Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.

This is Cartesian Frames, Part 8: Lights, Camera, Action!, published by Alicorn.

Sequence index: Living Luminously

Previously in sequence: The ABC's of Luminosity

Next in sequence: The Spotlight

You should pay attention to key mental events, on a regular and frequent basis, because important thoughts can happen very briefly or very occasionally and you need to catch them.

You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the third story from Seven Shiny Stories.

Luminosity is hard and you are complicated. You can't meditate on yourself for ten minutes over a smoothie and then announce your self-transparency. You have to keep working at it over a long period of time, not least because some effects don't work over the short term. If your affect varies with the seasons, or with major life events, then you'll need to keep up the first phase of work through a full year or a major life event, and it turns out those don't happen every alternate Thursday. Additionally, you can't cobble together the best quality models from snippets of introspection that are each five seconds long; extended strings of cognition are important, too, and can take quite a long time to unravel fully.

Sadly, looking at what you are thinking inevitably changes it. With enough introspection, this wouldn't influence your accuracy about your overall self - there's no reason in principle why you couldn't spend all your waking hours noting your own thoughts and forming meta-thoughts in real time - but practically speaking that's not going to happen. Therefore, some of your data will have to come from memory. To minimize the error introduction that comes of retrieving things from storage, it's best to arrange to reflect on very recent thoughts. It may be worth your while to set up an external reminder system to periodically prompt you to look inward, both in the moment and retrospectively over the last brief segment of time. This can be a specifically purposed system (i.e. set a timer to go off every half hour or so), or you can tie it to convenient promptings from the world as-is, like being asked "What's up?" or "Penny for your thoughts".

When you introspect, there is a lot to keep track of. For instance, consider the following:

What were you thinking about? (This could be more than one thing. You are a massively parallel system.) Was it a concept, image, sensation, desire, belief, person, object, word, place, emotion, plan, memory...?

How tightly were you focused on it? (Is the topic itself narrow or disparate?) What other items (sensory, cognitive, emotional) seemed to intrude on your concentration, if any, and how did you react to this incursion?

How did you feel about the subject of the thought? This includes not only emotional reactions like "this is depressing" or "yay!", but also what you felt inclined to do about the topic (if anything), and how important or interesting your thought seemed.

How does thinking, in general, feel to you? (I conducted an informal survey of this and got no two answers the same. Anecdotally, it may be rather key to determining how you are different from others, and so in refining your model of yourself relative to the fairly generic priors we're starting with.) Coming up with a good way to conceptualize your style of thinking can help you interpret introspective data, although be sure to abandon a metaphor that looks about to snap. You might have different answers when you're "actively" thinking something through - i.e. when novel information is generated in your mind - and when you're thinking "passively", as when you read or listen to some information and absorb its content as it comes.

What memories did the thought dredge up, if any - parallel situations from the past, apparently unrelated anecdotes that floated by for no reason, events where yo...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.

This is Cartesian Frames, Part 7: The ABC's of Luminosity, published by Alicorn.

Sequence index: Living Luminously

Previously in sequence: Let There Be Light

Next in sequence: Lights, Camera, Action!

Affect, behavior, and circumstance interact with each other. These interactions constitute informative patterns that you should identify and use in your luminosity project.

You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the second story from Seven Shiny Stories.

The single most effective thing you can do when seeking luminosity is to learn to correlate your ABC's, collecting data about how three interrelated items interact and appear together or separately.

A stands for "affect". Affect is how you feel and what's on your mind. It can be far more complicated than "enh, I'm fine" or "today I'm sad". You have room for plenty of simultaneous emotions, and different ones can be directed at different things - being on a generally even keel about two different things isn't the same as being nervous about one and cheerful about the other, and neither state is the same as being entirely focused on one subject that thrills you to pieces. If you're nervous about your performance evaluation but tickled pink that you just bought a shiny new consumer good and looking forward to visiting your cousin next week yet irritated that you just stubbed your toe, all while being amused by the funny song on the radio, that's this. For the sake of the alphabet, I'm lumping in less emotionally laden cognition here, too - what thoughts occur to you, what chains of reasoning you follow, what parts of the environment catch your attention.

B stands for "behavior". Behavior here means what you actually do. Include as a dramatically lower-weighted category those things that you fully intended to do, and actually moved to do, but were then prevented from without from doing, or changed your mind about due to new, unanticipated information. This is critical. Fleeting designs and intentions cross our minds continually, and if you don't firmly and definitively place your evidential weight on the things that ultimately result in action, you will get subconsciously cherry-picked subsets of those incomplete plan-wisps. This is particularly problematic because weaker intentions will be dissuaded by minor environmental complications at a much higher rate. Don't worry overmuch about "real" plans that this filtering process discards. You're trying to know yourself in toto, not yourself at your best time-slices when you valiantly meant to do good thing X and were buffetted by circumstance: if those dismissed real plans represent typical dispositions you have, then they'll have their share of the cohort of actual behavior. Trust the law of averages.

C stands for "circumstance". This is what's going on around you (what time is it? what's going on in your life now and recently and in the near future - major events, minor upheavals, plans for later, what people say to you? where are you: is it warm, cold, bright, dim, windy, calm, quiet, noisy, aromatic, odorless, featureless, busy, colorful, drab, natural, artificial, pretty, ugly, spacious, cozy, damp, dry, deserted, crowded, formal, informal, familiar, new, cluttered, or tidy?). It also covers what you're doing and things inside you that are generally conceptualized as merely physical (are you exhausted, jetlagged, drugged, thirsty, hungry, sore, ill, drunk, energetic, itchy, limber, wired, shivering? are you draped over a recliner, hiding in a cellar, hangliding or dancing or hiking or drumming or hoeing or diving?) Circumstances are a bit easier to observe than affect and behavior. If you have trouble telling where you are and what you're up to, your first priority shouldn't be luminosity. And while we often have some trouble distinguishing ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.

This is Cartesian Frames, Part 6: Let There Be Light, published by Alicorn.

Sequence index: Living Luminously

Previously in sequence: You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue

Next in sequence: The ABC's of Luminosity

You can start from psych studies, personality tests, and feedback from people you know when you're learning about yourself. Then you can throw out the stuff that sounds off, keep what sounds good, and move on.

You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the first story from Seven Shiny Stories.

Where do you get your priors, when you start modeling yourself seriously instead of doing it by halfhearted intuition?

Well, one thing's for sure: not with the caliber of introspection you're most likely starting with. If you've spent any time on this site at all, you know people are riddled with biases and mechanisms for self-deception that systematically confound us about who we are. ("I'm splendid and brilliant! The last five hundred times I did non-splendid non-brilliant things were outrageous flukes!") Humans suck at most things, and obeying the edict "Know thyself!" is not a special case.

The outside view has gotten a bit of a bad rap, but I'm going to defend it - as a jumping-off point, anyway - when I fill our luminosity toolbox. There's a major body of literature designed to figure out just what the hell happens inside our skulls: it's called psychology, and they have a rather impressive track record. For instance, learning about heuristics and biases may let you detect them in action in yourself. I can often tell when I'm about to be subject to the bystander effect ("There is someone sitting in the middle of the road. Should I call 911? I mean, she's sitting up and everything and there are non-alarmed people looking at her - but gosh, I probably don't look alarmed either..."), have made some progress in reducing the extent to which I generalize from one example ("How are you not all driven insane by the spatters of oil all over the stove?!"), and am suspicious when I think I might be above average in some way and have no hard data to back it up ("Now I can be confident that I am in fact good at this sort of problem: I answered all of these questions and most people can't, according to someone who has no motivation to lie!"). Now, even if you are a standard psych study subject, of course you aren't going to align with every psychological finding ever. They don't even align perfectly with each other. But - controlling for some huge, obvious factors, like if you have a mental illness - it's a good place to start.

For narrowing things down beyond what's been turned up as typical human reactions to things, you can try personality tests like Myers-Briggs or Big Five. These are not fantastically reliable sources. However, some of them have some ability to track with some parts of reality. Accordingly, saturate with all the test data you can stand. Filter it for what sounds right ("gosh, I guess I do tend to be rather bothered by things out of place in my environment, compared to others") and dump the rest ("huh? I'm not open to experience at all! I won't even try escargot!") - these are rough, first-approximation priors, not posteriors you should actually act on, and you can afford a clumsy process this early in the game. While you're at it, give some thought to your intelligence types, categorize your love language1 - anything that carves up person-space and puts you in a bit of it.

Additionally, if you have honest friends or relatives, you can ask for their help. Note that even honest ones will probably have a rosy picture of you: they can stand to be around you, so they probably aren't paying excruciatingly close attention to your flaws, and may exaggerate the importance of your virtues relative to a neutral observer's hypothetical opi...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.

This is Cartesian Frames, Part 5: You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue, published by Alicorn.

Previously in sequence/sequence index: Living Luminously

Next in sequence: Let There Be Light

Luminosity is fun, useful to others, and important in self-improvement. You should learn about it with this sequence.

Luminosity? Pah! Who needs it?

It's a legitimate question. The typical human gets through life with astonishingly little introspection, much less careful, accurate introspection. Our models of ourselves are sometimes even worse than our models of each other - we have more data, but also more biases loading up our reflection with noise. Most of the time, most people act on their emotions and beliefs directly, without the interposition of self-aware deliberation. And this doesn't usually seem to get anyone maimed or killed - when was the last time a gravestone read "Here Lies Our Dear Taylor, Who Might Be Alive Today With More Internal Clarity About The Nature Of Memory Retrieval"? Nonsense. If Taylor needs to remember something, it'll present itself, or not, and if there's a chronic problem with the latter then Taylor can export memories to the environment. Figuring out how the memories are stored in the first place and tweaking that is not high on the to-do list.

Still, I think it's worth investing considerable time and effort into improving your luminosity. I submit three reasons why this is so.

First, you are a fascinating creature. It's just plain fun and rewarding to delve into your own mind. People in general are among the most complex, intriguing things in the world. You're no less so. You have lived a fair number of observer-moments. Starting with a native architecture that is pretty special all by itself, you've accumulated a complex set of filters by which you interpret your input - remembered past, experienced present, and anticipated future. You like things; you want things; you believe things; you expect things; you feel things. There's a lot of stuff rolled up and tucked into the fissures of your brain. Wouldn't you like to know what it is? Particularly because it's you. Many people find themselves to be their favorite topics. Are you an exception? (There's one way to find out...)

Second, an accurate model of yourself can help you help others deal with you in the best possible way. Right now, they're probably using kludgey agglomerations of self-projection, stereotype, and automatically generated guesses that they may not bother to update as they learn more about you. I'm assuming you don't surround yourself with hostile people who would use accurate data about you to hurt and manipulate you, but if you do, certainly be judicious with whatever information your quest for luminosity supplies. As for everyone else, their having a better model of you will avoid a lot of headaches on everyone's parts. I'll present myself as an example: I hate surprises. Knowing this, and being able to tell a complete and credible story about how this works, I can explain to people who might wish to exchange gifts why they should not spring unknown wrapped items on me, and avoid that source of irritation. Most of the people around me choose not to take actions that they know will irritate me; but without a detailed explanation of exactly how my preferences are uncommon, they'll all too easily revert to their base model of a generic person.

Third, and most germane to the remaining posts in this sequence: with a better picture of who you are and what your brain is up to, you can find the best low-hanging fruit in terms of hacks to change yourself. If you keep going from point A to point Z, but know nothing about the route in between, then the only way you can avoid a disliked Z is to try to come to a screeching halt right before it happens. If you could monitor the process from the start...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.

This is Cartesian Frames, Part 4: Living Luminously, published by Alicorn.

The following posts may be useful background material: Sorting Out Sticky Brains; Mental Crystallography; Generalizing From One Example

I took the word "luminosity" from "Knowledge and its Limits" by Timothy Williamson, although I'm using it in a different sense than he did. (He referred to "being in a position to know" rather than actually knowing, and in his definition, he doesn't quite restrict himself to mental states and events.) The original ordinary-language sense of "luminous" means "emitting light, especially self-generated light; easily comprehended; clear", which should put the titles into context.

Luminosity, as I'll use the term, is self-awareness. A luminous mental state is one that you have and know that you have. It could be an emotion, a belief or alief, a disposition, a quale, a memory - anything that might happen or be stored in your brain. What's going on in your head? What you come up with when you ponder that question - assuming, nontrivially, that you are accurate - is what's luminous to you. Perhaps surprisingly, it's hard for a lot of people to tell. Even if they can identify the occurrence of individual mental events, they have tremendous difficulty modeling their cognition over time, explaining why it unfolds as it does, or observing ways in which it's changed. With sufficient luminosity, you can inspect your own experiences, opinions, and stored thoughts. You can watch them interact, and discern patterns in how they do that. This lets you predict what you'll think - and in turn, what you'll do - in the future under various possible circumstances.

I've made it a project to increase my luminosity as much as possible over the past several years. While I am not (yet) perfectly luminous, I have already realized considerable improvements in such subsidiary skills like managing my mood, hacking into some of the systems that cause akrasia and other non-endorsed behavior, and simply being less confused about why I do and feel the things I do and feel. I have some reason to believe that I am substantially more luminous than average, because I can ask people what seem to me to be perfectly easy questions about what they're thinking and find them unable to answer. Meanwhile, I'm not trusting my mere impression that I'm generally right when I come to conclusions about myself. My models of myself, after I stop tweaking and toying with them and decide they're probably about right, are borne out a majority of the time by my ongoing behavior. Typically, they'll also match what other people conclude about me, at least on some level.

In this sequence, I hope to share some of the techniques for improving luminosity that I've used. I'm optimistic that at least some of them will be useful to at least some people. However, I may be a walking, talking "results not typical". My prior attempts at improving luminosity in others consist of me asking individually-designed questions in real time, and that's gone fairly well; it remains to be seen if I can distill the basic idea into a format that's generally accessible.

I've divided up the sequence into eight posts, not including this one, which serves as introduction and index. (I'll update the titles in the list below with links as each post goes up.)

You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue. Why do you want to be luminous? What good does it do, and how does it do it?

Let There Be Light. How do you get your priors when you start to model yourself, when your existing models are probably full of biases?

The ABC's of Luminosity. The most fundamental step in learning to be luminous is correlating your affect, behavior, and circumstance.

Lights, Camera, Action! Luminosity won't happen by itself - you need to practice, and watch out for key mental items.

The Spo...

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This is Cartesian Frames, Part 3: Generalizing From One Example, published by Alicorn.

Related to: The Psychological Unity of Humankind, Instrumental vs. Epistemic: A Bardic Perspective

"Everyone generalizes from one example. At least, I do."

-- Vlad Taltos (Issola, Steven Brust)

My old professor, David Berman, liked to talk about what he called the "typical mind fallacy", which he illustrated through the following example:

There was a debate, in the late 1800s, about whether "imagination" was simply a turn of phrase or a real phenomenon. That is, can people actually create images in their minds which they see vividly, or do they simply say "I saw it in my mind" as a metaphor for considering what it looked like?

Upon hearing this, my response was "How the stars was this actually a real debate? Of course we have mental imagery. Anyone who doesn't think we have mental imagery is either such a fanatical Behaviorist that she doubts the evidence of her own senses, or simply insane." Unfortunately, the professor was able to parade a long list of famous people who denied mental imagery, including some leading scientists of the era. And this was all before Behaviorism even existed.

The debate was resolved by Francis Galton, a fascinating man who among other achievements invented eugenics, the "wisdom of crowds", and standard deviation. Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. The ones who did had simply assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't had simply assumed everyone didn't, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were lying or misunderstanding the question. There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery1 to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images2.

Dr. Berman dubbed this the Typical Mind Fallacy: the human tendency to believe that one's own mental structure can be generalized to apply to everyone else's.

He kind of took this idea and ran with it. He interpreted certain passages in George Berkeley's biography to mean that Berkeley was an eidetic imager, and that this was why the idea of the universe as sense-perception held such interest to him. He also suggested that experience of consciousness and qualia were as variable as imaging, and that philosophers who deny their existence (Ryle? Dennett? Behaviorists?) were simply people whose mind lacked the ability to easily experience qualia. In general, he believed philosophy of mind was littered with examples of philosophers taking their own mental experiences and building theories on them, and other philosophers with different mental experiences critiquing them and wondering why they disagreed.

The formal typical mind fallacy is about serious matters of mental structure. But I've also run into something similar with something more like the psyche than the mind: a tendency to generalize from our personalities and behaviors.

For example, I'm about as introverted a person as you're ever likely to meet - anyone more introverted than I am doesn't communicate with anyone. All through elementary and middle school, I suspected that the other children were out to get me. They kept on grabbing me when I was busy with something and trying to drag me off to do some rough activity with them and their friends. When I protested, they counter-protested and told me I really needed to stop whatever I was doing and come join them. I figured they were bullies who were trying to annoy me, and found ways to hide from them and scare them off.

Eventually I realized that it was a double misunderstanding. They figured I must be like them, and the only thing keeping me from playing their fun games was that I was too shy. I figured they must be like me, and that the onl...

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This is Cartesian Frames, Part 2: Mental Crystallography, published by Alicorn.

Brains organize things into familiar patterns, which are different for different people. This can make communication tricky, so it's useful to conceptualize these patterns and use them to help translation efforts.

Crystals are nifty things! The same sort of crystal will reliably organize in the same pattern, and always break the same way under stress.

Brains are also nifty things! The same person's brain will typically view everything through a favorite lens (or two), and will need to work hard to translate input that comes in through another channel or in different terms. When a brain acquires new concepts - even really vital ones - the new idea will result in recognizeably-shaped brain-bits. Different brains, therefore, handle concepts differently, and this can make it hard for us to talk to each other.

This works on a number of levels, although perhaps the most obvious is the divide between styles of thought on the order of "visual thinker", "verbal thinker", etc. People who differ here have to constantly reinterpret everything they say to one another, moving from non-native mode to native mode and back with every bit of data exchanged. People also store and retrieve memories differently, form first-approximation hypotheses and models differently, prioritize sensory input differently, have different levels of introspective luminosity1, and experience different affect around concepts and propositions. Over time, we accumulate different skills, knowledge, cognitive habits, shortcuts, and mental filing debris. Intuitions differ - appeals to intuition will only convert people who share the premises natively. We have lots in common, but high enough variance that it's impressive how much we do manage to communicate over not only inferential distances, but also fundamentally diverse brain plans. Basically, you can hit two crystals the same way with the same hammer, but they can still break along different cleavage planes.

This phenomenon is a little like man-with-a-hammer syndrome, which is why I chose that extension of my crystal metaphor. But a person's dependence on their mental crystallography, unlike their wanton use of their hammer, rarely seems to diminish with time. (In fact, youth probably confers some increased flexibility - it seems that you can probably train children to have different crystalline structures to some degree, but much less so with adults). MWaH is actually partially explained by the brain's crystallographic regularities. A hammer-idea will only be compelling to you if it aligns with the crystals in your head.

Having "useful" mental crystallography - which lets you comprehend, synthesize, and apply ideas in their most accurate, valuable form - is a type of epistemic luck about the things you can best understand. If you're intrinsically oriented towards mathematical explanations, for instance, and this lets you promptly apprehend the truth and falsity of strings of numbers that would leave my head swimming, you're epistemically lucky about math (while I'm rather likely to be led astray if someone takes the time to put together a plausible verbal explanation that may not match up to the numbers). Some brain structures can use more notions than others, although I'm skeptical that any human has a pure generalist crystal pattern that can make great use of every sort of concept interchangeably without some native mode to touch base with regularly.

When you're trying to communicate facts, opinions, and concepts - most especially concepts - it is a useful investment of effort to try to categorize both your audience's crystallography and your own. With only one of these pieces of information, you can't optimize your message for its recipient, because you need to know what you're trans...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.

This is Cartesian Frames, Part 1: Sorting Out Sticky Brains, published by Alicorn.

tl;dr: Just because it doesn't seem like we should be able to have beliefs we acknowledge to be irrational, doesn't mean we don't have them. If this happens to you, here's a tool to help conceptualize and work around that phenomenon.

There's a general feeling that by the time you've acknowledged that some belief you hold is not based on rational evidence, it has already evaporated. The very act of realizing it's not something you should believe makes it go away. If that's your experience, I applaud your well-organized mind! It's serving you well. This is exactly as it should be.

If only we were all so lucky.

Brains are sticky things. They will hang onto comfortable beliefs that don't make sense anymore, view the world through familiar filters that should have been discarded long ago, see significances and patterns and illusions even if they're known by the rest of the brain to be irrelevant. Beliefs should be formed on the basis of sound evidence. But that's not the only mechanism we have in our skulls to form them. We're equipped to come by them in other ways, too. It's been observed1 that believing contradictions is only bad because it entails believing falsehoods. If you can't get rid of one belief in a contradiction, and that's the false one, then believing a contradiction is the best you can do, because then at least you have the true belief too.

The mechanism I use to deal with this is to label my beliefs "official" and "unofficial". My official beliefs have a second-order stamp of approval. I believe them, and I believe that I should believe them. Meanwhile, the "unofficial" beliefs are those I can't get rid of, or am not motivated to try really hard to get rid of because they aren't problematic enough to be worth the trouble. They might or might not outright contradict an official belief, but regardless, I try not to act on them.

To those of you with well-ordered minds (for such lucky people seem to exist, if we believe some of the self-reports on this very site), this probably sounds outrageous. If I know they're probably not true... And I do. But they still make me expect things. They make me surprised when those expectations are flouted. If I'm asked about their subjects when tired, or not prepared for the question, they'll leap out of my mouth before I can stop them, and they won't feel like lies - because they're not. They're beliefs. I just don't like them very much.

I'll supply an example. I have a rather dreadful phobia of guns, and accordingly, I think they should be illegal. The phobia is a terrible reason to believe in the appropriateness of such a ban: said phobia doesn't even stand in for an informative real experience, since I haven't lost a family member to a stray bullet or anything of the kind. I certainly don't assent to the general proposition "anything that scares me should be illegal". I have no other reasons, except for a vague affection for a cluster of political opinions which includes something along those lines, to believe this belief. Neither the fear nor the affection are reasons I endorse for believing things in general, or this in particular. So this is an unofficial belief. Whenever I can, I avoid acting on it. Until I locate some good reasons to believe something about the topic, I officially have no opinion. I avoid putting myself in situations where I might act on the unofficial belief in the same way I might avoid a store with contents for which I have an unendorsed desire, like a candy shop. For instance, when I read about political candidates' stances on issues, I avoid whatever section talks about gun control.

Because I know my brain collects junk like this, I try to avoid making up my mind until I do have a pretty good idea of what's going on. Once...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Unweaving of a Beautiful Thing, published by atb on December 26, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

It had been eighteen minutes since Death had arrived and the witch had refused to be taken.

The spell was like spiderweb, intricate threads woven into the world, and Death had paused to admire it. They’d known that the witch might fight, for the powerful often greeted them with defiance. Fire had been flung at Death in every hue, while others they’d visited had attempted deceit, offering up innocents cloaked in their own guise. One wizard had tried a love spell, not understanding that Death already loved them all. But the witch’s web was something new; it was an attempt to trap Death in its threads. It was elegant and audacious and cunning, and yet.

“You are aware,” said Death, “that this approach will fail?”

The witch had turned forty a week before, and when she smiled, crow’s feet appeared at the corner of her eyes. “You’re right, it’ll probably fail. Still, it’s worth a try. Besides.”

She trailed off, and Death finished the sentence for her, having heard the sentiment many times before, “Besides, you would rather go out fighting.”

The witch frowned. “No, why would I.” She rolled her eyes. “Is that what other people say? You deal with a lot of morons, don’t you?”

Death did not comment.

“It’s beautiful,” the witch said, gesturing along the Melbourne laneway where they sat. Shoe-box cafes ran its length, tables spilling onto the pavement along with the smell of coffee. Graffiti turned the walls into a riot of colour, and the sound of milk steaming mingled with shouted orders and laughter and chatter. People strode along the alleyway, ducking in and out of cafes, oblivious to Death and the witch.

“I suppose it has its own sort of beauty,” Death said.

The witch nodded, plucking at the edges of her spell. “I plan to enjoy it for every minute I can buy myself.”

Death sighed. “I do have others to visit.”

“And every minute you spend with me is a minute that they too get to look for beauty.” The witch drummed her fingers on the table, before tilting her head. “You could just leave us alone, you know?”

This strategy was familiar. Normally people would beg for a day or week or eternity, but though the witch showed unusual calm, the impulse was the same.

“You are aware,” Death said again, “that this approach will fail?”

The witch shrugged. “I’m aware you’re not capable of questioning your purpose, but it’s worth a try. Besides.” This time, when the witch trailed off, Death waited. The witch smiled. “Besides, it gained me a few seconds, didn’t it?”

“I suppose it did.”

Death turned from the witch and studied the spell once more, testing its strength and tracing its lines. It had been twenty-one minutes since they’d arrived, and by their best guess, in nine minutes and fifty seconds more they would have the spell unpicked. Their hands began to flow.

The witch’s spell was elegant, but Death unweaved it with a speed that no mortal could match. They did not enjoying doing so, but they did not allow this fact to slow them. Enjoyment was not the point. Still, they were disappointed when the spell withered faster than expected. Nine minutes and fifty seconds they’d guessed, but just six minutes had passed when they were ready to break the final strand.

They paused, half hoping the witch would say something to delay the end, but she just smiled and sipped a coffee she’d ordered while Death had been busy. Death sighed. They made the final gesture.

“Oh fuck,” Death said, as everything went wrong.

The web of the spell snapped back, threads that had been unweaved stitching themselves into the world once more. Only, this time, Death had been enmeshed with the disintegrating spell and, as it regrew, it ensnared much of their power. Death reflected on this fact.

“That was devious,” they s...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Merry Christmas, published by lsusr on December 26, 2021 on LessWrong.

This year I was robbed at gunpoint for the first time. Most importantly, I wasn't shot. I don't think my assailants ran a careful calculation about whether it was in their interest to shoot me or know. I think they just preferred not to execute me unless they had to. True psychopaths are rare. I am grateful for the compassion those two desperate young men extended to me.

A reader of this blog sent me a lovely email complimenting me for being "adversarial". It made my day. When people write me nice comments and send me nice emails it's rare for me to read them fewer than three times.

There's a YouTube channel called Binkov's Battlegrounds which I sometimes watch when I'm doing research for this blog. The creator ends every video the same way.

[R]emember, Binkov may talk about hypothetical wars, but only real peace can bring us all together.

The same goes for this blog. I may talk about hypothetical wars.and real wars.and war crimes.and so on. But only real compassion can bring us all together.

This Christmas, I'd like to express love and gratitude.

For the readers who write nice comments and send me nice emails. I love you all.

For the readers who write mean comments and send me mean emails. I love you too.

For the readers who upvote and downvote my posts.

For the readers who have better things to do than create a Less Wrong user account.

For Daniel Kokotajlo and Steven Byrnes with whom I have had illuminative conversations.

For the Lightcone team.

For the authors who write books and articles I enjoy. There are too many of you to name.

For every person motivated to do good, regardless of its utility.

For the mad scientists doing gain-of-function research.

For my friends.

For my enemies.

For the factory workers and salespeople of Shenzhen who make the stuff I use and whose existence reminds me how cushy my life is.

For the proletariats of Vietnam who remind me how cushy life in China is.

For peasants of history who remind me how cushy life in modern Vietnam is.

For billions of strangers I will never meet.

For whatever comes after humanity, if it be sentient.

For incomprehensible horrors of incredible power.

For kittens.

For everyone who has ever harmed me. I forgive you.

For everyone who ever will harm me. I forgive you too.

For the two desperate young men who took my wallet. I hope you bought something nice with the $35 cash in it. I'm glad we could coordinate a mutually beneficial outcome.

I love each and every one of you. Merry Christmas to all. To all, a good night. ❤

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