@JoshuaLelon @SamoBurja @RoamResearch @andy_matuschak I think that'll be a huge piece of what's needed to do this at scale with scientific fields. Might also be helpful for managing meaning, values, culture, etc... but will be very inadequate to that task without some huge upgrades in how we're thinking about those questions.
April 2020
@JoshuaLelon @SamoBurja @RoamResearch @andy_matuschak Although this would also happen with new knowledge that is paradigm-busting in the Kuhnian sense—it would represent a break from the old. And in general lenses greatly affect how things are seen: psych is based on averages but there are no average ppl.
@SarahAMcManus @mattoflambda ⛪️ CHVRCH OV CRONCH ⛪️
Thread · Could social distancing wipe out cold and flu strains
This excellent comic (click to see full image) reminds me of a remark @raelifin made to me a few months ago—before this whole thing—something like "if everybody didn't interact for a couple of weeks, basically all colds & flus would die off"
obviously it's a bit more complex than that, including: - if people were in small groups, pathogens could jump around the group during that time long enough to survive to the other side 👩👩👧👦 - ...bats and other animals 🦇
...but at any rate, this is still kinda cool. I saw a tweet somewhere (couldn't find again now) with a chart showing how the flu season has been shortened due to all of the social distancing measures. Obvious short-term impact... could there be a longer-term one?
According to this article healthline.com/health/flu-inc… Flu incubation ~1-4days Flu contagious ~5-7 days after start of symptoms Those both just seem weaker than #COVID19, suggesting that social distancing at the level we're doing it could incidentally wipe out the flu too 😯
Similarly, colds have ~1-3 days incubation, ~7-10 days recovery. With people self-isolating, wearing masks, and also treating cold-like symptoms with WAY more precautions than usual... same possibility here. (probably less so due to longer lifespan & slower symptom onset)
Probably this won't happen, for various reasons, some of which I could guess at, but it's a fascinating notion. If social distancing measures were to continue into warmer months when R0 for flus/colds drops a lot anyway, it seems like that could *really* knock them out.
Based on thinking this through right now, I find myself with the impression that probably a couple of strains of something will die out, though we may not be able to tell given that there are lots of strains. Not a very bold prediction I realize 😂
Main reason this probably won't happen is that there are a lot of different places in the world with a lot of different factors, and like if Singapore is doing adequate contact tracing etc for #COVID19, then they'll still be hanging out & incubating flu for the rest of the world.
Retweeted @amyhoy
IMPORTANT REMINDER: due to incubation time & illness duration, it takes 2-5 weeks for even extreme measures against COVID-19…
Retweeted @KevinSimler
Another tail risk to consider, from spectator.org/coronavirus-th…
@mrgunn @yashkaf This makes me think "Let's make a new site called Metamodern Times or something, where writers & readers are able to see that all takes are valid but also recognize that some are more valid than others." And not amplify bad takes!
@dela3499 @RoamResearch @michael_nielsen @QiaochuYuan @s_r_constantin I have a twitter thread here from months ago that requests most of these 👇 Analytics seems cool but I'd build it as a tool for private roams first actually, thus oriented towards co-analyzing participation rather than host-optimizing-visitor-behv
@dela3499 @RoamResearch @michael_nielsen @QiaochuYuan @s_r_constantin Haha oh man yeah those are such a thing when it comes to app design.
@nosilverv I want to preserve for posterity what you changed your profile to look like today. Beautifully naked. Love it.
@QiaochuYuan heh, hi ⁉️
Retweeted @SarahAMcManus
@QiaochuYuan @Malcolm_Ocean lookit this here monk 🧘 monkin it up in some kinda weird-ass "vehicle" 🛺 don' even know wh…
Replying to @dispirateparts
@danlistensto I've been working off mixed data, figuring some undercounting was likely, not knowing extent. OT1H urns, dark apartments in Wuhan OTOH didn't WHO visit China in lateFeb & confirm their official story? OTGH, WHO seems to be living in China's worldview 🤫
@danlistensto I'm coming to appreciate that more now. I think I trusted them a lot more implicitly like a month ago, and updated then, and as I've developed distrust in the past weeks, I didn't backpropagate to what that would imply about China.
@QiaochuYuan what's your perspective on me?
Trying to discern odds I have COVID19. I've had a bunch of extra phlegm for the last week, sometimes yellow, plus scratchy throat late at night & morning. This is pretty typical for me a couple of times per year, from cold or allergies. Is this at all evidence for COVID19?
That's the symptom data. As far as exposure, someone else in my house has what we can only assume is COVID, though it's been mostly anosmia and mania—no fever or coughing. We haven't been able to get testing in Ontario given no known exposure to someone else testing positive 🤨
@Conaw Yeah. Have had trouble seeing much info at all on what super-mild cases look like. Like if people can be asymptomatic, then what does a barely-detectable-but-you-could-miss-it case look like?
@seconds_0 Have been taking temp daily, no fever. All under 37°C actually. No dry throat. Periodic coughs but they're all productive (ie coughing up phlegm. I have a fair bit of phlegm most of the year honestly) No headache or body ache. Minor stress-induced tension in my should.
@fortelabs @patio11 has thoughts in this thread. Not sure if they'll answer your question directly but I suspect you'll find them worth reading in the long-term.
Retweeted @damiengayle
Is Big Tobacco going to save the world from a respiratory disease? Can 2020 really get any weirder? …
@Peter_Turchin You might dig this thread where I speculate about long-term impacts of this!
Here's the chart! Or a chart, anyway. Flu rapidly cut in half, though seemingly not declining as fast now. Seems unlikely to hit zero altogether.
Retweeted @spectator
Each of us is walking around every day without realising that we are home to the world’s best virology lab, says @rorysuther…
@RobertHaisfield @JoshuaLelon @SamoBurja @RoamResearch @andy_matuschak Oh cool! I bought her book but haven't read it yet. (shoutout to Tiago for summarizing & sharing it)
my nam is ant 🐜 and wen its spring and april showers start to bring and all the wud begins to douse I come inside I eet the hous (we have carpenter ants here, and today @SarahAMcManus said "they eat the house" & my poetry-similarity-tracker was like "OH.")
Reality doesn't contradict itself. ...that's your map.
@made_in_cosmos @alt_visa fun fact: Daft Punk's epic rift in "Robot Rock" was sampled from this possibly-more-epic song "Release The Beast" youtube.com/watch?v=eVVfZA…
As we pass 1,000,000 confirmed cases of COVID19 worldwide today (surely many more undetected) Here's a song 🕯️🙏 from @BonIver's album 22, A Million: Track 10. 00000 Million I really love this live version: youtu.be/YJNi7aRwUzU?t=…
(Here's the album version, which is also good but has way less soul than the above live version) youtube.com/watch?v=0FqojM…
@samvega_pasada 👆 underrated tweet
Retweeted @EricRWeinstein
“[Masks] are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus,...” -US Surgeon General. The abov…
If you experience any kind of discomfort, take the ball away.
Replying to @backlon
@backlon Sell-outs. From their blog: > "Our goal has always been [...] to help as many people as we can..." "As many people". People are just a number. Sure, you can affect *more* people by being integrated with Apple, but not the million android users who helped you get there.
@backlon *sigh* ...I'm sad that the lifecycle of apps so often involves this kind of thing. I really appreciate @Conaw proactively saying "we aren't going anywhere" (with a $10k lifetime plan that guarantees it)
@_exoconnor are we human, or are we dancer?
Replying to @dispirateparts
@dispirateparts May I enthusiastically recommend Vulfpeck, a funk band that started in a basement in Ann Arbor, MI and brought all the furniture from that basement onto the Madison Square Garden stage: I've listened to this whole concert twice today. youtube.com/watch?v=rv4wf7…
Retweeted @magghu
Awesome tweetorial. Please don't be falsely comforted by recent trends #CovidOntario - alot of problems with current dataset &…
@IntegralMetamod don't even start with me I wrote a whole short story about this malcolmocean.com/2015/12/then-i…
@QiaochuYuan Also today, April 2nd, is the 1 year anniversary of Qiaochu playing around with Twitter, at my suggestion. Y'all are welcome 😊 Pretty fucking excellent grand finale to year 1, I must say 🍻🍿
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@QiaochuYuan Also today, April 2nd, is the 1 year anniversary of Qiaochu playing around with Twitter, at my suggestion.…
Retweeted @csvoss
I haven't used @CompliceGoals in a while, but it's really keeping me afloat during WFH. Thanks @Malcolm_Ocean! 🙏
Retweeted @Meaningness
Extraordinary lesson in competence: how a supermarket chain planned for a future pandemic, and is improvising around the p…
@SarahAMcManus: "relaxed muscles... or like, lack of muscle tension... is basically the comfiest blanket ever."
@RichDecibels I'm there!
Retweeted @RichDecibels
Hypothesis: the most effective social change movements of 2021 will mobilise around relationships + conceptual frames tha…
Retweeted @Timber_22
Hey friends! I'm proud & stoked to be launching WaterHorse Consulting, at my other handle @CoachingWater …
@Timber_22 @QiaochuYuan @SarahAMcManus @leashless @PezeshkiCharles @collinofzion I don't know that I'm particularly tracking any young integralists. I RT'd your top-level tweet about coaching though! One approach might be to have not just a free 30min session but a free 2-3 sessions for a couple of ppl, then you can get testimonials & marketpositioning tips.
Retweeted @magghu
Attended this lovely session today. In breakout rooms w/ stranger-turned-friends, we were encouraged to give voice to parts of…
@robertskmiles @zbinney_NFLinj THIS 👆 If I applied that reasoning to my tweet below, it would suggest literally just reporting the estimates as the main number: "Based on our model, including the latest test results, there are around 8-20M people worldwide infected with #COVID19"
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@robertskmiles @zbinney_NFLinj THIS 👆 If I applied that reasoning to my tweet below, it would suggest literally just re…
@robertskmiles @zbinney_NFLinj Back at the very beginning, these estimates might have been very close to the actual number of confirmed cases, because we didn't know: - about asymptomatic cases - about gaps in testing - how viral this thing actually was - still-(as of today, 2020-04-03)-unknown unknowns
@diviacaroline I think they're acting like "evidence for X" is only "are we forced to conclude X? could we get away with not concluding X, given available info?" There's almost nothing that there's "no evidence" for. There's evidence for telepathy. It's not *good* evidence but it's there.
@TheOrangeAlt Or rather, I'll point you to it, as strangely earnest twitter's chief resident McGilchrist enthusiast. Book: amzn.to/2xL5BEX My threads about it:
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@Meaningness @11kilobytes However, matters are muddled: due to the taboo of using hemispheres as a model, many people ha…
@robertskmiles @zbinney_NFLinj By the time you have "evidence of human-to-human (or community) spread" (even if the jury's still out 👇) you have evidence that confirmed cases are a serious undercount, & this increases the longer it takes you to realize. @WilliamAEden @diviacaroline
@diviacaroline 2010 EA Cause Area: basic rationalist training for W.H.O. & other key health officials
@perrymetzger @WilliamAEden Tho if you'd been sick, a negative result would be super useful, yeah? The specificity isn't perfect either, though 95.6% is a fair bit better than 93.8%. In other news, wikipedia's diagram illustrating these concepts is shit, because both numbers are awful: T+R 5/12 T−R 7/10
@PeterBorah @Aella_Girl I answered 51-85%, because it seemed like the funniest/weirdest answer, and that best captured my experience of digesting the question 😆🙃 And indeed it's the least common result.
"Things are the way they are because they got that way." — @JerryWeinberg
@visakanv This reminded me of this quote, which I thought you'd appreciate:
@visakanv Also this, which I also think you'd appreciate 😆 youtube.com/watch?v=WeKVM6…
@visakanv Aaaaand if I'm going to link you to @BriTANicK, I probably want to share one of their— —wait, before that: in searching their handle, I found they've posted a new video after a long time, and it's bizarrely similar to the one I linked above. youtube.com/watch?v=LrEweq…
@visakanv @BriTANicK Anyway, as I was going to say, check out A Monologue for Thee, and its sequel A Monologue for Three, that will probably play after. youtube.com/watch?v=HbVylF…
@visakanv @BriTANicK I may have erred. I didn't intend to link you quite that many videos. Oh well. I trust you to watch whatever makes sense for you.
@QiaochuYuan AAAAAAGGH I STARTED WRITING A THREAD I WAS EXCITED ABOUT BUT THEN I GOT LOST IN A BUNCH OF YOUTUBE VIDEOS WHY IS THE INTERNET SO GODDAMN FULL OF SINKHOLES @TRISTANHARRIS WE HAVE SO MUCH WORK TO DO
Thread · Kegan's stages as an artifact of left-hemisphere fixation
Hot niche take: Kegan's stages are universal only because everyone is universally afflicted with a dysfunction related to left hemisphere fixation. In a culture where this wasn't so, there would still be developmental stages, but they'd be nearly unrecognizable as Kegan stages.
The left hemisphere maintains a worldview that it thinks is consistent and perfect, always. That's its main job: to treat the world as something it understands and can manipulate. It denies the contradictions inherent to its map, whatever they are.
The right hemisphere, by contrast, cares more about seeing things as they are than having a perfect model where all of the parts fit together and there's a right answer. But we actively stunt this kind of thinking with modern culture & education.
As people develop more sophisticated ways of making sense of the world, whether via rationality or new age stuff, they end up with some sort of system that they interpret everything through, stored in their left hemisphere. This mostly runs their meaning-making show.
Kegan 1 is before LH takes over Kegan 2 is pre-ethical LH: I control the world to meet my needs Kegan 3 subjects that to external ethical system Kegan 4 learns to construct own internal system Kegan 5 stops trying to do things with a single consistent system, so must be RH-based.
My model clears up a common confusion with Kegan's model, which is "don't kids feel empathy? it clearly can't take until Kegan 3 to feel empathy." Of course not. But if LH has taken over, it takes a bunch of development to hack together simulated empathy.
So in a fluid-mode world like @Meaningness describes where ppl don't grow up fixated in LHem, there'd still be a development process of grasping ever more complex systems... ...but they'd be able to fluidly play with whatever level they *can* grasp!
Open Q: in this fluid world, would there still be discernable stages that map onto Kegan's stages? I don't have a good guess either way on this, but I have an intuition that any model whose stages naturally map onto Kegan's likely has a similar issue. This is many models: 😂
My current best candidate for a model to track the part of Kegan that isn't thusly confused is the Model of Hierarchical Complexity Separates out the "how complex are the cognitive primitives you can manipulate" from cultural stuff. @HFreinacht's intro: metamoderna.org/what-is-the-mh…
Then the Q: "what specific primitives are you using?" This isn't just qualitative. Some primitives of equal complexity are more powerful than others. Kids readily take to Systems Thinking, a metaframework that outclasses most ethical systems 🕸️
One model of what's going on with subject-object shifts in the Kegan sense (& also MHC upleveling) is that it's when the left hemisphere is able to grasp X as primitive, rather than it being at the paradox level. This could imply the RH is always one stage up from the LH...
...but if I had to guess I'd say there's actually a bunch of other learning for the RH to do, that either doesn't look like developmental stages, or is a completely different axis of dev stages. It's hard to put my finger on what it is though.
Anyway! I feel pretty satisfied with this Kegan+McGilchrist model (which I've had a rough version of for over a year) & this articulation of it. & I'm sure it's got gaps & tangles, and maybe an inconsistency somewhere. In any case, I'd love to hear what you think of it! 💬 ⬇️
@TheOrangeAlt I've thought this too— —2h later I have posted a thread with my thoughts on the subject! TL;DR the model would suggest that but my take on Kegan+McGilchrist suggests K6 wouldn't exist because K5 is kind of just untangling a bunch of confusions.
Would love to hear these peoples' response on this 👆thread: @Timber_22 @mattgoldenberg @QiaochuYuan @TheOrangeAlt @celestialboon @Meaningness @warmbott
@JimDMiller I resonate with the spirit of what you're saying here, and I think it's confused for multiple reasons. 1 - preparation matters a lot
Thread · Meta-thread of threads on McGilchrist's brain hemispheres · 1 of 38 tweets
🌶️ thread where I deconstruct the whole concept of Kegan stages, using McGilchrist's model. This idea has been bomping around my brain for a year... finally wrote it up decently:
@JimDMiller reason 2: cognitive complexity matters more than IQ In a complex situation, IQ 120 + Meta-systematic stage gets you further than IQ 160 + Systematic
@JimDMiller reason 3: knowing how to reason about real evidence matters more than both cognitive complexity & IQ WHO keeps saying "no evidence that X". Of course there is. There's evidence for AND against *everything*. The Q is how it shakes out, on balance. twitter.com/Austen/status/…
Replying to @mathsguy
@mathsguy @boom_sanaca @Austen It's even more complex than that. Absence of "evidence for" does generally represent some amount of evidence against. But also there's *some* evidence for almost everything.
@JimDMiller reason 4: knowing how to reason with evidence isn't enough if you're engaged in motivated reasoning because you're afraid of the truth most people aren't prepared to think seriously about death
@JimDMiller reason 5: intelligence etc can't help you solve a problem if you're incentivized not to solve it this guy 👇 is not an idiot he's using a lot of intelligence to feign dumb here, for political reasons
@Ben_Reinhardt @andy_matuschak Haha yeah my take is that somehow paradoxically-fractally it's true on multiple scales. As @andy_matuschak notes, that's partially due to unknowns: you'll do more than you intended, but lots of it will be different than what you intended to do Also nonlinear effects.
@Ben_Reinhardt @andy_matuschak I run New Years' workshops called the Goal Crafting Intensive & for 2020 we added a decade module, for which I wrote about the paradox here:
Retweeted @visakanv
I feel like this captures the spirit of society in two lines twitter.com/alicesperi/sta…
@webdevMason Yep, exactly.
@jimmyti @andy_matuschak I'll make a tiny pitch for my app complice.co here: it has week-scale & month-scale reviews, with customizable per-goal Qs. I've been meaning to add quarterly... wouldn't be that hard—tell you what, if you check out the app, I'll add it!🙃
@csvoss Join the meta-rationality club 🙃
@natural_hazard For people who don't understand how S1/S2 (Type1/Type2 processing in other dual process theories) are different from the hemispheres, check out the image in this tweet or the full comment that it links to:
@natural_hazard I've written about how the idea of "the unconscious" is a confusion. There are many things other than consciousness! The category "unconscious" is a weirdly-consciousnes-first notion, like how the category "gentile" is only a natural category for Jews.
@PeterBorah @natural_hazard Excellent short take.
@TheOrangeAlt @natural_hazard Have you read @xuenay's take on this? This is the most central piece, and it's part of a larger model that seeks to steelman what's going on with unconscious & conscious thinking-systems. lesswrong.com/posts/HbXXd2gi…
@TheOrangeAlt @natural_hazard @Meaningness I've written on this! Very resonant take:
@natural_hazard @yashkaf I'd recommend checking out Perceptual Control Theory, as its framing is much less confusing, as Scott notes 👇 This is key bc the metaphors we use affect the meaning we make. Friston says "we minimize surprise" and this doesn't match internal intuitions. slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/20/tra…
@natural_hazard @yashkaf For PCT, the 2 original books by Bill Powers are both great: - Behavior: The Control of Perception (long, technical, full of detailed neuroscience & cool phenomenological experiments you can try) - Making Sense of Behavior: The Meaning of Control (shorter, more accessible, fun)
@jondubin Oooh yeah, probably. Page #?
@aphercotropist 🤷♀️ while & after reading McGilchrist's book, I've come to be able to recognize clusters of phenomenological experiences that I don't have a better handle for than "left hemisphere" & "right hemisphere" what else am I supposed to use?
@Jeanvaljean689 @Meaningness @11kilobytes Baha yes, this is an illuminating and insightful bit of word-play. The wisdom will not fit in the artifice! This tweet 👇 says "maybe AI without wisdom can't be AGI" The one following it says "but maybe a powerful narrow AI can still fuck us up."
@TheOrangeAlt Yes, it was hard to see that my "you" wasn't addressing you @TheOrangeAlt, but was addressing your readers 🤪
@Timber_22 Yeah. Would be interesting to find other four-stage cycles and ask what sorts of spirals they might form. The panarchy loop / adaptive cycle would be another:
Retweeted @balajis
Every company should be able to opt into open review, where patients waiting on an approval can view all correspondence with t…
Replying to @stephentweedale
@MrSteveTweedale Hi Steve - a friend of mine is on Humira, & I was trying to look around on twitter to see if there were any stories of covid + Humira, & yours is one of the only ones I've found. Wondering how you're doing a week later, and if you have any sense if what you had was indeed covid
Retweeted @threat_update
so maybe @tylercowen goes on the list too
@aphercotropist "My hands don't type these words, I do." IDK man, seems like a false dichotomy to me. "The company's salesperson doesn't make the sales, the company does." Again, both both both. & the structure of the relationship matters! In a huge org, maybe "sales team", not "salesperson"
Retweeted @warmbott
@aphercotropist @Malcolm_Ocean the LH/RH model is a way to get to illegibility through legibility. McGilchrist often reinforc…
Replying to @warmbott
@warmbott @HFreinacht @TurtlingB Loevinger's Ego Development Theory? Haven't looked into it much but the basic descriptions I'm reading here seem to be contextual/LH-fixated in similar ways to Kegan. Tho maybe the upper 2-3 levels of both CG & Torbert both more clearly correspond to purely mental complexity.
Replying to @warmbott
@warmbott Hm, kind of the opposite of what I said here 👇 (which is not to say I disagree; just different emphasis)
@_exoconnor @aphercotropist Oooh I dig that aesthetically on multiple levels.
Replying to @warmbott
@warmbott Hmmm... McGilchrist is pretty clear that reason isn't a LH thing, though maybe deduction, or rationality, does? He uses reason similarly to how @Meaningness does, as something more embodied & situated & contextual, and requiring the RH.
@Aryeh___ @QiaochuYuan 17yo me knew what was up: When I'm lost in thought, where am I? Am I the searcher or the one I'm trying to find? Have I lost my mind, or is it my mind I'm lost inside? If I can't find my feelings, does it mean they're trying to hide? click to play👇🎶 maleidoscope.bandcamp.com/track/who-am-i
@WilliamAEden Right, so one could make a case that that wouldn't be true now, based on something that's different now from then, but you'd have to make an *actual case* for what is different and why that would matter and why other different factors wouldn't overwhelm that.
TL;DR = usually ppl wipe their butts at work half the time. Demand for domestic toilet paper is very consistent, so supply has little buffer. I had this sense a few wks ago but didn't announce it 🤷♀️ ift.tt/3435rEU
@aphercotropist @warmbott I assume something like "the complex and deeply intertwingled relationships of the two hemispheres, and how it can be both dysfunctional and functional, depending on how the hemispheres relate."
@_StevenFan @_StevenFan, based on your bio, "Peace: Seeking via neuroscience and psychology informed dharma" you might dig this page I've been working on called "Hemisphere Dharma" roamresearch.com/#/app/malcolmo…
@aphercotropist Hm, yeah. I perhaps overstated this ("perfect", "always"). I don't have appetite for spending more than the couple minutes I just spent poking around in the index of TM&HE seeking citations. My take comes from reading the whole book, which has hundreds of dovetailing references
@aphercotropist It's implicit in many many things, including well-established facts like the prevalence of anosognosia in patients with RH strokes, but not LH strokes.
🇨🇦 Canadians, get on this 👇
@MatjazLeonardis @Crit_Rat @ToKTeacher How did I not see this before? Existence of psychopaths—creatures that are generally intelligent & can pass as ordinary humans while lacking empathy—seems to me to immediately disprove DD's take that there's nothing to worry about with AI because it'll be a universal explainer.
@MatjazLeonardis @Crit_Rat @ToKTeacher (In re-referencing Beginning of Infinity, I didn't see DD make exactly the claim that AI risk is a confusion, but I think it's essentially implied by what he says, and I've heard his followers say it.)
@MatjazLeonardis @Crit_Rat @ToKTeacher Although moreover DD says "don't worry about anything" which—yes, "worry" doesn't help. But reality is absolutely allowed to kill you. & common narrow-focused approaches to problem-solving consistently produce new problems *that are worse* than the old.
@Crit_Rat Mmm, no. Viruses are *optimized* but they aren't *optimizing*. Key difference. Meanwhile evolution is optimizing, but it's still not *intelligent*. It's simply the process by which there come to be more of the kind of things that are better at making more of themselves!
@Crit_Rat @Juyan_Azhang @ToKTeacher "ours" includes the thoughts of all humans, including the humans who rallied other humans to genocide in Rwanda and the humans who went for it Those thoughts would be within its repertoire.
@Juyan_Azhang @Crit_Rat @ToKTeacher I think @Crit_Rat isn't seeing the orthogonality thesis, and is therefore also by default assuming that any intelligence would care about human wellbeing in the way most humans do. But by definition, a paperclip maximizer only cares about making more paperclips!
@Crit_Rat > Viruses literally are unintelligent machines optimised for a goal that is orthogonal to nearly all human values. That is not what "paperclip maximizer" means. A paperclip maximizer is an *intelligent* machine that is optimizING for a goal that is orthogonal to human values.
@Crit_Rat Your tweet above is the AI Safety equivalent of saying "this is just the flu, & we've seen the flu before, & it's not that bad" I'm not exaggerating. You're saying "don't worry because <false thing>". Reassuring ppl requires understanding why they're concerned in the 1st place
@Crit_Rat That's a different claim, and requires deconstructing what "intelligence" is. My take is that one *can* build a powerful optimization process with goals orthogonal to human values—corporations are actually a closer analogy here, which is disturbing since they're made of humans.
@Crit_Rat *AND* it may be that there's some other way we might use the term intelligence, which might include "wisdom" as part of it, and if we were to succeed at making one out of silicon etc, then maybe we wouldn't have anything to worry about. Maybe.
Replying to @warmbott
@warmbott @context_ing @HFreinacht @TurtlingB Very very with you here. My yearly review connects with a bunch of those ideas, although I still don't have a super detailed model of how the whole emotional brain thing relates to the whole hemispheres thing. malcolmocean.com/2020/01/2019-r…
Replying to @warmbott
@warmbott @context_ing @HFreinacht @TurtlingB Mmm, this is making me think that we may need 2 different models: - what does a typical developmental trajectory look like for someone growing up in a LH-fixated world, learning to loosen grip? - what would dev look like in a fluid mode world?
@Juyan_Azhang @Crit_Rat @ToKTeacher Ahhh yeah, well-put.
Thread · Plotting COVID growth on log scales against total population
Idea 💡 Show logarithmic growth charts with the total population indicated as well. eg for USA - 10^8.5 people total - 10^5.5 confirmed cases now - 10^2.5 confirmed cases a month ago at that rate, would max out May3 at current rates, would max out May28 ofc, won't stay exp
but this shows *visually* that in the last month USA has gone halfway from 10^2.5 (~300 cases) to 10^8.5 (full population) sort of obvious with 300 300,000 300,000,000 but graphs still help fortunately, things have slowed somewhat, so actual current slope is about half that
If we include not just the max but also the min, we can see that it's *more* than half the way from 1 case to 327M (specifically, 5.5/8.5 = 65% ~= ⅔ of the way there)
I made this spreadsheet publically viewable if you want to play with it. I'm not an expert at any of this, but playing around has been helpful for me! (Make a Copy, then edit, or if we're friends/mutuals then request edit access & make your own sheet) docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…
Oho! I figured out how to do logistic fns! I set them to assume it would cap at 70% of the population. This is revealing: the logistic is at most 3 days behind the exponential until half of the total (in this case 35%, ie 100k americans) has been reached, but then rapidly slows
It highlights how different these are: - "70% of population gets it at maximum growth rate" is (practically still exponential until huge) - successful containment: growth slows/halts *earlier* Say growth slowed from 30%/day to zero over a few weeks—total cases would stop at 500k
Hm. Above chart doesn't actually do it justice, because we fail to appreciate how far apart the purple & green dotted lines are. green is 200× purple. But if you try to do it on a linear scale... it looks weird the other way: current # of cases not visible at all on 50M scale!
Okay, this has been a satisfying experience of *learning* with the garage door up. I don't think it's exactly "work". It's been very playful! I'm also enjoying this experience of the interplay between tweeting & thinking/exploring. Mutually supportive.
Retweeted @garybasin
I notice I'm confused. I think there's a greater than 1% chance that we see complete societal meltdown in the next year. I…
@m_ashcroft @visakanv @nosilverv @RichDecibels @cognazor @collinofzion @SeanMombo @reasonisfun @maltybegray @QiaochuYuan @Conaw @fortelabs @david_perell @made_in_cosmos @mechanicalmonk1 I'm definitely crashing this party.
Retweeted @eigenrobot
Ok whats the best bidet
@Aella_Girl seems to me like the n-word is one of the only words that comes with a built-in use-mention distinction, which is actually convenient for talking out loud about a word's usage though if quoting a longer phrase containing it, then it seems like using the mention-form is 🤨
@garybasin Yeah, I feel similarly. I think part of me is like "I think I'd just be fucked in that situation and the amount of preparation I'd need to do would be extremely costly if that didn't happen, and STILL might not help" so there's a kind of 🤷♀️
@QiaochuYuan @Aella_Girl @davidb00ts @tasshinfogleman Still no @tasshinfogleman! So curious about his experience of reemerging.
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@jimmyti @andy_matuschak I'll make a tiny pitch for my app complice.co here: it has week-scale & month-scale…
@maybegray Fiji McAlpine on doyogawithme.com I've done this Rise And Shine routine periodically for years, I think I originally got it from @byudkowsky. It's one of my favorites 🧘♀️ vimeo.com/98560546
Retweeted @lexfridman
Air flow from a person breathing, talking, and coughing, with & without face mask. Visualization by @LaVisionInc https://t.…
@visakanv You're gonna love The Master and his Emissary 🥰 McGilchrist's upcoming book is gonna be called "there are no things" (it's all relationships & processes)
@Jeanvaljean689 @visakanv Yup, for real! There's a related book called Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, which I've only just started reading. It's a collection of essays, free on kindle though unfortunately formatted as PDF or something 🤨🧐 amazon.com/Everything-Flo…
@Jeanvaljean689 @visakanv TM&HE took McGilchrist 20 years to research & write though, so idk how soon we'll get There Are No Things! In the meantime, a lot of TM&HE connects with this same philosophy, so I'd definitely recommend it if you haven't read it.
@vgr @Conaw @visakanv @CultRoam I'm with @vgr on this one, which I think is saying quite a lot because he & I have very different aesthetics.
@coachnateb If you ever want to read an epic neurosci+psych+philosophy+history book about this exact distinction, I think you'd dig McGilchrist's The Master & His Emissary Or just this 44min podcast, which is about that how that model relates to education in general: metalearn.net/podcasts/ml41-…
This is pretty cool. Somewhere between @visakanv & more mainstream twitter growth advice. @QiaochuYuan I think you'll appreciate this. Obviously I'd use Roam instead of gdocs to track the various past threads. twitter.com/pearsonified/s…
Retweeted @Elodes12
Roam: "You have [166] hidden trauma's. Do you want to view them?" #roamcult
@nibrasibn @DougTataryn check this out
Replying to @joyurge
@joyurge Huh, idk! McGilchrist & Carse both come to mind, but neither is written in first person...
Replying to @joyurge
@joyurge Yup!
@QiaochuYuan @visakanv Reminder that this isn't workflowy... you can have meta-threads 1,2,3 where: 1: A, B, C, D, E 2: A, F, H, B, G 3: B, D, F, H, I (the letters are non-meta-threads) & they don't need to be of the same type 1 "personal arc in 🗓️order" 2 "advice, in ✅ order" 3 "thinking out loud"
Replying to @warrenmansell
@warrenmansell @Fi_Contextual Mmm yeah, important to see different meanings of the word. @Fi_Contextual, you might also appreciate this post of mine, exploring this question 👇
Thread · Using caffeine on your best days instead of your worst · 20 of 21 tweets
Most people: 1. drink coffee every day 2. never drink coffee 3. coffee only when sleepy/bored Galaxy brain: 4. Use caffeine on days you would already be very focused & engaged, to reach new levels of creativity & focus! Increase frequency of breakthroughs 🤯🚀 Thread 🧵👇
The basic gist is that the way caffeine tolerance works means that after 2-3 weeks of drinking coffee daily, your body upregulates adenosine production and now you need coffee to even feel awake & alert in the first place! So this suggests strategy #1(daily) doesn't help much...
What about strategy #2? (no caffeine) 🤷♀️ Totally acceptable to avoid a particular drug, especially if you don't know of a sustainably workable way to consume it.
Then strategy #3? (caffeine only when sleepy) If this is super rare (a 4am airport drive; morning after kid was up sick; etc) then it's like #2 but with a secret power up your sleeve—useful! But if it becomes a regular thing...
...well, if you drink coffee every time you're sleepy, and you stay up too late 3-4 times per week, then you're going to end up drinking enough coffee that you get tolerance, which will then put a cap on your max alertness! (plus maybe get dependence) Blue line, below
@random_walker, who invented this model, notes that lower max alertness for higher minimum alertness is a good trade for: - boring, repetitive work, where max output is limited by external constraints (eg data entry) - work where very-low attention is disastrous (eg truck driver)
So caffeine can't help your average alertness, but can allow you to change the variance. What about that higher-variance red line? The red peaks are perfect for non-repetitive work: - challenging technical problems - insight-generation - synthesizing nuanced perspectives!
Use caffeine where it'll make the most difference. In the 2 charts below, say caffeine moves your attn the same amount to the right. Nonlinear returns! 🔵 antagonistic: get out of the pit (function at all while tired) 🔴 synergistic: reach the peak (deep flow at 120% capacity)
Tips for synergistic caffeine usage: - get good sleep - avoid tolerance: do it once/week (maybe 2-3× during an atypical 1week sprint, then a week off) - take L-theanine to reduce jitters - maybe 1 dose first thing, then when that wanes, take a nap + more caffeine
Oh! Also, some find that taking caffeine while rested when they have no tolerance causes anxiety rather than excitement. If so, I suggest starting low & combining it the first time with some movement (running, dancing) or meditation, to unlearn "fast heartrate = anxiety"
Why isn't this more common? Probably most people who get into coffee originally do it as a daily habit, & it's hard enough to quit, let alone do something more strategic. Also, a lot of people are tired & find their work boring, so caffeine just helps them get through each day.
However! Why hack yourself into a shape that doesn't mind doing boring work? I was inspired to make this thread today because @reasonisfun & @m_ashcroft were tweeting about how coffee is a tool that The System uses for mass control of the populace 😜
And as Lulie points out here, the actual issue isn't the coffee but being surrendered to perpetually doing boring things! I'm a huge fan of rearranging your life to avoid doing things you find boring, tedious, etc.
There's actually 2 separate things here, though they kind of naturally go together: - whether to use caffeine while sleepy vs rested - whether to use caffeine to numb out & tolerate boring work, or to enhance your flow on challenging & meaningful work
I want to comment on that, given that boredom isn't 100% evitable. 1: if I start well-rested, then caffeine can sometimes make an otherwise boring task *fun*. eg I did my taxes one year with 300mg of caffeine and I was dashing around organizing biz receipts!
2: Often meaningful projects have random boring bits in them (even if they only take 1min) or bits that seem boring until you start them (then they're fun) Here caffeine (or any focus tool) can prevent fleeing challenge into distraction. Flow+work is more enjoyable than YouTube!
3: something something dzogchen something something emptiness there's a way to do unpleasant or boring things without suffering or self-coercing it's very hard to articulate what this is 🙃
I'll close with: caffeine is an amazingly safe drug to experiment with. A 10× dose isn't 10× energy but actually just weird 😒 (and will mess up your sleep) There's physical dependence (headache when you quit) but its tolerance profile caps out rather than escalating.
Contrast w other stimulants (cocaine, amphetamines, etc) which act on the dopamine system & are thus more seriously psychologically addicting. There tolerance means "take more for roughly same effects" til "more" is too much & then you die. Oh also they're illegal & expensive.
Huge shout-out to @random_walker for: - having this idea at all - writing about it here: arvindn.livejournal.com/57651.html - licensing it CC-BY-SA, so I could happily remix it, liberally quoting the original text & using his graphics, while also upgrading them I'll buy you a ☕️🙏😝
@Aryeh___ @m_ashcroft @JakeOrthwein Welp, these tweets inspired a long thread by me about how *I* use caffeine, which is *not* to tolerate boring tasks.
@Aryeh___ @m_ashcroft @JakeOrthwein Huge appreciation to you & @reasonisfun for being my writing inspiration today, although it wasn't so much "wrong on the internet" as "missing something important"
@reasonisfun Mmm yeah, I resonate with this a lot! I have a methodology for non-pathological caffeine usage, and your & @m_ashcroft's tweets have inspired me to write it up🥰 👇
@nibrasibn re songs: @QiaochuYuan, @mattgoldenberg, @joyurge, @SarahAMcManus & I have been collecting a meta-playlist called Songs To Sob To, here on this roam page👇 They're sorted by emotion, Core Feeling, & other themes like "death" & "parent-child relationships" roamresearch.com/#/app/metather…
Retweeted @nibrasibn
I've spent the last weeks writing about crying. I keep talking about vulnerability, now it's time to walk the walk. Over th…
@AdeleDeweyLopez I'm not saying 10× dose levels is good (or even really neutral) for you, I'm saying that you'd have no reason to bother taking such a high dose. Haven't looked in detail but 500mg is typical max useful dose (already 2-3× what most would do) & lethal dose is like 10g (20× *that*)
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing Yeah totally. Part of my take is "drink coffee when you're already excited to work"
@RichDecibels Initially thought that wouldn't work if I used @m2jr's "A startup is a set of founders with hopefully a set of proprietary insights that are a result of them living in the future." but there's a sense in which we're all living in the future now, so hmm 🤔 fs.blog/knowledge-proj…
@KalessLW @donsheldon @doctoranalog @andyweirauthor sqrt(1² + (2i)²) = sqrt(1-4) = sqrt(-3)
Replying to @nnevvinn
@nnevvinn @leashless Wow, yeah. And they must be censoring it (including tweets like yours here, I'm guessing) effectively given that despite a lot of covid-twittering I'd never heard of it until just now when I found this tweet via scrolling down @leashless' timeline & seeing a recent retweet.
Retweeted @rtraister
The staff. Of the resort. Is trapped. And forced. To serve. This couple. nytimes.com/2020/04/05/sty…
Replying to @eigenrobot
@eigenrobot imagine being bojo's Dr rn
@Conaw idk quite what the question is but the current way it works is ok. I'd like for it to be able to automatically generate a table-of-contents at the start of the page tho
@diviacaroline 50x the presymptomatic rate tho... ...but that has very different implications... ...this site estimates up to 40× unknown cases, depending on country, & 22× globally. twitter.com/nnevvinn/statu…
@yashkaf Ooh, definitely check out McGilchrist if you haven't already, both because he offers an important counterpoint to Jaynes & because while his theory doesn't comment much directly on the hard problem, it's definitely relevant 🧠 semi-thread here re JJ&IM 👇
@yashkaf Another idea: I Am A Strange Loop by Hofstadter, which explores the question in great depth. Oddly, despite DH talking of self as illusion, he doesn't reference Buddhism at all, and when I looked it up, he's apparently got a beef with Zen & its koans 🤷♀️👇 mindbodyproblems.com/chapter-two/
Replying to @gordonbrander
@gordonbrander Confusions (from my perspective) Things that remind me of other things Things that inspire some experiment I want to run
@dela3499 @Conaw An example of a real-live page that could benefit from a ToC, that doesn't seem anti-patterny to me:
@nosilverv Something I didn't know until reading @GretchenAMcC's Because Internet, is that linguistics is basically only the study of language-in-the-wild, ie how language is actually used not the supposed rules. This didn't use to include writing, but now does, because Twitter!
@dela3499 @Conaw Both of those options could work theoretically, but in practice they're a lot more cumbersome. The songs don't each need their own page—there's a lot more in this roam than the songs. And one page is critical for easily sharing just-the-songs publicly like I did above.
@diviacaroline If (oversimplified) incubation time were twice doubling time, then that would suggest at any given time that 75% of infected people are pre-symptomatic. Though that's only a 4× multipler, not a 40× multipler, which... matters 🧐
@dela3499 @Conaw - Not integrated with our existing roam context - Can't put the song under multiple headers, using block refs - Harder to improvise structure - No emoji reactions (which we use to track who has actually cried to a song)
Retweeted @cassaleigh_
The art of making art twitter.com/williamcrawley…
@yashkaf Fyeah! Would love to come to that bookclub meet-up! I don't know the parameters but lmk 😊
@yashkaf Have now read the post. Seems like you're off to a decent start! Loved this: 🤣 > And perhaps it could only be achieved through a genius-level application of Cunningham’s Law. Jaynes’ conclusions are provocative, and if his arguments are wrong they are wrong in subtle [...] ways
@Crit_Rat @Juyan_Azhang @ToKTeacher I'm with you about the importance of enculturation for AGIs.
Why isn't there a way on @GitHub for forks to advertise more clearly what they've added? There are dead(ish) projects with 400 forks and no easy way to see only forks: - are actively under development - with new commits matching a search query
Might as well put out the specific thing I'm looking for: There's a great twitter terminal client called t (I use it for @compluvi!) and I want a forked version that has an "append-to-thread" command, or better building blocks for making one (eg replies) github.com/sferik/t
Replying to @jstanotherview
@DanielleFong they are too B
Replying to @FioraAeterna
Replying to @FioraAeterna
@FioraAeterna can't find source but I've read multiple times that almost all of these were just invented by some guy hundreds of years ago and popularized as canon until they became canon some seem to meaningfully describe the group's structure (flock of starlings, V of geese); others jokes
Replying to @jstanotherview
@jstanotherview @m_ashcroft @FraserDeans I also made this chart nearly 7 years ago in what was arguably one of the first decent posts on my blog, that relates Flow & Deliberate Practice. (I just spruced up the chart with new emoji today as the old ones were ugly) malcolmocean.com/2013/06/flow-v…
Replying to @joyurge
@joyurge Ahhhha, extra confusing as that book is written by two people (same as The Guru Papers, for people overhearing this) but they write in 1st person singular. And not even like Hanzi Freinacht who at least is two people with one person's name.
Replying to @Sara_Slade_
@Sara_Slade_ @SarahAMcManus @JustinTrudeau Can we get someone who knows sign language to tell us if the hilarity of it manages to translate? @GretchenAMcC, know anybody?
@yashkaf Sounds like you read @Matt_Levine too! (Someone should write a song called "Everything is Securities Fraud"...🤔🎶) Anyway, I felt somewhat encouraged by this quote from yesterday's Money Stuff 🤷♀️ bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
@TheOrangeAlt My thread on better ebook reader ideas talks about some workflows that resonate with this. (the 4th & 5th tweets in the thread, in particular)
Replying to @robertwiblin
@robertwiblin @MaxyTaxy Yeah banality of evil is definitely the phrase here
Replying to @FioraAeterna
@TauTeFox oh man, this makes me think of mu-gender (I guess could also call it gender-mu) mu like "un-ask the question" "gender?" "mu"
@UnusualVideos Yo @AndrewHuang this is a quality sample
@TauTeFox exactly
Retweeted @michael_nielsen
"If you are a scientist at an academic institution currently working on a COVID-19 related project...we invite you to…
@diviacaroline idk if this will help your situation or exacerbate it (gotta watch the vid) twitter.com/Sara_Slade_/st…
Retweeted @startuployalist
@nwilliams030 When I was in my teens, my folks threw a lot of dinners and to speed up prep, we’d play a game unofficia…
@diviacaroline Also this twitter.com/RexChapman/sta…
Retweeted @RexChapman
2020 in 49-seconds... twitter.com/CucumberTonic/…
captioning as an art is underrated post below some of your favorite captioned images, where the image might be great on its own or not but the caption really makes it gold😙👌
@_exoconnor Mmmm I resonate with this. Also @_exoconnor I seem to pretty consistently dig your tweets and am regularly surprised to be the first person to like them until I remember you only have 25 followers (which also sort of surprises me)
Retweeted @waitbutwhy
Thoughts from a surgeon friend. Sharing with his permission.
Well I once knew a man Who was going insane He let love chase him right up a tree It took the police and a fire truck Just to bring him back down Oh I hate it when that happens to me RIP John Prine 🙏 youtube.com/watch?v=XVT_Y8…
🤣🤣 The real clincher here is "is this normal for a girlfriend to bury beans?" The author is seeing the whole thing through the lens of "what is a normal relationship?" 🤔 And neither "normal" nor "relationship" are really relevant to this situation & this woman's behavior.
How did @IFTTT manage to redesign its UI/UX to be so awful? It's shiny but unusable. I swear it was better a decade ago. Needs: - "duplicate applet" button - "new applet" btn on main page - way to view applet details without editing - buttons not tucked in the corners - &+
@garybasin @IFTTT Yeah, it's clearly made for mobile, that's why the buttons are all fucky.
Also I broke webhooks by changing my @IFTTT username. Went to WH settings; it showed old IFTTT username. I hit edit & it suddenly changed to new username & a new key. Before AND after, curl @ url-with-old-key gets "Congratulations! You've fired..." but nothing happens
The breaking happened months ago. I probably would have figured this out shortly after my complice.co→Hue Lights integration stopped working... ...if the UI wasn't so godawful, making me averse to troubleshooting.
@jhscheufen Could have a dead man's switch for it. 🤷♀️
@csvoss Yup. They need to be able to have a conversation that goes something like: "I'm scared." "Me too." "What do we do?" "Well, I bought a lot of beans" "Yeah, I buried them for later" "Will that help?" "I don't actually know" "Honestly I don't either" "I'm really scared" "Me too" 😭
bootysattva
@xstntlprvrt69 Mastering the Core Teachings of the Booty
@xstntlprvrt69 I don't think so but this earlier demo version with totally different lyrics might be 🧐 "You've got a physical reality, that you cannot deny You can feel it... so can I" ... "I want to liberate you" youtube.com/watch?v=xqMKn1…
@xstntlprvrt69 @SarahAMcManus standing in my doorway watching this video... "🎶 'cause I'm not satisfied until I get my buddha's delight 🎶" Sarah: "...fundamental unsatisfactoriness of all conditioned phenomena I GUESS?!?"
@HalifaxShadow I speculated on this here:
@QiaochuYuan @s_r_constantin Yeah & Tasshin's still in a cabin in Vermont, apparently, or at least not back on twitter.
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
more wild speculation: when kids yawn in school it's not because they're "bored," it's because they both don't want to be…
@QiaochuYuan What aspects, if any, were surprisingly fun?
"Here's what we need to do!" ...wait, who is "we"? twitter.com/s_r_constantin…
@QiaochuYuan @s_r_constantin I mean... [this gif but with the indoors & the outdoors swapped]
I'm with you, as long as "didn't hesitate" means "didn't hesitate as long as we could have" 🙃
@OneBigOh @QiaochuYuan Virtual meeting : physical meeting :: physical meeting : metaphysical meeting
@TheOrangeAlt whoa, cool! would want to check if that isn't a "side of the road you're riding on" effect they've noted similar stuff (maybe you've seen in TMAHE) about how mothers hold their babies... I forget the details
@QiaochuYuan @SarahAMcManus @xstntlprvrt69 then y'all can go on double dates with @TheOrangeAlt & @artemisfeels or something
Replying to @robertwiblin
@robertwiblin "It's just my job, " he says "I'm sorry." And draws a check, goes home to eat But at night he tells his woman "I know I hide behind the laws." She says, "You're only taking orders." That's how every empire falls. John Prine (died from COVID-19) youtube.com/watch?v=Hsu2oA…
@RichDecibels @jgreenhall @DanielleFong @RobbSmith @RonanHarrington @utotranslucence @csageland @magghu @nibrasibn Just bought a ticket! @SarahAMcManus will probably be there too 🚀
@QiaochuYuan I'd been intending to visit the bay in March and maybe Austin or the UK in April. Also John Prine died. I didn't know that much of his music but what I knew I loved.
@QiaochuYuan Nah this was me a few years ago.
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing Only as of past few days: - noonish wake up - eat lunch prepped by people who aren't room-quarantined - do cothinking/processing/uplevelling/connecting with @SarahAMcManus - misc computer time - eat dinner (as lunch) - more similar intense flow with Sarah - bed ~4am
@DanielleFong You need to pay X. X needs that money to pay Y. Y needs that money to... How far down the chain do you need to go to write an IOU?
Retweeted @DanielleFong
Think about it Burning Man 2020 *isn't* canceled It's simply expanded to a new location.
Retweeted @startuployalist
@jaltma 1. find people who have god levels of competence AND super-humane levels of kindness to learn with them asap,…
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @SarahAMcManus More typical/stable for me is like 2am-8:30am, ideally a bit earlier in the summer since I like being up with the sun. These past few days have been weird and we've just had amazing convos like midnight-4am. More on my sleepness here: malcolmocean.com/2016/04/polyph…
@TheOrangeAlt If you haven't tried complice.co yet, its whole workflow is built around having a fresh clear list every day. It's a very different flavor than GTD—worth getting a taste of even if you decide to go with something else.
@visakanv @Aella_Girl Yes, my main suggestion was gonna be to consult with @visakanv. Like maybe the two of you need different strategies but there's still lots of swapping notes to do. Also: what QC said.
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
i discovered a new pet peeve of mine in the monastery, which is people making general "ought" / "should" statements that a…
@QiaochuYuan you like... *half* owned it, by calling it a pet peeve rather than a should/ought for others
@JasnaTod @Aryeh___ I find this too! Also, re > I always felt grosser touching my face with gloves than with my bare hand, even if the amount of germs on both was the same. 👆 This may actually be wise: iirc virus dies in 20mins on skin, due to microbiome vs ~1 day on cloth, ~3days on plastic
@JasnaTod seems like a good time to post this selfie from Feb23 that I wanted to make sure I got with you while you still had the flaming pink hair 😊
@QiaochuYuan didn't know why I was suddenly seeing a bunch of unrelated Game of Life tweets until this though on reflection, if you'd asked me yesterday I probably would have guessed Conway was already dead, so,,,
@visakanv rhymes with this excerpt from this short story I wrote a few years ago, "Then I Wake Up" malcolmocean.com/2015/12/then-i…
@TheOrangeAlt Cool! Yeah, the switching apps meta-strategy is one of my favorite anti-techniques. Or like, techniques that sound like cheating but you can just do them. aha! I can now embody that with: haha new todo list go brr
Yo @visakanv @vgr what if we did a challenge game where you get a list of tweets from somewhere*, then you make a thread that somehow QT-weaves them together. *(eg first N in timeline, most recent tweet/thread from N different friends, someone just gives you N tweets, whatever)
@TheOrangeAlt Mmmmm both both both. That's kind of a lazy response but I do mean it, and not just in a balance way but like, dive deep into new scary experiences and also do deep healing. Sort of different dialectic being referred to below, but sort of the same:
@DanielleFong @Aryeh___ Source for the 14-28 day food thing? Hadn't heard that anywhere and couldn't find anything with brief googling.
@vgr from Carse's Finite & Infinite Games: > Evil is the termination of infinite play... to eliminate the play of another regardless of the rules. > Evil is never intended as evil. Indeed, the contradiction inherent in all evil is that it originates in the desire to eliminate evil.
Thread · Why we misread messages when resonance is missing
In the tweet below they're talking about people being uncharitable, but I think this is actually what's happening by default when anyone's reading anything. It's just that if you're in resonance with the person, then you'll fill in the gaps in a way that's fairly workable.
I've recently read some chat messages out loud to my friends, and more than half the time, when I do, I realize there's layers of meaning I completely missed (or inverted) when I skimmed it silently. Highly recommend trying this with a message you read & replied to earlier today
And my clearest memory of this happening was in a situation where I deeply admire & respect the person and have more shared context with them than either of us have with more than a few dozen other people. Yet still I wasn't really taking in what he was saying!
Lack of conversational resonance can happen in multiple ways: - difference in word meanings - difference in unstated assumptions (including re purpose of the conversation) - difference in emotional state (ordered, I guess, by "increasingly harder to reconcile")
The emotional state one is underappreciated. Two people in an argument are typically basically in two completely different scenes mentally, from some other moment in their life.
@_exoconnor @TheOrangeAlt Note that unlike eg arms the two brain hemispheres don't map onto the eyes themselves but onto the visual field. LH focuses on right side (& near center of gaze) and is oblivious to left RH favors left side but also is attuned into whole & periphery
Replying to @s_r_constantin
@s_r_constantin A related take on a slightly different level of abstraction, talking about how the decision-making structures that the people are in tend to result in them making similar decisions, or even for different decisions to result in similar outcomes. 🙃
@QiaochuYuan Wow these are great. Actually as I keep reading them I'm finding them more cynical than my taste. I like the first one though, and its deep relevance to this thread.
Retweeted @jessica_salfia
This poem is called “First lines of emails I’ve received while quarantining.”
Retweeted @Aella_Girl
You're in a party full of people invited by friends you know, vaguely clustered around your community/interests. You find o…
@pieratt somehow feels like it could make a 2×2 with this one twitter.com/punished_harve…
@xuenay @QiaochuYuan Mmm @SarahAMcManus and I were talking about this today, along with this PCT↔suffering model 👇
@QiaochuYuan @xuenay Mmmmmmmmm really appreciating you highlighting this.
@xuenay @QiaochuYuan In PCT terms we might also say something like "a need is something you are unable to reorganize away" which would include (for most people) hunger etc but also anything that you don't know how to go meta to would feel needy.
@csageland @vgr @ifIknewIdtellya Carse continues: ~> Infinite players understand the inescapable likelihood of evil. They ∴ do not attempt to eliminate evil in others, for to do so is the very impulse of evil itself... they only attempt paradoxically to recognize in themselves the evil that takes [that] form.
@nosilverv I want to be the kind of person who does this 👆
@RichDecibels I've found I need meta-relationships, ie other ppl who have a relationship to my relationship, who can thus offer a perspective on whether I'm flinching out of something fertile vs outgrowing something constraining. Ofc, requires a resonant community of challenge & support.
@RichDecibels Relatedly, also, I have a concept of Relationship Panarchy See this page on my roam for a short write-up: roamresearch.com/#/app/malcolmo… Also related, this article:
Replying to @MimeticValue
@MimeticValue your name & handle seem relevant here
@ajpoyiadgi @algekalipso this comic series 👆relates to the mindmelding tech you were talking about in your recent interview on @thegoodtimeline cosmictortoise.podbean.com/e/42-andres-go…
@ShapesOfEmpathy @SarahAMcManus @JaredJanes @cognazor
@_awbery_ @SarahAMcManus @chagmed @ShapesOfEmpathy @JaredJanes @cognazor Yeah! It's been really fun & helpful to talk with you about them! I'm curious what additions or modifications you'd make to that diagram! I just put in "e.g. 100k prostrations" as an example tantra ngöndro.
Retweeted @Buddh_ish
Try translating “sunyata” as “freedom” rather than “emptiness.” How does it feel?
@QiaochuYuan @Buddh_ish Oh interesting, that then jives with people saying "discipline is freedom"
@Buddh_ish Liberating.
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@dela3499 Umm.... prohibition is kind of famous for not working 😜 Banning deepfakes won't work, in the same way alcohol…
@_awbery_ @SarahAMcManus @chagmed @ShapesOfEmpathy @JaredJanes @cognazor Is there a name for the point between lhatong & nyi-mèd? or are those two practices done in parallel to get from the point labelled "experience of emptiness" to "nondual unification of method & wisdom"? (ofc, as always, answer may be "Q is founded on confused assumptions" 😆)
@_TimothyRowe Mmmm this resonates a lot with something the Perceptual Control Theory folks point at: There's a general tendency for people to miss out on intent (what is someone controlling for, in PCT terms) and focus on behavior (what are they doing). Cybernetic perspective.
@_TimothyRowe And ofc, hierarchical control systems mean that there are multiple answers to "what are they controlling for?" at different levels.
@_TimothyRowe As I keep saying, often the "why" is confused, in the sense of being composed of meanings from another place & time. So like "what is Bob's yell controlling for?" - make Jack be quiet - SO he will feel safe - SO he won't experience childhood helplessness
@Meaningness @chagmed @_awbery_ @SarahAMcManus @ShapesOfEmpathy @JaredJanes @cognazor Huh, so that seems like it might mean that the dzogchen line of the diagram above would only be accurate for... Aro? Nyingma? Wondering what the others would look like...
@misen__ @Meaningness @chagmed @_awbery_ @SarahAMcManus @ShapesOfEmpathy @JaredJanes @cognazor Yeah this is all super helpful. @SarahAMcManus and I will incorporate it, make a new diagram, and then push the Cunningham's Law button again 😂
@misen__ @Meaningness @chagmed @_awbery_ @SarahAMcManus @ShapesOfEmpathy @JaredJanes @cognazor PS if you ever have some sort of structure that you want illustrated, either or both of us might have appetite for that! On whatever level of abstraction :)
Retweeted @jborichevskiy
Current situation: clumsily switching between my podcast app and a Notes app Better: capturing notes in my podcast app…
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
burn the schools* down and free the children *zoom classrooms twitter.com/HeatherTDay/st…
if you meet the Buddha on the road keep 6 feet apart
@_awbery_ @the_aiju @Meaningness @chagmed @SarahAMcManus @ShapesOfEmpathy @JaredJanes @cognazor checks out tantra ~= weave
@collinofzion liberate me
@Buddh_ish Resonates also with the whole vibe of Bruce Tift's book Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation
@nosilverv Bruce Tift has a bunch of stages in Already Free on dissolving internal divisions, and I love the sass in stage 6, which points at exactly this thing. > We may find that we have still been operating on the subtle hope that if only we do this work... our disturbance will go away.
Retweeted @nosilverv
What if i won’t change anymore -- what if this is it? Can i accept myself, thusly? Not as a trick "Yea I'll accept myself so…
@Aryeh___ @maybegray @reasonisfun, this article is a frank & awful depiction of schools
Retweeted @Aryeh___
h/t @maybegray 'The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher' swaraj.org/multiversity/g…
@maybegray @stubborncurias @Aryeh___ sez en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tayl…, he started realizing this stuff towards the end of his career as a teacher, after which he became an unschooling activist, writing many books including one called Dumbing Us Down which is an elaboration on these 7 lessons.
@maybegray @stubborncurias @Aryeh___ In particular, his Teacher of the Year awards were '89, '90, '91, then... > In 1991, he wrote a letter announcing his retirement, titled I Quit, I Think, to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, saying that he no longer wished to "hurt kids to make a living."
@maybegray @stubborncurias @Aryeh___ Based on wikipedia, the scale of his activism seems such that he might be substantially responsible for the level of recognition that is emerging of how damaging schooling is. Obviously others have played key roles in that process too. @QiaochuYuan
I've been struck for some time by how much meaning I often feel when I see the green dot showing that a friend of mine is online such a small bit of data—literally 1 bit ⚫️🟢 but it connects to a whole space of possibility of a conversation we could be about to have Presence.
I think to some extent Bruce Tift's book Already Free might be a decent pragmatic unification of the two neurological models I looked at last year: McGilchrist's brain hemisphere model ↔ Fruitional View Unlocking the Emotional Brain's coherence framework ↔ Developmental View
Of course, it's not the most satisfying union 😛 Tift notes "I alternate between a Buddhist approach and a psychotherapeutic approach, without any hope of resolution"
Absurd that Zoom doesn't support an interview mode, where two videos are shown large, instead of having only "1" or "25" vids as options. (Could either have just-2 (like speaker view) or 2big+tinyrow (like gallery)) eg @peternlimberg would be using this regularly for the Stoa
@Prigoose Haha cool! Yeah, my ability to sleep biphasically was probably developed in part by experimenting with uberman (2011 & 2013) and everyman-3 (2013). Got lots of practice napping. Wrote this article at the time; don't necessarily stand by it all now malcolmocean.com/2013/08/polyph…
Been saying this for years. Light sleep, despite being one of the most common human activities (~4h/day for almost everyone) doesn't even have its own wikipedia page. There's a page for NREM (non-rapid eye movement) but that includes SWS aka deep sleep (obviously vital) as well.
@Prigoose Definitely feel free to reach out if you have questions or are despairing and want an outside perspective. I'm also happy to be tagged in future threads about this just to see how it's going for you.
@TheOrangeAlt I mean you could just use the reviews, either just the weekly & monthly ones or also use the daily outcomes process but without ever setting intentions. Pick Four, the workbook Complice is based on, didn't have an intention-setting step; I added that See blog.complice.co/post/163274697…
@Buddh_ish It's my top book reco of 2020 so far, by far. Knew it would be by like Jan 3rd.
@4lfil @visakanv @selentelechia @QiaochuYuan @TheOrangeAlt @vgr @nosilverv you want to be following this convo
@TheOrangeAlt @QiaochuYuan @visakanv @vgr I don't feel any specific sense of this yet. So far my replies have largely continued to be things I find fairly interesting. Not many "low quality reply guys" Visa talks about. I block almost anyone where cost of interacting w them seems not worth it, incl on others' threads
@visakanv @TheOrangeAlt @QiaochuYuan @vgr Very much looking forward to "3-5k is a very nice place to be, you get engagement on almost everything" and honestly kinda wishing that after that phase there would be a way to add strategic friction to people following me something between locked & not-locked account...
@visakanv @TheOrangeAlt @QiaochuYuan @vgr Gonna ideate briefly on how I might implement such a feature: - obvious 🔒🌎 hybrid: anyone can see all of my tweets but have to ask to follow - visible, but disable new follows altogether for a day - someone can't follow me until they've ♥'d 10 of my tweets (or some other N)
@visakanv @TheOrangeAlt @QiaochuYuan @vgr The last one (N ♥s) seems great because: 1. anyone who's been enjoying my tweets for awhile can instafollow 2. if not, they have to read through my older tweets first AND like them. This adds 3 frictions: - simple time delay - bored people will bounce off - haters don't wanna ♥
@visakanv @TheOrangeAlt @QiaochuYuan @vgr Oh and also it encourages a culture of people engaging on twitter only with people whose tweets they wanna ♥ See this thread:
@imhinesmi @visakanv @TheOrangeAlt @QiaochuYuan @vgr I know it's a 100% gameable proxy, but I think what I'm saying is that I think this would be enough that haters mostly wouldn't bother.
Retweeted @RobertHaisfield
#roamcult did you know that you can change the CSS styling? Thanks to @Malcolm_Ocean, I'm now able to wrap text when I…
@Timber_22 @Meaningness @chagmed @_awbery_ @SarahAMcManus @ShapesOfEmpathy @JaredJanes @cognazor Yeah totally, we're well aware that it's a map coming from the Aro perspective, mostly as mediated through @Meaningness & @_awbery_, though we were also reading Dzogchen Teachings by Chögyal Namkhai Norbu the other day and it jives with much of this. but still very dzogchen view
@visakanv @TheOrangeAlt @QiaochuYuan @vgr Say more?
@imhinesmi @visakanv @TheOrangeAlt @QiaochuYuan @vgr Oh yeah, I considered something like that... I think I dismissed it because "you can only follow me if I've liked one of your tweets" does incentivize people to send you a bunch of tweets. They do have to model what you like, but still, it could be noisy.
@imhinesmi @visakanv @TheOrangeAlt @QiaochuYuan @vgr Could be a shortcut tho! Could be: to follow me, must meet one of these: - I follow you - I've retweeted you - I've liked 5+ of your tweets - you've liked 10+ of my tweets - I follow 3+ ppl who follow you might make it easier to be lazy:
@visakanv @TheOrangeAlt @QiaochuYuan @vgr Yeah see this is where I sort of feel like I have ADHD but also feel like I maybe don't.
@TheOrangeAlt @QiaochuYuan airtable is like google sheets but shinier though slightly more constraining in some ways
@Aryeh___ @made_in_cosmos @collinofzion @nosilverv @NeoSomaliana @RoqaVuk @fvathynevgl @Dailan__M @BLUNDERBUSSTED @donmexlar @dicknoramus @ModernCortes @hbdchick @AAAllegedly @JimmyLevendia @Misanfrog @RightModernist @euneaux @CGoydich @Outis169 @fitzfromdublin @Gurdur @LadaMokusa @schubert_albert @Sigdrifr @romepix @CleopatraPhilo7 @RequiemImperium @HalifaxShadow @AetherCzar @iwrotesham @reaIDickMNixon @JohnSanilac @DoomerMarty @sarahschulman3 @ERG0101 @mauve_sky @HansueloDeHuevo @ninthhostage @sophie_ziner @mizoguccimane @unbridled_id @form_break @leaacta @GlitchesBrew @sashachapin @incertaspecie @FioraAeterna @SarahAMcManus @cognazor Finite and Infinite Games Already Free Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory The Fifth Discipline I Am A Strange Loop Radical Wholeness I roughly picked the four that seem top priority to read. haven't even opened the last one yet but
@_exoconnor @visakanv @TheOrangeAlt @QiaochuYuan @vgr Yup. Robin Sloan has a beautiful piece on this
Retweeted @adamneelybass
This video was inspired by Ben Levin’s ideas around FAKE guitar and the hysteria around sped up Instagram guitar playing…
Hit me with your best songs that are REALLY slow but still have a beat. I ♥ @Fkjmusic & @thesundropgardn's Vibin' Out with ((( O ))), which I'm inclined to say is 45bpm and in... 24/16 time? As in 4b/meas, each beat subdivided into 6... @adamneelybass? youtube.com/watch?v=9Gq9N-…
@mixcocam @mattellsworth @anthilemoon @RoamResearch Yeah to be clear I'm now part of the roamcult. Haven't moved everything over from WF because I have 6+ roams and I'm not sure exactly what to put where, plus I want to import it using JSON to preserve edit stamps, and haven't had time to write the script.
Hey @voicesocial_ I'm gonna suggest that you want me in your beta sooner rather than later, on the basis of my having spent the last year ideating extensively on how to build a better version of Twitter. See it here: twitter.com/search?q=from%… Testimonial:
Heard @RichDecibels describing @presencing_inst's Case Clinic and when I heard ~"group sensemaking process guided by a structure & precise timer" my first thought was "sounds like One Night Ultimate Werewolf but for Circling" presencing.org/resource/tools…
So many bizarre and unprecedented things happening, and then... Biden as Presidential candidate? Feels suspiciously boring. 🧐
Google has a Talk to Books thing, that lets you uhh... "Say something to books" & then relevant quotes show up. It seems... okay, so far? Worth playing around with a bit, probably worse than just putting keywords into "search tweets from ppl I follow" books.google.com/talktobooks/
Thinking @andy_matuschak & @michael_nielsen would be interested in this format. @KevinSimler too. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
@_exoconnor @visakanv @TheOrangeAlt @QiaochuYuan @vgr > The master metaphor for social media might just be the PA screech.
@DanielleFong @technobaboo @sanchak74 @patrickc @collision @marannelson @geetfun @sindero Mmm I'm mostly working on mindware / cultureware tech for non-naive trust-building. I think that software can help, but without adequate cultural shifts it'll tend to evolve itself towards the old attractors.
@Connoropolous @joyurge this seems like your sort of thing
@QiaochuYuan Lol this was my own tweet and I had to read it like 3× before I figured out wtf was going on
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@QiaochuYuan #ThrowbackThursday #ThowbackEveryday
@QiaochuYuan I actually think "dream mashups" is better than "nightmare mashups". There's a natural tendency, given usage context, for it to slip into "nightmare" but the point of the metaphor is not the scariness but the bizarreness of dreams, & lack of awakeness & meta-awareness thereof.
Retweeted @nosilverv
@zbingledack shit i totally forgot you could patent things instead of doing them
@TaylorPearsonMe Could try denoting certain numbers ($, pop) in logarithmic units, like decibans (@). I played around with this awhile ago. To convert X@ to normal numbers, 10^(X/10) So eg 30@ = 1000 60@ = 1M 67@ = 5M US Pop: 85@ $500B stimulus: $117@ stim/person = $117@-85@ = 32@ = $1500
@TaylorPearsonMe That's right, the last line shows that for ratios between decibans, you subtract instead of dividing! x-y@ = 10^((x-y)/10) = 10^(x/10)÷10^(y/10) So it's like order of magnitude, but the 1s digit allows much more precision. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartley_(…
@TaylorPearsonMe To double, add 3@ 10@ = 10 13@ = 20 16@ = 40 19@ = 80 22@ = 160 25@ = 320 28@ = 630 31@ = 1260 34@ = 2500 37@ = 5000 40@ = 10000 And ofc to 10×, just add 10@ And thus naturally, to 5× add 7@ (3@+7@=10@)
@QiaochuYuan Yeah. Also Doug said in January something like "your ability to meet a friend you haven't seen in a decade and it feels like yesterday is due to the emotional brain as well" Huh! And maybe also the "so weird to see you [friend from high school] here [some unrelated context]"
@DanielleFong @technobaboo @sanchak74 @patrickc @collision @marannelson @geetfun @sindero I just drafted a long tweetstorm ideating on possibilities for this but then I accidentally hit ctrl+w just before I was about to hit send, and twitter doesn't have onbeforeunload set up so the tweetstorm just vanished into the ether. I'm not gonna both trying to rewrite it, but
@DanielleFong @technobaboo @sanchak74 @patrickc @collision @marannelson @geetfun @sindero in summary I mostly think we need apps that help people have better conversations. Here are some pointers: - #TwitterReplacement - @Connoropolous' @RSFrame me ideating on slack replacements: roamresearch.com/#/app/malcolmo…
@DanielleFong @technobaboo @sanchak74 @patrickc @collision @marannelson @geetfun @sindero @Connoropolous @RSFrame + chat app for conflict-resolution / memetic mediation, either w a meditor role or bot that helps: - clarify assumptions - cool down when tense - steelman / reflective listening It could also match ppl to talk: mix of resonance/dissonance @peternlimberg
@DanielleFong I recall hearing about an app that would help with the cooling down when tense part. Like it was marketed towards people who'd had a falling apart (with an ex, family members, etc) to help them reconcile... and if someone tried to swear or type a reply too quickly, it would slow.
@AnnaLeptikon @nosilverv Yeah, weirdly I don't actually see what reply I made. I *was* looking at this yesterday though, and curious what if any progress @nosilverv has made in the last few months.
@QiaochuYuan @mattgoldenberg @mattgoldenberg would love to hear how it's been going!
@Meaningness @SarahAMcManus @_awbery_ Just read this ethics article. I forget if I'd read it before or not. Valued & enjoyed it. When I got to this paragraph 👇 I found myself wondering if that example might be publishable now in a way it wasn't before (assuming you still have the draft somewhere)
Great aggregation of threads that can help expand your sense of what's possible with twitter.
A decent number of these gave me a good chuckle 😂 twitter.com/Sara_Rose_G/st…
Retweeted @TaylorPearsonMe
Many of the predictions of what the economic recovery looks like miss the dimensionality. Will the economy bounce bac…
This poem by @dril is the metamodern version of whatever Invictus was the modern version of.
(if you don't recognize the title "Invictus", it's the one that ends like this👇 & like dril's poem above it was originally untitled) It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.
@RobertHaisfield @tangjeff0 @Conaw is pro-export & interop, to be clear.
@tangjeff0 @maxkriegers @houshuang @round @opinionsonline @csageland @KHPavle I also think it makes sense to separate "ping this person in real-time" from "make sure they see it eventually" although fortunately with bidi links "eventually" is mostly covered by natural exploring. But like, could have a sort of queue of highlights for the day/week.
@tangjeff0 @houshuang @maxkriegers @round @opinionsonline @csageland @KHPavle Yoooo loving this. I have added this twitter thread to a page on my roamblog about Conversation App Design: roamresearch.com/#/app/malcolmo… See also this; not really relevant to roam, though relevant to conversational apps that help resolve disagreement.
@tangjeff0 @houshuang @maxkriegers @round @opinionsonline @csageland @KHPavle ...which is relevant to Roam inasmuch as one of its original use-cases was for argument-mapping. I think Roam will soon be one of the best mediums for converging trains of thought. Most other apps are: - linear (gdocs, blog,.) - tree/diverge-only (workflowy, twitter, reddit,.)
@jborichevskiy @tangjeff0 @maxkriegers @houshuang @round @opinionsonline @csageland @KHPavle Also, another feature any sane team collaboration app needs to have, is an easy way to set it so that if you don't get to the thing within say a week or two, it slides into an archive. Some things are like, time-sensitive but non-essential opportunities, and need to not build up
Replying to @liminal_warmth
@liminal_warmth Fyeah. The most important recent theory in neuroscience came from someone working self-directedly: Iain McGilchrist, who researched & wrote The Master and His Emissary over 20 years while he had a clinical psychiatry practice. Highly recommended 🙌🤯
@liminal_warmth Relevant to occult (the right hemisphere plays a key role in anything related to perceiving the ineffable) as well as to entheogens (the right hemisphere is where one usually stimulates with TMS etc to induce mystical/spiritual states) twitter.com/liminal_warmth…
@liminal_warmth Also just in general, most peoples' default model of the hemispheres is sort of a vague sense of cariacatures of each but also "eh, it's not that important" but if you dismiss that vital axis, you'll end up projecting it onto other distinctions
@peak_valley_pea Need to disambiguate: 🔶 "I'm not addicted to my concept of this person" (an addition you're saying is unhealthy, & I agree) from 🔷 "I'm not allowing myself to rest any weight, logistical or narrative, on this person" (= an addiction to naive autonomy)
@peak_valley_pea @rothosphere "Never mind, I'll find someone like you" - Adele From my perspective (& I think @rothosphere's) this is unhealthy in a different way, fixating on relationship based on meeting certain criteria, rather than on being in sacred unique connection with exactly who your partner is
Looking at 538's covid polls, & feeling vaguely sad at the question > ~"Do you approve or disapprove of the way Trump is handling the pandemic?" which so clearly just becomes a partisan confidence vote instead of... maybe... "do you think Trump acted {early, on time, late}?"
(I'd want to break that down by [testing], [tracking], [lockdown], etc) ...I'm not sure. It's hard. Most people don't know at all what's going on, and so many of both the directly-virus-related impacts and the impacts of countermeasures are hard to see and still in the future.
@SeanMombo like everything, depends on context and approach also a given post could simultaneously be healing for the person who posts it & harmful to readers or healing for one reader, but then the poster might be harmed by how someone else responds
@jack_meditates @SeanMombo @selentelechia @adamfgcross @QiaochuYuan @visakanv @m_ashcroft @meditationstuff @NeoSomaliana @nosilverv
@NeoSomaliana @selentelechia @SeanMombo @jack_meditates @QiaochuYuan @visakanv @m_ashcroft @meditationstuff @nosilverv very similar to what @visakanv & @QiaochuYuan are talking about here (my tweet QT'd below is a reply to QC's, so you can click through to get to the original thread)
@jack_meditates @NeoSomaliana @selentelechia @SeanMombo @QiaochuYuan @visakanv @m_ashcroft @meditationstuff @nosilverv Yeah, welcome to strangely earnest twitter! You seem to already have the vibe 🕺🕺
@visakanv @jack_meditates @SeanMombo @selentelechia @adamfgcross @QiaochuYuan @m_ashcroft @meditationstuff @NeoSomaliana @nosilverv I'll contribute on a meta-level some writing about what even are opposites, inspired in part by an exchange between you & @danlistensto last October when you asked "what is the opposite of a traumatic experience?" Read draft at: roamresearch.com/#/app/malcolmo…
@SeanMombo I mean, maybe twitter (or your timeline in particular) needs more PSAs about how you can mute keywords? Settings > content preferences > muted > muted words
"To my emotional brain, it's all the time, all the time." — a friend of mine (paraphrasing my explanation of why for Bio-Emotive processing, it works best if you can speak in present tense ("I'm there, the kids are laughing at me, and I feel scared") instead of past tense)
@SeanMombo @NeoSomaliana @selentelechia @jack_meditates @QiaochuYuan @visakanv @m_ashcroft @meditationstuff @nosilverv Yep. Something I was recently reading (maybe Already Free by Bruce Tift?) was saying ~ "the reason we often feel small when triggered is that our emotional brains are actually living in a childhood moment, when we *were* small"
Had a lovely dream last night where I was in a cuddle puddle with @QiaochuYuan & a bunch of other people, and we were improvisationally singing together (a few ppl with instruments)... ...all on the stage in a HUGE, packed, auditorium, of 10k+ people, who were into it I guess!
It got to be like 5am or something and a lot of the people in the audience area had gone home, and we started singing to the remaining people like "why don't you come a little closer?" all in beautiful harmonies, and they did, and then it felt more intimate.
The auditorium was so huge that when the remaining people came in closer it almost felt like laying under the stars. 🌌 Was a beautiful integration of two desires: - to be seen & admired - to be connected & moved by others Performance & authenticity. Majesty & vulnerability. 🙏
@maybegray I am pioneering new frontiers in wholesome twitter
Replying to @sadmoonanalog
@sadmoonanalog @averykimball Noice.
Latest userscript! I lost a long tweetstorm last night because I accidentally hit ctrl+w on the wrong window (thanks to my new 20-button mouse lol @visakanv) and so I wrote a tiny thing that confirms before closing a twitter compose tab. gist.github.com/malcolmocean/7…
Replying to @djinnius
@djinnius @sadmoonanalog @averykimball yeah laptops are intrinsically unergonomic lol no way to have sane neck position & sane arm position simultaneously agreed this needs some sort of shelf for kb/mouse if you want to do more than read stuff on it
If you want to install this and don't know how, get yourself a userscript extension, then hit [NEW] then copy-paste this code in there. I use TamperMonkey for Brave/Chrome, and it seems to have versions for most browsers...
Thread · Onboarding pathways from fear and anger into connection · 7 of 8 tweets
Still feeling kinda sad about a guy who wandered into strangely earnest twitter and got triggered and scared and angry. Wondering what's got me hooked there. :thinking_heart: emoji
On the immediate content level, there's like, a sadness of the limitations of this medium. A feeling that if he'd been able to get in the same room with me & @jack_meditates & @visakanv & @selentelechia & so on... ...he'd be able to feel we're not trying to hurt him.
Then there's a part of me that knows that it's not nearly that easy. Feeling safe & being safe are just totally different things, and it's very easy to project your fear onto the situation and it continues to feel scary.
I notice I keep having this urge to try to reach out & try to connect with the guy, but he's been quite vocal in a leave-me-alone way so I guess I'm very transparently subtweeting the situation instead.
Does it help to remind myself that he's just the guy who happened to encounter my corner of the internet today and that there are a lot of such people? ...idk, I feel sad for all of them. How do we create onboarding pathways from people being sad/scared/lonely into connection?
I think that this onboarding pathways thing is really key. People stuck in shitty attractors need gradual steps, where the pathway starts with something that makes sense to them in terms of what they already know & understand. Best people to create = people who've been there?
One does not jump instantly from angry TLA* to spacious metamodern memetic mediator. There's many pieces, not all of which can be streamlined: usually involves making some connection with real ppl outside *TLA = three-letter acronym; replace with SJW or MRA or NRX or whatever
@HuanWin Mmmm yeah. As you say, it seems we're already doing it for certain people who are ready in some ways. Snd there's no obligation to try to expand our reach further, just desire and an open question of what our collective capacity is in various directions.
@SeanMombo @jack_meditates I appreciated some of your responses but I also think there's a point where actively saying seemingly-kind things while someone is upset, when you can confidently bet they'll take it not how you mean it, is actually not kind, and just reinforces an image of sarcastic assholes.
@collinofzion @QiaochuYuan 🔥📈🚀🌱! Probably it doesn't start with huge auditoriums but smaller ones. In the dream it was also at the end of some more overtly showy show, in which I was a performer (dancing? I don't recall exactly) so that's obviously one way in burning man etc would be a decent context
@salimmj4 @Aella_Girl @omniguest Though yeah, could change the account handle now, then clear the existing requests, then set up a system for the people you want to know what it is.
@Timber_22 @mlegls @jack_meditates @Buddh_ish
@Timber_22 @mlegls @jack_meditates @Triquetrea Whoa, fascinating. I once set a metta meditation to music, adapting the words to do so, and this is what I came up with: May you be safe and free from suffering May you be as happy and healthy as you can be May you have peace, and ease of being May you always be a friend to me
@Timber_22 @mlegls @jack_meditates @Triquetrea And if I recall correctly (which I'm not confident I do; this was 2012ish) I kind of invented the last line, like it wasn't part of the original text I was adapting from the MBSR course I was taking... but there just sort of needed to be a fourth line for the song!
@Timber_22 @mlegls @jack_meditates @Triquetrea It almost struck me as too cheesy or something, but I kept it. And now I'm feeling like "holy shit, maybe my right hemisphere knew what was up the whole time!" Still holding open whether: —"be a friend to|for me" —"have a friend in me" Here's the melody: soundcloud.com/malcolmocean/f…
@mlegls @Timber_22 I have ~opinions~ on this, coming from a Yudkowskian background plus recent extensive study of Iain McGilchrist's work on brain hemispheres and seeing how resonant that model is with the dzogchen take. (dualistic mind ↔ left hemisphere, nondual perspective ↔ right hemisphere)
@mlegls @Timber_22 This tweet and the 3 downthread of it summarize roughly my current take on the subject.
@mlegls @Timber_22 Here's the top of the thread; probably worth reading for anyone following this who doesn't have the context on McGilchrist.
@dela3499 This other twitter script is a must-have. The red dots & unread numbers are *obnoxious*. I've also used it for a few workflowy userstyles that only work if you can insert certain custom classes based on other elements. That's about it atm.
@m_ashcroft @egocv @visakanv yep. I think twitter on phone is an antipattern which is ironic given that the original 140-char limit came from SMS but twitter has evolved into something utterly different since then
My latest theme (the last week or so) is focusing on being in touch with the value of behaviors I want to do, rather than trying to do them. Instead of trying to be radically transparent, focus on valuing what happens when I'm revealing things samesidedly. The generator.
Of course, there may also be resistances or drawbacks. Those are fine; attending to the value of the behavior will help get me in touch with those! Then I might experiment though I feel scared, or discern that it doesn't feel like a good bet right now. Or tune in if not sure.
@peak_valley_pea Agreed re not forcing. Probably this approach will work way better 👇
Thread · Conditional predictions and what to do under uncertainty · 10 of 11 tweets
Great article on how media responded to experts re covid. Prediction becomes weird in a context where you have partial control, because you simultaneously want to be wrong while having people take you seriously. slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/14/a-f…
One approach might be to specify conditionals: "conditional on [these decisions/behaviors by govt & citizens], I predict X hundred thousand deaths; conditional on [alternative], I predict X hundred deaths" +"former scenario looks more likely, but I obviously ADVISE the latter"
The point, as @slatestarcodex makes very clearly in that article, is that when there's huge uncertainty & meta-uncertainty... focusing on predicting what will happen is a diversion from the real question: ❓What Does It Make Sense To Do While We Have This Uncertainty?
❓What Does It Make Sense To Do While We Have This Uncertainty? And *sometimes* the answer is "what we were doing before the question was even asked". But it's very risky to assume so! And if saying "10% odds of pandemic are too low to take action", then what's NOT too low?
Also, the answer (including the threshold at which it makes sense to change behavior at all) is different depending on who "we" is!
US govt could've reasonably started developing drive-thru testing infrastructure on Dec 31st (even if estimating 1% chance of pandemic) on the basis that that would come in handy eventually even if it wasn't needed in 2020. Citizens didn't need to change behv then or even know.
Another example, if experts figured on a 15% chance of a particular volcano erupting this month: - people living nearby 😷🛫 - governments nearby 🤔🧐🤝🧑🚒 - people intending to vacation there 😬👀🛬 - entrepreneurs 💡🤔🚌 - and most people far away, probably nothing 🤷♀️
if it were 95%, and a huge volcano, all the people nearby would certainly gtfo if they at all could, and the government might pay to safeguard these citizens. That probably doesn't make sense at 15%, but *something* makes sense. And how do we discern what that something is?
One thing that seems to help stimulate this kind of thinking is Scenario Planning—an adaptation of some military methods. Thinking in advance what it might make sense to do under certain conditions can generate better actions to take in the present. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scenario_…
Better actions now could be: 🟢 convergently instrumental (in any scenario, having invested in X helps) 🟠 preparation (in scenario C, we're fucked *unless* we did Y 3wks earlier) 🔴 fat-tail disaster-avoidant (scenario D would cost >$10T, currently P=10%, $10B NOW → P=5%)
Replying to @eigenrobot
Replying to @eigenrobot
@RichDecibels adorable tiny cement truck
Thread · Why disaster prediction is cybernetically weird
In this thread below, I didn't really explore this comment, which I think is the most original thing I say in the thread. > Prediction becomes weird in a context where you have partial control, because you simultaneously want to be wrong while having people take you seriously.
What is the weird thing here? It's a cybernetic thing. Control systems. Ha! It's related to the same reason why Predictive Processing language sounds confusing! Perceptual Control Theory is structurally analogous but phrased in a less confusing way. see slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/20/tra…
Planning to avoid disaster is very loopy! ➿ What you end up saying is "on the basis of something I think would happen if I didn't do what I'm going to do (to keep it from happening because I don't want it to happen) I'm going to do something that will prevent it from happening"
There's an important sense in which the desired outcome involves never finding out if original prediction was right! In a complicated system, you might, if you can run an adequate counterfactual simulation with new knowledge. But not in a complex system. twitter.com/helenbevan/sta…
Obviously ideally we get both: - minimal deaths - AND we'd get to find out whether our actions were indeed necessary for that (and if we took multiple actions for redundancy, which ones helped most) But the more you increase redundancy, the harder it is to tell what worked.
This is so on both governmental policy scales, and a single household. If we: - avoid public gatherings - wear masks at grocery store - wash groceries & deliveries on the way in - copper-tape handles - boost immunity w vitamins & nobody in house gets sick... what made the diff?
And yet if we do all of those things, and somebody does get sick anyway, it can still be really hard to know where the gap was—and the kicker is: *the more precautions we took, the harder it is to know where the virus got through anyway*
I guess this is actually sort of a U-curve: - no precautions means 🤷♀️, could have been anything (or many things) - some precautions means🤦♀️it was probably the things we didn't do - all known precautions means 🧐 wtf did we miss?
This is especially confusing when there are many actors. It might have been that your actions were redundant—if you hadn't got it, someone else might've. I think there's been a lot of that with covid, unconsciously: "it won't be so bad [because surely someone will do something]"
This apparently-inherent tradeoff seems like the sort of thing that Complexity researchers & Systems Thinkers might have a term for already—if so, I'd love to know what it is! @jim_rutt @NoraBateson @TaylorPearsonMe @cwodtke @RichDecibels @edelwax @snowded @Timber_22
Thread · Conditional predictions and what to do under uncertainty · 1 of 11 tweets
(This thread 👆 ended up being mostly about how to cope with the weirdness of predictions in these situations, rather than "wtf is weird here and why?", so I wrote a second thread in which I elaborate on the more fundamental question 👇)
@DanielleFong @nntaleb Haven't, no. Link? Couldn't find with a search. Seems to me it could indeed be very very catastrophic but unlikely to literally wipe out the human race (which is what I take "existential risk" to mean, following Bostrom) (Not intending to undermine point; just clarifying terms)
Reading books linearly is kind of like playing a video game: reading one chapter unlocks the next! Which doesn't remotely imply a reason to rush from one chapter to another...
@Jenlky minigames
@natural_hazard @mattgoldenberg @buster I'm currently reading Mutual Causality in Buddhism General Systems Theory by Joanna Macy, and... ...it's exactly about this thing! ...but it's not very accessible at all unless you're a serious buddhist nerd or already appetized. But seemed important to mention it here.
@natural_hazard @mattgoldenberg @buster Alternative more serious recommendation might be The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge. Said discipline is Systems Thinking, and the book talks extensively and much more straightforwardly about the nonstraightforwardness of most causal systems (ie mutual causality).
Retweeted @natural_hazard
What are people's recomendations for understanding complex loopy problems/domains? cc: @mattgoldenberg @Malcolm_Ocean…
@mattgoldenberg @coponder @natural_hazard @buster idk TAE but I'm curious to hear what you guys have gotten from it!
@nosilverv Noice! 🔥💯🚀🌱 The group I'm part of talks about developing learner mindset, and I've watched people learn past previous blocks way more than I'd've otherwise thought possible. I recently put a tag on page 52 of Dzogchen Teachings, where an excerpt connects with that shift.
Thread · Brain hemispheres, masculine/feminine archetypes, and non-duality
Had the same thought when I read this this morning! (ie Apr 9th, when I drafted most of thread) I'd heard left side of the body as feminine & right side as masculine, and since reading McGilchrist I no longer think this is spurious! (Flip L↔R for hemispheres bc contralateral) t.co/Mn14IZXCef
Meanwhile for a fleshed out theory of how masculine & feminine archetypes relates to the brain hemispheres, check out The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, by Leonard Shlain. I haven't read it myself yet though. alphabetvsgoddess.com
I've also noted that there's a different remarkable resonance between the Aro / Dzogchen perspective & McGilchrist, where the left hemisphere might literally be the dualistic mind and the right hemisphere the non-dual perspective.
I don't yet have an integrated view of how those two resonances relate to each other. Off the cuff... - when masculine LH tries to dominate feminine RH, you get, uhh... *points at current fractal dumpster fire* 🗑️🔥 - when the LH & RH can khandro-pawo dance, 🕺💃🌱🌼🤩🚀
Workshopping this thread with @SarahAMcManus and she's like: > yeah, you might map "dualist & LH" and "pawo & LH" but I don't think it makes sense to map "pawo & dualistic". Perhaps pawo & "integrated discernment of difference"? Me again: Maybe two modes/attractors for the LH?
@SarahAMcManus again: > Yeah, there's a current default operating system for the left hemisphere that is dualist all the way down. There's maybe a more integrated, fluid operating system for the LH that is more aligned with the non-dual tantric pawo mode.
(Malcolm again) So this is one lens on the apparent paradox where the LH needs to somehow learn to dance the RH's non-dual dance despite the RH being ineffable to the LH. The LH learns a different kind of trust than it's been using internally.
My current best answer for "what framework/paradigm would most allow the LH to dance with the RH?" is... Systems Thinking! Joanna Macy posits in Mutual Causality in Buddhism & General Systems Theory that "dependent co-arising" ≡ "systems thinking" twitter.com/BuildSoil/stat…
@TheOrangeAlt Wrote a thread! (Back at the time; it got stuck in drafts until today)
(Parenthetically) I think that monism (in the confused sense) comes from something like: - someone has a non-dual experience with their right hemisphere - sees its value - then attempts to pin down & articulate the insight with their left hemisphere, oversimplifying it to fit
Replying to @MimeticValue
@MimeticValue Yeah, nonlinearly is also great. I tend to read linearly within a given book (unless it's one I'm still assessing if I would want to read at all) but read half a dozen books in parallel, which is... like super smash bros? Combining unrelated characters 😂
@m_ashcroft @egocv @visakanv I mean, even just experiment for a week or two!
Retweeted @Noahpinion
Marc Andreessen argues that Americans need to focus on building better institutions. He's absolutely right. This is the ti…
@Noahpinion You might value the modern→postmodern→metamodern model. Not sure what introduction to suggest but maybe this interview of @HFreinacht on the @jim_rutt show jimruttshow.com/hanzi-freinach…
@Jeanvaljean689 Oooh, I don't know about the "other story". The main thing I'll note is that it would absolutely be an error to project "masculinity" & "femininity" in general onto the hemispheres. There are however particular archetypes (such as khandro-pawo) that have some resonance therewith
@Jeanvaljean689 I guess the other thing I'll say is that it could be that he's just talking about statistical aggregate data about brain activity or something boring & averagerian or whatever, that might be a byproduct of culture & not hold up in a functional society.
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
sometimes you have to go all the way out to "whatever immortal eternal being i / we secretly am / are that incarnated here…
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
sometimes you have to go all the way out to "the universe is fundamentally, irreducibly, precognitively, preconsciously ma…
Retweeted @SarahAMcManus
Me: Why am I dragging my feet on doing this small thing?? @Malcolm_Ocean: You haven't yet surrendered to the reality th…
@SarahAMcManus We made that tweet from a real exchange, & I was feeling slightly funny about my line. Just realized that I think I didn't say "reality that". There may in fact be some ideal option we haven't thought of, but we were in a state of having exhausted known options & all non-ideal
@SarahAMcManus In my experience, if someone has run out of ideas and all of them have drawbacks, but on an unconscious level they're still holding out for an option *without* drawbacks, they'll be stuck in limbo of "why am I not just doing the thing?" Either ideate or settle.
@SarahAMcManus Almost said "either ideate or satisfice" but I actually think the issue here is that the person *wants* to satisfice (ie pick the first option that's "good enough") but they haven't generated any options above that threshold & dunno how to generate more. settle = lower standards
@QiaochuYuan So stoked for you to read Already Free. It says epically incisive things about these dynamics.
@SarahAMcManus Yeah, I definitely didn't mean lowering standards globally or forever! And +1 to grieving.
@SarahAMcManus @MidnightGospel Happened my way onto the Dakini wikipedia page today and noted that the leftmost character in the sanskrit/hindi word was similar to the one in the lower left of this graphic...! ...but not the same. Played with Devangari unicode & gtranslate though & it turns out...
@SarahAMcManus @MidnightGospel Couldn't figure out exactly how to type the upper-right text, but the two characters are "ca" and "i", and in reverse order ( चि ) google translate says this is "chi" I'm guessing the non-reversed order is sort of a fancy stylistic thing? But I know almost zero about devanagari
Thread · Meta-thread of threads on McGilchrist's brain hemispheres · 1 of 38 tweets
A common thing that people try to map the brain hemispheres onto is masculinity & femininity, and some such mappings would be confusing & misleading, but others are remarkably resonant! Particularly the khandro-pawo dance from Vajrayana Buddhism:
@QiaochuYuan Awesome. I have this appetite I can't even quite explain that like... really wants to interview people about this book. Whether those interviews (or excerpts) get posted anywhere is an open Q, depending on person. Other potential interviewees: @Meta_Aesthetic, @cognazor...
Retweeted @SarahAMcManus
So @Malcolm_Ocean and I watched the first 2 episodes of @MidnightGospel last night and -- whoooaaa! Could've sworn I re…
@jondubin @SarahAMcManus Yeah exactly, as opposed to more of a stuck feeling that's like "I need to do X next but I neither have a satisfying way to do X nor a choice to be satisfied with something unsatisfying, so I'm just gonna,, uh,,,"
@sulphuroxide @jim_rutt @Noahpinion @HFreinacht Hanzi's take is? Yeah, I'm probably with you there. I also think that whatever *actual* metamodernism is won't need to define itself in relation to modernism anymore. We're still in the birthing-out-of-postmodern phase.
Replying to @magghu
@magghu @SeanMombo Ahhh those were the days. And yes, at age 12 I was making custom emoticons for MSN, including animated ones like the two huggers cuddling / basically making out (a few different versions of this) (Decent I think, given I hadn't myself kissed anybody at the time)
@magghu @SeanMombo (the absurdly large & fuzzy gif really doesn't do justice to the slick pixel-art of the thing. Now I'm like... do I want to upload these all somewhere...) In any case, here's a cough, which is timely for 2020 but at the time would have been used more... *cough* euphemistically
@chriswaterguy @Noahpinion @HFreinacht @jim_rutt basically yeah! modernism = building stuff with blinders on postmodernism = but those externalities tho metamodernism = how can we build things while accounting for externalities?
@sulphuroxide @jim_rutt @Noahpinion @HFreinacht yeah, tho it does have value for helping people who are explicitly postpostmodern finding each other so we can figure out what there is to cohere about
@cognazor @QiaochuYuan @Meta_Aesthetic your tweets were a couple of years old—mine was just a few months ago, thanks to "search twitter for tweets from my followers matching tift"
@spearofsolomon @warmbott @Meaningness Yeah, rationality is vital, it just needs to be situated in meta-rationality, and know that it is. Otherwise you end up with the equivalent of people using chess strategy outside of the chess game. Intro to this, for anyone who hasn't already read it: meaningness.com/eggplant
@cognazor @Meta_Aesthetic @QiaochuYuan I'm open to exploring that, although for some reason I'm mostly still drawn towards an interview format, at least to start with! Someone else could host a book club tho, and I'd show up!
@spearofsolomon @warmbott @Meaningness 🤣 yeah, exactly. Some buddhists talk about the mind as another sense organ, and I figure this might be what they're talking about. Another analogy I make—loosely as fuck!—is that the LH is like a computer/robot. Give it well-defined procedural problems to solve. Will goodhart.
I have a growing playlist of songs called Dancy, that's almost entirely composed of songs that suddenly & involuntarily spring my body away from working at my standing desk and into wild gyrations. #nowplaying: Puff Your Cares Away by @Gramatik youtube.com/watch?v=CJs8ah…
Replying to @incertaspecie
@incertaspecie I really don't know the context here, you may be interested in checking out vajrayana buddhism, which has a different perspective on the whole thing. I found this post really insightful, not sure if it's the place to start though vividness.live/2013/12/12/emp…
Replying to @incertaspecie
@incertaspecie Wow, really appreciate you sharing your experience of this. Is the idea essentially that someone acting without MeisnerT, might be more likely to repress the fear etc, but with MT, it just sort of makes itself really obvious?
Retweeted @vgr
But “the people” were elevated to divinity just as “the king” and “the law” once were. Both have now been brought down to earth, s…
Replying to @incertaspecie
@incertaspecie Mmm, like any system *can* release things, but some make it easier or harder (and that can depend on the person and the emotional content too)
Retweeted @patio11
@Pinboard Punting on the "authority" question for reasons that I think you can appreciate, I think "a plausible theory that tu…
@SarahAMcManus Oh hey check it out, @xuenay wrote a thread about this thing in waaaaay more depth a couple weeks ago Click for top of thread: twitter.com/xuenay/status/… Particularly relevant tweet/section 👇
Retweeted @OperationMoksha
Religion is not the opiate of the masses, certainty is. Religion is just the best supplier.
@OperationMoksha If you haven't checked out @Meaningness' hypertext book, I highly recommend it! This piece makes basically the same point: meaningness.com/eternalism
Hey @visakanv I found a comic that seems like a great anthropological study on how those "twitter is full of idiots" people experience twitter!
Loving how my "hot NICHE take" has 30 likes. Someone recently tried to tell this corner of twitter that we're not a corner but we're definitely a corner 😂
@visakanv What's the total # of users you've blocked? Ahh damn, the page (twitter.com/settings/block… ) doesn't have a count. Wait... if you scroll way the fuck down, then type this in JS console... document.querySelectorAll('div[aria-label="Timeline: Blocked accounts"] > * > div').length
@threader_app @maxefremov I've gone and turned the threader version into a google doc, to print it out & share at @Liminal_Agency docs.google.com/document/d/16v…
@visakanv (I have just checked in more detail and this method doesn't work.... new Twitter uses some funky react shit that isn't user-serviceable at ALL)
meanwhile in developed countries we're touching the faucet handle with our hands before & after we wash them smfh twitter.com/Kitimmys_Khay/…
I once sketched a take about [buddhist] suffering, in terms of hierarchical neuroscience (specifically Perceptual Control Theory) @xuenay now has a similar take that's much more detailed & gearsy in both directions (neurosci AND buddhism) 🤩🎇💞 thread👇
Replying to @VectorOfBasis
@BonbonFork @visakanv Hmmm playing around with this twitter command line tool... it has a command to block, and commands to mute & view muted, but doesn't have a command to view blocked Might be that the API does but t just hasn't implemented it github.com/sferik/t/search
Anybody encountering this in the future, see here for an expanded related take by @xuenay
Thread · Why "individual development recapitulates cultural development" persists
"ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" (each organism gestates as lesser life forms) was a notion from early 1800s evolutionary biology, now considered basically mythology. Why does it persist in relation to memeplexes? 🧐 "individual development recapitulates cultural development"
Some ideas: • as with biology, there *are* some resemblances; these get reified • laziness: there are too many developmental models, and people just want to map them onto each other • insufficient teasing apart of dimensions *within* developmental arcs
Maybe also the meta-models (eg AQAL, above) are being assembled by people who are mostly model-building by synthesizing other theories, rather than by people who are actually interacting a lot with people at all ages & stages, PLUS other cultures. (I admit, this includes me 😂)
@HFreinacht insists "any true metamodernist must also be a postmodernist". Um, no. A kid growing up in a modern society doesn't need to grok & critique postfaustian Catholic society first. I think this is only needed to *write cultural philosophy*, not to embody a culture.
That being said, there's something that I think *does* emerge at Tier-2 / metamodern stages, which is a much richer qualitative & experiential recognition of the extent to which cultural context (including value meme etc) affects how people experience themselves & the world.
Most people underappreciate (by a factor of maybe 50×) how powerful cultural context is, such that children & even infants are having radically different experiences now than they were 100s or 1000s of years ago. And how different we could yet make it 👇
Which brings us back to this memetic ontogeny-phylogeny thing! What do you think is going on here? Half-assed takes totally welcome!
teach your kids about goodharting before it's too late twitter.com/EvanSandhoefne…
Replying to @incertaspecie
@incertaspecie Here's a beautiful & playful song speculating on a very similar question (though about newborns, not babies still in womb) youtube.com/watch?v=nKnVbC…
Replying to @AellaPrivate
@AellaPrivate totally feel you re pronouns in bio given that on twitter you can simply pick a name/avatar to signal what pronouns ppl will use for you without thinking about it & can also just have name/avi be genderless without focusing on it P in B just signals "I care about gender"
Retweeted @max_hodak
The life science tools ecosystem is incredibly aggravating. Because of the length and time scales involved, tools are core t…
@jack_meditates @jazfloot Wow I love that this whole exchange just happened here on my thread while I slept. 🥰 Generative exploration & resolution of difference in perspective!
@makoConstruct Hmm... maybe? I think there sometimes ends up being unconscious motte-bailey dynamics with these tho too, where people reason using invalid models, then claim they aren't. Similar to when people put teleology into evolution, when it's more descriptive:
@mechanicalmonk1 @AellaPrivate Yeah, signalling allegiance was actually more what I was trying to say. "I care about gender" as being either a deep personal statement or an allegiance flag: "I care about being seen as someone who cares about gender"
Thread · Kegan stages as both growing up and cleaning up
Revisiting @mattgoldenberg's tweet here, & realized suddenly that this implies that CDT (Kegan's model) combines the "Grow Up" & "Clean Up" dimensions. Developing more nuanced constructs isn't enough to uplevel; must also unlearn older constructs.
This fusion isn't per se a problem with CDT—it may actually be an advantage in some circumstances, especially if people are aware of it (I definitely wasn't, when I first learned the model) and of its implications (still not sure I understand those!)
One weird implication... effectively a regression in Kegan stage among ppl who: - are actively challenging themselves relationally - can notice & activate otherwise well-hidden triggers (as part of doing emotional processing) eg I'm like 5yo in this 👇
(btw, if you're not familiar with Grow Up & Clean Up, they're from Ken Wilber's 4 Facets model, which also includes Wake Up & Show Up—developed to answer questions like "why do enlightened folk still have sex scandals?") twitter.com/JasnaTod/statu…
@HFreinacht, in ch17 of TLS says a similar thing: - each cultural code built on the last - thus we can only ever see at most one step into the future - thus we have no idea what's after Teal/Yellow/metamodern - thus Turquoise+ are BS from ppl with high state & depth (~=Wake Up)
My initial thought was that this seems to be making the common "memetic ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" (MORP) error.
But then I realized that the MORP error is about the trailing edge (the early stages) and this is actually talking about the leading edge. And since human meaning-making is a collective affair, there's a sense in which you can't get very far ahead of the collective leading edge.
There's an open question of what sorts of things are possible in small groups that are intentionally seeking to further the leading edge, & doing some combo of: - starting with people at higher stages - training Could they get multiple stages further? How long would that take?
Here I think Kegan's "lowest stage you can be reliably triggered into" metric is helpful, because it measures the reality that pushing the leading edge can't on-it's-own shift the overall meaning-making system... also need emotional reconsolidation:
So the leading-edge experiences created when ppl are embodying the new culture provide a new sense of what's possible, & then these can be juxtaposed with the old sense of what's possible, allowing the emotional brain to update. I've done a bunch of this work (& have more to do)
People underappreciate the extent to which their embodied sense of what is possible is profoundly, profoundly limited by their life experiences.
Just wrote another thread about Kegan. Not currently planning for this thread to become my devpsych metathread, but welp, things emerge.
Replying to @liminal_warmth
@liminal_warmth @selentelechia @made_in_cosmos @ouranometrian @m_ashcroft haven't seen enough films to have opinions on films oh except that Don John was one of the most original plots I've seen. doesn't follow ordinary tired arcs
Broke: observing others' body language to infer what they're really feeling but aren't saying Bespoke: observing your own body language to infer what you're really feeling but aren't acknowledging
@QiaochuYuan I've done smaller-than-10min amounts of talking to myself in the mirror a few times. Tried it more seriously in the middle of a bioemotive session and it was super weird. I found it hard to simultaneously be the speaker and the listener.... wanted a delay or something...
someone just liked this thing I wrote about contact improv dancing last year, and I thought it was worth amplifying applies to other improv partner dancing too like blues or west coast swing, but state space is way vaster w contact improv (eg can end up rolling around on floor)
@DanielleFong @forshaper @QiaochuYuan thirded
Thread · Four quotes on freedom, craving, and staying in the struggle
I hereby juxtapose 4 quotes about freedom, self-entrapment, struggle, suffering, craving: - from Finite & Infinite Games by Carse - from Already Free by Tift - from Dzogchen Teachings by Chögyal Namkhai Norbu - from @xuenay (partway down a long thread)
I'm enjoying the art form of assembling these quotes. They seem to me to together form a kind of mutual causality loop: Carse: we veil our freedom so we can stay at the struggle Tift: we stay at the struggle so we don't have to experience our freedom
And then Kaj's tweets start speaking to another layer: > dropping the craving feels like losing Kaj's saying "losing the money" I say it's also "losing the [finite] game" I find the two meanings of "losing" quite telling.
While working on developing cultures of samesided non-naive trust-building, I've noticed a common schema many people have (that they may or may not be conscious of) that goes something like "giving up the power-over games means losing"
More—and, enough for now. I'll close by positing a Girard scapegoating connection here: we have embodied cultural trauma from the long history of would-be game-exiters being sacrificed. I've found that terror in myself and am trying to work with it creatively & compassionately.
@jonnym1ller @_brandswell @SarahAMcManus & I speculated on some ideas about this over here last year... (including a reference to Akira the Don)
my love language is design
@Elodes12 Yes, it was you!
@cognazor For standard definitions of trauma, no. Under a definition of trauma and a model of human cultural development that notes that our culture is built on huge amounts of traumatizing experiences we consider normal... of course, just like everybody.
"ontology recapitulates philology"
("philology" isn't really the concept I'm talking about above, but it's surprisingly close given the relationship of language and culture, and given the lack of etymological relationship between "phylo" and "philo")
Replying to @cwdaniels
@cwdaniels What I'm saying here is... for example, I've felt loved—personally, not abstractly—over the last few years, by @Conaw's work on @RoamResearch... well before I even started using it, just based on seeing the prototypes and his dedication to honing it into something amazing.
@visakanv @sAasom @orpheaskk @nbashaw
@drossbucket @coyotespike @urbit has > We should note that in Nock & Hoon, 0 (pronounced "yes") is true, and 1 ("no") is false. Why? As in Unix, using zero for success generalizes smoothly to multiple error codes. And it's strange for success not to equal truth. Or at least, this is our official excuse.
@Aella_Girl Finding it hard to articulate this, but wanting to say: I see your move back into sex work (while continuing everything else) reading as an excellent next movement within a larger (implicit?) project of yours: fucking with peoples' categories. I am fuckyeah to that project.
@Aella_Girl The timing here, where the onlyfans is happening at the same time as changing your profile pic to something more abstract, feels spot on. It says "if you're here to oogle, there's a subscription for that" while making it clear that's not the point of your twitter account.
@Aella_Girl But then by *talking* about the onlyfans, on your twitter, in this introspective way (as is your style) you can simultaneously: - let people know it exists - work with the disjointedness (internally and outwardly) - nudge peoples' concepts of the meaning of sex work
@Aella_Girl My sense is that that combo will do most of what you're hoping for in being able to continue to associate with certain influential people on twitter while having the onlyfans. (Which wouldn't work *nearly* as well with your old profile pic)
me assembling quotes from different books into one tweet
@antonjw I'm with you. Vajrayana buddhism makes a lot more sense to me, as it's about what is actually so here and now. vividness.live/2012/09/11/pur…
@DanielleFong @erin_nerung @alexandria_jaye
Replying to @sonyasupposedly
@sonyasupposedly I have a policy of blocking people who complain about people blocking them 😂 Might as well get it over with. (To be clear, sometimes there's an actual discussion in which it's relevant to say "huh, looks like Person has blocked me" or whatever, which is *not* "complaint" here)
Thread · Idea: a latency-proof remote music loop machine · 1 of 4 tweets
💡🤯 idea: virtual collaborative loop machine 🎶🔄 This would allow people to create music together remotely, without the latency issue. Your input gets time-sync'd locally, and others only hear it once it's fully uploaded. I think this would be 🔥, esp now but also after covid
Thread · Things I want to exist: apps, tools, and funding mechanisms · 1 of 21 tweets
I think there's a huge market for this, and it'd be very easy to have a free version & a pro version (more tracks, more collaborators, higher res, export, effects, livestreaming, etc) Not easy to build, technically though.
Thread · Idea: a latency-proof remote music loop machine · 1 of 4 tweets
@mormo_music iOS only 😞 tho I guess that's also kinda to be expected. honestly it's probably where I'd advise a company start if they wanted to build this
@nebulosabar @m_ashcroft In good company here!
PSA: you are made of stuff
@fvathynevgl Might I recommend trying the BioEmotive process, which involves saying things like "nobody loves me" & "I feel worthless" then crying a lot when it resonates? (The crying is important—you're not trying to convince yourself of anything, but to find what phrases touch a feel)
@fvathynevgl @AQuinn2020 I was facilitating emotional processing with a friend who does a lot of this kind of self-affirmation talk, and she had a feeling of worthlessness she was blocked on because the self-affirming part wouldn't let her feel it. 1/3
@fvathynevgl @AQuinn2020 I invited her to say to that part "I know you don't want me to feel worthless, but right now I do" and the 😭 dam broke before she even got the words out, just from taking in that it was okay to have both at once. To love herself AND feel worthless. 2/3
@fvathynevgl @AQuinn2020 I think the self-affirming language played a really important role for her managing to want to continue to live at all after some devastating experiences... shifting the idea that she deserved to hate herself. *And* it only gets you so far. 3/3
@Aella_Girl Yeah! That was why I made a point of trying to articulate it. Glad it helped.
(Put another way, we might even posit that actual metamodernism, when it arises, will no longer define itself in relation to modernism & postmodernism, in the same way that "modern" isn't called metafaustianism) for now, the term...
PSA: if the idea of "talk to yourself lovingly" sounds awful, consider that your concept of what "lovingly" is might be someone else's concept—you need to find your own instead. As just 1 example: excerpt of an exchange I had with myself 2y ago: loving, also hardass-&-knows-it.
@danlistensto @HFreinacht Yeah, there's sort of a question here of the role of writing-about-it in all of this. To what extent is the writing descriptive, documenting cultural evolution? To what extent is the writing trying to actually cause things to happen? What other roles are there?
@DrewCoffman @lehrjulian I have been wanting this for a decade. Feeling @lehrjulian as a deeply kindred spirit for him writing this up!
@fvathynevgl Yeah, to some extent there's a meta-thing that needs to be dealt with before the "find/make your own concept" thing can even work, which is breaking down whatever idea makes you dismiss words of support. (Dismiss as... fake? naive? not-deserved? ...?)
@fvathynevgl The whole thing is very loopy & fractal, because fundamentally what the loving self-relation is is essentially profoundly accepting your present experience. Which is sort of also the move involved in recognizing whatever is blocking the idea of being loved! Bootstrapping.
Doing a lot of this is giving me a new sense of the value of twitter. Often the things I find are months or years old, but also often they're from last week & I just missed them at the time. Gives a felt sense of the ever-growing repository of interrelated ideas we're nurturing.
@fvathynevgl Ahhh. Well, this is where doing it internally can be really helpful. You can explore how it feels to talk to yourself different ways. As the speaker: - which feel authentic? - which feel forced? As the receiver: - which feel good, connecting? - which feel fake, bad-somehow?
@fvathynevgl @GeniesLoki The World of Null-A has a mature take: Venus is populated by ppl who grok non-naive collaboration, and they have no weapons there (no need). They get invaded, and they rapidly reorganize to fight back, losing 10% of citizens in the initial phase of stealing weapons from invaders.
@fvathynevgl @GeniesLoki The book is a pretty awful work of fiction, but I was impressed that it managed to depict a society that could truly wage both peace and war, at all. Huxley's Island is an impressively workable eutopia internally (sez me) but unstable in the context of surrounding violence.
@nosilverv @Jeanvaljean689 @krrishd @RoamResearch @visakanv @DanielleFong , something to keep in mind 🙃👆
pump up the jam pump it up *don't inflate over maximum PSI; see your jam manual for recommended pressure
Retweeted @metamitya
working on bringing threaded multi-dimensional writing to the masses
@WaterUndersea At the bottom of the ocean, yeah, no kidding!
Retweeted @DanielleFong
@realDonaldTrump OH COME ON
@ultimape @Conaw @GRITCULT @visakanv @KevinSimler @vgr @context_ing Yes, I like this. Maybe building on the wabi-sabi metaphor... instead of "renounce tweet", could say "repair tweet". That has its own issues but it's a neat idea.
@metamitya Really excited seeing this demo... just played around on my account and it still feels like it's missing: - proper QTs (including unique links for each block) - way to see what's referencing what - something... in the branch editor UI... that is hard to explain 😕
Retweeted @groundedSAGE
So sharing opinions on a public platform is risky. We are human and we all make mistakes. When someone shares something w…
A hilarious & simple example of how a brilliant idea—well-executed!—can look completely nonsensical when you don't understand the plan. twitter.com/mchammo/status…
Thread · Rethinking Twitter threads as editable, evolving units
Was thinking about this editable-threads-not-editable-tweets thing again today... And find myself thinking that if someone were building Twitter from scratch today, they might want to make Threads 🧵 be its own thing that's different from just a series of same-author replies.
Twitter has done this slightly in the UI: • when viewing, prioritizes all being shown in order, leaving replies til later • interface for composing a thread all at once • author gets "Add another tweet" btn at the bottom, which launches this thread composer not reply-composer
My thought today was inspired in part by playing around with @metamitya's app knovigator, which seems to sort of have this (it calls them quests, I think?)
This is part of a much deeper exploration I've had for some time which is like, what kind of relationship can two tweets have to each other? Currently it's basically: - reply - QT (quote-tweet) but there are many implicit things those official relationships can each mean!
Man. Okay, just thinking out loud here. What is the meaning of a reply? Moreso than anything else, whether thread or conversation, it represents the CONTEXT of a tweet. See something QT'd or RT'd? Click through to see its context. eg 👇 "which reason?"
My idea of individual tweets being non-editable but threads being editable would potentially kind of undermine this, unfortunately 🤔 But maybe it's something like, the old thread-structure isn't destroyed... just overlaid with a new by default? This is tough.
IDK. I feel like I'm onto something important here but I can't quite find it. Something like... okay, I created my roamblog so I could link to half-finished drafts, & what's great is that that same link will point at a finished draft once it's done. Can't do that with threads.
It seems to me like knovigator.com's Quest concept is kind of pointing at this, like, an ever-evolving exploration of a question. Where (as far as your exobrain is concerned) a given Quest represents your best answer to that question at a point in time.
Twitter could have this too. "Moments" wanted to be it but was were confused on a bunch of levels so it didn't work. @RoamResearch already has pages, but doesn't have the beauty of each utterance / thought-fragment being a static snapshot of the moment it was published.
(I mentioned this here talking about how Roam could evolve into a slack replacement.)
Also while we're on this topic, I need to make a plug for a "retract" button for a tweet. I can do a whole thread at some point about how I might design it, but for now check out this 💯 thread by @groundedSAGE on why we utterly need this 👇 twitter.com/groundedSAGE/s…
Aha, see right now I would love to pre-emptively link from here to a space where I would be designing the retract button for the tweet, but the only way to do that on twitter is to make an initial tweet that promises to become a full thread later, which is awkward.
I guess I'll make a page on my roamblog for it, where I can start collecting drafty thoughts. That's another amazing thing about Roam compared to Twitter... (Maybe my ideal version of Twitter would somehow have BOTH editable and non-editable tweets 🤯) roamresearch.com/#/app/malcolmo…
@amelapay @visakanv @Timber_22 Oh interesting. I'm still in slow mode but I'd been assuming that was mostly because: • I have half a dozen different roams and haven't decided where to put everything • I have 10MB+ in workflowy and want to preserve the node-edit-date by using JSON import But maybe wise!
@Jeanvaljean689 @ultimape @Conaw @GRITCULT @visakanv @KevinSimler @vgr @context_ing Maybe the metaphor we want here is "reunderstand" or even "learn" or something. Like, "I hereby modify this tweet because I have learned something and I don't want my previous understanding propagating" Although ofc ppl are traumatized around "learning"
@natural_hazard @xuenay @simpolism @yashkaf @nosilverv @mlegls Mmm glad to be tagged about stuff like this in general... ...in this case I feel like I'm missing too many of the specific concepts involved (eg GWT/GNW) to be able to really follow.
Replying to @groundedsage
@groundedSAGE @Conaw @ultimape @GRITCULT @visakanv @KevinSimler @vgr @context_ing Oh man, I love how you put this. I feel like I've found a kindred spirit in you 😊
Replying to @mlegls
@mlegls @natural_hazard @xuenay @simpolism @yashkaf @nosilverv Color illusions seem to me to be different from the suchness of color, which is the bit that's about consciousness. I dunno what they'd be, but I'd wager 50:1 that one could devise what are essentially color illusions for machine image parsers of some kind, maybe even cameras.
@chenoehart How's this coming Chenoe? 😊
Tagging @nosilverv & @DanielleFong & @visakanv & @mykola as fellow peeps thinking about related questions on various levels.
I have thought for awhile: it's a shame that "self-consciousness" got used for awkwardness because it seems like such a beautiful concept. As I digest the dharma it dawns on me: there might be something inherently awkward about consciousness looped into the self.
@nosilverv @natural_hazard @xuenay @simpolism @yashkaf @mlegls nah man I'm still holding out for the "wait I was confused when I tweeted that" button
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a #feels #SobSquad meetup there
@chenoehart Oooh that's exciting! Curious to learn more...
Retweeted @rsnous
"The symbol… was picked precisely because it had no known meaning but was easy to remember… Those surveyed were asked to guess…
@DanielleFong @nosilverv @visakanv @mykola I want to join forces with the joined force of the two of you joining forces!
Getting a vague sense I need a new avatar on here. Thoughts? Figuring still my face, but... different. Different how?
@QiaochuYuan I've been finding @DanielleFong's whole beingness intriguing, thrilling, & kinda terrifying quite a sensation to ride definitely plugs into a bunch of my unconscious stuff this I just feel straight 😍 about though 👇
@QiaochuYuan @DanielleFong oh also her doingness
@DanielleFong I put a bunch of pics into a deepstyle machine a few years ago 🤔
@QiaochuYuan hm hm hmm could combine that with this
Replying to @selentelechia
@selentelechia shower thots
@Conaw @sminnee @Radix_Motion I think this project may be coalescing over here 👇
@dela3499 Ooh, I like some of these styles. Although I think I want a newer picture of my face too—the previous one is 3+ years old. Not that it doesn't still look like me but... idk if I can find one I have that suits or will need to take a new one
@DanielleFong @nosilverv @visakanv @mykola @n0x00 @learning20201 @edelwax @nabutheraven @realjdburnett @Plinz @startuployalist @eigenrobot @selentelechia @KHPavle
@jonathanwilson theoretically but it was confused
@rsnous I wrote a blog post about this! malcolmocean.com/2016/02/sparkl…
@DanielleFong @nosilverv @visakanv @mykola @n0x00 @learning20201 @edelwax @nabutheraven @realjdburnett @Plinz @startuployalist @eigenrobot @selentelechia @KHPavle @djbaskin @alexandria_jaye @malnote @InquilineKea @made_in_cosmos @NPDeMember @SamoBurja @pscheyer @ThePsyence @Rhett800cc @starsandrobots Now the question is how we organize all of these people 😆
@mykola @DanielleFong @nosilverv @visakanv @generativist twitter dyson sphere
Retweeted @DanielleFong
😏
@Altimor Upworthy was created by the guy who coined the term filter bubble, and I vaguely recall reading somewhere that part of its mission was to bust filter bubbles, which,,,
Sometimes a track comes on (Fragile Memories by @olegmokhov) & I can't help freestyling. Managed to start a recorder this time! Inspired by many things that've been on my mind lately—some deep questions. Audio quality is... workable 🙉 Listen 🎶👇❣️❔ soundcloud.com/malcolmocean/t…
I notice I'm feeling nervous posting this! My brain claims that's just about the audio quality but ofc probably it's other more central stuff too. There's like an "I really want people to like it" which is probably also connect with an "I really want people to like me"
And also... that's not really what this freestyle was for! It's trying to say a thing on a different level. I think, moreso than hoping people like it, I hope people are touched, or moved, by it. That someone who needs to hear this opens themselves up, and hears it. 😮👉👈🥰
Also the last line in particular was inspired by @QiaochuYuan's Elegy, which I had just re-read because @joyurge referenced it 🙏💀😢 thicketforte.com/2019/01/19/ele…
@visakanv I have so much fucking appreciation for you doing this. The world needed this tweet.
Retweeted @visakanv
“The first principle is that you must feel yourself, and you are the hardest person to feel.” - Richard Feelsman https://t.co…
@visakanv Her: You: twitter.com/mchammo/status…
@WaterUndersea @nosilverv @natural_hazard @xuenay @simpolism @yashkaf @mlegls
@Aryeh___ @visakanv yo I just realized that your tweet here is perhaps also underrated because if we replied "underrated tweet" to all underrated tweets, then we could always have an answer when ppl are like "share a tweet of yours that didn't get enough appreciation"
@jhooks @vgr @RoamResearch Huh, that's not true. Here's a link to my roamblog (entirely public) roamresearch.com/#/app/malcolmo… and this tweet below links to a public page on a private roam... ...which, ahh, yes, doesn't load unless logged in. Used to be both would work logged out.
@CoachingWater @cognazor Reminds *me* of twitter.com/brownian19/sta…
@kaptinkoowel @SamoBurja Too Much Text, and Other Things I Learned in College: a memoir
@jhooks @vgr @RoamResearch I have a guess of why they're doing it, pretty sure it's temporary, and it makes sense to me with their long-term strategy, not from any sneaky "get people to make accounts" thing but just that there were a few bugs showing up related to this.
@QiaochuYuan @Aryeh___ @visakanv I was hoping someone would think so 🥰
are there crypto-folks out there building a social network where instead of likes you buy shares in a tweet, based on how much you think the tweet is worth? there's a few other details to sort out but I think w/ ~quadratic pricing you could do cool shit with this
@QiaochuYuan @Aryeh___ @visakanv then I'm like
@QiaochuYuan @Aryeh___ @visakanv the thought basically being prompted by the idea that if you think a tweet is underrated on that network, you'd just buy a bunch of it, and then other people would also recognize the value, and they'd buy it off of you... ??? profit?
quadratic pricing as in equivalent to quadratic voting: buying a ton of shares at once / from one account costs superlinearly more means something like "it's hard for one person to just price the tweet really highly, and a tweet is only worth a lot if multiple people like it"
maybe quadratic pricing is completely fucking bonkers and undermines the whole concept of there being a price but maybe it's also pointing at something really cool, even if many implementations would be silly po me
@QiaochuYuan @Aryeh___ @visakanv @nosilverv this seems like your jam on at least 1 level, probably 2-3
Retweeted @Timber_22
The year is 2029. @MalcolmOcean has developed an AI which helps him in his quest to connect everything relevant to McGilch…
@Timber_22 @MalcolmOcean The PhDs are all getting their credentials from @SamoBurja's bespoke printer, not academia
@PennerFred my sister suggested maybe this song was yours!
the non-obviousness of the obviousness is hardly obvious
if you can rise above control there is a shift awaiting you
@Aryeh___ @SarahAMcManus omg this gif
Article on how to have parties on zoom. @mattgoldenberg ran one of these recently and it was quite good! Way better than I was expecting. medium.com/swlh/how-to-ru…
@QiaochuYuan writes about how the magic of parties is they emerge interactions that wouldn't have had enough activation energy to cause themselves to happen otherwise.
TL;DR for zoom parties - have named breakout rooms - google doc topics/vibes for each room - make everyone a co-host so they can see who's in each room & move between rooms - as host, join on 2 devices, once as greeter to receive & orient newcomers, second as participant in rooms
Tagging @peternlimberg for the Stoa - @RichDecibels for whatever he's up to - @HiNaryan who was apparently the person who sent this to @mattgoldenberg in the first place - @tesselately who usually hosts lots of in-person parties and will probably find this at least intriguing
@uthmanzi there's an esoteric and an exoteric meaning I'm not sure which is which
@QiaochuYuan @cognazor Man I came across QC's original tweet today while looking for a recent one about parties, and this past week I've been thinking more about this "no symbolic or representational comms" thing, and came back here to comment this but then realized I probably already had. thanks self
@brewingsense @reasonisfun Yeah, I think there's a serious case for revisiting & revising the idea that all of our ideas are in the brain. The brain has a very special relationship with ideas, but ideas are intertwingledly everywhere, not just body but in physical order of systems.
@doxproofhandle @AlbinoDumpling @QiaochuYuan I would say rather than trying to do confidence in particular, play around on the meta-level. Try different poses, see what words arise to describe them. Some might end up as "confident" but even if not, the practice may itself add fluidity to your embodiment.
@doxproofhandle @AlbinoDumpling @QiaochuYuan Don't let your concept of cool overshadow your chill. When I was a ~preteen, I got the idea in my head that I would look very cool if I constantly smiled in a particular way, with pursed lips. Tense, not relaxed. I mostly only remembered to do it for photos—thank god.
@QiaochuYuan the evolution of twitter is a fucking wild tale
Thread · Finding work that's harder not to do than to do
I want to find the things that are worth doing & where it'd be harder for me NOT to do them than to do them.
The specifics of what these sorts of things are depend on the person, as well as on the approach to doing the thing. The person thing is part of the utter resource of our diverse individuality. Re: approach...
Often when I'm blocked on trying to *do* something, if I ask myself if I'd like to - "think about doing it" - "design how I might do it if I were to do it" - "write a proof explaining why it's impossible" ...those feel appetizing! & often lead to the thing getting done!
Or other times I can simply say "I seem to be trying to do this in a way I'm not enjoying... is there a way to do it that would feel better?" and LO there is and then things are awesome. Is there a way to train this? I'd like to incorporate it into complice.co 🧐🤔😍
Found myself reflecting that If we take a "I can't teach, only show by example" approach, this is how to
I think this thread can be construed as a sort of steelman of the fun criterion (cc @reasonisfun) which I haven't looked into in depth but feel like I have some sense of.
@DanielleFong @utotranslucence @Timber_22 Yup! I can rap the entirety of Hamilton, including @DaveedDiggs' Lafayette & Jefferson parts at full speed 🎤🤩 This is the rap @utotranslucence was probably referring to. Less impressive technically, just me vibin.
@DanielleFong @utotranslucence @Timber_22 @DaveedDiggs I can't think of a single character in the Trump story that I would want to seriously embody, but I'd potentially be down to help with audio demos or whatever.
Thread · Upward spirals of ideas and why quote tweets enable convergence · 10 of 14 tweets
2 days ago, @SarahAMcManus tweeted an idea I'd had of a Star Wars fanfic where the Jedi council is Tantric (nondual, wild, sexually-integrated) instead of Sutric (renunciate, ascetic, celibate), etc Just over 24h later, @Timber_22 starts laying out a sketch of how this might go
See a second chain, which begins here, and is largely actually a reinterpretation of the exoteric meanings of the sutric version (which of course IS a chunk of the basis of tantra)
This whole thing feels like such a lovely example of this kind of upward spiral positive feedback in the space of ideas, that Joanna Macy writes about on p99 of Mutual Causality. I mean, I had lots of examples already, but more are always welcome.
In the shower today, I was thinking about various projects I might take on, and I found something clicking into place like:
If we can find ways to plug our can't-not-do energy together into coherent wholes, amazing stuff will happen... ...not just effortlessly, but with *negative* amounts of effort! 🤯
For a long time I was getting myself to write using Beeminder, and while that worked & produced some brilliant pieces, it was *pushing*, rather than removing obstacles. Both Roam & Twitter remove obstacles, creating a positive feedback loop where writing begets more writing!
This thread itself is part of the positive feedback loop that happened from my Star Wars Tantra Jedi idea getting released & Tim building on it. In the process, I had an internal positive loop, writing a whole thread about the showerthought above.
But before I even got either of those threads published I got distracted by other tweets. Then over in this convo w @QiaochuYuan re evolution of twitter... I went to quote one of the above tweets in this thread... ...only to realize it was still in drafts
QTs (Quote Tweets) allow for a kind of CONVERGENCE that otherwise isn't possible. With almost all other media, things only diverge: chat, threads, tree-shaped nested replies, comments You can never pull it back together.
Twitter has a lot of room for improvement here too, to be clear. The convergence is still very sparse—only one QT at a time, no easy way to explicitly juxtapose 2+, to show parallel or paradox. Here's a hacky example of me doing it with screenshots
@QiaochuYuan I think that comment from @Conaw was incredibly visionary and also amplified the very shift he was pointing at, by causing us to recognize what was happening more clearly and explore it more consciously. (cc @visakanv) Positive feedback loops!
Thread · Upward spirals of ideas and why quote tweets enable convergence · 1 of 14 tweets
My notes on designing such a feature into a convo platform: roamresearch.com/#/app/malcolmo… If you're designing such a thing, consider yourself welcome—encouraged!—to incorporate my ideas! Credit is appreciated & moreover helps amplify the feedback loop!
@utotranslucence Really wish I had a version of this that was pro audio quality because it's a super cool track (also 5 years after I wrote & recorded it I acquired a loop machine, and it *totally* works live with the loop machine) soundcloud.com/maleidoscope/o…
Retweeted @visakanv_jpeg
what to do with money?
@sarthakgh @RayDalio "At no point does anyone in the chain know what to do with money in the real economy."
Thread · Mapping a 20-button gaming mouse for a Linux workflow · 2 of 11 tweets
Update: having a screenshot button on my mouse is amazing 🤩 So much easier than remembering exactly which hotkey I want to use. Plus screenshotting a section of the screen is already a mouse gesture, so it just makes so much sense! Thanks so much @visakanv ❣️
My latest innovation is mapping the left & right scroll buttons (as in pushing the scroll wheel left or right) to: ctrl-shift-tab ⬅️➡️ ctrl-tab which let me navigate between tabs really easily! (usually in browser though it could work in other apps too) combine with ctrl-w ✖️
@ClayNichols For examples of "think about it" or "explain why it's impossible"... idk, basically this is just my Captain's Log malcolmocean.com/2017/11/captai…
@ClayNichols For examples of design, the Complice blog has some! Check out this article, which has 2 links on "as in the past" to other articles. blog.complice.co/post/163528840…
@DanielleFong @Timber_22 @utotranslucence @DaveedDiggs after quarantine times I will be in 🆕🏴 sometime as that's where much of my family lives
@DanielleFong @Timber_22 @utotranslucence @DaveedDiggs yeah! it'll be fun to have a non-family thing I'm excited about going back for, too which I basically haven't since my friend moved out west a few years ago
Planning shortly to write a script to convert slack export json into @RoamResearch import json. Just looked into it and I think it'll be pretty easy & fun to do, and super useful whether you have unlimited slack history or not.
@TaylorPearsonMe Mmm, reminds me of the systems thinking principle of overcoming a plateau by removing limits to growth rather than trying to put more energy into the upward force.
Okay this is mostly written but I can't test the full thing because whenever I try to import anything into @RoamResearch (including something I exported *from* Roam & deleted the uids from) I get: ⚠️ Import error: b.text is not a function @Conaw help?
@jhooks @RoamResearch @Conaw Yeah I think I had the issue months ago and the reason I'm bothering to ask again now is that I figure there's more chance of getting attention since I'm building a utility for many people not just trying to do something myself. Helps to hear others having similar issues!
@Timber_22 @spearofsolomon @Conaw @visakanv Always love a re-up 📈 Tagging @nosilverv who is more actively working on twitter software than I am & @andy_matuschak whose personal site looks like your idea: notes.andymatuschak.org
@spearofsolomon Yeah, horizontal flow seems like an obvious vital feature for this new modality of twitter that some of us have started using...
@VitalPixel @m_ashcroft @egocv @visakanv Yeah, though the lack of multitasking can be helpful for focus. The problem is that there's so little worth focusing on on a phone 😂 But like, I sometimes walk to park or cafe with phone, phonestand, & bluetooth keyboard, and do some great focused writing singletasked.
@VitalPixel @m_ashcroft @egocv @visakanv Your eye for design resonates with mine, and I'd love to hear even a highlevel sketch of your sense of what is (or was) possible in terms of phone interactions, given existing hardware & OS support.
@Conaw @RoamResearch Oh huh, yeah, works in Firefox but not Brave. I tried to test this earlier but was having trouble logging in on FF (kept redirecting to login screen). But then it logged in just fine now so 🤷♀️
@Conaw @RoamResearch Fwiw, I have turned Brave Shields off altogether for roamresearch.com, so that shouldn't be the issue... though maybe it's running an oldish version? Anyway, I'll look into it, thanks.
@DanielleFong @Timber_22 @utotranslucence @DaveedDiggs Minda? I don't think so...
@Conaw @pjstadig @BlackForestBoi @ErikAllberg @worldbrain @RoamResearch @eriktorenberg Yeah this was what I said to @ErikAllberg when we talked about this... that Roam might just make enough money to not need to sell, even though it's taken VC. Many software companies don't have any realistic chance of that; Roam is different.
@ClayNichols Yeah, I haven't used it very much for therapy, though I did experiment with it as sort of a productivity technique? 👇 (I guess I was trying to do partswork/integration with it too but I didn't really understand the gears of what that *was*, at the time) malcolmocean.com/2016/04/introd…
@VitalPixel @m_ashcroft @egocv @visakanv Yeah it ended up being worse than just having files and folders. I feel like I kind of anticipated that... I've always been an android user but in 2011 I was briefly developing a file-sharing plugin for a cross-platform messenger app and iOS was wacky But yeah, coulda been...🤔
@VitalPixel @m_ashcroft @egocv @visakanv
@VitalPixel @m_ashcroft @egocv @visakanv @yoshikischmitz Oh yeah, I'm mostly not focused on mobile myself, so I'm excited to check this out. Any favorites?
@VitalPixel @m_ashcroft @egocv @visakanv @lehrjulian points out that this sort of thing could be dramatically improved with better hardware platforms, and I absolutely agree. If I made a smartphone it would have like 4 programmable buttons on the side.
@ClayNichols before trying to learn more about parts work, check out this book (at *least* the summary if not the whole book) which talks about the underlying mechanisms of why/when transformational change happens, with any therapy system, including IFS
@BlackForestBoi @ErikAllberg @Conaw @pjstadig @worldbrain @RoamResearch @eriktorenberg Finding myself wanting to point out somewhat 🤨ly that Netflix is different than the others: they are trying to fuck up peoples' sleep schedules without that even making them more money.
@DanielleFong @utotranslucence @Timber_22 @DaveedDiggs I'm reflecting that I think the only lines I had to actually slow down & practice to learn were: I'm in the cabinet, I am complicit in watching him grabbin' at power and kiss it if Washington isn't gon' listen to disciplined dissidents, this is the difference This kid is out!
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
broke: school should teach more important stuff, such as [basic skill possessed by all animals and actively destroyed by s…
@visakanv how does the recent learning I've been doing about systems thinking, positive & negative feedback loops, and limits to growth (as a general systems concept) relate to the likely trajectories for @conaw/@RoamResearch? (based on these convos 👇)
Retweeted @yashkaf
Poets who possess great range Can even find a rhyme for orange And those whose range is truly ample Wouldn't balk at rhyming p…
@ssica3003 "You can't have the same idea twice." - Heraclitus
@Aella_Girl Richard Wilkinson's book Mind the Gap makes a case based on animal & primate studies that inequality has negative health effects for high-status members as well. Something like "the gap creates added stress for everyone." amazon.com/Mind-Gap-Evolu…
@Aella_Girl But I think in practice most efforts to cause equality as an end in itself rather than as one aspect (by-product & means) of functionality of a system... ...are largely subject to the Green/postmodern value memeplex Snarky dialogue between the stages 👇 metamoderna.org/from-premodern…
@Jeanvaljean689 @visakanv @Conaw @RoamResearch Yep, was explaining in-depth to @utotranslucence the other day that the failings of money are downstream of left-hemisphere-fixated thinking, which will tend to corrupt would-be replacements on the money-level of abstraction.
@maybegray Josh Groban's Machine is the first one that comes to mind youtube.com/watch?v=VSwhwf…
@maybegray Oooh, also Break Your Heart by Barenaked Ladies. There's a part at the end that's quite epic & intense. Live version isn't great quality in this case, but it has more soul & more impressive vocals. youtube.com/watch?v=gHeHPx…
@maybegray @captain_mrs @m_ashcroft this end of this song is one of the most intense belts I know he's basically yelling at the top of his longs, but... it's beautiful somehow
Retweeted @Timber_22
Twitter as attempting tantric embodied shamatha-vipaśyana.* With dzokchen qualities. On Hard Level Dancing between acting…
Yo #roamcultists coming from WorkFlowy! I haven't done the slack conversion script yet, but I wrote one for converting WorkFlowy data to @RoamResearch while keeping the last-modified stamps. It's here, and I think it's pretty great: github.com/malcolmocean/w…
Took only maybe 40 minutes to write the core conversion function, and another like 3-4 hours to actually make it easy to USE. It'll auto-fetch your workflowy tree etc, & save it as a file. You can also have it just turn each of the children of one node into their own page.
WorkFlowy→Roam JSON conversion 👆 Tagging ppl I've seen talking about WorkFlowy & Roam: @kieran_tie @tomcritchlow @visakanv @sabon23 @fredericrenken I know @vgr already copy-pasted his WorkFlowy, but maybe he'd want to know about this anyway 🤷♀️
TODO list: - custom string modifier functions - workflowy link to block/page ref - ...?
Truly innovative products are worth trying even if you don't stay with them, because you learn something important about what's possible, from inhabiting their metaphor. Complice & Roam are both in this group. So is WorkFlowy (if you've never used anything similar). What else? t.co/CMJ0AHCiMs
@ahockley @marshallk @RoamResearch
Retweeted @Jeanvaljean689
@kcorazo @Malcolm_Ocean @visakanv @Conaw @RoamResearch @utotranslucence @andy_matuschak Very interesting - IMO, "[[]]"…
Have read a few of my smart friends speculating about UFOs, based on recent new footage from pentagon... ...and it sort of feels to me like theology, as in the below tweet. Say you knew for certain alien tech had visited earth, but nothing else. What the fuck would you know?
@TheOrangeAlt I had liked one of your tweets above, but then I unliked it when I saw this tweet....?... (it was the McGilchrist one ofc 😜)
If you want to hide likes from Twitter, get yourself a userstyles app (I recommend Stylish) then import this style: @-moz-document domain("twitter.com") { div[role="group"] div[role="button"][aria-label*="Like"] { display: none !important } } t.co/wzRvVIdY9z
@threadreaderapp unroll my own thread
@threadreaderapp unroll my own thread
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
minimum viable school replacement is access to a library, a forest, and a person who loves you
I just got a reminder from myself 67 days ago, quoting someone saying "well we'll just have to keep track of that date then, and know that we don't know what's going to happen then" ...umm. ....well played, past self.