It might be that they're one novel thing he could both discern as a specific thing and pretty much completely understand what their purpose is once he started paying attention to them. Just about everything in a modern city is an unfamiliar thing tied to a large context of other unfamiliar things, so you'll just zone out when you're missing the context, but stairs and carpets are pretty much just stairs and carpets.

“Clarity didn’t work, trying mysterianism” is the title of a short story by Scott Alexander

Was it the title? I always thought Scott used the phrase as commentary on why he was posting the story, same as gwern is doing here. As in, he tried to clearly say "an omnipresent personal AI agent that observes your life and directly tells you the best way to act in every situation you encounter would be a bad thing because building up your own mind into being able to overcome challenging situations is necessary for a meaningful life", people didn't buy it, and then he went "okay, let's try this untitled short story to illustrate the idea".

For this gwern thing though, I've no idea what the failed preceding non-mysterian attempt was.

I haven’t looked into this, but I’m guessing the IQ results are from some form of language barrier?

Many people have tried very hard to find explanations for the IQ results that are something other than "low intelligence" for decades. If a replicating result that provides such an explanation had been established, it would have been broadly publicized in popular media and even laymen would know about it. Instead, we're being told we are not supposed to look into this topic at all.

It seems like the neologism is mostly capturing the meaning of signal from Shannon's information theory (which "signal and noise" points towards anyway), where you frame things by having yes/no questions you want to have answered and observations that answer your questions are signals and observations that do not are noise. So if you need to disambiguate, "signal (in the information-theoretic sense)" could be a way to say it.

The dark age might have gotten darker recently. Everyone's scrabbling around trying to figure out what AI will mean for programming as a profession going forward, and AI mostly only boosts established languages it has large corpora of working code for.

I've been following the Rust project for the last decade and have been impressed at just how much peripheral scutwork contributes to making the language and ecosystem feel solid. This stuff is a huge undertaking. I'm not terribly excited any more about incremental improvement languages. They seem to be mostly a question of not making crippling foundational design errors (hello C++) and expending enormous engineering effort on tooling and libraries. What might be more interesting is something that targets a specific niche and does something very cool for exactly that niche (Inform 7, dhall), or languages that go for a shoot-for-the-moon paradigm shift like Unison or the "we need to make large programs writable in 100x smaller codebases" from Alan Kay's VPRI research team.

I've got an idea what meditation people might be talking about with doing away with the self. Once you start thinking about what the lower-level mechanics of the brain are like, you start thinking about representations. Instead of the straightforward assertion "there's a red apple on that table", you might start thinking "my brain is holding a phenomenal representation of a red apple on a table". You'll still assume there's probably a real apple out there in the world too, though if you're meditating you might specifically try to not assign meanings to phenomenal experiences even at this level. Now you also have a straightforward assertion "I'm a person who's awake, aware and feeling experiences", and you indeed are, but out there, in the physical world, and your awareness is actually the whole substrate of your phenomenal world. But then in your everyday view you also have as part of your world representation the representation of your body, with the sense that thoughts and feelings go on in the representation. And normally you just identify the representation-self with the real physical body and brain out there in the world, like you identify the mind-picture of the red apple with the red apple out there on a table.

But the representation "me, in this body here which I'm aware of" within your sensory landscape isn't the same thing as your actual physical brain out in the world generating your whole world of awake awareness any more that the impression of an apple in your mind is an actual physical apple. Maybe the idea with the meditation is to become aware of this and realize that consciousness goes on even when you stop paying attention to your representation of yourself and it falls out of your space of perception.

I haven't tried galantamine, but didn't find the drugless techniques all the same. The standard advice of keeping a dream diary and psyching yourself to have a lucid dream and to do reality checks never worked at all for me. Wake-back-to-bed on the other hand got me dozens of lucid dreams and often worked the first time I tried it after a break. It's also annoying to do because it involves messing with your sleep cycle and waking yourself up in the early morning, and it seems to always stop working if I try to do it multiple nights in a row.

Agree with the other parts though, the lucid dreams are generally pretty short, kind of samey. Maybe it takes a longer dream for the narrative to get properly weird, and the WBTB lucids are more often short dreams that start out of nowhere than becoming lucid midway through an involve dream. They're also too sporadic to get any sort of ongoing active imagination practice going since I don't have any routine of trying to WBTB once every week or something. There's Robert Waggoner's lucid dreaming book that talks more about possible ongoing psychological development you could make happen with repeated lucid dreams, as opposed to just the "hey, lucid dreams are a thing" books, but I guess a regular routine and some kind of intentful approach would help a lot here.

One thing I've been thinking is that the stories about shamanic journeys sound a whole lot like lucid dreaming, so maybe you could take a page from there. Try to travel to the underworld or overworld, meet some spirit entities, ask them what's up and maybe have a nice chat about large integer factorization.

I had the same problem, then I started mixing cottage cheese in the oatmeal and that fixed it.