http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2018-08-01T13:50:33Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com http://ranprieur.com/#927426b636136ce8a397dd97e73218faeb78e292 2018-08-01T13:50:33Z August 1. Picking up from a week ago, Gryphon sends this Twitter post by Gwern, Maxims of Applied Demonology.

The word “demon” is used for so many things. Scott Peck’s book People of the Lie uses it for something that a psychologist would call personified mental illness. I find this concept useful: that there are voices in my head, that don’t serve my long-term interests, and don’t want me to know about them.

Gwern’s concept of the demon world is oddly heavy with financial metaphors. I’d like to see some rules of demonology from a culture without money. As a Taoist-pantheist, I would put it this way: if you go astray from the Tao, your gains will not be worth it, and circumstances will pull you back toward the Tao. When I write about “agents of fate”, that’s a personification of the future imposing its will on the present.

Then there’s the concept of demons as trickster spirits, who might not want anything except to toy with human emotions.

Farther down in Gwern’s feed, he has a critique of utopian social engineering, where he writes, “Small samples show wild gains but bigger samples show smaller, often zero, effects.”

That happens in a lot of things, all the way from paranormal research to hard science, where it’s called the decline effect. I see it as a universal law of reality creation. When fewer people are looking, for a shorter time, it’s easier for the eye/mind to see/create what it wants. As more perspectives join, they bring reality back toward the conventional.

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