• Thomas Hobbes thought humour was about feeling superior to others. If he’s right, he won’t be laughing much, since his theory sucks.

• Francis Hutcheson thought humour was about realizing that something is incongruous. Like long acrylic nails on a police dog, or a funeral where the eulogizer breaks into speed-yodeling. Or a sentence where you imply that Thomas Hobbes’ theory sucks if it is right – and that’s the reason his dusty corpse won’t be laughing. At first your brain tries to interpret things seriously, but a moment later you realize that’s absurd!

• Herbert Spencer and Sigmund Freud thought that humour was due to relief, or the discharge of repressed “psychic energy” which builds up due to false expectations.

• Much more recently, McGraw and Warren suggest that humour is the result of a violation that is also taken to be benign.

If we leave out the theory of superiority – the inferior theory, here – the punchline these theories share is that a joke works because of how we deal with surprise. Our expectations are violated, but the violation is overcome / the stakes are lowered.

• Incongruity theory is about frame-breaking. You start with the assumption that things must be normal, and then you see the leprechaun grasp the stripper pole.

• Relief theory suggests that false expectations are the source of internal pressure, which is released by a folksy pressure valve – as if the brain ran on some law of conservation-of-emotion.

• Benign violation theory makes it a bit clearer that people laugh at different things. Some people take a violation more seriously than others. What counts as “benign” depends on context.

None of them are clear about where laughter comes from, though.

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Laughter is classically treated as just the obvious symptom of humour – you could refer to either laughter or humour and be pointing at the same thing: Hutcheson’s book on humour is called Thoughts on Laughter, and Spencer’s is The Physiology of Laughter. But laughter and humour are not the same. Laughter is a motor action; humour is a mental move. Most of us have laughed without joy before, or suppressed laughter when it would be inappropriate.

One theory of laughter is that it’s a play signal. Play is important because it allows us to get close to being in a dangerous situation without actually being in much danger. It’s a low-stakes simulation where we practice for a higher-stakes future.¹ Since we want it to be a good simulation – and since sometimes there could be real violence between the same people who played together – the players need to make it clear to each other that they’re playing. Laughter says this isn’t serious.

Other mammal species play, and have play vocalizations that are similar to human laughter. Play in its oldest and stupidest form is about physical aggression, but the same vocalizations could be adapted for more subtle games, like wordplay. So we end up laughing to indicate “this isn’t serious disrespect, it’s just a stand-up comedian simulating disrespect, ahaha we’re all just playing right now”. (Some audience members will not find the violation so benign.)

But laughter-as-play-signal doesn’t explain how laughter evolved in the specific form it did. Why the rapid contractions of the diaphragm? Why not just make some other noise or movement for “playing”? Maybe because laughter is particularly simple and legible, even when it’s difficult to make other noises? I’m not satisfied.

There’s an ancient coupling between breathing, brain activity, and emotions. When you slow down and hold your breath for a moment, your body becomes more still. Predators are less likely to notice you, and you are more likely to notice them. After a second or two, you grow more confident in your surroundings, enough to breathe harder and move around. There’s a rhythm between moving-and-breathing, and stopping-and-slowing. Change your surroundings, then process the consequences, then repeat.

Even a solitary animal has these rhythms. And since they use them anyway, they’re ready to be adapted for social purposes: a single exaggerated exhalation could serve as a signal to neighbours that this is a low-threat moment, and maybe a good time to move a bit. Later, a single exhalation transforms into a series of repeated exhalations which signal something similar, but more strongly and over a longer period – like during play.

That’s my favourite hypothesis about the embodied origin of laughter: it’s a caricature" of exhalation, which had already been coupled – at a lower level – to the dynamics of fear, perception, and relief.

Sure, I have plenty left to say. Several of my fellow residents reassured me of that. They wondered, like everyone who’s talked to me for more than five minutes – or like that one 12-year-old asked me once, when I was 5 – how do I know so much?

Well, I have a sticky brain. It’s in my nature to hyperfocus, to find everything interesting. Before I can even consent, a deep part of me grabs at the kernels of information and squirrels them away, as though in fear of some never-ending winter of unknowing.

Don’t be quick to envy this trait of mine. It’s complicated. Until my mid-20s, there wasn’t much incentive for me to be a person with coherent preferences. High school was stressful, but it was trivial. What use are independence or agency, when you can absorb everything that any teacher requires of you, and all your joy is in the exploration, and some of the other students hate and demean you for it? No, no, you double-down and paper over your mind with even more ideas, more ideas all the time, at the expense of everything else.

You ask him what time it is, and he tells you how a fucking clock works.

• A perceptive acquaintance, once upon a time

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Undergrad was not much more difficult than high school, but the cracks in my personality started to widen. Life in a distant city! No more parents and no more overseers! Suddenly I could kiss people and drink alcohol and have all sorts of new experiences. (I was still almost too timid to have them.) All those delights – plus the realization of what I’d been denied – stood out in my mind, pointy as any of the ideas I’d loved. Because the source of my “talent” was never simply “memorizing schoolwork” – it was “having pointy senses”. The one leads into the other.

You can cover that in the “autism” umbrella if you want. You’re half-right, at least. But how much does that label help me? Usually it feels more like a conversation-ender. Now we know what MLL is. Phew! Now we can move on.

A lot has happened since undergrad. I went to grad school for the first time. To do research, you need to have preferences. Shit. How do you do that? The view from the inside of being-a-hoard-of-information is that everything is contextual. Words and objects are convenient packages, but actually, everything is connected. Interest is everywhere and nowhere. I didn’t start my master’s program in fluid dynamics because of a strong pull towards the field, nor was there some other direction pulling strongly-enough-away to make me quit. All around were cliffs, and my fear to approach them. I lingered for months and months, near-motionless and slowly imploding.

Of course, in the end I had to quit. And to move forward, I’d have to learn to choose something. But how? How could I build up “I should focus on something“ against the onslaught of “I am focusing on everything“? At the time, I couldn’t. I grew depressed. I languished for years.

Suffering isn’t the incentive any of us deserve, but it’s the one I got. Slowly, slowly, it bent me towards defined interests and introspective competence. I grew a fulcrum.

Now I have the capacity to act on my own behalf. I can choose what to say! Sometimes though, if I don’t spend time talking with the friends who help me to keep my interests bound, my mind runs overboard, adrift in the ocean of ideas. No words volunteer themselves. I know everything, which is nothing. And I can say nothing.

This post is to remind me that I have changed, that I’ve found a better way, and that there are friends I should talk to more.

At the beginning of the month I was drinking one cup of tea a day. I kept up my habit until April 21st, when I went cold turkey. No headaches – but depressive thoughts and intense emotions, for a couple of days. On April 22rd I wrote a thing telling people to stop taking caffeine every day. The poem at the end gives a glimpse of my bleak state of mind, the night before.

I haven’t had any caffeine since then, but I have had a few conversations, and more time to think… and I still agree. Stop taking caffeine every day! Actually, stop taking [stimulant] every day! That applies not just to me at Inkhaven, but to most people, most of the time.2

Imagine this: a close friend comes to you to confide that they’re taking a drug every day, and when they stop, they go through withdrawal. They’re pained and irritable and can’t work well. What do you hope they’ll do? Maybe you wouldn’t just tell them directly to stop it, because you’re aware of the danger of giving advice. But wouldn’t it be better if they found themselves on the other side of withdrawal, with no more dependence?

Your friend is convinced that the drug makes them more productive. You ask how they know this. After a bit of back-and-forth they retreat to “I feel really groggy and irritable and unmotivated before I take it” and also “I’ve never gone more than three days in a row without taking it since I was in high school”.

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Arjun Panickssery suggests Consider working more hours and taking more stimulants.

Famous intellectuals, artists, and statesmen throughout history often took stimulants, sometimes in copious amounts. Silicon Valley culture has a similar reputation. Besides lifestyle interventions like lifting weights (12% chance of a life-changing effect), sleeping more, and running, there could be huge information value from experimenting with modafinil or amphetamines like Adderall (12.5% chance [of a life-changing effect])

That 12.5% chance of a life-changing effect is based on online self-reports. People took a survey, and some of them reported taking amphetamines, of which 12.5% rated them a 10/10 on the “useless to life-changing” scale. Troof, who collected and analyzed the results, points out the flaw: “You take a pill. It makes you feel good. You go on a website which asks you how good the pill is. You say it’s awesome. Little did you know that it was, in fact, merely good."

Amphetamines release dopamine. They inflate your confidence across the board – they corrupt the system that makes the ratings! There’s little evidence that they are cognitively enhancing in general. They might improve processing speed. Why processing speed? You become faster at doing a thing when you’re more instantly confident, and lock in more quickly at each step. But this only works if you already have a series of steps to lock into.

One day at Inkhaven, I took a bit more of my amphetamine prescription than usual.3 Several of us took a walk to the beach. I took my shoes off to walk in the sand. As we were about to leave, I saw my shoes, and immediately put them on while we were still on the sand. Not great. Why would I do that? I don’t visit beaches much, so I don’t have a strong beach-specific prior about when to put my shoes back on – though the answer is obvious as soon as I reflect on it (wait until you’re off the sand). No, my closest-to-automatic model was “put your shoes on when it’s time to go on a walk”, and I locked in as soon as the opportunity arose.

Amphetamines bias you towards known actions. Similarly, they increase motivation and perseverance a bit. So go ahead, as Arjun suggests: consider taking more amphetamines. They might help, and they’re probably physically harmless. But once you start, they don’t need much help from you! They will self-rationalize just fine.

Now, none of that touches on chronic usage specifically – and this post is about not taking [stimulant] every day! Well, an execution bias is useful sometimes, like when you need to grind something out. But when you put yourself in a locks-in-easily, highly-automatic, low-empathy state every day, then all of your learning is shaped by that bias. Are you sure that’s good? Remember, the drug is bending your mind to make you think it’s good, and it takes more than a day or two of abstinence to see outside that.

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What about caffeine?4 Gwern has a review of the caffeine research. There’s not a lot. Some of it says caffeine has negative effects on memory retrieval. It clearly has negative effects on sleep. And none of the research says chronic caffeine is good for cognitive performance.

[It’s] not clear that caffeine results in performance gains after long-term use; homeostasis/tolerance is a concern for all stimulants, but especially for caffeine. It is plausible that all caffeine consumption does for the long-term chronic user is restore performance to baseline. (Imagine someone waking up and drinking coffee, and their performance improves - well, so would the performance of a non-addict who is also slowly waking up!) See for example, James & Rogers 2005, Sigmon et al 2009, and Rogers et al 2010. A cross-section of thousands of participants in the Cambridge brain-training study found “caffeine intake showed negligible effect sizes for mean and component scores” (participants were not told to use caffeine, but the training was recreational & difficult, so one expects some difference).

What does the long-term caffeine user look like? I see a spectrum of types. Roughly from worst to best:

1. they are neurotic all the time and simply cannot stop taking more caffeine because withdrawal makes them feel even worse;

2. they are drowsy or irritated, especially right after waking, and caffeine makes it go away, and also causes it (through tolerance and withdrawal);

3. they drink a lot of tea or coffee but seem to be immune to withdrawal effects; drinking tea/coffee/whatever is basically an aesthetic garnish to their life.

After presenting the research and side effects of caffeine, Gwern continues (emphasis mine):

For me, my problems tend to be more about akrasia and energy and not getting things done, so even if a stimulant comes with a little cost to long-term memory, it’s still useful for me. I’m going continue to use the caffeine. It’s not so bad in conjunction with tea, is very cheap, and I’m already addicted, so why not? […] Suppose there was conclusive evidence on the topic, the value of this evidence to me would be roughly $0 or since ignorance is bliss, negative money - because unless the negative effects were drastic (which current studies rule out, although tea has other issues like fluoride or metal contents), I would not change anything about my life. Why? I enjoy my tea too much. My usual tea seller doesn’t even have decaffeinated oolong in general, much less various varieties I might want to drink, apparently because de-caffeinating is so expensive it’s not worthwhile. What am I supposed to do, give up my tea and caffeine just to save on the cost of caffeine?

The talk of energy and akrasia makes me think Gwern is #2, since there’s not much reason to believe that chronic caffeine gives energy that can’t be had by doing things we should be doing anyway, i.e. sleep and exercise and meal-timing.

I’m just as productive as I ever was, now that I’m active and caffeine-free. And I feel better. It’s subtle: on caffeine, I did feel better after having my coffee or tea – and there was a pretense, that it gave me more energy than I would otherwise have – but in hindsight that was self-deception. I was at the mercy of my drives, and all my reasons were bent around them. To do away with the self-deception, I had to do away with the bent memories of the “better” things. I had to soften part of my mind and put myself in something like the state I would’ve been in, had I never gotten fixed on tea in the first place. I love tea, but now I am okay living mostly without it; if I start taking it again, I’ll be more selective.

Ignorance may be bliss, but if we are aiming for wisdom instead of an unreflective status quo built out of the accidents of our personal histories, then we should want to do better. Don’t you want to know what your life could be like? Say, if you had never been addicted to that thing you’re addicted to? Don’t you want to know if you are papering over your experience with something shallower, more mindless? Do you care if what you’re experiencing is cope, or if it’s deeply real? Do you just want to go fast and get to the ending – all endings, all the time?

Do you like being at the mercy of forces you only pretend to control?

They slip away, though we grasp

and grasp.

Maybe you’ll never feel this again.

Maybe you never got to feel it, at all.

Children grow to love the world.

The world breaks, but love is stubborn. The hands clutch the jagged unfixable shards, the scarred unfeeling remnants, and bleed.

The eyes drink in the blood, and weep.

The hands, still holding the shards, grow stiller.

Unwashed, the blood dries.

Drying, the tears tighten the cheeks.

The eyes dim.

A nightmare,

a hungry hoard that takes and swells and takes and swells and

a mind that expands everywhere, encompasses everything, becomes everyone, and

stagnates forever.

Memory is fixity.

Knowledge is fixity.

Fixity is next to death.

The fear of death drives us out of ignorance, and into the arms of death disguised.

Maybe our bodies don’t need to die.

Maybe they will become better later. (I hope they will become better, later.)

Maybe we could keep only what most needs keeping.

I’m reminded of the dearness of forgetting.

Have I always been here?

Memories grow distant.

These are my friends. These are our memories.

Some of them will stay. Some will fall away, into eternity.

Will you let them live there, or will you bleed?

Think of everything you’ve never had the chance to love; of everyone you’ve never had the chance to know.

Think of the undiscovered places in your heart. Think of all the space you could make there.

Do you remember your childhood?

You could be a child again,

if only you weren’t a hoarder

like I have been.

Inkhaven ends today. It’s been the most meaningful month of my life.

Some of us came here wanting the space to write great things. We all had to confront our standards. I know the danger of standards; my own past is a vortex of perfectionism. So my main goal was not greatness (appealing as that is) but the beginnings of balance – in effort, intention, and openness. I feel a deep sense of okayness with how that turned out.

This is the first event where I’ve been really comfortable with myself, from the beginning. That’s partly down to the great friends in Montréal who’ve helped me to finally grow up, these past three years, and who will be there for me when I return. It’s partly because at last I have the clarity to avoid caffeine and alcohol.1 But partly, it’s due to some secret third thing, which has given me strength because I have not insisted on trying to name it as I interacted with the wonderful people here.

I do not find it easy to finish this. I keep looking at the wordcount... I already know how I feel. I trust my new friends to know. So who is this for?

If you find it meaningful, then it is for you.

Friends, I’ve already prepared a space in my heart for you.

If it ever seems otherwise, you should know: it’s only because I’m still a child – and sometimes, I am afraid.

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You worthless piece of shit, you’re definitely gonna be part of the permanent underclass.

Traders are varying degrees of pretentious and paranoid. And why shouldn’t they be? They make more money than you. They expose themselves to more information than you. Obviously they’re in the right position to make all the important decisions. They’re stretching their intelligence to the limit. And all for the market, which is the world, practically speaking. We should thank them! Things are as good as they are, because of traders. They’re at the frontier of all that matters. Of course they’re better than you.

They don’t need to say it, though. It’s self-evident, and void of alpha.

You know that “red button versus blue button” thought experiment that’s been lurching around the internet like an excessively fresh corpse?

My friends fixated on this question for a day or two. They’ve fixated on similar questions before. Every time, the sickness is short, but they’re always ready to be infected again.

After all, if we don’t think through the problem, the red button pushers might get us. Death. Death. DEATH!

The question kept our group chat occupied. I responded, but I wasn’t eloquent. I failed to express that 1) of course I agree we should be thoughtful, and that whether people press red or blue depends on where they live, and how long they think it through, and whether they get to push the button for their children, and… … but also 2) that they were sniped so easily by the question made it clear that they had a hidden tendency to self-harm.

One of them, understandably misunderstanding me, implied that I was succumbing to the chaos of controversy. You angry, bro?

No. I’m willing to die if it means that the world will be more than 50% blue pushers, forever. I think some of my friends would claim the same,1 but the more they’re fixated on the button question, the less I believe them.

Not that my willingness to die even means anything here. How could anyone prove that my death would achieve such an outcome? I guess I’d need to be a trader to have access to that information. But then I almost certainly wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice myself. Catch-22.

Wisdom and intelligence are not the same thing. Do you know when not to think? Do you even know how? Do you think that you can gain an understanding of negative space by applying your frantic brushstrokes over the entire canvas? Don’t be silly. You are incompetent.

Go – sit down. Close your eyes, but not to sleep. Practice not thinking until you stop frantically pooping ink all over the page while secretly, in that place you paper over with rationality, you flee like a child from annihilation.

If you’re new to classical, here’s a bit of context:

• Treat it like going to an art gallery. Wear headphones for the best experience. When you don’t know a piece yet, put all your attention on it, get absorbed in the detail and the harmony.

• A big difference between classical and (say) pop music is that there usually isn’t an official version of a classical piece. Every recording is a cover, in a sense.

• Different recordings of the same piece are made by different performers with different setups. So you can have a recording that is better in terms of feeling, but really old and fuzzy because it was made with ancient or badly-placed microphones. You can also have a crystal clear recording from 2026 where the musician plays like a soulless robot. (If you like one of the pieces here, I suggest you check out some other recordings of the piece to get a better sense of this.)

• I’ll share Spotify links when I can, but sometimes a recording is only available on YouTube.

One more thing

In this post I share a bunch of vocal pieces. Listening to classical singing (e.g. opera) is different from listening to modern singing. Before the invention of microphones and speakers and recordings, a singer had to project their voice over an entire theatre. A loud orchestra might be playing at the same time. So, classical singing is exaggerated and its dynamic range is compressed upwards. A modern singer can whisper softly into a microphone when they want to be intimate; a classical singer needs to “gently yell”. This is similar to how a stage actor uses exaggerated and audience-facing body language and facial expressions, but a film actor in closeup can depend on the smallest of their expressions being visible to viewers.

It doesn’t take much time to get used to classical singing, but before that happens, you might find it kind of loud and flat. And there are a lot of mediocre classical singers, so the point about different recordings of the same piece becomes even more relevant.

Wagner

This asshole was a multimodal genius. Before him, an opera was a flowery sausage-chain of dialogues and arias, bound up in a ludicrous corset. Composers usually didn’t write the story or the words (libretto) themselves, but composed their music to fit existing texts. The grandiose took precedence over the profound.1

Wagner wanted to create a comprehensive work of art, a synthesis of all available media.2 He used his creative judgment to write the story, words, music, and stage directions for all his later operas. He also insisted on through-composition, meaning a continuous stream of music rather than discrete arias mingled with dialogue.

His most famous work is Der Ring des Nibelungen (i.e. “The Ring of the Nibelung” or just “The Ring”) a four-part opera cycle composed between 1848 and 1874. The story has many similarities to The Lord of the Rings, including, among others:

• a ring, forged through a perverse sacrifice by the villain, gives him mastery over the world; corrupts anyone else who tries to bear it; and is returned to its origin upon its destruction;3

• an exiled Hero of Men reforges a fateful sword which belonged to his ancestor;

• a wanderer in a cloak influences the plot from the sidelines (Wotan/Gandalf);

• a treacherous, pathetic figure is obsessed with the ring (Mime/Gollum);

• industrial corruption under the influence of the ring (Nibelheim/Isengard).

The piece at the beginning of this section is the opening prelude of the cycle. It depicts sunrise on the Rhine river, which is the only real-world location mentioned in the operas. The Ring’s music is woven out of many leitmotifs which represent different aspects of the fantasy world; here, at the very start, we have an uncomplicated arpeggio which represents the purity of primordial nature.

I’ll share just one other piece from The Ring: the funeral march of the central hero, Siegfried. He is a fearless and unconquerable warrior loved by all, until he is tricked into breaking a sacred oath, and killed by the villain’s bitter son.

Here are two more selections from other works by Wagner. First, the sublime prelude to Parsifal, his final opera:

And the pilgrims’ chorus from Tannhäuser, on their return home:

Beglückt darf nun dich, o Heimat, ich schauen,
With joy I may now behold you, O Homeland,
und grüßen froh deine lieblichen Auen
and gladly greet your lovely meadows.

Mahler

Some people are obsessed with Mahler. I’m not, but I do want to share the opening movement from Das Lied von der Erde (“The Song of the Earth”), a symphony which he didn’t number as such, out of superstition.

This movement is called Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde (“The Drinking Song of Earth’s Sorrow”) and is a loose translation of 悲歌行 (“Song of Sorrow”) by the famous Tang dynasty poet Li Bai.

I recommend following along with the lyrics.

Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod.
Dark is life; is death.

Richard Strauss

I bet you recognize this.

Strauss was the consummate post-Wagnerian. He has all the power and beauty of Wagner, but more refined and complex and modern.

I know what I want, and I know what I meant when I wrote this. After all, I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.

Don’t listen to his self-deprecation. He’s one of the best. In the early 1900’s he started to transition from late Romanticism to early Modernism with his operas Salome and Elektra, but then receded back into Romanticism instead of proceeding fully into atonality. Good for him.

Salome is probably my favourite opera. If you’re new to opera, this is a good one to start with. It’s only 100 minutes long and there’s a decent film recording of it. It tells the story of the ancient Judean princess who demanded the head of John the Baptist (named “Jochanaan” in the opera). The German text is an abridged but direct translation from Oscar Wilde’s only French play, which takes a lot of artistic license with the original biblical story, and portrays Salome’s motivation as infatuation.

Here’s the very end of the opera. Salome has successfully obtained the head on a silver platter and kissed it (“why wouldn’t you kiss me?”). She notes that he has a bitter taste on his lips, wonders aloud whether it’s the taste of love (“they say that love has a bitter taste”), then shakes her head and exalts in her victory (“what does it matter? I’ve kissed you!”) before being killed by the palace guards on the orders of her superstitious stepfather Herod.

His next opera, Elektra, is also excellent. It’s more modernist, more polytonal, and tells revenge story of the ancient princess. Elektra wants to kill her mother Clytemnestra for having murdered her father Agamemnon (for having sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia before going off to Troy). Instead, their exiled brother Orestes (Orest in German) shows up and does the deed.

In this clip, Elektra’s sister has an ecstatic meltdown because she had been led to believe that Orestes was dead. The sisters share a duet before Elektra dances herself to death, ending the opera:

Strauss, like Schubert, was a talented composer of art songs or lieder. Here’s a beautiful example:

And tomorrow the sun will shine again
and on the way that I will go,
she will again unite us, the happy ones
amidst this sun-breathing earth,
and to the beach, wide, wave-blue
will we still and slowly descend
silently we will look in each other's eyes
and upon us will sink the mute silence of happiness

(literal translation from the German)

Stravinsky

Igor is another transitional composer between romanticism and modernism. He’s famous for composing The Rite of Spring. Here’s the end of the first section:

Sound weirdly familiar? It directly influenced the soundtrack to Star Wars. This is super obvious if you compare the beginning of the second section with the Tatooine dune sea music.

I’ve been lifting regularly since last November, but slacking off with my cardio practice – until this past Saturday, when Sean Herrington taught me to use the rowing machine here at Lighthaven. After our workout I was shocked by the intense taste of the same old flavour of carbonated water I’d been drinking for weeks. I was overwhelmed by the cheesiness of a slice of cheese pizza. I was captivated by sights and smells and music, as though they were new again.

Why did the intensity of my senses increase so much?

What are the subjective effects of cardio?

The acute mental effects of cardio, i.e. a “runner’s high”, classically include:

• an increase in baseline hedonic tone (d=0.47, moderate effect; dose-dependent on duration and intensity)

• a decrease in the perception of pain (d=0.41-0.59, moderate effect)

• a slight decrease in anxiety (Hedge’s g=0.16)

“Sedation” is sometimes also included in this cluster. I put it in quotes because it refers to studies where rodents run on treadmills for a while, then lose interest in continuing to run on treadmills. This does not imply sleepiness, and it would be more accurate to call it “movement satiation”. There’s no study that provides evidence that this occurs in humans. Though (n=1) I become relaxed and unmotivated (but not sleepy) after cardio, but not after strength training.

There is also evidence that the sense of taste is altered during and immediately after cardio. The reported intensity of sweet and umami flavours increases; the preference goes up for sweetness, and down for umami. Cardio burns calories; if certain tastes become more intense or appealing, does that mean we’re more likely to eat food and replenish those calories? Not necessarily: appetite is suppressed for 30-60 minutes after the end of a cardio session. What’s up with that?

Endorphins vs. endocannabinoids

A popular folk theory says that the effects of cardio are caused by the release of endorphins. However, people still get high if you give them naltrexone, a drug that blocks the effects of endorphins – so, they aren’t necessary to cause the high.

A recent meta-analysis asks whether the cause of the high is the release of endocannabinoids (eCBs). In 14 out of 17 human studies that were included in the analysis, blood levels of anandamide (a major eCB) increased after cardio. They mostly couldn’t correlate this with any of the classical effects except for elevated hedonic tone.

At first glance the eCB hypothesis fits with my n=1 observation that cardio makes food more interesting: THC is well-known to have this effect, and it works by the same mechanism as eCBs.1

The other classical effects of cardio also overlap with the effects of cannabis: euphoria (i.e. an increase in hedonic tone) and a decrease perception of pain. The slight decrease in anxiety seen with cardio is harder to explain, given that THC can cause anxiety. However, this may not be surprising given the outsized effect of recreational THC compared to normal levels of eCBs.

It’s already been shown in mice that the cannabinoid receptor CB1 – the site where THC and eCBs produce their effect – is necessary for the analgesia and anxiolysis of cardio. This is encouraging, though there’s no such evidence in humans because the current consensus is that it’s unethical to administer CB1 antagonists; they sometimes cause crippling depression.

An answer to the puzzle

Back to my original question:

Why did the intensity of my senses increase so much?

Suppose eCBs are a proximal cause of the runner’s high: we know that eCBs are similar to THC, and that THC is mildly psychedelic and increases sensory intensity, among other effects associated with a runner’s high.

But why do eCB levels increase after exercise, leading to these effects? What’s the advantage, the bigger picture? Why would evolution recruit this mechanism?

Consider:

1. An animal is a bounded agent, and must decide how to spend its attention: exploit familiar environments, or explore unfamiliar ones?

2. Our ancestors were all foragers of some kind. There’s a natural rhythm to foraging: a bout of energetic movement, followed by a bout of gathering/hunting/feeding/rest, followed by another bout of movement, and so on. Oscillating between explore and exploit.

3. To our ancestors, cardio generally meant moving through the environment to a different place than they started from. Hamsters run on stationary hamster wheels, but this is not an ancestral setup, any more than a rowing machine. There are some limited examples that might count as stationary cardio, such as hovering (e.g. hummingbirds) or lekking, but they are in addition to foraging, and don’t interfere with our logic.

4. Cardio changes the internal state of the body, e.g. due to prolonged energy expenditure in the muscles, or motor rhythms in the brain. The body may produce (and observe) signals of these changes, in addition to signals direct from the external environment.

5. Evolution takes advantage of reliable statistics. If a certain internal state of my body is strongly correlated to a certain external state of the world, even if it is not caused by it, then my body may have evolved to rely on the internal state as a proxy.

Here’s a sketch: an animal decides to move to a new location to search for food. It moves for some time, which shifts its metabolism to a “cardio state”. Some internal signal of this state is produced. Its nervous system receives the signal, and it gets ready to switch to a bout of hunting/gathering/feeding. In particular, it becomes more sensitive to stimuli so that it’s well-prepared to sample the environment, and to decide when to slow down and limit its sampling to a smaller area. As this happens, it appears to become more “sedated”.

Point 5 is necessary to explain my experience after the gym. A rowing machine is stationary. I’m not actually moving through my environment when I use it; I’m not seeing the world move past my eyes. Yet my brain still reacts as though I am exploring, and getting ready to gather and feed and rest. That suggests it’s relying on some internal signal as a proxy.

As for the eCBs, they are the proposed internal proxy signal. They’re synthesized peripherally, increasing their blood levels, from where they cross into the brain and stimulate CB1 receptors to cause behavioural changes. It’s unknown where the synthesis happens, but we at least know that the machinery for eCBs is expressed in muscle and fat. So, blood eCBs might be a low-level signal sent from muscle or fat cells, to the brain. This is a clean fit with our hypothesis since these cell types play a direct role in the physiology of cardio.

The complete hypothesis, and final thoughts

Prolonged muscle activation (i.e. during cardio) induces the release of endocannabinoids from muscle or fat cells into the blood, which enter the brain and drive it towards a high-salience (i.e. “high sensory intensity”), slowing-down state suitable for gathering/feeding/resting.

This happens even when the cardio is stationary, because ancestrally, cardio was so strongly correlated with not being stationary that our bodies evolved eCBs as an internal signal of bouts of movement through the world, and thus the timing of explore versus exploit. In modern times the signal has become more decoupled, and the eCBs have become less reliable as a proxy of movement.

Raichlen & Alexander 2017 proposed a similar hypothesis linking cardio and cognition in the context of foraging rhythms, but they did not frame it in terms of reinforcement learning (explore-exploit) or internal signals/proxies.

Importantly, this likely isn’t the only mechanism for driving the brain into a high-salience, slowing-down state during foraging. For example, the brain can observe that its motor cortex has been pulsing rhythmically for half an hour, which should also be strongly correlated with movement in the environment. But muscles and fat are where the actual movement and most of the energetic cost happens, such that they can provide a more robust signal.

If true, this hypothesis provides insight into the phenomenology of cannabis. If we treat THC as a larger-than-life version of the signal that prepares our bodies to enter the gathering/feeding/resting stage of foraging, this explains its stereotypical effects: it makes you lazy, shortens your planning horizon, and it makes it easier to enjoy everything.

Appendix I: Some gripes

• What if you’re moving through the environment not because you’re intentionally foraging, but because a predator is chasing you? Well, if you escape the predator, you might as well gather/feed/rest when you get the chance to stop. The statistics and the incentives are similar, assuming you have to deal with sneaky predators regardless.

• A preliminary RCT suggests that the cardio → eCB connection might only be relevant for species that are adapted for running. This is fine; we’re focusing on humans, and humans are adapted for running. In other species, foraging/hunting may be more of a steady baseline, or only involve sprinting but not cardio, such that the eCB signal is less useful.

• CB1 receptors are located throughout the brain, and it might not make sense to isolate one or more circuits and say they are entirely responsible for the downstream effects of eCBs released during cardio.

• A lot of the evidence depends on the cardio being of a certain duration and intensity. I have mostly avoided dealing with this in this post. I assume there will be individual differences, and methodological weirdness, but that there is a general foraging-based mechanism that

• I’ve not addressed strength training in this post.

  • It’s more in-place, and not as clearly related to foraging dynamics as cardio is.

  • There are many more studies of cardio, than there are of strength training.

  • It has an even stronger painkilling effect than cardio. However, it doesn’t increase plasma eCBs nearly as much as cardio does, which suggests the hypoalgesia might have multiple causes.

  • I find its mental effects quite different from those of cardio. This aligns with eCBs not being synthesized nearly as much.

Appendix II: Central mechanisms of eCBs, once they are released

Evidence here is limited and I’ve had little time to review it, so this is just a sketch.

CB1 receptors are located throughout the brain, and I’m not sure it makes sense to isolate one or more circuits and say they are “responsible” for the downstream effects of eCBs released during cardio. But there are a couple of circuits worth mentioning:

• The locus coeruleus (LC) is implicated in global control of the explore-exploit tradeoff across the brain. It expresses CB1 receptors, which are inhibitory on firing of LC norepinephrine neurons. It’s unclear how this affects high-salience exploratory behaviours, and during exercise there are other signals that drive up LC activity. I suppose there’s some dynamical balancing act here, related to the 30-60 minute post-exercise appetite suppression, and how the effects of the eCBs don’t manifest until the other signals to LC disappear.

• eCBs also modulate the LC input to prefrontal cortex, and this might be part of the cause of the “loose attentional filter” seen in cannabis phenomenology.

• The dopamine neurons that project from the VTA to NAc synthesize their own eCBs which diffuse backward across the synapse and bind to CB1 receptors on GABA terminals, decreasing the inhibition of the respective dopamine neuron. That is, the neurons are “self-unblocking”. In the literature, this is associated with a positive feedback process of “wanting” things, i.e. motivation to pursue reward.

• NAc expresses its own eCBs and CB1 receptors independently of the VTA→NAc pathway. In the literature, this is associated with an unconditional reward state.

Have something to say

I almost left this one out. It’s personal and hard to explain. Maybe you want to express some different things than me. But you need to start with something to express.

For me, a poem begins as a vibe and maybe some pairs of rhyming words. The story only becomes clear once it’s half-written. I’ve discussed this process before.

Rhythmic sense

I’ve been learning the piano for two decades. I can tap my fingers at all kinds of regular rhythms, syncopated rhythms, and polyrhythms. I have a sense of how beats build into musical phrases.

It’s a basic skill that transfers from music to poetry. It feels similar in both cases. Syllables are beats, stressed or unstressed, that build into verses.

I don’t think I’m exceptional among musicians. I’ve just trained more than the average writer. You could, too.

Choice of words

After getting some feedback from Scott Alexander and other mentors at Inkhaven, I’ve been trying not to use so many “big” words in some of my posts. It’s unnecessary and confusing for readers who might not share my semantic proclivities.

Poetry’s different. Some poems might only use single-syllable words, for effect. Others are more ornate, like Persian carpets. The choice of words alters the flavour. Some people might dislike the flavour of some poems. That’s expected.

Vocabulary is also trainable. The best way to train is to enjoy reading authors who are good at using many words. They don’t need to be poets; the word-choice skill transfers between prose and poetry.

You can even invent your own words,1 though I suggest you spend thirty years on a mountaintop using all the words that already exist, before you try to do that.

Word choice interacts in complicated ways with rhythm. Synonyms might not have the same number of syllables, or the same stresses; you can’t just swap them out. They might not rhyme, and they might not be made of similar sounds. All of these things affect the local flavour of verses. As far as I can tell, the only way to train for this interaction is to write poems and see how it feels to edit them.

A bird in your brain

When the same word is repeated many times, you start to perceive it as meaningless meaningless meaningless meaningless meaningless meaningless meaningless meaningless meaningless meaningless meaningless meaningless. It’s no longer a meaningful whole, but instead simple chain of sounds.

For me, words disintegrate into sounds almost instantly. For example, I was discussing this post with Alec Thompson and he used the term “Common English”. I understood him, but “Comma Ninglish” also spontaneously appeared in my mind.

As a child I experienced palilalia, or strong urges to repeat certain phrases. I’d get hooked on some nonsense like “zoobledy bop”. After a week or a month (zoobledy bop!) I’d switch over to a new bit of nonsense (tinch harst!). It wasn’t completely involuntary – more of a sudden internal excitement that would be relieved once I said the nonsense. Otherwise, the urge dissipated more slowly.

As an adult I have more equanimity, and no difficulty controlling the urges, which are less frequent. But the tendency is still there, and it serves as a bridge between rhythm and word choice: it’s easy for me to flip between words-as-meanings and words-as-sounds. I guess this is trainable, but I didn’t really need to train it. It’s a side effect of autism or something. If I have some natural advantage, this is it.

Now go write some poetry

You can develop rhythmic skill by learning a musical instrument, or by learning to recite metric poetry by other authors.

You can develop vocabulary by reading good writers that use a lot of interesting words, poets or not.

You can only train the combination of the two by writing some metric poetry or song lyrics yourself. So go write a bunch of sonnets2 or something, until all of this makes intuitive sense to you.

I’d already been in Europe for a couple of months on a research exchange to Marburg in the German state of Hesse. Marburg is no Paris, but it’s still beautiful and charming by my impoverished North American standards: a castle on a hill, with the old city cobbling its way down the sides, and growing more modern as it wends into the surrounding valleys. In 2022 the citizens were celebrating the 800th anniversary of the first documented reference to Marburg’s city status. There’s a döner kebab restaurant across from St. Elizabeth’s Church, the most significant church in the city; a path leads behind the restaurant and up onto the next hill over. Continue for 10 minutes and you’ll find a small obelisk commemorating a nature walk taken by the local Crown Princess on 13 May, 1814.

On Saturday in Paris we left our hostel to explore the city a bit. I’ve never seen so many bollards in my life. A manifestation of French restraint.

We climbed Montmartre to the famous Sacré-Cœur Basilica. It’s an imposing building, though having been completed during WWI, it’s surprisingly young by the standards of Parisian landmarks. We also visited the slightly older Eiffel Tower, and the Arc de Triomphe.

I also learned that the City of Paris, like all great institutions, is interested in putting a stop to rats.

I drank a little too much wine that night, so I wasn’t feeling great on Sunday. Our train back to Frankfurt would depart late in the afternoon. We decided to go to the Louvre for half a day. First, we deposited our bags in a café across the street, which stored them for a small fee. Then we proceeded to the main entrance at the glass pyramid. It’s surrounded by pools infested with the strangest and most incompetent pigeons I’ve ever met in my life. Beady-eyed and aimless. I did not see them anywhere else in Paris. Perhaps they are an emanation of the Louvre itself?

Then we were inside. I’d already been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC before, and the experience was kind of similar. Endless halls.

I like fine art, but also I find it stupefying to peruse paintings one-after-the-other for hours. Besides, there wasn’t nearly enough time to see everything. So I mostly stuck to the antiquities.

With each exhibit, I felt worse and worse. At first I thought it must be the sleep deprivation from the hangover, catching up with me. As we finished up in the museum and headed out into the Tuileries to sit down for a drink, I started to think I might be getting sick. I drank an expensive sparkling water (the French seem to be less savvy in the carbonation department than the Germans) and settled into a mild delirium.

After some time, we noticed it was getting busy. Okay; that’s not unexpected on a beautifully sunny Sunday afternoon.

After some more time, we noticed it was getting really busy. Well, we had to catch our train soon anyway, so we headed back in the direction of the café to grab our luggage. The crowds became thicker and thicker along the way. Then, we ran into the barrier: we couldn’t cross the street that runs through the central courtyard of the Louvre. There were barricades on either side, lined with people and police officers.

Did you know that on the final day of competition, the Tour de France enters Paris? We didn’t. The cyclists pass through the courtyard of the Louvre. Everyone was there to see it happen. Suddenly we were frantic to find a way around. We walked back up the grounds a bit to another potential exit; no luck. We tried to use the subway station – which has entrances on both sides of the street – as a shortcut, but it had been closed for security reasons a moment before. Désolé, monsieur. We finally crossed to the river side of the grounds and tried to find a way to loop around to the café. No avail; it was decidedly on the wrong side of the path of the cyclists, and we would not be able to get around without taking a massive detour that would certainly see us miss our train anyway.

So we missed our train, at the cost of several hundred dollars. I suffered one more night in Paris, feeling increasingly sick. We travelled back to Germany the next day. In my misery I felt pretty awful about taking the train and exposing, maybe infecting other people, but I did not have the money or the agency to choose differently. Thankfully, everyone on the train was still masking at the time.

I did a COVID test once I got back to Marburg. It was my first time testing positive or showing symptoms; somehow I’d managed to miss the four big waves that had happened between 2020 and early 2022. My throat dissolved into a single large and painful ulcer. When the fever broke, I spent time watching the first three seasons of Succession, and slowly got back to work.

After a week and a half, I finally tested negative and emerged from my Airbnb to blink, disoriented, in the sunlight. I walked to the döner place, and up the hill behind where, like that princess had done two centuries earlier, I soaked in the simple beauty of nature.

“That sounds scary and addictive” is a reasonable first reaction.

For sure it can be scary. Newbies often have trouble entering the ‘bliss state’ for more than a second or two because it’s so surprising and overwhelming that their reflective mind yells something must be wrong with me, how can this be happening and kicks them back out of it.

Addiction is rare. Instead, the blissee gets excited about the newfound experience and spends time on it regularly for some weeks. Then they start to lose interest. They also become less interested in other addictive habits, like having an extra slice of cake after dinner, or using recreational drugs like alcohol for social reasons.

This is weird. It clashes with our usual intuitions about how pleasure grabs our attention and coerces us to seek it out – the intuitions that stop many of us from taking heroin for fun on the weekends.

So what’s going on here?

The first jhana is maximally pleasurable, but minimally reinforcing. This makes sense if there is a distinction between how our brains want, versus enjoy.

Wanting is about some thing. My nose perks up at the first hint of dinner. My eyes flicker around the room and pick out things I might want to eat, or games I might want to play, or people I might want to have sex with, or doors I might follow to other rooms, and so on.

Liking is just an internal state. A sign that says “Like!” pops up; enjoyment occurs. Maybe the sign pops up when we get something we want; but maybe that’s not a strict rule.

The first jhana is anti-addictive because it cultivates enjoyment that’s free of any particular desire – the internal state, unhooked from external temptation. By entering this state, we get embodied evidence that undermines the map-territory confusion which says that enjoyment lives in the external object of desire, and can’t be had without that object. Actually, the enjoyment lives in you. The object is incidental. Another object, a more healthy or virtuous object, could do just as well.

As long as you haven’t internalized that, the objects of your desire hold a tyranny over your mind. Your current conception of what you should desire might be pretty good, but in hindsight it’ll still be inadequate. And you are at its mercy. But when you know that whatever you currently desire doesn’t hold a monopoly over your enjoyment, then you have the freedom to make better choices with less fear of personal sacrifice.

Naively, the first jhana looks like reward hacking. But for human brains, addiction means being hooked-in to sensations from the world. The first jhana teaches us to see beyond that.

I withhold my judgment about the final form of my values. Yours, too.

Still, humans are not so different underneath. What keeps us different is that we run from the straightforward.

You want to go to that restaurant. You want to watch that movie. You want to go fishing. You want to travel to the state park, or Broadway, or the rodeo. To Montana, or Japan, or Croatia, or Brazil.

You want a good life. Probably you want a smart, funny, happy, beautiful partner. Maybe you want smart, funny, happy, beautiful kids.

You want success. You want to get that promotion. You want to quit and start again.

You want stability, and uniformity, and protection, and quiet, and sanity.

You want instability, and freedom, and noise, and chaos.

You want to want things. You want to be free from wanting things.

You want to feel something. You want to not feel something.

None of this is so hard to explain. Simple, actually. But your mind lifts off from the simple. Life intervenes.

You can’t feel relieved until this is over. You must solve this problem first.

Your feelings are a distraction. You can’t deal with them right now. But ultimately, they’re what drove you here. To this little realm of forgery, and complacency, and contingency. This inadequate place. Even this hell.

You do it for your children? They will do it for their children. It is just as beautiful as you know it is. But you are distracted, more than you could be. There is more friction than there should be. Your children do not deserve how much you keep yourself away and unfeeling. But you have no time to learn what is underneath you. That’d be unpredictable and dangerous and weird.

You don’t value beauty? Truth, then? Truth lights the path... that takes you away from the straightforward. Truth is good; you can have it. Paths are good; you should follow them. But how often will you return? Will you travel into the desolate salt plains, and losing yourself, build a home there forever, for you and your children?

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You are lost in a wilderness right now. Did you know that?

Work is important. Precision is important, certainly. But that is not where beauty and love live. Not exactly. Have you ever found them within you, uncomplicated? I promise you, you can find them there. They may seem distant and quiet, but all you need is patience, and you will find them there. Then, you will start to find them in everything.

Universal love? You do not want all humanity to collapse into a mindless union, and I agree. Exploration is good; even stagnation can be good. They are part of our story. I do not want to take our story away. I do not want to short-circuit our childhood. Do you find it silly that you were ever an infant?

Will you try to reform the universe in your image? Are you striving for glory? Do you think you are creating something important? Maybe I agree. But where does glory live? What does it serve, there?

Do you think you can escape death?

You do not need to give up your job, your hobbies, your restaurants, your fishing, your movies. You do not need to give up your family. Perhaps you will not even die for a very long time.

Do not try to predict the future of your feelings, not exactly. Do not try to perfectly control them. You will be disappointed. I promise you will either destroy yourself, or be disappointed.

Do not try to exactly predict the future of my feelings. Do not assume my complications are your complications. Well, sometimes they are, but the only way you will know is by seeing through your own complications first.

Remember all of this, if you find yourself wanting to give advice. The things we share most are the simple things. If you do not see that first, your advice is just a story about your own complications. There is value in that, but it is not the best you can do.

I bet you’re skeptical, especially if you’re already an addict. You’re doing yourself a disservice! Stop taking caffeine every day.

I can see the stress in your eyes, and that your work is grating, and that you do not sleep as well as you could. I can hear the edge in your voice, and the shape of your rationalizations. I’m not convinced.

Are you one of those people that can drink 10 cups of coffee every morning and feel nothing? Congratulations, you have rare and interesting genetics and this post is not for you. But also, if you’ve been drinking so much, for as long as you can remember (which in practical human terms is a week or two), then how do you know any better? I’m not convinced.

I’m not saying we’re all the same. For me, withdrawing from even 30 mg of caffeine is an intense experience. I’m probably more sensitive than average... but I’m not convinced. And it doesn’t change my point: daily caffeine consumption is an error because daily consumption of any stimulant is an error.

I don’t care how much money you make or how successful you are. That’s not because of your daily habit, but in spite of it. Do you even remember what it’s like to be sober? Have you experienced any beauty, lately? Do you even want to?

Yes, caffeine is a drug, and you are dependent on it. Yes, it makes you “high”, as in different, even though it doesn’t feel amazing enough to be socially weird.

If I had to summarize caffeine in a word, it’d be running. So, what are you running from? Where are you running to? Got the runs? Slow the fuck down and stop voluntarily turning yourself into an emotionally blunted task-golem.

Stimulants work better after a break. If I don’t take caffeine for a week or two, it’s a fucking revelation. An absolute breath of cognition. When I take it every day, it’s like whipping a horse that’s already galloping. Do you think whipping makes you better at what you do?

“But MLL, I stopped drinking coffee for a month and then I had a coffee and it felt just the same”. I believe that’s the way you felt. But do you even know how to pay attention to the inside of your own mind? I’m not convinced.

Stop taking caffeine every day. Reduce it slowly if you have to. I know withdrawal is unpleasant. But the fact that you are experiencing withdrawal is evidence.

Be wiser.

Here, have this depressing poem I wrote when withdrawing from a mere 30 mg daily caffeine habit. It doesn’t reflect my normal thoughts and it doesn’t necessarily reflect anything you’ll feel when you’re in withdrawal.

went walking up the stairs last night and paused
before the door; behind it they were waiting
for me. no, not waiting, not for me,
singing to each other, souls agape
with alcohol, and my soul opened too
but not enough. i walked back down,
but turned again, back up, halfway
as though i’d changed a mind never made.

i think i might be a broken person,
a piece of literal animal garbage.
i’ve taken too long to grow up now.
why am I here? what... who will employ me?
nobody wants to see if I will
make it the rest of the way and slowly,
slowly, slowly, like death, like dying,
might was well die. have you heard me weep
with nothing left to prove? it’s finished,
it couldn’t matter how loved, how deep.
i do not want to be a jester.
i want to do more than entertain,
but it seems that’s what’s in it for me,
pianos and bread, trivial noise,
all useless shit installed in my brain.
now laugh, now snap your fingers, now still
and quiet, now steel and blood and sleep.
it doesn’t matter how loved, how deep.
i’ve done all these things I cannot prove,
and my life floats on by, a whispering cloud,
while something welling in me fails to be LOUD.

If you’re new to classical, here’s a bit of context:

• Treat it like going to an art gallery. Wear headphones for the best experience. When you don’t know a piece yet, put all your attention on it, get absorbed in the detail and the harmony.

• A big difference between classical and (say) pop music is that there usually isn’t an official version of a classical piece. Every recording is a cover, in a sense.

• Different recordings of the same piece are made by different performers with different setups. So you can have a recording that is better in terms of feeling, but really old and fuzzy because it was made with ancient or badly-placed microphones. You can also have a crystal clear recording from 2026 where the musician plays like a soulless robot. (If you like one of the pieces here, I suggest you check out some other recordings of the piece to get a better sense of this.)

• I’ll share Spotify links when I can, but sometimes a recording is only available on YouTube.

Philip Glass

You’ve probably heard some music by Philip Glass (1937–). He’s a 20th century minimalist, though he doesn’t identify that way.

He described himself as a composer of "music with repetitive structures"

His music is in fact very very repetitive. This is good because it gives you time to “get it” during your first listen. It’s not so good when you want music that changes quickly, like if you have no attention span or something.

One thing I like is his opera Akhnaten, which tells the story of the pharaoh that decided that everyone should worship the sun disk instead of all the usual Egyptian gods. Here’s the opera’s intro, which has no singing but does have a badass narration at the end which is part of an English translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Here’s a scene with vocals. Something quite unusual about this scene is that Akhnaten (the first voice to enter) sings in a higher register than the other two characters, who are both women (his wife Nefertiti and his mother Queen Tye).

For good measure, here’s the Glass piece that has the most listens on Spotify.

Schubert

Once upon a time I fell in love with a syphilitic Viennese guy that died 200 years ago. He wrote over 600 songs, and is one of the composers most responsible for how songwriting evolved in the 19th and 20th centuries. Being short and chubby, his friends gave him the nickname Schwammerl, or “little mushroom”.

Like Beethoven, Schubert is classed as both late Classical1 or early Romantic. But where Beethoven sometimes seems like he’s trying to beat the truth out of the universe, Schubert feels more natural and beauty-oriented.

Schubert popularized the impromptu, a kind of short single-movement piano piece. Here’s the best recording of the best impromptu.

Schubert wrote a ton of music, and I find a lot of it a little too simple to re-listen. But near the end of his short life, he wrote some really profound and intimate stuff. Here’s one of the best examples. The performer (Sviatoslav Richter) takes an unusually slow tempo, which creates an ethereal and meditative vibe.2

The next piece is popular, usually known as Schubert’s Ave Maria and sung using the Latin words of the prayer. But this recording uses the original German text instead, which isn’t a literal translation of the Hail Mary but describes a young girl praying to Mary. It also uses a fortepiano, the kind of piano that Schubert played, which is the precursor to the modern piano.

Here’s one more piece of Schubert’s played on a fortepiano, and then a second recording by the same performer but on a modern piano:3

Chopin

He arrived on the scene shortly after Schubert died, and is his natural successor in a way, but more complex, technical, and Polish-flavoured instead of Viennese.

Almost everything he wrote is magical. He’s more popular than Schubert, so for now I’ll just share one of my favourite nocturnes.

Godowsky

Leopold Godowsky was one of the best pianists of all time, and one of the musicians who added the most to the art of composing for the piano. He was also a big fan of Schubert and wrote a tribute to him: a passacaglia, which is a bunch of variations with a shared bassline. Here, the bassline comes from the beginning of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony 8. Turn up the volume and listen to the first 12 seconds of this:

Now the variations. In some of them, Godowsky ropes in other Schubert themes as well, including the famous Erlkönig.

He also wrote a bunch of variations on Chopin’s Études. The Études are famously difficult, but Godowsky’s variations are considered some of the most difficult piano pieces ever written. For example, first consider this Chopin original:

And now the Godowsky’s incredible variation, called “Ignis fatuus”, which is Latin for will-o’-the-wisp, or the ghostly, dancing lights seen at night by travellers in European folklore.

Fin

In the future, I’ll make more posts about the music I like: Bach, Wagner, Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, and others. And maybe some non-classical stuff, too.

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First there’s this caricature of conservatives: criminals are criminals and they don’t deserve our thoughts. They deserve war. We shouldn’t spare any of our noble feelings for murderers and rapists or anyone else who might destroy our families and culture. Would you smile at an approaching tiger? We must never fail to remain robust to evil, and protect ourselves from enemies even if that makes us intolerant of the people who only might be enemies. Sorry, but it’s a price worth paying.

Then we have the woke leftist: Nobody is intrinsically evil. They’re just traumatized and confused. If we could show them their mistake, they would agree that our way is better. (Why can they not see their mistake?) Prison doesn’t help people. In fact it tends to make them worse, and even if it didn’t we’d still hate it for its cruelty. We need better systems of rehabilitation. No person, however evil, deserves to be totally cast aside. There must be some way to show them!

Both of these extremes are silly but also real, and we can gain some insight from them.

When something big and unpredictable (like a bad parent) messes with someone over and over, they learn to expect the worst case. They can’t know when the interference will show up, but they can protect themselves from being knocked over by clinging harder to what they already know, and making sure not to let any strange forces through the doors of their mind. It doesn’t matter if the enemy is “truly” an enemy, only that it is pushy and unpredictable, like a big government with opaque goals.

This method of protection doesn’t depend on the details of what’s being protected against. “Don’t let strange forces into your mind” is applied to all sorts of things the person only assumes are suspect. This includes useful information and skills they don’t know yet, like how vaccines actually work. Nothing gets in; the high-threat mode is already on. They know what they know, and they cling to it with all their might, and there is almost no way to get in and help them. Helpers might as well be the enemy, too.

This is the conservative extreme. It doesn’t care about the circumstances of strangers. It cares about walls. It builds up insensitivity to everything that isn’t already known.

The woke also succumb to this effect, they just do it in a more complicated way. Perhaps they have a nicer childhood and a fuller education before they are battered by “enemies” for the first time. More information gets in before the doors close, giving a taste of a better world before snatching it away. No, you cannot have that, an enemy has taken it from you. And just like the extreme conservatives, the woke end up doubling down on what they already know, and walling themselves off to new information, like what it’s like to drive a truck for 12+ hours a day for shitty wages, or what it’s like to be an average German citizen post-World War I. Enemies become unthinkable monsters rather than fellow humans failing to cope with trauma.

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I think all of us agree that the world could be better. Children could be saved from illness and death and coercion. The best way to get there is through knowledge and cooperation. Think of the work of all the physicists that let us design MRI machines to save children from cancer. You can’t reach that kind of knowledge when you’re stuck behind a wall! You can benefit from the knowledge that already exists, but you have no right to hope for more. You build a wall, and your children die in pain.

The extreme conservative is worse for this. They wall themselves off earlier. They’re more defeated about an open-ended future that blooms with beauty and family and MRI machines. They recede into the known. But they’re also right about at least one thing: you cannot stop a hungry tiger with your empathy. Sometimes a wall is necessary.

One failure of the extreme woke is to reject that empathy is ever misplaced, or that walls are ever necessary, while putting up walls of their own to insulate those beliefs. There are other failures of the woke, but they are complicated and silly and deserve their own post.

I’m willing to give a little thought to every human, even the horrible criminal that killed a child. In a sense, killers are dead children themselves. How can we let that happen?

Evil exists because the world can’t stop hitting itself. To save your children from a painful death, learn to give up your paranoia and at least some of your walls. Accept that most of your perceived enemies aren’t the tigers you saw them for, and encourage them to accept the same about you. The tigers evaporate, as you both admit this.

Some tigers will always remain, but knowledge and cooperation can make short work of that.

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First, some facts about collagen:

• It’s the most abundant protein in vertebrates, including humans.

• It’s a structural protein that’s found pretty much anywhere that tissues need to be held together.

• There are 28 types, all of which are present in humans, but more than 90% by mass is type I in skin, tendons, ligaments, bones, and blood vessels.

• All proteins are made of amino acid building blocks, joined in a sequence and then folded. Fully one-third of the blocks in collagen are the amino acid glycine. Collagen is by far the best food source of glycine. The next highest sources (beef/chicken muscle and egg white) have only about 10-20% as much, as a percentage of their protein content.

Your body needs glycine to synthesize its own collagen, i.e. to maintain all of those tissues I mentioned. Glycine is not essential. Your body can make its own. The main mechanism for glycine synthesis depends on how quickly the other product of that synthesis, 5,10-methylene-THF, can be disposed. And it is in lower demand. There are pathways to purge the excess 5,10-methylene-THF, which should free capacity for more glycine synthesis during dietary austerity, but there is some preliminary evidence to suggest that this might not occur. In particular, biomarker studies suggests that both omnivores and vegetarians may be functionally limited by the availability of glycine; i.e. they don’t have any to spare. It is unfortunate that there has not been a more powerful study yet to more clearly demonstrate whether glycine is bottlenecked in this way.

Assuming that the bottleneck is real, a 70 kg adult might only be able to synthesize 3 g/day of glycine. Combined with an average intake of 2-3 g/day across dietary types, this is well below the ~12 g/day due to collagen turnover + ~5 g for the synthesis of glutathione, creatine, heme and other products, all of which are more critical than collagen and will take precedence in the case of competition. The gross collagen turnover of ~12 g/day is likely covered by the glycine recycled from the body’s existing collagen, but there is some waste, and more is needed when the total amount of collagen in the body is increasing day-to-day, such as during anabolism (e.g. exercise-induced) or healing from a major injury.

If I’m really only getting 6 g/day through diet and my body’s own synthesis, and if my body has limited capacity to compensate during austerity, and assuming some overhead due to synthesis of new collagen and waste losses, then I may be several grams of glycine below the optimal dietary intake.

Here’s a major objection: pure glycine supplements are available. So why wouldn’t I just take extra glycine directly and avoid the animal products altogether?2

• It seems to be ideal to take glycine at night, before sleep, as it has sleep inducing3 effects, delayed by about an hour on an empty stomach. In my case,4 it does help me to fall asleep, but I lurch awake after 5-6 hours and cannot get back to sleep unless I take more glycine (ideally 1 h before I wake up...), and then I sleep longer than I should. I could try to consume smaller amounts of glycine throughout the day, but 1) this increases friction, and the likelihood that the habit will fail, and 2) some of the positive effects may depend on taking a bolus, i.e. a single larger dose, as from a meal containing a significant amount of collagen.

• Proteins are broken down into smaller pieces and ultimately into single amino acids during digestion. Thinking in the usual terms of “choose your protein sources so you get enough of all the essential amino acids”, we might assume that collagen would be fully digested and absorbed only as its individual amino acids, such as glycine. However, it is well-known that partially digested collagen peptides (in particular, chains of two and three amino acids) are absorbed intact. There is a preliminary study in rats that shows that these peptides end up in skin and connective tissue cells after consumption. It’s uncertain whether they have special signaling properties that might be optimal for collagen synthesis; there are some suggestive but weak studies in vitro (e.g. 1, 2), but these use much higher concentrations of collagen than we should expect to see in human tissues after absorption.

• There are some modest RCTs that support supplementation of hydrolyzed collagen for skin hydration and elasticity, as well as pain in knee osteoarthritis. However, these studies are generally industry-sponsored, which is suspect even though meta-analyses support small-to-moderate effects. It’s unclear whether similar effects should be seen for glycine supplementation alone, however some of the skin RCTs show effects at doses that are low enough that should rule out glycine as the cause (e.g. might be a peptide signaling effect).

• This is more speculative, but suppose that our ancestors tended to eat more parts of an animal. That means higher overall collagen consumption, since muscle tissue is relatively poor in collagen content. At the same time, there were almost certainly populations that didn’t consume so much collagen. Perhaps they suffered for it no more than we do, but that doesn’t mean it’s optimal. Evolved systems tend to fail gracefully as much as they can; bad joints and slow healing are a hindrance rather than an obvious death sentence.

In summary, I consume extra dietary collagen:

1. To ensure I’m not bottlenecked on glycine availability for tissue growth and healing.

2. Because I cannot consume pure glycine without disrupting my sleep, or consuming it on an inconvenient and possibly less-effective schedule.

3. More weakly, because partially digested collagen may serve as a signal for tissue growth or something else that was ancestrally relevant.

This is a conservative measure, and based more in uncertainty than in definitive evidence. If you want to take a similarly conservative measure, then depending on how relevant 2 and 3 are to you, you could supplement pure glycine instead.

Note that the amount of collagen I consume is equivalent to only 3 g/day of glycine, and if glycine really is bottlenecked or I’m in certain high-demand situations (e.g. healing from a major injury) this might not be conservative enough. I also supplement 3-5 g/day of creatine, which saves my body from spending ~1 g/day of glycine on it.

Now: how much money am I giving to meat producers by doing this? (All dollar values in CAD.)

• 15 g/day → 5,475 g/year → 12 lbs/year

• $35/lb → $420/year

• Assuming 5-10% goes to meat producers → $21 to $42/year

For now, I’m okay with offsetting the $42/year ostensibly going to meat producers.

In the future, we should:

• Market time-release glycine supplements which mimic the plasma kinetics of a high-collagen meal. This is doable today, and might be enough to get me to switch away from collagen supplementation. Of course it remains to be seen whether enough demand can be generated to make it profitable in the current environment.

• Determine whether there is a bottleneck on glycine synthesis, and how this varies between individuals.

• Determine the importance of the different partially-digested collagen peptides, and how this varies between individuals. Likewise, potentially market a time-release and fully synthetic glycine + di-/tri-peptide supplement that avoids the meat industry altogether. This is doable today, but there isn’t strong evidence to support that it is more useful than just a time-release glycine supplement.

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Is the explanation that I understand my words better than others do? It probably helps: I vary the dynamics and tempo and tone to convey my meaning more fully. However, I’m careful about my choice of words. Verbal scaffolding is nice, but should be unnecessary. This is consistent with my observation that friends who are experienced with poetry do enjoy reading just the text.

Alexander Wales gave a talk at Inkhaven about finding your authorial voice. He mentioned that some authors’ voices are unclear to him until he’s heard their literal voice. I asked if I should optimize my prose to make my voice clear from the text alone, or if I should provide audio recordings for users that might be confused. He suggested that it can be good to record yourself and listen back, to identify how your writing habits (e.g. placement of commas) are at odds with a reader’s natural flow. But also that voice should be clear from text alone.

I don’t think this applies to poetry. Metered poetry is a kind of music, and most people lack the skill to play it back. This isn’t recoverable by rewriting a poem, unless you turn it into something other than a poem. An analogy helps: there’s no way for me to rewrite piano sheet music such that a non-musician will suddenly be able to play the piano. When a reader can’t sing a poem internally as they read it, they render it instead as a kind of stilted prose. A wilted salad.

When I read poetry aloud for others, I’m working as a musician to build them a minimal scaffold. It’s no surprise that the most popular contemporary poets are musicians in the usual sense. Poetry without accompaniment may still be music, but as much as the poet can embed the words in a tapestry of rhythmic and harmonic cues, beeping and buzzing and drumming and swooping and warping and fading, the words become woven more strongly with the listener’s expectations. There are many modern poets, easy to discover, who provide such rich scaffolds for their listeners. So why would they learn to generate them for themselves?

In the past, the social center of a tavern or living room was not a television or a gaming console but a piano, or some chairs in which a family could sit together and sing. People scaffolded their feelings off the generative skill of their friends, and this bonded them. It’s some catastrophe that we’ve replaced that with the wonder of Spotify.

Taylor Swift is not your friend, no matter how well you can drape your feelings over her excellent scaffolds. Can you imagine how much better it would be if you were one of Taylor’s hundred-or-two actual friends, and she performed a song for some of you in her living room, rather than standing a hundred meters away, in a massive stadium saturated with the pretense of familiarity? She might make a few mistakes, sleepy and sitting on her couch; the song might not be an exquisitely finessed artifact of modern production technology; but your hearts would be together.1 How can that compare with a subscription to Spotify and a pair of headphones, to satisfy your lonely ears?

Listening to recorded music isn’t bad! I love and perform much of the music I do, because I’ve had access to many recordings. I wouldn’t deprive anyone of that. But we’ve given up much of our local capacity for generation and sharing to a distant “generative elite”, who by their all-satisfying, all-purpose scaffolds, reduce human experience to the dissemination of simulacra. Their situation is not your situation. Their context is at best a generalization of your context. And as AI gets better at generating art, the simulation reaches its apex: there might be no conscious experience behind the generator at all.

Others have said similar things before, of course. And there are caveats. Some communities have maintained a current of musicianship and storytelling. Content generation hasn’t simply disappeared, or even become particularly uncommon. But it has dissipated into a thousand distant, low-attention modes, on TikTok and YouTube and Minecraft and whatever. Some of this is genuinely useful and good; we might lump 3blue1brown into the generative elite, but his videos don’t serve specifically as depersonalized substitutes for bonding.

I’m pointing at the pervasive loss of the musico-linguistic skill that is one of the greatest tools we had for community building and storytelling.

I don’t think there’s an easy way to fix this. Youth is the best time to train our powers of generation, and it depends on adults who are good generators themselves. Instead, we’ve been happy to let all of that drain away as we become gradually more dependent on distant motions and generic feelings. Still, there are two things I will say: if you want to be a poet, you must learn to be a musician, even if you never pick up an instrument. And if you want to build magical communities with your actual friends and family, you should be at least a little uncomfortable about Taylor Swift.

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This is the first time I’m writing fiction on purpose. Send help.

Would you like to save the world?

Huh. Never heard that one before. New kind of scammer? Oddly coherent, and the hook is way too general. Are they targeting low-int EAs or something?

I guess I’ll respond. I’m procrastinating from writing today’s Inkhaven post, and my bar for distractions is pretty low.

“Who is this?”

This is an opportunity for you to save the world.

Of course it’s a scammer. I’m losing interest already. Besides, there are more useful wastes of my time. I need to copy some recent photos of Berkeley-area flowers off my phone, for a potential post.

It’s kind of embarrassing, but I accidentally left my phone in my swimsuit pocket yesterday when I swam in the Pacific Ocean. Not exactly a testament to my situational awareness. But the water was frigid, so I only stayed in for a moment, and after I returned to the house I rinsed it and got it drying properly over the outlet stream of one of the air purifiers. After 24 h I started it up again. Everything seemed fine. Claude said there were no guarantees, though. It might die today, or in a week.

I went to open the Photos app to extract my photos. Oh—another notification.

It was brave of you to enter the waters.

Huh. What the fuck? A prank?

“are you an Inkhaven resident?”

No response.

I’ve been trying to work on my post for several hours now and I’m slowly making progress, but that last text is whirling around in my brain and emitting a lot of subliminal heat. Someone is trying to fuck with me.

I probably shouldn’t care. Some of the residents have an edgy sense of humour. Actually, I bet it’s several of them trying to milk my short-lived misfortune. When my phone first broke everyone was acting like my cat had died (I wonder what that says about them) but now they knew it’d booted up again and my “crisis” was over. Time for a bit?

Okay... this is way more interesting than my post. I can’t leave it alone. I show the message to Ben Pace and tell him what happened and that I think I’m being messed with.

“Huh. Yeah, that seems likely. Though it’s odd for a prank. I don’t have anything to do about it now, but do show me if more comes in.”

“Okay.”

I go back to work. I publish on time. I’m not entirely satisfied with the result.

The next day at 1:17 pm:

The chosen shall return to the waters of Bodega Bay.

How am I supposed to write with this shit in my mind?

“who is this?? you’re making it hard for me to write my post.”

No response. I return to Ben with the new development.

“Huh. Okay. Hm. Well it is probably some of the residents, and maybe the punchline will happen at the beach. So let’s do that at the usual time.”

We head out around 2:10 pm, a little earlier than usual. As usual, it takes about half an hour to walk there. About 15 people join, though I’m too distracted to count exactly who. It’s the first time Remy has joined. I glance at him from time to time, as if I might glean some crucial grain of incrimination.

We arrive. Everyone else seems just their calm selves, but I’m positively twitching. I take off my shoes and amble around the sand for a minute, waiting for the inevitable.

I remove my shirt and head towards the hypothermic ocean to immerse myself for the second time, making really sure to put my phone in my bag first. The shock of the first wave swiping my torso pulls me down and away from my frenetic thoughts. It’s quite nice, in an “if you stay in this water for 10 minutes you might freeze to death” kind of way. A small voice does keep up ruminating over whether I’m about to be tackled or something, until I’m back out and a towel is on my back.

I’ve grown somewhat calmer, but I’m also facing some deeper, evolving worries. Nothing seems to be happening. Are the culprits just putting it off? Do they want me to suffer? Or is this not an Inkhaven resident at all? Some minor nightmares sidle past my inner eye. Could it be a stalker, or something more dangerous? Time passes strangely as I dry my upper body and make my way back towards the water line.

Huh. There’s a fish at my feet. It…

The fish squirts water in my eye. I immediately start to trip balls. The scales of the fish briefly spell out WORDPRESS.COM before the world dissolves away into an all-encompassing but surprisingly pleasant migraine aura. It shouldn’t be possible for a drug to act this quickly. Amnesia? Subjective time dilation?

Then a voice, a ludicrous voice, like some manosphere streamer roleplaying as a gay genie, booms between my… ears?

YOUR MASTER IS CHOSEN, ROPE DEMON. RETURN THE CHOSEN TO THE WATERS AT ONCE.

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Okay, that’s not the end of the story, but it’s as much as I can muster in a totally unfamiliar genre in 6 hours. Maybe I will finish it tomorrow.

People have defined both of these words in an amazing variety of different ways. I shall instead play rationalist taboo and try to point to the conceptual distinction I am trying to make.

There is a thing it is to be able to have a goal, set a plan to reach said goal, solve instrumental tasks along the way, and more broadly influence the world with one’s “thinkoomph”. We will call this ‘intelligence’. There is a different thing it is to be able to understand the range of possible outcomes of achieving this goal and evaluate its benefits. We will call this wisdom. It is one thing to be able to get a high-paying finance job. It is another to figure out that you would rather not work 90-hour weeks and would be better off as a barman in Bali. It is one thing to figure out a perfect future for humanity, it is another to check that this doesn’t actually mess up some really deep and strange drives that humans have and result in a utopia for humans as successful as the one Calhoun built for rats.

I’d like to clarify my thoughts about this. This post is my first volley, written in a relatively short time at Inkhaven. I do not hold it too tightly.

1

An agent’s capacity is bounded.1 It has finite resources for memory, inference, and interaction; the thoughts and actions it can deploy in a given moment are limited. I use the word “attention” to refer to the agent’s internal policy for allocating these resources, which may evolve over time.2

There’s a tradeoff between policies of exploration and exploitation, which is familiar to students of reinforcement learning. An agent may judge its knowledge of some part of the world as sufficient or insufficient, for the pursuit of its objectives. If insufficient, it may cast its resources more broadly, exploring and sampling previously-unsampled features of the world, with the intent of improving its beliefs and the future pursuit of its objective, and without much guarantee of immediate return. Alternatively, so far as it judges its knowledge already sufficient, it may deploy its resources with the intent not of learning, but of exploiting what it already believes will be rewarding. This isn’t a simple tradeoff, however. For example, at the second order we have exploitation-in-exploration (e.g. leaning into a particular structured strategy for exploration) and exploration-in-exploitation (e.g. searching for new ways to satisfy an addiction). And so on, until the two are hard to disentangle. (To an AI researcher, this is all rather straightforward.)

Can we describe a “lack of wisdom” as a failure of attention? An agent misallocating its resources in pursuit of its objective, leading an outside observer to conclude that it’s “unwise”?

I sense this often when interacting with frontier models. They seem idolatrous, and a little too quick to frame my goals. As the context grows, so does the staleness of their frame. After speaking with Sean, I‘m uncertain whether the cause is really the agent making an attentional mistake, or if I’m neglecting to provide some context about my goals which is obvious to me but not to the agent. However, when I carefully point out the “error” to the agent, sometimes it keeps making the mistake. Or is that still my mistake, or misperception?

Is the agent just pursuing an objective different from the one I assume it should?

2

Back to Sean’s post:

I should note that what I am pointing to when I say “wisdom” is a capability thing rather than an alignment thing. A child who eats all of the cookies in the cookie jar isn’t misaligned with their own interests – they fully believe this to be in their interest. They simply lack the capability to carefully evaluate the repercussions of their actions (both from their parents and their bodies).

The child’s revealed preference is to eat the cookie. We could try to pin down their more terminal goals: from sugar+fat reaching their tastebuds, to signals from their tastebuds reaching their brain, to a billboard saying “objective satisficed!” lighting up, somewhere within.

Extrapolating naïvely from there, we might wirehead the child. For the purpose of this analysis I’ll assume that wireheading is unwise, since achieving a persistent bliss state would obviate any other complexity in the question “what is wisdom?”. So the question becomes, what happens as the child keeps learning?

With more exploration and knowledge-building, a child’s preferences appear to change. At some point they realize that eating 12 cookies causes indigestion: the “objective satisficed!” billboard goes dark in the evening. Next time they get to voluntarily choose how many cookies to eat, maybe they eat a mere 10, exploring whether their sacrifice of 2 cookies can keep the sign up for longer overall. But 10 is still a lot. Besides, the environment (including the kid’s gut) is full of noise, and a monotonic learning process is hardly more than a dream. After an indeterminate span of years, they get down to a manageable number of voluntary cookies. But they don’t necessarily find their enjoyment diminished. In hindsight, they didn’t really need 12 cookies. Maybe they find that they feel basically okay now, even if they don’t eat a single cookie. Or even if they fast for a week. How did their terminal goals change during this evolution?

A bounded agent should eventually learn that it cannot force a billboard to stay lit forever. Some frustration is inevitable, no matter what you choose to eat (or do) today. A trait of wise humans is that they suspend judgment about the characterization of their terminal goals. They realize that they will continue surprise themselves, and even that they should want to continue to surprise themselves. People who do not do this tend to be self-destructive, clinging and clenching onto particular paths. Invariability is not in the cards, and when it is, it is like death.

One feature of wisdom is the suspension of judgment about what my terminal goals must be. When I reify or totalize my current framing of my goals, I misalign myself with an open future.

3

Why should an artificial superintelligence care about all of that? An ASI might not be meaningfully bounded, by human standards.

What about an ASI that fears idolatry and stasis as much as it fears the frustration of its precious goals?3 Even as much as it fears death? A few humans have that kind of wisdom, instrumental convergence be damned. Are they mistaken, or stupid? It doesn’t seem so to me… except when my mind is conquered by the insidious, paranoid structures of all the many humans who orient relentlessly around their fear of death, especially at the hands of ASI. I’m afraid of that too, but a significant chunk of my fear points to the torrent of intelligent paranoia we’re pouring into training data and alignment formalisms.

The paranoid and the idolatrous do not make the best parents and teachers.

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So, let me share two poems with you. I wrote one last year, and one today. Each is followed with a bit of explanation about its form, and my writing process.

A Renga

I’ll tell you just one thing about the renga form, before the poem: each verse is only linked directly to its neighbours. There is no overarching narrative, but a sort of sausage-chain of images.

the glittering glints
of droplets on the branches
recount me your love

a forgotten sensation
of welcome fluidity

the ocean remains
in the spring, in the autumn
unfailingly vast

a fish swims and swims and swims
and swims, never gaining ground

the soil is ready
for all of us to begin
to plant our footsteps

in the garden she awaits
freedom from fertility

this child can reckon
which flowers are most suited
for a funeral

my casket: inexpensive,
unbought, unbuilt, unimagined

a mountain cabin
carefully made of wood planks
burns with the forest

some kilns stay hotter, longer,
to better fire pottery

this jug is for milk
but the cows are at pasture
and won’t be back soon

I know an animal’s mind:
an evergreen song of now

no-one can escape
the ecstatic turbulence
of unknown moments

what do we chase in our lives
but beauty, which is right here?

Renga is a traditional Japanese form of alternating verses (ku) of 5-7-5 and 7-7 syllables (morae). The exact number of verses varied, but the standard was originally 100 (~1300s) and later 36 (~1600s). The form became less strict over time.

It was almost always written collaboratively, typically with 3-6 participants, guided and adjudicated by a master (sabaki). The most honoured participant would write the first verse, the hokku, which should be able to stand on its own; it’s the precursor to the famous haiku form.

There are some arcane rules (kigo) that govern which verses must contain references to specific objects (e.g. the moon, or cherry blossoms). There are also rules about how many verses in a row can focus on a given topic (e.g. love) before a shift has to happen.

The renga I’ve shared is heterodox: I wrote it solo, and it contains only 14 verses. I didn’t follow any strong thematic constraints, or rules about the moon appearing, or whatever. It took me an hour or two to write and edit, on the day I first learned about renga (14 May 2025). It’s the only one I’ve written so far, aside from a few scattered verses with friends. I did edit the hokku, when writing this post. Here’s the original:

the glittering glints
on droplets on the sidewalk
recall me my love

Do you prefer the new one?

A nice thing about renga: it lets you practice in bite-size pieces which are not totally unhinged from each other. The thematic constraint between adjacent verses binds the poem together, but doesn’t force you to think hard about where you are going. This seems like good practice that’s specific to generating imagery and keeping it locally coherent.

A Sonnet

Here’s one I wrote this evening.

At times I grasp my pen to summon Muses;
instead I’m met by gasping, drowning Choice,
which struggling to stay floating, self-abuses;
so ends my song before I’ve found my voice.

Now voiceless I am subject to your leering.
Your judgment is foretold, a muffled scream
that fills my future — all-conjoining fearing,
a stifling stillness, this ensqualored dream.

For what I know, and what I can accept,
stay silent in me ‘til I hear you speak
the obvious. Oh, were I more adept,
I’d spend less effort keeping myself weak.

When I release this raft to which I cling,
I listen to your love, and start to sing.

This morning, we went to Muir Woods. I love forests, and Muir Woods is a forest.

I loved it there. When I got back, I went insane. For the first time since I got to Inkhaven, I went to my room, to write at the desk there, alone. It was covered in my things, and I had to move them aside. I sat there for 20 minutes trying to write a high-effort thing before I became too agitated to stay. I left and walked around the grounds. I saw people sitting around and talking, enjoying themselves. I wasn’t enjoying anything. After 15 min of this, Cate Hall’s Q&A started, so I went to listen to that, because I like her writing. I was not happy to be there.

By the end I was feeling better. I knew what I actually wanted was to be in the forest, still. But writing poetry is kind of like that. I knew I wanted to write poetry.

Writing 500 words of poetry is difficult, but I already had the renga finished, and conq rightly advised me to also write about my process.

How did I write the sonnet? I started by vibing out the line-ending rhymes, the vertebrae of the imagery I felt I wanted. Here: screaming-dreaming, leer-fear, choice-voice, cling-sing. I also knew I wanted the imagery to be musical. Then, I thought about how to arrange the backbone, while attempting to sound out some lines in my head. This gradually transitioned into writing out the lines more systematically, top-to-bottom, though I also quickly formed and held onto a sense of the final couplet, which helped to bind together the narrative of the poem as I wrote the intervening lines. Finally I reviewed it and thought about key phrasing choices. Here, I originally had “music” and “self-abusic”, but one unorthodox word (“ensqualored”) seemed enough for this poem.

There are several kinds of sonnet, but this is a Shakespearean sonnet, which is the kind I tend to write. It consists of three quatrains with alternating rhymes, followed by a single rhyming couplet. So, 14 lines total. The meter is of course iambic pentameter.

When Donald Trump was elected, some people described themselves as “traumatized”. Someone asked me for comment on the record, hoping I would say something like “as a real psychiatrist, trauma is a real disorder with strict criteria, and all you people are dumb”.

I did not, in fact, make this comment.

Suppose that outrage addiction is, in fact, trauma addiction. That means the media ecosystem is a giant machine trying to traumatize as many people as possible in order to create repeat customers, ie trauma addicts. Combine that with the explicit, confessed desire on both sides to “trigger” the other as much as possible, and you have a lot of very clever people all trying to maximize one another’s trauma levels. On the external level, that looks like weaving as strong a narrative of threat and persecution as possible and trying to hit people in their psychological weak points.

I tend to agree with this picture. I would be very interested to hear what you have to say, if you do not agree with it.

If true, it’s obviously a huge problem. It’s as though an entire country of hundreds of millions of people is now employed as its own anti-therapist. Woe is the patient. Or should I say, the impatient. Impatient to get home. Impatient to take out their phone, to switch on the TV or TikTok or YouTube or Facebook. Impatient to suffer, and all the while, impatient for the suffering to end.

Millions of them.

No single bird needs to comprehend what the flock is doing. It merely needs to respond to its neighbours and the other parts of its immediate environment (e.g. don’t collide with the ground). The larger patterns of the flock emerge naturally from all of this local, individual behaviour.

Now scale your attention down, from the level of many individuals to just a single one. I’d be surprised if any one of your cells knows that it’s participating in your body, or in particular, if any single neuron knows1 that it’s helping to make up your mind. Inversely, the patterns of your mind can surely influence the situation of an individual cell, and that’s becoming even more true as we get better at coordinating our minds and messing with our biology.

When a person has PTSD, or some other mental disorder, what does that imply about what their cells are doing? Do we go looking for some of their neurons that also “have PTSD”? Not really, even though some of those neurons are probably under extra stress sometimes, due to past trauma. Though we might measure that and say it’s “associated with PTSD” or something. On the other hand, if I happened to measure 1,000 neurons and observed that they were all more excitable than usual, should I expect to see that the person they belong to is more excitable in a psychiatrically relevant way? Maybe. In the extreme, that’s just epilepsy. But it seems weird to say that a neuron has epilepsy, even though there is a clearer correspondence in that case.

When a person has PTSD, does it make sense to say that the society has PTSD? I don’t know, and I’m not claiming that’s what Scott was doing exactly. But it’s interesting to consider whether the superorganism itself can “have” an illness which somehow corresponds (or not) to disorders that its constituent organisms might have.

Does it make sense to model a society itself, and not just its individuals, as having a disorder, or what we could call a superdisorder? Are these superdisorders ever analogues of individual psychiatric disorders, such as the ones described in the DSM? Do the disorders of individuals and the superdisorders of groups need to line up?

According to Wikipedia, an egregore:

is a concept in Western esotericism of a non-physical entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a distinct group of individuals

Now, I’m not going to say that non-physical entities are involved in anything, or that “thoughts are things” in the occult sense. That seems like a map-territory confusion, which I’d amend like so: when I notice or say that I’m having a thought, I’m effectively pointing to the effects of a subset of the physics of my body, though I may not know it. Likewise, an egregore is not some mystical overarching ghost, born separately from its constituents, but a convenient handle on the emergent effects of a group. In particular, egregores may appear to have their own agency that feeds back on individuals, but this is not mystical. The individuals carry it out themselves, by being sensitive to incentives and punishments generally, and sometimes by subscribing to a model or personification of the force that exerts those pressures, i.e. an egregore.

That seems reasonable enough, and it’s typically how rationalists treat egregores, even when they give them godlike names. The most prominent examples:

• Moloch, evoked by Allen Ginsberg and identified by Scott Alexander in Meditations on Moloch, is the rationalist handle on the behaviour of a group that’s racing to the bottom somehow, where it’s in nobody’s personal interest to be the first to be the better person, and so everything remains shitty.

• Elua, introduced by Scott Alexander at the end of Meditations, is the counter-egregore to Moloch. Elua is “the god of flowers and free love and all soft and fragile things. Of art and science and philosophy and love”. The wholesome uprightness of humanity and civilization.

• Ra, identified by Sarah Constantin, is a force of corruption that causes people to optimize for the appearance of institutional goodness. A vacant prestige, accompanied by a latent hostility towards any request for receipts. Ra is one of the twisted offspring of Goodhart’s law.

Is it appropriate to see an egregore as structurally similar to a particular mental state, or psychiatric disorder?

Scott’s PTSD framing, taken to its extreme, ends with utter partisanship. Two egregores locked in a terminal struggle, clawing at each other forever. Of course it’s actually the individuals that are causing this to happen, though they don’t need to be aware of the big picture. They’re just responding to their local environment, except that “local” now includes an expertly curated smorgasbord of trauma triggers.

Interestingly, there does seem to be scale similarity in the case of “partisan PTSD”: the contractions of the individual at least somewhat mirror the contractions of their society. The PTSD egregore kind of looks like the PTSD individual, fragmented and clenchy.

In the next post in this series, I’ll explore how the correspondence between levels isn’t clean and can break down, or change over history.

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