Say you have some mental tech you want to install. Like TDT or something.
And you want it to be installed for real.
My method is: create a subagent whose job it is to learn to win using that thing. Another way of putting it, a subagent whose job is to learn the real version of that thing, free of DRM. Another way of putting it, a subagent whose job is to learn when the thing is useful and when things nearby are useful. Keep poking that subagent with data and hypotheticals and letting it have the wheel sometimes to see how it performs, until it grows strong. Then, fuse with it.
How do you create a subagent? I can’t point you to the motion I use, but you can invoke it and a lot of unnecessary wrapping paper by just imagining a person who knows the thing advising you, and deciding when you want to follow that advice or not.
You might say, “wait, this is just everybody’s way of acquiring mental tech.” Yes. But, if you do it consciously, you can avoid confusion, such as the feeling of being a false face which comes from being inside the subagent. This is the whole “artifacts” process I’ve been pointing to before.
If you get an idea for some mental tech and you think it’s a good idea, then there is VOI to be had from this. And the subagent can be charged with VOI force, instead of “this is known to work” force. I suspect that’s behind the pattern where people jump on a new technique for a while and it works and then it stops. Surfing the “this one will work” wave like VC money.
I had an ironic dark side false face for a while. Which I removed when I came to outside-view suspect the real reason I was acting against a stream of people who would fall in love with my co-founder and get her to spend inordinate time helping them with their emotions was that I was one of them, and was sufficiently disturbed at that possibility that I took action I hoped would cut off the possibility of that working. Which broke a certain mental order, “never self-limit”, but fuck that, I would not have my project torn apart by monkey bullshit.
Nothing really happened after ditching that false face. My fears were incorrect, and I still use the non-false-face version of the dark side.
Most of my subagents for this purpose are very simple, nothing like people. Sometimes, when I think someone understands something deep I don’t, that I can’t easily draw out into something explicit and compressed, I sort of create a tiny copy of them and slowly drain its life force until I know the thing and know better than the thing.