"The words you speak become the house you live in" — Hafiz
June 2019
Just came across The Book of Trees totally by coincidence while searching for something else, and the diagrams intrigued me. Wanted to share with @Conaw and figured I'd post here for all to see. I have some weird hunch @chenoehart would like this too.
From my journal 2 years ago: > "Man, I just had a tiny little urge to play <addictive game>. It's fucking *nuts* watching my mind immediately go into action rationalizing it. The... striatum? Orbito-frontal cortex? [I had just read a book on addiction, The Biology of Desire]
> I swear, I just point my mind at the possibility and I get a fuckton of reasons. It's very bizarre to observe. And the reasons feel quite compelling. No, that's not it. Pay attention, Malcolm! 👁👁
> The reasons are not what is compelling. The reasons are a distraction. The compelling thing is basically just the dopamine gradient, and it happens *before* the reasons."
@QiaochuYuan Oh man I keep updating this. Look, a million faces to choose from:
Retweeted @mykola
This is the exact thing that has been weaponized in the information war we're fighting, right? The fact that we lack a way to…
Thread · Meta-thread of threads on McGilchrist's brain hemispheres · 1 of 38 tweets
@QiaochuYuan wrote a thread about different fictional magic concepts, that divide along hemispherical lines! (Also his thread links back to this meta-thread at the end, so we've got a nice loop going 🔄)
Retweeted @leashless
People, nearly all people, are so fucking lost. It's not that hard. 1) you will all die 2) everybody else's pain hurts as…
Replying to @RivalVoices
@RivalVoices Come at me ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/10/que…
@RivalVoices To be clear, I don't think we actually disagree 😜 the case you're talking about here seems pathological to me. The cases in my post are largely ones where there's a button that gives you an answer but either it's misleading/false or it has other side-effects you don't want.
Retweeted @ssica3003
When someone says “come at me” to @RivalVoices I find it viscerally exciting. Thanks @Malcolm_Ocean 😂
Replying to @RivalVoices
@RivalVoices Hmm... feels like you're thinking about complicated systems and I'm thinking about complex systems...
Retweeted @michaelthaber
he heard it as something that happened, as part of the reality. Since he didn't hear it as a mistake, he felt it was his…
Retweeted @Meaningness
Meta-rationality, rationality, and reasonableness. The book is actually about the meta-, but getting clear on the relation…
Replying to @RivalVoices
@RivalVoices Are you familiar with the distinction between complicated & complex systems? This video is my favorite intro: youtube.com/watch?v=N7oz36…
@RivalVoices Relevance to this situation: in a complex system many things don't have static answers, so you can't just replace your question with an answer and then forget about the question. You instead have a constantly-evolving investigation process around the questioning & answering.
Thread · Withness vs aboutness thinking and the brain hemispheres
One model I've found myself dancing with over the past few years is called More than Cool Reason: "Withness-thinking or "systemic thinking" and "thinking *about* systems" Withness and aboutness are two very different modes of thinking! PDF: lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/xmcam…
When I first read this article, sometime in 2014 probably, I was still pretty hardcore rationalist, and so I found a lot of the remarks in there pretty challenging to engage with because they threatened my rationalist eternalist stance!
Of course, at that time I hadn't read meaningness.com either, and might have found it pretty threatening too. Although in 2016 it was a major factor in allowing me to relax my grip on rationalism as such.
More recently, my grip has been further relaxed by Iain McGilchrist's work on the profound differences in the worldviews of the left & right brain hemispheres. 📖🧠 It's very clear to me that 👉LH is aboutness-oriented 🤝RH is withness-oriented Gripping itself is LH/aboutness!
Seriously, the left hemisphere's denotative language center is right next to the part of the brain that handles hand-action. Moreover (see excerpts) "I've got a grasp on X" = "X is now my tool (in concept-space or physical space) that I can use to manipulate the world."
The last excerpt in previous tweet points at this aboutness/withness distinction in an incredibly pure way: LH-aboutness: "subjects with RH damage tend to grasp anything within reach" RH-withness: "hands [...] seeking not to remain isolated...trying to find companionship"
@RivalVoices Whereas in a complicated system, the answer speaks for itself in a different way, and any changes are readily trackable. It's also related to "am I outside of or part of the system I'm trying to understand?" Related: withness & aboutness
Although sometimes I set out to do something but then I notice a bug in my productivity app and end up fixing that instead of doing what I was going to do. #GoodProblems?
I consider my engagement with language deeply creative, so I use the little red underlines to draw my attention to typos, but if I prefer my spelling of a word I just add it to the dictionary. eg just now I was told benefitting→benefiting. ew no.
@rfinz @Conaw @visakanv The Herbie Hancock video clip? Yeah, whole vid is on youtube, and I found it in this article: openculture.com/2018/04/herbie…
@rfinz @Conaw @visakanv Also if y'all like post-mistake thinking and music, check out this blog post of mine inspired by Keith Jarett's Koln concert: malcolmocean.com/2017/11/transc…
Relatedly, @context_ing's handle is about verbing the word "context"! Love this ♥ twitter.com/context_ing/st…
@noididntreadit @maxwellsfoley @asteroid_saku Yeah it seems like this analogy is amusing but oversimplified to the point of misleading. The whole brain functions in a very parallel way. 🧠 However, within that, linear reasoning can be used, which is serial, and this form of reasoning is strongly preferred by the LHem.
@noididntreadit @maxwellsfoley @asteroid_saku That said, there are visible neurological diffs between hemispheres! Better described as "the RH has more intertwinglement, ie is less capable of being modelled as a bunch of distinct modules that talk" (tho this is truer of both hems than usually assumed) McGilchrist, ch2 👇
Retweeted @mashable
No more traffic-causing construction twitter.com/mashable/statu…
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing Btw, I totally didn't get this, despite musing briefly on your handle once or twice. I think the _ in the middle messed me up. I see @contexting is taken, but maybe add a _ at the end? And similarly, using a hyphen makes it seem non-cromulent, imho twitter.com/context_ing/st…
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@noididntreadit @maxwellsfoley @asteroid_saku That said, there are visible neurological diffs between hemispheres! Bett…
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing Hm yeah. Maybe you can approach it by contexting instead... using the word "contexting" enough that people get it 😉
Replying to @s_r_constantin
@s_r_constantin I think about this as "you need a meta-culture": Common ground not on the level of "what are the norms?" but "what are the meta-norms?" or in other words: "how can we navigate the inevitable differences-in-norms in a way that works for everybody?"
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@s_r_constantin I think about this as "you need a meta-culture": Common ground not on the level of "what are the norms?…
Replying to @s_r_constantin
@s_r_constantin "inventor" (~age 5. my main invention idea at that time was a teleporter ("if atoms are mostly empty space, can't you squish'em?") but the closest I got to realizing that specific dream was writing a love song about it at age 17) maleidoscope.bandcamp.com/track/teleport…
@s_r_constantin I later had a lot of ideas for "what you could do if you had attractor/repulsor beam tech?" and also some sketches of something that is basically AppleWatch + GoogleGlass + <50 things smartphones can & can't-yet do>. Makes sense that I went into engineering, not science! 🤣
last night I said something like "I can feel my mind breathing" and I think this is basically what I meant
@david_perell Curious what the read-count is at now! (Or if you've seen other sides of it spreading further) Was it already trailing off at 100k or is it still well on the way up?
Retweeted @david_perell
Deep bonds take time. Instead of spending two or three hours with somebody, I prefer to spend two or three days with the…
@JimmyRis Well, who is this "we"? For any given "we", there might be a more workable answer than if it's sort of implied to be "everyone" or even "everyone in this room".
I'm impressed by the unanimous agreement on uncontroversial love. So uncontroversial! 🤣
Retweeted @JimmyRis
@Malcolm_Ocean What are the limits on “we” formation that allow workable solutions? Does a rigorous “we” generative process e…
"Having revealed a question, you might get an answer, or you might get a better question, or you might even get a response like “exactly!” to an open-ended question. Which isn’t answering the question; it’s agreeing w/ the Q’s relevance/importance." ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/10/que…
@JimmyRis Exactly.
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @utotranslucence @anielsen108 @JustChap Yeah, I think I'm actually talking about metamodern metanorms:
Experimenting with a Twitter Moment called ♻Reusables, which is a collection of tweets I expect to QT later, for reference. Inspired by @visakanv, of course. (Figured I might as well publish it to let others in on my process. Only has 4 tweets atm) twitter.com/i/moments/1135…
@JimmyRis ☝*points at url bar*☝
Thread · Meta-thread of threads on McGilchrist's brain hemispheres · 1 of 38 tweets
Me reflecting on another model of two ways of thinking ("aboutness" and "withness") that map almost perfectly onto the left & right hemispheres' unique worlds:
"Say you're having a conversation with someone, and you're trying to talk about a concept or make sense of an experience or something." lttr.ai/DRqv #Communication #DivergentThinking #Brainstorming
Retweeted @visakanv
@noididntreadit I notice there are currently 125 people on your best follows list, and 125 people you're following. 🤔
Turning and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon is... just beginning to be able to make out the falconer!
@jonnym1ller shame need to control
@made_in_cosmos @visakanv @context_ing @round Reading this, I feel... slightly less bad about having scanned (poorly) then thrown out all the paper copies of the songs I'd written. Doing kon-mari 3 years ago: "paper doesn't spark joy in my life!" ...hadn't adequately separated "bank agreements" from "personal writing"
Retweeted @mykola
Would love this. Imagine a show dedicated entirely to peaceful banality under a context of childlike wonder. Is it possible to…
@TheAnnaGat @matthewclifford Oooh, I like how he articulates the power of innovation & also the recognition that that doesn't mean we're *necessarily* fine. So many people seem so certain one way or another. Relatedly, I love @dthorson's phrase "perhaps-inevitable near-term collapse".
Have things gotten better or worse over the last few hundred years?
Retweeted @eriktorenberg
What’s the best book you’ve ever read on punishment, accountability, restorative and punitive justice — i.e how do we pr…
Man I really want to know who is answering what. And why!
@QiaochuYuan @uncatherio Mostly haven't noticed anything in terms of body L↔R lateralization, although I seem to carry a fair bit of tension in my right shoulder that has sometimes increased at times when my LH is feeling panicked. But it's hard to say.
Retweeted @visakanv
Interesting conversation with a writer friend earlier about the fragmentation of information. We both agreed that fragmentati…
@garybasin @eriktorenberg @andychen @julianweisser Huh, fascinating. Not even sure what to make of this.
@eriktorenberg @andychen @julianweisser Related: (unclear if this claim has actually been verified; nobody so far has posted a source study)
.@SarahAMcManus: "Maybe we're both experiencing some typical-mind fallacy here." Me: "Definitely. Or, well, at least, I definitely am. I guess I can't really speak for you here. Wait, fuck."
Thread · Suddenly grokking the wisdom behind old platitudes · 1 of 4 tweets
Have you ever had an experience of suddenly grokking what an oft-quoted phrase, proverb, or cliché was saying? Did it come from looking at the phrase, or did you have a deep insight, go to express it, and realize you were saying words you'd heard before?
"Every single thing, including the mountain behind my house, which is billions of years old—if you were able to take, as it were, a series of time lapse camera—you’d see the thing morphing and changing and flowing. As Heraclitus once said, 'everything flows.'" — Iain McGilchrist
Incidentally... not-incidentally!? There's a beautiful Gaelic poem Shores by Sorley MacLean, that speaks similarly of a bay and a mountain ("Prishal")—the same mountain Iain refers to, on the isle of Skye. (From a commenter here: jennymackness.wordpress.com/2018/03/15/the…)
@fortelabs @garybasin Further on this:
Replying to @pup_god
@pup_god *stumbles up to elevator door* *dusts off ⬆ button* 1️⃣
Retweeted @OrdureBizarre0
Thread · The only constant is change, and what the left hemisphere wants · 17 of 18 tweets
The Only Constant Is Change (a thread) Today I finally grasped the significance of this, after the reading & thinking I've been doing around Iain McGilchrist's @divided_brain hemisphere model 🧠
(Here's a soundtrack for this The Only Constant Is Change thread—a song with this title by one of my all-time favorite artists, @BT. I'll come back to the lyrics a bit below) youtube.com/watch?v=xwiZFy…
The left hemisphere really wants a static, unchanging world. Physically, this means wanting things to stay still so they can be grabbed, manipulated, used, eaten. Ontologically/psychologically/epistemologically, this means a static foundation that it can build on.
And yet... perceptions of stasis are illusory.
Which brings us to today, when I was talking with @gmws82 about this, and linked him that BT song, and then stared at the title with a beginner's mind: The Only Constant Is Change
And suddenly I got a wave of emotion come up, as I really took in this phrase, originally from Heraclitus, that "The Only Constant Is Change" ...before I'd kind of waved it away or something?
Now... okay, so the LHemisphere wants a constant that it can trust, and it'll make up all sorts of constants that don't exist in order to have something. But in fact, there's ONLY ONE CONSTANT and it's CHANGE. But there is one! There aren't zero constants. There's one!
There are different ways to relate to "The Only Constant Is Change," even as LH🧠. How my LH had responded before was, "Fuck off—I wanted a constant and the only constant you can offer me is change? That's the worst constant EVER.🙄 Fine, I'll just keep my static illusions." 😡🖕
The other way—this new way I've found—feels actually satisfying. My LH is like "Oh, wait, I can stop pretending that my illusion-constants are real, because there is an actual constant?!" And yes, it's change. But I have my trusty right hemisphere that is *made* for change.
I looked up BT's lyrics today, and they're deeply relevant: Make it clear, integrate this love and fear Still hopelessly hopeful Wounded child seeking wonderful As closed as I am Born a craftsman of shifting sands ⬅ What lies I learned Lessened my 'bility to be present
In explaining to another friend why I'm so excited about Iain McGilchrist's brain hemiphere model, I said > "it finally gave my left hemisphere a model to explain that there is more to thinking that it knows and that furthermore, it doesn't have to handle everything.
> There's been this huge sense of relief from my left hemisphere as it realizes that it was never made for handling unknowns, complexities, and uncertainties, and that I do contain a part that is made for that and will activate automatically if my left hemisphere just. lets. go.
> (This is a really strong metaphor btw—grasping is a core left-hemisphere function and related to how it understands everything, so "let go" is almost literally saying "relax your left hemisphere")"
The phrase "The Only Constant Is Change" now feels to me like almost a mantra that my Left Hemisphere can use to remember this. 🙏
I have noted that the LH learning to trust the RH feels like surrendering to God, since RH is incomprehensible to LH. It seems that there's a sense in which that's not just a feeling, but basically just *true*. (The RH works in mysterious ways, from LH's perspective!)
McGilchrist resonates: > "It’s a fool who says anything positive about the nature of God, but I’m not convinced that God is omniscient and omnipotent, either. I think God is in the process, is becoming. God is not only just becoming, but IS becoming, you see what I mean."
And this shift from God as Being to God as Becoming connects with the (fictional? ...? ...?!?) religion Earthseed, from Octavia Butler's novels. In our conversation today, after I'd laid out a much shorter version of the above thread, @gmws82 shared this page with me:
Thread · Suddenly grokking the wisdom behind old platitudes · 2 of 4 tweets
Also very curious to hear *which* phrases these were, and any context you have for what caused you to have the insight or how you might try to convey it to others. I've just written one of my own:
I think I've more often had the latter experience (insight→phrase) but this experience today was an interesting example of the former (phrase→insight)
Replying to @utotranslucence
@utotranslucence ...what do you think you know about this world... and how do you think you know it?
Replying to @s_r_constantin
@s_r_constantin > "A strong case can be made that blitzscaling isn’t really a recipe for success but rather survivorship bias masquerading as a strategy." Wow, this is a really solid article. I love the investigations of the development of strategies in Google & Microsoft too...
@s_r_constantin > "When companies use automation to put people out of work, they can no longer afford to be consumers; when platforms extract all the value and leave none for their suppliers, they are undermining their own long-term prospects. > It’s two-sided markets all the way down."
Retweeted @aaronzlewis
@visakanv a funny idea in ur mind is like glass while it’s still hot, moldable, fluid by the time u give it to other peop…
@_awbery_ @xuenay Came across this thread sometime later and wanted to note for posterity that @_awbery_ has started working through The Mind Illuminated and is posting commentary (though mostly not on twitter yet)
@_awbery_ @jondubin follow-ups!
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing Not sure I understand. Elaborate? (Or is that the point? :P)
Retweeted @aaronzlewis
@Malcolm_Ocean yes! mostly the latter. i wrote something once about how these cliches get wrung dry and how we re-fill the…
@aaronzlewis Haaaa yess. Love this post. There's also an interesting thing where terms can get so stale that using them sincerely becomes fresh. It seems to me that people in touch with the aliveness of synergy as a phenomenon could revive it as a term. (I may be plotting just such a thing)
Thread · Enlightenment models, Culadasa, and hemisphere lateralization
@_awbery_ @QiaochuYuan One thing I found striking is Culadasa's description of enlightenment in terms of the neurology, talking about the brainstem. I'm now super fascinated how this connects with @Meaningness' depiction of the different Results of sutrayana & tantrayana.
@_awbery_ @QiaochuYuan @Meaningness I have posited that all forms of awakeness seem to have something to do with increased right hemisphere activation, but Culadasa's description in the podcast seems different!
@_awbery_ @QiaochuYuan @Meaningness Reading this Theravada quote (see adjacent tweets) it seemed that the subject in question was left-hemisphere attention (although as effectively integrated with right-hemisphere awareness.)
@_awbery_ @QiaochuYuan @Meaningness But then this distinction between LH attention and RH awareness itself comes from... Culadasa! Not sure of original source but this reddit post on /r/streamentry about McGilchrist's brain hemisphere work says Culadasa explicitly connects the two. reddit.com/r/streamentry/…
@_awbery_ @QiaochuYuan @Meaningness Meanwhile, tantric/dzogchen "result" as described in Spectrum of Ecstasy seems almost 100% about shifting to a primarily right-hemisphere-based form of consciousness. (Realizing now that this thread 👇 doesn't actually explain the relationship! #todo)
@_awbery_ @QiaochuYuan @Meaningness So! I still have only the foggiest ideas of how these all relate. Would love to hear thoughts from @_awbery_ or @Meaningness on the subject! Or maybe that needs to wait for me to explain how I see the hemispheres as connecting to nonduality.
@_awbery_ @QiaochuYuan @Meaningness Oh! One further thought is that I have a felt sense of a subtle connection between some of the descriptions of renunciate practice in this thread, and the disembodied philosophers of the enlightenment, eg Descartes.
@_awbery_ @QiaochuYuan @Meaningness Sense of "the body is a problem but by breaking it into parts we can reject it thoroughly." Here's Descartes re: the body, from McGilchrist's book, The Master and his Emissary. The screenshots are in two pairs—there's a jump of a few pages between them.
@_awbery_ @QiaochuYuan @Meaningness Now I'm wondering "was Buddhism originally like this, or did it evolve to be?" (Similar to the absurd opulence & authoritarianism of the Catholic church—absurd because it calls itself Christian and Christ seemed quite opposed to such opulence & authoritarianism.)
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
Have things gotten better or worse over the last few hundred years?
@vahlamorgulis @visakanv Mmm, so glad to hear it. I would love to hear more about your situation that made you so ripe for it! (If you're open to sharing) (This as part of a concept for collecting if-thens for small interventions that can make a huge difference for people if well-timed.)
Replying to @innerstitial
@AndJohnsonAnd @GinkgoApp Oh yeah, I tried Ginkgo and I do think that some of its views would be great for navigating branchy threads! I also recommend treeverse, though it is limited in some other ways:
@AndJohnsonAnd @GinkgoApp @Conaw have you seen Ginkgo? It would be worth having a view option like this in Roam, for sure.
Thread · Meta-thread of threads on McGilchrist's brain hemispheres · 1 of 38 tweets
Grokking the relationship between change & stasis. Cried a couple happy tears while writing this one:
@verohecko Ooh! Highly recommend doing a deep-dive into learning about the brain hemispheres. Most people's model of the hemispheres is kind of "eh, whatever" because for decades most models were shitty, but now there's an actually-decent starting point: metalearn.net/podcasts/ml41-…
Thread · Why McGilchrist's hemisphere model beats System 1/System 2 talk · 5 of 7 tweets
Pitch for why McGilchrist's @divided_brain model matters: Lateralization is not just in humans but in mice & birds & fish, so there's gotta be SOMETHING going on there. If you try to understand the rest of the brain while ignoring hemispheres, you're going to be confused!
Eg I think that at LEAST 50% of the time (maybe 90%) when people I know talk about working with their System 1 & System 2 (Kahneman's terms) they're actually talking about their R & L hemispheres respectively. Similarly with triune model of brain, etc.
The obvious importance of the hemisphere axis to our experience of thinking & acting means that people are going to try to talk about it—so if they refuse to use hemisphere terms, they'll use others. This then confuses the meanings of those other terms!
(That's, of course, assuming that those other terms weren't already confused; I don't think Kahneman was confused about S1/S2 but other models probably come with such issues because they were developed during the Period Of Hemisphere Models Being Unfashionable To Talk About.)
(I've been tweeting on this topic for awhile; if you're now intrigued, check out this podcast metalearn.net/podcasts/ml41-… then my meta-thread below)
I think this experience of loop-closing was an early encouraging experience for me in New Rhizome-Threaded Twitter. It was very shortly after I seriously got back on. @visakanv @conaw
@verohecko Most other popular brain models blatantly ignore the hemisphere axis despite its obvious importance, so they have to add epicycles to correct the confused assumption.
@visakanv Pragmatic Q on what happens to be your bday: in your experience, does a QT always get its full text quoted if it has no image and is all one line?
Thread · Meta-thread of threads on McGilchrist's brain hemispheres · 1 of 38 tweets
Most other popular brain models blatantly ignore the hemisphere axis despite its obvious importance, so they have to add epicycles to correct the confused assumption.
@visakanv @bcnorange Mmmm a lot of this resonates with an experience I had when I wrote to Future!Malcolm one year out! A kind of "I hope your life is awesome and I'm gonna try hard to make it that way!"
@visakanv @bcnorange If I were to try to do one 10y into the future, now, I think I'd be preoccupied with my uncertainty about the world situation, and having trouble imagining who I would be because of an inability to imagine the context I'd be in.
Thread · Spectrum of Ecstasy and McGilchrist's hemisphere model · 1 of 8 tweets
Further thoughts on this over here: (mostly more questions, not answers)
@_awbery_ @QiaochuYuan @Meaningness 🤔...I'm not sure how to parse what you said into my dualistic binary of "it was originally like this" or "it evolved to be like this" 😜
@xuenay @_awbery_ The other thing of course is to post additional updates as part of a thread, so that people who are interacting with that thread see it maybe, but others don't. (There's currently no convenient way to explicitly do this on Twitter)
Replying to @RivalVoices
@RivalVoices @visakanv @Conaw: "ad hoc ontologies" as a marketing phrase for Roam
Replying to @RivalVoices
@RivalVoices I wish I knew more! This was all from Romeo Stevens (I should have made the quotedness clearer) He's doesn't twitter but he's got a google group for talking about stuff like this now, so you could go there and ask about it! groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/…
@RivalVoices I think @meditationstuff has thoughts on subjects like these too.
@SarahAMcManus Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 💖
Retweeted @Meaningness
_Meaningness_ is a complex book. It has an imaginary component and a real component. twitter.com/ssica3003/stat…
broke: reading tea leaves bespoke: reading napkins twitter.com/innerstitial/s…
@alifeofmovement @utotranslucence @vgr @SarahAMcManus @Conaw @context_ing @TheAnnaGat I don't use any myself. Did use Treeverse a few times but it hasn't worked for me recently and it doesn't let you actually *send* tweets. Would love to see others'! @visakanv
@utotranslucence Poorly-ventilated rooms (classrooms, conference rooms, etc) (This will get harder as atmospheric CO₂ rises!)
Retweeted @utotranslucence
How many normal, modern things will we see as barbaric in 30 yrs time? Maybe: Medical intervention in low-risk childb…
Retweeted @tasshinfogleman
@Prigoose @MonasticAcademy my experience is that on the day i receive the feedback, i am confused, don't understand wh…
@micahtredding @context_ing @Conaw I use this extensively in workflowy, where I have dte = 2019-06-09 @ 09:11 jdt = 2019-06-09 jtm = @ 09:11 Optimized more for readability than search, though still searchable. Very useful for captain's logging.
@QiaochuYuan @mckaywrigley Culadasa on @OortCloudAtlas' podcast: "[therapy] has been taking people from a dysfuctional state, to a normal state of dysfunction."
Retweeted @reasonisfun
"Each culture tries to fix its visionary moment, when it was transformed by a new conception either of nature or of man. B…
@QiaochuYuan @_awbery_ That seems obviously like a terrible model...🤔 ...but yes, I am having such an impression 🤣
Just-In-Time Reading Recommendations (JITRR) Share your examples of things shaped like this: "if someone says _______➡ I tell them to read ______"
@_awbery_ @QiaochuYuan @Meaningness disgust meditation amirite
@QiaochuYuan @_awbery_ Oh! I came here via my notifications and I thought you were replying to this thread over here a few days ago where I started to speculate in this direction:
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @Meaningness Yeah, I'm seeing more clearly now: if you *start* with the model "humans are basically rational agents" then you need to add epicycles called "biases" in order for your model to not be completely terrible. But why start there?
war is a penny auction
Retweeted @visakanv
"ADHD is the human brain in conflict with a legal system that tries to coerce it into something it has not accepted or agreed…
@jondubin Haha excellent, yes. I've heard from at least 4 people now that they read that post at exactly the right time and it hit them really powerfully. Here's one. I asked the person about what made them ripe, which was part of the inspiration for this thread:
@QiaochuYuan Yeah I get that too. The best recs are often subtle, like something just clicks and you're like "I can't say quite why... I think you need to check out..." I think this thread merits some real examples, and those would be much more useful than just Topic→Author
Thread · What makes a just-in-time reading recommendation
JITRRs, now available on TWITRR! This thread has lots of great suggestions so far (thanks @uberstuber, @RivalVoices, @made_in_cosmos!) and it could really benefit from more in-depth examples of a detailed situation/problem not just an "I want to learn about Topic X"
I'm actually going to go a step further and say, as the person who coined the term JITRR, that if the trigger is just a topic then it's not a JITRR, it's just a "top books organized by topic" list.
Ex: @uberstuber had "get rid of shit"→MarieKondo. Which... ok. But some ppl have issues (hoarding or procrastination) that MK probably won't address. Meanwhile, *I* might recommend MK to someone who expressed "I feel like I can't access my internal sense of what I deeply want"
(Reason for my rec is that the best way to learn something is to practice and the KonMari method gets you to practice asking "does this spark joy in my life?" about every single item you own! Throw out enough objects you don't really like & you finally notice you hate your job🤔)
My trigger is much more specific of a feeling (which isn't even well-captured by those words there) and is also much more counter-intuitive—something you can't find just by googling. Qiaochu, who inspired the original thread, replied to it like this:
Qiaochu's pointing out something that I hadn't fully realized when I made the thread, which is... that it's kind of asking a paradoxical question! 🙃 You can't provide a JIT Reading Recommendation out-of-context. Just-In-Time for what?
So maybe the thing to do to collect JITRRs is to look for examples in the wild, then come back to this thread or the other one and report in on them! New prompt! "once, someone said <weird specific thing> and I told them to read <unusual suggestion>" (& it helped? hopefully?)
@uberstuber Appreciating all of these as general recs! Hope you won't take it personally that I critiqued one as an example in this thread to clarify what I meant by JITRRs:
Branching off, if you happen to be reading this tweet and have some eerie sense of resonance, I recommend this post by @briantimar > "Don’t force yourself to do anything you hate. If you get too good at this, you won’t be able to figure out when to quit." briantimar.github.io/notes/mimetic/…
@QiaochuYuan Mmmm have now made a new thread inspired by this. Deeply appreciating the role you have played in guiding this thread! 😍
Retweeted @paulg
Programming does at least train you to suspend judgment. You're constantly faced with things that seem as if they couldn't possi…
Retweeted @jondubin
@Malcolm_Ocean lol this is so funny. just this morning i was going to tweet an interest in creating a library/map of "topic"…
"Forward is a very multi-dimensional direction." — me last week
@aaronzlewis If you read @DavidDeutschOxf's work (eg The Beginning of Infinity) he makes a really profound case for the historical memeplexes of humanity having been parasitic in a way that was detrimental to human well-being. And that new, symbiotic kinds of memes are possible now.
@aaronzlewis @DavidDeutschOxf It's been one of the books that has affected my thinking most in the last few years, AND I want to note that I think it is limited in a few major ways so I wouldn't recommend just downloading his worldview. The stuff on memetic evolution seems solid tho.
Retweeted @aaronzlewis
almost all the metaphors we use when we talk about memes are based on disease they're viral, they're parasitic, they 'inf…
@marionnjoya 🤔 The face is perhaps better at telling you what someone is feeling/thinking when the person is *not* trying to express something with it.
@alifeofmovement Found it! I happened to look under "Lists I'm a Member Of" and there are a few Lists made by @GimmeThatFeed which is it. (Still doesn't let you see who/what they interact with most, ofc.)
Retweeted @TaylorPearsonMe
1/ Developing a basic understanding and intuition around how complex systems work may be the most important thing I've…
Retweeted @chazfirestone
All the balls are the same color — and that color is *brown*!
@dhrumilwbc I wrote an article about EPCOT... but more talking about the delightful and annoying ways in which our lives are already EPCOT-like. medium.com/@Malcolm_Ocean…
Damn, just re-read this article I wrote in 2017, and I forgot how good it is. It's about the ways in which the whole digital world has become a sort of Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Both pros & cons to that, and it's hard to escape. medium.com/@Malcolm_Ocean…
Retweeted @reasonisfun
For epistemologically sound & bubbling-with-ideas self development, @Malcolm_Ocean's blog is one of the best things on the…
@reasonisfun @noididntreadit I think that the Best Posts page is probably what you're looking for: malcolmocean.com/best-posts
Retweeted @nicklovescode
This question has changed my life and I'm slowly realizing how many situations it is useful in. What's your relationship…
@aaronzlewis @DavidDeutschOxf I would LOVE there to be more people who have read both Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and his Emissary, *and* David Deutsch's. Lots of core resonance, but nearly-completely opposition re: "what has happened to culture in the last 500 years?"
@nicklovescode Ooh yeah, I wrote an article years ago about a few low-hanging fruit for creating value in relationships, and this was one of my suggestions! I could stand to do it a lot more still. Article→ malcolmocean.com/2015/02/creati…
@uncatherio It's a hallmark of a bunch of ways culture is broken that this is the first time I've heard this idea.
@szajmon @aaronzlewis @Prigoose Yeah I consider this fact downright absurd. How did we fuck this up? Even closed cross-platform apps like Slack or fb messenger often use native emoji. It's one thing that's nice about Twitter—has its own set and uses it everywhere (I assume?)
💡a metaphor dating service "single metaphier seeking metaphrand" (those terms from Julian Jaynes fogbanking.com/anatomy-of-a-m…)
@britt @aaronzlewis @visakanv @TheAnnaGat
Surely nobody ran out of their cave shouting “Eureka!” after having discovered the interjection?
source: @slatestarcodex's excellent review of Joseph Heinrich's book The Secret of Our Success slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/boo…
Just found out about openmindplatform.org Very cool to see that @JonHaidt is involved—he's one of the first people I thought of when I read it, like "how does this work when some of these beliefs stem from underlying value differences?" Tagging @Conaw, @SpencrGreenberg
Hmm... as I go through Step 3 of their process, it's pointing at a bunch of stuff about irrationality, and I find myself thinking that the model is a bit oversimplified. Probably a step up from what most random people have, so maybe good on net? But it's what I'm moving away from
Replying to @brownian19
@brownian19 @jondubin It's a mess! Your insight "other people can't make me do things" is also only a stage in development. There's an important truth to it, *and* it could be used to justify cruelty: "if you were taking responsibility for your feelings, then you wouldn't be upset right now"
@jondubin @brownian19 Yessssss. Guru Papers is fantastic.
@brownian19 @jondubin It has a similar property to the "upper limit problem" (ULP) which is "I'm only willing to let my life get so great before I'll sabotage it." Helpful for self-inquiry, but trying to tell someone else that this is what you think they're doing is almost always anti-helpful.
Idea: ceiling mount for page-a-day calendar that releases one page each day like a falling leaf 🍃 @BoredElonMusk
@eriktorenberg This amazing thread by @meditationstuff talks a bunch about this and about big picture ways for something different to happen.
@eriktorenberg @meditationstuff (That tweet above is summarizing this blog post, which is also very relevant. The rest of the thread builds on that!) samzdat.com/2017/06/01/the…
Replying to @brownian19
@brownian19 @jondubin Yeah, I recommend the book. Some of the tone I find a bit weird; overall quite powerful. Lots of other books by the Hendricks. @tasshinfogleman recommends Conscious Loving, for instance.
Replying to @brownian19
@brownian19 @jondubin Oh man if you want to read/think about self-regulation like that, check out perceptual control theory amazon.com/Making-Sense-B…
Retweeted @made_in_cosmos
You seem to sit still But inside Every single atom Is dancing What's there to be Afraid of They've been dancing Li…
@Timber_22 Ah. I first read him years ago and didn't dig deep (just a few articles iirc). Your analysis here has me going "...oh."
Replying to @FateOfTwist_
@FateOfTwist_ @fortelabs @garybasin Related amazing talk by Corey Anton that was a mix of 🤣 &🤯 for me youtube.com/watch?v=0lD4qg…
@jondubin @QiaochuYuan Yeah. Have been meaning to make a thread that is actually *intended* to be an introduction, but have so far not found time & attention for that. This 44 min podcast is my go-to rec in the meantime: metalearn.net/podcasts/ml41-…
Retweeted @jondubin
I've been ravishly chowing down on @Malcolm_Ocean's tweets about the Master and His Emissary. So much gold here, with very pr…
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@aaronzlewis @DavidDeutschOxf I would LOVE there to be more people who have read both Iain McGilchrist's book The Master…
Thread · Packing for Doug Tataryn's Bio-Emotive retreat at MAPLE
I knew I had a colorful aesthetic but didn't fully appreciate the extent of this til packing to go to @DougTataryn's Bio-Emotive retreat at MAPLE and realizing I don't own a single shirt that matches their dress code (dark, solid color, loose, no text). My one black tee is tight.
The details of the workshop, if you're curious: (it'll also be my first time going to the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth (monasticacademy.com)) eventbrite.com/e/bio-emotive-…
For context on Doug's Bio-Emotive work, his interview on Emerge is great and a large part of what attracted me to the workshop anchor.fm/emerge/episode…
Although I'd also listened to his interview on my friend @jameswjesso's podcast a couple years ago, which covers some different angles: jameswjesso.com/a-crash-course…
You can also learn a bit about it from this Deconstructing Yourself interview with Culadasa, who talks about how Doug helped him unstick some feeling-blocks that were still present after his awakening.
(And I've written about a few of my thoughts on that second podcast here)
@tasshinfogleman indicated to me that he wasn't certain but it'd probably be an offline retreat, so this thread is also "goodbye for a week, twitter!"
Am I half-full of myself or half-empty? 🤔
@_awbery_ @Timber_22 @Meaningness @QiaochuYuan @SarahAMcManus @HareeshWallis @ssica3003 My advice would mostly be to find some people who seem themselves to be embodying K5 & learn from being in close contact with them. But then again, that's something I only achieved by accident, in the sense that I'd never heard of Kegan prior to getting involved with such people!
@_awbery_ @Timber_22 @Meaningness @QiaochuYuan @SarahAMcManus @HareeshWallis @ssica3003 It's fascinating to hear Rin'dzin cite me as someone who really groks this. Feeling into the resonance of that & also the dissonance! I have substantial conceptual grasp as well as tons of exp in a learning community... *And* am constantly finding new gaps in my grokkage
@_awbery_ @Timber_22 @Meaningness @QiaochuYuan @SarahAMcManus @HareeshWallis @ssica3003 And... I seem to be someone who is also actively theorizing about it! (Based on my own experience and my other reading) Here are two paragraphs from a chat of me speculating on a connection with Iain McGilchrist's hemisphere model.
Fidget toys that you eat: - pistachios - pomegranates - cherries (stem knots) - ...?