I want to learn @chrisbarber's Resonance by practicing
if anyone's interested, please DM. organizing an ephemeral group of people to practice together.
links below about what it is
i’m walking outside my house and i hear my son crying - he’s clearly upset.
i go to the front door and go in. he can’t find his shoes that he wants to wear.
i don’t say anything, he comes towards me and i go towards him, we know the drill. i pick him up.
he’s three years old, almost four.
i put my hand on his back, skin to skin. i take a big breath. sometimes he’ll follow, sometimes he won’t.
my wife says “he’s really sad that he can’t find his crocs“
i say “ah, you wish you could find your crocs. the blue ones or the yellow ones?” i copy some of his experience back to him, and add a guess question that’ll help me learn.
“my pokemon ones” he says through tears.
“your pokemon ones - your white pokemon ones”
“yeah” he says, crying
i take another big breath. his breath follows. i walk into the living room and gently sway side to side while holding him.
“are you worried you lost them?” i guess to learn.
“no - i - want - to - wear - them - to - the - car” he says through tears
“you want to wear them now to the car?”
“yeah :(“ he says and releases another big cry. that one definitely hit the spot, and it hurts for him.
i take another breath. he follows again.
“and you love those shoes”
“yeah”
“they have squirtle and charmander and pikachu and bulbasaur on them”
“yeah :(“ he says through another big cry. that hit the spot as well.
“you want to find them so that you can wear them?”
“yeah”
i take another breath.
this is what using the resonance communication method or another emotional-first communication method looks like with kids. with big situations, it might be a couple minutes. with small ones, it might be 10 seconds. instead of reassuring, justifying, or explaining - first the focus is purely on the emotions and reflecting back the experience. emotions first, logic second.
Andrew Conner retweeted
interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had
with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works
already-clean.goodfire.com/
“let’s keep that one, that one sounds reasonable” — my wife
I spent the last week in a real lab, and it's so funny how massively superstitious everyone ends up being.
You sorta have to. You're teetering above chaos, trying to force complex dynamic into rational systems. It mostly works!
Bunsen burners don’t reduce contamination. It was all an illusion. My biology teacher was wrong.
This isn’t surprising, though. So much of biology, and the way we do experiments, claims to be “scientific” but is actually swaddled in mysticism.
Just walk into a laboratory and watch biologists for a day; they will do all sorts of weird rituals that — if you ask them to explain — will elicit no answer other than, “Well, that’s the way I was taught to do it.” Why are washes always five minutes long, for example? Why are they always done in groups of three? Did anybody actually ever measure this stuff?
The Bunsen burner wasn’t even invented for its modern use. Robert Bunsen, a German chemist, invented it in the 1850s to heat up his chemical reactions. Microbiologists later used it to flame and sterilize instruments, which makes sense. And then there was all this debate and controversy about Pasteur’s swan-neck flasks, and this idea that microbes were floating in the air and contaminating things, and so microbiologists decided to take the Bunsen burners they had used to sterilize instruments and just …. put the open flames on their benches to sterilize the air. But this was pure mysticism. Nobody ever actually studied whether or not this worked.
Someone ought to open up a lab and raise money to run “mysticism experiments.” Like, how bad is it (really) if we don’t wash things for five minutes in three cycles? How bad would it be if we didn’t incubate with antibodies at 4 degrees Celsius overnight? Why do cells eventually saturate in LB media? (Some people argue it’s because they run out of carbon, but others claim that's totally a lie and it's actually the magnesium.)
Much of experiment is tacit illusion.
I'm in this as well, but not with painting. I have theories about how this happens, but it's basically the opposite of grinding and franticness.
It's like something leaps out and grabs you.
Anyone experienced this? Anything predicated it?
Oh yeah, no surprise, Cedric wrote about this! xitter.cf/ejames_c/status/209190…
