@songbirdstew @webdevMason Yesss, delightful framing. Also sign me up (subject to the topic being one I'm sufficiently interested in).
April 2019
@DellAnnaLuca Umm... it seems that you're proposing a shift from > "Higher education has been built around the needs of the universities, not of the students." to having it be built around the needs of employers. Not saying this is bad, but it *is* a different set of priorities.
@DellAnnaLuca Rarely do I see a thread where half of it makes me go "yes!" and the other half "what?" so interspersed. Experimentation, no paywalls, absurd loans & opportunity cost—totally! This assumption that education is just job-training... it's *become* that, but isn't intrinsically.
@DellAnnaLuca As you yourself said, university admissions is mostly screening for smarts & conscientiousness, not actually training. If it were, people would audit for free. See also "The Desire To Pass Tests"
@DellAnnaLuca Although university also plays a key role in our current society of allowing people to try independence in a miniature real-world, to learn adulting.
@DellAnnaLuca Oh! I'm not saying it's GOOD at this role.🤣 I'm just saying it's kind of the only thing allowed to play it! Kids aren't allowed very much independence while still living at home / in high school, and so post-secondary education necessarily becomes the transition phase.
Retweeted @visakanv
@ryan_nayr_ @webdevMason I write on many different mediums and over time my twitter style has infected my other mediums, I no…
Thiiis.
@david_perell rewriting = rethinking, yes! And... there are kinds of thinking that aren't done in writing. These are nonlinear, undirected, nebulous, unspecified. One can be good at those without being good at writing. But yeah I guess to be good at *all* of thinking requires skill at linear.
@eriktorenberg I wrote this blog post a few years ago on this subject! Slightly different emph, but... - massage - positive feedback - public appreciation / shoutouts - sharing learning malcolmocean.com/2015/02/creati…
...it's coming from the feel that this ain't exactly real, or it's real but it ain't exactly there...
Thread · Anger as the left hemisphere's substitute for grief
Huh, came across questions I had 10 months ago and now I have a new clue towards an answer! @visakanv
I still don't understand the full structure, but one thing I've learned in the meantime from reading McGilchrist's book on the @divided_brain is that: A) most emotions (grief for sure) are mostly based in RightHem B) anger is based in LHem C) grasping for need to control is LHem
So from the left hemisphere's perspective, it can maintain its sense of control by feeling anger rather than grief. And having this control matters to it a lot. A well-integrated brain isn't subject to this need for control, but can hold it as part of a larger picture.
But, as McGilchrist points out, most people in the modern western world don't have well-integrated brains! 🧠 Our left hemispheres have taken over in a certain ways, and the result is the identification with this need for control & certainty & being right: hence, anger.
I'm valuing, in this moment, that even as I feel a deepened sense of understanding here, I also feel aware of how much I still don't know. (This too is a hemispheres thing.)
Oh and another thought: Kübler-Ross' 5 Stages of Grief seem to also involve a left→right hemisphere shift! Denial - very very left-hemisphere. Anger - also left-hemisphere Bargaining - ?? Depression - right awakens, left collapsed Acceptance - right, w/ left integrated
(And! Lots of complexity in details of the actual *relationships* between the hemispheres... and I don't really understand this at all! I'm just reaching that chapter in the book, and I'm guessing even after I've read it I'll still feel like we really don't know yet!)
Retweeted @visakanv
THE PARETO PRINCIPLE OF INFINITE BULLSHIT - 80% of everything is bullshit - once you eliminate that, 80% of what remains is…
@Crit_Rat Yes! I talked about this as "you can't aim awayness-based motivation".
Thread · Onboarding newcomers into Twitter's threading culture · 5 of 9 tweets
I'm introducing @QiaochuYuan to twitter, and I'm like "find some meta-rationality people to follow in the list of who @utotranslucence is following", & also follow @visakanv & @GRITCULT to learn threading. "Seriously, this is important for understanding the power of the medium."
Then read this lovely doc:
And make sure to actually see the meta-threada at the bottom:
And this thread of mine is probably overkill for your current level of understanding, but it kind of explains when you might want to quote-tweet versus retweet-&-reply
And then—don't worry about it too much and just play with it:
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
We can use words to point to the way out of words, into everything else. Rumi remix: out beyond ideas, there is a field. I…
@utotranslucence You can make a new storm that embeds previous tweets in any order, but you can't later change which tweet is a reply to which other tweet. (Visa laments this here👇)
Thread · Forgiveness as the absence of resentment · 10 of 11 tweets
Forgiveness is sort of a backwards concept, like phlogiston (which ~= "the absence of oxygen"). Forgiveness ~= "the absence of resentment". So if you don't resent in the first place, then you can reach a state of "forgiveness" without actually performing an act of "forgiving".
Resentment isn't a belief, or an emotion. More of an attitude, or stance, or orientation. And it's related to grudges, spite, bitterness, & grievance. (And blame, and entitlement, and being offended.) None of these words *is* the thing (map≠territory) but there's a thing here.
And, like many people who recommend forgiveness, I hold that resent is not beneficial for anything. There's a well known quote, “Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”
Note that even if you think that punishment makes sense, say for game-theoretical reasons*, resentment and punishment are totally separate things. You can punish someone without resenting them, or resent them and not actually effectively enacting any punishment on them.
*I mostly don't think punishment makes sense, but that's a tangent here. See this thread for clues on that (click the tweet below then scroll up)
I do, however, believe that sometimes someone might act in such a way that you don't want to spend more time with them, not from a stance of punishment but for the same reason you don't do other activities you don't enjoy (eg you usually don't put on music you don't enjoy).
This, you can also do without resenting. It will actually be much much more effective for _you enjoying your life,_ in fact, if you can do it without resenting the person.
It isn't easy—consistently taking a post-resentment stance basically requires an entire mental OS upgrade. But it's worth it—that upgrade allows clearer thinking, including making sense of about ppl's expected future behavior, & making choices about how you engage with the world
Clarification 👀 There is a huge difference between the mental act of forgiveness and the *speech act* of forgiveness. I'm not talking about the latter at all. The question of "when does it make sense to tell someone you forgive them for something?" is a whole different thing.
There are contexts in which that can be worth doing. The obvious one is because they've apologized and you want to recognize their apology. But I think that often the impetus to say "I forgive you" actually comes from an urge to assert power over someone.
@mattgoldenberg Mmm yes I like this and it resonates for me. ♥ And I guess that is also different than the thing that occurs when something resentable happens but one doesn't resent in the first place. Kinda like Kintsugi - repairing broken bowls with gold.
@jonnym1ller Yeah liget is legit. I read that article last year, thought lots about it, & explored it a bit myself. And @QiaochuYuan and I were recently talking about that in relation to the hemispheres. I don't know the details, but defs something more L🧠R-integrated with liget, vs anger.
Retweeted @jonnym1ller
@Malcolm_Ocean I just discovered the superb @ribbonfarm post of yours on the art of asking & holding questions. Curious if…
@jonnym1ller @ribbonfarm Mmm, the first thing that comes to mind as I read your highlighted version is around this not-knowing piece. Definitely feels related to Iain McGilchrist's model of the brain hemispheres and how the left can't handle not-knowing while the right naturally does.
@jonnym1ller @ribbonfarm And this then makes me question my choice of the metaphor of "hold your questions". Because holding onto things is very much a left-hemisphere thing (grasping tools) whereas I think a lot of the thrust of the post is trying to point at right-hemisphere thinking.
@jonnym1ller @ribbonfarm Ahaha and then the Question your Qs section is consciously deploying left-hemisphere thinking. But be careful b/c the LHem will tend to err thusly: > Of course, make sure that when you do answer Q’, don’t mistake your answer for a full answer to the original question Q, however.
@jonnym1ller @ribbonfarm This section is making me think of something I've done recently. When people want to hear more about the culture-change project I'm in, I first ask them "what questions are you holding that you think we might have or *be* an answer to?"
@visakanv c.f. the opening of this video: youtube.com/watch?v=aAVPDY…
Retweeted @visakanv
1/ It's very interesting and useful I think to apply the MVP model of product development to personal development. http://t.c…
@jonnym1ller @ribbonfarm Anyway! I just reached the end of your highlighted copy of the article, and I'm looking back at your tweet... and I'm not actually sure what you're asking there! You can say more things and then maybe I'll say more things.
Retweeted @_awbery_
RIP Oxford shark man. Weird how the local & social fear was always “what if this leads to more sharks on the skyline, NIMBY…
@QiaochuYuan @patrissimo Yeah, feels like there's something to this. 🤔🧠 (To those not familiar, we're not talking about the misguided 50-year-old theories of rationality vs emotion, but rather Iain McGilchrist's more recent synthesis of a ton of further research.)
@QiaochuYuan @utotranslucence @visakanv Mmmm yeah. I've been enjoying seeing the notifications of various favorites of yours as you traverse old threads I've been in :)
Retweeted @visakanv
Metaphor for subjective social reality: fridge light. Every time I open my fridge, there's light. Therefore, the fridge light…
@candeira @visakanv Related: section III of this article by @slatestarcodex slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-c…
@michael_nielsen We need a social network where you can only comment if you know what "po" is.
@michael_nielsen (In case it isn't clear to someone reading this, obviously you can't directly implement this in any boring way. One could try... an invite-only social network with pyramid-scheme-style karma correlations, so if you invite assholes you get penalized... many issues with this too.)
@tasshinfogleman @michael_nielsen Ah yeah that's a whole thing. I also want the ability to have hive-mind tweets. Say you+me+@michael_nielsen could create a temporary entity that any of us can tweet from and nobody knows which of us tweeted it. Could allow semi-anonymous unpopular-opinion-sharing
@tasshinfogleman @michael_nielsen In a given thread by that entity, we could be having a conversation with each other, one person could be having a debate with themselves, or some other weird combinations. Haven't fully fleshed this out but I think there's cool stuff here.
@tasshinfogleman Uhhh... I started working on a blog post &/ LW post awhile back but didn't finish it. Here's a link to the draft/outline workflowy.com/s/5490ab3b5814…
@tasshinfogleman At the bottom I link to this book review which isn't particularly great but given that my draft/outline isn't even finished might be helpful. jamescrisp.org/2009/10/23/po-…
Retweeted @Meta_Aesthetic
Toeing the line between skepticism and openness —too weird for traditional skeptical secular groups, but awkwardly jade…
One reason I appreciate following @visakanv has just been deeply fed by this @Patreon update: He's documenting pursuit of internet popularity, but clearly doing so with a kind of play and integrity and desire for scalable friendship rather than fame. patreon.com/posts/april-10…
(Visa writes lots about this on twitter itself (eg see this tweet below) and the Patreon update just went into a bit more depth about it)
(Also, re: the first tweet and its link to a patrons-only post)
it's kind of like... have you ever had an experience where you couldn't see the forest for all of the signs saying "this is the forest"?
@QiaochuYuan @SamoBurja I feel good about this bet. 😉🙃
@SomethingOkHere Will check it out! I have a few other relevant links bookmarked, such as Status as a Service by @eugenewei eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19…
@jonnym1ller @ribbonfarm Oooh, you'll probably also want to look into McGilchrist's hemisphere work, as it seems that curiosity is highly-lateralized to the right. This is my recommended intro: metalearn.net/podcasts/ml41-…
@jonnym1ller I'm pretty seriously planning to develop some workshops or other training on brain lateralization integration. Not sure what level of abstraction they'll be on, but yeah, will probably include something about working with questions, so let's keep in touch.
@tasshinfogleman Yeah, I think that while PO has 3 meanings, the first is probably the most key? Also ffs everything is just getting subsumed in McGilchrist's 🧠 hemisphere model. Still useful, but really important to understand that this thinking shift is not a small one—a whole paradigm.
@jonnym1ller Whoa! That's super cool. Very glad to see it. Yes, let's keep in touch.
@noididntreadit This is what it was a year and a half ago. Haven't looked at it since except a brief skim right now to ensure I was fine posting it publicly. Would be different now I'm sure
carpe DMN
@jonnym1ller @ribbonfarm @metalearn1 Any thoughts, if you've listened to it now?
Retweeted @noididntreadit
Notes on Questions Are Not Just For Asking by @Malcolm_Ocean ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/10/que…
Retweeted @deewhock
After nine decades on this marvelous planet it is apparent to me that I know very little about truth, and neither does anyone…
Retweeted @dilgreen
@deewhock Best measure of human progress I can come up with ; "the number of ways of thinking about things that are accessib…
My bubble on twitter is largely outside of politics and I'm very glad about that. And. I found this, and it seems important for everyone to know that this language is being used so blatantly—language that in the past has often led to genocide, in Germany, Rwanda, & elsewhere. twitter.com/markmobility/s…
Thread · When someone tells you something you already know
When this is just a random tweet (which is what @QiaochuYuan was originally talking about) then it's just 🤷 But if you have this experience with someone who knows you well, you need to at least acknowledge this: they wouldn't be saying this if they didn't have a reason.
Now, the reason might not have anything to do with you at all. Maybe they just want to vent. Maybe they tell this story every time chickens are mentioned. But if you can tell that they really are trying to tell yourself something they don't already know, then ask: what is that?
And also ask: how would they know if I knew it? maybe I partially know it but if I knew it deeper they'd know because I'd act differently... ...maybe they're *assuming* I'd act differently because they're making some other assumptions about me or the world.
If you have a model for why they're saying it even though you already know it, then MAYBE you can stop there (although don't trust your models too much—your brain makes up stuff.)
But if you're still like "I have no idea why you're telling me this thing I already know" then that could be a great time to share that. Phrasing matters though—I wouldn't advise uttering the quotation earlier in this tweet.
Instead, say "I really want to understand what you're saying, and I'm currently not getting anything new from this. I believe I've heard you say this before. Do you have the sense I missed you last time, or is there a new piece that you're wanting to add to that?"
More important than the exact phrasing is the tone, and upstream of tone is STANCE.
In order to get on the same page, you need to get on the same *side*. Taking a same-sided stance here means orienting based on assumptions like: • there is something I don't understand here • both of us care about figuring that out
These things are always true to some extent, so it's a question of whether you want to emphasize them or de-emphasize them.
@noididntreadit Mmm this last quote reminds me of @QiaochuYuan's first tweet, last week:
@kintsukuroikun @cosimia_ There's a fix! Oddly enough, I had just been showing @SarahAMcManus this, then came to my timeline to show how it worked, and saw @cosimia_'s tweet! Go to twitter.com/settings/muted… and add these weird things to your mutes. Doesn't work 100% but helps.
@kintsukuroikun @cosimia_ @SarahAMcManus Also, whenever you see a "Person liked" tweet, hit "show less often" and Twitter will eventually learn. Come to think of it, I did both this & the weird mutes above at the same time, so I'm not actually sure which helped more or if one did nothing.
Retweeted @dthorson
Deconstructing perception does not unbind the historical cultural systems you are molded by. Deconstructing historical cult…
Replying to @z3nblack
@z3nblack Mmm yeah. I remember 6 years ago meeting someone who had done a deep investment into meta-skill training for like a decade. And I was impressed but also like "nah I don't have the time/patience for that." I'm now 7 years in on just such a thing, and it's so deeply worth it.
@The_Lagrangian @kevinakwok Link me?
Me: "I want a Hindsight 2020 bumper sticker" Internet: amzn.to/2InbF9N Me: "Okay fair I just want to know it exists, I don't actually want to own one. Thanks."
If I'd known in advance how hard it would be and how long it would take, I never would have done it—unless I'd *also* known how worth it it would be.
👆 This is something I've been fortunate to encounter multiple times. I have the sense that it's actually quite common... assuming that you're someone who's willing to put in hard work to achieve something.
Underestimating how long something will take happens 99% of the time. I think people also chronically under-estimate how much more awesome their life can be when they do things worth doing. How to know in advance? I either unconsciously know or have somehow made 4 great guesses.
Replying to @z3nblack
@z3nblack Definitely a lot of uncertainty early on and a lot of gradual deepening of commitment. It's a clear example of something of this phenomenon:
@dthorson @leashless Haven't listened to this one yet but just saw this ribbonfarm article that dovetails with something from the first one, that was something like "collapse is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed"
Retweeted @webdevMason
Nothing about the universe implies any absolute limit on “people getting amazing stuff done” or “people trying crazy moons…
@noididntreadit Ah! No, it's actually not the case that I wanted to own the thing in the first place—I don't have a car to put a bumper sticker on. But I _did_ have a preference for it existing, which has been satisfied by this result. And apparently I wanted to tell people about it.
@noididntreadit I think that in general I do have patterns like the one you described though. I've tended to value ~originality a lot. Some people do a lot of summarizing others' ideas while writing... I have drives to do as little of that as possible. Probably to a pathological degree 🙃
@mattgoldenberg Mmm I find this 2×2 fascinating and beautiful. Which is all-the-more exciting because I can't fully locate my own sense of orientation on it! I think it would project down to somewhere in the bottom right↘️, but also it has important aspects of ↙️& ↗️. Oh & Boddhisattva.
Retweeted @mattgoldenberg
1/ At the extremes, people have one of four life goals: To achieve a state of nothingness (himayana enlightenment), to…
@mattgoldenberg One toy model to point at this might be to gesture at the difference between a Kegan 3 Hivemind and a Kegan 5 Hivemind. The latter incorporates a bunch of really important things about individualism that the former does not. (And the latter is more like the thing I'm aiming at)
@mattgoldenberg Another way to point at it is to consider 2×2s that map onto this one about attachment styles. Because of tensions on diagonal dismissive & preoccupied axis ⤡, it's easy to feel like that's the natural axis & that Secure isn't possible. Not sure how to map that into your 2×2
@mattgoldenberg Aha! I figured out how to map it to your 2×2. Twas mostly a technical challenge. Note that I'm not really talking about attachment styles here, but saying that there exists an isomorphism between {dismissive & preoccupied} and {individualist & collectivist}, & I want {<secure>}
.@SarahAMcManus: what are you doing? Me: Simultaneously something deeply connected with that-which-is-most-meaningful, and also something fiddly & trivial. (learning CSS 3D transforms to make this meta life-purpose chart)
@mattgoldenberg Lots of 2×2s that map onto the attachment styles one. Slightly more central might even be this one around "closeness & independence" (I might call the latter "autonomy" or "self-authorship") mentalhelp.net/blogs/the-danc…
@mattgoldenberg Exactly. I'm very satisfied that I actually made this 2×2×2! And neat to find it on a diagonal rather than just adding a single new axis that's orthogonal to the original 2. I think there's a lot of rich fruit to pick with that sort of two-by-two-ery.
@mattgoldenberg Also @QiaochuYuan you're gonna wanna check out this thread. And probably @utotranslucence & @alifeofmovement too.
@QiaochuYuan Use an avatar generated by an AI: thispersondoesnotexist.com
@vgr Bought dinner for a fellow at the airport last week who had lost his job after he suffered a stroke last year. (How do I know that's not just his line? 🤷 He felt honest, not trying-to-convince, and was indeed limping.) Wondering about the prevalence of that sort of situation.
@vgr Made me think a lot about the psychology of UBI too. The guy apologized many times. He expressed that he hated asking for money after decades of being able to support himself—and clearly, he preferred asking for money over choosing to die of starvation instead.
In high school I used to procrastinate by reading productivity blogs... then I built a productivity app, which now pays my bills. (complice.co)
Thread · Context on effective altruism's relationship with AI risk · 17 of 18 tweets
@leashless - Just listened to your interview with @dthorson, and... holy shit. It's going to take me awhile to digest the whole thing. Maybe I'll say more later! Right now, just a comment on the Effective Altruism thing, since you said you "look forward to being corrected"
I want to note that I resonate with the core point you were making, both in my personal experience and in other EAs (I've been to 5 yearly summits & have many EA friends). This core point (I gather) being: EA prioritization is biased due to inability to BE WITH suffering.
So my aim here is mostly to give you a bit more context about EA's relationship with AI. One thing to know is that it isn't really a single institution. There's a Center for Effective Altruism which coordinates stuff, but EA is more of a "collection of movements under one banner"
At least one of these movements (from Eliezer) was oriented towards AI before altruism. early-Eliezer thought "make AGI, it'll fix everything" then realized that by default it would be like capitalism×100: a system that systematically optimizes for things-other-than-what-matters.
At that time (mid-00s) there was no global conversation around superintelligence as a risk at all, so he wrote the LessWrong sequences to convince people to care about it. That clearly worked to some degree: there are now dozens of people working fulltime on it, and others aware.
In the interview, Vinay, you posited that nobody in EA was in a position to do anything about AI risk. I'm not sure what you meant by that, but a bunch of EAs got jobs at DeepMind for this purpose, for instance. And the other work happening seems it should have *someone* doing it
Anyway, EA formed from the merger of these people and a few other groups that had come into being around questions like "how can I use my money—whether billions or just <the rest of my paycheck beyond what I need to live>—to best care for the world?"
So AI was part of it from the very beginning, not a distraction that showed up later. Then there definitely have been lots of people within EA who started out oriented towards human or animal suffering, and shifted priorities towards AI risk.
Lots of reasons for this: my own favorite has been that if we were to solve poverty then an unaligned superintelligence were to come into being, it would all be for naught. Meanwhile, an aligned superintelligence could deal with not just poverty but biorisk and nukes as well.
On a totally different level, many people who are working on AI risk are doing so because it seems like exactly the sort of thing that they *could* do something about, inasmuch as there are core mathematical challenges to solve there, and they are math geeks.
As I said, I do think that there's something importantly true about your comment that EAs are inclined towards AI because of not wanting to emotionally deal with suffering. It's easier, it seems, to contemplate "the future exists or not" than feel weight of present collapse.
Ofc, I can't speak for everybody, but this definitely resonates with my own experience of trying to think about this stuff, & my experience of others. And it's not about not thinking about suffering, but about it not being spiritually real to EAs. It's abstract; decoupled: QALYs
Altho I acknowledge this bias, I still think AI risk is very important, which I doubt will shift unless I become certain that collapse will prevent all progress on AI. But I'm starting personal work on collapse & suffering, so other priorities may become more thinkable for me.
Btw, it seems many EAs can't deal with their own suffering either, so they end up counterproductively sacrificing each other's well-being, rather than doing what you describe in the podcast: simultaneously considering people you see (homeless or friends) AND your long-term plan.
There's a growing body of people connected w/ EA who are clear that a different, more spiritual orientation is needed. I find this encouraging! It's not yet clear to what extent any large chunk of the movement will go in that direction, or if it will fork, or form something new.
Here's a talk+transcript if you (or anyone who's reading this) is interested in more context on AI alignment work: intelligence.org/2017/04/12/ens… I deliberately didn't @-mention people here, b/c this thread exists in the context of the interview, which they won't have heard.
On which note: anyone reading this thread who hasn't heard the VG+DT interview, it's here, in 2 parts: 1: anchor.fm/emerge/episode… 2: anchor.fm/emerge/episode… Very intense. I don't recommend listening if you're feeling emotionally unstable or you're heading to work or something.
@ToKTeacher @dela3499 @jockowillink If I sleep 8+ hours one night I can't sleep at the same time the next night. I now nap midday & sleep less, which seems to work better. Blog post on this: (I don't always sleep 6h these days; prefer to allow for 7-8 but often I wake rested after 6h) malcolmocean.com/2016/04/polyph…
@QiaochuYuan @SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence @alifeofmovement @Meaningness Yeah! Important little subskill. @altairspace wrote this excellent article on it, connecting it to the improv "yes, and": namelessvirtue.com/2015/08/19/but…
@VesselOfSpirit hmm, based on this post it seems maybe the realization was more like 2002? lesswrong.com/posts/fLRPeXih…
@ESRogs @QiaochuYuan Also, I think most people who know me wouldn't think of me as cold, but I'm someone who hasn't been able to deal with suffering. Vinay Gupta's point in the podcast wasn't even that EAs were particularly bad at dealing with it, just that it matters more than for a non-EA.
@ESRogs @QiaochuYuan (I know you were responding to Qiaochu's point, not Vinay's. Not sure if you even looked at the original thread I posted. And on that note I will point out that I did at times feel pressure from other EAs to become cold.)
Thread · Context on effective altruism's relationship with AI risk · 1 of 18 tweets
Addendum, from another thread:
Retweeted @DellAnnaLuca
1/ What if, when interacting with people, we saw them as a population of mental patterns, rather than an indivisible enti…
Retweeted @DellAnnaLuca
3/ It would put some natural selection pressure on anyone’s mental pattens, leaving only the better ones surviving. Indi…
@DellAnnaLuca @Altimor ...and if you want a science fiction take, about an AI, check out Crystal Society and its sequels. The first book is available for free online: crystal.raelifin.com
@DellAnnaLuca Very relevant article by @KevinSimler meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-w…
Yesterday me, @SarahAMcManus, and @tasshinfogleman met up in Atlanta, GA! We talked at delightful length about memory, time, recording conversations, Twitter, vulnerability, relationships, and suffering/unsatisfactoriness/dukkha.
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
You know the thing where a husband and wife are arguing about the dishes but it isn't really about the dishes, it's about…
Retweeted @nhallam
Inception
Retweeted @ultimape
One things I've learned is that compression of ideas is relative to the community you're speaking to. Its easier to compress…
When @SarahAMcManus & I saw the news about the Notre Dame fire, what came up for us were hushed sounds, deep breaths, & singing part of "Entropy", a song Sarah wrote. My phone happened to be recording, and we wanted to share the experience. chirb.it/Cz62gB
We're intending to make a full-length and higher-quality recording of this song and others we've written, over the next few months. ♥🎶
Retweeted @alifeofmovement
It is not the burning of Notre Dame that heavies my heart the most. It is seeing all the tweets pointing to the fire…
@cognazor @JaredJanes @utotranslucence How is the relationship between social technology (culture, language, religion) and digital technology (eg crypto, DAOs, etc) a bootstrapping / chicken-and-egg problem? (I know she and I resonate a lot about the culture stuff, so I'd love to hear her connect it with crypto)
Retweeted @TheFinnMK
A Glorious Dawn by @musicalscience has been on my to-dub list for a long time, and after seeing the recent first-ever pictur…
Meanwhile in space... "The word is derived from the Kumulipo, a centuries-old Hawaiian creation chant of 2,102 lines, and it means “the adorned fathomless dark creation.” It stems from “pō,” which means powerful, unfathomable and ceaseless creation" nytimes.com/2019/04/13/sci…
@alifeofmovement I took a college course called Popular Music & Culture and it was the most meaningful history course I've ever taken, by a long shot. Taught me a lot about the development of culture & identity over the last century. Threads of race, generations, war, class, depression, etc.
@webdevMason I (& people I talk with) find singular-they-for-named-persons sufficiently confusing that my solution for people who don't want he or she has been to construct all of my sentences about them to eschew pronouns altogether. Involves saying the person's name about 2-3× as often too.
@webdevMason Btw, by "ppl I talk with find this confusing", this isn't something they've told me. I *observe* that if I use singular-they-for-named-persons, people think I'm talking about a group, even if we're talking about someone they know uses "they". (I've also started adopting "y'all")
@visakanv @TheAnnaGat Yeah, I found the enneagram profoundly insightful for the same reason: "You mean there are people who resonate with all of these other descriptions as much as I resonate with this one?!?"
Replying to @brozena
@brozena Reminds me of this remark of mine, though it was to a different question.
@brozena The more general point, that is somewhat relevant here, is that any self-terminating meme or gene isn't fit, so will disappear.
This is an epic thread. Anyone who works 1-on-1 with "clients" probably wants to think a bit about this model.
Replying to @leashless
@leashless @RichDecibels @dthorson @riemannzeta @conscious_evo @AugurProject (For anyone wanting to find out more about what VISA was originally, check out the talk transcript linked in this tweet)
Most conflicts between self-and-other are frustrating largely to the extent to which they engage in a conflict between different parts of self.
Retweeted @eriktorenberg
Uber and Airbnb are marketplaces that figured out how utilize an idle asset. Airbnb turns spare bedroom into extra cash…
@tasshinfogleman @visakanv Oh interesting! I did an internship at Twitter in 2013... seems like an eternity ago now. Not sure I still know anybody there. I'm happy to share the list with them, but for them the first thing I'd recommend is "fix your incentives". Without that, the rest will get corrupted.
Replying to @peternlimberg
@peternlimberg @utotranslucence @RichDecibels @alifeofmovement @peternlimberg 👋🌊 friendly reminder that I'm with a group in Waterloo that's also interested in this stuff. Let's keep in touch as things develop.
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
Most of the corpus callosum (L & R hemisphere connection) is inhibitory connections. I keep going on about internal conf…
@lpolovets Me: "Can I change my plan?" Them: "Only Rob and Jean are authorized to change plan." Me: "Okay I'll get Rob, hang on... Rob!" Me, holding the phone away, in British accent: "What?" Me: "Can you talk with Company about Thing?" Me, in British accent: "Hi, this is Rob..." (fantasy)
@tasshinfogleman @visakanv Also my actual interpretation of this feature request for an alternative app is "no way to link/search specific messages → honestly the way I would probably implement this is that there's no such thing as a DM, just tweets with a limited audience."
@QiaochuYuan @SarahAMcManus Aha, seems there's a thread:
@tasshinfogleman @visakanv Well, they could look just like an ordinary tweet url: domain/username/status/128347235934128014 or maybe "status" would get replaced with something else. ...probably it already _would_ be something else, in a different system.
The word "frustrating" in that tweet is actually pulling a lot of weight! Etymology: Latin frustratus, past participle of frustrari "to deceive, disappoint, make vain" If you have a conflict with someone else, that you are unconflicted about, you will simply act (likely exit).
But say you hate someone's mood swings but you love their intellectual banter. Now you're conflicted! If you leave, you lose something you want. If you stay... can you get them to change? Do you have to accept something? What will your friends think? Compromise may be unstable.
You might be able to articulate a hypothetical world-state that all parts of you agree would be better, but then when you try to make that change, you'll face resistance from parts of you that: - think it's impossible - think you don't deserve better - think it's a waste of time
@KevinSimler Yeah I totally used some onomastic magic to get a way bigger representation on that map than I would have had otherwise 🙃
Thread · Mapping the schools of Buddhism: sutra, tantra, dzogchen · 3 of 6 tweets
Realized today I really don't have a good map of the different schools of Buddhism. Found this excellent chart by @Meaningness differentiating Sutra & Tantra. Now wondering: • Tantra = Vajrayana ? • Sutra = {Mahayana, Theravada} ? • what else is there? vividness.live/2013/10/23/sut…
This realization was prompted in part by reflecting on @mattgoldenberg's 2×2 that distinguishes mahayana & hinayana(=theravada?).
Speaking of which, I'm very interested in @Meaningness' take on the 2×2×2 I made by incorporating the rough structure of attachment styles. Does Tantra have a location on there?
@Meaningness The axes on my 2×2×2 are a bit confused, because I added the colorful grid diagonally, basically dissolving the original {individualist-collectivist} axis into being a function of both avoidance and anxiety (as separate axes). Note that it's not intended to be about attachment...
@Meaningness ...but about some more general underlying thing, like "closeness" and "autonomy".
"If you're regretting, you're basically saying 'we need to throw out the whole universe and get a new one,' which, you know, is rather inconvenient" "yeah—it's stuck to you!"
👆 I found this exchange delightful because the suggestion that the universe is stuck to you is simultaneously helpful+true, and clearly absurdly false. It's a cariacature of a dualistic perspective trying to understand non-dualism.
Thread · Mapping the schools of Buddhism: sutra, tantra, dzogchen · 3 of 6 tweets
Oh and then also what is the relationship of Tantra & Dzogchen...
Aha, okay, found this on a wiki. Tagging @SarahAMcManus who was also exploring this yesterday. (screenshot 2 from wikipedia shows that atiyoga=dzogchen) rigpawiki.org/index.php?titl…
Now I'm confused again about what "bodhisattva" means, since I didn't have the impression that mahayana and boddhisattva were the same. @tasshinfogleman?
@Meaningness @_awbery_ Principles thing is helpful! Things I'm still confused about: - do people who successfully follow renunciate paths end up renunciate forever? is this considered correct, or an accident? - how does that relate to the idea that one might switch back & forth between sutra & trantra?
@Meaningness @_awbery_ - is the previous confusion coming from the fact that lots of people do only renunciate, & lots of people do both? (are there people who do no renunciate stuff?) - I think I had a concept of one big path & one big goal, but it sounds like... are these paths... fractal?
@Meaningness @_awbery_ (re previous tweet: to be clear, I mean: multiple big paths and multiple big goals, but each path roughly leads to one specific goal and you don't try to follow multiple paths or you'd get lost or end up somewhere else entirely)
@SarahAMcManus Note: in order to do this it's important that you have other sources of chocolate, if you like to eat chocolate regularly. Otherwise instead of celebration, you've set yourself up with a system based on rewards (ie temporary absences of punishment) #PCT
@SarahAMcManus Also Sarah these cashews do look WAY more like beans. Btw, this idea was inspired by something @jamesnorris_ introduced at our Focus Week retreats, although in that context you would go around & share said treats with other people, as a way of announcing you achieved something.
@Meaningness @_awbery_ Oh also: where does the concept of bodhisattva fit into all of this? does it have as much to do with mahayana as the chart from that wiki suggests?
@Meaningness @_awbery_ Oh also: David's chart, which puts Sutra as renunciate and Tantra as exultant (vividness.live/2013/10/23/sut…) seems (to my very new understanding) to be in contradiction to the chart from Rigpa Wiki (rigpawiki.org/index.php?titl…) with the "outer tantras" as ascetic. ascetic ≠ renunciate?
@Meaningness @_awbery_ Huh, but on the chart anuyoga is shown as #8 whereas it seems atiyoga is #9 and is the same as dzogchen. And I thought your approach was based in dzogchen...
@Meaningness @_awbery_ Ahh, and in your conception, atiyoga isn't a subset of tantra? (I apparently need everything spelled out!)
@Meaningness @QiaochuYuan Mmmm, interaction. Btw @QiaochuYuan I've read that book (~2y ago) and I also think you'd like it.
Okay, hm. And in 2017 I went to a workshop called the Fire & Nectar Retreat, by @HareeshWallis. Which was billed as "tantra + yoga" but now I have no idea where it fits in all of this. The event included teachings & asanas. livetru.org/course/fire-ne…
@mattgoldenberg This obviously needs to be connected with this chart by @_awbery_
@_awbery_ @SarahAMcManus @Meaningness Aha! Yes, this is basically what I was looking for. One of the things that hadn't fully occurred to me at the start is that part of why the classifications are nebulous is that there isn't one canonical classification accepted by everyone.
@_awbery_ @SarahAMcManus @Meaningness Just to make sure I'm understanding: does any given location in one of the first 3 columns correspond to the aim directly to its far right? Although maybe the aim of spontaneous liberation isn't recognized within the canonical classification vajrayana?
@Meaningness @_awbery_ Aha! My question is answered by @_awbery_'s chart (it was a confusion based on how the 2nd and 3rd columns talk about things differently)
@QiaochuYuan @HareeshWallis I don't think it was this. It had very little about sex, except for a quip that while there was a hot-tub, the retreat center & temple was run by Hindus, not Tantrikas, so we needed to wear swimsuits.
@SarahAMcManus @HareeshWallis Okay, now the part I'm confused about is "why, if Sutra and Tantra are near-opposites, has Hareesh done such an enormous deep-dive in the form of a book called The Recognition Sutras? Something something "sutra"~="text"? amzn.to/2XpKNdD
Retweeted @_awbery_
The impossibility of extricating yourself from horror, death, decay and beauty. Gorgeously illustrated @SarahAMcManus I love…
Here's a chart by @_awbery_—one take on an answer to my inquiry above:
@ifIknewIdtellya Haha oops. 😉 Also, hilariously: sūtra is Sanskrit for "thread" & tantra is Sanskrit for "loom, weave, system"
Ahh, so you fear a sense that others will reject you because they can't tell that you've changed and learned?
I've recently been corresponding with someone via Twitter DM, and it's prompting me to tweet certain things that feel generally of-interest. This has been quite fruitful and is sort of like turning a letter into a blog post, but much shorter. 🍇🍈🍉🍊
This is the first one. I added 3 further tweets to the thread a couple hours later.
Then there was this, which is not quoting the DM thread but something that happened a few weeks ago in-person. But I wanted to share that into the DM.
And just now, I asked the person this question, and then I found myself wondering how that question would land as a random snippet of conversation sent to everybody. Would people resonate?
Replying to @minobenjo
@SlaytonBenjamin @tasshinfogleman Right, I get that in general. What I don't understand is the significance of both of them being column 3 in the chart above.
@Meaningness @_awbery_ Reading this article, it occurs to me that you'd be interested in this attempt to translate the Buddha's teaching into totally modern language. And, of course, I'd be curious to hear your take on it. facebook.com/romeostevens/p…
Really appreciating seeing this perspective from @Meaningness, who has stared at Buddhism 100× as much as me. It's something I'd been coming to appreciate myself recently, grappling with various people referring to various things as "Awakeness" vividness.live/2012/09/13/epi…
And so +1 to dissolving the word "enlightenment", but we do need words to talk about certain temporary or persistent states of being that afford different kinds of perception or cognition. The word "awake" seems to work okay, but maybe it needs to be qualified as "awake to _____"
Or maybe they just all need their own terms, based on what they make possible. And "awakeness" or something else could still be used when talking about things that are true in general of these different states. Curious about suggestions. 👁👁
Oh! one thing I've been realizing is that it seems that almost everything people want to call "awakeness" is associated with right-hemisphere brain function. That is, they all involve an awareness of the limitations of re-presentation and a connection with what is present. 🤔🧠
Retweeted @everytstudies
I'll write a extensive comment post but for now I'll just quote myself: "when someone says something obviously absurd, c…
@Dandy_Roddick People's beliefs and disgust might be real now but that doesn't mean they weren't originally formed for arbitrary political alliance reasons. See this article on the history of this, with sources: meaningness.com/monism-dualism…
@Meaningness @garybasin @_awbery_ This makes me think the distinctions might need to be presented as dialogues. So you could present a similar core engine of Dzogchen (if that's a meaningful notion) and then you & Romeo could ask each other clarifying questions: "Ahh, so does that step involve...?" etc
@Meaningness @garybasin @_awbery_ Other newer schools I'm very excited to see connected in with all of this include @meditationstuff's recent work—he's been making bold claims lately! meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2019/04/07/200… meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2019/02/09/giv…
@Meaningness @garybasin @_awbery_ @meditationstuff Along with @BentinhoMassaro, who I haven't looked into much yet myself but I've heard some good things about. He seems... maybe monist? But again, I really don't know yet. This is maybe a decent place to start for a map of what he's doing: trinfinityacademy.com/essentials/sel…
@QiaochuYuan @Meaningness @garybasin @_awbery_ @meditationstuff @BentinhoMassaro Welp. As I said, hadn't investigated it. What a mess. Seems there's also this article, which points out the original author had had his demise as the bottom line before ever getting involved. Still seems there are some self-enclosed loops / guru stuff. medium.com/@avera.media/c…
@QiaochuYuan @Meaningness @garybasin @_awbery_ Then there's this article about a devoted follower who committed suicide sometime after Bentinho said “Wake up to something important... Otherwise, kill yourself.” azcentral.com/story/news/loc… Parents had hired cult-extraction specialist to pry him away... & meanwhile Jesus is like:
@Meaningness @reasonisfun It could be a pretty arbitrary index. eg my site has a page called "Best Posts" that is basically just a list of posts vaguely arranged by a few totally arbitrary headers. not any sort of ordering or "read this before that" malcolmocean.com/best-posts
Retweeted @DellAnnaLuca
How will my life be in 10 years, if I keep doing what I’m doing every day?
@meditationstuff @Meaningness @_awbery_ Right so this is the one goal, many paths model. I like how you talk about many 5/7s, etc.
Gonna add @meditationstuff's tweet/article Many Enlightenments here too, since it's obviously relevant.
Gonna add @meditationstuff's tweet/article "Many Enlightenments? a non-rigorous position" here too, since it's obviously relevant.
Retweeted @webdevMason
@KevinSimler I really see what we're doing to most kids in school as equivalent to a nonsurgical lobotomy — I think it lik…
@JamesClear Is there something it would be good for someone to know, that I haven't gotten around to telling them? (especially helpful to ask this of particular business partners or intimate partners)
Replying to @ponekarl
@KarliePonett There are coercive & collaborative modes of meta. Examples of meta-thoughts that are more collaborative: - how do I care for the people in this conversation? - what is meaningful about what I want to say? - who are these people & what context do they need for this to make sense?
@KarliePonett However, these thoughts could all be had in a fearful or shameful way, which would then make them coercive again. The effect of "meta" is a question of core assumptions, not really the words. Eg "pause to post this?" is totally a thought worth having *if* not full of self-doubt!
@KarliePonett So yeah, I think that the divergence roughly happens at that approval step, as you say. Thinking about what someone would think while reading can be rich & intimate! Similar to sharing a song in-person. Can be beautiful, unless you're worried the whole time what they'll think.
@KevinSimler certain kinds of terrible design where something would clearly have been better if people had thought about it literally at all (eg the Zeo sleep-tracking clock having a white LED ui instead of a red one)
@fortelabs @JoelGoyette Agreed with the selection (#1) and the edits.
@EinsteinsAttic @leashless @ana_andrianova @dthorson I think the other thing is that (particularly following @JemBendell's interview on Emerge, but also in general) you created a connection between the collapse that's already here and the collapse that's yet to come. Similar to @vgr's Fourth World concept: ribbonfarm.com/2019/04/08/wei…
For me it depends but sometimes once I listen closer to the lyrics there's something really powerfully-relevant going on. Recently I shared a song with "this kinda captures <shared experience>" & while we were listening I was like "wow this resonates WAY more than I thought"
@Aaron__FF I like the concept of this but I also think part of the whole point is that there are no purely-denotative descriptors. My sense is what we need is for people to become much more conscious of the difference between denotation & connotation, and able to choose how to orient.
Replying to @realtimeai
@RealtimeAI Yep totally. Sometimes songs are musically catchy or some other kind of sticky. Hence the importance of "sometimes" and "might" in talking about this.
Current status: pretending to feel awkward at a family Easter gathering because I dressed in pastels and everyone else is in Leafs jerseys.
Aha! Now plan is going exactly according to everything...!
portmanteau of the day: workshopportunities
Thread · Woo people have a trainable sensory modality rationalists lack
(quoting Romeo Stevens) Imagine if you had a sense of taste that could only detect 3 different responses: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Foodies, sommeliers and the entire world of indulging in the infinite varieties of taste would seem absolutely insane to you.
Rationalists, I have some bad news for you about woo people. They have a sensory modality you don't and have a variety of languages in order to talk about their experiences with each other. Yes, they generally have bad epistemics and thus weird metaphysics related to all that.
But *everyone* has shit epistemics, so that isn't a valid dismissal.
Their sensory modality has no good instrumentation for quantifying it yet. It is essentially much finer detection of CNS activity in the body and all the ways such activation can propagate. The good news is that, like cultivating a palate, this is trainable.
(Romeo doesn't use Twitter and gave me a 👍 to crosspost this from facebook.com/romeostevens/p…)
One of the comments on Romeo's facebook post linked to @AndreevAlexei's excellent LW post about this, which notes "Now, it just so happens that the mystical language borrowed a lot of words from physics. But the way they're used is different." lesswrong.com/posts/nbw2Nfji…
Something I realized recently is that the use of physics language is partly because, well, you've gotta get your words from somewhere, but also partly because of the cultural dominance of science-as-legitimate-way-of-knowing, even among people who don't trust science.
Which is not to say "it's scientists' fault that woo people explain bodywork in terms of electromagnetic fields" because eh, fault isn't helpful here. But there's something going on in terms of the memetic selection pressures.
But it's not just about scientific language. There's also cultural dominance of the idea that you should be able to explain things in words. The dao that can be spoken is not the true dao, and there's a whole bunch of stuff that loses its richness when explained: jokes, music,.
This "only explainable things are valid" demand of our modern culture is tightly connected with the present dominance of the left-hemisphere's world, which is symbolic and representational.
Meanwhile, mystical experiences involve something really important happening in the right hemisphere. But then when there's then pressure to explain that, people make up all sorts of wild theories with their left hemispheres. ~= what Romeo means here:
Understanding the structure of the brain is important for understanding thinking, and there's way better research on this now than a decade ago. To learn more, check out this 44min podcast metalearn.net/podcasts/ml41-… or this thread:
@infiniturtle Similar progressions with other topics: • Addiction: immoral → disease → learning (see The Biology of Desire) • Homosexuality: immoral/disorder → born-this-way → ? (it's clear that not all LGBTQ things can end at born-this-way, but it was a stopgap to fight shame)
@KevinSimler I only use Twitter on desktop, and I use a mix. There's no official chronological timeline on desktop, but realtwitter.com takes you to a search results page that works pretty well. But I use the main algo timeline sometimes too.
@jonnym1ller @buster @metalearn It wasn't until I was reading McGilchrist's book that I fully realized what a paradox *is*. 🤯 To left-hemisphere logic, it means "one or both of these propositions need to be rejected". To right-hemisphere sense-making, it means "here's something I don't understand yet".
@jonnym1ller @buster @metalearn I mostly knew of the concept of a paradox from logic, where you can use it for things like proof by contradiction. This assumption yields paradox, ∴ false. But originally & more broadly, it can mean something counter-intuitive or simply counter-to-what-seems-known. Etymology:
@QiaochuYuan @cosimia_ I wrote about this in an earlier thread with @cosimia_!
@QiaochuYuan @cosimia_ And this one, and a lot of stuff further down for the intrepid explorer:
@SarahAMcManus @s_r_constantin @reasonisfun @Meaningness Click through my tweet and watch the video clip it's referring to; an example of a TV show in which a dad does think about the thing.
me just now: "meaningness.com is like... a fan-nonfic, of Dzogchen, set in a STEM department of a university" (@Meaningness)
@SarahAMcManus @visakanv @QiaochuYuan "hakuna traumata" is amazing. 🦁 "hakuna" means "there are no" so that's actually a cool aspirational concept.
I found the fear of death hiding under the fear of suffering hiding under the fear of powerlessness hiding under the fear of stillness hiding under a ton of effervescent energy.
(riffing on @RealtimeAI) twitter.com/RealtimeAI/sta…
@QiaochuYuan Loose speculation on mine, or at least one chain of mine:
@mrgunn Yeah it's super unfortunate that "woo" encompasses a bunch of real things that are hard to explain & also a bunch of complete quackery. A natural outcome of it being a term invented by people with contempt for both, but yeah. Plus yeah, the comorbidities.
@mrgunn I basically don't use the phrase "woo" myself, fwiw, because of that confusion. (I was quoting someone else here) If you read this subthread you'll see some of my take on why the comorbidities:
@pnw_anglo Ha, brilliant. Not surprised foodie-ism is overhyped, but the broader part of the analogy still holds: that most people have a larger ability to describe what food they enjoy and what they enjoy about it than about subtler experiences. Some don't, for biological or psych reasons.
See, look at it go:
@infiniturtle Yes! Also a rebranding of nondualism that extends beyond monism. meaningness.com/terminology/no…
@mrgunn That makes sense to me, although I would advocate for more integrated parallel training rather than sending people deep into the rationalist hole before showing them any ineffable stuff. Not sure that training yet exists anywhere in the world, but we're working on it!
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@mrgunn That makes sense to me, although I would advocate for more integrated parallel training rather than sending peop…
@mrgunn Who is this "we", you might ask? Great question. There isn't one coherent team, but my list of people working on stuff in this ballpark includes at least: me, @SarahAMcManus, @QiaochuYuan, @Meaningness, @utotranslucence, @alifeofmovement, & [__your_name_here__?]
@wminshew @micsolana @webdevMason Yeah signing will be helpful but the actual thing everybody needs is just to really not trust videos any more than they trust words (as being something that could just be made up). Which... doesn't bode well since people have lots of misplaced trust in that too.
@wminshew @micsolana @webdevMason At any rate, I suspect the most effective way to pull this off will be to make a bunch of patently absurd videos, that are obviously fake because they couldn't have come to exist (now-dead actors talking about specific modern events?) but that look convincing. So people feel it.
YYZ✈️DEN (en route to Boulder)
@SarahAMcManus @jonnym1ller @RealtimeAI Mmm I find myself wishing I had basically paraphrased what Romeo said, rather than quoting him. The tone was provocative/antagonistic, which has produced a similar implied/present tone in some of the responses, that I'm not enjoying.
@SarahAMcManus @jonnym1ller @RealtimeAI To @RealtimeAI, I want to note that this original thing by Romeo is not making any supernatural claims anymore than saying "you could learn to paint better than most people know how" is making supernatural claims. To be clear: the *bad explanations* do make supernatural claims.
@SarahAMcManus @jonnym1ller @RealtimeAI (This is separate from the question of whether Romeo's statement is true, false, confused, important, irrelevant, etc.)
@jonnym1ller @SarahAMcManus "I don't have a suitable alternative model yet" is a huge chunk of why I think McGilchrist's work is so important. Only the right hemisphere knows how to say that at all. If LH is in charge, either bogus theories invented ("woo") or evidence denied (eg Matt's response)
@jonnym1ller @SarahAMcManus In other words, to the left hemisphere, "reality" is near-identical to "my world-model", so there's basically no such thing as "things I don't understand". And that's fine! That's the RH's job. And... LH needs to allow it to do that job.
@jonnym1ller @SarahAMcManus > "LH needs to allow it to do that job" could sound prescriptive, and it sort of is, but it's also just highlighting that 70% of the corpus callosum is inhibitory, so the RH literally *can't* do it's job if the LH won't let it (& vice versa)
@jonnym1ller @SarahAMcManus People who looked at early brain data described left hemisphere as "dominant", something that has since been refuted—in the sense of the LH being more important. But the LH's *personality* does seem to be more "dominant" in the sense of domineering. 😮
Retweeted @callumflack
The interstitial era for Big Media. Go read a blog instead! twitter.com/ow/status/1121…
@XplodingCabbage @s_r_constantin Hmm, digging a little more deeply in the link you posted, there is at least some origin related to prisons, in the context of the term being introduced by this film, which featured prisoners. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_Cult…
Replying to @dionvandewal
@Di0nysos_ If you want company while working, you could set up a virtual coworking room for crypto people, say at complice.co/room/crypto (that link will generate a temporary room; to customize settings make an account & create an actual room)
Retweeted @Chris_Auld
A rant about the state of statistical work in (clinical) medical journals: 4/20 "Weed day" edition. Last year @JAMAInterna…
Replying to @johannespunkt
@johannespunkt @UNDICTION @byudkowsky (context: this fb post, which is almost 5 years old wow. facebook.com/strohl89/posts…)
Retweeted @The_Lagrangian
@literalbanana @Tipsycaek @KevinSimler kidneys are also cognitive organs since they are mechanisms for filtering useful…
Thread · Low neuroticism, emotional agility, and hyperthymic temperament
@KevinSimler @ArtirKel I don't have low emotional response but I typically test in bottom 1% of neuroticism on Big Five tests. Pretty okay with that!
@KevinSimler @ArtirKel Oh! I don't have low emotional response but I think one of the most neuro-atypical things about me is my high emotional agility. Except like 3-5 times in my life (for periods of a few hours each time, usually) I have been able to move between emotional states near-instantly.
@KevinSimler @ArtirKel This proved helpful in a situation where my community had someone who was working with a lot of really scary and devastating personal patterns, and anybody else would be wrecked for the whole day after holding space for them, but I would just go do something else after, nbd.
@KevinSimler @ArtirKel (To some extent this ability was bolstered by a bunch of compartmentalization. I've since deconstructed that a fair bit, but other things I've learned in the meantime have left me with probably greater capacity for this sort of thing on net.)
@KevinSimler @ArtirKel I think this might be related to mild ADHD, in terms of how my attention works—shifting focus and also hyperfocus. Nothing resembling a diagnosis because it's never been totally disruptive to my life.
@KevinSimler @ArtirKel Oh and somehow-relatedly, I don't know what the evidence is for "hyperthymic temperament" as a concept, but the description is very much me and very much awesome: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthym…
@KevinSimler @ArtirKel (I've had to do a lot of learning to be less annoying than I was a few years ago, vis-a-vis talkativeness, love of attention, repetition, tirelessness.)
@KevinSimler @ArtirKel Oh huh here's a paper that talks about all of this and has lots of great diagrams universitypsychiatry.com/clientuploads/… @slatestarcodex you might be interested in this. it has some new types of Bipolar: ¼, ½, I½, II½
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@KevinSimler @ArtirKel Oh! I don't have low emotional response but I think one of the most neuro-atypical things about m…
Retweeted @KevinSimler
In what ways do you think of yourself as neuro-atypical or contributing to cognitive diversity? Follow-up: What kinds of…
What concepts/terms first emerged as strawmen but now have people who sincerely claim to believe/follow/value them? (Negative utilitarianism and nihilism are two examples)
@jonnym1ller Well, the book has definitely helped me with this:
@Dandy_Roddick Now I'm wondering if there are serious Russell's Teapotists...
Replying to @brownian19
@brownian19 You can now join a mailing list / newsgroup for his stuff! groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/…
@KevinSimler @AndrewSshi I had a hunch this might be related to developments in the relationship between brain hemispheres (LH became dominant as empire progressed, & prefers simple symbols over realistic images) & found these pages in McGilchrist... but they're talking about BC not AD, so timing is off.
@procrastiwork Waterloo (about an hour west of the Toronto airport)
@_FitCrit Doesn't necessarily:
@_FitCrit Although also this seems related to brain hemisphere lateralization, and the (rationalist) left hemisphere's job is to focus narrowly and ignore what it doesn't understand, which kind of literally means having a more limited palette. This is key!—but incomplete.
@_FitCrit To use a physical metaphor, it's like the ability to zoom in on a specific aspect of some image. It lets you analyze things in more detail but in order to do it you have to ignore the rest of the image.
@QiaochuYuan @andy_matuschak Mmm, yeah. I built complice.co to tackle this challenge, and I think it does an okay job of that! Instead of a huge backlog of TODOs, you have your big picture goals then each day you ask freshly "what am I going to do towards these today?" & enter intentions
@DellAnnaLuca @KevinSimler Yeah, makes sense in general. Then a question of "how else to model the pressures that cause neurons to reorg?" & inasmuch as blood flow increases to regions of the brain that are most active (I assume so since fMRI works by measuring this) there does seem to be something there.
@DellAnnaLuca @KevinSimler Although devil's advocate would simply say "neurons that are less active don't need as much blood flow, and are still getting some" and that seems reasonably likely as well. And probably it doesn't make sense for the brain to kill off neurons just because they aren't being used.
Replying to @Johnwbh
@Johnwbh @mattgoldenberg Mmm yeah, those terms were pointing at a very real group. Nihilism & negative utilitarianism were philosophies invented by people who wanted to point out how terrible they were.
@QiaochuYuan @andy_matuschak & while it has an "intention" list instead of a "task" list, they're still structurally/functionally very similar to tasks so it's easy to fall back into old patterns. If you want to help develop next iteration of Complice, get in touch! My full-time focus is elsewhere atm.
@Meaningness @jamesheathers Given the response to this thread, I have the sense that @jamesheathers could get funding to do this full-time via Patreon or similar quite readily. Not sure how that scales but it seems like it would be a good start for helping him get some sleep.
@DellAnnaLuca @KevinSimler Huh, interesting. Just gave a skim of Appendix A. It does describe "constant competition between cells", although I guess that's friendly competition.
@DellAnnaLuca @KevinSimler Huh, wait. Just realized something off about: > In general, entities collaborate in the measure that they share DNA & compete in the measure that they don't. Two chimps share more DNA than a chimp & a bird, yet the former pair competes for mates whereas the latter pair...