It is currently 5.30am. The initial hearing will begin at 10.30am. I am considering an insanity plea, perhaps by showing them this blog as evidence.

“I am not fit to stand trial,” I will say. They will chuckle, admiring my commitment, and proceed with the proceeding. “No really, I am insane. I have no business being here. Look at me, I am insane.” They chuckle all the harder.

What do I fear? “I fear becoming disembodied.” This is how I put it to a friend yesterday. The verdict will be “guilty of overindulging in woo and other carnal sins”, for which there is only one appropriate course: beheading. And I will return once more to my place as a floating mind, another cog in the mental machine of AI safety.

But perhaps this is wrong. I do not fear being disembodied. No, this is backwards. Disembodiment is the desperate response to the torrent of fear coursing through my frayed nervous system. Anything to stop the flood which would drown us all. Yes, numb. Yes, numb is good.

I’m staying in one of Lightcone’s holding cells, “Kolmogorov Keep” (named in honour of the Soviet mathematician who testified against his doctoral advisor, Nikolai Luzin, accusing him of plagiarism and nepotism during Stalin’s great purge).

The physical layout has also been designed with intimidation in mind, following Christopher Alexander’s principles for how to throttle life. For example, the single bathroom is only accessible via the two bedrooms, with one door on either side, so whenever I use the toilet I need to lock the other door to ensure my privacy. I keep forgetting to unlock the door afterwards, meaning that my fellow inmate is unable to use the bathroom. I assume this is to engender conflict between detainees in an effort to keep morale low and independent will weak. I find this despicable.

Despite their best attempts, I had a pleasant conversation with my fellow trialee yesterday. He knocked on my door, and I loudly shouted “Just a minute” in a panicked expression, as I was naked playing Slay the Spire at the time. I don’t have any issues with him seeing me naked, but I was worried that it would make him uncomfortable. I then became worried that he thought I was masturbating, given how long it took me to come to the door. I also don’t have any issues with being known as a masturbator, but I was worried that he would hear the panic in my voice and think that I was both masturbating and ashamed by that fact, and being in contact with this shame would make him feel uncomfortable. I thought about explaining that I had already masturbated a few hours ago, but I did not.

The conversation was pleasant and he seems like a nice man, which was deeply upsetting. I didn’t ask what he was in for. I expect he will be found innocent. I don’t know what to infer from this about my own prospects. I don’t think innocence is a strongly limited resource, but surely there are diminishing returns.

As per my previous post, I am praying for courage: the courage to speak truth.

The interrogation will begin: “How have your beliefs changed since Hugging Face?”

And with a meek strength I will answer: “I have little knowledge or interest in the matter, and I am not sure that I still believe in the notion of beliefs.”

“Blasphemy!”

“Is it true that you regularly attend circling events and liaise with known members of the spiritual community?”

“Yes, it is true.”

“Off with his body!”

“Repent for your sins and we will show mercy. Swear on HPMOR and recite the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Nihil Supernum’.”

“I cannot, as I have recently attended a few Quaker meetings, which forbid me from oaths, and I am now Quasiagnostic.”1

As my body quakes and spasms from the unbearable force of the truth, I hear their pronouncement: “Harritic!”

‘Suffering is real. You are relatively well off, and have the ability to help. You should help.’

This argument has some sort of force within me, or power over me. It pops up at various times, with various faces. It’s been present when I’ve been thinking about whether to work at Lightcone (it’s interesting that this argument often has a specific vision of what helping looks like, in this case working at Lightcone is the thing that counts as helping).

Whose argument is this? Is it mine?

Joe Carlsmith’s On Sincerity (as always) comes to mind:

Perhaps, indeed, the polite company is not so polite. Perhaps the polite company is structuring the conversation and concepts in adversarial ways; pressuring you to use a “should” that is not really yours. Perhaps you cannot see this directly; but a part of you senses coercion, and that part shuts down, clamps up, rebels.

As I tune into this argument, or rather, the experience I have which this argument is some kind of pointer to, I get an underlying sense of ultimatum or threat. This is quite subtle, it’s not overtly named, and easily missed, but definitely present.

And it gets interesting. The rebuttal is:

‘Yes, well, look sincerity is important. Sure. So is the nature of your motivation, and whether it’s coming from the right place. Sure. But look, what really matters isn’t motivational purity, it’s the outcomes’

(There’s something of this in Joe Carlsmith’s piece as well: ‘Maybe you treat your supposed sincerity about The Thing – your oh-so-fine feelings, your passionate conviction, your oh-so-crystal internal clarity – as a signal of some kind of righteousness and purity and definitely-true-ness and justified-in-doing-whatever-ness and the-normal-rules-don’t-apply-ness.’)

And then I start to develop my response (‘my’… interesting), which perhaps involves gestures to the importance of personal fit, giving gladly, rule utilitarianism or some such thing, in the overall project of doing good.

But. It seems to me that there’s something in these nascent responses that still grant too much. I’m remembering Bernard William’s critique of moral theories like utilitarianism as involving ‘one thought too many’. And here, it seems that this nascent response is one response too many. Like, we’ve already agreed in principle, and now we’re just haggling over price. We’ve already agreed that what matters is the outcomes, now we’re just debating the most effective route. We’ve already agreed to prosecute this via rational argument, now we’re just seeing whose wins.

And yes, fine, sure, outcomes and rational argument do seem important. But what really seems to be going on when I tune back into the original argument, and what feels easy to overlook yet clear once I notice it, is the undercurrent of threat.

And now, I imagine, instead of responding to the argument in kind, with various reasons and so on, instead, just saying “no”.

And the response I get is fury. Either hot, criticisms of selfishness of laziness, previously waiting in the wings, come out in full force. Or cold, resentful silence.

Intense.

When I ask myself now, ‘oh, what if I just stop doing good?’ I get a sense of abandonment. If I stopped, my friends would leave me.

There’s something hilarious and painful noticing how my career has been oriented towards preferentially supporting those who do good. Even now, after achieving some distance from the core of effective altruism culture, one of the things I’m considering is emotional coaching for EAs. There’s something about this I find incredibly grotesque.

(I also remember when working in grantmaking, evaluating various mental health for EA projects, and one of the main ways in which I evaluated them was by trying to work out how much productivity, measured in EA work hours, various programs would buy)

Memories of childhood are very present to me here, my mother in particular, guilt, crticism and so on. (I’ve joked to a friend that the EA Forum has the voice of my stepfather, which also seems to me to be not 100% a joke).

There’s something fiery that comes up in me. It feels more basic than any argument, and it’s ‘No, I will not be coerced. If you show my your pain I will do my best to open my heart. And I will not be coerced. And if you give me no other choice, then I will do your bidding, but I will not follow your will.’

This feels deeply terrifying and relaxing.

Notes

• I worry that this post borders on being illegible, so I’m going to try and inject some final bits of legibility.

• It seems to me that there is some significant part of my altruistic (or effectively altruistic) motivational structure, which has a flavour of threat response. ((I do not like saying sentences, as it seems very reify-ey (or alternatively, I feel suspicious and even resentful of aiming to understand myself here)).

• I can give various reasons as to why it might be bad to operate with such a motivational structure, but these reasons still seem to grant too much. They still seem to be operating within the underlying threat framework.

• It seems to me that a lot of people, myself included, have some kind of not fully whole relationship with EA, and then go through a messy breakup. I think people can end up in a place where they have ‘raised their price’, but are still subjects of EA. (to be clear, I don’t think that people universally have unhealthy relationships with EA or altruism, but my guess is it is very common)

• I like Nate Soares Replacing Guilt Sequence. And, I think that it’s easy to have an implicit orientation of ‘Why replace guilt? Well, because that would make me more effective!’

• EA is big on decoupling. I think this can make EA’s a lot more liable to a form of ‘rational coercion’, being compelled to do things which don’t feel in integrity because the reasons said so. Shut up and multiply, biting the bullet and so on. EAs are relatively big on arguments, and relatively weak on reading social context (not sure about this, but anyway). This means that they will be liable to miss when social frames contain an element of coercion, and instead aim to prosecute rational argument from within that frame.

• One way I have of understanding all this is as a fawn response. Roughly, a fourth survival strategy. Fight, flight, freeze, fawn. Fawning is appeasing or pleasing in response to threat.

• One of the old catchphrases for EA was ‘combining the head and the heart’. My sense is that the heart typically gets short shrift in this combination.

• (I don’t feel fully settled on the following) I think the break I have with EA is deeper than I presumed. I previously conceived of my break with EA as at core methodological. But I think it’s deeper than that. Ultimately, the thing that I have the most trust in is not my head but my heart.

‘Wow, that’s so exciting!’ I said, as my eyes turned emerald and my prefrontal cortex began a search for cyanide.1

Jealousy is one of my least favourite things to admit to, I’d honestly much rather talk about my intermittent erectile dysfunction.2

But, as they say, that which can be destroyed by a long hard look in the mirror should be. So here we go.

It seems that I have some sort of semi-conscious sense of what is rightfully my domain, which he has enroached upon. The EA-circling-coaching niche obviously isn’t big enough for both of us, and whilst I am funnier than he is, he is more conscientious and handsome than me, so he has me beat 2-1. The winner-takes-all dynamics here mean that I will inevitably die hungry and childless, whilst his filthy genes will be spread via countless concubines.

This would be bad enough, except that a) circling-coaching is within the domain of spirituality, and successful spirituality means the death of the ego. Jealousy and cyanide are obviously the domain of the ego, which means that I can’t complain without admitting my spiritual failings. Also b) EA is within the domain of morality, and successful morality means doing things for others. Jealousy and cyanide are obviously not really compatible with that either, so I can’t complain without admitting my moral failings.

This feeling, which seems to come with a sort of gut-punchy sort of stomach sensation, is quite familiar to me. I used to have it a lot more in the domain of effective altruism proper, but now it seems to have relocated into the subdomain of EA spirituality.

When unwholesome things like this come up I usually try to ask myself, ‘what is the wholesomeness within this?’ I’m actually a bit stumped on this one, but will keep you updated.

I’ve been spinning circles around contemplating about whether it makes sense to do this recently, and thus I sent Oli an email:

I had a call with Oli yesterday about all this. I think he was very nice and it went well, but I was too busy dissociating to properly tell.

I have a lot of respect for Oli and Lightcone1. I respect what I see as a strong commitment to the truth, especially something like ‘truth to power’.2 Also, I respect Lightcone’s something like agency and willingness to get stuck in and do things.

These are also qualities that I feel some inadequacy around. I am a big fan of truth, but prefer speaking it into my personal journal rather than the face of power. I also am a big fan of getting stuck into things such as holes3 or family sized bags of crisps, but not so much large sized projects which require substantial planning, execution and engagement with the real world.

I’m a bit wary of labelling some parts of me wholesome and others unhealthy. That said, I think there’s a bunch of wholesomeness connected to wanting to work at Lightcone. A sense of inspiration and aspiration. Of taking the world seriously, what it is and what it could be (the stakes are real). Of taking myself seriously, and how I could impact the world.

And a bunch of things that feel less wholesome. Fear of judgement, shame, desire for approval, to be important, and so on.

I can imagine a world where Lightcone is a place I can grow, and become more fully myself, or who I’m meant to be, or who the world (in some grander sense) is asking me to be. And I can imagine it as a place where I become smaller, or distorted, via trying to fit myself into a nicely shaped box according to who the world (in some smaller sense) is asking me to be.

What am I praying for (insofar as praying is something I do, which isn’t clear)? I think for courage. Courage to be with these various fears and not dominated by them. And perhaps also for forgiveness, for the ways in which I’m unable to.

Wish me luck, mudafuckas!

Consider veganism. Whether you’re a vegan or not, try asking yourself: “should I be vegan?”

No need to answer. I’m interested in what it’s like to ask. In particular: I think there’s a way of “actually asking” this question, and a way of “fake asking” it.

The “actually asking” version aspires to actually end up a vegan, if you should be a vegan; and to actually end up not-a-vegan, if you should not be a vegan. […]

The fake version does … something else. It resists opening the question fully. It’s not willing to end up going either way. […]

And there are other ways to end up in fake-mode for questions like this – especially if you’re asking them in social contexts. Sometimes, a social context doesn’t allow certain questions to be answered in certain ways – at least not without punishment.⁵ Maybe a part of you wants to say “yes, look, I value my own transitory pleasure and convenience more than I disvalue the severe suffering of these animals.” Or maybe a part of you wants to say more extreme or selfish or disruptive things. […] But perhaps polite company does not permit you.

Perhaps, indeed, the polite company is not so polite. Perhaps the polite company is structuring the conversation and concepts in adversarial ways; pressuring you to use a “should” that is not really yours. Perhaps you cannot see this directly; but a part of you senses coercion, and that part shuts down, clamps up, rebels.

I think Joe is on the money. In particular, I think he’s right that being able to ask questions for real and not for fake is really good and important. And also that social contexts play a big role in whether this actually happens.

I would like people to have more polite company.

• In my broader social mileu of EA and AI safety, everything seems kinda intense right now. One thing is there’s this question of whether the people working at frontier labs are the good guys or the bad guys. I would like such people to have an environment to actually think about this question in a real way.

• I recently posted about cheating on an EA work task. Annoyingly this has got many views. Nearly at the point where if you round up it would be a whole thousand. This is very irksome, I would much prefer people to be reading the pieces that reflect my personality more fully, such as I am the Nameless Tao. Nonetheless, if I ask myself, ‘what could have been the case such that this whole cheating thing wasn’t enacted?’, my main thought is, oh, probably if I had someone to talk to/ someone I could be honest with.

• I wrote about Hamming questions a while back (‘What are the most important problems?’ ‘Why aren’t you working on them?'). I think these are good to ask. And also, it’s very easy to ask them and ‘go fake’, or end up adopting a ‘“should” that is not really yours’.

I’m getting back into coaching at the moment, and one of my aspirations for it is to offer people polite company in exploring important questions.

I don’t think this is a trival task. It seems to me very easy for coaches to end up structuring explorations in subtle ways that lean fake. Perhaps encouraging people to disavow ‘shoulds’ which are really theirs, prompting people to uncover hidden depths which don’t really exist etc.

Maybe it’s easier to just think about these things alone?

Perhaps! But however, as Joe puts it ‘to be alone is not a simple thing. We are always overhearing ourselves. We have internal company, too — whether polite or impolite. And just as we can deceive ourselves, so too can we coerce ourselves. Indeed, the two are sometimes closely intertwined’.

It does seem to me that polite company is possible, and often better than the alternative. I’ve often found myself coming to clarity in the company of an honest and patient friend.

(I am offering coaching on a donation basis. If you have found yourself compelled by my arguments for polite company, feel free to slide into my dms).

The experience

The main feeling of the experience was stress.

I did not originally plan to spend longer than the allocated time. As the time limit approached I felt increasingly stressed, with a sense that the quality of my work was not “good enough”. The time ran out and I hadn’t finished and I carried on working.

I was aware that I was spending longer than the time limit. But it seems like I was flinching away from this fact, and on another level it seems I was not truly taking in what I was doing.

I had various justifications popping into my head for why what I was doing was ok:

• I had a sense that the work I had completed didn’t reflect my true abilities, in part because I thought stress was impairing my performance.

• I had a subtle sense that I somehow deserved the role.

• I thought that other people might also be spending extra time on the task, and so sticking to the time limit would be unfair to me.

My sense is that something like the following cycle was happening:

I’d become peripherally aware that I was spending longer than the limit → This would feel painful - guilt, shame → One of these justifying thoughts would surface, something like “my work on this doesn’t reflect my true abilities” → The feelings of guilt and shame would be ‘pushed’ back, and I’d feel some relief from the pain → I’d continue working.

It’s difficult to say whether I actually believed these things, or even what counts as believing something in this situation. I imagine that if someone had asked me “do you actually think these things are true and/or justify spending longer on the task?” the question would have felt very painful to hear, and I ultimately would have answered ‘no’.

I also had a subtle sense that what I was doing was “wrong”, but that I would make up for it in the future. I didn’t have a concrete sense of what that would look like, but it was something broadly in the direction of “work hard” or “work harder” on EA things.

Additional comments

I was not happy in my role at that time and I did not feel “successful”. It seems to me that a lot of my sense of self-worth was tied up in my work - in particular, in “being successful” in EA or by EA lights. Roughly, doing things that people within EA judged to be impactful or held in high regard. I did not feel like I had good options for being “successful” in this way. The role I was applying for felt like one of the only such options. Relatedly, I felt a sense of financial insecurity around my job prospects, and an overall sense of scarcity.

It seems like I viewed this as “aberrant” at the time — not actually me or a true reflection of me. Whether or not I was an honest person was not something I had much of a reflective view of. Insofar as I had an unreflective view of my honesty, it was mostly based on a sense of me under “normal circumstances”, which didn’t take much into account these kinds of “aberrant” occurrences.

It now seems to me that this was one of the stronger instances of a broader pattern of dishonesty under circumstances where my abilities or work were being evaluated. Other things I notice in this genre: subtly inflating my work outputs, expressing opinions that didn’t feel fully true to me but that I expected relevant people to be pleased with.

(I wrote this in March but I didn’t post it, I think because I was too scared. I just read Richard Ngo’s What just happened? A retrospective of AI alignment which somehow has nudged me to post this now).

I’m a big fan of principles-first stewardship in principle. I think EA needs a steward, and I think that stewardship should be organised around EA’s core principles.

But I think CEA’s particular growth-centric approach to principles-first stewardship is stewarding EA in the wrong direction.

I think that: The key question for principles-first stewardship should be “Is EA a place that embodies and nurtures EA principles?” I think there are serious reasons to worry that it isn’t such a place - that EA has become more ideological and less truth-seeking over time, and that growth focused approaches to community building like CEAs are a big part of the reason why.

A summary of my main points:

• It seems to me that EA is dying. I’m less concerned here about growth metrics, and more concerned about the health of EA as a community and a moral/ intellectual project. It seems to me that EA is losing its question-nature, and also has become something that people are less and less willing to stand behind or participate in.

• Growth is not “Community Building 101”. In EA it’s often assumed that the default way to build a community is to focus on growth. I think this is wrong, there are many ways to approach community building that don’t have this focus. And more importantly, I think that part of the cause of EA ‘dying’, is the strong focus on growth. This is because…

• The ‘growth funnel’ approach to EA community building is in tension with open truth-seeking. In practice, this approach involves funnelling people towards particular answers to ‘How can I do the most good’. If that’s the case it stops being an open or ‘living question’ - the bottom lines in EA are often in practice already written.

• EA community building doesn’t serve the people who most deeply practice EA principles. Many experienced EAs are disengaged from the community and reluctant to identify with it. I think this is partly because EA community building isn’t for them, and partly because EA isn’t functioning well as a place that embodies EA principles. I think the focus on growth is a contributing factor to both of these things.

• The post-FTX challenge is fundamentally about trust, not brand. Framing it as a branding problem leads to a strategy focused on communications and perception, when the deeper question is whether EA is worthy of the trust people place in it.

• CEA’s brand strategy is in tension with open truth-seeking. On a deeper level, it seems to me that CEA’s brand strategy involves constructing a positive narrative about EA at the expense of an accurate one. I think this is a mistake.

I worked at CEA from 2016 - 2021 on the EA Groups team and then again from 2025 - March 2026 as a Fund Manager at the EA Infrastructure Fund.

My views are informed by my time at CEA and in EA community building more broadly, though this post focuses on CEA’s public strategy rather than internal information from working at CEA.

The EA community is something I care a lot about, and my guess is the same is true for all those working at CEA. Because of this I’ve been hoping to write a piece that is more ‘constructive disagreement in service of building a better community’ rather than ‘criticism’.

I think I haven’t succeeded at that - when reading the piece back it feels more combative than I would like. I’m sorry for that. This piece has been a challenge to write and ultimately it feels like a choice between publishing it as is or not at all. I’m hoping that it’s still worth posting even if the framing is more critical than I want it to be.

I’m aiming for strongly stated, weakly held.

I’m also grateful to Claude as well as multiple humans for feedback they’ve given on this piece.

It seems to me that EA is dying

The ‘Growing the EA Community’ section of CEA’s 2026 progress report gives metrics for growth across CEA’s engagement funnel, and also includes the following comment:

Anecdotally at least, it seems that we have already been largely successful in moving beyond narratives about the “death” of EA. I had a journalist tell me at the beginning of 2025 that they wanted to write a piece about how EA isn’t dead, but they couldn’t because they didn’t have the data to back it up; now we have receipts.

I think that, sadly, EA is in fact dying.

Though the kind of death I’m worried about isn’t primarily about declining membership or engagement metrics. It’s about the health of EA as a community and as a moral and intellectual project.

EA as a question

A common way of describing EA is as a ‘question, and not an ideology’. And EA’s question-nature seems to be a core part of what EA is - if EA were to become ideological, it would in an important sense no longer be EA.

But EA seems increasingly ideological to me, it seems to be a lot less concerned with asking and answering a genuinely open question, and a lot more concerned with causing people to follow established paths to impact.

I don’t think I’m alone in having these concerns. A 2022 twitter poll found 70% of respondents saying “yes” to “Is effective altruism an ideology?”

Kerry Vaughan, previously Head of EA Grants and Individual Outreach at CEA, made a similar claim on twitter in 2022.

Any community organised around shared principles will, to some degree, converge on shared conclusions and perspectives - being completely non-ideological seems impossible, or at least the wrong target to aim for.

That said, I think the convergence that does exist within EA is increasingly better explained by social dynamics - selection effects, incentive structures, and how community building is implemented - than by open truth-seeking and application of EA principles, and EA is becoming more ideological over time.

EA as a community

It also seems to me that EA is dying as a community. For example:

• People are often reluctant to identify as EAs, and instead describe themselves as ‘EA-adjacent’. EA does not seem to be something that people seem willing to stand for or behind, especially for people who have been around EA for longer.

• Longer-standing EAs also don’t seem to engage much with EA infrastructure. Of the EAs I know who’ve been around for a while, I don’t know any who are part of a local group, and only a small handful actively engage on the Forum.

• When people do engage with EA infrastructure, eg. attending EAG and so on, it seems to be less because EA is something that they are excited about/ care about, and want to participate in and contribute to - and more because engaging with EA is going to be in some way instrumentally beneficial.

• Many past leaders of EA no longer seem to support it, and many seem to actively disavow it.

Various posts which inform my conception of EA death

In her post Ayn Rand’s model of “living money”, Anna Salamon describes how processes can ‘lose their relationship to the unknown’, for example scientists that ‘get stuck defending some fixed theory’. I worry that EA is a process that is losing its touch with the unknown.

In his post On Sincerity, Joe Carlsmith differentiates between ‘fake’ and ‘real’ ways of asking a question ‘Should I do x?’. I worry that the question ‘How can I do the most good?’ as asked in EA contexts, is becoming increasingly less ‘real’.

In his post Geeks, Mops and sociopaths in subculture evolution, David Chapman gives a model of the lifecycle of subcultures, and describes how they can go from generative to hollow and focused on resource acquisition. I worry that EA is becoming less generative and more hollow in this way.

In the EA of yesteryear, people often discussed potential failure modes — dilution, ossification, disconnect between leadership and community (eg. see Rebecca Baron’s post on movement collapse scenarios). My sense is that several of these are now actively playing out.

Growth is not “Community Building 101”

CEA’s strategy post:

‘The cornerstone of momentum will be growth: this is Community Building 101’

This seems wrong to me.

Of other communities that I’m part of or know of, few focus strongly on growth, if at all (I like Richard Bartlett’s writing on microsolidarity as an example of an approach to community building which isn’t centred on growth).

If I had to complete ‘growth is ___ 101’, my answer would be ‘startups’.

It seems to me that startup philosophy has heavily shaped how EA approaches community building. Both CEA and 80,000 Hours participated in Y Combinator. The main model for EA community building is the “engagement funnel.” Strategy discussions are framed in terms of metrics, users, product-market fit, and scaling.

But building a truth-seeking community is quite different from building a startup. In particular, startups optimise for a legible, quantifiable goal - revenue, users, growth. “Doing the most good” is a lot less legible and quantifiable, and treating it like a startup metric is liable to run into Goodhart’s Law: when a proxy for some value becomes the target of optimisation pressure, the proxy will cease to be a good proxy.

A big part of my story of the cause of death for EA: community building has focused on proxies like ‘career changes,’ and that focus has undermined the community’s integrity as a place of open truth-seeking (more on this in the next section).

The growth funnel model is in tension with open truth-seeking

Targeting high impact careers and donations

A main focus of EA community building is growing EA’s resources - talent and funding flowing into organisations viewed as high impact or EA aligned. Community building is often judged successful based on whether these goals are achieved.

There’s a big tension here with EA being a community of open truth-seeking. If the purpose of the community is to funnel people toward conclusions that community builders have already reached, then “How can I do the most good?” isn’t really an open question - the bottom line is already written.

An example of this - when I managed CEA’s Community Building Grants programme (2018–2021), the main way we evaluated grants and made decisions about additional funding was through evaluating case studies - instances where a group member had gone on to land a role that was potentially impactful.

In retrospect, I think this was a mistake. This meant a setup where group organisers had a strong incentive to push members toward careers we’d recognise as “highly impactful,” regardless of whether they agreed with the assessment or whether it made sense for the individual. It’s difficult to tell exactly what effect this had, though I imagine this put group organisers in a difficult position.

For example, group organisers often did 1-1 career advising, and I expect it to be very tricky to maintain openness about what career an advisee should do when their conclusion affects whether you will or won’t receive further funding (if I knew a university guidance counselor’s job was dependent on people going into specific careers, I’d be very wary about students going to them for career support).

(My sense is that evaluating community building in this way is still relatively common practice, though I don’t actually know this to be the case)

As per the Peter Singer quote, “Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be travelled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.” But within the EA funnel, we often have a pretty good guess of where people will end - in large part because the funnel is designed to take them there.

Not all EA community building metrics are about “high impact careers.” Some target engagement itself - people becoming engaged EAs, growth of particular programmes, attendance at events. I think these are less distorting than career-change metrics, but similar problems can arise. It may not always be the most impactful thing for a given person to engage more deeply with EA. And growth of engagement metrics is only good if the ecosystem people are engaging with is actually functioning well.

Selection effects

Even without explicit growth efforts, communities naturally select for people who conform to the community’s worldview - not just those who share its underlying principles. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs describes the basic dynamic.

The EA worldview includes:

• Explicit beliefs - eg. the importance of AI safety, animal welfare, global health

• Implicit assumptions - eg. a preference for quantitative methods, framing things in terms of economic theory, particular epistemological commitments. (see James Fodor’s Effective Altruism is an Ideology, not (just) a Question for more on this)

• Principles - eg. scout mindset, impartiality etc.

Many people are genuinely committed to EA principles but don’t share the full worldview - either the explicit conclusions or the implicit assumptions.

These people tend to get filtered out through subtle mechanisms. They’re perceived as less “EA-aligned.” They feel less of a sense of belonging. They’re seen as weaker candidates for opportunities. They have less reason to engage, so they drift away and the community becomes more homogeneous.

Growth efforts that target engagement turbocharge these selection effects. It’s much easier to generate engagement among people who already agree with the EA worldview than among those with reservations. Even a careful growth strategy will tend to pull in people who conform and push out people who don’t.

To CEA’s credit, there’s a bunch of things they do that push against insularity - the criticism contest, principles-based EAG admissions, and a commitment to welcoming diverse cause prioritisations. I think these things are good. But I also think they function more as patches on a system whose structural dynamics push the other way.

And some are hard to implement at scale - assessing whether someone genuinely understands EA principles, versus just displaying EA identity markers (working at the right organisations, having read the right books, using the right language), is a much harder evaluation problem.

Growth is only good if EA is functioning well

CEA’s strategy post gives two main justifications for growth:

‘Most directly, there’s the impact people have through their careers or donations when they put EA principles into practice.’

It’s not obvious to me how much it makes sense to describe what happens in EA outreach as people putting EA principles into practice, as opposed to being led down a recruitment funnel. (I definitely think it’s part of the picture, but not the whole picture, and I worry that it’s becoming a smaller and smaller part of the picture).

If a primary justification for growth is that people will have more impact by applying EA principles, it seems to me to be important to be confident that that’s what is happening.

Another possible motivation for EA growth, which I think is relatively common, is thinking that EA-recommended areas are high impact, and that it’s good to funnel people towards these (AI safety in particular, though not exclusively). If that’s the motivation, I think it’s more honest to do outreach for those areas directly.

‘And more indirectly, achieving growth would be strong evidence that EA is bouncing back from the damage done by FTX. It would be among the clearest possible signals to our stakeholders - funders, community builders, the community itself, potential community members, and the world at large - that EA is worth listening to, committing to, and investing in.’

This seems wrong to me as a matter of fact - I don’t think it’s the case that growth amounts to the clearest signal that EA is worth listening to, committing to, and investing in by various stakeholders.

Though even if it were the case, I think that this would be a sign that something was going wrong with EA. I’d hope that the clearest signal that EA is worth listening to would be that EA has true and valuable things to say, rather than that it’s growing. And if it turns out that stakeholders are more interested in whether EA is growing that whether it’s eg. saying true and valuable things, I think this is a sign that the strategy is focusing on the wrong stakeholders.

EA community building doesn’t serve the people who embody EA most deeply

Many people who’ve been involved with EA for years - people whose careers, donations, and thinking have been deeply shaped by EA principles - don’t describe themselves as EAs. They say “EA-adjacent,” or they’ve dropped the label entirely.

My sense is the standard view here is that people don’t want to associate with EA because of reputational cost (and perhaps also that not affiliating with EA is in some way a ‘defection’). I think reputational cost is part of what’s going on.

Though I also think that for many experienced EAs, the community and culture no longer reflects their values, and it isn’t something they want to stand behind. And I expect for some, it’s because EA just doesn’t feel very alive any more.

Relatedly, experienced EAs don’t seem to engage much with EA infrastructure. Of the EAs I know who’ve been around for a while, I don’t know any who are part of a local group, and only a small handful actively engage on the Forum. This seems to be getting more pronounced over time.

I think a big part of what’s going on is that EA community building isn’t really for established EAs. It’s for funnelling people toward established paths to impact. Once someone has reached the bottom of the funnel - once they’ve landed a ‘high impact’ role or made their career pivot - there isn’t much reason for them to keep engaging. The funnel was designed to move them to an endpoint, not to support their ongoing development.

A related point - EA community building seems less about helping people have an impact by their own lights, and more about having an impact by the lights of the community builders. Will MacAskill has recently argued that EAs should feel a kind of “civic duty” to affiliate with and engage with EA. I’m not sure. I think part of the reason EAs don’t feel this civic duty is that community building isn’t designed to serve them but to affect them.

This feeds into EA’s ‘death’. A lot of what’s most valuable about EA is implicit - virtues, patterns of thinking, cultural norms and such that are not easily formalised. If those people are disengaged, the community will fail to transmit much of what makes EA valuable.

A possible alternative approach would focus less on funnelling and more on creating something that the most thoughtful, experienced EAs genuinely want to be part of. Paul Graham’s startup advice “make something people love” seems important here (my disinclination towards startups as a model for EA notwithstanding), though in particular, where the ‘people’ are those who embody EA principles the most.

FTX was a trust problem, not just a brand problem

My sense is that CEA’s strategy frames the post-FTX challenge largely in terms of brand damage and recovery. The stewardship post talks about how “we’ve let critics define us and lost ground in public discourse,” and the response focuses on communications, storytelling, and messaging.

There’s some truth to the brand framing - people can and do end up with wild misunderstandings of EA, and better communication can help. But I think the deeper issue is different.

FTX didn’t just happen to EA - it also happened within EA. SBF was supported, celebrated and elevated by many parts of EA leadership. The damage wasn’t primarily to EA’s brand; it was to the trust people had placed in EA - and that loss of trust was at least partially warranted.

This distinction matters because trust and brand call for different responses. A brand problem calls for better communications. A trust problem calls for becoming more trustworthy.

EA has a culture of deferring to leaders and people in positions of expertise, and for good reason - it’s impossible for everyone to figure out everything from first principles, and relying on others’ judgement is essential for doing good at scale. But this means it’s very important for EA to be a trustworthy community. EA’s impact depends a lot on people being able to trust each other, and on that trust being deserved.

The most important post-FTX question, to my mind, isn’t “How can EA’s brand recover?” but “How can EA become a community that’s worthy of the trust people place in it?” That question leads to different priorities than a communications-focused strategy. It leads to questions about governance, transparency, accountability, and the quality of EA’s internal epistemics.

CEA has done some work here which I think has been valuable - the Reflections and lessons from Effective Ventures post as an example. But in the overall strategy, this seems secondary to growth and brand recovery. I think the balance should be reversed. I worry that a strategy centred on “improving the brand” risks treating the symptom rather than the underlying condition.

CEA’s brand strategy is in tension with open truth-seeking

It seems to me that CEA is trying to create a positive narrative about EA. This is somewhat explicit in the ‘Improving the Brand’ section of the strategy document:

We want revitalized EA communications to be: Proactively driven by people aligned with EA principles, resulting in Honest and positive messaging [...]

I think that there’s a tough question for such a strategy - what if there are true and relevant things to say about EA that aren’t positive?

In general, the picture that CEA presents is often a lot more positive than the picture that I have. And CEA’s picture also seems importantly incomplete or inaccurate to me. For example:

• As above, I think the discussion of FTX in CEA’s strategy document misses the ways in which FTX was something that happened within EA, not just to it.

• It seems to me that EA is dying, whereas CEA thinks ‘we have already been largely successful in moving beyond narratives about the “death” of EA’

• To me the vibe of effectivealtruism.org seems more oriented to persuade rather than inform, as per this comment I made previously.

• It seems to me to be something of a stretch to call CEA’s strategy ‘principles-first stewardship’. I’d expect such a strategy to be a lot more focused on ensuring that EA is in fact a place that embodies EA principles than CEA’s actual strategy does.

I think that the attempt to create a positive narrative ends up running counter to ensuring people have a full understanding. And I think this is bad:

• This strategy will select against people that care about truth over positive narratives. Having people that care about truth seems very important for EA.

• It’s important for people to have self-awareness within EA. It’s important for people to have an accurate understanding of questions like ‘Is EA dying?’ and ‘Is EA trustworthy?’.

• On a personal level, I don’t like it. I don’t want to be in a community which is trying to cultivate my impressions in a positive direction. I would like it to be left up to me whether to view what is happening in EA positively or negatively.

What principles-first stewardship could look like

This post mostly focuses on ways in which CEA’s approach diverges from my sense of ‘principles-first stewardship’.

I want to give a few comments on what a ‘principles-first approach to stewardship’ would look like to me:

Primarily, I think this would be guided by the question: Is EA actually a place that embodies and nurtures EA principles, both individually and collectively? And the strategy would flow from taking seriously the possibility that the answer might be “not as much as we’d like.”

This might mean:

Aiming to understand the question: Are EA community members applying EA principles? Are EA organisations? How can we tell? What do they need to support them in this?

Designing the EA community for truth-seeking, not conversion: Seeing success not as increased engagement metrics, but as a flourishing epistemic environment. This is a lot harder to measure, but a lot closer to the EA raison d’être.

Rebuilding from the core outward. Focus first on creating something that experienced, thoughtful EAs want to be part of and/ or are willing to stand behind.

A comms strategy that is based around aiming to inform rather than persuade. Ensuring that people have a full picture of what is going on with EA, warts and all.

Treating the post-FTX challenge as a trust problem as well as a brand problem. Focusing on ensuring that the community and ecosystem is worthy of the trust people put in it.

Taking seriously the possibility that the EA worldview has blind spots. Actively seeking out people who share EA principles but bring different worldviews and assumptions. Doing more good stuff like criticism contests.

I think CEA’s current strategy puts growth and brand recovery at the centre, with epistemic health and trust as secondary concerns. In my view of ‘principles-first stewardship’, that would be reversed, not because growth and communications don’t matter, but because they’re only valuable insofar as the thing being grown and communicated about is actually good. And I think the question of whether EA is functioning well as a truth-seeking community deserves more attention than it’s getting.

Point system

• If you make the joke: 2 points

• If I make the joke but you are there to witness it: 1 point to you, 1 point to me

• If I lose full body control/ hit the ground: Bonus 2 points to whoever makes the joke

• New rule introduction - yellow cards: If anyone breaks the spirit of the game they will be penalised with a yellow card.

Log

• Alan: I was going for a walk with Alan. He made a joke and I collapsed on the path. I’m not sure if it was intended to be a joke but it was very funny. Also a small child was nearby, who was presumably confused as to why I had gone from vertical to horizontal, and ran over and put it’s small child hand on my chest in what was presumably intended to be an act of spiritual healing. This was very sweet. Score: Alan - 2 points + 2 bonus points +1 small child spiritual healing bonus point. Also on the walk we were talking about wholeness, and I said something like ‘I am all for wholeness but I want to be a different whole’. This was very funny and I collapsed. Score: Me - 1 point, Alan - 1 point. (Alan’s codename was previously Stefano. However, due to an error in my cryptography algorithm I accidentally called him Siegfried, which risked depreserving his anonymity, hence moving to Alan as a new codename)

• Liam: I was playing with a small sloth called Liam. I had previously purchased this as a Valentine’s day gift from Tesco. The sloth has a loveheart sewn to it’s paws which says ‘I ❤️ you slow much’. I was playing with the sloth and thrusting it’s hips back and forth in a sexual manner. I found this very funny and collapsed. This has happened to me multiple times. Score: Me - 1 point, Liam - 1 point. Also, later on I was talking to Liam (this is a bit confusing because Liam is both the name of the Sloth, and the codename for someone else) and said that I was feeling fear. Liam asked me what I would like to feel instead, and I said ‘just about anything else’. I thought this was very funny and collapsed. Score: Me - 1 point, Liam - 1 point. Also, there was another time when we were talking about [redacted] which was quite intense, but I also found it quite funny and collapsed. Score: Liam - 1 point.

• House: I was chairing our fortnightly house meeting. I was about to make a joke about how being an enneagram type 5 exculpated me from basic house responsibilities. The potential of this joke was however too much for me and so I instead collapsed. I’m a bit unsure about whether this gets the ‘hit the ground’ bonus points. I was in a chair, and sort of slumped out of the chair in a semi-controlled manner. Ultimately I don’t think the impact on the ground was forceful enough to justify the bonus points, but it’s a bit of a judgement call. Score: Me - 1 point, House - 1 point. Later on I spent some time alternating between crying and laughing manically. Honestly it’s a bit unclear to me why. Or perhaps I don’t want to tell you, you nosy bastards. Anyway, I went to the bathroom to get some tissues, and on the return from the bathroom, I collapsed. This is an interesting one because I didn’t even have a specific joke in mind, but it seems like I was just going of pure ambient joke potential. Given this the relevant Shapley values are unclear, lets say: Score: Me - 2 points, House - 2 points, God - 2 points.

• Sponish: Sponish said that he would not be available to have a halloumi wrap after our squash game. Foul: Sponish - yellow card.

• Jarhend: As correctly pointed out in the March update I forgot to include him in the final scoreboard. Score: Jarhend - 1 reparations point. However, his comment exceeded the comment character limit. Foul: Jarhend - yellow card.

Running Total

As ever, please correct me with any corrections or admissions.

• If you make the joke: 2 points

• If I make the joke but you are there to witness it: 1 point to you, 1 point to me

• If I lose full body control/ hit the ground: Bonus 2 points to whoever makes the joke

Notes

• I am using codenames to preserve anonymity

• The leaderboard is effective from the start of March

Log

• Siegfried: He knocked on my door to say it was time for dinner. I opened the door and instead of responding just stared at him for 5 seconds. He said ‘Did you knock?’. I found this very funny and fell over. Score: Stefano - 2 points + 2 bonus points.

• Liam: We were [redacted] and I was about to [redacted] but then [redacted]. Which was very interesting. Score: Liam - 1 point + 1 mystery point, me - 1 point. It’s hard to work out responsibility for this one.

• Jarhed: I was complaining about something whilst on a walk in the park, I think about feeling opressed in my circling coaching training calls. He said ‘Hmmm… and is that ok?’. I found this very funny and fell over. Score: Jarhed 1 point + 1 bonus point (I didn’t fully collapse but I did need to lie down in the park so only 1/2 bonus points).

• God: I was in a quaker meeting for worship and collapsed. Score: God - 2 points + bonus 2 points. Good Samaritan point to Liam for explaining to the quakers what was going on.

• Jarhed: I was discussing various judgements that I am holding onto with Jarhed. I discovered and reported that I feel I have suffered greatly visa vis EA and am owed recompense. I found this very funny and collapsed. Score: Me - 1 point, Jarhed - 1 point.

• Sponish: I unfortunately don’t remember all of these well. I can remember being in the vietnamese restaurant and saying ‘no I can’t say that, if I say that I will collapse’ and then making the joke anyway and collapsing. Score: Me - 1 point, Sponish - 1 point.

  • I also remember being near the boris bikes and making a joke, and then collapsing. Score: Me - 1 point + 2 bonus points, Sponish - 1 point. Good Samaritan point to the random passerby who asked if we needed any help.

  • I think there was another one that I can’t remember.

• My circling coach: I was explaining how I felt superior to the other people in the training course and found this very funny and collapsed. Score: Me - 1 point, Circling coach - 1 point. I also explained how when I was talking to Jarhed I had discovered how I am owed recompense by EA, and how I found this very funny and collapsed. I also found explaining this very funny and collapsed again. Score: Me - 1 point, Circling coach - 1 point.

Running total

• Me: 8 points

• Siegfried: 4 points

• God: 4 points

• Liam: 3 points

• Sponish: 2 points

• Circling Coach: 2 points

• Random passerby: 1 point

I can’t remember all of them - please let me know if there are any I haven’t included (I think Liam and Sponish are owed more points).

Most of my housemates were away today. For the first time, the cat sat on my lap. I made sure to not move at all so as to maximise my comfort as a mat for cat. Including when the cat decided to dig it’s nails into my leg.

I also bought new shoes from Sports Direct recently - the Aldi of sportwear. The man in the shop was on the rude side. Also apparently one is only allowed to try on two pairs of shoes at a time in Sports Direct. Anyway, somehow I ended up saying ‘thank you to the man about 7 times during the interaction, and also bought some insoles which I do not want or need.

It seems to me that I would have been a lot less accommodating is the cat and the Sports Direct man were nicer to me. I don’t understand exactly what is going on here, but I think this is negging.

Also, I have been eating a lot of börek recently. I initially went to a expensive cafe nearby to buy my börek. The first time I went there I didn’t actually have a börek but instead had a halloumi sandwich and 2 side salads as part of their lunchtime deal. The man (a different man to the Sports Direct man) said I could have 3 side salads instead of the advertised two. I recently discovered that there is a supermarket right next to the expensive cafe which also sells böreks, but much cheaper. And I have started going there instead. But I have to walk past the expensive cafe and when I do this I am unable to make eye contact with the expensive cafe. It seems that my psyche understood the accepting of the third side salad as a pledge of allegiance to the expensive cafe, and now I feel a deep sense of shame and disloyalty whenever I go to the cheap supermarket to buy the much more reasonably priced börek instead.

I don’t think this is negging, but it seems similiar, somehow.

Many years ago I read the Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test. It reassured me that insofar as I’m worried about being a psychopath, I’m probably not, as worrying about whether one is a psychopath isn’t the kind of thing that psychopaths do.

I used to worry about being self-absorbed. I also worried that this is exactly the kind of thing that a self-absorbed person would worry about. Not a good time to be an evidential decision theorist. One wonders how many questions online Narcissism Tests really need to include.

___

I more recently read Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity.

‘[...] there was a person who thought they were like totally going to develop Artificial General Intelligence. Then they ran into me; and soon after, instead started agonizing about how they had almost destroyed the world. [...] I was rolling my eyes about the part that was a more blatant mistake, completely apart from the epistemic prediction error they probably couldn’t help; the part that would have been a mistake even if they had almost destroyed the world. I was rolling my eyes about how they’d now found a new way of being the story’s subject.’

When I read this I felt a sense of shame, and it seemed this triggered a set of worries about my self-absorption. Shit, am I making the end of the world about me? I don’t know whether the irony here is obvious. I imagine it is, though in the grip of the worry it wasn’t obvious to me.

—

Both many years ago and more recently I read Joe Carlsmith’s On Sincerity. It’s one of my favourite essays and I’ve read it many times. In his section on sincerity’s failure modes:

‘[...] Another, more subtle failure mode is about over-concern with sincerity itself – either in others, or in yourself. [...] Thus, it is easy to treat the question of whether one is sincere as, somehow, the main thing; to agonize endlessly about possible flaws or biases or rationalizations or contradictions in one’s character; to turn most of one’s moral gaze inwards, rather than outwards towards the world’

Shit, am I making sincerity about me, turning my moral gaze inwards rather than outwards?

—

Semi recently I was talking to someone about some friction in our relationship. I don’t have good words for our relationship, to some degree a friend and to some degree a mentor, though neither of those feel quite right.

I was going to attend a workshop, and I found out that broadly speaking she wasn’t too excited about me being there. I felt quite hurt and surprised by this. Anyway, I did go on to attend the workshop, and whilst I was there we sat down to discuss what was going on.

One of the things that she said was that whenever we interacted, I made the interaction all about me, and that I couldn’t see her. I was rather mortified to hear this. I then went on to explain that in the times that we interacted previously I had very low self-esteem. The irony wasn’t obvious to me here either.

—

My sense of what’s going on here at the most basic level:

Experience judgement → Attempt to escape judgement → Experience judgement.

Not all attempts to escape judgement are going to be so neatly self-defeating - often attempts to prevent or escape judgement are successful.

Sometimes I need to fart, but I fear judgement. Typically I will hold in the fart. And this is successful, in that I do not then fart, and I am not judged for farting.

But with the examples above, the attempts to escape judgement and the cause of judgement seem one and the same. In the case of self-absorption:

I read something from someone I respect, or whose judgements are in some way important to me. I interpret them as saying ‘self-absorption is bad’, and see ‘self-absorption’ as about something that I’m doing.

My response to this is to turn inwards and ask ‘Is this something I’m doing wrong? How can I be different?’

Though turning inwards isn’t the only way of attempting to escape judgement.

Very recently I spoke on the phone to my father to ring him for his birthday. I had been putting off ringing him. He said that I don’t ring him often enough.

Here we have a similar pattern, but with avoidance replacing self-absorption.

I experience guilt in relation to my father. I attempt to escape this guilt by not ringing him. At some point this guilt is too strong and so I ring him. I experience him as judging me for not ringing him often enough.

I think there are many ways of dealing with judgement and interpersonal tension more broadly. The strategies I seem most adept in are turning inwards and avoidance.

These are far from the only strategies. Ones where I’m less far on the skill tree: fawning and conflict.

I can imagine people who are more proficient these strategies ending up in a similarly ourobourus structured pickle on receiving judgements of being too clingy or too aggressive. I imagine the default responses upon receiving these judgements being ‘I’m so sorry how can I make that better’ or ‘Fuck you you prick’ respectively.

What’s the solution to this?

Well it seems to me that the basis of this is judgement, whether it’s self-judgement or other-judgement. Judgement is the core sin and you should stop doing it.

Hehehe. I think this is close, but also no. One cannot dig oneself out of a hole, and one cannot escape judgement via judgement, and one cannot escape the pain of condemnation via more condemnation. (Or at least I haven’t been able to so far, please dm me if you’ve found a way to do this).

The real answer is opening one’s heart to Jesus. As the big jeezy put it himself:

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone

Also

Judge not, lest ye be judged

One challenge in writing this is not being too judgemental. Like, a lot of the words I’ve used ‘avoidance’, ‘fawning’, ‘self-absorption’, ‘fuck you you prick’, ‘evidential decision theorist’ all seem to contain some implicit condemnation. Even ‘judgement’ is a bit ‘judgy’.

This is obviously very bad, if there’s one sin that’s worse than judgement it’s hypocrisy. Very big pickle. But also, the saving grace is, one can also be not judgemental about that! Mwahahaha!

(To be honest I’m a bit confused by Jeezy, on the one hand he seems very non-judgemental, on the other hand, well:

But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.

I’m not sure what ‘Raca’ means, but I assume it’s beyond the pale.)

—

Hinterestingly in Joe Carlsmith’s On Sincerity he quotes Eliezer - ‘no mother and no father’. The full bit.

No rescuer hath the rescuer.

No Lord hath the champion,

no mother and no father,

only nothingness above.

This is hinteresting because:

• I’ve mentioned my father

• I’ve quoted Joe Carlsmith

• I’ve mentioned Jesus

• I’ve quoted Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Eliezer wrote Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

• I am writing Harri Besceli and the Non Methods of Post Rationality

• I like psychoanalysis

Things this post should do or include but doesn’t because of time, energy and/ or spiritual constraints:

• Talk about how when I imagine Eliezer ‘rolling his eyes’ the thing I imagine is contempt. Contempt for people who are ‘making it all about themselves’.

  • I see directing contempt at someone as a kind of violence, or attack. And given this, I expect the natural response to this to be some kind of self-protective, or self-concerned behaviour.

  • It seems important to talk about this in a way which isn’t eg. saying ‘Eliezer is bad’.

  • It also seems important to talk about or point out. I think that taking on other people’s judgements is a big part of how people depart from the Way.

  • I think that doing this well is in fact about my spiritual abilities at present (I am sorry).

• Overall be more coherent.

• Talk about ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’, where ‘them’ includes me, Eliezer, and my father.

  • Also talk more about Jesus and persecution.

• Talk about how parents and God are very similar

  • At least from a child’s perspective parents are or are supposed to be benevolent, omnipotent and omniscient. They are also the source of moral truth, judgement, praise and punishment and promises that things will ultimately be ok (if one does what they instruct).

  • Tie this into the ‘no mother and father’ bit.

  • Also, the notion of hell as being separated from God, or unable to receive God’s love.

  • Maybe say something about evolution and attachment theory and about how being without the love of a parent is a big deal developmentally. Plausibly. And also maybe that attaching to judgements, about oneself and others is in some way a survival strategy. Plausibly.

• Talk about how not judging oneself or others for judgement is not the same as permitting oneself to judge.

• Quote the song ‘Upwards over the Mountain’ by Iron and Wine, which I have been listening to on repeat recently. In particular:

  • Mother, I made it up from the bruise of a floor of this prison

  • Mother, I lost it, all of the fear of the Lord I was given

• Talk about how the quaker thing of ‘seeing that of God in everyone’

  • Point out that this isn’t just turning one’s attention to the ‘good bits’ in people, but seeing God in all of a person. At least according to me, I don’t know I’m not really a Quaker nor do I believe in God. Probably.

  • Tone down the God vibes in this section with an amusing anecdote by talking about how I went to Quaker meeting for worship last week and had a cataplectic attack in the middle of the meeting and fell off my chair. This is particularly funny if you know that Quaker meeting for worship involves sitting together in silence for an hour.

• Talk about how I suspect that the answer to all of this is to feel whatever is there to be felt, without attaching to any particular stories.

  • Including feeling how it feels to be on the receiving end of contempt, or judgement, without attaching to any judgements of one’s own.

  • (and plausibly that the function of judgement is to enable oneself to not feel the feelings)

• Also, talk about how I like the nihil supernum quote, but not the ‘rescuer’ part.

  • Talk about saviour complexes, but in a way which isn’t judgey.

• Use AI to generate an ourobourus pickle image

I’ve been getting into the deep end of non-judgement recently. Largely this amounts to loudly and randomly proclaiming ‘judge not lest ye be judged!’ in conversations with people. Almost always with out any prior context which would make it a relevant thing to say.

Anyway, I and said friend were talking about judgement. I was saying, broadly, that I’m increasingly becoming less bought into judgement. According to me, at least when I’m vibing in a certain way, judgement is an illusion.

Judgement is about blame. Which is about punishment. Which is about control.

I am not into controlling others, or being controlled by others (at least when I’m vibing a certain way), and so I reject judgement thusly.

My friend disagreed, and thought I was an unrepentant sinner.

We debated this for a while. I had the upper hand in this debate, and so decided to show mercy by switching the focus of the conversation from the philosophical to the emotional.

‘What does holding judgement give you?’ I asked.

I believe it to be good form to answer for oneself any question that one asks, so one has a yardstick for judging whether the response is up to scratch, and so I began to think about this myself - what judgements am I holding on to.

I began to think about my relationship with EA - and it seems to me this is one of the places where I’m holding onto a lot of judgement (I imagine this will come as a shock to regular Bestjelly readers, but it is I confess true).

Anyway, at this point in the call I burst out laughing and had a minor cataplectic attack. This seems to be an increasingly regular feature of my personal therapeutic process.

The thought that came to mind in asking myself ‘What does holding onto judgement give you?’, was something like ‘I have suffered greatly, and I am owed recompense’. And I found this very funny.

To be clear, I think that it’s true that my relationship with EA has involved a lot of suffering, and I don’t mean the funniness to downplay that. Though, well, I don’t know, I think it is a very funny thought.

In a large part because in some ways it feels true! It seems that part of me does or did have a strong sense of being owed recompense.

When I tune into this, I imagine this form of recompense to come when I complete the many magnum opuses of EA that I’ve been working on for the past few millenia. After posting the magnum octopodes I imagine being paraded through the streets of the EA Forum. I am on a four horse chariot and wearing a purple toga, and forum citizens shower me in karma and sing songs of my sacrifice before declaring me consul for life.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. At least at the moment I have a some sense of opening, like a hold on part of my psyche easing.

I don’t know if this will last. Perhaps tomorrow I will be back at it to demand satisfaction.

I could tell by my girlfriends tone that she disagreed with this assessment. Fortunately I am an expert at conversational implicatures and surfacing hidden communicative intent, and so in my half slumber I responded - ‘am I not supposed to be shouting?’. Apparently not.

This was the first time I did a bit of nocturnal shouting last night. The second time I dreamt that I was writing an essay about how everything had been turned into marshmallow. Importantly, pastries, and only pastries, had wisely been exempted from this otherwise universal transformation. I got out my phone in order to find a relevant quote to insert into my essay, which I hoped would somehow help contextualise the state of marshmallow affairs. But then I threw my phone against the wall. I found this very vexatious as I needed my phone for the quote and now it was broken. And so I shouted ‘Noooo’. Again, perhaps a little melodramatic, but still a situationally appropriate response in my world.

After this I decided I needed to shake off the nighttime shouties and went downstairs to get some rhubarb streusel (which I have recently learned is similar to but distinct from a strudel) as well as some banana bread and cream. I then ate this in bed, next to my sleeping but probably not very deeply girlfriend.

We are currently staying with my parents in York - me, my girlfriend, my brother, my brother’s partner, their 2 year old daughter and my granny, together with my mother and stepfather. My brother is on nighttime duty and sleeps with his daughter in a separate bedroom to his partner. This is in part so that only one of them has disturbed sleep when their daughter wakes up crying in the middle of the night. This is also in part because my brother snores like a bulldozer or some other industrial construction vehicle, and so he would likely disturb his partner anyway. He recently had nose surgery to desnorify him, but this has not been successful.

After I had finished my streusel and banana bread my brother knocked on my bedroom to check if everything was ok, as apparently my shouting had woken him up. I found it very sweet to be included in the remit of his nighttime welfare duty.

One of the few objects in said bedroom is the Desiderata - a framed print of a prose poem by Max Ehrmann. This used to belong to my grandparents, who are know in the stage of their lives where their children and grandchildren have begun to lay claims to their various possessions. I haven’t been paying much attention to the family whatsapp group where my mother has been listing these items, and have missed out on many treasures such as the octagonal dining table (which I recently learnt actually has nine sides), various silverwares and large quantities of playing cards. My grandfather was/ is a hoarder and has ammassed many room fulls of knick knacks and paddywacks, and so there is a lot of physical inheritance to go around (my grandfather is still alive, but his health is deteriorating such that he is no longer able to successfully defend his hoarder treasure from my mother’s desire to clean the house).

The only item that I have laid claim to is the Desiderata, which I have fond childhood memories of. However, my brother also apparently has the capacity to develop fond childhood memories, and also laid claim to the Desiderata. This has put my mother in a difficult position as the de facto executor of my still living grandparents’ estate. Her strategy for navigating this conflict was to give my brother the Desiderata, and to print of another Desiderata and give the copy to me. If the carving of the family estate had happened a few years ago, I expect I would have won out in this minor struggle, though since my brother has provided her with a granddaughter he has managed a surprising late stage usurpation of my position as favourite child.

My mother thought that I wouldn’t notice that I had been given a knock-off desiderata (see this post for more details on my mother’s acts of deception and how this has informed my character development). I was not fooled, and upon realising this and expressing my outrage, she decided to switch strategy and instead give my brother the knock-off desiderata. Though plausibly then fearing that my brother would also be wise to her ersatzery, she switched strategy once more and informed my brother that I had stolen the real Desiderata, and abnegated any further responsibility for determining the true rights to the heirloom.

It’s unclear to me who is in more need of the Desiderata’s wisdom, given the nighttime events. The poem opens ‘Go placidly amidst the noise and haste’, which perhaps describes my brother’s lived environmental context better than mine. Though the poem continues ‘and remember what peace there may be in silence’ which is plausibly a lesson that I have greater need of learning. I do not know, though I do not plan on any relinquishment.

After I had finished the streusel and banana bread, and after my brother’s check-in had concluded, I messed around on my phone for a while, which it turns out was not broken after all. I spent some time on r/Narcolepsy. I’d always vaguely assumed that my tendency towards nighttime shouting and screaming was the result of some childhood trauma, buried in my subconscious until I reach the relevant item on my processing todo list. However it seems that the nighttime shouties are a fairly common phenomenon for narcoleptics, as well as having frequent vivid crazy dreams.

It felt good to read r/Narcolepsy. It seems that I often forget that I have narcolepsy, and reading about others’ experiences felt like a good reminder. It was fun to read my fellow narcoleptics responses to ‘What’s the weirdest place/time you’ve fallen asleep?’. I particularly enjoyed the answer: ‘I was saying the prayer at a church event. Everyone initially thought I was having a spiritual moment when I went silent, but after a minute they caught on.’

I’m not sure of my own answer to this, but some of my favourites

• Outside Pergamon Museum in Berlin. I was museuming with my mum, and found it quite boring, and so left her to continue looking at old objects and stuff whilst I slept outside.

• In the waiting room for my narcolepsy diagnosis appointment.

• Under a table in the library at college. I woke up to the chemistry teacher shouting at me that the library was not an appropriate place to sleep. I think this was a bit unfair, but it also happened after I’d attempted a student-led coup against the teachers, and so I can understand her antagonism towards me.

• Any time I’m in a car. I think the strongest soporific for me is being in a car with under-seat heating, gets me every time.

I am currently in my parents living room with my niece and brother’s partner - soon it will be time for their midday nap. Before that she has two projects that she needs to complete. One - running around in circles on the carpet. Two - building a house under the table that I am sat working at. I am jealous of her energy levels and joi de vivre. But I am smarter than she is and have better fine motor control so it all evens out in the end.

Her inadequacy in these departments was recently showcased when my mother gave her a knife whilst they were baking a cake together. My brother thought it was insane to give a two year old a knife and so proclaimed ‘this is insane’, and proceeded to reappropriate the knife from the two year old. Taking a knife from a two year old it turns out is a difficult task, and intimately related to the reasons one should not give a knife to a two year old in the first place. Luckily the gash on my brothers’ hand is only surface level.

Once all the relevant naps are said and done, we four generations of family will celebrate a belated Christmas together. I anticipate it with eagerness.

Merry Christmas!

I would like to have something to say, really. Something substantive and maybe even memorable. But the truth is I have been running out of things to say for at least a week now. Perhaps two.

I have made, as far as I can tell, an earnest effort. I have made multiple attempts to write poetry.

Attempt 1:

Words are like turds,

You should not step on them,

Attempt 2:

My name is Henry Bescelo, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

I have experimented briefly with writing Harri Potter and the non-methods of post-rationality.

But I am dry. And so I really have no choice but to run down the clock. I don’t feel proud of this, I would have liked to go out with a bang. Another zinger about Henry and his love of bitches would have been nice.

I don’t think it’s right for me to apologise. I have sincerely tried. I don’t think you believe me when I say this but it’s true. It’s sad for everyone for it to end like this, most of all me. But that’s how it is.

The items on my desk include: 15 batteries, a white peach and raspberry vape, a prescription carton of dexamphetamine, a macbook, a shia le bouef mouse mat, a singing bowl, a mouse, a keyboard and monitor. The macbook is open to the ‘September trip’ chat in whatsapp, which is currently displaying a photo of my friend’s bottom. He is wearing shorts which are unreasonably tight.

I am wearing shoes. They are red.

I also don’t feel shame. Would it not be more insincere to write something substantial under the guise of intrinsic motivation? I think so.

Some of the batteries say ‘energizer max’ on them. Some other ones say ‘amazon basics’. There is also a third type of batter, which says ‘allmax’. These last kind are AA, whereas the first two kinds are AAA.

Wittgenstein once said something about a ladder. The basic idea was that you go up a ladder, and then you have to throw the ladder away. Wittgenstein is not from Lichtenstein, but ‘Wittgenstein’ does rhyme with ‘Lichtenstein’.

I worry that you will see this as an act of disrespect. This is not my intention, I have nothing but fondness and gratitude for you.

I have eaten four bags of crisps today, all of them jalapeno flavoured. I have also eaten one cheese sandwich and one crisp and cheese sandwich.

And I said ‘Big’

And he said ‘Good luck

In two days I will be in an aeroplane. I like being in an aeroplane. It is like I have been gifted a block of free time. In return I have to sit in an uncomfortable chair and go to the bathroom everytime I want to vape. But it is mine nonetheless, and no one can take it from me. I often end up watching the film of whoever is sitting in front of me and to the right. Last time I watched about half of what seemed to be a Bridget Jones’ Diary sequel.

Whenever I guess the time and it’s earlier than I expect, I’m elated. YES, free time! And whenever it’s later than I expect I feel robbed and aggrieved. How dare you.

I often fantasize about having more time. I feel giddy at the prospect of a weekend where I have no plans. It’s a land of opportunity. I would like a time chamber.

I think I have neglected the past previously. The future has so much more potential.

José Ortega y Gasset - The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, ‘here and now’ without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point blank.

Yes, I feel you José. It’s an outrage. Someone should do something.

And now. And now. And now. And also now. Yep. Right now. Here again. Now.

It’s all so very immediate. Unavoidable.

It’s like sand. It gets everywhere, up your nose, in your sandwiches. You try to grab it and it slips through your fingers.

Apparently, this is not just the adverts, the show has already started. It’s been going on for a while in fact. This is, in fact, it. It’s what we’ve all been talking about and imagining for so long. And we’re right in the middle of it. Phwoar.

Possibility. So much possibility. Fantasy.

‘I wish it had happened differently’’

‘Yes, it’s in the past now’

‘Yes, I just wish it had been different’

‘Yes. And it’s in the past now’

‘Yes, I know, I just wish it had been different’

‘Yes, I know, and it’s in the past now’

You can get trapped in time. Loopy. Looping. Over and over and over. And over. Like a monkey with a miniature cymbal. Allegedly. Snagged, you can get snagged in it.

I often forget about time. But once you see it you see it everywhere. All over the place. Shit! I forgot about time! It’s happening right now! Somebody do something!

Choice. Choosing. Narrowing. You could have chosen anything, and this is what you chose.

Moments, queued back for eternity, step by step, marching, one moment in the limelight, then poof.

‘Can I have another go?’

‘I’m sorry it doesn’t work like that’

‘Why not? I just want to go back and do it a bit differently’

‘I’m sorry, you can’t, that’s not how it works’

‘Right’

I look at Aragorn. I look at the orcs. I look back at Aragorn. I look back at the orcs. I slowly raise my hand.

“I see where you’re coming from Aragorn, I really do, and I appreciate the speech… I was just wondering… well, did you really have to behead their diplomat? It did seem like he was being a bit rude, but, well, I’d just prefer not to fight if we don’t have to, and it seems like maybe we could have tried negotiating? Don’t get me wrong, I am very committed to this whole defeat Sauron, help Frodo and so on, just, well, the chances that Frodo is still alive don’t look great given that diplomat had his Mithril shirt. Also, well, maybe it would have been better if we hadn’t rested all of our hopes on two manchildren and a very suspicious looking gremlin. I’m not saying what we’re doing is pointless, just well, as I said I’d prefer not to fight if I don’t have to. And, well I guess it’s a bit late now, but had we considered other ways of distracting Sauron, a fireworks display perhaps? It didn’t really feel like we had much opportunity to give input before suicide charge was decided on as the main plan.

And, well… I hate to be a negative nancy, but… the speech… it feels a bit… manipulative? Like, I just think that there are plenty of good reasons for not fighting. I don’t know, wanting to wait for reinforcements, wanting to see if they wouldn’t mind sending us a replacement diplomate to negotiate with, wanting the battle plan to be voted upon by a representative subsection of the army and so on. And you’ve specifically highlighted forsaking our friends and breaking bonds and whatnot. Which, well, just seems like a very specific part of reason-space.

And it kinda sounds like your conflating the Age of men coming crashing down and not fighting. Which, well, as I’ve mentioned the mithril shirt, it kind of seems like we’re out of luck on the Age of Men front.

And a small other thing - when you say ‘I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me’, well I actually feel quite unseen, and disconnected from you. Like, you didn’t even look me in the eyes, you looked at Jeff, granted, but not me. And, well you’re presuming it’s fear, but actually I’ve got this hay fever thing going on, and you didn’t really check. Like, I didn’t sense much curiosity in your voice when you said that, or openness to being wrong. So yeh, I actually felt quite othered. I’m all for esprit de corps, I’d just appreciate more of a non-violent communication style.

And, I guess it seems like, well, given the diplomat has no head, that we’re going to have to fight now. Fine, I guess, just for next time, I’d really appreciate you bearing all this in mind. And also, would it be ok if we waited until we got a bit closer until we charged? Just usually we start running from quite a distance, and with all this armour, and the heat and so on… I just don’t want to be tired by the time we get to the orcs. Thanks.

Part of me is still holding out for it to be some kind of hoax or con. Ooops, I ended up in a doomsday cult, oh well, at least we’re not all going to die.

My mother told me that throughout her teens and twenties she believed that everyone was going to die in a nuclear war. I’m hoping for something similar, but it’s feeling harder to maintain as fears go mainstream.

Very plausibly we won’t all die, though it does seem like the end of life as we know it. I like to complain about my life but I’m also quite attached to it. I don’t really want to be posthuman, I just want normal life but slightly better.

I don’t really have plans or fantasies longer than a couple of years. Previously I might idly daydream about how I’d raise children or what retirement would be like. This no longer seems to happen. When I try to imagine the future now I get a 404 error. Occasionally I get flashes of imagery from The Day After Tomorrow which I haven’t actually seen, but have seen the trailer for.

When I listened to the Rest of History’s episodes on WW1 I felt an odd sense of kinship hearing about those under siege by the Russian army at Przemyśl.

It’s hard to orient to on a personal level. How does one prepare for the future? One of the most plausible actions seems to be to build up one’s reserves of general purpose tradeable tokens. This feels gross to me. I expect there’s some blindness here as well. It seems like I can maintain working on things broadly related to AI safety without looking directly into the eyes of the beast, but taking actions to influence how I will appear in the future, well that’s a bit much.

It’s unclear if there’s anything I can do about the whole situation more broadly.

There is one voice in my head that says ‘Well, there is a possible world where you try really hard and I don’t know become the president or something (after somehow becoming a natural born citizen of the US), and then once you’ve done that you can probably somehow steer to safety. So stop fannying around and get on with it’

I have some hesitations about listening too closely to this voice in my head.

Perhaps singlehandedly saving the world is slightly too ambitious a target, and a more appropriate aim would be more something like joining/ finding one’s role in the war effort.

I also have some hesitations about this.

At some workshops I’ve been to there’s an institution designed to combat messy situations known as the 5-minute tidy. Someone will notice the creeping invasion of physical chaos, and boldly bugle ‘5-minute tidy’. This decrees a state of emergency and requires all citizens to do their duty to king and workshop. Loud music is played, limbs move, objects are moved and so on.

A difficulty I’ve found is that it’s often unclear where objects go and whether they are still in use. Plausibly the right response here would be to take a minute to think about what actually needs doing and how to do it. But somehow I usually end up hypnotised by the high bpm music and visibly moving limbs everywhere that I instead respond to this by picking up an object and walking around purposefully, or diligently straightening cushions, or drawing Lord Kitchener’s face.

Anyway, I have some suspicion of being in the middle of an ?-year tidy. To be fair to the 5-minute tidy, it does typically result in a significant victory over the forces of chaos.

1 - Pretend you know what you are talking about

You don’t even have to try that hard! One of the easiest ways to do this is to pick a topic that the spotlight decision makers don’t know much about.

For example, let’s look at Hauke Hillebrandt’s essay giving writing advice.

Sentences: Shorten long sentences to ~20 words to increase readability[2]- err on the side of breaking them up; use fewer clauses; no redundancy; unnecessary adjectives; reduce need to recall references to other parts of the sentence (e.g. constructions like ‘the former and the latter’).

Someone familiar with good writing might realise that there are 46 words and 156 clauses in this sentence. They might also be curious about what exactly Hauke means when he later says ‘Use the Mumford methods’, given no additional context is given, and click on the link Hauke provides. They might, after all this, think that perhaps this isn’t a good candidate for featuring in the Inkhaven spotlight. Fortunately that is not the world we live in!

2 - Work at Inkhaven

You can find the Inkhaven spotlight by clicking on the ‘Meet the 40 Residents publishing every day at Inkhaven’ link.

Fortunately, being an Inkhaven resident isn’t actually required. If like Kave Rennedy you are tired from your days work at Inkhaven, and are struggling to find a coherent way for the little girl to cut the rope with blunt scissors, you can simply ‘And the little girl took her scissors, struck them twice on the well curb to give them sharp edges, and cut through the bucket rope.’ And this will be worthy of the spotlight.

You don’t even need to publish every day! Ben Pace has missed 8 days of publishing, but his lessons on epistemology, derived from his experience of being tricked by a character in a computer game, is in the spotlight.

What not to do

1 - Write things worth reading

Surprisingly, this will actually hinder your chances of being in the spotlight. No matter if you’re pouring out your soul in the form of poetry or pouring out your soul in the form of psychoanalytic poetry analysis, if it’s too good it will not be included.

2 - Offend Vaniver

You might have beaten him playing Anno 1503 many years ago. You might have not been sufficiently gushing when you mentioned a valuable conversation you had with him in the Inkhaven feedback form.

You might even be confused about what you could have possibly done to offend him so. You might lay awake at night racking your brain for any possible hint of why you’re being mistreated so, whispering ‘What more do you want from me Vaniver? Why? Why would you do this to me? Do you think I don’t notice, that I don’t check? Endlessly scouring the updates for my name, finding only drivel about people who think they are ships and spectres and AI. Is this about the beard? You fear I am growing a beard to rival your own? Why? Why? Why?’

In perusing the woo memosphere I kept coming across hints as to where this route to enlightenment might lie.

• “The ego is a chronic muscular tension,” - Alan Watts

• The Body Keeps the Score - A book by someone

• Chakras and stuff

Hinteresting. Very hinteresting indeed.

I had quit my job and was spending some time living with my parents who had recently purchased a massage gun. I used said massage gun and found it very pleasant. Very hinteresting.

A nascent plan began to form: Use massage gun to release muscular tension and dissolve the ego and or any trauma, become enlightened, move out of parents house and get a new job. And so I began pummeling away.

I think my parents were somewhat concerned. Their son, in his late twenties, had just quit his job and moved back home, and had begun spending all day in his bedroom with a massage gun, occasionally leaving to eat meals, but otherwise spending his time with the massage gun. He would say that he was spending his time reading, but the massage gun was loud enough that it could be heard from the next room over.

Anyway, I had not completely lost the plot, and despite my woo wonderings I was still trained in the art of science and evidence and a skeptic at heart. I did some googling online, and found an article about trigger points and self massage as a treatment for mysterious chronic pain. I didn’t have chronic pain per se, but chronic pain seemed in a similar ballpark to dukkha. Also, the article was quite long so I didn’t read most of it, but I did notice that it had lots of footnotes and some references to pubmed. Skeptic satisfied.

Fairly quickly I realised that the most satisfying area to massage was the left side of my neck. I also stopped using a massage gun in favour of just rubbing my neck with my hand. This became quite compulsive/ addictive.

I am familiar with addictive behaviour, most notably playing computer games, more specifically, playing Slay the Spire. Fortunately, one can block Slay the Spire. Unfortunately, it is not so easy to block one’s neck. This is not for want of trying.

I first attempted to block my neck by using an Eigso Punk Leather Collar Choker for Women and Men Studded Spikes Black Pu Necklace Wide Strap for Woman and Man, which I ordered using my stepfather’s Amazon account.

Sadly, the band of the collar was too small, and so my hand could still access the relevant part of my neck regardless.

I then attempted to block my neck using HEGCOIIE Neck Warmer Snood for Men & Women,Winter Neck Gaiter Fleece Bandana Face Covering Mask Windproof Neck Scarf Neckwear for Outdoor Sports Motorcycle Skiing Running Cycling (Black). This also didn’t work, as my hand could reach underneath the HEGCOIIE to find the relevant areas of neck. Also it was quite hot.

I tried wearing both the Eigso and the HEGCOIIE at the same time, but this also did not work.

What if it is not the neck that is the problem, but the hands? I once tried tying my hands to my desk with shoelaces.

I also tried the psychological approach, discussing the issue with a coach.

So, just to make sure I understand the situation, you have a thing where you compulsively massage your neck…

Yep

And this has been going on for many years..

Mmmhmmm

And this… neck massaging… is interfering with your day to day functioning because, as you mentioned, when your hand is occupied with your neck you are no longer able to perform activities such as typing, opening packages or other things…

Yes that’s right

And the more you massage your neck the more uncomfortable your neck becomes…

Mmmm

But you are reluctant to stop because you think, as you mentioned previously, that if you do it for long enough that this might resolve some trauma or tension which will lead to, as you put it, a state of quasi-enlightenment

Mmmhmmm

And you don’t want to see a doctor about the pain in your neck because you don’t trust that the doctor wouldn’t just conclude that you have lost the plot…

Yes

And that’s what you would like to discuss with me today?

Yep

…I see…

I asked friend what I should write about today. And then I told him that I should write a spiritual dictionary. He said I should do A to E today, presumably because he still wanted to contribute to the conversation after I had answered my own question.

I have skipped A, and gone straight to B. I also didn’t make it to C, D or E.

Spiritual dictionary. Anger. Avoidance. Boundaries. Consciousness. Death. E.

Boundaries

Boundaries are when you let someone into your home and they don’t take their shoes off. And they start moving things around and changing the thermostat and scribbling on the walls.

Or perhaps more likely, boundaries are when you know someone is coming into your home, and so now you have to move your underwear and crisp packets from off the floor where they belong and into the bin, in order to please their sensibilities.

How does one establish boundaries? You ask them to take their shoes and opinions off at the door.

This is my home and you must abide by my rules when you are in my home. If you cannot abide by my rules then I will not let you into my home. If you try to gain entry to my home without my permission, then I will use kung fu or other drastic measures.

People however are cunning. They may say “you wouldn’t part an old man from his walking stick?” and only after you let them into your house do you realise that the walking stick is a magic wand that they will use to do an exorcism on you.

Do not guilt trip me old man, this is my home and you must abide by my rules.

Friend and I laid the preliminary groundwork for the spiritual dictionary during the aforementioned conversation, and we each proffered definitions of boundaries.

I said that boundaries are the difference between what is mine and what is yours. He said that boundaries are what determines whether you are okay. I forget exactly what he said, I was more interested in what I was saying at the time and so I forgot to pay full attention to him. Let’s say these are both true.

Sometimes I think something is mine, and you think it is yours. Now we have overlapping boundaries and disputed territory in the middle. And probably at least one of us is going to send in the tanks.

Also, relatedly, sometimes, I need something to be a certain way in order to be ok, and you also need that thing to be a certain way in order to be ok. Perhaps those certain ways are different certain ways.

I am low energy. You assume that this is about you, and that you are not being a sufficiently good conversational companion. This is not ok. You must now interfere with me and my energy levels in order to be ok. It is your problem to solve.

You are anxious. I find this painful and am not ok. Now I must interfere with you and your anxiety in order to be ok. It is my problem to solve.

We are entangled. Like wired earphones or electrons. This is messy. And also everywhere. People love interfering with each other (and also maybe being interfered with).

Stop it.