My kindest reading of people who retreat so far it actually compromises their work is that it is a mental health preservation move because they can't handle the optimum GSCITC immersion for their project. Their work could be improved if they had the stomach for more gonzo-nausea.
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My harshest reading is that they're narcissistic snowflakes who overvalue their work simply because they did it.
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So my recommendations would be: develop an intuitive ability to tune your GSCITC immersion from full-retreat if you got a big grant to do some work only 3 other people in the world understand... to full-speed-ahead gonzo immersion if you need 2y oracular foresight
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If you find your natural brain has a comfort zone, then build a second brain that equilibrates it there, and use it more or less as you need to wander from that set-point.
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One reason I haven't invested in building as strong a BASB as many is simply that my comfort set-point is mostly near the gonzo edge. I need the full 2+ year foresight potential of the GSCITC for the thinking I'm most effective at. If it means continuous partial PTSD so be it.
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One sign of the cost of this tradeoff. Though I can see this thread would be nice to put into a blog post, I don't feel like I can conjure up the energy to do it. It will likely remain in this context, only accessible and grokkable to people who are also in a roughly gonzo place
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And also, I need a better term than GSCITC... but something without baggage. Hive mind, borg, AGI, efficient narrative marketplace... all the terms I've been able to think of have inappropriate or misleading connotations.
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For those who came in late... this train of thought began with my Against Waldenponding newsletter last year
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Which I recently added a Part 2 to...
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The Waldenponding newsletters were Oct 2018 and April 2019. I think I first broached this topic even earlier in this newsletter. Your Passport to the Metabrain (Jan 2017). Shit, this has been on my 2nd brain for a long time.
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The cost of being in gonzo mode online is admittedly quite high. The effect on more retreated modes of production (essays, books, products) is very noticeable. My best thinking in the last few years has been on twitter, but the reach is far lower than my blog or newsletter
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Final point: you are almost certainly overvaluing information from history and undervaluing information being processed live in the GSCITC for *any* project you take on. Why do I think that? At some point AlphaGoZero discarded all human history of Go playing and went full gonzo
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This is a form of temporal egotism. We have identities anchored in personal/collective history, and we like to think distribution we are attached to is the distribution of input value. Chances are, an AI approaching any given problem you take on will throw away most of history.
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Final final point. I flagged conversational media eating authorial media. This has been my personal ego challenge. It is hard to admit, having spent 10y building up an identity/vanity around my longform, that my conversational thinking embedded in the GSCITC is better quality.
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Do you want to record a podcast episode about this tweet?
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nah, this is too early stage thinking for me to talk coherently about in audio media
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