@Zach_Schloss @AE_Robbert @SarahAMcManus @utotranslucence @Conaw @QiaochuYuan @alifeofmovement Any updates?
July 2019
I vaguely recall recently hearing/reading about a list created (maybe decades ago?) of a few dozen intertwingled problems, that it was posited could not be solved individually but needed to be addressed simultaneously & together. Can't seem to find it now though. Any ideas?
Replying to @mikamckinnon
@mikamckinnon Whaaat. I am a Canadian who does this and until now I mostly thought it was a weird-personal-quirk sort of thing.
Retweeted @GretchenAMcC
Strunk & White, 1918: Omit needless words!!! [Okay great, but how?] McCulloch, 2019: Many people report that twitter'…
@QiaochuYuan @danlistensto maybe "dehumanisation" sounds active because "de-" what about "unhumanisation" or something?
@webdevMason Not sure what I actually want to say about it but finding myself wanting to share Contact Improv with people. It's partner dancing, but with no lead/follow distinction and involves both partners literally putting weight on the other. @visakanv youtube.com/watch?v=zQRF2s…
@webdevMason @visakanv It is striking because it's the kind of dancing that you can do beautifully with a bunch of different people, but (unlike the macarena) each iteration is totally unique and unrepeatable. So it's neither purely interchangeable nor based on learning the same moves. Attunement.
Replying to @visakanv
@visakanv see also: Contact Improvisation
@Evolving_Ego No, more like these sorts of things: twitter.com/jonni/status/1…
Replying to @jonni
@jonni Mmm yep, that's definitely the sort of thing. I guess I thought someone had made a specific list that was intended to be somewhat complete (although obviously not 100% complete)
@QiaochuYuan @Meaningness cf. the important difference between "believe" and "believe in" - and both can have naïve or purely faith-based forms, as well as non-naïve forms grounded on some amount of self-trust and personal experience.
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
There's some kind of awful toxoplasmosis life cycle thing going on with trauma and ideology. Trauma begets ideologies to m…
@Aella_Girl I continue to feel really satisfied with my current pinned tweet:
@david_perell I think there are at least a few things that are on this level of power that could be invented right now, but so much energy is going to random apps etc instead. (Or maybe even that have been invented but need some standardization to catch on.)
@selfprime @webdevMason @visakanv Not surprising, given that one of the inspirations for contact improv is aikido! (some others being choreographed modern/contemporary dance, & social dancing)
@jasonhickel Degrowth won't work because it's evolutionarily unfit. If 95% of world does it, the rest can just take over. It's the memetic equivalent of trying to reduce population by having conscientious people not have kids: simply creates strong genetic selector against conscientiousness!
Retweeted @SarahAMcManus
Let's see... I think it'll be easier to make this into a thread. For context, Matt wrote: "Kegan 5 isn't letting go of…
@briecode A few ways to look at it. @DougTataryn uses "suppression" to refer to (semi-)conscious choosing to not feel something, and "repression" to refer to this process becoming automatic, often in the form of chronic muscle tension interfering with feeling.
@Saurya I'd recommend listening to this interview with Culadasa where he talks about emotions he was blocking despite tons of meditation, and then check out @DougTataryn's Bio-Emotive Framework, which is what Culadasa used to get unstuck.
@Saurya @DougTataryn Doug also talks more about the relationship of meditation & emotions in this interview on @dthorson's podcast Emerge. You could also start with this one and *then* check out the Culadasa one. anchor.fm/emerge/episode…
@Saurya @DougTataryn @dthorson Note there are two different things here: - anxieties (internal) - chaos of life (external) Meditation could be helping you not-deal-with either of those. Doug's emotional processing systems can help with anxieties. For chaos of life, you might have to make some tough choices.
@Saurya @DougTataryn @dthorson Oh and I'm realizing that Doug has an audio program for working specifically with anxiety. I don't know how well it works if you don't have his full framework, so I'd suggest listening to those podcasts first, at least: bioemotiveframework.com/shop/emotional…
@briecode @DougTataryn Based on his workshop last week, it's now clear to me that if I don't process my feelings, then they end up running my life. So key to not suppressing is that your attention doesn't *always* go elsewhere. twitter.com/Tybawai/status…
@Timber_22 @jasonhickel Oh, if we're talking something as specific as CO₂ emissions, then yeah, my argument doesn't apply at all. It's a critique of the perspective that thinks it could possibly work to just try not growing & tech-developing at all. Which is what "degrowth" sounded like to me.
@Timber_22 @jasonhickel Looking at the wikipedia page, this makes tons of sense to me. But I'm still wary of framing it in terms of what it *isn't*. Towardsness & awayness create very different movements. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth
~"The coherent state that emerges as action taken, enfolds only some of the potentials. Those not selected are in a sense “left behind,” but not eliminated. The open plurality preceding the selection now simmers in background of being, available… when a new situation arises."
This intriguing quote lightly edited from @bonnittaroy's article suggesting a shift from talking about Complex Adaptive Systems to talking about Complex Potential States. And she's quoting two other people! medium.com/perspectives-o…
"How might human systems, our governance and economies be transformed by switching from evolutionary paradigms to potential states paradigms where the emphasis is on co-creative emergence, fluidity, and uncanny causality?"
"How might this theory of change based on complex potential states, re-imagine our past, not as a fluke of evolution, but as a rare and precious feature of potention, as the fundamental creative force of advance?" I'm tempted to make a po-tension pun… 🤔
@GretchenAMcC I'd love to see results of some linguists etc trying this experiment!
Retweeted @VincentHorn
“I’m not seeing through the model, it’s seeing through me.” - attempting to describe my experience of a meta-model, in con…
@tasshinfogleman Not sure if she's published anything about it, but I imagine @mulldrifting would have thoughts on the subject.
@KevinSimler Making a passive income business (complice.co). Non-biz folks were just like "what?" and biz folks were like "but it's too small" but I'm just like "it pays the bills and I can do whatever I want!" Lots of other subtle stuff that's hard to easily point at.
@visakanv @KevinSimler ☝☝Thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis. ☝☝ Not mainstream, not counter-culture, not counter-counter-culture. Cultivating my own aesthetic.
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@visakanv @KevinSimler ☝☝Thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis. ☝☝ Not mainstream, not counter-culture, not counter-counter-culture.…
@visakanv I think this 👆 is an example of this 👇 phenomenon, although here with the boring lowercase barely-a-full-ideology "people suck"
@visakanv Meanwhile I'm suspicious of people trying to boringly build their brand. 🤔 Nobody could possibly want to just do that without some ulterior motive like having fun... 🙃
@visakanv @KevinSimler Which! Is not to say that sometimes intentionally being counter- isn't helpful. Sometimes you need to exercise an option a few times to really know you have it:
@visakanv @KevinSimler Also like... what are the chances that the default or broad expectations for you are actually the best option or even an okay one? Don't be weird for the sake of weird, but be concerned if everything you seem to want happens to be totally normal...
@primalpoly (I know you know this, but for other people) Note that replication doesn't necessarily mean that it's good for anything other than replication. Some memes replicate because they're beneficial, others just bc good @ reproducing. Fireworks continue to be deeply delighting to me🎆
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
Practice being weird when the stakes are low so you'll be ready when it counts.
@misen__ If you practice new moves in the forest and nobody sees you, is it still weird? 🤔
@Megatronic13 Suddenly realizing that I think suspension-as-punishment basically relies on inconveniencing the parent such that the parent is angry at the child and punishes them explicitly or just via taking out their anger on the child. ...fuck.
@misen__ @ifIknewIdtellya What. Very curious about this.
@Megatronic13 Also realizing that of course for many people, this connection is very very obvious and is scored deep into their childhood memories. 😢❤🙏
@_FitCrit @Megatronic13 This story ended with me having to call my mum from the principal's office and tell her that I had done something wrong. I said as much then said "it's a long story, I'll explain later" and when I explained she cracked up. 🤣
@QiaochuYuan @coponder Another way to scale therapy is via chatbots. I think that will be very very insufficient, but also critical for us being able to make it through the years until we can scale therapeutic *cultures.* replika.ai
Retweeted @cognazor
Six ways to go 'meta' with @bonnittaroy and @dthorson. I hadn't thought about 'going meta' in the context of all these differ…
@aaronzlewis I highly recommend Iain McGilchrist's work for a neurological explanation of how these factors reinforce each other! This podcast is a good place to start, then check out his book metalearn.net/podcasts/ml41-…
@mandalaeyes @alt_visa @aaronzlewis Yeah, this. I think it was literally dubito ergo cognito ergo sum This made deep sense to me—still does—and I therefore used to get grumpy at people shitting on Descartes. Have since read enough to know their shitting was warranted, but still think this phrase is solid.
@mandalaeyes @alt_visa @aaronzlewis I think that if Descartes had never said "dubito... ergo sum" and someone less disembodied had said it instead, people wouldn't shit on the phrase much if at all. But he *was* confused and it's not a coincidence that in his confusion he said this thing.
@mandalaeyes @alt_visa @aaronzlewis Oh and apparently I asked about this a year ago! I feel less confused now after reading Iain McGilchrist. 🤓
Further thoughts from me a year later, after reading Iain McGilchrist's books about the brain hemispheres:
@everytstudies @InceptiveJ I think maybe you're looking for something like "correct" vs "acceptable" views? (Both of these terms bake in a ton of connotations that may or may not be desired by you)
Retweeted @pup_god
retweeting this to force my subcojnscious to realize it its hard twitter.com/simongerman600…
@_awbery_ @Meaningness @jaspergregory Find myself optimistically hoping that that handle contains a secret tube for transporting air bubbles out from the bottom. But that's probably way less necessary if blades go halfway up.
@aaronzlewis @mandalaeyes @alt_visa cf Jesus
@timoreilly Ahh yes this makes the adversarial examples phenomenon way less confusing or surprising. Wish the article had more image examples!
Replying to @chadandy
@chadandy @Megatronic13 Mmmmm kind of like prison. cf Mimi Silbert describing her Delancey St Foundation (alternative to prison) and saying ~"this training is much harder than just sitting in a cell! but people reject it because it means treating the convict as a real person." youtube.com/watch?v=b8Sf7U…
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
My latest thinking about internal conflict is something extremely obvious-in-retrospect: that the main axis of internal…
Thread · Bergson on intuition, perception, and change as base
Have just read the first half of this and it's really cool.
This insight about the relation of action & perception & categorization is really powerful and connects directly with Iain McGilchrist's model of the brain hemispheres.
Quote from Plotinus: "All action weakens contemplation." I recently spent a week at the @MonasticAcademy, meditating, emotion-processing, & doing we-space work (eg circling). And one thing I noted was the challenge of having we-spaces that can act to care for the future.
"But suppose that instead of trying to rise above our perception of things we were to plunge into it for the purpose of deepening and widening it."
Both/and philosophy
"constant effort of the mind to limit its horizon, to turn away from what it has a material interest in not seeing" McGilchrist highlights that the left hemisphere's world is already narrowed in this way, so any such effort is the effort of the LH to suppress RH's perspective.
Loving how Bergson appreciates so strongly with Kant's demonstration of "metaphysics requires intuition" then disagrees so plainly with Kant's conclusion that "metaphysics is impossible"
And then yes, at last, the reason @infiniturtle shared this with me: a really cool piece about the nature of change & movement and how [the left hemisphere] tries to build it up from fixity, rather than recognizing change as the base aspect.
Huh, in saying "recognizing as base" I'm now thinking about "base, path, result", terms from @Meaningness/Dzogchen. And *then* I'm wondering: is the "recognition of change as base" the same as the "recognition of emptiness" described as base for tantrayana in this table...?
@infiniturtle @divided_brain Oooh. Made a new thread about my experience reading so far:
Retweeted @krishkhubchand
tweeeps! @MatthewWSiu and I are running an experiment where we connect people with similar learning interests. if you…
Replying to @brownian19
@brownian19 @aaronzlewis @DavidDeutschOxf Yeah second half was challenging for me, as an engineering major whose only enjoyable experience of a history course was one on Popular Music & Culture. First half is much more neuroscience & psychology though, and I found it fascinating and exciting. Maybe focus on that?
@callumflack @DavidDeutschOxf Fyeah. Me a few weeks ago:
@callumflack One summary I've playfully made of DD's The Beginning of Infinity is "The left hemisphere's best pitch for why & how to use your right hemisphere." (Note that it still looks at everything from primarily LH-based perspective.)
Retweeted @callumflack
We did the soft wind. We danst slowly. We swrld Aroned. We danst soft. We lisin to the mozik. We danst to the mozik. We m…
@aaronzlewis @DavidDeutschOxf A few weeks later, getting my wish: 🤩
@aaronzlewis Yeah I think we're borked on this because people fundamentally don't grok what *change* is. The reality that change is always already happening. There's no moment when it starts or could be averted.
@aaronzlewis I therefore think that "climate change" simultaneously is a perfect phrase for this and also a terrible phrase, because it lands right in the blindspot of the part that needs to understand that there's something to do about the whole thing. (That part ~= left hemisphere)
@aaronzlewis Yeah, see my thoughts on optimism/pessimism on this stuff, over here (inspired by David Deutsch & Iain McGilchrist) (link is to halfway through thread because otherwise it's hard to follow due to twitter's threading prioritization algo)
@tasshinfogleman I voted "Just let me see results 🔎" as my actual vote for how I view the word "spirituality".
"Whenever you prove who was first, the harder you look you'll find someone else who was more 1st. & if you persist in your efforts you find that the person whom you thought was 1st was 3rd. Someone'll appear on the scene who was more 1st than you thought was 1st in the 1st place"
- “Sivowitch Law of Firsts” (via @tasshinfogleman) I can't find a source for when Eliot Sivowitch first coined this law, but in any case it doesn't matter much as surely someone beat him to it.
@Timber_22 @QiaochuYuan @KevinSimler @visakanv @Conaw This is the thread:
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing Mmm one thing I've played with a bit, which I'm enjoying, is just practicing orienting to the uniqueness & contextuality of things. I'm making breakfast, same meal as every day. But oh, this banana is thicker than the one yesterday, & peeled easier. Compost bin has <contents>
@context_ing At @MonasticAcademy, I was introducing @DougTataryn to McGilchrist's model, & I gestured at the table & said "to LHem, these are just 2 cups". Then I said ~"to RHem... huh, that cup was brought up by someone who isn't here now. Where did they go? Are they coming back? ...etc"
@context_ing @MonasticAcademy @DougTataryn Many perceptual shifts like this (eg attuning to subtle change: 🌲s grow). I think there's lots more work to be done in practicing them. And yet, to some extent, all of this isn't RHem practice so much as practice for the LHem to learn to let go:
@callumflack @cognazor @KeenDisregard He doesn't literally say this, but his followers act as if he does. Viewing everything as problems to be solved, even if you take the badness out, still sort of presumes a kind of understanding & control that (based on McGilchrist & complexity theory) seems to be illusory.
@callumflack @cognazor @KeenDisregard I think that it's a huge step compared to the idea that everything is problems and it's intractable. But it's still missing the part where the wrong note BECOMES the right note based on what you do next.
@callumflack @cognazor @KeenDisregard For further on what I mean there, see this blog post. I've been meaning to write a follow-up for awhile (that will address this even more centrally) but haven't gotten to it yet:
Thread · Transcending regret and the do-over koan · 1 of 4 tweets
Also this @wondermarkfeed comic is a hilarious take on this koan. 🙃 wondermark.com/c1481/
Thread · Onboarding newcomers into Twitter's threading culture · 1 of 9 tweets
Also, @KevinSimler describes a general form of the thing I did here for Qiaochu > Grassroots "getting started" programs for new Twitter users over here:
@ekhornung @AlexCartaz @KevinSimler IIRC, you're allowed to skip onboarding process. I forget how but something like after making the account, just open a new tab to twitter.com and ignore the onboarding flow tab. If not, this custom thing could include instructions to follow then unfollow 10 celebs
Retweeted @KevinSimler
Alright. I've been sitting on an idea for a couple years now, but finally realized I'm never going to act on it. So I'd l…
💡Have you got any ideas you've been sitting on for awhile, that you'd like to set free and see who else plays with them? Make a top-level thread, then embed below.
Thread · Transcending regret and the do-over koan · 1 of 4 tweets
What I like about this comic—one thing, at least—is that it's still post-regret in the sense that it's not looking for the RIGHT thing to do; it's not fix oriented. Perhaps there are two sane do-over stances, one being to do everything the same; the other, nothing
@SarahAMcManus @misen__ Opportunities out of whack? Visit your local kairopractor today!
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @MonasticAcademy @DougTataryn I think moreso than training those individual hemisphere capacities, it trains some sort of meta-awareness of the difference between those two views and the ability to consciously choose which to orient to.
@context_ing @MonasticAcademy @DougTataryn Exercise: Look around your room. LHem: pick an adjective (red, round, flat, etc). Count the # of <adjective> objects in view 🔢 RHem: pick a specific object. What its history? What's a memory involving it? How do you feel about it? What don't you know about its history? 🕸
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing Me to the CFAR alumni mailing list a few weeks ago when someone asked about optimizing meals:
@josephus77 @cognazor @JimmyLevendia Nice! I originally found it through a different mix I was listening to (on youtube) that included this same clip.
@Conaw @utotranslucence Wtf is this. Amazing. What even. (Needs mic closer to mouths, further from guitar) Is this what y'all do at the Embodied Rationality Church these days?
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @infiniturtle @divided_brain Not yet! I have the book, but haven't taken the time to use it yet. It seems like an excellent concrete suggestion though, and one I'd recommend to anyone reading this who doesn't already have a handle for how to practice RHem stuff in their daily life.
(From a thread about a book called The Mushroom At The End of the World) Tagging @dthorson who I think will like this tweet in particular, and @SarahAMcManus to ask "shall we order this book?"
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@context_ing @MonasticAcademy @DougTataryn Exercise: Look around your room. LHem: pick an adjective (red, round, flat,…
@tasshinfogleman Link to a relevant thread of @dthorson, @JaredJanes, @VincentHorn...
I don't have to justify. I don't have to justify not having to justify.
Excellent thread about how to leverage good intentions into things actually happening, rather than assuming that they will automagically just because everyone thinks it's a good idea.
This blog post of mine points at an overlapping principle: malcolmocean.com/2017/12/make-a…
What's the sort of thing that you and the people you spend time with notice, that most people don't? What's the sort of thing that you notice, that people close to you don't?
@made_in_cosmos @aaronzlewis @ecstadelic Could do much worse than "syntellect"! Although maybe also "syntellect" could be better used to point at other things. I like Robert Gilman's Foundation Stones which describes us as in a transition from Empire Era (last ~10ky) to Planetary Era context.org/foundation-sto…
@thewiseturtle @aaronzlewis Curious to hear more about your work!
@dthorson > "Discovering that people I trust & respect are feeling similarly felt really good... the one thing I am sure of is whatever is coming, I know it will be better to face it together. At least if we’re lost we don’t have to be lonely." - Jake Bornstein facebook.com/jacoblbornstei…
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @qorprate @KevinSimler @Meaningness @literalbanana @thewiseturtle @garybasin @ssica3003 @misen__ @danlistensto @_awbery_ @SarahAMcManus @aaronzlewis Now I'm trying to guess who said what. I know my own and I can recognize @SarahAMcManus... Dead metaphors sounds like @aaronzlewis (aaronzlewis.com/blog/2019/03/0…) Besides that, I don't have any particularly strong guesses! Would love to hear others' guesses (more than just reveals).
@Evolving_Ego Both? Not enough people starting innovative businesses that can hire the kind of talent that's out there going to waste.
Retweeted @startuployalist
“My topic is the shift from 'architect' to 'gardener', where 'architect' stands for 'someone who carries a full pictur…
@thewiseturtle @aaronzlewis Also intrigued by "architectural" phrasing.
Retweeted @aaronzlewis
maybe the outsider candidates should call B.S. on the debate medium and do a small-group podcast instead. pair up with som…
@timeular @PhotosByDepuhl @IFTTT @zapier Does this exist yet? I'd love to color-code my Phillips Hue lights based on what I'm working on. (I actually already do this through a complice.co integration but it would be fun to make it physical.)
Really great thread on parenting philosophy. Appreciating the level of abstraction that Divia's working on here, not just specific heuristics (but also a few of those, with context).
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @uberstuber @oliverburkeman If I were to buy one of these, it would be less about the logging and more about having clarity of "what am I actually doing right now?") I guess I could just use a die for that (and in fact I once did have a multi-colored shape I used in this way)
Replying to @RivalVoices
@RivalVoices I see. 🤔 So that implies you might have noticed what sorts of things *in particular* you notice more than others... 😉
@diviacaroline Welcome back! I'm enjoying what you've been posting. Here's an intro-to-twitter thread I wrote for Qiaochu a few months ago. Already a bit out of date—many more people doing interesting rhizome threads than just Visa & GC now.
Replying to @RivalVoices
@RivalVoices > "Focusing, to the point where every sentence I speak is of that kind." Mmm. Yeah, it seems to me that Focusing is something like "allowing parts of the mind other than the Left Neocortex to speak." Sometimes this is RH, other times more like emotional/limbic brain.
@RivalVoices @DougTataryn's Bio-Emotive Framework is specifically geared towards giving a voice to the emotional/limbic brain. bioemotiveframework.com I recently did a workshop of his at the @MonasticAcademy and it's very powerful stuff.
@RivalVoices @DougTataryn @MonasticAcademy A group I know called Leverage Research has a related technique called Belief Reporting (@meditationstuff might comment on how this connects, or on the relationship of his technique Folding) leverageresearch.org/blog/introspec…
@RivalVoices @DougTataryn @MonasticAcademy @meditationstuff Core to all of these is something I might call "Authentic Meaning" (styled after Authentic Movement or Authentic Relating) Speaking in such a way that you're clearly in touch with "what is the meaning of what I'm saying right now? do I mean this?"
@RivalVoices @DougTataryn @MonasticAcademy @meditationstuff In speaking from the Right Neocortex, any authentic meaning done in communication is necessarily deeply contextual. So the words I'm choosing need to not just ring true for me, but be words that I'm trusting to convey my meaning in this time & place & relationship.
Thread · Feeling emotions fully vs stripping them of meaning
Reading article on Spacious Freedom. vividness.live/2012/06/21/spa… I've been thinking a lot about emotions lately from going to @DougTataryn's Bio-Emotive workshop. Lots of profound resonance there with Aro/Dzogchen: > Self-liberation means allowing emotional energy to be as it is.
Reading this 👇 & wondering if more accurate than "stripped of meaning" would be "stripped of implication". Wanting to ask @Meaningness about this because language here seems important and allowing the meaningness of emotion seems 💗as long as it doesn't say "therefore!"
(oh man, lost 5 tweets here 😕 ...continuing roughly from memory)
Maybe my issues is with "stripped" actually. In doing the Bio-Emotive work, I've been learning how profoundly important it is to really allow the meanings that are present in the feelings, rather than stripping them away. But then, once truly felt, the old meanings loosen.
To be clear: I'm assuming Dave Chapman groks this. I'm just inquiring about the precision of the phrasing. I love how this Aro page puts it: > "When we allow our emotional realm to be as it is, we are freed to experience the texture of life directly." — arobuddhism.org/community/an-u…
"I endeavor to accept all of my feelings, including the feeling of "I can't accept any of my feelings"!"
Seems to be the emotional lens on the dzogchen paradox: I am already enlightened, including in moments when I'm struggling to become enlightened & hating every bit of it. Looking back, I'll see clearly that I was enlightened in those moments too. (I've tasted this, I think!)
Retweeted @aaronzlewis
the classic version of this quote says “You’re not stuck in traffic, you *are* traffic”. this phrasing is an unfortunate r…
@aaronzlewis Duuuude check out @BonnittaRoy on Emerge, with Six Ways To Go Meta. You'll love it so much. player.fm/series/emerge-…
@_awbery_ @context_ing @qorprate @KevinSimler @Meaningness @literalbanana @thewiseturtle @garybasin @ssica3003 @misen__ @danlistensto @SarahAMcManus @aaronzlewis Yeah it's so neat that @context_ing chose a bunch of people who would answer very consonant things, resulting in a list where many of us are like "yeah! these!" So the guessing here isn't "who wants this?" but "who's today's spokesperson for this aspect?"
@Conaw @uncatherio @utotranslucence Oh I thought she meant mics for recording. ...do both!
@thewiseturtle @SarahAMcManus @KevinSimler @danlistensto @ssica3003 @context_ing @misen__ @_awbery_ @qorprate @Meaningness @literalbanana @garybasin @aaronzlewis Yes, and in order to find out how you changed the future world, not only would you have to run reality far into the future, but you'd also have to run the *counterfactual* far into the future, so you'd have something to compare it with! (as if there were *one* counterfactual)
Replying to @qualiacomputer
@TurnkeyTyranny @raphamilliere @AllenSaakyan @sarahbouchat @jameswjesso @NeseLSD @neurodelia @jameslkent @RCarhartHarris @LeloSelen @anilkseth @ManojDoss @MendelKaelen @romy_lorenz Ha, this video is delightful.
@Meaningness Excellent! Instant updating = one of the delightful things about having your books be webpages :) This phrase I think has a grammar typo now tho (remove the "to"?) > When not to drawing implications from emotions
@Meaningness I was enjoying last night & still enjoying how in a thread where I link to a page that says "It can be confusing that one Buddhist teacher says ‘you must drink alcohol’ & another says ‘you must not drink alcohol’." I got this initial response: > ...probably right but I’m drunk...
Retweeted @KapilGuptaMD
An excerpt from today's Private Discourse . . .
@visakanv This so much. This feeling. Why Twitter? This feeling.
Retweeted @visakanv
a mutual: tweets something I know about me:
@visakanv You linked from the sax thread to this thread but it needs a link back too :) twitter.com/visakanv/statu…
@fortelabs @ClayNichols Reminds me of this poster @SarahAMcManus has: (click to see whole thing if you're looking at a square)
Thread · Onboarding newcomers into Twitter's threading culture · 1 of 9 tweets
Welp, haven't even read it yet but I'm sure this thread needs a link to @visakanv's new thread about the types of threads he makes:
@visakanv @albertwujj This exchange is delightful 🤣
@joeld @ctbeiser @vgr @Meaningness this is related to your interests:
@visakanv @hellosamrick @komal_42 @Prigoose
Replying to @RivalVoices
@RivalVoices @DougTataryn @MonasticAcademy @meditationstuff Oh no way! Perhaps I know you better than I know I know you... 🤔👁️
@komal_42 @DougTataryn talks on this podcast interview about this exact dynamic and a general structure for how to deal with self-undermining or relationship-undermining patterns like it. (CC @uhnuhgha) anchor.fm/emerge/episode…
@Triquetrea @visakanv Yeah likewise. Not enough time to have all of the conversations I want to have even WITHOUT spending time having conversations I don't want to have.
Retweeted @cowtung
@Malcolm_Ocean Memes like "justice" and "deserve" weighing people down.
@cowtung Sounds like you're one of my people! 😄
@VincentBarr Sounds like a great idea!
Thread · Publishing ideas without writing the introduction first · 9 of 10 tweets
Realized today that I have a ton of unpublished mini-theories or mini-essays or whatever. Okay, I knew that part. What I realized today was that the reason I haven't published them isn't "they aren't good enough" but "nobody has the context to follow them"
I've been meaning for 2 years to write up a satisfactory introduction to Perceptual Control Theory that would allow me to then say the things I was excited to say about it. But I could never get motivated enough to write that introduction.
Today, on an email thread, I spotted someone saying something about suffering (in the Buddhist sense) in term of error signals, and I just wrote up my theory from 2 years ago (lightly improved since) as a reply to that thread! (Here it is because #ErrTowardsPublishing)
There was a sense of "oh, there's at least one person here who will read this and be able to understand it roughly in the terms in which I'm thinking it". And that energized me to write it. This has been happening to me a lot; today's example was just clearer than the rest.
Other examples: yesterday I laid out a model in a chat to @reasonisfun, that I'd been refining for 6 months, because it was answering a question that almost nobody else in the world was asking because it relates a few different uncommon models.
Twitter is a fucking fantastic medium for this sort of thing. It organically constantly generates the phenomenon of "if you want to write an interesting essay, write it to an audience of one specific interested person."
A substantial fraction of my published-online writing in the last year has been not just on twitter but as replies to people. I realized today I need other mediums that also feel appropriate for writing about whatever feels exciting without worrying about giving context first.
This is a pretty simple thing on one level: post text to internet. I could use my own blog, or some new blog, or Medium, or whatever. I'm now imagining almost something like... starting with emails to people, then having an explicitly epistolary blog. Thoughts? Ideas?
Or what about even having a group blog somewhere, called something like "Thinking Edge", where multiple people can publish things that aren't assuming more than a handful of people can actually follow them, and that's fine. Or would that make it worse because it would diverge?
Trying to find a quote (I think it was from Chris Argyris' book on Org Learning?) ...something like: The farmer opened the door, and the young MBA pitched him his fancy new agriculture process. The farmer refused, saying "son, I don't farm half as well as I know how already"
Retweeted @jondubin
@Malcolm_Ocean I thought you'd appreciate this. It's an excerpt from Adyashanti's book True Meditation, where he describes a…
Retweeted @ajzsh
i think about this video like at least once a month
@_awbery_ @jondubin @QiaochuYuan Huh, fascinating stuff. I continue to sit with this profound & important question about the relationship of the brain hemispheres to the various notions of enlightenment.
@mykola @visakanv @andy_matuschak Yesssss. Also the bidirectional thing isn't really there. If I QT you, your original tweet shows no reference to my QT. CC @Conaw who is building stuff like this
Replying to @ryn__x
Retweeted @andy_matuschak
When I first read As We May Think* as a teenager, I was astonished by how much it predicted of the computer age in 1945…
@andy_matuschak @nsbarr @gmws82 you'll probably wanna check out this lenses thing if you haven't already seen it.
@Kinch_ahoy @andy_matuschak @michael_nielsen @jamescham Came across this weeks later and thought I'd ping it to see if it wants to materialize now (also possible you sent Andy a DM or an email)
@jonnym1ller Song I wrote a decade ago, that still rings deeply true: maleidoscope.bandcamp.com/track/who-am-i
"awakening is realizing that these *are* the good old days." - Romeo Stevens
@mykola This seems kind of like a choose-your-own-adventure twitter thread...
@jonnym1ller Yeah I think that every time I play it (whether live or by putting on the recording). Which maybe casts some doubt on this theory:
@jonnym1ller Mmm I'm relistening to the whole album for the 1st time in awhile and on this track I had forgotten how much the echoey lines (which were added at the studio, not present originally) evoke Flight of the Conchords (including one line being an explicit ref) maleidoscope.bandcamp.com/track/i-like-y…
@mykola Omnomnom. I've added you to my list of people who are thinking about this. I've been thinking about it for awhile, mostly tagged #TwitterReplacement
@QiaochuYuan Do everything at a standing desk, or if you need a break:
@QiaochuYuan Another option: lay in bed on your side, with your laptop sideways. This has worked for me sometimes, although again I just use the standing desk 100% of the time these days, and walk around my room or stretch while watching something.
@QiaochuYuan Option 3, to keep your current set-up, but avoid neck strain: get some of these prism glasses: (link to buy: amzn.to/30sZrSX)
I've recently been thinking a lot about how much harder it must become to change your mind about something once you've published a book about it—particularly a popular one. Urge for consistency is strong enough *without* thousands of artifacts.📖 Related:
Replying to @publius__2
@publius__2 @vgr Ahh, that's because you're buying prefab bunches at the grocery store. The solution is to tear off 2 from one green bunch, 2 from lime-colored bunch, 2 from one yellow bunch, & 1 from a totally ripe bunch, and then you've got a week of bananas. (obviously not always an option)
Retweeted @destraynor
Thinking about productivity and its tools * Your email is what *others* think you should work on. * Your Todo list is wha…
@QiaochuYuan Yeah they don't work as well for me as I'd like either. Still kinda confused about this.
Thread · Why feelings want to move, and unpublished old drafts · 2 of 10 tweets
@knottierwith Having taken Doug's workshop, my perspective is something like: most people have barely ever let their emotional brains speak at all. This means that there's little room for feelings to bear NEW info about new situations. Instead, they feel rejected bc of childhood rejection.
@knottierwith I've done Bio-Emotive process ~daily for the last few weeks, & I've already learned a tremendous amount about the past & present, from feeling my feelings. AND when it's about the past, it does tend to produce a letting go of the feeling. But that's diff than letting go of info.
Retweeted @visakanv
Nice Here’s my #1 rec for @twitter: realize that quote tweets are a killer feature of your product. Add it as a separate par…
@visakanv But this already applies to replies, no? I would say in principle (not sure if this is currently so) someone who you've blocked shouldn't be able to QT you. It should at most show up as just a raw hyperlink to your tweet, with no backref-like-this-proposal.
Retweeted @visakanv
The race is on to assemble the best possible articulations of ideas in ways that are not just funny or clever, but deeply res…
@graphrick @visakanv Hacky solution: search twitter for [URL-OF-THAT-TWEET] then use something like tab snooze (a browser extension) to make yourself see that search page again in like 6mo or a year. Should then show all of the tweets it's quoted in (though this doesn't work consistently).
@visakanv @Twitter Oh man I totally didn't see this until now. Very relevant to the #TwitterReplacement idea I've been musing about for awhile. I think if @jack is serious about incentivizing collaborative conversations, this QT thing is a key move.
Thread · Why feelings want to move, and unpublished old drafts · 8 of 10 tweets
@knottierwith Feelings *want* to move, in my experience. So "discharge it" is more like discharging... a sneeze? Or your bladder? Or something like that? It's a release of pressure that wanted to be released. The experience is very different than trying to "get rid of" the feelings somehow.
@knottierwith Ooh! An even better analogy. You know how when someone says something that reminds you of something you want to say, and there's a kind of pressure towards saying it, that gets released when you do? (And can be distracting if the convo moves on before you get a chance)
@knottierwith So basically the exact same thing happens with feelings, except most people don't know how to express their feelings at all, so it becomes a distraction because life moves on without it getting expressed. And then it's harder to express later because it's inappropriate.
@knottierwith The "harder to express later" thing is interesting, and an interesting counterpoint to the exchange over here that got us talking in the first place! twitter.com/knottierwith/s…
@knottierwith I've got a bunch of unpublished blog post drafts from 2-3 years ago, and some of them are simple models that could be edited & published now. But others are... ways I was making sense of things then, that I now consider inaccurate or confused, so I wouldn't want to just publish🤔
@knottierwith ie it wouldn't make any sense to publish them as if I'd written them this week. But, while confused, those structures (a) would probably still be useful to others and (b) are still helpful landmarks in my own conceptual landscape. So I sorta still want to publish them?
@knottierwith I mean part of me wishes I had just published them at the time, even given their need for clarity-edits. But then, idk, I might have gotten more fixated on them despite their confusions!
@knottierwith I think I need a second blog or something, where I can just put writing so I can link to it if need be, but nobody's following it so it wouldn't actually need to be edited to make sense or whatever. I keep coming back to this idea but I haven't done it...
@posobin Whoa, this is cool and I love this pitch for it! The Chrome Webstore page really needs some screenshots, showing how the sidebar works. Here's one of my blog's archive page:
@posobin (Not saying you should use this one, just putting it here for the sake of people on this twitter thread)
Awesome thread showcasing a cool extension designed to make the internet a more social place—next to each hyperlink on a page you can see which of your friends have tweeted about it!
@posobin Hmmm... seems it doesn't work on twitter itself! This permalink (Feb 8) should have a 🔘 Next feature to add I'd say would be something that explicitly counts the number of QTs, even just by oneself or oneself & one's mutuals or whatever, and displays that next to RTs and ♥s.
@mykola @visakanv @andy_matuschak @Conaw @posobin's extension Ampie is v close to being able to do this. Here's its sidebar showing QT'd instances of Visa's "now that more of us are playing the threading game" tweet. So it just needs the ability to embed a QT count next to the RT & ♥ counts. Which'd open the sidebar
@knottierwith Mmm yeah. "Mistake" can maybe be helpful in domains like human factors (analyzing patterns in user↔system interaction) but for navigating your own life they're generally counterproductive. I wrote a whole piece Transcending Regrets, Problems & Mistakes:
@knottierwith Hi! 👋🌊 I don't know who you are but I'm excited you've joined twitter as we seem to have similar explorations & interests from different perspectives! You look well-oriented but if you want a tour check out this intro thread I made for Qc:
Delightful thread about approaching habits from a mindset of learning & exploration rather than "I should do the correct thing"
@posobin Hilarious bug report: it inserted its little circle into an email I was writing, when I made a link. I was able to just delete it by backspacing and it didn't come back.
@posobin This one here. I checked a few and the permalink never gets a blue circle.
@posobin Oh, gotcha. Shall I take some for you?
I vaguely recall reading somewhere that one of the main considerations among voters is: "can I imagine this person as President?" Surprise surprise, playing president on TV helps you get elected as actual president! cnn.com/2019/04/21/eur…
@utotranslucence @visakanv Oooh, yeah. That's a very powerful fractal definition of suffering, and definitely seems related.
@IonaItalia @visakanv @LetterWiki 🤩 I will in a few weeks 🔜 (Am deep in a few other short-term projects atm and want to engage with this at the right moment!)
@HuanWin Oh man yeah I forget people don't know about those hotkeys. I usually do Ctrl+T to get a new tab for the search, but yeah. Don't use your mouse for this! (Blog-post-sized rant about this) malcolmocean.com/2015/12/interf…
@posobin I'm not getting a circle in the top right corner when I'm on that page, and if I load an adjacent tweet in that thread, I don't get one on the permalink. I do get a top-right circle on twitter/i/notifications.
@visakanv @Twitter I had a further thought that I wanted to plug back into this thread about QTs-as-killer-feature. The tweet composer needs a really solid UI for searching for tweet to embed
@visakanv @Twitter For an related UI/UX flow, consider the linker in google docs, which lets you paste a link but also automatically searches the web for whatever phrase you're linking. It obviously wouldn't work the same in Twitter, but I think the underlying inspiration is basically the same!
@visakanv @Twitter Whoaaaaaaaa. The ‣Headings field here (which I literally didn't notice existed until posting that tweet) is making me think it would be cool to be able to reference a tweet from the very storm you're composing, which you can't usually do because it doesn't exist & have a url yet
@posobin Wanting to double check that you understand the drive for having the QT number shown in line. Hard to tell in short-form with you just responding to feedback. See context here:
@QiaochuYuan ☝This tweet was the inspiration for me to go write these ones 👇
@QiaochuYuan Because obviously there's a limit to how many different accounts one can make a quick search for from:ACCOUNT. If I were designing this it would probably have one hotkey that would open the search from:SELF and another from:_____ and another with no from: param.
@visakanv @Twitter @jack Seriously how do we get this in front of Jack?
@visakanv @Twitter @jack Ofc, QTs are being one way among our peeps, but my impression is that elsewhere they have a a bad rep?
@visakanv @Twitter @jack This is of course because people don't understand that amplifying something you disagree with is still amplifying it. (See this thread of Visa's on this topic)
.@visakanv Just realized your name, as "Visa V", sounds the same as "vis-à-vis" (if pronounced with a french accent!) Which etymologically means "face to face" but ofc as a loanword in english it means "in regard to." = a perfect name for you vis-à-vis your threading/QTing!
@visakanv @Twitter @jack Oh! I am realizing that the first 3 times I read that tweet by PG I misunderstood what he was saying and thought he was saying the QT feature was bad. Seems he's just saying it's bad for giving feedback, which is basically true.
@posobin ....your app is already a twitter plug-in! Or I guess maybe more of a twitter plug-out. If you won't, would you be down if I forked your extension & used the relevant source code to build a new extension that does this? Would give a link back to Ampie where I post it.
Retweeted @erik_kaars
Ok, I'm dithering to avoid sending a piece of writing, SO how about a mini-thread on medieval cannibal babies? Medieval C…
Retweeted @callumflack
“you can't move beyond something you don't understand”
Thread · You can't be anti-something without being for something · 7 of 8 tweets
@TheMusingMind This thread on markets pointed at the whole thing in a very powerful way, which is pointing at how the issue is perhaps not so much about capitalism and more the erosion of that-which-is-not-capitalism. (Not saying these are unrelated!)
@TheMusingMind Also I came across both this thread of yours and this other one by @callumflack responding to both of them tonight. This tweet below relates to why people don't like "capitalism". Ofc, "communism" usually has same problems. cf Seeing Like A State twitter.com/BenMosior/stat…
@TheMusingMind @callumflack I basically don't believe it's possible to be anti-something. You need to be for something. It can be very helpful in that process to point at what you're not, but anyone who boos at capitalism without gesturing at what they're saying is better does not understand capitalism.
@TheMusingMind @callumflack To be clear: that does not mean the person's experience doesn't matter! Not knowing of an alternative economic system doesn't mean don't say "my life sucks under this one" or even point at structures that are producing problems. I'm just saying don't say "end capitalism"
@TheMusingMind @callumflack All of this is feeling related to this excellent essay by @everytstudies: (I guess because people could have the same views of structural problems & ideal solutions, and one says "end capitalism" and the other "fix capitalism") everythingstudies.com/2017/12/19/the…
@TheMusingMind @callumflack @everytstudies Oh! And you might like this thread of mine:
@TheMusingMind @callumflack @everytstudies (I'm feeling more verbose than organized atm so I'm probably not putting all of these links in quite the optimal places in your threads. But I'm very excited to have met you on twitter and am looking forward to interacting with future things you post! 🙃)
Retweeted @TheMusingMind
Thread to gather info/plant seeds on: What is "Post-Capitalism?" The more I dig into capitalist critique & the cultural…
Thread · You can't be anti-something without being for something · 1 of 8 tweets
@TheMusingMind @callumflack @everytstudies Oh man and here's another tweet from just now that also needs to be here in this mashup: "To develop a revolutionary science, we must overthrow the black banner of capitalism represented by the theory of relativity!"
@callumflack Have you read further at this point? Curious to hear how if at all the book has influenced your thinking or experiencing so far!
@Timber_22 @dthorson I just opened the doc linked above: "Part One Introduction: Curriculum and Consciousness A curriculum is a miniaturization of one civilization and a transition to the next." ...I only got this far but I'm pretty sure you'll want to read this.
I have no idea what I searched for on Amazon such that 70% of my Prime Day deals are onesies for toddlers.
I'm hanging out in this pomodoro coworking room for the next hour or so. Work periods start on the hour & half-hour, break :25-:30 and :55-:00. Come work with me 🙃 complice.co/room/general
Replying to @brozena
@brozena I finally got to reading this! As someone with hyperthymic temperament, I've long been keeping an eye out for what to keep an eye out for in terms of bipolar, and I'm appreciating the simple clarity of this piece.
@Timber_22 @dthorson Skimmed it in the course of formatting it for printing (google doc here: docs.google.com/document/d/1Lb…) and I noticed that it also brings in Gebser!
"flow state" almost feels like an oxymoron 🤔 Related:
@posobin Bug report: I'm composing a tweet and your extension keeps inserting a circle after the link here, and then it gets destroyed. Guessing this is due to the hack that makes the textbox have colored text (usually html under a transparent textbox)
Thread · Revisiting a 2011 bucket list
Just found a file called BucketList.txt from 2011, and I've done 3/5 things on it and feel that the other two are well within my capability if I wanted to but I'm not sure I actually *do*. ◻do a TED talk ◻publish a book ☑release a CD ☑found a company ☑go to burning man
TED seems like an arbitrary side quest to me now. It might happen incidentally in the course of me doing other interesting things and meeting interesting people, but if it doesn't that feels fine. Could at some point be instrumentally useful for pointing attention at something.
It seems fairly likely I'll write book-length things over the next decade, but I'm likely to make them be primarily online, so they can be: - less linear in structure - easily deep-referenced eg here on twitter - edited as I learn new things! 👇
I released a CD in 2012. That's actually related to how I came across BucketList.txt... I was looking to see if I still had the Reason audio files if I wanted to remix/remaster the tracks. maleidoscope.bandcamp.com/album/the-mind…
I founded a company in 2013: complice.co, a goal-oriented productivity app. It's bootstrapped & still just me, which is just the way I like it. I get to spend my time doing what I want, not responsible to employees nor VCs. It helps other people do meaningful things!
And I've been to Burning Man 4 out of the last 5 years! Not going this year because the last couple years were really stressful putting on a theme camp with messy social dynamics and it's time for a break. In future? Maybe. Kinda sick of dust so maybe regional burns.
Anyway, cool ☑. I guess I need a new bucketlist.txt Here's a few ideas of things that feel like they're implicitly on there already: ◻go indoor skydiving ◻see the aurora borealis ◻relatedly, experience a 24h day by being way north near summer solstice
These things don't feel particularly important. Everything that's important feels way too nuanced, improvisational, and interpersonally-connected to try to pin down to a few-word summary or to say "this is what *I* want to do"
Reading this fascinating bio of Gregory Bateson, and really enjoying this quote: > "This was always his style, to force the debate toward the larger picture, making any hasty intervention appear grotesque." aeon.co/essays/gregory…
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing I've had periods of my life where I do, but somewhat less so these days, for various reasons. I like them though and was recently thinking I might do it a bit more. (Though probably not much in the next couple of weeks because I'm attending/hosting a long event.)
@alifeofmovement Oooh I'm going to try this. My back has been feeling weird lately.
@selfprime I wrote a thing with this exact metaphor! malcolmocean.com/2016/06/you-fl…
@Conaw Related:
Retweeted @Conaw
Why is it that we have more energy to articulate an idea when we know we have an interested / possibly receptive audience? I ha…
@eriktorenberg Worth noting: most of these, as dysfunctions, are likely at least as much products of memes as genes. Not that genes aren't relevant, but memes outclass genes (evolve faster etc) so most selection is there. (Read @DavidDeutschOxf's Beginning of Infinity for how this came to be)
Retweeted @webdevMason
The idea that life is divided into fun thing (earned, relatively rare, & expensive) and not-fun things (done in exchange,…
I would so so so love to hear a politician stand up and begin their speech with this. @Evolving_Ego for President.
@Evolving_Ego Huh, I'd seen this before and when I saw it again right now I noticed it's very similar to something @BretWeinstein says in this talk: (the relevant section is something like 40mins in; it's been a few months since I watched it) youtube.com/watch?v=bz0oxI…
@Evolving_Ego @BretWeinstein Also I'm not suggesting you should watch it, just wanting to connect these two nodes in the grand zettelkasten.
@HuanWin @EzekielLucas_ @uberstuber @balajis @focusmate @mochiboard @RayDalio @CompliceGoals Ooh yeah. I've done some musing on what would make Complice into a full-fledged social network. Right now the social features are quite minimal—and I think that any truly productive SN will start as a productivity app then grow social, not the other way around.
@HuanWin @EzekielLucas_ @uberstuber @balajis @focusmate @mochiboard @RayDalio @CompliceGoals Currently the main social features are: - accountability partners - pomodoro coworking rooms (with silent video; chat during breaks) (complice.co/rooms) - a hidden alpha feature called Shared Purposes (eg "AI Safety" or "reduce CO₂")
Replying to @brozena
@brozena I think the sense of "this is all coming together" but a lack of some deeper coherence. One thing that causes me to be deeply not-worried right now is the substantial extent to which I'm doing collective decision-making and I trust my colleagues to not be manic.
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @gordonbrander @_awbery_ @utotranslucence @QiaochuYuan Oooh yeah. I love the color palette of the whole situation too. My bedroom+office basically has no chairs. 2 days ago I did some carpentry to convert a 🎹keyboard to standing height. Floorspace for yoga, dancing. Zafu for meditation. Futon bed/couch.
@context_ing @gordonbrander @_awbery_ @utotranslucence @QiaochuYuan I sometimes use a bluetooth keyboard sitting on my futon/bed/couch, with my screen (usually workflowy) zoomed in like 250%. Fun way to use my computer, sitting comfily but not hunched over a little laptop.
Retweeted @reasonisfun
Micro crowdfunding where you vote with your wallet which thing a creator makes next (blog post, video, art, Tweetstorm, et…
@reasonisfun @vidythatte @context_ing @aaronzlewis @Conaw @ultimape @GRITCULT @visakanv @KevinSimler @vgr I think the way to do that would be something like "Add IFTTT on sms or some messenger client, then set up a thing so when you message them, it gets sent to Day One". IFTTT supports Day One so this might already be possible.
Thread · Features I want in ebook readers and reading apps · 13 of 16 tweets
#ThingsIwantToExist: better ebook readers. Hell, a better app for reading digital text altogether—when I shift from "ebook reader" to "interactive reading" I find myself thinking current best thing might almost be "paste into gdocs" and that's nuts.
Here's a related thread someone else made, with a few suggestions (spaced repetitions, auto-summaries, etc)
I think it can go WAY further though. We're still stuck in skeumorphisms. We have 100s of experiments at UIs for composing or editing one's own writing (that needs more innovation too but 🤫) but so few takes on "how to relate to prose you've never read before"!
SOCIAL STUFF I'd like to see in e-readers: - see what/when friends are reading - share highlights & comments with friends (like gdocs but better) - ask friends to comment on a given passage - direct integration with tweeting passages—& allow them to somehow deeplink into the book
CREATIVE STUFF I'd like to see in e-readers - ability to remix books by reorganizing sections or pulling in other passages - ability to link between sections of books - ability to draw or record audio as a comment (ofc, would want all of these to be shareable too)
MNEMONIC STUFF I'd like to see in e-readers: - make your own SR cards inline by blanking out words - share SR cards - make & share song mnemonics - embed spaced repetition cards in book/doc (see @michael_nielsen & @andy_matuschak's work 👇) x.com/qualmist/statu…
NONLINEARITY STUFF I'd like to see in e-readers: (even with paper, who needs to read books linearly?) - implementations of different paths through non-fiction books - ability to track sections/chapters/pages read without going in order
RANDOM STUFF I'd like to see in e-readers: - polls & surveys - relatedly, live-updating stats - a VR e-reader where you can have dozens of pages floating in mid-air and can draw connections between them😎 - publish improvements/corrections (with history!)
As people are beginning to notice, Twitter is basically the best app for the social & creative stuff above, which is NUTS given that it was made for public texting and evolved as a news platform. And it needs major work to be optimal for this purpose.
Another piece on the importance of QTs. But there are like 4 non-existing relationships tweets could have! And the links between apps-for-reading and twitter are still too weak. Including no ability to copy-paste original text as text (because screenshot).
@fortelabs has been working hard on *workflows* for interactive reading ("progressive summarization") but the tools for this are still far from ideal. And the kinds of workflows that we can't even imagine because the tools aren't there.
@Conaw has been working on some incredible software prototypes in this space. Not focused on e-readers but his app does include progressive summarization etc. Check out this video demo and request access at roamresearch.com youtube.com/watch?v=WwI5mu…
Okay, hopefully that's the best thread so far on how much more awesome reading digitally can be. Comment below with further desiderata & related projects and let's flesh this out!
Thread · Design notes for a conversation-optimized Twitter replacement · 1 of 17 tweets
🧵🧵Meta-thread For over a year I've been thinking & modelling about "what would twitter be like if it were actually optimized for conversation?" Mostly I've been tagging my thoughts #TwitterReplacement but haven't been collecting them anywhere. (A lot is still in workflowy too)
Thread · Things I want to exist: apps, tools, and funding mechanisms · 5 of 21 tweets
🧵🧵Meta-thread Things I Want To Exist (that afaik currently don't) Click through to the specific threads in order to discuss desiderata or existing solutions. Use this thread for sharing your own #ThingsIWantToExist! (But keep it meta; make your own thread & embed it here)
A version of twitter (or alt UI for twitter) that's actually optimized for having dense rhizomatic conversations. I have been collecting design thoughts (tagged #TwitterReplacement) for this for over a year; message me if you're planning to try making it!
@reasonisfun just tweeted about a micro-crowdfunding idea💡 (inspired by something I had tweeted! This is why twitter is so great. And her tweet inspired this very thread about #ThingsIWantToExist)
10× better podcast apps. This thread has a great list of desiderata:
Ugh, and talking about podcast apps is prompting me to note that our apps for digital reading also need major attention. Such core tasks with so little innovation! What are all of these tech companies DOING? So just made this epic thread:
@reasonisfun @context_ing Speaking of inspiration, your idea inspired me to make this thread of things I want to exist (including sharing this idea of yours)
@reasonisfun @context_ing And then making *that* thread inspired me to make a whole thread about better technology for reading:
Thread · Meme drives: gene drives applied to self-replicating ideas · 10 of 11 tweets
meme drives
...what? there's a thing called a gene drive that makes a gene spread really fast through a population from a small start, basically by making it always (or usually) be inherited rather than only a 50/50 shot.
In using the term "meme" here, I'm referring to "an idea that causes someone who holds it to spread it to others". Quoting @DavidDeutschOxf: > "A culture is a set of ideas that cause their holders to behave alike in some ways. [...Memes are] ideas that are replicators."
So extending the "gene drive" concept to memes, we get a notion of a particular variation of a meme that tends to spread itself extra-virulently. That has a particular tendency to outcompete other memes at the reproduction stage, not just via later selection.
I'm recognizing that this kind of sounds like this disturbing phenomenon that @nntaleb talks about in this article (/chapter from Skin in the Game) describing how the majority can end up with a medium.com/incerto/the-mo…
I originally imagined that there also might be creative ways to use the idea of a "meme drive" as well, but as I thought about it more I found myself thinking "this seems to describe a kind of meme that would tend to spread among people even if it was bad for them."
Which... makes sense, given that one of the main proposed uses of a gene drive might be to literally kill off an entire species of mosquito (the ones that carry malaria, dengue, & zika) by eg making all offspring male. This only works if gene spreads though maladaptive.
Then I realize out David Deustch (quoted above) has written extensively about this exact structure in The Beginning of Infinity. For most of human history (& prehistory!) the kinds of memes we've had have been optimized for replicating, not truth or subjective well-being.
The "meme drive" metaphor then allows us to think about how these "static memeplexes" are so sticky (eg why ex-Christians still act as if they're afraid of hell and parents do all sorts of shit to their kids they swore they wouldn't)
...and furthermore allows us to ask questions like "given that these static memes have a meme drive, do we need an even more powerful meme drive to replace them?" and "what would that even mean?"
@eriktorenberg @DavidDeutschOxf It's profoundly changeable within one's own lifetime, rather than being something we'd need genetic engineering to change. Note that changing one's core memeplex is far from *easy*. But it's way more tractable than CRISPR-cas9 & gene drives.
@_awbery_ @utotranslucence @context_ing @_awbery_ can I see a picture of this near-horizontal relaxed workstation?
@eriktorenberg @DavidDeutschOxf Worth reading Joseph Henrich's The Secret of Our Success, as well, for a detailed description of *how* memes outclass genes from an evolutionary perspective and how humans are optimized for memetic evolution.
@posobin Yes and eventually you run over the character limit.
@Altimor @readwiseio Here's an accidental @readwiseio connection I got. First book is The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks:
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @armandcognetta @readwiseio
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing Yeah. It makes me both sad and also hopeful. Sad that so many billions are going into software development and it's mostly reinventing old wheels. (How many different podcast apps? etc). Hopeful because
@posobin Ah, yes it is. I'd switch to the new one if I could.
This is why the downloadable @WorkFlowy app is useless—no tabs. I have at least 4 WorkFlowy tabs open basically at all times. At *least*. And they're part of my working memory. And switching will not do. You can do offline in-browser now. Do it!
Replying to @brozena
@brozena Yeah. Seems to me like the dream of anyone who has tasted hyperthymia/hypomania/mania is to find a way to harness the incredible mental energy in a sane way 🤯 Like a nuclear power plant ⚡vs a nuclear bomb 💣
@brozena I think that collaboration with other people are key to achieving that dream. Which presents a new challenge: How can I move fast & fluidity with other people, without stepping on each others' toes?
@posobin Seems not. New accounts & gradually enabled for existing accounts. Just tried googling "switch to new twitter interface" and got a headline "Twitter is changing Twitter to be more like mobile app" which is unnerving in the context of your recent thread:
@visakanv My face when I saw these pics. Damn. Gorgeous. (a different photo, but the same expression on the same person)
@andy_matuschak I have a tiny thing I do which is that I keep a little container of (uniquely delicious) chocolate-covered coconut-covered almonds that I call "Victory Beans" and whenever I or my peeps do something worth celebrating, we each eat one. It's a little ritual to reify the moment.
@andy_matuschak I also log them, so it becomes a record of a bunch of moments when we felt really jubilant. I'm thinking I might want a name other than "victory" though because I've recently been reflecting that framing things in terms of "winning" reinforces subtle zero-sum assumptions.
@andy_matuschak I think I'm inclined to go with "Jubilation Beans" \o/ Anyway, it's really important that you keep this meaningful/sacred and not just a food nor a *reward*. Meaning make it small, keep other sources of chocolate in your life, and take a moment to really savor the experience.
@visakanv Panic! At The Disco is famous (in my head anyway) for super-blatantly and creatively ignoring the obvious Schelling name for a song. So the name becomes more of a commentary or a caption. First album 👇Pretty sure none of these tracks' lyrics contain their titular phrases.
@visakanv > "Things will tell you their names" Reminds me of an article I can't now find, about the new Detective Pikachu movie, that was saying "The fundamental difference between animals & pokémon is humans had to classify animals but pokémon tell you their names. They come categorized!"
@fortelabs @TheLaurenValdez Most people who think they're going meta are actually just spitballing & are still stuck in the frame. Like Vizzini in this scene in The Princess Bride. (I wrote a whole article about this here: malcolmocean.com/2015/05/meta-i…) youtu.be/U_eZmEiyTo0?t=…
Retweeted @fortelabs
Most people who think they’re contrarians are actually just contradictarians H/t @TheLaurenValdez
@posobin Wondering if you have thoughts on this fork prospect? I'm not going to have time to do it for a few weeks but I'd enjoy having it brewing in the back of my mind.
@visakanv Also related: how do people name instrumental music?! I've written a bunch of lyrical songs and either I use a word/phrase from the lyrics or there's an obvious way to say what the song is "about". But an instrumental song may not have an "about".
@posobin Okay cool, let's stay in dialogue about what's possible here. I deeply appreciate the work you're doing, with the extension and your threads about technology & design. 🙏
@jondubin @QiaochuYuan @Conaw @HareeshWallis Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh this is gorgeous and an amazing missing piece in a model I'm fleshing out about "when is the thing that's not your intellect your right hemisphere and when is it your emotional brain?"
Retweeted @jondubin
@QiaochuYuan @Conaw Oh cool, @hareeshwallis touches on this in Tantra Illuminated
@jondubin @QiaochuYuan @Conaw @HareeshWallis I am so stoked to be able to start getting really clear about this stuff. People use terms like "system 1 & system 2" and by "S2" they mean the verbal loop (~= leftHem neocortex?) & by "S1" they mean EVERYTHING ELSE. But there's a lot to differentiate in that "everything else"!
@jondubin @QiaochuYuan @Conaw @HareeshWallis It makes sense to me that the left neocortex would treat everything else as a big blob, because it first & foremost makes a categorical distinction between its coherent articulable worldview (which it trusts at a level before awareness) and, well, everything else.
Haven't thought about this idea for more than a minute but even if it's terrible, it seems well worth discussing.
@tscottphillips 1st thought: whoa yeah, makes total sense. Velocity of money! 📈🚀 2nd thought: oh and this functions similarly to scrip currencies with démurrage (~=negative interest) 3rd thought: what about somehow applying this on the level of banks? Basically route bank profit to public good
@tscottphillips I lean bearish on govt ability to spend wisely, for obvious reasons like bureaucratic inefficiency, but ceteris paribus (given the govt has budget of $X to spend) it seems that it would be better for it to come from something like wealth tax than something like income tax.
@QiaochuYuan @visakanv Of course! I'm not saying I *like* that PATD does this. It's still annoying just like the other ones Visa's pointing at. It's just not boring, is all. Naming Everybody Dance Now "Gonna Make You Sweat" was just a plain old mistake/accident.
Thread · How a song title carries the artist's commentary
How can a song have canonical, common-knowledge commentary by the artist? (without putting it in the song) What media allow that? Naming it weirdly is kind of the only way to do it... (inspired by this tweet in @visakanv's thread)
Here's a really interesting example: James Blake's The Wilhelm Scream The song's lyrics talk about "falling", and those lyrics have a very different meaning due to the title, which also contrasts loudly with the softness of the minimalist ambient genre. youtube.com/watch?v=isIABK…
That in itself would be worth tweeting. #ButWaitTheresMore! Now listen to *this* song (make it to at least 1m30s before you keep reading my thread, if you want the full effect) youtube.com/watch?v=b3SAli…
<!-- seriously there are spoilers ahead --> <!-- are you sure you want spoilers? --> <!-- it's okay if you do, it's just better if you've had the chance to listen -->
Okay, wtf is going on here? Well. James Litherland's song is the original. James Blake's song is... something between a cover and a new song sampling/referencing the old one. And I think that re-titling it something distinct (and not just "Falling") is saying: this is a new song.
And not just "this is a new song" but "this is a new song with a new meaning". The mood of James Blake's song feels kind of nihilistic, dissociated. That, combined with the title The Wilhelm Scream, gives the whole thing somewhat of a dark vibe.
#ButWaitTheresMore: James Litherland is James Blake's father. 🤯
Crazy stuff, right? Anyway, somehow this is all feeling connected to what I was tweeting yesterday about what it would mean to be able to remix books, and how twitter acts as a medium for that. What's possible in music? What does song metadata look like?
One incredible resource for this is whosampled.com, which among other things has caused me to discover that a bunch of riffs I like (from Daft Punk, Pretty Lights, etc) are actually samples from elsewhere!
In searching for that tweet, I discovered an old thread of mine that is very very related to this James Blake/Litherland thing: (click around the thread—there's a great exchange w/ @callumflack that's buried by how twitter organizes replies by default)
Anyway, I'm going to wrap by linking this funk cover of The Wilhelm Scream by @The_Bamboos—my favorite version. It doesn't have this dark vibe and instead feels sensual, and actually closer to the original James Litherland style than to James Blake! 🙃 youtube.com/watch?v=-4CTVt…
@QiaochuYuan @visakanv Started replying with further thoughts here then decided at tweet #3 that they wanted to be their own thread. So deleted the first three to minimize duplication & confusion.
@QiaochuYuan @visakanv hoisting tweets to top-level out of threads when
@danlistensto I'm gonna tag @Z_Jacobi here because he's into this stuff and has thoughts on policy and how to increase velocity of money etc.
@visakanv Stevie Wonder names some of his influences in a song: > For there's Basie, Miller, Satchmo > And the king of all Sir Duke > And with a voice like Ella's ringing out (Count Basie, Glenn Miller, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald) youtube.com/watch?v=6sIjSN…
@visakanv Aside? Jacob Collier has a fantastic video deconstructing the musical influences of that song in particular: - R&B but with jazz - intro: big band swing drums - then motown drums - chromatic stuff - solo in most universal scale: pentatonic - blues scale youtube.com/watch?v=CZP6no…
@visakanv Something that blew my mind in that video, that seems obvious but I'd never noticed before: The blues scale is a pentatonic scale with one additional note added! (If you're familiar with black keys = pentatonic, here's the E-flat blues scale! 👇) Thanks @JacobCollier ♥🎶
Replying to @brozena
@brozena Yeah, and there are profound insights related to what it takes to jam musically and what it takes to improvise through life with people. (the replies to this 👇tweet include an article I wrote about regret, inspired by music as well)
@visakanv @Twitter Another thought I wanted to add to this thread for reference: For QTs to assume their rightful role as killer feature, their text needs to be embedded in full, not sometimes (and inconsistently!) truncated.
Thread · Replies vs quote tweets as directional links between tweets
a reply is a way of saying "now that you've read THAT, read THIS" a QT is a way of saying "now that you've read THIS, read THAT" (From my current musings on the kinds of relationships tweets can have. Importantly, in both cases, the "that" tweet is the older one.)
Note that this works the way it does due to the current main limitation of QTs, which is that you can't tell by looking at a tweet that it has been quoted somewhere. Otherwise QT would also have the reply property.
This is bringing up a metaphor of linked lists & pointers from CS data structures. Replies are technically a doubly-linked list, but QTs are currently basically singly linked (Have to perform a search operation to go backwards)
Context: starting to work on this question I tweeted about yesterday on the relationships between tweets.
Where I got started was reading this 2011 @kevin2kelly article on What Books Will Become that @procrastiwork linked me over here, which prompted musing about the question "What is prose?" twitter.com/procrastiwork/…
I'm noticing I get very different answers to "what is a tweet/reply/QT/blog/book?" when I think as a writer vs a reader vs a commenter.
Tagging @visakanv, @conaw, @posobin, @prigoose, @aaronzlewis, @myk, @gmws82. Noticing that—relevantly—I am tagging you way down here, but you will want to go back up to the first tweet in this thread. Which I would love to embed here as I compose, but ofc it doesn't exist yet!
And of course the big-picture context for this thread is my continuing exploration of my #TwitterReplacement concept:
I'm going to add this tweet as a side-tweet to that one, but that means I have to tag you all again for you to see it, because twitter-thread-logic. Hmm 🤔 @visakanv, @conaw, @posobin, @prigoose, @aaronzlewis, @myk, @gmws82 Okay, start here 👇
@robertskmiles @visakanv I love that you have actual answers for me! I don't have anything I want to do with them, but I still find it delightful.
Retweeted @reasonisfun
The moral of this story shouldn't be "put your phone in another room for boring tasks", but "do activities you can be inte…
@knottierwith Oh, say more? Internal conflict is a topic of deep interest to me! malcolmocean.com/2017/06/toward…
Retweeted @reasonisfun
"Discipline is remembering what you want." When that works, it's not 'discipline'; it's getting less conflicted.
@tscottphillips I only know one booksworth (Rethinking Money) about démurrage and it's very hard to explain how/why it's different from absurd inflation, but basically you have to pay a fraction of the $ you have each month, to keep it as valid currency (typically 1%)
@tscottphillips Among other things, this means that if you're going to owe money next month, you might pay in advance so *they* need to pay the 1%, not you. So you pay them. But then *they* don't want to hold it either, so they hire others to do more stuff.
@tscottphillips Note that 1%/mo is 12%/year, so it's hard to beat that with investments or something. But it's not 12% inflation, because each month when you get paid $X, bread still costs $Y that month. It's just that you can't buy as much of next-month's bread with this month's paycheck
@tscottphillips Anyway, people (such as @Z_Jacobi) have told me that démurrage is not actually the best way to increase monetary velocity, but I don't actually understand the other technologies very well.
@tscottphillips Re 3/banks... I don't really know! It was a half-assed thought: "where does wealth live?" "banks". But as people have pointed out on my thread over here, the wealth taxes would create some pretty bad incentives.
@nJJJJRh Yeah in practice it depends. When starting a thread with a QT, it often means "here's a thought inspired by this tweet/thread" so read inside first. When embedding mid-thread, it's usually more like "here's further thoughts on this subject" or "pithy counterpoint to tweet"
@_awbery_ @JaredJanes @utotranslucence @context_ing I see your treadmill-desk-with-split-keyboard and raise you one exercise ball. (I also have a split keyboard there.) (I've only done this once or twice.)
@Conaw @coponder Here's one way you might be able to tell which it is: (half-joking, but this thread is defs relevant)
@TheMusingMind @jdj_writes @dthorson @JaredJanes @MonasticAcademy @DougTataryn I'm inclined to frame Show Up as the part where in each moment you act as caringly as you know how, regardless of how much of the other 3 Ups you have. This is paradoxically both a discipline one can commit to and a way of viewing what everyone is already doing and can't not.
@diviacaroline @Aella_Girl @rothosphere In addition to falsely dividing feelings & reason, it also falsely implicitly fuses feelings & intuition (which are totally different parts of the brain!)
@KevinSimler @adambaybutt Another issue is that most of the object-level problems that are before us at the moment are wicked problems / complex systems. Part of what'as unique about the moon landing is that it's still a *complicated* system, without optimization pressures working *against* it.
@KevinSimler @adambaybutt (click through for some explanations of "complex" vs "complicated", for those unfamiliar)
@KevinSimler @adambaybutt Contrast the non-conflicted nature of the moon landing with trying to achieve: - social or political change in the face of lobbyists - cures for diseases that can mutate - AI Safety in the face of 100× as much $ going towards capability research
@jdj_writes @TheMusingMind @dthorson @JaredJanes @MonasticAcademy @DougTataryn Yeah, before I learned the Ups I started working on my own model of dimensions of self-improvement. Still a rough sketch but something like - embodiment (trauma processing & structural integration) - feeling your feelings - ontological fluidity - awakening - mindset
@jdj_writes @TheMusingMind @dthorson @JaredJanes @MonasticAcademy @DougTataryn Part of the inspiration was listening to this interview of Culadasa which highlights that one can be enlightened yet be a jerk due to unprocessed feelings. So those are separate dimensions. Then what else?
@jdj_writes @TheMusingMind @dthorson @JaredJanes @MonasticAcademy @DougTataryn I'm thinking of these dimensions as being in one sense orthogonal, but like how north & east are orthogonal on a map. Depending on the territory, you might need to go a bit north in order to keep going east, & vv. Being able to move in all the dimensions makes other dims easier.
Replying to @FateOfTwist_
@FateOfTwist_ @RivalVoices @meditationstuff MOAR SYNTHESIS! I feel sad in relation to how many people just read & regurgitate models/practices, rather than constantly trying to integrate them all together like I do. (There are others who do this but it's surprisingly rare even among people whose thinking I like.)
@FateOfTwist_ @RivalVoices @meditationstuff (And I don't just mean naive modernist integration like it all needs to be one coherent theory of everything. I also mean simple things like "well what would this model say about that model?" what kind of conversation would they have?)
@xuenay @jondubin @QiaochuYuan @Conaw @HareeshWallis Ha, I'm not surprised. Makes me ponder the use of the Systems 1 & 2 example in my post about naming things. Maybe it would have gone way better if they had just said "fast-cognition & slow-cognition". Way fewer confusions with those terms I think. malcolmocean.com/2016/02/sparkl…
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @diviacaroline @QiaochuYuan Mmm I like what this is saying and am finding it very hard to read. I think part of it's the font on @TheSideViewCo which is 😒. Another piece is like, I want a high-level overview of the whole thing so I can see where the pieces fit and where it's going. Tossing into Pocket.
Retweeted @AndJohnsonAnd
this is wise. i remember thinking this on my own, writing it down, and, later, agreeing with it. but also, on another o…
@TheSideViewCo @context_ing @diviacaroline @QiaochuYuan ♥ hi! Thought I'd be saying "Switch from whatever font you're using to something normal" but when I checked the CSS the answer is actually even simpler than that! Remove the line of code that says: letter-spacing: -1px Dunno who thought Georgia looks better smushed.
@AE_Robbert @TheSideViewCo @context_ing @diviacaroline @QiaochuYuan Once it's not smushed, Georgia is a fine font and the text immediately feels readable rather than something that hurts my eyes to squint at. You could choose a different body font and that would also be fine, as long as you don't similarly squish it.
@AE_Robbert @TheSideViewCo @context_ing @diviacaroline @QiaochuYuan Yeah! I love how I @'d you and you were like "oh yeah?" and now things are being fixed. Super satisfying flow of feedback!
@AE_Robbert @TheSideViewCo @context_ing @diviacaroline @QiaochuYuan Probably at least a dozen other people explicitly thought "I don't like this font" (general heuristic is for every bug report there are at least 10 people suffering silently) Will be interesting to see if your Avg Time On Page increases (might decrease because faster reading!)
@AE_Robbert @TheSideViewCo @context_ing @diviacaroline @QiaochuYuan Oh man but now I'm thinking about those studies that showed better retention with harder-to-read fonts. (Although that's no good if people just leave or switch to skimming) qz.com/1417818/hard-t…
@Timber_22 @dthorson @jdj_writes @TheMusingMind @JaredJanes @MonasticAcademy @DougTataryn I have a goal on my Complice account called Digest Blocks...
@Timber_22 @dthorson @jdj_writes @TheMusingMind @JaredJanes @MonasticAcademy @DougTataryn I think that the reason you can't find another good term for "Showing Up" is that it' actually confused and wants to be a few different things: - Relating - Caring - Working ... based on those three, I'm inclined to call it Collaborating
Retweeted @FateOfTwist_
9/ I guess I think there are a lot of habits to unlearn and assumptions to excise from being a rationalist. Postrationali…
@uncatherio There's a piece about exactly this in a book called The Rough Patch! I can't find our copy atm tho. Something about having the space to lose yourself in play, including forgetting that your container-holder (parent or whoever) exists, and when you come back, they're still there.
Thread · Meme drives: gene drives applied to self-replicating ideas · 1 of 11 tweets
Thread · A taxonomy of what writers do: integrate, distill, expand, extend · 9 of 10 tweets
Found myself thinking about different kinds of thinker/writers today, inspired by this exchange with @FateOfTwist_
and then by seeing @visakanv saying "a big part of why I write is so I can think clearly without all of the inelegant clutter of (most) other people’s words, and models. It’s an act of compression. and thinking huh, this is a different yet valuable thing
And now I'm like "hmm I want a taxonomy of different roles that writers play in their writing". For instance, I generally aspire to integrate models with each other and/or with experiences I've had, to say new things. "What does X look like through lens of Y?"
Integrating is I think a little different than something more like "connecting" or "collecting" which are more just saying "these are related" but aren't seeking to precisely say how. I do lots of this too.
Others aspire to distill: in that thread, Visa describes how he isn't just summarizing one article or book but reading a ton of different things and then sharing only the best & juiciest bits.
Others expand and flesh out. I think there was a guy who wrote a book on how to use @Evernote (no, not @fortelabs). Can imagine that as turning a few basic how-tos or feature manuals into really in-depth instructions. And I think they hired him? concept → short-story → novel
Others aspire to elaborate or extend. "Okay, so if this model is true, that would imply..." "What happens if we take this idea seriously?"
What else? I just threw this thread together, so surely my categories are totally incomplete and also ill-defined. Maybe some sort of Clarifier can come along and clean it up...
Also interested in which of these purposes you resonate with, and who you think really exemplifies the other types. And are there better ways to phrase the motivations here?
Replying to @FateOfTwist_
@FateOfTwist_ @RivalVoices @polyaletheia See this is why we need better ebook reader apps. (also key to have a bluetooth keyboard so you can type fast on your phone)
Retweeted @tristanharris
Saw an early screening of "The Great Hack" – terrific film profiling the backstory of Cambridge Analytica, out on Netfli…
"I'm looking at the Home Depot website, and the price is good but... there's no way to know what's in store. which I guess is the nature of the global VUCA situation!"
Replying to @keendisregard
@KeenDisregard @callumflack @cognazor Friendly reminder that we're coming into late July :D
Retweeted @MilanGriffes
"In the high-threat mode, everything is flagged as a potential threat, including exiting the high-threat mode." -- Romeo…
I have a floating notion that by the end of the Aro email course on meditation, the instructions again become very minimalist, almost like True Meditation (whose only instructions are "no manipulation") Trying to recall if @QiaochuYuan told me this or...
@visakanv The complice.co today page is intended to be this. Depending on phase of day it fills one of 3 roles: 1. asking "What am I intending to towards my goals do today?" 2. checklist of such items + pomodoro timer 3. asking "What did I actually achieve today?"
@visakanv Writing this reply to you is reminding me that since getting back onto twitter in a major way, I haven't done any threads on Complice or productivity more generally. So that's now percolating and we'll see what arises!
Got myself & @CompliceGoals this tiny profile on @IndieHackers' instagram. The amount of editorial work it took to distill my biz story into these few sentences (while staying accurate) was quite something! instagram.com/p/B0OZ27FnmgN/
Here's my longer interview on IH from a few years ago: (it's one of my "you need to read this before asking me for business advice" articles, so I don't have to repeat myself) indiehackers.com/businesses/com…
Retweeted @noididntreadit
@Malcolm_Ocean I've kept up with this for the most part. It's more fun if I try to fantasize it, turn the todos into go…
@reasonisfun @diviacaroline @Aella_Girl @rothosphere Not intrinsically. My remark was intended to be something like "this isn't just the difference between the G key and the A key—one is a computer keyboard⌨ and the other is a musical keyboard!🎹"
@reasonisfun @diviacaroline @Aella_Girl @rothosphere (When I started with the key metaphor I was originally planning to say "one is the keyboard and the other is the mouse". Which also works. Point being, totally different types of things, even if they can work in concert.)
@reasonisfun @diviacaroline @Aella_Girl @rothosphere One key difference between what I'm calling "intuition" and "feeling" is: • intuition🧠 (~right neocortex?) is context-sensitive & aware of complex factors • feeling🧠 (amygdala etc) is simple & atemporal ("I feel scared because you spoke loudly like my father did when drunk")
@reasonisfun @diviacaroline @Aella_Girl @rothosphere (Note that most people don't actually have the ability to articulate what the feeling brain is experiencing. They just react as if the drunk father is in the room threatening them. This is part of what the Bio-Emotive Framework offers—ways to differentiate what's arising.)
Hmm now I'm playing around with the idea of: - left neocortex ~ computer keyboard⌨ - right neocortex ~ musical keyboard 🎹 - emotional brain ~ keys to your past 🔑
Thread · A taxonomy of what writers do: integrate, distill, expand, extend · 1 of 10 tweets
Ha, delightful, @Mellow_Mizz made his own version of this, Extending it in the process:
Retweeted @SteveStuWill
Amazing time-lapse footage of a day in the life of a pair of houseplants. Plants are so much more active than we usually…
@visakanv I've been thinking about creating an epistolary blog or something like that, and that seems really relevant to this thread.
Retweeted @Azeirah
@geoffreylitt I'm working on an interactive zettelkasten browser, I think it might be interesting to you to see where this is…
Replying to @_Rian_Stone
@_Rian_Stone @GRITCULT Understand the structure of ideas, not just a bunch of words and phrases.
Has anyone yet found a way to make the red dot on the new-twitter favicon go THE FUCK AWAY? Fav or RT if you also want this. I'll reply to this tweet & @ everyone who does* once I find a solution. *(unless this goes crazy viral ofc)
@ConceptualJames Fuck.
@fourfoldvision Have you seen this thread? It's an amazing reflection on the subject and speculation on what might be needed.
Retweeted @RaphiSee
A new point of view found me today: an unsustainable system is not unnatural. It is just a transition period between more sta…
@visakanv Relatedly—is "freedom" is even possible in this sense?
@visakanv Also you VV & @QiaochuYuan will both appreciate that I found that tweet by searching for stuff from QC on consent, finding this tweet then scrolling and seeing the embedded one by @yhazony, then searching that tweet to find this OTHER one QC quoted it in.
@ToKTeacher @hunchandblunder Mmm, I think you're making the assumption that the static/coercive memes are contained in the overt content of what is or isn't taught, as opposed to being contained in the crazy-making experience of being brainwashed into thinking you're learning things when you're actually not.
@ToKTeacher @hunchandblunder In practice it can be both. My sense is that this is one way in which the transition from static to dynamic memeplexes is a WEIRD place and can't simply be modelled as being X% static, (100-X)% dynamic. so people think schools are for learning to think
@rikvannoord Can someone test if "woman is to doctor as man is to X" returns "nurse" using the original code?? (CC'ing @BenGoldhaber via whom I found your thread)
@namiiMercurii @reasonisfun @diviacaroline @Aella_Girl @rothosphere Yeah ♥ Lots of resonance with what you're saying here. *And* I will continue to talk about parts of the brain because they do matter! Concretely: LHem stroke patients have very different personalities & outcomes than RHem stroke patients. Nuancedly:
@QiaochuYuan Mmmm yeah. I like what @RobinSloan wrote about this, as an art installation in the form of a thread on a fictional social network: platforms.fyi Excerpts (but go read the whole thing, it's not long)
@QiaochuYuan @robinsloan Probably reasons this wouldn't work, but I think it's worth considering if micropayments might solve this. Each RT/QT sends 10¢ to the original author, so you don't want to RT/QT stuff you don't want to support.
@QiaochuYuan @robinsloan Ugh, first reason this might be a bad idea is that even though it's crazy cheap it might also at other times incentivize people to re-post clever remarks rather than RT them—ooh, especially if you want the dough for getting lots of RTs on it.
Retweeted @Rainmaker1973
Ok, we had seen a solar eclipse from the Moon before [buff.ly/2YrAg2I] but this view captured the Moon, the Eart…
Retweeted @leaacta
which of these is most real?
@jondubin Mmm yeah. My perspective on the thing you're doing here is that it's really important and also that it's possible (and awesome) to reach a point where you don't have to forgive because you never considered anything a mistake in the first place.
@jondubin I've written about my perspective on regret here awhile ago. And I have a sequel percolating.
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
Forgiveness is sort of a backwards concept, like phlogiston (which ~= "the absence of oxygen"). Forgiveness ~= "the abs…
@jondubin @jondubin I love that you came back to this thread to post your updates! I'd be curious to hear if you have a sense of resonance with what I'm saying about there being a place where forgiving as an act isn't even necessary...
Replying to @lazyleger
@yslcrypto @webdevMason The copyright period is well-past expired, so you could just republish it as Notes To Self by Marcus Aurelius. Here, I made a book cover:
@yslcrypto @webdevMason (Source of painted statue: this redditor: reddit.com/r/Stoicism/com…)
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@yslcrypto @webdevMason The copyright period is well-past expired, so you could just republish it as Notes To Self by Ma…
Retweeted @jackbutcher
You can’t opt-out of what you’ve already consumed. This tweet is now in your brain. Enjoy.
Thread · Contextualizing the case for crying at work
@tasshinfogleman This needs contextualisation, in a few senses: 1. if we had a healthy society in the first place, people wouldn't need to cry nearly as much 2. the unhealthiness of our society is related to why people are not crying as much as they need to (because it's not acceptable)
@tasshinfogleman 3. it may not actually be healthy for a particular person to cry at their workplace, because they might incur judgment/censure, or because they might get fired (losing health benefits = unhealthy)
@tasshinfogleman 4. given human history, it's important to give your coworkers context as to how to interpret the meaning of such crying, so eg they don't feel like they should do something about it if you're just needing to release the feelings
@tasshinfogleman 5. if the crying is loud and it distracts other people from being able to work, then it doesn't necessarily make for a healthy workplace (we're in the process of converting a shed in our backyard to be used for emotional processing ("the NEDER shedder") for volume purposes)
@tasshinfogleman 6. crying can also be used to manipulate people 7. if the crying isn't actually healthy processing but just someone freaking out, then kinda-by-definition this isn't healthy
@tasshinfogleman Now, with all of those contextual factors as a given, I think I basically resonate with your hot take.
Retweeted @ssica3003
Hades, an egregore theoryengine.org/life/hades-an-…
@ssica3003 Mmm! Valued this. A few thoughts as I read it: 1. is there a list of such egregores somewhere? I've read the posts on Moloch & Ra, and I recall hearing a few other Lovecraftian monsters coined (blind idiot god of evolution, etc) but it would be neat to have a semi-canonical list
@ssica3003 2. blindspots vs part of mind actively maintaining the not-seeing relates to McGilchrist's @divided_brain work. Seems that the left hemisphere's *job* is to have blindspots. Ideally it integrates new stuff from RH, but most people are traumatized such that it actively suppresses
Retweeted @patrissimo
10/ Now, however, I see huge opportunities in the competitive governance space, as our initial idea capital has compounded…
@reasonisfun @made_in_cosmos Hmm, I just found the platform reading.supply via @jondubin and it seems like it might be made for this sort of thing! Tagging @visakanv & @conaw too...
@reasonisfun @made_in_cosmos @jondubin @visakanv @Conaw @jondubin can you hit me & Lulie up with an invite? this seems like an easier thing to try out than setting up a whole new blog.
@tasshinfogleman @cascadiality @QiaochuYuan @dthorson @PeterXPark @JasnaTod I have heard about circling on zoom but somehow I feel like the latency and lack of ability to see who's looking at who would make it super weird. At the very least, it's not a circle anymore 🤔
@tasshinfogleman @cascadiality @QiaochuYuan @dthorson @PeterXPark @JasnaTod And, I have not actually tried it, so I'm not saying "it can't work"—clearly it does for people! Just saying I'm surprised that it does, and I feel like even if attempting it produces something good, I'd expect the something to be sufficiently different as to need a new name.
@jayvidyarthi Whoa.
Retweeted @jayvidyarthi
a work of art worthy of your close listening/watching: youtube.com/watch?v=BqnG_E…
Retweeted @MiGrant
@fortelabs @Conaw @micahtredding @dthorson @context_ing @RivalVoices @Malcolm_Ocean @aaronzlewis @devonzuegel A link between i…
Thread · A script that simulates a quote-tweet notifications tab
Currently hacking together a script that will sort of allow you to check your notifications for quote-tweets.
Okay, here it is! Tagging zettelkasten & threader-folks: @visakanv, @conaw, @QiaochuYuan, @BillSeitz, @micahtredding, @context_ing gist.github.com/malcolmocean/0…
@visakanv @Conaw @QiaochuYuan @BillSeitz @micahtredding @context_ing I'm also gonna tag the people who retweeted Visa's original tweet about QTs as killer-feature 🚀 - @okohonen - @verohecko - @TheBigSTD - @JonesOnTheNBA (I made a little script that can simulate having a QT-notifications tab)
@visakanv @Conaw @QiaochuYuan @BillSeitz @micahtredding @context_ing @okohonen @verohecko @TheBigSTD @JonesOnTheNBA This is mostly a proof of concept, because: A) it's a little script, not a full-on userscript or browser extension. It wouldn't be much work to do that but I've already spent enough time on this today. This means you have to run it manually every time.
B) the ratio of other shit to QTs is so high that since it can only filter, it must load & hide hundreds of other likes etc ...which makes it very slow (so, in my experience, it's hard to get further back than a few hundred notifications, which might be only 1-5 QTs)
Non-QTs are shown as 2px lines so that you can see that it's indeed loading more—and see how much chaff it is separating from your wheat.
HOW TO USE: 1. open your Notifications on Twitter 2. open the javascript console (How: tinyurl.com/jscons) 3. paste in this script and hit enter 4. wait (& maybe trigger Twitter's "load more" function by scrolling up/down or switching to/from the tab)
@QiaochuYuan @visakanv @Conaw @BillSeitz @micahtredding @context_ing Instructions are on the page linked, and also here:
@utotranslucence @arletterocks Ooooh yeah. I don't even quite remember what we talked about that was relevant to this but it's definitely something that resonates interestingly for me, as a markèd man!
@utotranslucence @arletterocks And as someone who (like @visakanv) has reflected extensively on the different availability of men's clothing & women's clothing. I might wear mostly women's clothing if I found more that was compatible with the shape of my body.
@QiaochuYuan @vgr Hmmm yeah, somewhat maps: LH: what is abstractly, generically true? (context aside?) RH: what's going on here?
@tasshinfogleman @dthorson @PeterXPark @JasnaTod @QiaochuYuan @mattgoldenberg tweeted some good stuff here:
@danlistensto @context_ing "I like to be confused, because then I learn" - me in a song nearly a decade ago youtube.com/watch?v=mT9KOX…
@chrxn @kumupowered @dthorson @FutureThinkers_ @leashless has been on both!
Thread · Forgiveness as the absence of resentment · 1 of 11 tweets
Also here's a very old blog post of mine on this topic, that's still relevant: malcolmocean.com/2013/12/apolog…
Replying to @z3nblack
@z3nblack And/or are apologizing for things that were fine in the first place. Like having a preference, or existing. See also:
Retweeted @fourfoldvision
This is alarming. twitter.com/xavierfettweis…
What true yet bizarre/useless out-of-context things might you go back and tell your younger self?
@brantchoate If you don't have any recent instances of people quoting your tweets, that's what it should show. If you *do* and it's still showing that, then there's a bug somewhere. I just QT'd you so it should show this now:
@utotranslucence Mmm yes. I do also think it's functionally possible to categorically let go of "resentment" altogether, separate from forgiving individual instances. Similar to what I describe about behindness here: malcolmocean.com/2019/01/nothin…
@utotranslucence Although after going to the BioEmotive retreat, I think my perspective on this has evolved... now I'd say: your big-picture map can change to be post-resent, but you might still be carrying resentment & fear in the emotional layer, which hasn't been felt & released
@selfprime @vervaeke_john Oh? I'm a fan of de-con-fusing words, but I'm not seeing what it's doing here exactly.
Thread · Wanting composable editors for trees, tables, prose, and threads · 2 of 4 tweets
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @procrastiwork @visakanv @Conaw @micahtredding @andy_matuschak @Azeirah Oooh hm, yeah. As someone who has tried drafting documents in workflowy, I can see the appeal. For some reason I hate the mindmap aesthetic—it mostly seems like noise/clutter (not just WriteMapper but in general)
@context_ing @procrastiwork @visakanv @Conaw @micahtredding @andy_matuschak @Azeirah What I really want to have is a few really good editors for: - trees (workflowy!) - tables (airtable!) - prose (google docs!) - threads (twitter!) - ?? PLUS the ability to embed any of these anywhere within any of the others. Boom. #ThingsIWantToExist
Thread · Things I want to exist: apps, tools, and funding mechanisms · 1 of 21 tweets
An integrated multi-structure content editor.
Thread · Wanting composable editors for trees, tables, prose, and threads · 2 of 4 tweets
@context_ing @procrastiwork @visakanv @Conaw @micahtredding @andy_matuschak @Azeirah So I could write a blog post within workflowy, or embed a workflowy tree in a twitter thread, or make a twitter thread in an airtable, or have a table within a google doc.
@context_ing @procrastiwork @visakanv @Conaw @micahtredding @andy_matuschak @Azeirah @NotionHQ seems like maybe it's trying to be this but so far it's mediocre at trees/prose/tables and doesn't support threads at all.
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@context_ing @procrastiwork @visakanv @Conaw @micahtredding @andy_matuschak @Azeirah What I really want to have is a few…
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing If you just want to structure text in tree-form, something like workflowy is the way to go. If you want to actually format it or something... 🤷♀️
@visakanv Seems that the "runner's high" might be at least as much associated with endocannabinoids (read: endogenous marijuana-like chemicals) as endorphins. "Runner's high" was coined a decade before endocannabinoids discovered. But endorphins were hot at that time.
@visakanv Relatedly, this article by @sarahdoingthing that posits that marijuana might be able to help bootstrap runner's high.
@visakanv @sarahdoingthing On a different note, sharp/intense pain usually releases substantial amounts of endorphins, so some people who regularly hurt themselves are... addicted to more than just a microdose of opioids.🤔 (note to anyone finding this: obv it's more complex than this—same with exercise)
@CharlesGedeon @visakanv I often take screenshots of things like "I looked up a song using google's search-by-music" or "here's a thing I might want to look at or think about later".
@visakanv @Twitter Oh! I think this has improved with the new twitter UI. Embeds are much more often (even always?) displayed in full. Does that match your experience @visakanv?
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @procrastiwork @visakanv @Conaw @micahtredding @andy_matuschak @Azeirah Can you elaborate on this? I feel like there are aspects I don't fully understand at this point. (I'm also noticing some interesting stuff about the distinction of links vs embeds...)
a bumper sticker that reads: This *Is* My Other Planet
@catherineols happened to see the above tweet of mine and this tweet below on the same day, and wanted to connect them:
@catherineols I also want to connect this thread to this thread on #ThingsIWantToExist ...better micro-grants or platforms for doing this sort of funding are also on this list!
Thread · Things I want to exist: apps, tools, and funding mechanisms · 1 of 21 tweets
Better systems for facilitating people working on these things! Could be micro-grants, micro-crowdfunding, DAOs...
Replying to @leashless
@leashless @dthorson I'm curious to know @Meaningness's take on how this (Vinay's remark, in the context of Daniel's whole thread) connects with eg the Aro Buddhism > "Self-liberation means allowing emotional energy to be as it is." arobuddhism.org/community/an-u…