@devonzuegel @juliagalef found a technique for this. TL;DR = ask for the numerator & denominator separately. measureofdoubt.com/2011/05/06/the…
March 2019
Thread · Training a shift toward right-hemisphere perspective · 7 of 8 tweets
After watching this engaging convo between JP & IM about the latter's work on the @divided_brain, I have the sense that my top personal learning priority is shifting my internal locus to my right hemisphere. Suggestions for how to train this? youtube.com/watch?v=xtf4FD…
IM has a different model than the classic rational-left / emotional-right brain divide, where each hemisphere specializes not in different things but in different perspectives. The left ignores any info that doesn't fit its model; the right integrates unknowns. (👈oversimplified)
Relevant RH capacities: 🎭improvising 👁diffuse attention ⚛nonlinear thinking 🌏big picture thinking ❓embracing uncertainty 😍orienting to what's meaningful 👥seeing people as experiencers & carers (not objects) 🕸seeing world as flowing complex systems (not static concepts)
But I'm not holding these as separate skills to train—my right hemisphere is actually quite good at all of these already! That's its job—and I've trained many of these too. The thing is that these capacities have been restricted by my left hemisphere's dominance.
Most of the corpus callosum (L & R hemisphere connection) is inhibitory connections. I keep going on about internal conflict & I suspect that L↔R interaction represents a lot of that conflict.
It seems to me, based on McGilchrist's work and a ton of my own experience, that shifting one's locus from L to R will produce a major shift in how that conflict shows up, because of the nature of the asymmetry. R can make sense of L perspective WAY better than vice versa.
No doubt I'll write more on that as I read/watch more of McGilchrist's work and integrate it with #PCT (Perceptual Control Theory) and other models. For now: I would love to hear the extent to which you personally resonate with any of this, or how you've worked with it. 🗨 👇
Retweeted @cognazor
Catching myself wanting to say something interesting, an energy to observe in awareness and let dissipate
Honing mode vs Jamming mode (in conversation) goo.gl/NnzneK #Communication #DivergentThinking #Brainstorming
@noididntreadit Hmm, I like your 2x2! —& I think it's basically totally different than what I'm talking about! Honing isn't necessarily repetitive, nor jamming necessarily one-off. And by "not necessarily" I don't just mean "they usually are but not always". Not sure there's a connection at all!
@noididntreadit Meta: my above response was a honing move, based on your suggestion that the axes were similar, which made me think you were doing something of a honing move yourself. I think if you'd just said "huh, that reminds me of this 2x2" I'd've parsed it as jamming & responded in kind🤔
@noididntreadit Your 2x2 reminded me of this 2x2 that I made, although they're definitely very different as well. But both thinking about behavior patterns.
@noididntreadit More than the 2x2 itself, the stuff you were saying about navigating it resonated. Particularly this bit:
@noididntreadit And if I had to make up a way in which the top two quadrants of yours and the top two of mine are somehow mapped on the same L-R axis, I might tentatively point at the left and right hemispheres of the brain. (tho I'm a bit obsessed with that atm)
Broke: Incense the change you wish to see in the world Woke:
@JMannhart @devonzuegel @juliagalef I have a speculation that the doc is basically categorically refusing to tell you anything about your own prognoses... but answering these questions about the past are just facts. I encourage people to test this by changing from "what % of me getting X?" to "what % of past X?"
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @divided_brain Wow, I listened to the first one of these and it's fantastic. Can't wait to listen to the other, especially as it's more explicitly about McGilchrist's work I think (although that gets brought up in the first as it's known to be a point of common interest).
Retweeted @Meaningness
🆕 Counting, the most basic rational procedure, depends on non-rational skills. Simple illustration of a major theme of my…
@cognazor I added this to a new TwitterMoment (haven't really used the feature before) called #JustRightHemisphereThings based on the recent kick I'm on (thread👇)
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @divided_brain Damn. Also man I am so excited for ML-based smart noise reduction software. It's gonna be so good.
@GimmieThatFeed "cosimia_"
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @divided_brain Ah, so contrary to what I initially thought when I read your "the shitty thing" tweet, listening to it in the shower on a speaker will maybe be _better_ than listening to it in headphones.
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @divided_brain OMG I've thought of this stuff for years. I'm so embarrassed for humanity that this doesn't exist already. Maybe @otter_ai should build it, as a marketing channel...
@Evolving_Ego Not presidential candidate, but a group working on ballot initiatives. Interestingly, they say "decriminalizing all drugs is more likely to pass than just one specific drug." therooster.com/blog/beyond-mu…
@Evolving_Ego Oh totally. It seems like a step on the way though. And I don't just mean directly in a legislative sense: once you've decriminalized something, it's a lot easier to have public conversations about it. (eg cannabis started as a medical thing and is now legal in various places)
@_awbery_ @context_ing What's the thing and what return has it had?
Good maxim—except as a fraction of "time spent on twitter" itself. Although the answer there isn't so much "less reading. more tweeting" but "more replying. less favoriting"
@noididntreadit 🤔 ...there have got to be some really good 2×2×2×2s. Now if only we could draw them.
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @_awbery_ I'm so looking forward to when there is something that lets workflowy-tree structures and excel-table structures mutually embed each other. No idea what this will look like yet but it feels like it'd be amazing. Maybe in v319 of what @conaw is building.
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @_awbery_ Mmmm okay. I think I'm getting most of this from my complice.co daily+weekly+monthly reviews (it needs to have quarterly too but I haven't implemented that yet). And there's work to do on visualizing things better.
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @_awbery_ @Conaw Hm, you might want to look into inqwire.io - hasn't publicly launched yet, but they just load your data temporarily, and you keep it in files on your device. Although like... I still back mine up to the cloud anyway... 🙃
@Conaw @context_ing @_awbery_ YES LIKE THAT.
Retweeted @reasonisfun
Culture (anti-rational memes) has these equivocations to try to make it impossible to have collaborative interaction witho…
Retweeted @cosimia_
One of my favorite poems, and one of my greatest struggles: What makes us leave what we love best? What is it inside us tha…
One minute you're waiting for the sky to fall The next you're dazzled by the beauty of it all youtube.com/watch?v=Age3O5…
Retweeted @sam_havens
@DRMacIver @ssica3003 I woke up thinking about this... Hypothesis space is probably very high dimensional, so no points are…
@dela3499 sounds triplicitous.
My latest thinking about internal conflict is something extremely obvious-in-retrospect: that the main axis of internal conflict in people is between their left & right hemispheres' profoundly different perspectives.🧠
This is critical for not being the person in this scene questioning your life choices:
@callumflack This is part of what I love so much about twitter: the ability to lift a sentence out of its original tweetstorm/conversation, while retaining context, in a way that isn't natural in any other medium. eg I retweeted just this yesterday:
Thread · Fragments extracted from longer works that stand on their own · 2 of 6 tweets
I'd love to collect a list of excellent things that were originally just an unassuming part of a longer thing but that stand powerfully on their own.
My favorite example is the "Litany of Gendlin", which was reified by folks on LessWrong some years ago. It totally reads like a litany when displayed like this with the line breaks, but it wasn't originally meant as such. It was just a paragraph in Gendlin's book Focusing!
Put your pedal to the _______
This thread is not exactly how I'm holding it, but resonates with something important in me that I haven't see any other attempts to articulate.
Retweeted @visakanv
Who are you following? Why? What are you tweeting? Why? What experiences would you like to have? Why? Who would you like t…
@visakanv Still sad that there's no way to see where a tweet is referenced. eg your just replied to one that is embedded in this one, but there's no easy way to see that. Would love to get your take on this btw, as it's relevant to this very thread etc:
@KA_OConnor @RobinSloan has a fascinating newsletter that is currently called Year of the Meteor. Very eclectic mix of aesthetic stuff. buttondown.email/year-of-the-me…
Retweeted @alifeofmovement
Therapists are a licensed profession. This makes it seem as if you must be a licensed therapist to do what normal frie…
@fortelabs Sell ebook, but give physical book away for free... ...to maximize virality from coffeetable exposure?
@eriktorenberg Important to note: all of this also applies to Go & even StarCraft, particularly as DeepMind's AI starts to win at the latter. The rules and choices may be more numerous & info less perfect, but they're still pre-defined & closed. Completely different from real-world complexity.
@eriktorenberg This difference is dramatically underappreciated by people who think of the world as if it behaves the same as some decent abstractions, plus or minus some error bars. (This is most people) Relates to difference between "complex" & "complicated" systems: youtube.com/watch?v=N7oz36…
@eriktorenberg I've recently been thinking a lot about Iain McGilchrist's rich model of brain hemisphere differences, and it seems pretty likely that another way of talking about this is that our paradigms are dominated by a left-H view of the world.
Retweeted @eriktorenberg
Chess is a limited metaphor for long term initiatives, because it implies a winner for every loser, a pre-defined scope…
Replying to @soundofcrunchy
@fortelabs Yeah I wasn't assuming it was the same book. I'm also not saying I think it's a bad idea! It could be quite effective as a loss leader for the entry-mid-premium value stuff!
Retweeted @visakanv
One of the many things that suck about school is that you can’t score 10,000 on a test. Years of being stuck in 0-100 has a w…
@visakanv Also that you get scored based on ONE person's assessment of how close you came to some ideal. I started a business in university, and it was immediately clear that the feedback loops were so much better there. The question is just DOES IT WORK? Also feedback is made of money.🤑
@visakanv And I guess relatedly to the 10,000 thing... in school if it works you're done. I mean you have to be able to do it again but only when you're tested again. With a real-world situation, you can continue getting value out of something that works, but you get to naturally get bored
@visakanv Which then drives the urge to scale, automate, systemize, etc. Find better ways to do things. Rather than "phew I finally passed the test".
@callumflack @visakanv "Removing mental models so you can see clearly what's under your nose" is screaming out to me as being relevant to the recent thinking & learning I've been doing about the L & R 🧠 hemispheres.
@callumflack @visakanv Which makes me think it might be less about removing the models themselves and more about transforming the relationship with them (ie grounding more in RH)
Thread · Training a shift toward right-hemisphere perspective · 1 of 8 tweets
@callumflack Not at all! I think that reaction gifs are actually a prime (if satiated) example of the thing I'm talking about. Almost always from longer pieces: a moment in time, extracted. Probably for many gifs, more time has been spent watching the gif than the original full movie etc
Replying to @soundofcrunchy
@HarmonicTension We're encultured to think we can't do things we aren't formally trained to do. The world NEEDS everybody to be able to give therapeutic care to their friends & family & communities. This will be true even if AIs take over diagnosing oddities & prescribing meds.
@visakanv I've vaguely thought maybe a browser extension could do it? Search twitter for each tweet on the screen, then stick a thing next to the 🗨🔃♥ icons with a # of quotes. API search only gets recent stuff. I think web search gets all...? test one of your most-quoted? (search url)
@visakanv If you're on mobile, you might need to use the "share link to tweet" feature. If you're on desktop, find the tweet then click on its date. The one whose url is active in a given popped-up-thread is the one with the biggest text.
@visakanv ...Yeah definitely it doesn't show all 😢 I just searched this one (embedded here) and it's showing a QT from someone else but not your own recent embed replying to me here: twitter.com/visakanv/statu…
@HarmonicTension (Not that that will be sufficient work for everybody; people also need solo projects, and other things. But it does represent an important "something to do")
Retweeted @rivatez
it’s a shame how people take the beauty of air travel for granted. imagine telling a person 100+ years ago that they would get…
@dela3499 Connections between critical rationalist ideas and other theories. CritRat twitter seems to have a ton of people saying the same things repeatedly (lots of quoting Popper & Deutsch). Good things, but I want to see it integrated & developed, rather than echoed.
@suchaone ...they're so relaxed! youtube.com/watch?v=Ils9zK…
@fortelabs something about gatekeepers something about upfront capital/investment required something about scale
@fortelabs Mmmm yeah what I meant by scale was... something about the thresholds, predictions, etc. With both ones on the right, there's something about the unknownness of demand before you put it out? (Ahh, also... something about upside & downside?)
@fortelabs Probably worth asking the @ScribeMediaCo folks to weigh in, since they're practically Ghostwriters-As-A-Service
Retweeted @alexeyguzey
great demonstration of my deep skepticism of ANY data obscure methodological detail was responsible for ~10% change in an…
"The one exception to the right hemisphere superiority for the expression of emotion is anger. Anger is robustly connected with left frontal activation." - p61 of Iain McGilchrist's book on the @divided_brain Fascinating.
@callumflack Huh... are you saying it's a riff on Lost A Friend? (Which I just discovered) Different melody... It does have a really close sample of Freddie Scott's "(You) Got What I Need" though! whosampled.com/sample/2064/Bi…
@callumflack On which note whosampled is an amazing source for musical/audio examples of the "thing exalted from original" I totally misunderstood Daft Punk's music until I looked it up on there. It's all brilliant samples of (at least now) obscure 70s & 80s music. whosampled.com/sample/226/Daf…
@callumflack (Above example is one where original song is also awesome. In fact, "Get up! Time to release the beast!" hook is way more epic than "Robot Rock") Oh but then 2013 RAM album is mostly original! Even Contact, tho it opens w/ just NASA recos over an 80s song whosampled.com/Daft-Punk/Cont…
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
Put your pedal to the _______
@krazyander @reasonisfun Or they might be asking for context: "You did something that surprised me. What information would I have needed to know about the situation for your behavior to have made sense?" But see also multiple types of explanation—justification here is fear-based: malcolmocean.com/2015/10/causal…
@gerstenzang @ivanhzhao I think he's talking about hardware being a commodity. But then I think it's less about hardware/software and more about underlying tech vs uniquely designed user interface stuff. This then explains Apple's relationship to hardware fairly clearly.
@dela3499 Whoa I really like these! :O I could sort of imagine getting one of them as a tattoo, actually...
This vid has a fascinating thing where early on it shows a fake ~AR interface; later in vid that display is floating around the guy while his eyes are closed Suggests not so much "AR interface"; more "representation of his working memory" (cc @visakanv) youtube.com/watch?v=716cs2…
@dela3499 ❗Yes, good point. Could imagine one with 3× or 5× rotational symmetry but a similar aesthetic, that would also be really nice.
Retweeted @ssica3003
Seeing a lot of anti-polyamory stuff on Twitter right now. Just thought I’d shout out that in my bubble there are many folks…
@guillefix @dela3499 and then there's hexagon graph paper for organic chemistry:
@cognazor @everytstudies I start to say something like "here I read this article and it's interesting" and then I'm like "well I might as well say something about it" and then I'm like "oh man this connects with this other thing I was reading/thinking about the other day" eg 🧵👇
Retweeted @utotranslucence
@visakanv Apparently according to my super unscientific framework, my core quest is ‘to be special’. There’s also a st…
@utotranslucence @visakanv Huh, both of these tweets of yours resonate a lot. I've recently been recognizing & working with some blindspots generated by the specialness thing, but the core thing still seems powerful & important.
@dela3499 @guillefix Yeah! It would be a very neat surface for the kind of drawings you've been doing. Tag me if/when you post them 😊
@selfprime "almost... got it..." pixels.com/featured/the-o…
Retweeted @NoraBateson
Here, in the melting structures of obsolete systems, is the fluid of possibility. It’s sticky with confusion, it smells li…
@dela3499 @guillefix Cool just tab-snoozed your insta. I don't use the app myself so I don't have any direct way to follow people.
Retweeted @everytstudies
@Malcolm_Ocean @cognazor "Maybe I should write a post on it... wait it got more complicated than I thought... let's step…
@everytstudies @cognazor This is part of what I like about twitter though. It lets my thoughts at a given moment just be my thoughts at that given moment, rather than becoming reified into a PIECE. I also like that I have pieces. But I'd like a good space for putting out my drafts as what they are. 🤔
Retweeted @Meaningness
🆕 Tech startup cofounders developing into meta-systematicity (“stage five,” “fluidity”). The same themes as meta-rational…
.@visakanv I see you liked my tweet about brain lateralization, and want to encourage you to check out Iain McGilchrist's book. Its impact on my introspective capacity is about an order of magnitude more powerful than anything else I know. (@introspectVV)
@AnkurRSharma What happened? How are you feeling now?
Retweeted @Jonathan_Rowson
Premodernity is driving us. Modernity may be killing us. Postmodernity is confusing us. Metamodernity is waiting for u…
@reasonisfun @Meaningness I don't see a disagreement here! My explicit knowledge of both philosophies is a bit past "I've read Beginning of Infinity and Meaningness". Possible I'm misunderstanding either here. Also possible I'm using them both fluidly in such a way that they don't FEEL they disagree 😉🙃
@reasonisfun @context_ing I think that it's not being model-free, not "using a better model", but *using models differently*. Which is similar but I think importantly distinct than "using inexplicit models". The right hemisphere has a different relationship to its models, and this matters.
@reasonisfun @context_ing My current recommended introduction to this stuff is this podcast btw: metalearn.net/podcasts/ml41-… He lays it out really clearly in 44 minutes. (The original link to the convo with Jordan Peterson is also great, but this is a clearer intro for most people I think.)
@reasonisfun @Meaningness That's partially splitting hairs about the word "disagree", but it's important. My eyes constantly disagree about what I'm seeing, but that just gets integrated into a 3D view, not fought over. Physics & biology emphasize different things but are both models of matter.
Thread of great "quotes" generated by GPT-2. Not sure if they're being generated as quotes or if they're just random sentences pulled from larger GPT-2 paragraphs. Most certainly *feel* like quotes.
The above uncertainty relates to this tweet of mine from last week, which I'd love more responses to:
@reasonisfun @Meaningness I'm actually not sure if #MetaRationalism is a single philosophy at all, or if it's just pointing at "philosophies meta to rationalism" 🤔 (the implication being that there may be multiple ways to do that) (but of course all philosophies have variations, over time & between ppl)
@quasimondo Aha, yes, that makes sense. Is this sort of like deepstyle? The GPT-2 model keeps everything it learned about language from the larger corpus, but then adapts its output style to be like the famous quotes?
@Meaningness @reasonisfun Also David have you looked into any of Iain McGilchrist's stuff on brain hemisphere lateralization? It's profoundly relevant to your work. He frames the modernity madness & breakdown as being characteristic of the left hemisphere denying the role of the right. Core to all of this
@bierlingm @dthorson Damn. I'd heard there was a shooting but hadn't heard about the manifesto. Just read a bit about it. Our future seems to depend on a bunch of people (the media) ignoring obvious incentives gradients (to dramatize this & further). Not a good situation.
Retweeted @GRITCULT
Takeaways: Short Netflix Entertainment industry is decentralising Content = attention economy. The main metric is distra…
Retweeted @Rrooze
@Mangan150 Human brain is composed of 60% fat yet it's normal in our culture to feed non-fat formula from birth. Guess what's a…
Hadn't seriously thought about this, but yeah. Guessing there's deep deep fear here that people are avoiding looking at.
Twitter what's that word for when a person does something for one reason and then makes up a totally different reason why they did it? eg a split brain patient, one hemisphere does a thing, other hemisphere gives (false) explanation for it. #tipofmytongue
@visakanv fabrication? that's the closest one I have so far but I'm pretty—aha! Of course it's in the index of Iain McGilchrist's book. Pretty sure "confabulation" is the word I was looking for ✔
Replying to @realtimeai
@RealtimeAI Intelligence is key, and so is leverage. We need both. Both wells of resources are huge and untapped. The more pressing question is "what leverage do we have to release what & how much?" I think there's potential for powerful synergies here, beyond just "rich help poor"
@Meaningness @reasonisfun Rationality involves both hemispheres, to be clear! But based on what I've read, rationalization (including the extreme of confabulation) seems to be predominantly a LH phenomenon. "Confabulation is believed to be a result of damage to the right frontal lobe of the brain." (wp)
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@Meaningness @reasonisfun Rationality involves both hemispheres, to be clear! But based on what I've read, rationalizat…
Replying to @realtimeai
@RealtimeAI Totally. Additionally, there's something unique & important that happens when people can pursue/explore a thing without having to first convince someone else it's a good idea, which would be happen if rich smart folks tapped into purpose. GMI would also help (cc @AndrewYangVFA)
@Meaningness @Chris_PK_Smith @reasonisfun Is this the piece you're talking about? I'll check it out. pitt.edu/~jdnorton/pape…
for me, spellcheck is more of a neologism-tracker than an error-corrector
@KevinSimler Mmmm! Well, let me just say on behalf of the collective, we missed you too!
@KevinSimler @vgr Seems like an even further extreme than "delete the boring rambly introduction that was just there to get your thoughts flowing". I'm also thinking about how lots of people recommend flipping through a book until something catches your interest, rather than starting at word one.
@JeffreyALoyd @visakanv @paulg Yeah, silence probably a good place to start. It's not just a language shift but a thinking shift. You need to, in yourself, access a way of thinking that takes in the investor and their question, rather than just querying "what's my line?" and saying something.
Replying to @keendisregard
@KeenDisregard @fortelabs I just read Beginning of Infinity by Deutsch and it was a serious candidate to answer Tiago's original question here. Haven't read FoR so can't compare, but BoI is newer.
@fortelabs Currently reading Iain McGilchrist's book The Master & his Emissary, and it's having profound effects on my ability to introspect. And I wasn't sure about calling this paradigmatic but then I thought about it and it definitely is. Grokking brain structure key for grokking thought
@fortelabs Early brain hemisphere models were totally confused, and so for decades this have been unfashionable to look at, but the hemispheres play very different roles in tiny birds, and human brains are *more* lateralized than birds, so clearly there must be something important going on.
@fortelabs Here's a short tweetstorm by me about my thinking on it. But it's developed a lot since then based on reading just the first 20% of this book and I expect it to develop a lot more. I'm planning to make training programs for this stuff.
@fortelabs Here's a link to the Kindle edition since it seems elsewhere in this thread that that's what you prefer. This new expanded edition has a great intro that clarifies a lot of his thinking in the decade since he published it. amzn.to/2TcXvtV
@fortelabs (Oh! And the book is so long that that whole intro fits in the X% free sample preview.)
Replying to @Douglas9162
@Douglas9162 @z3nblack Doubling this recommendation. Would love to discuss it with you if/when you do check it out. Some recent thoughts of mine:
Reading this article by @david_perell, I'm grokking something I hadn't before about the relationship of college-as-coming-of-age-ritual to shifts in parenting to "a society ruled by parents who won’t let their children out of sight" perell.com/blog/what-the-…
I'm taking in that there's a sense in which high school + [being a teen at home] aren't actually really offering a developmental context for growing into independence for many people (anymore). And university does. I'm looking forward to seeing what replaces that role.
Because if you remove the costs of new buildings, JSTOR, profs... and the "signalling" aspect as even a weak justification for the price in terms of RoI... then giving 18yos a context they could move into together and discover independence together becomes way more affordable
🤔 I think you'd ideally want it to not just be a house full of 18yos, but a mixed age range that's still narrow enough that nobody needs to be the "parent"... but wide enough that people don't have to figure out adulting from scratch. Although ofc there is the internet for that
"Before there can be harmony, there must be difference." - Iain McGilchrist, p129 of The Master and his Emissary (@divided_brain)
Replying to @z3nblack
@z3nblack @Douglas9162 ...I guess I was doubling Douglas' recommendation of the book, to you. And I'd be open to discussing it with either of you but I have no idea who he is. And only the slightest idea who you are, from having followed you for a bit.
@bierlingm @dthorson Aha, thread from @GRITCULT that lays this all out in detail. > One of the biggest questions of our time is : > "Is suppressing Memetic contagion, a violation of free speech?"
Loving this song "Life" by @Bartoven+@SigmaHQ. Doubt he was thinking about 🧠hemispheres, but he was seeing the same structure. RHem sings to LHem: 🎶 Lighten up, you’re way too serious 🎵 You’re way too caught up in what’s right 🎶 & what your theory is youtube.com/watch?v=s7RYwu…
That was chorus. Second verse: 🎵I see the patterns, yes I do see how your way is so secure 🎶I’ll leave that all to you LHem operates by automatic patterns, and feels secure in its sense of coherent world-model. RHem *needs* LHem to do autopilot so it can stay big picture.
🎶I’d rather find a balance, and reach for things beyond my wildest dreams 🎵& watch them dreams come true RHem reaches into the unknown. 1st verse is less relevant; if anything it's from LHem perspective. Def feeling an internal conflict. Lyrics: genius.com/Sigma-life-lyr…
I seriously think this song can be a helpful mantra in a moment of the left-hemisphere feeling threatened by something that contradicts its theory. Note that "theory" here doesn't mean something explicit, just whatever simplified world-model the LHem is taking as absolute truth.
@fortelabs 2, maybe 3. Though I think you can do way better. Here's a 3min mockup of how I'd evoke the concept "write of passage"
@fortelabs There's probably a tweak that would increase the extent to which this evokes "acceleration" Some sort of motion line/effect, or maybe making the line dashed and having the dashes get longer.
Retweeted @suchaone
you're not assembling it right. it's actually a kind of fractal that can generate more eggs with toys inside. …
Thread · Trading truth for coherence, authoritarianism, and the left hemisphere
> When information sources were limited, we traded truth for coherence. > Trigger warning: the media was never truthful. There, I said it. To be fair, the media didn’t actively deceive the public either. ~@david_perell truth→coherence trade continues. perell.com/blog/what-the-…
Afaict, from my current reading of Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and his Emissary, the left hemisphere's job is maintaining a workable coherent system (and ignoring what doesn't fit). Blindspots necessary for focus. Most modern western people identify with their LH, so...
As articulated (probably inadvertently) in @Bartoven's song "Life", the left-hemisphere is caught up in what's right by its own theory, and assesses everything by that.
Bob Altemeyer has a book called The Authoritarians in which he describes patterns of thinking that sound very similar to all of this: (This screenshot is from this fascinating series on people who post on estranged parent forums. issendai.com/psychology/est…)
Altemeyer notes correlations between this "authoritarian follower" pattern and current right-wing politics. Not sure if that would hold pre-60s-counterculture-rotation (see @Meaningness) but I'm guessing broadly so inasmuch as "right-wing" = "status quo". meaningness.com/political-left…
But as the 🤯 book The Guru Papers points out, our culture has been authoritarian for a long time, and we've ALL got substantial tendencies to try to seek safety in authorities. And based on recent @divided_brain neuroscience, seems this is partially innate. So... what do?
...I haven't gotten to end of McGilchrist's book yet, so I don't know! Based on my internal practice & introspection since learning of @divided_brain model, it *seems* that the LHemisphere needs to take the RHem as authority. RHem is then open to new info, so whole brain learns.
@dthorson Loved the little update today :) Curious to know how many people *are* listening to Emerge! It's a fascinating medium where no like/comment section means I have no idea!
#NeologismOfTheDay: rubberduckery (in the context of "rubber duck debugging", although not programming - ift.tt/1Ng9Rao)
@fortelabs Added this to my list of "features to include in my hypothetical twitter replacement (ui) I'd like to build".
(lifted from the middle of a thread about privlege)
@fortelabs This is what it currently looks like, in workflowy. Haven't dumped all implicit ideas; this is just to keep from forgetting new ones (I also have lists of people who might be interested in collaborating or alpha-testing, a list of relevant threads, a list of related projects...)
@fortelabs Btw, given my other priorities, I think my ideal relationship to this project would be somewhere between "advisor" and "designer", not "running the whole show"
Replying to @_TamaraWinter
@_TamaraWinter The Guru Papers (amzn.to/2TiCEoN)
Thread · The shattered Overton Window and finding common ground
Another astounding thought from @david_perell's recent article: that the Overton Window, ie "the range of acceptable opinions in society", has collapsed. perell.com/blog/what-the-…
Now that I'm thinking about this, I would characterize it as something much messier than just collapse. The Overton Window is obviously many-dimensional. It probably used to have some range in all dimensions. The point is, there was just ONE Overton Window.
I would bet that over the last while, the main political party positions roughly formed each end of the Overton Window. Any opinion between left & right was acceptable. Now each group holds the other in such contempt that there are very few opinions that are broadly acceptable.
(Each group has its own Overton Window, I guess, although these are also nebulous and multitudinous. A moderate has a different but overlapping Overton Window with a more extremely-opinionated person in the same general area.)
I am literally polling my mind for things I think all Americans would agree with and mostly I'm just getting facts, not opinions. & even then, not all facts. 😶 Maybe meta-opinions like "political tensions in America sure are high these days" or "this next election is important"
And even then, probably many people would disagree with such statements if uttered by a political opponent, because it might be a trap to try to convince you of something you know you don't believe. (This *does* happen, but any conversation in which people fear this is FUBAR.)
That's somewhat alarming because as @AdamKahane explains from decades of working with major conflicts, one key step for creatively moving forward is getting people-in-conflict to experience agreement that the situation needs to change.
My sense is that the *agreement* part really is important there. It's not enough that everyone thinks it—they need to actually be able to recognize that at least on that meta-level, there's some common ground. That means a shared purpose, which allows collaboration.
What does it make sense to do in a world with a shattered Overton Window? I wish I knew the answer. Alas, all I can hope for in this moment is that I've framed a slightly better question. and now I'm thinking of @NoraBateson's recent tweet:
Replying to @danielharan
@danielharan Hmmm... the image I got from reading @AdamKahane was of a smaller group of people in a room together. But you'd need many such rooms to handle current USA politics. I think the thing you're saying would help a bit, but I don't think it it would *feel* like agreement.
Tired midday? There's a nap for that. malcolmocean.com/2016/04/polyph…
Watched this powerful video by Greta Thunberg about climate and how she has led a movement of children refusing to go to school because action needs to happen now and clearly learning more science won't help if current science is being ignored. youtube.com/watch?v=EAmmUI…
There've been over 1,400,000 striking students worldwide in the last few weeks. I think that this represents something really important both for climate & for coming-of-age. On Wikipedia, "The strikes have also been criticised as truancy." Not surprising. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_st…
Truancy. Right, it's a crime if you don't go to school. This is not like a labor strike. This is civil disobedience.
@fieryfalliblist If I temporarily buy into the idea that it's meaningful to summarize something so rich with a word or two, I would say "Integrity". I think it's upstream of your 1,2,3,5.
@lawsonfulton @visakanv 1Q84 is a really weird book oddly, despite the variety of wild stuff in there, the scene that stands out to me most is that it features a scene where the protagonist goes to pee and is thinking about something (a lover?) while he does. ...so many stories have no bathrooms.
@procrastiwork @visakanv This was gonna be mine! Growing sense of it plus a recent reco from @utotranslucence. But I'm probably gonna be focused on Iain McGilchrist's book for now.
@reasonisfun One can experience a state of "not-knowing". It's a thing. It's a different thing that experiencing "eating some pizza" which is also not knowing. Negation and absence aren't the same. The opposite of black is still a color, not the absence of the concept of colorness altogether.
Retweeted @Plinz
Solving the mind body problem does not involve understanding the relationship between two physical entities, but between two men…
I've been posting a bunch of tweets & threads lately that I've thought were quite good, to almost no reaction 😞 Not interesting to others? Inferential gaps? Too dense? Not dense enough? Wrong time of day? Maybe this is why I do a lot of replying: at least 1 person appreciates.
One thought I have is that this twitter acct has had 5+ different focuses over a decade. Music, Arab Spring, techstuff, design-rants, now metamodernism So maybe very few of my 1315 followers are (A) still active on twitter and (B) actually interested in what I currently post. 🤔
So I guess on that note...
Retweeted @reasonisfun
We fight ourselves so much. 😕 I'm on to you, coercive memes. You won't take us alive. 🐉⚔️🐁
Replying to @sentientist
@sentientist I went to their profile & saw them tweeting abt a diff person having blocked them for no reason, & I'm like "cool, maybe if I block this person I'll get free publicity." I did block them but not for that reason so much as because I felt tempted to reply & wanted to stop myself.
@sentientist (Fwiw, some people use shared block lists that you can get added to really easily (I've been). Or they block people who tweet a single thing they disagree with. You don't want to interact with these people! Not because they're evil but because there's clearly no common ground.)
Retweeted @patrissimo
4/ If a "todo" is actually an "idea", it's natural to ask: "What is it an idea about?". Answer: "It's an idea about how to…
@patrissimo This thread sums up SO clearly why I built complice.co. Here's a screenshot from the homepage that pitches that aspect. Complice actually eschews having an ongoing backlog of *anything*. Ideating is important but don't get fixated on it at the expense of what matters
@patrissimo I've written an article about the insanity of Behindness malcolmocean.com/2019/01/nothin…
@patrissimo I've sometimes tried reframing them to "opportunities", ie "here's a thing I could move on". I like ideas too. See also @GKhuyen's
@visakanv Oh wow! A lot further back than I thought. But I wasn't that active on Twitter for much of 2015 & 2016, I believe. So it makes sense that I don't have memories of you til I got back active in 2017. Which was inspired by wanting to connect with @fortelabs, among other people.
@wminshew I don't sleep-track anymore. I don't think there's a good replacement for zeo, particularly for naps. Almost all are motion based, & in a nap I never move whether I'm awake or in light, deep, or REM sleep. I haven't looked whether they can somehow tell SWS & REM apart at night.
Replying to @socraleese
@socraleese this except instead of "the kind of people who learn lojban", with "the kind of people who hang out at a pub" ↓ (mi prami la lojban)
Replying to @minobenjo
@SlaytonBenjamin It's not about fame. I want to have conversations! I'm not looking for 100s (or even dozens) of retweets, just one or two people to talk with me about whatever I posted. Oh, and it's about impact. If what I read affected you, even a little, it makes a difference for me to know.
@Plinz Yes! Which requires not immediately squashing them with an answer and forgetting you had the question. (I wrote an article on this based in part on an excellent comic that echoes your sentiment; link in article) ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/10/que…
I have a playlist of songs I like that have glitchy vocal edits! Decided to make it public so that other people could check it out. I'd love to hear more recommendations of songs that could go well on here. play.google.com/music/playlist…
Off the top of my head, a list of artists that do a fair bit of this: • @BT (first song on the playlist is by him and has a world record for # of vocal edits) • @seebmusic • @si_bonobo • @KygoMusic
Really great point in this article from @RichDecibels. Definitions: - Dyad = group of 2 - Crew = group of 3-8 - Congregation = close group of 30-200, potentially made of Crews - Crowd = group of more than 200 people Source: medium.com/enspiral-tales…
I think the core issue he's talking about here regarding individualism is that groups aren't particularly *real* entities in our discourse. There are just "people", individually and in aggregate. This misses the importance of relationships and how they structure everything.
(This is from Part 2 of a 4-part series; check out Part 1 here for some context) medium.com/enspiral-tales…
Retweeted @noididntreadit
Notes on Common-knowledge self-commitments for changing patterns of thought by @Malcolm_Ocean malcolmocean.com/2016/07/common…
@noididntreadit Ha, I've been thinking about these ideas a bunch recently but hadn't re-read my own blog post, and I found your summary to be a helpful refresher! What I put in this blog post seems even _more_ true & important to me now than it did then. Particularly the self-commitment part.
@Plinz @DoqxaScott @SlaytonBenjamin @RJsnda Seems there's also a kind of "taking self as object" move. @Meaningness frames this as "selfing". It's not that there is no self in such a moment, but that there isn't a fixation on it. meaningness.com/self
@Plinz @DoqxaScott @SlaytonBenjamin @RJsnda @Meaningness I also really enjoyed something @HareeshWallis said at the Fire & Nectar tantra+yoga retreat 2017: Your self is just as real as Gandalf. 🧙 Gandalf is totally real, as a character in a bunch of familiar stories. So is Malcolm Ocean. So is <your name here>.
Replying to @utotranslucence
@utotranslucence Yeah if I were running for office atm I would be making parodies of all of the songs from Hamilton. This YG one is nice but also very suboptimal for marketing. People who aren't already pro-Yang will probably get bored within first 20 seconds of "Yang Gang 2020" & leave.
Thread · Steering with attractors versus repulsors across dimensions · 1 of 6 tweets
@cosimia_ @Conaw Oh! Just saw this again and thought that this could be great perfect thing for @ncasenmare to build a little interactive demo about. I don't think this is quite a full concept, but the difference it makes to have a target (not just something to get away from) is key!
@SarahAMcManus I haven't! I have a draft of a blog post that sort of rants about it for a bit, but that's it. I do have my own twitter take on towardsness vs awayness motivation though! (this tweet is partway through—scroll up for the top; it's a mess because reply)
Thread · Steering with attractors versus repulsors across dimensions · 1 of 6 tweets
@cosimia_ @Conaw Also if you've made it here and you want to think more about this, check out @SarahAMcManus's thread that describes some other pitfalls of the awayness based motivation system:
Thread · Twitter thread ownership as a metaphor for who steers a conversation
As I continue musing on how I'd design a #TwitterReplacement, I noticed that something really messy happened with a thread of mine from a month ago. It started with this reply to @cosimia_
I was on a roll—lots to say. Ask a question I've thought about a lot but not talked about and that's what you'll get! But it's really hard to follow my train of thought in this thread. Even for me, trying to track down my tweets in it is hard.
The reason is that Twitter's thread view prioritizes replies from the person who tweeted the very first tweet in a thread. This makes sense! It's why, even if many people reply to the first tweet in a tweetstorm—even before storm finished—the storm shows up as one block.
But in this case, because @cosimia_ was engaging a bunch with my tweets and *she* was the owner of this particular thread, there's no way at all to follow the train of thought that *I* was originally having.
It occurs to me that this is an interesting metaphor for what sometimes happens when someone in a conversation is given (or claims) a certain kind of high-status role. Even if someone else is talking, the attention always returns to what this person thinks or wants to know.
I've noticed myself take this role sometimes. My "mmm" & "ahh" & "oh?" that make a 2-person convo very engaged can make a group convo just about me and the speaker. I'm kinda steering their train, making it about my understanding & interest rather than about what's on their mind.
This isn't *bad*! Status & power aren't bad. Twitter's design is a simple prioritization system that works great for most use-cases. *And* you want to be aware of the impacts and be able to shift them when necessary.
And so that's a thing I'd add to my #TwitterReplacement: the ability to organize tweets more directly after the fact. To say "check out this thread but particularly this chain of it", for instance. (Also it would collect all notifications from a given thread and organize them)
@GRITCULT @threadreaderapp @kriskarzy Gonna tag this old thread #TwitterReplacement because I'm using that hashtag in a new tweet and this is main old thread about it. See also this one:
"this is actually kind of odd, as I would expect CD to be very LH, but IM describes DA as a RH thing" (me in my notes just now; half of those abbreviations would be opaque to me too without context)
I sometimes use Workflowy in black-on-white mode and sometimes white-on-black and I find that I experience a difference in how much bold text stands out between the two of those. Here's an example! Next tweet has a poll.
In which of those images does the bold text stand out more?
I'm also realizing that this effect for me doesn't seem to be as strong with this image as it does under ordinary use, so here's another poll! Have you noticed something similar before in a different context?
a curious thing about space stations is that they're not stationary... #ShowerThoughts
"...we have to be constantly vigilant to undermine language's attempt to undermine our understanding." — Iain McGilchrist (paraphrasing Heidigger) on p150 of The Master and his Emissary @divided_brain
I just saw this afternoon that McGilchrist gave an Alfred Korzybski lecture, and I feel like this quote connects with why that makes sense—Korzybski was the one who popularized the phrase "the map is not the territory." youtube.com/watch?v=HRMiHw…
@visakanv this is your current following/followers. Very elegant.
Wait it literally updated to 10.1K between the time I took that screenshot and the time I posted it. Wtf you're on fire. 🔥
@arundelo I was dumb and got the top/bottom thing wrong. Welp, let's throw all my data in the 🗑. Let's try again: In which of those images does the bold text stand out more?
Replying to @realtimeai
@RealtimeAI @dela3499 @reasonisfun Carlos, it seems to me that you've got an implicit rival theory: "it happened for reasons we don't yet understand" 🤔 which indeed is a Pareto improvement on the wizard theory: 🧙 (a) because Occam's razor (b) because it doesn't involve bullshitting yourself
@RealtimeAI @dela3499 @reasonisfun I've been thinking a lot lately about the tendency to bullshit oneself, because of learning about the left hemisphere's tendencies towards rationalization & confabulation and noticing it a ton in myself. LH is a powerful machine but w/o RH influence refuses to take in new info
@RealtimeAI @dela3499 @reasonisfun Not sure what the connection is exactly between the relationship between the left & right hemispheres, and the original topic Lulie was tweeting about (coercion & anti-rational memes), but they're definitely very structurally related and I'm excited to understand this better.
@RealtimeAI @dela3499 @reasonisfun If you're interested in learning more about McGilchrist's work, I recommend this @metalearn1 podcast as a solid introduction: metalearn.net/podcasts/ml41-…
Huh and apparently the Danes already have a word that basically fills this role! I think "hwa" is more powerful because of its explicit connection with "here we are", but it's cool to see this: fastcompany.com/90313683/pyt-i…
Verifying my Blockstack ID is secured with the address 1GsxtJNa4CT7y1aK1YncpX7J4P1eWJfLYy explorer.blockstack.org/address/1GsxtJ…
Thread · Chronos, kairos, and designing Complice against gridded time
This section of Judy Wajcman's paper "How Silicon Valley sets time" gives me a sense of pride in relation to having built complice.co—and is related to why I'm wary of adding any calendar ui to it. (the highlights are @devonzuegel's)
@CompliceGoals is made for a structured improvisational approach to productivity. You write down what your top priorities are for the day, and you can re-order them, but you can't plan out your whole week in advance, and there isn't exact times of day.
Plus, in relation to that last point around recording things vs not... Complice is explicitly saying "what are your goals & priorities? how do you make sure your day is focused on those and not random busywork?" 🎯"what do I want to make happen?" not "what's on my plate?" 📥
This paper resonates with my recent thinking about McGilchrist's @divided_brain model too—the impact of attentional mode on experience. Linear, gridlike, interchangeable time (what the Ancient Greeks called "chronos") is definitely a more left-hemisphere way of viewing time. 🧠
What this article points out is that we don't even really consider that there might be other ways to view time. The other Ancient Greek word was "kairos", and it points at a more subjective time, based on the feeling of a given moment or arc of experience.
If you've ever had the experience of "putting something off" and then the moment it actually happens is clearly the *right* moment? Like something just clicks? That's kairos in action. But we're afraid to trust what we can't systematically control. Well, our left hemispheres are.
I think complice.co is more compatible with this kind of serendipity & opportunism than more rigid or grid-based systems. And if I take that seriously, what additional features might it want...? 🤔
@thewiseturtle @cosimia_ I would reframe this as "modern life-threatening scenarios are made *MORE* threatening by acute anxiety rather than less". So it's less about amount of risk but about the response being maladaptive for the situation. I think something much more clear & precise is also possible.
@HunterBergsma @cosimia_ @DavidDeutschOxf I found most of it remarkably easy to read, while also being mindblowing. But I won't claim I would expect that to be true for everyone.
Retweeted @RichDecibels
Ppl say we need a 'WWII scale mobilisation' to survive #climate #collapse. I think the job is more on the scale of cath…
@tommycollison Not important for everybody, but... 1.3% (increasing) of US adults have Inflammatory Bowel Disease Fecal transplants 💩 are probably better than existing medications for this but won't be readily available until profit-route found. Despite shit being cheap. #microbiota
I love the idea of this extension History Search, for making it way easier to track down ideas by searching the text of sites you've visited, or by date, etc. Not yet sure if I'll buy this appsumo deal, but probably. Tagging @visakanv & @fortelabs appsumo.com/history-search/
@mattgoldenberg I've become increasingly skeptical of any sentences—particularly my own—that contain the word "just". "I just need to"—no. 🛑 If I *just* needed to then I would have done it already. There must be something else that I'm avoiding looking at. 👀
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@mattgoldenberg I've become increasingly skeptical of any sentences—particularly my own—that contain the word "just". "…
@webdevMason @plum_io is in this category, but I think it's more focused on a forced-choice Big 5 Psychology test than on IQ. (Forced choice as in you can't come out with 100% conscientiousness, 100% non-neuroticism, 100% openness, etc; not that those are optimal) plum.io
@webdevMason @plum_io Note that my summary is based on talking with the founders (and taking the test, experimentally) like 4 years ago. I assume it's evolved a bunch since then.
Thread · Asking what your attention feeds and incentivizes · 1 of 5 tweets
Here's another great positive example from @patio11:
I'm going to be at YC120! Anyone else I know going? blog.ycombinator.com/yc-120/
@catherineols @ID_AA_Carmack Me too!
@fortelabs @visakanv I can imagine some smart algorithms that can check if that url is already stored, compare a hash with the given page, etc? And most things in programming are very fast compared to network. Not super hard to save a page's data in 20ms, then sync later in the background. But yeah
@fortelabs @visakanv Anyway, text is small but they do also save a screenshot of the page. So yeah, decent chance it slows things down. AppSumo has a 60-day moneyback guarantee, so probably the right strategy (for me) is to buy it and give it a serious shot and see if it's a good tradeoff.
> "Towns and cities from Ottawa in Canada to Orje in Norway have indulged joke 'silly walks' signs before, but this is the first time a council has put one up itself." bbc.com/news/blogs-new…
@dthorson This chart somehow has an absence of any connection between rationalists and post-rationalists? Definitely both conflict there and movement, for obvious reasons.
@ctbeiser @othercriteria @michael_nielsen @wesyang and growing
Took me reading a whole book to understand the importance of this. (Edward de Bono's "Po: Beyond Yes & No". Which, unfortunately, is written in such a way as to be very hard to read for people who don't already understand the very concept he's explaining amzn.to/2WyPTUE)
@dthorson A lot of it that I've seen is happening within close personal relationships rather than in public fora, but here's an example: (click through to original LW post)
@devonzuegel what does it autocorrect "fnord" to?
Just came across this tweet that is loudly reminding me of my recent reading into Iain McGilchrist's @divided_brain work. The left hemisphere basically pretends anything it doesn't understand doesn't exist, so it needs the RHem to periodically point out unknowns & not-knowing.
Note that the left hemisphere also mostly ignores what the right hemisphere "knows", because the RHem makes sense of knowledge in a totally different way. So if you're identified with the LHem (as almost all people alive today are) then you'll encounter what Visa describes ⬆️
Which relates to these other quotes from Inner Game of Work. The LHem likes to pretend it has no learning to do: it needs to JUST EXECUTE its perfect PLAN. From RHem perspective, all is learning. More accurate except in very constrained circumstances.
Note the presence of this suspicious word "just" in the LHem-based thinking there.
(And, as Iain himself says, the LHem is my second favorite hemisphere! it's important. I'm not dissing it.)
@visakanv @TaylorPearsonMe @james_clear @devonzuegel @farnamstreet Hm this thread about incentive design is making me think of this post by @meditationstuff, particularly as summarized by @tasshinfogleman here: