Michael "Valentine" Smith
- an old friend & colleague of mine
- here's us talking about the meta-project we're on about:
43 linked references
November 8th, 2025
- a note on stabilizing from Michael "Valentine" Smith: Psychosis is a loss of ability to stabilize.
- The subjective experience of a reality arises from stabilizing on a coherent ontology. What defines stabilizability for a reality is whether the ontology can function as coherent in use.
August 22nd, 2025
- this relates to Michael "Valentine" Smith asking me the other day in response to seeing everything here as a learning experience... "why would anybody ever NOT see things that way?" and I commented
- everything IS a learning experience
- but sometimes what you're learning is that life will overwhelm you and you can't handle it and can't learn any greater capacity in contact with the overwhelm
- (or maybe not without shutting down major other systems)
- there's a thing that happens when kids are playing where someone says "it's not fun anymore"
- and hopefully the scene responds by easing off
May 15th, 2025
- interesting puzzle I noted today in convo w Michael "Valentine" Smith
- if NNTD is simultaneously about every perspective being locally sane & ~collaborative... and yet there's no way to have the mind actually DO the spacious thing
- (where mind here is game: my mind calls me the body -aka- taking mind as object)
- then... something like "how does that work?"
- I think I forgot a piece before I managed to jot this down
April 17th, 2025
- Note to self: typefully is the tool that's really good for drafting twitter threads, that Michael "Valentine" Smith uses
January 18th, 2025
- NNTD intro thread by Michael "Valentine" Smith
- read off-twitter: xcancel.com/Morphenius/status/1879962712333304198
November 15th, 2024
- David Deutsch uses "Understanding" to refer to something like everything makes sense, in Book/The Fabric of Reality - according to Michael "Valentine" Smith
- and ofc "seeking PCK"
game: my mind calls me the body -aka- taking mind as object
- developed by Michael "Valentine" Smith and myself in spring 2024
- (I would call him the main source of it but I've been the main novice player of it!)
- but there are more or less accurate/useful referents for "I/me", and it seems to me & Michael "Valentine" Smith that "this body" is in general a more accurate & useful referent than "some relatively arbitrary fragment of the mind"
August 31st, 2024
- people at CFAR workshops being disturbed by how much Michael "Valentine" Smith could read their body language
June 28th, 2024
- convo w Sahil & Michael "Valentine" Smith
- from Sahil >
- > Second law: You cannot expect actual order (stable structure) to arise spontaneously. If you see it, there must have been a controlled process lurking behind the scenes which involves entropy production in the larger naturally unfolding context.
- > An example would be: A priori, if I tossed a 100 coins and they all came up heads, or if all the gas molecules were repeatedly going to one corner of the room, you'd be surprised, and consider it a thermodynamic miracle. However, if you were more careful, you'd notice how this is an open system, and point out some systematic force that biases it towards a "low entropy" region, producing a bunch of heat in the process, in accordance with the Second Law over the whole system.
- > Cosecond law: You cannot expect deep caring (stable commitment) to arise via control/force. If you see it, there must have been organicness/freedom lurking behind the scenes which involves connection, even in contingently-arranged controlled situations.
- > An example: You and I might have met in order to work on a project; our relationship might be purely instrumental and it would be surprising if it extended beyond into true love. But not really: it's possible that we have liberated interactions within that container that allow back and forth openness and integration of our more personal sides, which is in line with the cosecond law.
- MS > I directly perceive something about the 2nd law of thermodynamics
- I don't believe it
- (struck that I have some sense of this wrt 2nd law, but I feel like insofar as I've traced the proof it's pretty loose)
- Sahil > ergodicity, minus-first-law
- Sahil > causal bias in our understandings
- science, progress
- "gears" understanding
- reductionism
- bayes theorem
- likelihoods describe things that are compact, causal, modularly defined
- very good for atomistic, causally-defined things
- posteriors are complex, depend on lots of factors
- duals
- LCM <=> GCF
- cartesian ? sets <=> disjoint union sets
- MO > same fact-ness? like integrals & differentials
- S > yes, theorems for free
- S > can't predict what chess grandmaster will do, but can predict he'll win
- MS > but that's a statistical thing
- (I think that that's still viewing it in the causal frame. in the telic frame it looks more like "no, it's because he wants to win and can")
- 2 claims:
- is it possible to dualize?
- if so, what does it look like?
- (but there's a choice of dual, depending on how you structure the first category)
- S > thesis by Yoshihiro Maruyama
- meaning and duality
- (beyond chapter 1 not very readable)
- we're very good with likelihoods, not so much colikelihoods (which involve stable spirit, commitment, etc... rather than stable substrate)
June 20th, 2024
- convo w Michael "Valentine" Smith
- aka
- = is it real?
- = does it increase life? / does it serve life?
- = does it solve the problem?
- = does it usefully organize negentropy
- definition has to anchor back in the first person
- "what matters" can't be an objective definition
- if you say "solve the problem" then you've baked in relevance
- which has the problems pointed at by 2012 paper Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science
- but I think that's inherent to it; the aim is not to solve that part but to factor it out so it can be multiplied by something else that is clear
- relevance × (... ... ...)
- part of what's great about the growing corn frame is that it's like 0-1 in terms of simulacra levels
- = is it solving a problem that exists without other minds?
- what's really grounding about growing corn is you need to eat
- intelligence as non-lifecycle-based adaptation
- "the meme is not informing you what the problem is"
- it informs on the level of strategies
- analogue to NVC's strategies vs needs
- "what's the real problem when you factor out the solution frame?"
- "your problem is you might go to hell if you don't accept Jesus as lord and savior"
- "every apparent problem/solution has something real to it—that's how it's able to grip you
- but that doesn't mean the frame is telling you anything useful about what the problem is"
- "problems are problems you can tell for yourself before you're given a frame"
- me > what about the problem of calculus not integrating with the rest of math? (for the first 200 years)
- "well, calculus is not saying that calculus needs to be plugged into the rest of math"
- how can I tell if a problem is solved?
- "does it actually work?"
- do I have enough counter-space for the cooking I'm about to do?
- am I saved by Jesus?
- is my apartment a safe place for a toddler?
- self-help has a baselessness
- heideggerian problems? see nosilverv's thread
- long thread by nosilverv, that talks about heidigger's present-at-hand and ready-to-hand and self-improvement requiring self-as-object, and 4chan
- difference between "X" and "my conception/experience of X"
- "the problem is solved" is not framed in terms of my conception of it
- terminal goals, temptation to write-off
- original spin — in spirituality, the "your resistance is a problem"
- you can't tell that it's a problem until they're telling you so
- and then the only way you can tell is they're telling you
- which is giving you a solution to a problem you couldn't tell you had before they gave you a solution
- me > but sometimes it's "the reason you're hurting is your resistance"
- which has a different issue, not this one
- tracking "is it real" that go up a lot higher
- eg the emotional torment of being stuck in naraka
- if there's an intervention that can relieve the torment, that counts as growing corn
- M > what about solving a problem someone doesn't know they have until it's solved?
- but you can tell, after the solution was implemented, that a real problem was solved
- "what is the problem that is being solved, by the solution that is being abstractly described as removing original spin?"
- I mean, shoulding yourself in the foot
- business is solving problems for other people
- = you can't escape learning
- = you can never solve all your problems
- the issue arises when you try to be free of problems, rather than trying to be free of this problem
- we are trying to solve both
- suffering / being trapped in an experience you don't like
- inability to get along
- your mating dance stuff has the potential to be real... but your feedback loops may be kinda fuzzy
- could be worth trying to rework that
- vs speaking to a group of people about abstract principles about NNTD and how it applies to relationships
- where the feedback loop is people saying "wow that's really insightful" but does not show you that the problem has been solved
- alternatives to 4-week course:
- 1y monthly call
- 1-on-2 coaching packages?
- doing mating dance coaching for couples
- where your intent is on helping them land on clarity of
- "we're not for each other"
- "fuck yes let's get married"
- "we're exploring the question in a way that feels really good" (although that's gameable unless it's a feeling that persists in the context of awareness of death, marriage, etc)"
- they can both tell that the way they're exploring this is CLEARLY oriented to the question of whether
- not just a narrative thing
- that they don't yet know but they can tell that they're discovering it
- and this process-level I can tell for myself clarity leads to an outcome clarity of apart or married
- a tiny bit of fuzz - how long does clarity take to get?
- moreover, there can end up instead being a narrative saturation of "we're all about clairty"
- "deals" seem in part about each person being with their real problems
- but also there's something else that maybe feels missing in that
- where eg in Jan+March I brought in that I was stressed about money
December 21st, 2023
- convo w Michael "Valentine" Smith
- MS > but there's true-me stuck in the LH
- MS > "this isn't rooted in the sociosensual, so stop that"
- MO > "which isn't very sociosensual"
December 15th, 2023
- rec1 9:30
- > death doesn't bring meaning to life. love brings meaning to life. death makes it easier to open calcified parts of our hearts. and part of how it's able to do that is because it's horrible
- "that you will be flung in harder if you don't choose to go"
- "I'm not going to buy into anything that claims I have to buy into it"
- rec2 10:05
- "oh god, I'm doing the apology thing again, oh no!"
- "punishing yourself even though it's not visible, to make it easier to remember that it's not a move you want to make"
- "you don't deserve X" / "you shouldn't want X"
- "what if good is good and bad is bad and you just admit it"
- supercoop
November 28th, 2023
- Mal's recent thread
- epicycles
- ego psy-op insight: there's nothing wrong with me
- (huh... god-shaped hole... superorganism-shaped hole)
- anorexia - not just a misperception of the body but a judgmental & shouldy one
- not hedonism but anti-anti-hedonism
- MO > if you don't know why the pain is worth it, don't do it
- MS > tough love is category error
- MS > you cannot morally fail
- snake cult stuff - link
- for your own good, I'm going to let your process run however it needs to here
- believing in sin
- there's a flaw in you - this graspiness - and you cannot have what you want until you purify yourself of this sin
- ego as guard of id
- superego would love a trick to neutralize or control the ego
- LINK: the superegos have gone crazy malcolmocean.com/2023/07/superego-conflict-and-evolution/
- "I am trying to take care of my needs... but there's something wrong with my nature?"
- (I = ego, my nature = id)
- original sin making the id wrong
- we're obligate symbiotes with culture/groups
- what it would be like for a church ceremony to be a haka?
- MO > I think the haka has a cleaner id/superego relationship than the catholic church is willing to admit
- noticing for yourself that you have done something that hurts the group
- toddlers sin all the time
- but if you're behaving like that but you could know better...
- 2 issues with "all values go down to the id"
- not sure where id bottoms out
- PCT
- intrinsic reference levels
- highest-level principles etc
- which you can be trying to fulfill without tracking how they all cache out or something
- culture can put psy-ops here
- wait, although they're powered by injecting pain into the intrinsic reference levels somewhere
- getting you to whip yourself
- (tho why doesn't this get reorganized away?)
- intrinsic reference level for being in sync w superegos???
- oh, trying certain strategies on certain other levels is verboten
- peoples' inherent drive to fuck around and find out gets linked up to pain as well
- MS > Deutsch talks about how anti-rational memes attack curiosity and creativity
- empathy, caring about others
- animals etc
- "why would I ever be tempted to override what I want for the sake of an argument"
- "maybe I'm wrong about what good is"
- looking at base drives and wondering if some of them are wrong and need to be fixed
- flickering gate
- I don't want to die but maybe I have to and if I don't find a way to want to by the time I have to then maybe I go through something even worse, so I need to find a way to want to die
- huh, "I can tell for myself" has the recursive quality, which animal gnosis doesn't
- 5:27pm MS explains from scratch
- should I feel bad?
- pain from
- recognition of not having been present
- + sense of "shouldn't have lost track"
- psy-op gets us to assume the pain is about the failure, NOT about the should
- shouldn't-have energetic signature, tied to threat of connection being lost
- parent experiences the same shouldn't-have pain / badness / (unhandledness)
- extra-ness to this
- parent hurting because adding something extra
- but makes the same error of assuming it's about the kid
- 2nd arrow meme
- but then this meme gets co-opted by the psy-op
- MS > afaict, what seems to be making me rapidly immune to this thing
- is like NO, I don't compromise that part of me
- previously was trying to look for the right principles
- the 2nd arrow's pain matters too
- MO > I fucking hate how people use words like illusion & delusion
- MS > andrew holochuk
- gave a much more helpful breakdown of where that word could be useful
- tibetan dream yoga
- dreams are not as real as physical world
- physical world is not as real as <something else>
- clear light mind
- emptiness, hollowness
- illusoriness is gesturing at that
- you have fallen for the illusion
- real = solid, independent, and lasting
- thinking things are solid, lasting, independent
- reifying without recognizing that you're reifying
- of course this pain matters because all pain matters because that's what pain is
- I am not here to endure pain for the sake of some greater good
- ALSO you are free to suffer the pain from the 2nd arrow as long as you feel like it
- alternative: 2nd arrow's pain matters too, so you shouldn't've done it
- but other alternative is to leave that part unnamed, which lets the psy-op creep in again
- there's not a principle "get out of pain asap"
- there's just "pain hurts" and a natural inclination to move out of it
- because FOR THE ID!
- "I don't want that. that hurts"
- from the core: what is an alternative?
- it's okay for me to make mistakes
- not just "because I'm learning"
- I can fuck up this way for the rest of my life and it's okay
- it's okay means "I will still back me. I will not back the idea over me."
- inverse of believing there are morals and that I need to become a moral/better person
- range of coordination moves based on being shamable
- "Val doesn't care about coordination"
- an attempt by an adjacent meme
- means by which coercive superegos dom/coopt egos
- MO > ego as interface
- MS > huh, why did the interface become self-aware?
- MO > arguably superego/culture is self-aware... but it's gloopier whereas there's a decent stable-ish fixed-point for the ego: the body of the person; their perspective
- ego getting obsessed w dao, paradox, etc, is ego being confused by this psy-op
- not to say there's a mind configuration that is free of every paradox
- naming this whole thing...
- MS > I often name based on history
- MO > "the original psy-op"
- seems like maybe the other psy-ops emerge from this
- tie-in with original sin
- MS >
- issues...
- if we find an even prior one, this name will be really unfortunate
- psy-op intentional
- "the original spin"
- MS > is the inclination to back the narrative that is attached to the cause of pain, over the part that is being hurt
- MO > inclined to say "disowning"
- MS > not all cases, sometimes more like "I can't help myself but I've gotta find a way to stop"
- MS > is the draw to back the narrative around why the pain is there, instead of backing the part that is being hurt
- MO > pressure
- adaptive entropy link
- gen3 OS vid link
August 19th, 2023
- but Michael "Valentine" Smith pointed out
- > Nah, there's totally a difference. It's whether, uh, Briah is responding to Atziluth vs. emanating spontaneously. 😛 Uh, translating… it's whether you're interpreting best as you can vs. seeking something onto which to attach THIS PARTICULAR INTERPRETATION. (But I agree, they're way more similar than most folk name.)
June 19th, 2023
- notes from Michael "Valentine" Smith voice memo
- prime as about spiritual truth
- gravitas, what matters
- "saying what's true"
- mass
- gnosis is prime-sight
- fate-sight feels like remembering in an embodied way that literally everything is relevant
- discovering that I have more mass than some people
- (and some of them had a lot of mass!)
- "how deep is your cultivation of truth?"
- navigating a fate tangle, trying to maintain clarity while navigating it
- "running with each step as it goes, as part of a fate thing"
- everything is attached with spiderwebs that move & swim & breeze in the wind
- there are no "just coincidences"
- not just the relevant things that pop up in consciousness
- interdimensional spiderweb
- most things are kind of like specks of dust
- but some things are like bowling balls
- Truth like a thud
- spirit btw might be better described as the preciousness
- what it's all for
- difference between Fate & Mind
Looking, Direct-Knowing, Gnosis, ~Trust
- my friend & colleague Michael "Valentine" Smith is doing a bunch of stuff with this
- here's a vid of his that's probably about this (I haven't watched it but the title feels right)
- this one might also be
- he also explains it in relation to math here
- he also wrote this post, which talks about it as Looking
- which has some follow-ups from others
February 7th, 2023
- not perceiving the holy idea is the same as having a particular delusion
- the unholy delusion (of 7 is that you can direct your own unfolding)
- which causes unholy difficulty/discomfort (of not knowing what to do)
- which causes unholy reaction (of planning)
- great take on what happens when you lose track of certain facets of nonduality
December 29th, 2022
- sent this to Michael "Valentine" Smith just now
- I had an insight as I was falling asleep, about the totalizingness of our memeplex and how to interface better with everyone at this phase
- which is instead of framing things as "collaborative culture" or whatever, to frame it in the sort of tautological lens of "whatever culture allows people to have the kind of relationship to culture that they want"
- I haven't quite figured out how to language the tautology, but I'm guessing you'll see what I mean, and we can iterate on it
December 14th, 2022
- M > satisfaction jamming with Michael "Valentine" Smith
December 8th, 2022
- convo w Michael "Valentine" Smith
- every death is because an overload of adaptive entropy
- incapability of adaptation
- MO > what about anti-intelligence instead of "adaptive entropy"?
- MS > The Thermodynamics of Stupidity
- technical debt
- not fungible like monetary debt
- entropy... you owe something
- overdrawn
- MS > in debt to buy something
- MO > bet, sometimes ponzi-esque
- MS > here you buy a RESULT in terms of techdebt etc
- MS > spending intention?
- MO > spending sanity?
- traumatic adaptation
- inadequate equilibria
- moloch is what crawls through the crack of adaptive entropy
- adaptive entropy is the friction that keeps systems from coordination
- MS > entropy has this quality of leaking out & infecting things
- MO > say more
- MS > re perpetual motion machines
- entropy is the thing that builds up
- (adaptive confusion)
- if someone has a burden of adaptive entropy inside, the identify function is going to latch onto a subsystem
- MS > why ever force?
- (because it appears there's no other way to achieve the result, and the result is written on the bottom line)
- MS > NNTD feels particularly Holy Perfection to me
- what you are doing is exactly what you should be doing, because that's what should means
- (the Type 1 holy ideal)
- backing desire move from Perri Chase
- create oasis of anti-entropic vibes
- Angel Grant - hired by Perri Chase, maybe has NNTD insight
- does somatic experiencing, trauma work
- student of Gabor Maté
- lots of great stuff here about choice
- god will unfold god
- exaptation
- MO > if there is nothing god is telling me to do in a given moment, then I do whatever the fuck I want, and that's choice / free will
- MS > whoa, yup, clicks. but means you can't value having choice, or you disincentivize hearing god
- MO > you get free will / choice, but you don't get to demand it
- MO > you get to choose what flavor of you you want to forever embed into the blockchain that is the upward spiral
- everything else just happens - it's not up to me, so this is the only Q
- noticing where choice is real
- if you're confused about where you can or cannot choose
- choice of turning away from god?
- Bonds that make Us Free
- MS >
- NNTD derives free choice
- Prime derives [listen to God] choice
- NNTD as perfect forcelessness
November 6th, 2022
speciation metaphor for meta-protocol › in Convening an Ontario meta-protocol jam I wrote › It seems to me that: these principles are on the meta lev…
- Michael "Valentine" Smith commented:
- > I suspect that cultural norms are an example of these principles enacted, the same way that biological evolution is the continuation of the same thing that created stars and planets (viewing that as something like "mechanical evolution"). My understanding of the truth of your point here isn't that these principles are meta instead of object. Rather, that the interesting thing for talking about these things explicitly is the way these principles apply to the meta level. Kind of like the most interesting thing about evolution now is at the memetic level.
- we dig into this somewhat in the middle of this long video but end up more argumentative than dialogical
- talking about scraping off skin cells and honoring the fractal parts down as well as up:
- also re parallax:
- MS > Notice that in the parallax analogy/example, neither eye ever sees through the other. What happens instead is, each eye learns how to coordinate with the other, and a separate process (the visual cortex) creates a "third eye" that does in fact see out of both eyes simultaneously. A larger "you" gets constructed out of two smaller "you"s, and it's only the larger "you" that needs to see from both vantage points.
- I don't know how much that actually generalizes. But I think it does some, and maybe a lot. Like, I don't ever need to see the world through your interface thing — but I need to have a way of coordinating with it enough that our process of jamming together allows an emergent "we" to arise that "sees" through both of us. (And you with mine, likewise, of course.)
- MO > Yeah, this is another open question for me of things that are similar and different at different scales, because it obviously analogizes quite well, but to name a simple contrast, I clearly can imagine the world through your perspective in a way that the eyes can't and don't need to. Like if we're facing each other, I can imagine your view, in which I'm seeing my face, but I'm not calling it "my face" I'm calling it "Malcolm's face", etc etc. So that's clearly unlike eyes in that way. And then there's a question of in what other ways is it similar/different.
- MO > Speaking of parallax, I'm enjoying how we seem to have a bit we're doing where you tend to find yourself as the "maybe it's basically the same at all fractal scales" eye and I find myself as the "maybe it's actually very different at all fractal scales" eye! Like that came up re scraping off skin cells. I continue to be very excited about having a conversation where we try to dovetail all of this!
- Michael "Valentine" Smith brought up the liberalism paradox, aka tolerating the intolerant or welcoming the unwelcoming again
- re
- > A vast diversity of cultures can exist on top of this cultural platform. What these cultures have in common is a certain kind of interoperability—a capacity to see and honor each other.
- and I commented:
- well there's also "they can see and honor each other" which is different from "they can see and honor cultures that aren't able to see and honor other cultures"
- like in some sense the answer to the latter also has to be yes, but also... it's in practice much harder/messier.
- oh! huh, using the speciation metaphor, here's another rather weird way of thinking about it:
- Gen3 cultures have wildly different phenotypes but are broadly all of the same species in the sense that they're interoperable...
- and then ALSO some Gen3 cultures will also be able to mate with some Gen2 cultures
- and the Gen3 genes/memes are dominant and therefore the offspring will be Gen3
- I say "some" here because I think that for a Gen3 culture to mate with a Gen2 culture, they need to be much closer in object-level-culture-space than two Gen3 cultures need to be
- (and for completion's sake, I guess Gen3 could also mate with Gen1?)
- also "mate" here is something like the deep perspectival intimacy of parallax/ophanim, which we already talked on tuesday about how it has an interpenetrative vulnerability quality that's somewhat like sex.
- Michael "Valentine" Smith responded
- > This is the most questionable part, to me. I agree! And yet, it's the part I'd be least surprised to discover were wrong.
I'm reminded of the basic postmodern glitch. If you're welcoming everyone, do you welcome those who don't welcome everyone? Those who don't welcome you? How does that work?
Closely related to "How does a tolerant society deal with intolerance? Do we tolerate it, or not?"
This is the basic thing I see Wilbur's Tier II shift addressing. The Green to Teal transition.
(I know you know all this. This just seems like a part that isn't fully addressed yet, so I'm keeping an eye on it.)
- and I commented later to Michael "Valentine" Smith that this was entirely irrelevant to what I was trying to say
- BUT that it was entirely relevant to what Jean was needing in order to hear me
September 27th, 2022
- something that Michael "Valentine" Smith and I independently noticed a couple years ago is that we had some sense that the collaborative culture we were working on would scale superexponentially
September 24th, 2022
- context: Michael "Valentine" Smith sent this
- I recently (re?) read Scott's summary of The Mind Illuminated. Something really stuck out for me in it. Been noodling me for days now. I've been wanting to run it by you.
- Here's an excerpt apparently quoted from the book (bolded emphasis mine):
- > What makes [enlightenment/cessation event] the most powerful of all Insight experiences is what happens in the last few moments of consciousness leading up to the cessation. First, an object arises in consciousness that would normally produce craving. It can be almost anything. However, what happens next is quite unusual: the mind doesn’t respond with the habitual craving and clinging. Rather, it fully understands the object from the perspective of Insight: as a mental construct, completely “empty” of any real substance, impermanent, and a cause of suffering. This profound realization leads to the next and final moment of complete equanimity, in which the shared intention of all the unified sub-minds is to not respond. Because nothing is projected into consciousness, the cessation event arises. With cessation, *the tuned-in sub-minds simultaneously realize* that everything appearing in consciousness is simply the product of their own activity. In other words, they realize that the input they’re accustomed to receiving is simply a result of their own fabricating activities.
- (Well, okay, the bolding didn't work, alas.)
- The lead-up to the cessation offers a kind of common-knowledge cascade of the type you & I have been talking about.
- ( see this video )
- Something feels really significant to me about this.
- The rest of Scott's summary gives the impression that the book's model is, there are two kinds of places consciousness can go: RH & LH. RH is expanded awareness. LH is intense focus. But you can build consciousness itself by stretching it to do more of both. Stabilizing attention & expanding awareness, more & more at the same time, since they kind of oppose.
- That consciousness provides the space for these common knowledge cascades to happen.
- These feels like the internal version of the external social thing we're attempting. Somehow my thinking is skipping a beat on a detail here though.
May 9th, 2022
- see Michael "Valentine" Smith post on LessWrong
February 22nd, 2022
- from convo with Michael "Valentine" Smith
August 1st, 2021
What are the components or dimensions required for collab… › I had an old model back in like 2015 or 2016 about this, …
- AHA! from an email to Michael "Valentine" Smith & Logan Brienne Strohl
in the meantime
- Michael "Valentine" Smith talks about the viability of a transition process, requiring that it be functional in the meantime, not just in the limit.
February 11th, 2021
- Michael "Valentine" Smith > maybe not cut, but still "penetrate"
- Michael "Valentine" Smith > finite incantum
- call with Michael "Valentine" Smith, talking about memes
- thinking about David Deutsch's anti-rational vs rational memes
- Malcolm > seems also "arational" as a type of meme
- which is what typical internet memes are
- they are intentionally optimized for being ideal replicators
- whereas anti-rational unintentionally evolve towards being ideal replicators
- and rational intentionally evolve towards being meaningfully worth spreading
- re DD's "anti-rational vs rational memes" concept…
I think internet memes are a 3rd type
anti-rational = unintentionally evolve to spread
arational = intentionally optimized for being ideal replicators
rational = intentionally evolve towards being meaningfully worth spreading- re DD's "anti-rational vs rational memes"…
internet memes are *nonrational*…?
🦠👿🤬anti-rational: hacks host to spread despite harm to host
😂📈🙃nonrational: host optimizes for viral spread
💡🤯🛠️rational: host shares because beneficial (& maybe improves before sharing) - Thinking out loud about this, to check my initial insight:
1. how are nonrational memes different from anti-rational?
contrast
🧿 old unquestioned dogmas ("Bible tells me so" to "because I said so, that's why!")
💩 creativity & irreverence of internet meme culture - 1b. The important thing is that with anti-rational—aka STATIC—memes, the host is functionally *attempting* to propagate the exact same meme they received, without any changes
And any evolution happens *in spite of* that attempt, because more sticky or spready memes win. - 1c. By contrast, internet memes are *intentionally* changed, & creators hope they'll be picked up and changed *MORE*🚀
The infinite-game-ness of meme-remixing certainly has a fun-theory quality to it, but underlying substrate favors just *change*, not improvement in rationality. - 2. how are nonrational memes different from rational?
contrast
🧪 science needs rationality & vv, democracy needs liberalism & vv
😮 people falling deep into youtube conspiracy holes- is youtube conspiracy the best comparison?
- 2b.
- 2c.
October 15th, 2020
- great metaphor from convo with Michael "Valentine" Smith
- me: "if you have to carry a full glass of water a kilometer without spilling any, as fast as you can, there's a way you need to orient to that"
- him: "yeah, find a lid"
- me: "yeah! rather than rushing"
September 23rd, 2020
- Michael "Valentine" Smith reminded me of this old LW post about brain hemispheres
- (it summarizes Ramachandran's model, which is less potent than McGilchrist's brain hemisphere model)
There is no away
- Article on this by my friend Michael "Valentine" Smith
Reality is alive: don't carve it
October 8th, 2020 After some further digesting I have com… › Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, as a frame, is the… › [[Michael "Valentine" Smith]] > maybe not cut, but still …
- Michael "Valentine" Smith April 18th, 2021 > or maybe a better way to point at untangling, in the sexual metaphor, is "seduce"
- foreplay necessary for penetration to be good!