* How aiming at what you want gets you more of what you want.

* How aiming at what you don’t want gets you more of that, too.

* Self-fulfilling prophecies in growth, agency, and even AI safety.

Transcript available on Substack.

This podcast extends a recent post:

Referenced media:

Examples of self-fulfilling prophecies in AI alignment

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrislakin.blog

Chris and Joanna riff: The dance between flow and structure, between openness and commitment between the receptive energy we often call feminine, and the directional energy we often call masculine, the capacity to feel and yield and the capacity to hold, to follow through. Boundaries, status, society, and truth.

Transcript: Available via Substack.

Related

Emotional numbness:

“Locally optimal”:

The hostile telepaths problem

“Yang” (agency) and “Yin” (manifestation):

Boundaries:

“Zooming in” on suffering:

Chronic pain:

““God””:

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrislakin.blog

100s of hours of IFS therapy and meditation didn’t do it for him.

Unlearning →

And now I think it's just feels much more like, oh, okay, here's somebody who I like. And I'm gonna just express however it is that I'm feeling in the moment.

6 months after:

Sid is a very private person, so he asked that his voice be transformed with AI.

Mentioned in

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrislakin.blog

Multiple therapists and modalities fell short.

Unlearning →

I used to get triggered by very small things…

Mentioned in

UPDATE 18 months:

Since we last spoke I kept getting better by shifting how I understand love, other's death, making mistakes.. - I keep growing when I want.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrislakin.blog

I met an engineer I’ll call Bob at a prediction market conference. “8 years of talk therapy [and] 1 year of actively seeking exposure to scary situations” didn’t do it for him.

Unlearning: “working with you once accelerated this immensely, like 4 years of exposure in 4 hours.” →

Every week I’ve had some new ridiculous, fun, stupid project that I had others rallied around. It's exactly the stuff I pictured doing a long time ago but never really did

UPDATE 12 months: He says he's doing great.

UPDATE 18 months: He says he’s very happy and resilient, has lots of friends (and dates) now :)

To protect Bob’s identity, his voice has been transformed with AI.

Mentioned in

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrislakin.blog

Damon Sasi is a mentor of mine, and he is also a therapist who claims to be very psychologically healthy. What’s his inner experience like?

Probably for an average week, maybe I'll suffer for like five minutes

I don't think I have any prolonged internal conflict

Self-loathing to me was a weird concept […] Like, what does it mean to like self-loathe?

It’s not that he had a great childhood, either.

[My childhood] wasn't terrible. And I say this and then maybe I'll give some examples and people will be like, maybe it was terrible. […] my parents divorced when I was pretty young. Both my parents, I think, were very absent. […]

He would get drunk often. He once hit me in the back with a two by four. My older brother was pretty physically abusive before he chilled out. And by chilled out, I mean like, we're cool now, but I left home after high school specifically to get away from him. […]

I think overall the experience I had growing up was just being very alone. I didn't feel like my parents were really my parents. I feel like books raised me in very strong and very real ways I could give examples of. I had a lot of friends. I enjoyed my friendships quite a lot, but I didn't feel like I had family, basically at all. […]

What is it like to be psychologically healthy?

I don't think I've ever hated anyone ever in my life. Possibly this is not true for like very brief moments or brief periods of time or something and it's like hard to remember them. It's just really easy to like let go of hurt or anger against other people.

This is why I actually had to become very good at just forming boundaries when I was young. Like just very clear, very clear boundaries with other people because I just couldn't hold onto anger against them no matter what they did to me, which was like not great given my upbringing. […]

there was one occurrence in my entire life where I think I came closest to what people call depression […]

I've had little T traumas or hang ups or whatever word you want to use for them. But big T traumas just feel like they never happened in part because I never felt like I lacked agency in my life. […]

basically zero [Big 5 personality] neuroticism […]

Related posts:

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrislakin.blog