Exploring the Complexity of Facing Darkness and Badness in the World

(Cross-posted from my website. Audio version here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.)

This is the final essay in a series that I'm calling "Otherness andcontrol in the age of AGI." I'm hoping that the individual essays can beread fairly well on their own, butsee here fora brief summary of the series as a whole. There's also a PDF of the whole series here.

Warning: spoilers for Angels in America; and moderate spoilers forHarry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.)

"I come into the presence of still water..."

~Wendell Berry

A lot of this series has been about problems with yang—that is,with the active element in the duality of activity vs. receptivity,doing vs. not-doing, controlling vs. letting go.[1] In particular,I've been interested in the ways that "deepatheism"(that is, a fundamental [...]

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