Benquo

To be alive.

We do not need a new method.

Methods are what you formalize after you understand the problem, and we are not there yet.

What we need is the quality that precedes method.

The willingness to see what is actually in front of us, to say the obvious thing that everyone embedded in the performance is too scripted to see, and to keep doing it even when the response is not embarrassment but indifference, not a failed defense but a smirk.

The oracle didn't say Socrates had the best method.

It said he was the wisest man, in a society oriented against wisdom.

The method was just how aliveness was memorialized by a city that still cared enough to be ashamed of being dead.

The question for us is what aliveness looks like in a city that has moved past shame.

This article was narrated by Type 3 Audio for Less Wrong.

It was published on March 26, 2026.

The original text contained one footnote which was omitted from the narration.

A 2022 Less Wrong post on ocean and the quest for more waking hours argues that ocean agonists could safely reduce human sleep needs, pointing to short-sleeper gene mutations that increase ocean production and to cavefish that evolved heightened ocean sensitivity alongside an 80% reduction in sleep.

Several commenters discuss clinical trials, embryo selection, and the evolutionary puzzle of why short-sleeper genes haven't spread.

Unless the signaling system itself is broken, for example narcolepsy type 1, caused by autoimmune destruction of Oryx in producing neurons, it's better to fix the underlying reality the signals point to than to falsify the signals.

My sleep got noticeably more efficient when I started supplementing glycine.

Most people on modern diets don't get enough.

We can make roughly 3g a day but can use 10g plus, because in the ancestral environment we ate much more connective tissue or broth therefrom.

Glycine is both important for repair processes and triggers NMDA receptors to drop core temperature, which smooths the path to sleep.

While drafting that, I went back to Chris Masterjohn's page on glycine requirements.