I think the problem of the criterion is really, really important. So important that I’m willing to risk annoying people by bringing it up all the time. I think it matters because a failure to grok it is at the heart of why we fail to notice we’re confused and…

The title lays out my thesis in perhaps the maximally provocative way: if you put direct effort into keeping your identity small (à la Graham), you are doing harm to yourself akin to the kind of harm you do to yourself by suppressing emotions. I was inspired to write this…

I keep finding cause to discuss the problem of the criterion, so I figured I’d try my hand at writing up a post explaining it. …

You are probably dissociating all the time and don’t realize it. Let’s look at just what I mean by this bold claim. Disclaimer: I’m not a medical professional, and although I’m talking about “dissociation” here I definitely don’t mean to give medical explanation or advice about clinical dissociation. I’m going…

In this post I present a model of human psychological development based on increases in the structural complexity of ontology. Or more simply, it’s a model about how human minds grow in terms of how complex their models of the world are. It breaks down development into 8 stages that…

When I was a teenager, I knew my mind was not like adults. Sure, I was like adults in a lot of ways. I believed things. I trusted things. I knew I was right sometimes. But they didn’t change their minds. I did about once a month! Woe was me…

An important, ongoing part of the rationalist project is to build richer mental models for understanding the world. To that end I’d like to briefly share part of my model of the world that seems to be outside the rationalist cannon in an explicit way, but which I think is…

Exactly two years to the day I started writing this post I published Map and Territory’s most popular post of all time, “Doxa, Episteme, and Gnosis” (also here on LW). In that post I describe a distinction ancient Greek made between three kinds of knowledge we might translate as hearsay…

I’ve mentioned in posts twice (and previously in several comments) that I’m excited about predictive coding, specifically the idea that the human brain either is or can be modeled as a hierarchical system of (negative feedback) control systems that try to minimize error in predicting their inputs with some strong…