we are in…...

3+ day, 22+ hour ago (1692+ words) This whole consciousness sequence (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 , part 6, part 7 ) has taken a long time, and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface. I may have bitten off a bit more than I can chew. But it's time to move on, and time to make a few looser and more speculative statements. What did we learn here? How do I view consciousness now that I've done some reading about it? Going back to Eric Hoel's three "things we talk about when we talk about consciousness: the sense of a self I think #1 is really the primary concept and #2 and #3 are derivative. The waking state (2) is a state in which you notice/perceive/are-aware-of (1) anything, while total unconsciousness is a state in which you are conscious of zero things. The self (3) is the subset of your experiences where you…...

4+ day, 8+ hour ago (1247+ words) I've gone through two big eras in my use of psychedelics. In the first, I tried two dozen different psychedelics without much direction. It was like holding a magnet up to an old CRT TV and watching the image glitch and warp. Lots of substances, but not that much substance. In the second era, I learned to direct my trips toward healing. Psychedelics became tools I wielded intentionally, and they dramatically improved my mental health, helping me with depression and trauma. The shift happened over a brief period when two things coincided: I'd accumulate a lot of meditative insight and I discovered neural annealing " a model of how the mind updates itself. It's hard to tease the impact of each apart, but in this post I'll focus on neural annealing, as I wrote about meditation elsewhere. Neural annealing is a…...

5+ day, 9+ hour ago (632+ words) Knowledge, like all things, is best in moderation," intoned the Will. "Knowing everything means you don't need to think, and that is very dangerous." Garth Nix, Lady Friday[1] In the pursuit of knowledge, there are two bad attractors that people fall into." One of them is avoiding ever knowing anything. "Oh I could of course be wrong! Everything is only suggestive evidence, I can't really claim to know anything!" The second is to really lean into believing in yourself. "I know this to be true! I am committed to it, for constantly second-guessing myself will lead to paralysis and a lack of decisiveness. So I will double down on my best hypotheses." The former is a stance fearful of being shown to be wrong, and the ensuing embarrassment, so avoids sticking one's neck out. The latter is also fearful of…...

5+ day, 17+ hour ago (963+ words) Certain rationalists are prone to telling people, in great detail, that rationalism is not a religion. Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about how Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult and then wrote three separate essays either denying or mocking the idea that what he was in or leading a cult, which sends sort of a mixed message. My immediate reaction is that rationalism is so obviously a religion that it is insulting to deny it. People whose opinions I respect have the exact opposite reaction. This comes down to a question of definition, which is fundamentally arbitrary. There are undeniably traits that traditional religions have and rationalism lacks, and if you think these are good litmus tests for being or not being a religion, rationalism is not a religion. These are the traits of traditional religions that rationalism does not have:…...

2+ week, 3+ day ago (843+ words) On a warm spring weekend, Jerry B wanders through Hyde Park. At a corner, he happens upon the Preacher Man, standing on a soapbox and proclaiming the Way of Truth. Jerry B: Now hold up, Preacher Man. I don't think I buy what you're selling. Let's try an example. Preacher Man:(Smiles approvingly.) You doubt my prescription, yet you neither brush it aside, nor blindly accept it; you argue back and make things concrete. That is the Way of Truth. Please, go on. Jerry B: Consider belief in the afterlife. Sure, obviously there is no afterlife as a factual matter, but belief in the afterlife spares so much pain for so many people. Again, I don't necessarily claim that belief in the afterlife works this wayin reality. But the thought experiment shows that it's at leastpossible for situations to come up in…...

2+ week, 5+ day ago (131+ words) Crosspost from my blog. That said, this behavior supports a false consensus. You can become an expert on almost any small set of these questions, such that you don't really need to defer very much to anyone else's testimony about them. But you can't become a simultaneous expert on most of the questions that you care about. So, you have to defer to other people about many or most important questions. There are too many questions, and many important questions are complex and too hard to figure out on your own. Also, you can get by pretty well by deferring: a lot of other people have thought about those questions a lot, and often they can correctly tell you what's important to know. But deference has several deep and important dangers....

2+ week, 5+ day ago (180+ words) Is this type of goodness about memetic bullshit value claims or something else? Funnily enough, when I thought I had an example of this with washing vegetables it was somewhat controversial. Back in the day when debates about religion were fashionable, one of the standard back-and-forths went roughly like this" Today, the religious egregores are not so dominant. But their niche is still filled by the memetic egregore Goodness - the egregore whose constituent memes are claims about what is Good. The memetic egregore Goodness is the same type of thing as the older religious egregores. It feeds on the same feelings and instincts, and fills the same niche. And one can have basically the same arguments about it. Goodist: If we reject Good, then what's to stop us from stealing and murdering each other? Agoodist: Well, mostly people don't want…...

2+ week, 5+ day ago (605+ words) Published on November 11, 2025 2:49 AM GMTPeople have been celebrating Secular Solstice for over a decade now, in our small community. Many different programs and versions have been collected at Secular Solstice Resources (and elsewhere). The amount of material can be overwhelming. Many Solstice programs are based around original material being written or updated, speeches that are specific to the speaker, and other things that make it challenging to reuse.The goal for this program is to be an easy-to-follow, easy-to-reuse Solstice program for a group celebrating Solstice for the first time, or the first of a few times, possibly a small group, possibly without many resources.Simply print one copy of the program per participant (or fewer and have people share), and follow the directions.If you aren't familiar with the songs, you will need one or a few people to…...