Cormac's Snow Day
A low effort(?) (experimental? personal?) post. Mostly not about AI
I got a bunch of new subscribers today and by a bunch I of course mean 4. Today was the first day this month where I didn’t do any work related to AI. That sentence is not strictly true. I’ve had an hour’s worth of thoughts on what I should do tomorrow1. I thanked and also very lightly complained to a friend of mine (hi Zack welcome to my substack) for reaching out to a bunch of friends in AI safety after I had requested a list of the people in AI safety. Oh, and right before this exact moment (5pm) I was reading If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies2, but that’s not real work - that’s just relaxing. I did cry while reading it, but that doesn’t make it work!
Long Preamble Over
I love snow. I love Dancing. I woke up and spent the next 4 hours dancing around NYC. In the streets. On bridges. Surrounded by snow. Sliding on so many icy surfaces. It was fucking wonderful.
My favorite part was an hour dancing in Madison Ave. It’s a wide one way street, plenty of room for cars to pass. Well shoveled but still slippy slide-y fun. My back to the wind.3 My front to the cars. Surrounded by stoic tall Manhattan buildings. Almost deserted so everyone is happy to see other people. There’s something truly epic to feeling into music4 on a wide open snow filled street in the heart of New York.
This was probably the hardest decision of the day. Five fun people (in addition to the 5 homies) slept over for a snow sleepover last night, and it was really really enticing to stay up with them instead of getting up early to take advantage of peak blizzard and no cars out. I think I made the right choice, but also I am clearly neglecting my social life and this was low hanging fruit. There’s something about tackling a third major thing that feels dangerous. Something about losing focus and being spread thin. A housemate thinks I should stop moping and just exert my power.
Power
I’ve been thinking about power recently. It seems like most people think I have it (I think I do too.) But I’ve been confused about why recently. For a while my model was I was clearly socially powerful because I started and ran a beloved community event every other Saturday for 4 years. I now don’t do that and currently do not have nearly the same social status/power5. And yet it seems like I am at most only slightly less powerful. There’s something about agency and ability to execute, but also there’s “powerful vibes” without knowing those.
I really really really love being playful, but some of my playfulness has been sharper since I’ve been sadder and that’s bad. A housemate said something about how being slightly off target is worse the higher the magnitude of the shot (slightly grazing you with a bullet is way worse than with a poke). Careful power. Good Power. Attuned power.
Back “on topic”
I came back from the snow dancing and all 5 bonus people were still in the house! In fact many of them were just waking up! I love being in a house filled with lots of people, it’s still such a good vibe to just be in presence and impromptu conversations. Soak in the people. Soak in the communal snow day energy. It seems like this should be repeatable.
After relaxing for 6 hours I’m about to go play DnD. I’ve been playing every other week with this group for something like 3 years. We were all strangers when we started. I am not really 1:1 friends with any of them. It’s so fun, but also it’s such a weird relationship. I wish there was a mechanism for voting a mediocre player off the island, but I think this is a case where simply suggesting that is negative EV6. It’s really fascinating to spend this much time with these people (probably 300-500 hours) in a satisfying way but with no genuine connection.
I suspect that if my social calendar of things with people I love were full DnD would probably be dropped, but it’s not super clear. I am currently really in a wanting to be wanted and wanting to want phase with simply too many people, so thinking about what I would do with an overpacked social calendar is not top of mind. I empirically struggle with long term friendships. I suspect I am not vulnerable enough or share enough about how I feel towards them: my love, my wants, what they mean to me, how important they are, it doesn’t feel natural7. Instead, I mostly just allocate the time and am excited to see them in that time. I’m starting to suspect I could do better than this. Wow, I literally just had one of the slept overs tell me that they want to make sure I know that they want me after I complained about this at open circle8. That was really nice!
I suspect the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze on this post. I’m trying out writing about the “Purpose, meaning, and life well lived” part of my description. If you’ve made it here feel free to let me know if it was worth it to you to finish reading this, if it wasn’t I ofc won’t take it as an attack. I think every subscriber so far has my phone number, no excuse.
Once my Claude Max subscription refreshes
The most read book targeting the general audience on why AI killing everyone is worth thinking about. You can buy it here. I pirated it because that is my cached efficient workflow on how I read anything, but I felt kinda bad about it this time so idk maybe that’s a thing to think about. If you want to read it but don’t want to pay money here is that link.
This is really important, if you want to dance (or even walk) around in a snowstorm find out the direction of the wind and make sure it is towards your back. Snow flying into your eyes radically worsens the experience.
If you’re curious the playlist I went for about 55% high energy sonically chaotic/diverse dance music, and 45% vibey no/minimal beat interpretive vibes, you can find the playlist here.
obviously there’s still some foundational social power in that lots of people who know me are aware that I successfully executed that etc
expected value, I am trying to convey in two letter that bringing this idea up would have social consequences and if anything would lead to a slight increase in me getting voted off the island so it’s not strategically worth it. Maybe I should suggest a check in but I don’t think that would actually help move us towards the outcome that I think is good for all but one of us a change happens with the person who doesn’t show up prepared or on time. Maybe it would generally be worth it anyways. Unclear.
Especially in older relationships that began during a version of me that was less outwardly emotional. The classic example being family (hi Helen welcome to my substack).
Weekly relational mindfulness event where people can process hard thing in community. Adjacent to circling/authentic relating.