the snail shell


The Experience Machine Private Beta

(Hugo set the disappearing message time to 1 day)

Tom! Great to hear from you. I’m so glad you got into the beta. Ok, I’ve got to give you all the scoop I can. Of course you know you cannot tell literally anyone this. Not even Sandy! I know, I know. Listen, I can’t tell anyone this. But… while I do believe this is the most important project in the world, it’s really playing with fire, you know? I can’t just let you waltz in there unprepared.

thanks man! yeah I’m excited!

Ok, they’ve told you the basics, right? You come in for “a day” of subjective time, about 80 minutes objective time. And you choose the valence, 0-10. 5 is absolutely neutral, a very ok day. 6-10 are better, 0-4 are worse. And we pay you, or you pay us, exponentially: going through a 5 day gets you $0, going through a 4 day pays $20, a 3 pays $200, 2 pays $2000, and so on. We pay you more to help us test out the low levels here; otherwise everyone would just bliss out. And you pay us if you want an especially nice day: $20 for a 6, $200 for a 7, and so on. AND THEN we give you $20 for your time - so you actually break even on a 6, and make $40 total for a 4. Make it worth your while to test the mid levels too.

how the hell do you get the levels right?

I know, right? I KNOW. Well, first of all, that’s why we’re doing all this testing; we don’t wanna have someone come in expecting a 3 and get a 0. But second of all, we evaluate it with the participants in the debrief and … it just works. Remember when LLMs Just Worked and everyone lost their minds? This is bigger than that. It has pretty good access to most of your brain activity and so it figures out what “7” means for you and then pipes that right in. Of course, it took a lot of work to simplify things that much - but that’s roughly where we’re at. It can sense content too, so if you come in thinking about basketball, you’re going to get a day where you’re playing basketball, so keep that in mind. It takes in the latent content vector and our valence parameter and generates the experience around that.

ok ok so … just think of puppies and kittens?

Well, sort of. That’s the content, but the valence is the valence. If you think about puppies, an 8 day might be frolicking in the fields with puppies, while a 2 day might be your puppy dying, or you getting attacked by a dog.

that’s only a 2??

Yeah. Well, so yeah. Here’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Think hard about the valence you pick. I’ve got lots of stories.

ok, hit me

4, 5, and 6 are pretty safe. You’ll have a day. Definitely recommend that first time. You’ll get to come back, I’m sure; most people do. And you’re more … psychonautically adept than most.

lol

Some of the repeat 6ers are pretty sad though tbh. You know we’re trying to recruit a cross section of people - so we do get some people who are, shall we say, down on their luck. They’ll sit there and run 6s as much as we’ll let them. They break even on $ and they’re having a decent time. I think if we let them they might live out their lives at 6. And I don’t know if I can blame them - given what they have to go home (or “home”) to. But I digress, sorry. What were you going to pick?

I mean, I thought a 2; I can take it and I wouldn’t mind $2000

You probably can. Most people can. You know AGE’s Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain, right? Our valence scores are inspired by that - it’s what leads to the exponential payments, but it’s also necessary in order to capture the full breadth of human experience. And we’re sort of re-deriving those scales - if people would pay $200 for a 7 and $2000 for an 8, then we have a good bit of evidence that our “8” is 10x as good as our “7”. Sorry, I wandered off again. You could take a 2. But it’s 10x as bad as a 3, which is 10x as bad as a 4; take a “meh” bad day you’ve had recently and multiply it by 100. That’s why maybe a dog attack or pet death might be there.

huh. yeah I never really thought about it like that

And communicating that is a thing we have to get better at. God, when we first started, we had people going straight for the 0. We warned them, but $200k was hard to pass up.

oh god

Yeah, it … listen, I told you I seriously believe this is the most important project in the world, right? That’s what keeps me going. But after Jason Mickleman, we …

who?

Oh, thank god our PR team is so good. Listen - guy did a 0 unprepared, got PTSD (or who knows, just intense T), killed himself 2 days later. Between the mountain of forms he signed and our lavish outreach, I don’t think his family blamed us, incredibly. I mean, the guy did have problems already. I shouldn’t even tell you this. Again, stops here. But that’s why nowadays you have to do 3 2s before you try a 1, and 3 1s before a 0. And we do have someone watching you now - we can’t really understand much of what’s going on, but we can have a fuzzy sense, and we can tell when someone’s going completely haywire - kind of like a comatose hospital patient with all the monitors.

so what did go through his head on his 0?

We don’t know. But: for all the insane mental landscape you could be traversing, somehow it’s usually pretty mundane. We very rarely hear of people flying through space or being tortured by demons; more often it’s very normal life stuff. Probably wasn’t Star Trek, more like Breaking Bad. Loss of family and friends, abandonment, guilt, shame, hopelessness, rage, sickness.

why aren’t people flying through space?

A question from a true DMT aficionado! Look, you (particularly you) may meet the cactus person and the big green bat. But most of the time, we think, the generative algorithm rejects anything that’s too far out in qualia-space because the valence wouldn’t match. Put you in 6 dimension harlequin world and you’ll glitch out, and that really doesn’t match a “3” or a “7”. Now, on the 0s and 10s, the bets are off.

i’m quite comfy in 6 dimensional harlequin world

(Now I know you are fine in 6d harlequin world)

Jinx. Hah! But you know what I mean.

why do you do the 0s anyway? why anything <10?

It’s important! Have you read our namesake’s works?

your namesake pff

He is! Ok, I realize branding as “Nosic” does sound very Silicon Valley, but well, we are where we are, and he didn’t exactly endorse us.

are you… are you building the torment nexus?

No! No, listen. Mickleman aside, for a lot of the 0s, it’s a transformative experience in their lives. They go through hell and they survive. They know that they’ve tasted the worst it can get, and that gives them tremendous power and security. This might be you at some point: your medicine adventures, your meditation practice, all your bodywork; you might be up to it, and that might help you. But I’ll leave that to you. Just, don’t dive right in.

yeah, gotcha. what about the 10s?

Ironically, that’s also a transformative experience in their lives. Remember MDMA for PTSD? This is way better. Way better. Most people have never known love like this. Knowing that that’s possible changes things for them. It’s hard to be dour when a 10 experience exists. And especially if it’s easily integrable: those who experience very ordinary 10 days go home and notice everything, the birds chirping, every beautiful thing their spouse does, the awe and wonder of their kids. They just got an expert course in how extraordinary those things are.

they stop and smell the flowers, right :P

Well yeah, but … look, you’ve told me about some of your “10” experiences! I’ve heard you, in 45 minutes you’ve dropped off those heavy weights of grief and guilt you’ve been carrying, you’ve realized that you are loved and you do love and your heart is a raging furnace full of energy that you must get back out into the world!

ok, fair. yeah. sorry

Nah it’s cool, it’s a long way between those states and here. But it doesn’t have to be. Imagine you spend an hour a day doing this at 10; how much better would those other 23 be?

sure, if I had $200k to blow every day

We’re working on that, yeah. Clearly it can’t stay that way forever. But it costs an insane amount of compute. Thank god we’re not burning fossil fuels anymore or we’d be pariahs. But it’s expensive, and we are burning investor money for sure, on everyone but the 9s and 10s.

ok, so will I get addicted?

That… we don’t know. That’s the dark side of an Experience Machine in every house. Like Nozick, we wonder: will everyone just zonk out forever?

how is it now?

We have had some worrying behavior. I told you about the 6-addicts. We do have a couple of 10-addicts - really rich guys whose names I absolutely cannot mention. We’ve also got some 8 and 9 “addicts”, though I’m not even sure if that’s the word - people scraping together money repeatedly to get a fraction of the 10 experience. But maybe it’s less “addiction” and more like massage therapy or a sauna. Let your mind relax; these are very good days. Remember that the world is a beautiful place, even if it’s been beating you down recently.

huh. ok. yeah ig I can work with this. uhh I’ll try a … 3? maybe a 7 next time?

Love it. Start slow. I’ll do what I can to make sure they invite you back.



I'm Tired

(well I’ve been sick for most of this week, that’s a big part of it. nevertheless,)

There’s no “spark” left. whenever I think about going out and Doing Something New, there’s a huge ugh field, like the activation energy required is infinite. like being in crisis mode: “no I can’t bake croissants for fun; I don’t even have enough wheat to survive the winter.”

Having a kid is just endlessly demoralizingly difficult. Two parents both wiped out for 4-7 days with a toddler who’s doing fine is one of the worse circles of hell, and we only dodged that bullet thanks to my mom who’s a hero and has watched him for most of a week. I don’t know what we do when this happens next time. Hope we keep dodging bullets.

And people talk about it like they talk about minor annoyances. “Oh yeah, it’s the worst when everyone’s sick.” No, casual “oh yeah, it’s the worst” is like when you get too many telemarketer calls. Sick-with-a-kid is a kind of Bad that we should maybe talk about in hushed tones or euphemism around it so as not to awaken whatever spirits are in charge of it.

(am I being melodramatic? like, ok, it’s not “family member murdered” kind of bad. there are worse things. but I do feel like most parents, and non-parents for that matter, underrate how hard this is!)

Maybe this is why this election just feels like “:shrug: whatever”. back in 2016 I got super bent out of shape, made a bunch of calls, donated to a bunch of causes, went to protests, started my own dang email newsletter. Didn’t do an ounce of good. Do you think I persuaded Nancy Pelosi1 to “fight whatever bad thing Trump did that day”? This year, I can’t seem to care:

  1. For all the stupidity, not all that much happened in 2016-20202
  2. We can’t do anything about it anyway. Maybe call Nancy Pelosi a couple more times.
  3. A lot of “caring” just means “getting mad because someone posted something without doing anything”; again, please unfollow everyone who pisses you off, unfollow everyone who makes you feel anxious, please

  1. she was my rep at the time, I wasn’t just picking her out as a famous public figure ↩︎

  2. yeah I know: Roe, the judiciary more broadly, border children, Jan 6, lots of smaller things. These are all quite bad! But we were worried about N*zi marches in the street ↩︎



Newbies, Journeymen, and Surfer Dudes

or, “I first called this Stage 1-3 but I could not bring myself to post a concept as miserably-named as Type I/II Error or Kahneman’s System 1 and 2”

It seems that most activities one chooses to do, broadly speaking, go through about 3 stages:

  1. Newbie. You don’t like the thing yet. You can’t even do the thing, you feel like an impostor, you fall on your face, it’s not fun.
  2. Journeyman. You can do the thing, kind of. You have to psych yourself up to go do it. You enjoy it, kind of, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little.
  3. Surfer Dude. You just do it effortlessly. If anyone ever says “want to do X?” and you don’t have to be doing something else, you say hell yeah.
StageActivation Energy RequiredEnjoyment
1. NewbieHighLow
2. JourneymanHighVariable
3. Surfer DudeLowHigh

Obviously, it’s great to be a Surfer Dude! In as many activities as possible! Notice when you are that, and treasure it! If you have a chance to go from Newbie to Journeyman or Journeyman to Surfer Dude, take it!

How does one do that? I don’t know, and that’s a bummer. I think I’m a Surfer Dude in only a couple things: puzzles, some video games (like Slay the Spire), maybe cooking. Even in activities that I like and value, like biking, lifting, meditating, I’m Journeyman at best. And this suggests that it’s not about raw hours doing the thing: I’ve spent literally thousands of hours on some of these! How am I not a Surfer Dude yet? And puzzles was a pretty quick ascent to Surfer Dude; they are shaped just like my brain is.

Some hypotheses:

side notes

This is not about how good you are. If you suck at chess and lose constantly, but you love it, you can still be a Surfer Dude. Indeed, actual Surfer Dudes were not necessarily “the best surfers” - they just really like it. Of course, it tends to correlate, because if you really like doing the thing, you’ll probably get good at it.

I guess I should also bring up one more side stage: Addict. Maybe this is stage 3a. It’s just like Surfer Dude, but instead of High enjoyment, it’s Low. (the prototypical example is scrolling on social media, or bingeing bad TV, or gambling or smoking or whatever people get addicted to.)

This is also not a value judgment of the activities. Hell, you can be a Surfer Dude at reality TV. But the reason people don’t talk like a Surfer Dude about “low status” things like reality TV is not about the status, but that they tend to lead you to Addict, not Surfer Dude.