On the Seelie and Unseelie Courts

  • There appear to be two kinds of social reality
  • Unseelie - type that fixates on dark and manipulative aspects
    • Brazenness
    • Manipulation
    • “Acceptance of the cesspool of human communication”
  • Seelie - type that fixates on light, conversational, flow aspects
    • Niceness
    • Community
    • Civilization
    • Willfully blind to the concept that passive moves have consequences
  • Neither side contains good people but both sides have good intentions
  • When Seelie and Unseelie meet, there is an implicit unacknowledged struggle
  • There is a sensation of tongue-tiedness and a change in conversational flow
  • Discussion question
    • Do you feel that you’re more Seelie or Unseelie?

On Dangerous Technology

  • “Dangerous technologies”
    • Anger others
    • Can provoke crises
  • Mindhacking and trying weird things can be dangerous technologies
    • Example: “sparkliness”
      • Mix of hypomania and introspection
      • Can be directed outwards
      • Combined with an understanding of narrative and social reality
      • Starts to feel like a real thing if other people start validating the intuitions fostered by this practice
      • Drawback: hypomania is pushed to full-blown mania and you lose touch with reality
    • Dangerous technologies are generally defined by high-variance interventions
      • Meditation can be a dangerous technology if you push it far enough
      • Some nootropics are dangerous technologies
    • The power of belief is an up-and-coming dangerous technology
      • Belief in bulletproofing (i.e. bulletproofing charms that encourage bravery and group cooperation)
      • Conviction charisma among startup founders (i.e. “reality distortion field”)
  • Not all mindhacks are dangerous
    • Double cruxing
    • Developing charisma through practice and ordinary socialization
    • Various techniques for overcoming bias
    • Most traditional rationalist techniques are “safe” whereas “dangerous technologies” are more in the “post-rationalist” canon
  • Dangerous technologies are appealing because they create outcomes quickly without a lot of effort
  • The problem is that the outcome can be good or bad
  • Dangerous technologies are unproven, and using them too blatantly tends to alienate the more grounded people around you
  • Discussion questions
    • How does one approach a risk benefit analysis, when one of the risks is going insane?
    • Are non-dangerous technologies powerful/proven enough to be worth the additional effort?

On The Tangent Stack

  • How do you keep a conversation going and make it seem fun?
  • Strive to generate response that give you hooks to follow up on
  • These hooks are often little tangents in the other person’s story
  • Instead of bringing up the tangent right away, remember it, and then ask a question about it when the conversation lulls
  • Example story
    • Friend gets on the wrong train and falls asleep
    • Ends up in the wrong state entirely
    • Gets off lost and despairing and goes to a Waffle House
    • Approached by a strange man in a trenchcoat who offers tickets to the right destination
    • Tickets are legitimate and friend ends up at their destination only a day late
  • Example tangents
    • How did they learn to sleep that deeply on the train
    • What part of the wrong state did they end up in
    • How did they find a Waffle House so fast
    • How did the man in the trenchcoat make them feel
    • What was their actual destination like
  • All of these tangents can generate further tangents, which can be used to keep the conversation going longer
  • Simple concept that plays to the strengths of people with strong working memory
  • Less helpful when telling stories, as opposed to asking questions
  • Doesn’t give you a way to wind down a conversation
  • Discussion questions
    • How much of a tangent can you maintain?
    • What does it feel like to have a tangent stack applied to you?
    • Do you ever have problems with too much conversational flow

On Breaking The Script

  • Conversations often fall into scripts
    • Example: “How are you doing” “Fine, thanks”
    • Many conversations fall into scripts
    • Even if the words aren’t literally scripted, responses are often from a limited number of pre-determined categories
    • While scripts are safe and comfortable, it can be profitable to break out of scripts
  • When looking for a script breaker, what should you keep in mind?
    • Goal
    • Unusualness
    • Accessibility
    • Specificity
    • Audience
    • Playfulness
  • Goal
    • What are you actually after by asking a weird question and breaking the script?
    • Whenever you do anything deliberate in a conversation, keep your goals in mind
    • By being mindful about your goals, you can efficiently turn initial responses into an enjoyable conversation
  • Unusualness
    • The question has to be a little weird to break out of the script
    • If you were asked the question, would you have to stop and think, or would you be able to answer it instantly?
  • Accessibility
    • The other person has to be able to answer the question
    • If the question is too esoteric, the other person won’t be able to map that question to their personal experience
  • Specificity
    • Is the question specific enough to be answerable
    • If you make your question too broad, people will either spit out a rehearsed answer or they’ll freeze up
    • Adding constraints helps
  • Audience
    • Where are you trying to control the conversational frame?
    • Know who you’re talking to and change which questions you ask in response
    • Consider what the other person would find most fun
  • Playfulness
    • Don’t forget to have fun and show that you’re having fun
    • The point of script-breaking is to be fun and spontaneous
    • If people think you’re being strategic or attempting to gain an advantage, they’ll refuse the question
  • Additional things to pay attention to
    • Delivery
    • Context
    • Consider the above to be guidelines, but don’t be constrained by them

On The Nature of Hypnosis

  • The commonality between all depictions of hypnosis is focus
  • Hypnosis can be modeled as a focus hijack
    • Taking someone’s focus and directing it in one direction
    • Leaves opening for suggestions to take hold
    • Model of hypnosis opens up possibilities in therms of how to set up the space for hypnosis, how to create inductions, and how to awaken
  • Inductions
    • Subject needs to be comfortable with you and being put into a trance by you
    • Any hesitance of the part of the subject is stealing focus
    • Once the hypnosis conversation starts, go gradually and build up a trance
    • Make sure the subject is physically comfortable
    • Actual induction is relatively trivial - give them something to concentrate on and reinforce natural bodily response
  • Awakeners
    • Opposite of inductions
    • Release someone’s attention and allow it to become theirs again
    • Hypnosis can be seen as the opposite of meditation
      • Meditation is about taking active control of your own focus
      • Hypnosis is about outsourcing your focus to someone else
    • A good awakener is gentle, slowly raising the subject from their trance
  • This model of hypnosis as focus hijack allows a deeper exploration of what attention is and how it acts as a resource in a modern society
  • Model removes much of the esoterica from hypnosis
  • Discussion questions
    • How much does the focus hijack model resonate with your hypnotic experiences
    • What are the gaps and flaws in this model?