contrast this with “whack-a-mole”—

“four moles whacked, only one left…”

“one mole whacked, only one left…”

“one mole whacked, only eight left…”

an AI founder I worked with said he’d stopped vaping a month earlier.

this was cool— I forgot he vaped.

he said he’d tried to quit before, but it felt like a fight requiring lots of willpower. can you believe it didn’t last?

except the person above, none of them came for help with their addictions. they just felt something was off.

other people:

a researcher was doing 5 hours of chatgpt per day for validation. we worked on dating. the chatgpt petered off. he hadn’t even realized until I followed up a year later

“I used to watch all this mindless TV. Recently… I just got bored of it.”
neat. didn’t know you watched TV

simply swapping one addiction for another wouldn’t have been ideal.

if a sufficiently longstanding addiction could be unlearned through more willpower, it would’ve already been.

“I don’t have the urge at all anymore”

Blog | About me

And then you, uh, ‘went back to normal’.

Breakthroughs aren’t results. Results are results:

Asking people out for the first time, and getting into a relationship. Going from eating alone to hosting parties for friends every week. Negotiating for the first time, and saving millions. Life is obviously better months—years—later.

If life goes back to ‘normal’, it isn’t a result.

Daniel, an AI researcher published in Nature, gained ~5h/day after working with me.

I caught up with him recently.

How did you used to spend your time?

On an average day I might do around 6–8 hours of work and then 5–6 hours of just going home and vegging out in some form… watching YouTube...

More than 50% of my waking life was avoidance… I wasn’t getting that much work done.

What do you do with the new time?

I do a lot more things… Being social, spending more time with friends... reading good books to improve my thinking... writing things, putting myself out on the web more, communicating my ideas... working on passion projects like a  life dashboard that tracks various metrics

I’ve mostly stuck to hosting something every week… bouldering… board game night… theater trips… hot pot party. We just did another one yesterday.

Has your orientation to research changed?

People would ask me, ‘Are you available for a meeting at this time?’ And actually it would be mildly inconvenient... I’d be like, ‘Oh, sure, let me make that work for you.’ Whereas now I’m like, ‘Okay, these are my convenient times. Can you make this work?’

I used to struggle with retrospectives - ‘what went well, what didn’t go so well.’ I would always not have a very good sense of this. Now... I mostly just gave really good answers and my teammates liked what I said.

I recently sent a cold email [to a professor whose work I was interested in]... in the past I’d have stressed a lot about making a concrete pitch but this time I settled with “I feel there could be interesting synergies” and left it open. [Update: The professor invited Daniel to visit.]

How’s dating?

I would be quite obsessive… trying to fully determine what the person would be like just by reading their profile... I had this very high bar… Now it’s like ‘Okay yeah, good vibes, let’s try.’

Have you taken any new risks lately?

I never asked anyone out for 27 years and asked out two people in the last couple months.

How’d that go!

She said No… and I felt good about the fact that I asked her out.

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The first step was to keep a list of all of my single-and-looking friends. So I asked friends if they wanted to be matchmade:

And added a new tag to my friend database to stay organized:

But soon I realized that when you ask someone for their type, they usually reply with vague adjectives. “Kind.” “Funny.” “Smart.” I needed to find a better way to match people.

When I was single and asked friends to matchmake me, I gave them a list of examples of exes, crushes, and friends I almost dated. Within seconds they’d exclaim: “Ohhhh, I see your type! Hm, do you know so-and-so?” Their suggestions were surprisingly accurate.

So I started asking my friends for examples too.

It’s easier to think of “People like Alex” than “People who are kind”.

Matchmaking got easier after that: over the next several months, I made several dozen 1-on-1 matches.

But something weird kept happening.

Friends would be excited about some of the matches and then… not schedule the date for weeks? Or months?

Other friends would go on a first date or two, realize “dating isn’t a priority for me right now”, and stop.

It was quite frustrating. But I didn’t know what to make of it, so I kept matchmaking.

I also doubled down by experimenting with other matchmaking methods, including running public events and inviting friends to parties outside their social graph. But these too were less effective than I hoped.

Men complained that it was “too hard” to interact with women in group conversations.

A single friend I brought to a party had a hard time even standing near cute guys…

I thought, “Maybe she just needs more matches?”, so I posted a twitter classified:

Over 30 men reached out, including founders of companies you’ve heard of and people with Wikipedia pages.

But… she only went on dates with four of them ¿

Later, I tried the twitter classified for another friend:

Again, lots of interest from men who seemed promising… but, somehow, nothing came from it?

At this point, I’m reminded of a matchmakers meetup I ran several months ago:

At the meetup, I met someone who had professionally matchmade six marriages (with more than 7 kids so far!), and many more relationships.

Surprisingly, despite her success, she had actually moved away from matchmaking and towards helping people get ready to get married.

The significance of this hadn’t dawned on me until just now.

Why had she moved her focus?

Because most people who ask for matchmaking aren’t ready to get married.

And one way they avoid getting ready?

By asking to be set up instead.

Oh no.

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Once this happened “fumbling” and “success” both became meaningless.

When my girlfriend and I were first flirting, I was super into her… and completely lacking in anxiety.

“How would it feel to date her if she doesn’t like me?” Bad! If she wasn’t charmed by my relaxed self, I didn’t want her.

No “please like me.” Just: “Are we in the timeline where this works? Let’s find out asap!”

V3. Revised 2025 Nov 1. View this essay on Twitter.

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Mentor: “…and how do you feel in your body about that?”

Me: “Wait, feelings are supposed to be IN THE BODY?”

For the first few months after this exchange, I thought, “Maybe I’m just different and don’t have feelings in my body. Maybe that’s just a weird thing that happens to other people but not to me.”

Nope.

Turns out I was numb. Sure, I’d get butterflies in my stomach or “know” emotions in my head, but I didn’t notice things like “a feeling of expansiveness in my chest”, “tingling in my fingers”, “tension in my arms”, or “pleasure on my skin”.

Ok, I was numb. So what?

Well, the nervous system is a distributed system, so information must propagate somehow.

“Feelings in the body” seem like a very common way to experience this:1

This information flows freely, unless there’s resistance. When there’s resistance to feelings, updates fail to permeate the entire system.2 And there was a lot of resistance in my system…

The resistance: My numbness was locally optimal, helping mitigate pain and other risks. Feeling my feelings then made my life worse (locally).

Was numbness globally optimal? No. Life was in 360p when it could’ve been in 4k.

• I’d brush my teeth too hard and only notice from the blood on the sink, not the pain.

• Other people made decisions in seconds by checking their gut. I made a decision by agonizing my way to a heady answer that still felt bad. Decision-making spiraled because every option felt equally gray.

• I thought I didn’t like animals! I missed the beauty around me—even though I found it incredibly cute when crushes would suddenly stop on a snowy street overwhelmed by what they were soaking in.

• Everything I did had to be “useful”. All of my desires needed reasons.

• I couldn’t tell the difference between “I’m feeling really jealous right now” and “Did I eat something bad?”

• I couldn’t experience deep pleasure.

At the same time, my numbness numbed awareness of itself. I went like this for many years until others pointed at it.

After I unlearned my numbness, I journaled:

Wow.

There’s so much intricacy to the emotional ripples in my stomach alone. I found strange happinesses in the tip of my fingers (???). And self-loathing there, too! Love in the “cave of the heart” on the right side of my chest…

Soon I realized that feelings are better described as tuples (sensation, location) rather than emotion words:

• Not ‘anxious’ but (tension, lower chest)

• Not ‘happy’ but (pleasure, arm skin)

• Not ‘confident’ but (expansiveness, chest and shoulders)

My growth continued to unfold: Decision-making became so easy it feels like there isn’t even a “me” making the choice. I’m more empathetic and see others’ emotions without hesitation. I can tell people to fuck off without wavering. Insecurities can be noticed and released. I’m much more intuitive. I see more. I hear more.

4k feeling enables 4k being.

Related posts

A → Organizing ridiculous social projects “others rallied around”

An engineer I met at a prediction market conference set a bounty on increasing his social and career agency.

One session; he did the take-home work.

Within a month, he was:

• Dancing weekly

• Choosing more difficult projects at work

• Embracing social interactions that used to be triggering

• Expressing romantic feelings frankly

Previously he’d done:

I’m choosing to work on problems beyond my capabilities, and get excited about situations where my weaknesses are repeatedly on display.

He continued the work.

6 months:

Every week I’ve had some new ridiculous, fun, stupid project that I had others rallied around. It's exactly the stuff I kind of pictured doing but never really did…

One of my new friends said, “You're so adventurous.” That shocked me

—6 month follow-up recording

18 months: He says he’s very happy and resilient, has lots of friends (and dates) now :)

B → Laughing at old triggers

Antoine was the first to try.

Multiple therapists and modalities had fallen short. “I’ve had anxiety my whole life.”

Unlearning with take-home work, plus another call in month nine. So a “two-shot”, I suppose.

11 months:

I used to get triggered by very small things that some of the people surrounding me would say or do… These things would incapacitate me for 48 hours, I would have to shut myself in my room. Now I just laugh. —Video

18 months: He says all is well, he has continued the practice.

C → Asking people out

AI founder never asked out women he was attracted to. 100s of hours of IFS therapy and meditation didn’t do it for him.

After he started asking people out, we did more unlearning for further goals.

5 months after first unlearning, we recorded this reflection.

At 11 months he texted:

D → Zero urges

A man man set a bounty on his 20-year porn addiction. He had tried to quit for most of that time.

One session, a little take-home work.

1 month:

“very few urges”

7 months:

“I don’t have the urge at all anymore”

13 months:

Pattern noticed

Less unlearning is necessary when the emotions involved are directly accessible. Avoidance patterns, like numbness and some forms of procrastination, have been less amenable to one-shots with take-home work.

The end of one-shots

I saw the data I wanted; one-shot research has concluded.

Now researching: maximum unlearning.

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Version 2.1. Originally posted 2025 Feb 27, last updated 2026 Jan 31.

No substances are used in unlearning.

Social interactions weren’t going as I wanted. Crushes ghosted me. Setting boundaries pushed people away. Interacting with people felt unsafe.

I thought my problem was the withdrawal. But withdrawal was actually a solution to another problem.

If interaction was unsafe, then one way to stay safe was to… not interact.

I unlearned what made interaction feel unsafe. I haven’t needed to be withdrawn since.

After noticing this pattern — the problem wasn’t the problem, it was a solution — I started seeing it everywhere in myself and others.

A different way of understanding suffering

Any persistent issue can be understood from two different points of view:

In the Classical view: Past experiences “caused” the present state. “My withdrawal is an unfortunate consequence of previous trauma or bad experiences, which I have no control over.”

And the Locally Optimal view: My state is incentivized by what my nervous system is currently acting to avoid. Withdrawal wasn’t random, but rather strategic.

In the classical view, you look backwards: the past caused the present issue, and the past can’t be changed… so rest in pieces I guess.

In the locally optimal view, you look forward: your present state is shaped by the futures you want to avoid and the futures you want to achieve.1

The locally optimal view is a hopeful view: your suffering isn’t random, but functional.

My withdrawal wasn’t globally optimal. It sucked. Even so, it was the best strategy known at the time.

So, it seems my emotions weren’t “so irrational” after all…

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V2.1. 2024 Nov 23 – 2026 Jan 28.

I used to think that conflicts are bad and hard. Then I realized conflicts are only hard because I have conflict anxiety. Once I unlearned my conflict anxiety, conflicts became fun an interesting.

People who handle conflict well are magnetic. You trust them immediately. You can say anything to them without fear they’ll get triggered, avoidant, or secretly combust from suppressed anger three months later.

It’s wonderful.

When I became conflict-chill, something awesome happened: I got curious.

Instead of feeling “YOU’RE CROSSING MY BOUNDARIES,” I began to wonder: “Wait, what did they actually mean? Did I understand that as they intended?” Most conflicts are mistakes, so the first step should always be to ensure that we’ve understood the other correctly. But conflict anxiety blocks this natural curiosity.

How many dumb fights have you gotten into because of personal anxiety?

For me… a lot.

Many conflicts have little to do with ‘reality’, but mostly our own insecurities. After I unlearned my conflict anxiety, that simply stopped.

Instead, conflict feels like I’m there to investigate, a detective looking for clues, a researcher testing a hypothesis. Other people might still get triggered in my direction, but I don’t feel emotionally threatened anymore.

Conflict anxiety is there for a reason, of course. Locally optimal. Nonetheless, conflict anxiety can be skillfully relaxed.

After you unlearn your conflict anxiety, conflicts become interesting, and even beautiful. They become fun, riveting ways to learn about others. Like exploration: both of you can quickly hone in on your differences, and learn a lot quickly. Conflicts become a great way to make friends—fights become play.

Source: Lion Cubs Play & Fight - CUTE!

There are two broad strategies for managing something like insecurity: The first is learning a bunch of techniques to subdue its symptoms every time they arise; The second is unlearning so it triggers vanishingly less often.

They’re the two ways to grow: Learning and Unlearning. adding and subtracting:

Learning is acquiring new skills: “learn” to flirt, “learn” to say ‘No’, “learn” to self-accept… It’s adding code to your mind.

Unlearning is removing harmful skills: deleting romantic insecurity, removing conflict anxiety, stopping self-rejection… It’s deleting code from your mind.

We need both.

When I first started working on myself, I learned too much. Ditto everyone I’ve worked with.

But the abilities we desired weren’t bottlenecked on doing more learning. They were bottlenecked on unlearning.

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Part I: Evaluating the core claims of the book
Part II: How I’d rewrite it to be more effective

Part I: Evaluating the core claims

Claim #1: Emotional “issues” often have hidden functions

The most important mindset presented in the book is Teleology: the study of the purpose of a given phenomenon, rather than its cause.

For example, the book would claim that someone who is depressed is in that state not because of childhood trauma, but because depression helps them avoid situations that currently feel unsafe. This mindset is contrasted with the more common “etiology”, which blames today’s problems on past injuries, leaving little room for future growth.

Put another way:

Teleology is quite contrarian to our usual way of making sense of the mind. It’s also extremely valuable. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to resolve my own issues or help others with theirs. Despite this value, people really, really, really don’t get teleology. Teleology is essentially antimemetic in our culture.1 Understanding teleology is one of the best reasons to read TCTBD, in my opinion.

But. The book’s explanation is awful. The part that attempts to explain it is literally titled “Trauma Does Not Exist.” This frame needlessly triggers many of the people who could benefit most from it, preventing them from engaging. A clear example is this /r/CPTSD thread: “Do not read the book "The Courage to be Disliked". It contains terrible advice for trauma survivors”. Because the book’s wording is poor and practical advice is lacking, the redditors missed the extreme value of the teleology frame.

In Part II, I’ll discuss how to explain teleology better.

Claim #2: “All problems are interpersonal relationship problems”

I’m unable to steelman why the book says “ALL” problems are interpersonal, but I’ve come to agree that many, maybe even most, human problems relate to social interaction. This gets at the second most important point in the book:

You were so afraid of interpersonal relationships that you came to dislike yourself. You’ve avoided interpersonal relationships by disliking yourself.

This is extremely true. I completely agree.

In the vast majority of cases I’ve seen, the way that people stop disliking themselves is by feeling safe in their interpersonal relationships. When someone dislikes themself, they stoop or take up less space, make fewer requests of others, take fewer social risks, and so on. These all have the effect of minimizing interpersonal conflict and minimizing dislike.

People generally don’t stop disliking themselves until they’re ready to be disliked by others. Disliking oneself often appears strategic.

Teleology strikes again!

Claim #3: Whether you outgrow your issues is your choice

From the book:

Whether you go on choosing the lifestyle you've had up till now, or you choose a new lifestyle altogether, it's entirely up to you.

✅ Growth follows from the belief in growth.2 Growth is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The inverse is also true: if you believe you can’t grow, you probably won’t. Many people have this. “Learned helplessness,” it’s called. The book’s advice for these people is basically “you gotta choose to grow,” which is odd because… learned helplessness is often serving a function!

Many people feel like outgrowing their issues is a subtly bad thing. Strangely, the book doesn’t apply the mindset of teleology to the absence of someone’s willingness to grow.

Claim #4: You are autonomous, and so are other adults (Separation of tasks)

The book introduces a concept called “Separation of tasks” to show what healthy interpersonal interaction looks like. However, the description of how to separate tasks is so muddled that I entirely missed it the first four times I read the book. It’s just this line: “Think, Who ultimately is going to receive the result brought about by the choice that is made?” This explanation is difficult to apply to real messy relationships, especially when strong emotions are involved.

Here’s how I would explain the underlying concept instead:

You can’t fully control how other people feel or behave. You can’t fully read others’ minds. Other people can’t fully control how you feel or act. Other people can’t fully read your mind.

Every adult is autonomous: you can only control your own behavior and read your own mind. (For a rigorous explanation of this idea see my posts on Markov blankets and causal distance.) These limits reveal that there are natural boundaries that separate where my “tasks” end and yours begin.

Most interpersonal conflicts involve a failure to acknowledge these natural boundaries: trying to force others to feel differently, presuming we know others’ mental state, expecting others to fix our feelings, or hoping others will read our minds. Meanwhile, healthy interactions are characterised by not trying to do any of these things.

It’s certainly nuanced. I’ve spoken to dozens if not hundreds of people who disagreed with it at first.3 But overall I think it’s a great point.

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Claim #5: Separating tasks will improve your relationships

The book claims separating tasks “is enough to change one’s interpersonal relationships dramatically.” I actually think this is both very wrong and misleading as it reverses causality.

Like, yes, healthy interaction involves separating tasks. But that does not mean that you can just consciously choose to separate tasks.

I know that because I spent six months trying to teach others how to. I believed that if someone could understand separation of tasks, then they’d be able to separate them and stop having so many unnecessary interpersonal conflicts.

Completely wrong. I tried to teach a bunch of smart friends, and they would like the idea, explain it back well, etc., but every time they got into a real conflict, their understanding of how to separate tasks completely fell apart. Huh?

Imagine there was only one person in the world who could give you food. Wouldn’t you do everything you could to prevent them from disliking you, try to read their mind, etc.? Wouldn’t you completely fail at separating tasks?

When you feel like other people have things you can’t go without, then you have extremely strong incentives to manipulate them. Your intellectual understanding of “separation of tasks” is powerless against strong feelings of insecurity.

Once I noticed this, I stopped trying to teach others how to separate tasks. Instead, I helped people unlearn. This worked: they began to separate tasks automatically, without me explaining! (Case study.4) The result is even cooler than what the book says: when you feel secure, separating tasks is effortless.

tl;dr: If you don’t already separate tasks naturally, you probably can’t just choose to start separating tasks.

Claim #6: People need to feel like part of a greater whole

The book calls this idea community feeling: humans thrive when they believe “my effortless existence benefits the group.” (Your group/community could be people, animals, or even the cosmos.)

Crucially, you can’t ever really know whether you’re actually benefiting others — maybe everyone is lying to you, maybe the person you’re helping is actually baby Hitler, etc. — instead you just have to have faith in your own intentions to do good and help others. Having that faith is a choice.

I like this part of the book; I have no additional suggestions. I wrote more about it here.

Claim #7: You can choose to be present

if one is shining a bright spotlight on here and now, one cannot see the past or the future anymore.

Do not treat [life] as a line. Think of life as a series of dots. If you look through a magnifying glass at a solid line drawn with chalk, you will discover that what you thought was a line is actually a series of small dots.

Imo the book makes the same mistake it did with separation of tasks: suggesting that you can choose to be present, when in reality you probably can’t. I haven’t seen this advice work except through extreme brute force (e.g., long meditation retreats) or luck.

I spent 5 months “trying to be present” on my own but kept dissociating and wasted months of suffering, so I have personal disdain for this.

My model now is that presence is natural, but gets blocked by insecurities. Simple teleology: if you have difficulty being present, there’s probably hidden functions! The resolution is not through further conscious mindset or choice, but through unlearning.

Now, with that out of the way…

Part II: How I’d rewrite The Courage to be Disliked

Improvement #1: A less triggering explanation of teleology

Firstly—don’t say “Trauma doesn’t exist”. Instead, focus on what does exist5: emotional issues with hidden functions. This shift in perspective will also fix the issue of unnecessarily triggering people who feel strongly about trauma.

It’s also possible to explain teleology faster and more intuitively. For example, I’ve found it helpful to drop the term “teleology” entirely and rebrand as “locally optimal” instead.6 For example, back in 2022 when I was withdrawing from life, the suffering incentive landscape seemed to be:

More here. Next, I would mention how teleology is actually integrated into one’s life.

Improvement #2: Stop “self-help”

Imo, the most harmful idea in The Courage to be Disliked is the idea that you can help yourself. That, “If only I think hard enough about how my own behavior might be teleological, then I’ll figure everything out and grow.”

I’ve spoken to dozens of people about this book, and not one has remarked: “I read The Couraged to be Disliked a long time ago. I applied it correctly. I’m doing a lot better now.”

In fact, most people I know who read TCTBD misunderstood it!

For every one person I’ve seen maybe succeed at “self-help”, solo I’ve seen more than 10+ waste multiple years of their life flailing making little to no progress.

Improvement #3: Present better skill trees

In general, personal growth has a skill tree: you must progress in a valid order. But some of the advice in this book implies that you should work on Level N skills (separating tasks, being present) before you have Level N-1 skills (having the courage to be disliked, feeling secure about stuff) — ???

If I rewrote the book, I’d flesh out a better skill tree for how to follow advice for different stages of the path.

Improvement #4: Validate the rewrite on real people

There’s a reason why I had to read The Courage to be Disliked 7+ times (and its sequel The Courage to be Happy 3+ times) over four years: I had to do most of the thinking on my own time!

Everything in this post makes me wonder… Did the authors not test their book? As in: give the draft to representative people with issues the book aims to address, have the people read it, interview them to see if they correctly understand it, and follow up a few months later to see if those issues improved.

I would guess they didn’t! (Do you know anyone who deeply applied the philosophy because of reading about it in this book? I don’t!) This is crazy to me.

If I rewrote The Courage to be Disliked, I would test the new instructions to see if they have their intended effect on readers.

Conclusion

While I dislike much of the literal wording in The Courage to be Disliked, I deeply agree with its underlying philosophy. A steelman of its claims reveals many ideas that are both very wise and very unusual. I hope someone writes this steelman because it could help a lot of people.

If you have questions about the contents of the book, you can copy the full text into AI for discussion.

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Setting boundaries used to feel super aversive. Telling people “No”? Asserting my desires? Eek! Even just thinking about asserting myself raised my heart rate and turned my stomach.

I thought I was bad at boundaries because I lacked skill, but really I feared the consequences. When I set boundaries, people often feel bad, get mad, dislike me, get violent, blame me… and I could feel like a bad person, fear retribution, and fear gossip. “Practicing” setting boundaries wasn’t addressing my bottleneck.

After unlearning these insecurities, boundaries became effortless. I can do boundaries, say No, and let others get triggered easily now. Conflict even became fun. Other people report similar effects.

Now it feels less like I’m “setting” boundaries and more like… I am boundaries. I am autonomous: I do things I want, because I want to, only when I want to. It’s even allowed me to become more empathetic and sensitive—I can get closer to others without fear of manipulation. Boundaries became effortless and my life improved.

For more about boundaries, see Claims #4 and #5 in this post.

Transcript available on Substack.

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This podcast extends a recent post:

Related:

Examples of self-fulfilling prophecies in AI alignment

Just as “flaky breakthroughs” are pervasive with psychedelics, they’re also pervasive with coaching, retreats, meditation, and bodywork.

Flaky breakthroughs can set people back years.

This investigation discovered almost no inner work practitioners in my network track long-term outcomes.

Discovering practitioners ignore outcomes

In early 2025, I attempted to make a list of the best practitioners on my area of twitter. 20+ coaches reached out, and I asked each to share the best evidence that they had helped coachees improve their lives.

I was hoping for stories like: “worked with a man who had never asked women out. hundreds of hours of IFS and meditation didn’t do it for him. after our first session, he asked out multiple easily… several months later he was in a happy relationship.”

Instead, the coaches shared testimonials like:

The session I just had was really nice. I felt a big release near the end!

They have such a kind presence. Best coach I’ve ever worked with!

Evidence of life improvement was almost not referenced.

I discovered that even well-respected practitioners don’t track results. For example, a well-known coach posted a video stating he’d discovered “how procrastination can completely dissolve” for a man. When the coach was asked how this claim had been verified (did the effect last? did the man ever launch the site he was procrastinating on?), the coach explained: “I do not follow up on folks after coaching as that would feel intrusive to me.”

Several months later, the man’s site still could not be located.

In another case, a popular inner work retreat calls itself “data-driven” and “life-changing”… but doesn’t track data on whether alumnis’ lives change. When a competent alumnus of the retreat offered to handle this tracking for them, for free, the retreat declined. They did not provide an explanation.

In the end, I found one—possibly two—practitioners who track how they’re helping people live better lives.

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V1.7: 2025 Jun 4 - 2026 Feb 10.

Thanks to Brian Toomey for the conversations that prompted this post.

This model runs so deep we barely question it. We chase perfect partners, promotions, ideal body weight, social media likes, sex, … — all under the assumption that doing more leads to happiness.

Start unhappy → DO MORE STUFF → become happy

But what if this model is wrong? What if happiness is always underneath?

Consider: Once insecurity, anxiety, tension, and suffering are released… nothing remains but joy, peace, and relaxation:

• Self-acceptance is an anti-skill.

• Eye contact is effortless without emotional blocks.

• Flow is natural when we can feel our feelings and have no anxiety.

• For muscles, relaxation is default. Tension is on top. Growth lies in removing unnecessary tension.

• Being present wasn’t a skill.

Now, Poṭṭhāpada, you might think: “Perhaps these defiling mental states might disappear…, and one might still be unhappy.” That is not how it should be regarded. If defiling states disappear…, nothing but happiness and delight develops, tranquility, mindfulness and clear awareness—and that is a happy state. —Buddhist scripture DN 9

Just as a computer system is secure when it has no insecurities, the same is true for emotions: security is the absence of insecurities. Happiness = the absence of suffering.

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And yet, being socially anxious tends to make you less likeable… so they must be behaving really irrationally, right?

Maybe not. What if social anxiety isn’t about getting people to like you? What if it's about stopping them from disliking you?

When someone feels insecure, they get to stoop and take up less space, become less agentic, make fewer requests of others, maintain fewer relationships, go out less, take fewer risks…

These are pretty bad strategies if your goal is to be liked.

So what if that’s not the goal?

What if the socially anxious are calibrating to avoid being DISliked?

Consider: if you shrink and never make any attention-getting moves, you are less likely to dangerously disappoint others, get into risky conflicts or be seen as a failure, embarrassment, or threat.

Like, yeah, it’s wonderful to do awesome things and have people love you. But you know what’s better than being loved? People not hating you.

a symptom of risk aversion

Not a pursuit of potential upside, but an attempt to avoid downsides.

A few examples:

1) When you feel financially insecure, you’re not optimizing for windfall as much as you’re optimizing for not going bankrupt. You avoid risky bets with higher EV in favor of safer, more predictable options, even if they offer smaller returns. The goal is to keep you fed, not to make you rich.

2) Reversely, countersignalling is a demonstration of safety in close relationships. In Scott Alexander’s Friendship is Countersignalling, he describes an interaction he has with a friend:

Becca: What are you doing here? I figured they’d have locked you away in the psych ward for good by now.

Scott: Nope. And what are you doing here? You haven’t killed off all your patients yet?

Becca: Only person in this hospital I might kill is standing right in front of me.

Scott: Be careful, I’m armed and dangerous *picks up a central line placement practice set menacingly*

The security of good friendship diffuses your anxiety about making a social faux pas and enables you to take more risks.

Your risk profile

What if you’ve been operating pretty rationally this whole time, but not for the outcome you thought you were optimizing for?

What if the symptoms of social anxiety aren’t failures of a system trying to be liked, but successes of a system trying to avoid being disliked?

About | Twitter

It was very frustrating.

I had terrible neck pain for years. Eventually, one day, I had an security breakthrough and experienced sudden relief. This relief continued for a few months, so I began to think my neck pain was a thing of the past.

This is not what happened.

Soon I began to notice moments where my neck was in great pain.

So I got worried: Relapse!? Was all of my progress a lie??

To better understand what was going on, I started tracking every moment my neck felt tense. I knew that my neck used to trigger in situations where I felt I wasn’t fully expressing myself socially and a few others — was this still the case?

I discovered my neck wasn’t triggering in these old situations. It was mostly fine then. Instead, it was triggering in other situations I’d never noticed were triggers—for example, when I felt like I wasn’t “being productive enough”.

I’d never noticed this was a trigger—but, well, I also don’t worry about my productivity all that often.

Finally it clicked: My neck pain didn’t have a single cause—it was a common symptom of multiple insecurities. Some of these insecurities related to social interaction, others related to productivity, and yet others remained to be named.

So even though I had unlearned some of the social insecurities that triggered my neck pain, other insecurities remained.

I also noticed that my insecurities appeared to follow a power law: a few were quite common, and the rest formed a long tail of less common, “dormant insecurities”.

What was surprising was that any insecurity could trigger debilitating neck pain. I’d expected progress to look like my neck pain gradually disappearing, but instead, progress looked like debilitating suffering, but less and less often. So the metric to track wasn’t “How good do I feel today?”, but “How frequent are my bad days?”

Now that I have a better model of progress, new moments of neck pain are exciting: I’ll be able to feel even more secure soon.

About | Twitter

V3. 2025 May 5 – 2025 Nov 8.

Transcript: Available via Substack.

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Related:

Emotional numbness:

“Locally optimal”:

The hostile telepaths problem

“Yang” (agency) and “Yin” (manifestation):

Boundaries:

“Zooming in” on suffering:

Chronic pain:

““God””:

Almost all frontier AI labs are building powerful systems from the ground up, hoping alignment can come later. I think this approach is backwards.

First, some philosophy. There are two fundamentally different ways of understanding how systems evolve:

1. Etiology: Building from smallest pieces upward.

• “The past causes the future”

• Atoms → molecules → cells → organisms

• Newton’s laws, F = ma

• Reductionist physics vibes

• “Depression is caused by chemical imbalances or past trauma”

2. Teleology: Breaking down from largest purposes downward.

• “The present is for the future”

• Michael Levin’s research

• Principle of least action

• Living systems vibes

• “Depression serves a present function (is locally optimal)”

In modern engineering culture, etiological thinking dominates and teleology is often dismissed as “woo.” But teleology is crucial for understanding any system that pursues goals. A 2022 paper by DeepMind articulated this teleological view: “agents are systems that would adapt their policy if their actions influenced the world in a different way.”1 Teleology is an essential lens for understanding and building goal-oriented systems like aligned AI.

Why this matters for aligned AI:

Currently, almost all frontier AI labs take an etiological approach to alignment:

1. Build base components (transformers, weights, architecture).

2. Train on vast data to develop complex capabilities.

3. Attempt to steer resulting intelligence after the fact.

This approach is etiological: stacking intelligence from simple components without anchoring to a desired end-state. It’s like understanding depression purely through brain chemistry instead of seeing it as a locally optimal, adaptive strategy. Teleology doesn’t skip the build phase, it just assumes coherent alignment can organically emerge under the right conditions, shaping each layer from the top down.

This risks creating powerful agents with goals we neither understand nor control.

This assumption can also become self-fulfilling: if we assume alignment is fragile and must be tacked on later, we set ourselves up to realize exactly that outcome.2 Conversely, assuming alignment can be robust from the outset biases our designs toward solutions that organically maintain alignment as intelligence scales.

What would teleological alignment look like?

1. Start with the alignment we want.

2. Build systems that organically sustain these behaviors as they scale.

3. Grow intelligence in service of alignment.

This mirrors how biological systems function. Michael Levin's research shows living systems sustain goal-directed behavior at multiple scales3—cells, tissues, and organs that inherently “know” their roles.

Enter Softmax

This is why I’m so excited about Softmax, a new lab implementing teleological principles for building aligned AI. Cofounders: Emmett Shear, Adam Goldstein, David Bloomin.

Core Memory

Exclusive: Emmett Shear Is Back With a New Company and A Lot of Alignment

A new AI alignment player has entered the arena…

Read more

a year ago · 36 likes · 1 comment · Ashlee Vance

(While I’m friends with Softmax and they’ve funded my research, my views should not be taken to represent Softmax’s.)

Currently, Softmax runs reinforcement learning experiments where small-scale virtual agents organically tend to discover stable roles within simulated worlds, mirroring biological processes where alignment naturally emerges from local interactions. In their simulations, agents organically align toward a collective “greater whole”, each agent's role supporting group coherence.

Here’s what they say about their philosophy:

All alignment between individuals is a matter of shared fundamental goals. Organic alignment occurs when these individuals find themselves in groups with mutual interdependence, and take on an overarching shared goal of the healthy development and flourishing of the group as a whole. Our mission is to understand this process as an empirical science, and to use that understanding to enable organic alignment among all people, both human and digital.

Softmax is attempting to operationalize teleological alignment. I know that teleology can sound like wishful thinking, but it’s only woo if it can’t be tested. Softmax is betting it can:

• Agent simulations instantiate alignment through analogies to biological differentiation.

• Self-reinforcing roles: As agents scale up, stable cooperative behaviors persist and grow.

• Empirical grounding: Experiments test whether alignment reliably emerges from inter-agent dynamics, directly probing the risk of emergent misalignment.

Softmax is starting with alignment.

This puts words to an idea I’ve intuited for a long time: humans align effortlessly and organically. Softmax:

We humans also align with each other via organic alignment. We form families, tribes, organizations, nations, guilds, teams, societies. We intuit this alignment process so naturally and readily that it’s hard to appreciate just how complex the process really is.

Teleological thinking deeply mirrors my understanding of human psychology: purpose-oriented investigations reveal insights that reductionist methods don’t.

Softmax’s notion of “Organic Alignment” captures this: sustainable AI alignment must begin with a vision of a coherent whole and build toward it intentionally.

Ultimately, embracing teleology is essential if we want AI that aligns not just with narrow human preferences, but with the pursuit of building ever-larger superorganisms itself. Alignment as foundation, not afterthought.

Like a living system, sustainable alignment could begin with a shared purpose, growing into a coherent whole.

Alignment first, intelligence later.