Retweeted @PHLPublicHealth
If there is still any confusion about the importance of face masks, this graphic should help: Thanks for the tag @Eli…
May 2020
@MugaSofer @Timber_22 Historical grounds, right, of course, yeah... because the events of Jesus's life are totally well-documented in sources other than the Bible. </sarcasm> To be clear: you may be spot on about how it worked for Anselm in particular, it's just still an absurd jump of reasoning.
Currently watching a video of myself from the side (interviewing @joyurge in person) and I'm struck by how little I've seen my own face in profile. My smile, my nose... so unfamiliar! Really hard to see in mirrors or when on live webcam 🧐 @visakanv you might wanna try this
@dela3499 Mmmm yeah. @Conaw repeatedly says this about Clojure See many tweets searching `from:conaw learn clojure` twitter.com/search?q=from%… My fav:
> To be sure, we must circumvent our current political paradigm. Yet this is not a separation from politics qua politics—it IS politics. palladiummag.com/2020/04/30/its…
@GretchenAMcC poly-SEM-y (east coast of Canada, not a linguist but my sister is)
@RoamResearch Am trying really hard to not get nerdsniped into building this with a userstyle 😅😅😅
@nickredmark This gorgeous song Landsailor is about exactly this. 🎶 headless and faceless 🎶 tireless and seamless behind these walls 🎶 this is my progress 🎶 when you don't notice my lines at all youtube.com/watch?v=KysI3r…
Retweeted @nickredmark
Technology is not about making a thing. That frame is counterproductive. Technology is about making a thing (ultimately al…
@QiaochuYuan @maybegray @GlitchesBrew saturated psychedelic sacred theory community and $1 in change which I will spend on the word "YES"
@eriktorenberg idk how heard/underheard it is but I think this interview of Daniel Schmacteberger is underrated. I keep thinking of how fucking clear he is about like: you've got to get to the generators, not all of the downstream stuff.
"How should I know what I'm thinking? I'm not a mind reader." (cartoon from New Yorker a few days ago)
@houshuang I'm saying there are things where the value of the learning, for whatever initial phase (could be hours or months), is already totally worth the cost to learn it. For other things, not so. If you have 10h to spend learning a language, do Lojban grammar not Spanish food vocab.
Wtf is going on with twitter, reloading me to the top of threads when I want to be partway down? Is this one of my userscripts acting up or happening for everyone? Looks like maybe everyone... @QiaochuYuan @Aryeh___
Replying to @MimeticValue
@MimeticValue @MemeticCaper @Meaningness I offer this 2×2×2 which says that the individualist/collectivist axis is a false dichotomy. (Like nihilism & eternalism—there's something better that's not just an awkward compromise)
Thread · Prediction and follow-up on Sweden's no-lockdown approach · 2 of 6 tweets
Prediction: in 2 months Sweden will either: • have done some sort of "lockdown" (the kind WHO was previously insisting they do and is now praising them for not doing 🤨) • have >26k deaths (10× what they have now) Possibly both. P = 75% (I have lots of model uncertainty)
(It was hard to come up with a clear concrete figure for the deaths. I think there's a substantial chance it'll be much higher, but also tiny factors can affect things a lot. But based on looking at this site, Sweden looks a bit like New-York-a-month-ago, moving at half-speed.)
Just had half a 2×2 flash into my head, but I'm not sure what the other half wants to be. Maybe a few possibilities... Anyway, figured I'd just put it out & ask: What's the ↕️ vertical axis? What's the 🌸 pink (upper-left) quadrant? What's the 🍊 orange (lower-left) quadrant?
@ankurrsharma Tapering? This doesn't look like tapering to me. The daily deaths aren't smooth enough to read at all. Here's cumulative. That said, it only looks like a linear increase the last few weeks, so maybe what they're doing brings R down to ~1.
Replying to @publius__2
@publius__2 Oooh, yeah, if that's the vertical axis... top left would be ~"playing pretend"...? & bottom left would be ~cheating/spoilsporting
@DoqxaScott Yeah, I mean more specific things with these words... the contrast I'm making is between something like arguing ~= "here's how reality looks to me, so you're wrong if you see differently" revealing ~= "here's how reality looks to me... how does it look to you? how to combine?"
@rjgoodin ooh I like this
@chriswaterguy Oooooooh I really like this. It comes very close to matching what I had in mind but didn't know how to put words to! Like that arguing is not just "here's how I see it" but "you must see it this way" whereas revealing leaves that space open.
@DougTataryn Oooh, yeah, neat take! Different than the thing I was looking at but I like it a lot.
Replying to @iantay_
@iantay_ oooh true it definitely can manifest as that!
@namatt0 Oh fascinating. Like groupthink? And why is that orange & not pink? What would pink be then? Or what would the vertical axis be?
@hitsthings Mmmm right, that's an obvious distinction for the left side! I was feeling into it but somehow didn't find the words. But yeah, like... lying as a way to try to keep the peace, vs to manipulate. Could add a third column: "spitballing/playing" ↕ "(defensive) bullshitting"
So delighted by all of the engagement this is getting! I got ratio'd hard (12 replies, 5 likes) and the responses are all really thought-provoking 🤩🥰 It inspires in me the idea of a site for jamming on 2×2s (or maybe diagrams more generally) Share, fork, analogize, meta, etc
@DougTataryn More like @chriswaterguy's reply Your "individuated-collective" axis inspires something for my *vertical* axis though... like "differentiated-vs-psychologically-dependent"... which would be the reason why the arguer NEEDs the other person to agree with them. idk re leftcol tho
I have a new playlist called "Yes", that is, in one way or another, about orienting to life in a way that deeply allows what is so. Currently just a couple items on it—got ideas? Probably a few Leonard Cohen songs would fit... Link: play.google.com/music/playlist…
Why are subject-object shifts hard? An intriguing answer: "The peculiar elusive relationship between the subject & the object of the act of cognition [is one of] …total interdependence in which relative stability is achieved & mantained through the circularity of interaction"
In other words, our very experience is maintained by continuing to interpret things through our existing conceptual mappings and distinctions. Our challenge is like Neurath's boat replacing the hull while staying afloat twitter.com/karleychenne/s…
This quote is from Joanna Macy's book, btw, Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory ...which absolutely lives up to the epicness of its title.
I have a feeling "hindsight is 2020" is going to have a different flavor after this year.
@Jeanvaljean689 @DougTataryn @chriswaterguy Oh right, ofc! L↔R axis doesn't have to be "lies"/"truths" at all! Right could still be "report reality as I see it" and left could be like... any other type of move one might do in a conversation, such as "ask a question", which might put 🌸 interview (UL) 🍊 interrogate (LL)
@Mappletons I built them out over like 5 years on workflowy, then just ported them to roam. Styleable tags was basically a requirement for me to switch, as the colors add so much signposting to what's going on
Retweeted @KateRaworth
"Systems thinking is too advanced for undergraduates" an economics professor once told me. I just taught the basics of f…
@KateRaworth @rethinkecon @PluralEcon @EricBeinhocker @joyurge check this out
@utotranslucence I do pretty much all of my work at a standing desk, even when travelling, and that switch probably one of the best choices I made (6 years ago) For the first weeks, it was hard to stand for more than a halfhour. Now it's hard to sit for a halfhour.
@visakanv Don't stop doing it for me! It makes my tweet more valuable because it's now a jumping off point into your tapestry. Also it's fun and I just like a sense of people thinking together!
Replying to @incertaspecie
@incertaspecie @QiaochuYuan check out this deep throat film youtube.com/watch?v=LqdFL0…
@QiaochuYuan I like how a lot of Ted Chiang's stories contain some context for how you came to be reading it. (but not all; like he's not addicted to needing to do that) Ooh and @raelifin's Crystal Trilogy sets this up as a really fascinating plot point from the very beginning!
Retweeted @eriktorenberg
If your expertise is brand building & positioning, the biggest arbitrage opportunity for your skills may be winning hear…
@Plinz I forgot the name of the one by the Flight of the Conchords guys so I looked it up to add it here but then there it is, it's already here ("What We Do In The Shadows")
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing At @Liminal_Agency we've been exploring a new kitchen practice of cooking collective meals (previously mostly solo/pair) with a specific intention towards a meditative approach, & I've now participated in 5 such meals... as an observer. I've learned a ton by watching & noting 👁️
@JasnaTod I'm pretty sure this message from past me was from the convo we had when you were at @Liminal_Agency... ...maybe the thing that we didn't know was going to happen was you going into a cabin!
@JasnaTod @Liminal_Agency I so value your writing this piece & sharing it with us 🙏 Wishing you a safe journey into the unknown & back. A lyric comes to mind: 🎶 you set out 🎶 with all the knowledge that you've earned 🎶 and when you got back 🎶 somehow only part of you returned anatta? idk 🙃
@JasnaTod @Liminal_Agency Hmmm... if we relistened to the recording of that conversation (or put it through otter for a transcript) we could probably at least find the context of the statement! Whether that would add much clarity, hard to say.
Retweeted @HiFromMichaelV
To make sense of the current pandemic, Feynman's report on the Challenger is more relevant than any virology or epistem…
@jnymnz sounds like myriad got decimated 🕶️ ... 😎
@SarahAMcManus @harmonylion1 @nosilverv I initially read "Drawing" as "Darwin" and I was like "DARWIN HAD AN ANUS PRINCIPLE WHAT"
@jondubin @utotranslucence Ohhhh... I feel like I saw that. It goes crazy tiny-thin. I would want one if I were regularly working in cafes without bars, but I rarely go to cafes and the starbucks near me has a tall table plus a bar that's usually empty so 🤷♀️ A few search results:
There's a 2×2 waiting to happen here folks... twitter.com/realtimeai/sta…
@jondubin @utotranslucence a 👏 laptop 👏 without 👏 an 👏 external 👏 keyboard 👏 is 👏 an 👏 intrinsically 👏 unergonomic 👏 product
@nosilverv which paper is this from?
Replying to @warmbott
@warmbott I'd love to check it out
@DoqxaScott Hm, no. I'd say just simply learning something new is like repairing something on the deck of the boat; it doesn't usually threaten the very thing that keeps the boat afloat.
@QiaochuYuan @sparkpo @m_ashcroft @DavidDeutschOxf Ugh I contain such a synthesis but I don't feel motivated to write it out. Somebody interview me live who is curious and excited about the synthesis and relatively familiar with both Deutsch & McGilchrist, and I'd love to talk about it. Maybe @sparkpo?
Replying to @Malcolm_Ocean
@Jeanvaljean689 @QiaochuYuan @sparkpo @m_ashcroft @DavidDeutschOxf Relevance of Deutsch to McGilchrist... yeah. Here's my super pithy summary:
@ankurrsharma Huh, interesting. I see what you're saying... I wasn't thinking about the spikes themselves as relevant, exactly, but yeah. Huh. Well, we'll see!
@Jeanvaljean689 @QiaochuYuan @sparkpo @m_ashcroft @DavidDeutschOxf Another oversimplified way to contrast the two perspectives would say - "a straw Deutsch follower would answer "better" as loud as they could on this poll" - "a straw McGilchrist follower would answer "worse"" - someone who understands both would say both
@emareaf So with you here. Here's one of my models, addressing basically this question: malcolmocean.com/2017/11/self-r…
@ankurrsharma Can you link me to a general explanation of this principle? Like I think I get it but I'd love to see the math!
@m_ashcroft @Jeanvaljean689 @QiaochuYuan @sparkpo @DavidDeutschOxf For some people I'd say "start with McGilchrist because otherwise you'll probably end up with some confusions from Deutsch" but you* probably have enough right-hemisphere appreciation already that you won't fall into those traps. *like me; I read Deutsch first
@m_ashcroft @Jeanvaljean689 @QiaochuYuan @sparkpo @DavidDeutschOxf It also seems possible to me that Deutsch could be a useful stepping stone for someone coming from a very bayesian rationalist or reductionist background, towards grokking some important hemisphere stuff... ...but I'd want them to read a preface I wrote before reading Deutsch.
When I first launched the current design of my blog, in 2014, I made a playful decision to have each post have an accent color (5 options). I just realized today that the selection was all one color still, and that I could fix that! Check it now 👇🌈 malcolmocean.com
@11kilobytes @m_ashcroft @Jeanvaljean689 @QiaochuYuan @sparkpo @DavidDeutschOxf Haven't explicitly written the preface but there are some tweets where I talk about some (though not all) confusions I see with Deustch... see many tweets: twitter.com/search?q=from%… and this one (& surrounding thread) in particular 👇
@Jeanvaljean689 @m_ashcroft @QiaochuYuan @sparkpo @DavidDeutschOxf OMG yeah there's totally a market for stuff like this. It might be small but it includes me at least.
@ankurrsharma This reasoning isn't valid in exponential thinking contexts. My figure actually came from: - current *estimated cases* in Sweden: 200k - doubling every 2 weeks: 1.6M in 42 days - 5% deaths ~17 days after that: 80k - round down So it assumes no deaths this week.
@ankurrsharma This is not to say that I'm right—I think there's a serious case to be made that Sweden may have got R to ~= 1, so it's only growing linearly, in which case your reasoning would basically apply and they wouldn't hit 26k deaths. Just that your reasoning doesn't refute mine.
@m_ashcroft @Jeanvaljean689 @QiaochuYuan @sparkpo @DavidDeutschOxf This article would be 150% better if you changed the title to "Let The Others Find You" I think that lede is not worth burying, and it would become a much stickier meme if you put it in the title where people would see it when the link is shared on twitter
@m_ashcroft @Jeanvaljean689 @QiaochuYuan @sparkpo @DavidDeutschOxf (In order to actually get twitter to show the new title, you'll need to go here & put in the url, to get it to refresh the cache) cards-dev.twitter.com/validator
@ankurrsharma I'm mostly not looking at cases either—my 200k cases estimate comes from this site 👇 (tw blocks url) which uses an estimation methodology of deaths today imply cases 17 days ago, then estimating growth since.
@ankurrsharma The efficacy of this method depends heavily, of course, on how well they're able to map the a given policy (lockdown, contact tracing, social distancing, etc) onto a resultant R value. They could totally be underestimating how well Sweden's method is actually working.
@11kilobytes I have no idea. But your question, in the context of this thread, is reminding me of a showerthought from this morning of like... an 18yo, instead of college, reads books I recommend & tries things & just like... blogs about what they're learning.
@Jeanvaljean689 @m_ashcroft @QiaochuYuan @sparkpo @DavidDeutschOxf of course [[roam hack]] [[example]]
@m_ashcroft another reason to
@m_ashcroft where "ready" here actually means "you have assembled a bunch of similarly-weird friends"
@ankurrsharma Yeah honestly I'm updating towards like... Sweden is at R~=1, which would imply that basically they're in a very sensitive situation and will be for a long time potentially. That they've basically done the "flatten the curve" thing but where the curve gets really loooong.
@ankurrsharma Anyway, I appreciate your engagement with me about these models. I've learned from it!
@QiaochuYuan @sparkpo @m_ashcroft @DavidDeutschOxf Oooooh! Maybe the "how to reconcile Deutsch & McGilchrist" could be a dialogue between me & @mindmeanings! He's already explicitly contrasted them here:
@ankurrsharma I found that exact chart when trying to understand the spikes thing you were talking about and was surprised by the lack of spikiness in it.
@ankurrsharma This is a contradiction. In order to be that short, they'd have to be getting infected faster. Even if they're doubling exponentially as I posited (every 2 weeks) it would still take 2.5 months to hit the inflection point on the logistic curve.
@m_ashcroft @Jeanvaljean689 @QiaochuYuan @sparkpo @DavidDeutschOxf Didn't know about McGilchrist when I read Deutsch, nothing intentional. I found Deutsch through connecting with @reasonisfun. His work connects powerfully with the work I'm doing on designing collaborative cultures.
Thread · Looking for the best introduction to complex systems thinking · 1 of 4 tweets
Best introduction to complex systems / systems thinking? Something that takes a person from seeing everything as a complicated system that can be understood just in terms of parts, to seeing that there's a whole different way of looking at things that's necessary for clarity.
@mechanicalmonk1 @m_ashcroft @Jeanvaljean689 @QiaochuYuan @sparkpo @DavidDeutschOxf I might actually suggest learning a bit of systems thinking / general systems theory, or about complex systems as distinct from complicated systems. Maybe just in parallel. Not sure of best intro—just asked the world here:
@Jeanvaljean689 @JakeOrthwein @11kilobytes @m_ashcroft @QiaochuYuan @sparkpo @DavidDeutschOxf Mmm! Cool. Yeah, my guess is that in the case of both Popper & Deutsch, they understand much more nuance than they've been able to convey to the people who follow them. One of the best takes on this phenomenon I've seen, ironically, is the Socrates Dream chapter of Deutsch's BoI
> a "fix the future" party looks very different to a "fix the present" party. > You have to defer fixing paper cuts in the present if you want to fix annihilation in the future. It's an exercise in political delayed gratification. Fucking epic mic drop thread by @leashless 🎙️⤵️ twitter.com/leashless/stat…
@cozyunoist glad you shared it anyway! different things for different people—someone with a math background might get a lot out of this in particular! eg @Morphenius or @QiaochuYuan, perhaps
Thread · A running collection of delightful animal clips · 1 of 35 tweets
Thread · Looking for the best introduction to complex systems thinking · 1 of 4 tweets
If you want to disambiguate the things I'm asking about here, by all means do! - general systems theory - systems thinking - complex systems - complexity science - nonlinearity, power laws, etc
"intros to systems thinking?" 👆 Tagging @TaylorPearsonMe @jim_rutt @edelwax @cognitivepolicy @NoraBateson @bonnittaroy @cognazor @warrenmansell @KateRaworth @snowded @thewiseturtle @utotranslucence Keep notifications decluttered by replying to the above tweet, NOT this one 🙏
teach your kids about object permanence before you're gone
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing Are you,,, answering my question by subtweeting me while QTing me? Well played 👏😂👏
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
they do weird things with their mouth / face in photos on purpose because they're embarrassed of what their face looks lik…
@QiaochuYuan i'm compassionate or creative; just that there is a self-aggrandizing tendency
@themarcusnewton Took me 3 reads & clicking through to the site to be certain that "DNA Pathways - Design for life" wasn't a biotech company. I love the graphics on the site, though the tiny font in some of them is nearly unreadable. Hoping this feedback is helpful, not discouraging 🙏🥰
capturing requirements early = how end up back in the very metaphor that necessitates the existence of the problem in the first place. Designing a new system means finding a new metaphor. Then we can ask, within that metaphor, what is required, and get somewhere new.
@captain_mrs gonna go out on a limb & posit it has something to do with a decade of being forced to sit still listen to someone
@visakanv Reminds me of this old blog post of mine, Causal Explanations vs Normative Explanations Particularly this example I give at the beginning: "it would be work" malcolmocean.com/2015/10/causal…
"it's like a crotch shot... and I didn't even know I had a crotch there" #Overheard
Suggestion for @Conaw & @RoamResearch - set up a roam stack exchange where people can ask questions & get answers, while it's growing so fast you can't offer 1-on-1 support. I think the #roamcult could get that SE out of beta really quickly, including by pasting from slack.
it's not cheating to make something more fun
Retweeted @Meaningness
@JakeOrthwein @meditationstuff @reasonisfun @mindmeanings @Malcolm_Ocean @nosilverv But also if you take the map metaphor…
@Klaudioz @Conaw @RoamResearch Slack is a fucking goldfish that has no memory whatsoever and no natural way to combine 2 people asking the same question, let alone a dozen. No way for knowledge to accrue.
@voyageur_techno @Conaw @RoamResearch Easier but worse imho, and I think there's enough energy to take the harder option. Don't want to get distracted by questions about google docs or whatever while there. Roam is worth it, and the community naturally has a help-each-other energy that would be v appropriate to SE
@QiaochuYuan @utotranslucence This is actually one of my favorites, because it feels less like tarot than tagging oneself in just like, a picture of stuff. Shoutout to @SarahAMcManus's recognition of this potential in a list of 210 reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire
@visakanv re Complice marketing? "still seems like a good idea, also, would be work, and,,,"
@Jeanvaljean689 Yeah! Nice flavor. It maps on to a distinction most languages have between two kinds of knowing. In french the verbs are savoir & connaître, for instance. I have explored using "grasp" & "grok" for this in English. McGilchrist talks about this at the start of ch3 of TMahE:
@Jeanvaljean689 Elaborating on "grasp" & "grok": LeftHem language center is right next to the part that grasps tools—even in left-handers. When someone says “I grasp this idea” this metaphor means “I can control & manipulate the world with this idea that I am holding separate from myself”.
@Jeanvaljean689 The term “grok” is a loanword from Martian whose original meaning was “drink”. When someone says “I grok this idea” this metaphor means “I have incorporated this idea into myself. It is part of me and I am made of it. We are not separate.” This resonates with RightHem view.
@drossbucket @Meaningness @utotranslucence @meditationstuff @JakeOrthwein @reasonisfun @mindmeanings @aphercotropist Any or all of you might be interested in reading this exchange I had with @Meaningness about map≠territory a year ago. Might even be helpful to @Meaningness' writing on it!
@Meaningness @aphercotropist @meditationstuff @JakeOrthwein @reasonisfun @mindmeanings I had an idea about writing a story (or series of stories, or cartoons maybe) where the brain hemispheres are two folks going for a walk together & relating with each other. This metaphor & its implications feature heavily. So far this is what I've got👇
Retweeted @literalbanana
“I want to save the world” lol what are you saving it for. do you think they will give you another one like a marshmallow
Replying to @ponekarl
@ponekarl @nosilverv I think it's a particular interpretation of something that's actually half a hormonal shift.
"we're not a machine, but we're well-oiled"
Thread · Looking for the best introduction to complex systems thinking · 1 of 4 tweets
Also I haven't done this course but it's got some rave reviews and it's probably the best high-touch introduction you can get to Complexity at this time. By @zaidhassan, whose work (The Social Labs Revolution, 10-in-10) I appreciate deeply. courses.complexity.university/covid19
@Jeanvaljean689 Yes 🥰 Sadly? I think that's beautiful 🙃 In part because I think grok may actually be even deeper than connaître or kennen... especially in their casual usage in those languages that have the terms. idk, just a thought
@nosilverv Can I get a signed print of the 4th one?
Retweeted @naval
Colleges have to convince students for the next year that a remote education is worth every bit as much as an in-person one, and…
Retweeted @ashleymayer
There's no harder announcement for a CEO to make, but this was really, really well done. news.airbnb.com/a-message-from…
@hyponymous I have a post distinguishing two kinds of explanations here! There are of course other kinds of why, as you note above. malcolmocean.com/2015/10/causal…
@imhinesmi @sebastmarsh Mmm yeah. I explored this in a blog post, where I call the "owe" one an entitlement... ...I point out in there that sometimes people say have entitlement when they actually *don't* anticipate, eg "I'll expect everyone to have their assignments in on time" malcolmocean.com/2016/05/expect…
@hyponymous I love these kinds of disambiguations! I've written already about the expect one: malcolmocean.com/2016/05/expect…
@hyponymous And later I added a third kind of expectation, which weirdly doesn't have an obvious name in english afaik. malcolmocean.com/2017/09/the-th…
Retweeted @RoamResearch
@AdamLivesay7 You're not our target user if Roam is worth less than netflix.
Retweeted @NoraBateson
here is a little piece I wrote today about what is concerning me now... medium.com/@norabateson/m…
Another #TwitterTriptych, featuring @david_perell & @paraschopra
@maybegray hmm... *peers over orange-tinted blue-blocker glasses* ...this is *definitely* gray.
@andrewhuang This could be a kickstarter maybe. Except I guess shipping a piano... fuck.
this guy is my new role model (in some dimension)
This is fucking 😙👌 Featuring @eigenrobot & @WomanCorn #TwitterTriptych
@JimmyRis @eigenrobot @WomanCorn Fine, biptych
@JimmyRis @eigenrobot @WomanCorn I hope you're happy
Btw the action is now happening over here... seems they might go with discourse instead of SE. I can see pros & cons, and maybe it just makes sense to have both.
Replying to @eigenrobot
@eigenrobot @JimmyRis @WomanCorn I mean actually clearly the term for these is #twiptych
Tagging #twiptych for future searching, since @JimmyRis insists that it's inappropriate to use "triptych" if there are only 2. There were 3 in my first one 👇 hence the name I guess
@yashkaf you jest but en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_m…
vitamins and supplements are nearly a commodity yet they sell (to consumers) for wildly varying prices yet they don't differentiate by having square boxes that stack & dispense easily 🧐
Replying to @eigenrobot
@eigenrobot Nice try Cunningham 😝 I have shit to do today that's not explaining how orthogonal these two trios are 🙃
@noelnotdothing @Meaningness @chaosprime
@vgr Like the daycare that added fees for late pickup & found things get worse because the fee was less than the implied social cost when no fee. > "I had one family who were routinely late and I think it's just something that they built into their budget" . thestar.com/life/health_we…
"an asteroid calling itself #2020JA" TIL asteroids are like pokémon and announce their names 🙃
@TomLisankie Show me a pic of their containers? The only containers I'm seeing on the site are like, big bins of whey protein... what do the pills come in?
Replying to @s_r_constantin
@s_r_constantin @reasonisfun @meditationstuff @drossbucket @JakeOrthwein @Meaningness @utotranslucence @mindmeanings @aphercotropist Seems to me that a substantial chunk of dealing with motivated cognition is going to involve working with emotional schemas, a la UtEB: lesswrong.com/posts/i9xyZBS3…
@s_r_constantin @reasonisfun @meditationstuff @drossbucket @JakeOrthwein @Meaningness @utotranslucence @mindmeanings @aphercotropist And in particular, working with the kinds of schemas described in Already Free as being a source of existential annihilatory panic. What is the "motivation" in "motivated cognition" fundamentally about?
@s_r_constantin @reasonisfun @meditationstuff @drossbucket @JakeOrthwein @Meaningness @utotranslucence @mindmeanings @aphercotropist Also relevant: these pieces I've assembled here.
@CyrusOfHearts Motivated cognition is largely avoidant; adding pain increases the fear & panic. Which is not to say there won't be discomfort involved in unlearning things - there often is, but it's *towards* something.
@Jeanvaljean689 @Paul_Johnson Huh, I'll need to see some examples to really understand it. I resonate with the 🧠 connection, & so @Paul_Johnson if you haven't checked out Iain McGilchrist's work (a new, actually good model of what's going on with hemispheres) I highly recommend it!
@Jeanvaljean689 @Paul_Johnson This mini-book might be a great introduction for you. I think it has the potential to deeply inform the chaos map's development. scribd.com/document/39727…
@Jeanvaljean689 @Paul_Johnson Ahh I'm seeing that at @PathwrightApp you're doing education stuff. You might also dig this podcast, which is also a great intro: metalearn.net/podcasts/ml41-…
@Meaningness @nosilverv @drossbucket @JakeOrthwein @utotranslucence @meditationstuff @reasonisfun @mindmeanings @aphercotropist seems like the cognitive science folks tried to crawl back out of the box
@bradydaleaswell @JakeOrthwein .........it was me.
Replying to @liminal_warmth
@liminal_warmth You can somewhat fix it for yourself with a userstyle. 1. Install the stylus extension or equivalent 2. new style for twitter .com 3. paste in this: [data-testid="sidebarColumn"] {display: none} (you'll need to use address bar for search but that's better anyway)
@Meaningness @JaredJanes @Leslie_C_Bangs I'm getting a lot out of Spectrum of Ecstasy, and I'm only halfway through. Also checked out Entering the Heart of Sun and Moon first in 2017, and it was cool though also kind of confusing at times. I'm kinda wondering what Leslie purpose is in learning more...
@meaning_forge idk about discord but @SamoBurja's work is relevant & @SarahAMcManus was recently modeling this in relation to self-organizing teams
Retweeted @churrundo
Replying to @liminal_warmth
@liminal_warmth This was basically me in 2019 but for brain hemispheres, and I think I've done a decent job of that! Mostly by tweeting excitedly and relating it to other things. Will take another few years to really percolate, but gradually more & more people are reading McGilchrist now!
@CyrusOfHearts That's a motte-bailey I think.
@CyrusOfHearts > The myth that if only you understood enough, you could avoid pain. Yup. I love how @xuenay puts it in this thread 👇
@TomLisankie Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh yes, brilliant. Organized for the user, not for the seller. I still think there's a market for the thing I was envisaging, which is eg like a rectilinear container of one type of pill, maybe with a dispense 1 thing like the classic straw dispenser
@Leslie_C_Bangs @JaredJanes @spearofsolomon @Meaningness In that case I'd recommend checking out McGilchrist's brain hemisphere model, which gives a kind of neurological background for some of the concepts. Might be a helpful bridge. Short intros: text scribd.com/document/39727… 12min vid youtube.com/watch?v=dFs9WO…
@reasonisfun @m_ashcroft Oh interesting. Yeah, that seems totally compatible to me! Also @Meaningness' old paper "What are plans for?" is a great read and deeply relevant to this frame shift.
@ae_fernandes @zaidhassan Probably too late to join but this is round 2 and I get the impression they're intending to do a round 3 in a month or two.
@bryankam @Connoropolous @liminal_warmth I read Jaynes! His theory is actually sort of the opposite, and was based on old conceptions of what was going on in schizophrenic patients 👇 (I don't know much about this myself but McGilchrist worked with schizophrenics in his psychiatric practice)
@Human__Age @liminal_warmth I haven't done a proper intro but you could pop around this meta-thread where I link a bunch of threads of me relating the model to various topics... and see what catches your eye!
Thread · McGilchrist's divided brain and ways of attending · 25 of 63 tweets
Intro thread to Iain McGilchrist's work, based on his mini-book Ways of Attending: How our divided brain constructs the world. "Attention is not just receptive, but actively creative of the world we inhabit. How we attend makes all the difference to the world we experience."
Forget everything you thought you knew about the difference between the hemispheres, because it will be largely wrong. It is not what each hemisphere does — they are both involved in everything — but HOW IT DOES IT that matters.
The prime difference between the brain hemispheres is how they attend. For reasons of survival we need one hemisphere (left, in humans & many animals) to pay narrow attention to detail, to grab hold of things we need, while the other (right) keeps an eye out for everything else.
> "The result is that one hemisphere is good at utilising the world, the other better at understanding it." Here's an image from an RSA animate of a talk McGilchrist gave, illustrating the narrow & broad attention happening simultaneously:
Attention matters. > "Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, attention has the power to alter whatever it meets. The play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged."
The titular fable: the Master and his Emissary This is one main metaphor McGilchrist uses to point at the different role each hemisphere is best to play, and how that relationship can break down.
The next section of Ways of Attending features McGilchrist's context for being interested in this research, including the Q: "why was it that the things we prized about the work of a great poet, turned to a handful of dust when one tried to inspect them more closely?"
IM is well-aware the topic is passé: > "Some of you may already be thinking: not the old chestnut about the hemispheres again, surely? > Despite frequent acknowledgment by many leading neuroscientists that there do seem to be fundamental differences between the hemispheres...
> scientists have largely given up trying to put their finger on what these might be, piece after piece of information showing that every conceivable activity – language, visual imagery, and all the things we thought in the past distinguished them—is served by both hemispheres."
> The problem is that we generally look at the brain as having “functions”, and if you do that, sure enough, those functions are shared by both hemispheres.
> But if you look, not at what the brain does as if it were just a machine, but at how – in the sense of “in what manner” – it does it, as if it were part of a living person, some very important differences start to emerge.
> My view: the relationship between the hemispheres, like that of the master & his emissary... is not symmetrical. > Each needs the other; each has an important role to play. But those roles are not equal—one depends more on the other and needs to be aware of that fact.
> So I am not going to argue anything as facile as that the left hemisphere is “mistaken” in what it sees or what it values. > It is not: but its vision is necessarily limited. > The problem comes with its unawareness of that fact.
1st Q: why is the brain divided at all? > If the whole purpose of the brain is to make connections, and if, as many believe, consciousness arises, in some yet to be specified manner, from the sheer interconnectedness of such a vast array of neurons, why chop it down the middle?
> It could have evolved as a single mass. But, in fact, hemisphere divisions go right down the phylogenetic tree. So whatever it is for, it must operate, not just for man, but also for animals and birds. What is that?" < he notes it's not from language or righthandedness >
> If we come to look at the evolution of language, we find further puzzles. Why do we have language at all? Surely, in order to communicate. And if not that, then at least to think. But neither of these propositions is true. Music came first.
Moreover, IM notes, while vocab is based in the left hemisphere, most of the rest of communication is more based in the right—the "music of speech": - intonation - irony - metaphor - context > Language is not necessary for thinking/communicating, just for certain kinds of [such]
> My view is that language and the hand have a certain common agenda – that is, they enable us to grasp things: to pin them down and make them useful. And we cannot deny that they have done that in spades.
> They have helped us to use the world and, by doing so, to develop many of the things of which we are most justly proud, the fruits of civilisation. But there is a price for this kind of approach to the world.
~> Attention may sound a bit boring... just another “cognitive function” – but it's actually the way in which we relate to the world. > It doesn’t just dictate the kind of relationship we have with whatever it is: it dictates what it is that we come to have a relationship with.
IM takes a case study of an animal simultaneously: 👀 focusing narrowly with its left hemisphere on discerning food from not-food 👁️ attending broadly with its right hemisphere to unknowns in the environment (friend or foe) These 2 modes are incompatible; hence need for split 🧠
> In humans, because of the development of the frontal lobes, which enable us to stand back from the world, the need for specialisation becomes greater.
> As we stand back, we can see the world either as separate from ourselves, as something we can use, or as quite the opposite – as connected to ourselves more deeply: we can see others, for the first time, as beings like ourselves, the ground of empathy.
> Being able to represent the world artificially – to map it conceptually, substituting tokens for things, like the general’s map at army HQ – enables us to have an overall strategy; this is what language achieves. But it inhibits us from being there, in the experiential world.
> So for humans the need to have both ways of understanding the world, and yet keeping them apart, is paramount.
Replying to @eigenrobot
@JaredJanes @spearofsolomon @Leslie_C_Bangs @Meaningness I like reminding myself that "sunyata" exists as a word that isn't already overlaid with other connotations, and keep that as the central tag in my head so I don't think I'm talking about whatever "openness" might imply to someone unfamiliar with dharma.
Seeing @JaredJanes compare order & chaos concepts with buddhist form & emptiness (aka @Meaningness's pattern & nebulosity) And was suddenly struck by the resonance between @deewhock's concept of the "Chaordic Organization" & the buddhist "form is emptiness & emptiness is form"
@Paul_Johnson you might also dig this in relation to your Chaos Mapping thing (which ofc also involves mapping order & the relationship between them)
@callumflack Yo, wanna have a conversation about this & record it & post it to the internet? (not saying we'd have to reconcile as part of the convo, just to relate & explore & develop etc)
Retweeted @callumflack
My current internal “wide-angle method” is a tension between the McGilchrist’s ideas and Deutsch’s explanations. I actuall…
I didn't write such an intro at the time, for various reasons. Maybe this thread will become another meta-thread, but specifically for introductory brain hemisphere content 🤔💡🔰 Here's a thread that's explicitly an intro, using the lens of attention 👇
@Human__Age @liminal_warmth Inspired by your tweet, I ended up typing up half an intro thread based on McGilchrist's mini-book Ways of Attending. I'm intending to finish the thread tonight.
@OshanJarow @callumflack Update: @callumflack & I have DM'd and are planning to follow up on the idea in a few weeks when he's got more time. Reply here to follow I guess, or if you have specific questions etc.
@spearofsolomon @JaredJanes @Leslie_C_Bangs @Meaningness
@Paul_Johnson @JaredJanes @Leslie_C_Bangs @spearofsolomon @Meaningness
This again, while listening to @vulfpeck's Live @ Madison Square Garden show for like the dozenth time. youtube.com/watch?v=rv4wf7…
@Connoropolous @liminal_warmth What'd you think of it? (or what do you think of it so far, if you're still partway through) It seems to me deeply relevant to the whole collaborative culture thing, and eg inward/outward mindset
@spearofsolomon @Leslie_C_Bangs @JaredJanes @Meaningness I think that's part of it, though also there's a sense in which things are somewhat nebulous no matter what model you use.
aggregore thread there are too many egregores I have lost track 😳 post them here for egregation
@evilsizor @EzekielLucas_ @fortelabs @thisiskp_ @Steve_Daheb @JamesClear @alex_pentland @JonnyBird @gtdguy @nireyal @Pocket Oooh I love how the animation illustrates the strengtheningness. Positive feedback loops!
@spearofsolomon @Leslie_C_Bangs @JaredJanes @Meaningness Hm, idk. It does seem there is more fact-of-the-matter to the question of whether a molecule contains carbon-14 vs not, than questions like "who am I?" and even "is there water in the fridge?" This has something to do with rationality vs meta-rationality. meaningness.com/metablog/ratio…
Thread · McGilchrist's divided brain and ways of attending · 23 of 63 tweets
> "Unfortunately, though the hemispheres need to cooperate, they find themselves in competition, simply because the left hemisphere’s take on things is such that it thinks it knows it all, while it *cannot* be aware of what the right hemisphere knows.
> Each needs the other, but the left hemisphere is more dependent on the right than the right is on the left. > Yet it thinks exactly the opposite and believes that it can “go it alone”.
> I believe the battle between the hemispheres (which is only a battle from the left hemisphere’s point of view) explains the shape of the history of ideas in the West and explains the predicament we find ourselves in today."
How our divided brain constructs the world: what does brain research reveal about the different kinds of world each hemisphere creates? In Ways of Attending, McGilchrist notes that he's compressing things immensely—I'm of course going a whole step further with this tweetstorm 😂
The hemispheres have distinct architecture, the right being more nonlocally connected /parallelized Right also uses more norepinephrine whereas the left uses more dopamine, which makes sense to me in relation to the classic phenomenon of "stimulant narrows focus of attention"
~> whatever we experience comes to us first – it “presences” to us in unpreconceived freshness – in the RHem. ~> New exp of all kinds – whether music, words, imaginary constructs, objects... even skills... is dealt with by the left hemisphere only later, once it becomes familiar
> The right hemisphere is better at making connections between things: it tends to see things whole, whereas the left hemisphere sees the parts. > The LH tends to see things more in the abstract, the RH sees them more embedded in the real-world context in which they occur.
> As a corollary, the right hemisphere seems better able to appreciate actually existing things in all their uniqueness, while the left hemisphere schematises and generalises things into categories.
~> the LH is better attuned to tools & to whatever is inanimate, mechanical, machine-like, & which it itself has made: such things are understandable in their own terms, because they were put together by it, piece by piece, & they are ideally suited to this kind of understanding
> In contrast, the right hemisphere is adapted to dealing with living things, which are flexible, organic, constantly changing, and which it has not made.
Further on music & art, and the extent to which both of them rely on the betweenness & relationality that characterizes the right hemisphere's perspective.
On emotion—anger is lateralized to the left, but everything else to the right, including empathy.
> Only the right hemisphere has a whole-body image; the LH sees the body as an assemblage of parts and as if it were an object in space alongside other objects, rather than a mode of existence. For the RH, we live the body; for the LH, we live in it, rather as we drive a car.
> Reasoning is by no means confined to the LH, though sequential analysis largely is. Deductive reasoning, many kinds of mathematical procedures and problem-solving, and the phenomenon of sudden insight into the nature of a complex construct seem to be underwritten by the RH
Overall ~> Experience is forever in motion, ramifying and unpredictable. In order for us to know anything at all, that thing must have enduring properties. If all things flow... one will always be taken unawares by experience: since nothing is repeated, nothing can ever be known
> We have to find a way of fixing it as it flies, stepping back from the immediacy of experience, stepping outside the flow. Hence the brain has to attend to the world in two completely different ways, and in so doing to bring two different worlds into being.
> In the one, that of the RH, we experience the live, complex, embodied world of individual, always unique, beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes, a world with which we are deeply connected.
> In the other, that of the LH, we “experience” our experience in a special way: a “re- presented” version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes on which predictions can be based.
> LH attention isolates, fixes & makes each thing explicit by bringing it under the spotlight of attention. In doing so it renders things inert, mechanical, lifeless. ~> ...also enables us for the first time to know, & consequently to learn & to make things. This gives us power.
> These two aspects of the world are not symmetrically opposed. They are not equivalent, for example, to the “subjective” & “objective” points of view, concepts that are themselves a product of, & reflect, one particular way of being in the world—[the LH's way]"
With the RH, ~> we experience the world pre-reflectively, before we have had a chance to “view” it at all or to divide it up into bits – a world in which what may *LATER* come to be thought of as subjective/objective are held in a suspension that embraces each potential “pole”
> These are not different ways of THINKING ABOUT the world: they are different ways of BEING IN the world. And their difference is not symmetrical, but fundamentally asymmetrical.
The right hemisphere's attention is outward, to the Other; the left hemisphere's is inward, on its virtual world.
@jameswjesso Oh cool! Shared it with this preface: > It's basically talking about the dishes as being a prime generator of resent *and* a prime opportunity for collaboration & teamwork.
@JaredJanes @Leslie_C_Bangs @spearofsolomon @Meaningness Which in particular? the text, the vid, the meta-thread? the whole combo?
@JaredJanes @Leslie_C_Bangs @spearofsolomon @Meaningness I've also since tried making a twitter thread based on the text, which is very long but maybe also a decent intro!
Replying to @brownian19
@brownian19 Yeah, that one's also good! Ways of Attending is a very weird book in that it is like 30 pages long and yet is a very not-cheap book. Worth $20 to have it on a coffee table, maybe, but the Kindle version should be $2 like the Search for Meaning one you just bought.
@brownian19 This is part of why I came to be attempting to port the entirety of the book onto twitter in the form of this thread. Fortunately, someone has uploaded it to scribd also, so that's another option for reading/downloading it: scribd.com/document/39727…
Thread · McGilchrist's divided brain and ways of attending · 15 of 63 tweets
> You might say: ok, here are two different ways of conceiving the world: but how do you know that they are not equally valid? I say that they are both very important—both, in fact, essential for our ability to lead civilised lives—but not equally valid.
IM references the foundational crisis of mathematics, where people setting out to create the perfect internally-valid trustable system (the LH's dream) ended up instead proving the impossibility of creating such a system.
Also: - broad attention must come before we choose what to focus on - there is a whole everything to behold before it can be broken into parts - analysis of speech & gesture shows thought often precedes verbal articulation - representation first requires it to be present
> What the left hemisphere offers is, then, a valuable but intermediate process, one of “unpacking” what is there & handing it back to the right hemisphere, where it can once again be integrated into the experiential whole (as w/ practicing a song—fragmenting then reintegrating)
(A brief aside: the buddhist perspective holds there as being a sixth sense organ, the mind. This seems to me very consonant with the view McGilchrist presents, with the left hemisphere essentially playing this role: an internal logic machine & simulator, for use by the RHem)
However, McGilchrist notes, there's a tendency for the LH to try to take over, because from within its oversimplified virtual world, that world appears complete. And thanks to role in language, it has control of the media & can propagandize and delegitimize the RH's perspective.
McGilchrist makes a pretty serious case for "LH has taken over" as a diagnosis about our present situation, culturally. Reading TMahE was 1st time I distinguished the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment. See also "[what scientists do] is not scientific method as conceived"
> Let’s do a thought experiment. What would it look like if the left hemisphere came to be the sole purveyor of our reality? 🔢 big picture reduced to meaningless bits 🧑🏭 increased specialization & siloing ℹ️ information valued over wisdom 🎓 paper qualifications over experience
What else if LH runs the show? 👃 abstraction & thingification of human body, world, art, etc 🧑💼 fewer people doing work involving lived world, more manipulating numbers & plans & procedures 💵 fungibility - loss of sense of uniqueness 🤖 machine metaphors 🔲 either/or
Yet more, if LH in charge? 🙄 derogation of higher values, cynicism 👤 impersonal replacing personal 💔 social cohesion disrupted 🕸️ context devalued ⛏️ exploitation, not cooperation, as default interaction 😡 resentment leading to overemphasis on uniformity/equality
What else? 👀 govt paranoia & obsession w control 🤔 reasonableness replaced by rationality 🤦♀️ failure of common sense (relies on hemisphere cooperation) ❓loss of insight 🤷♂️unwillingness to take responsibility 🤨 intolerance & inflexibility 🙉 unwillingness to change one's mind
But wait—there's more! 🤩 resentment & undercutting of awe/wonder 👻 religion seen as mere fantasy 🤝 tacit knowing, non-verbal communication, & implicit contracts downgraded 🗳️ democracy strangled by ever-complicating rules 🐾 intolerance for ambiguity, rather than appreciation
> Does that ring any bells? In terms of the fable with which I began, the emissary, insightless as ever, appears to believe it can see everything, do everything, alone. But it cannot: on its own it is like a zombie, a sleepwalker ambling towards the abyss, whistling a happy tune.
Thus concludes my summary of Iain McGilchrist's book Ways of Attending! If you've read this, you're now very well-equipped to dive into my explorations 👇 of how the model relates to to many other topics: - buddhism - grieving - AI - systems thinking - &+
Or maybe you want to go straight to the source! The Master and his Emissary is one of my all-time favorite books and it has profoundly affected my relationship with myself and my relationships with other people. Get a copy here: amzn.to/2LgKkX8
Finally finished this. Took 3 sittings to do, which I had totally not anticipated. Figured that condensing a book it takes 20 minutes to read into a tweetstorm (with liberal copy-pasting & screenshotting) would take maybe an hour, but it was more like 5h. Feeling glad I did tho!
Whoa, twitter is trying out a new UI for replies/conversations (I'm only seeing this on a relatively new account) It's a bit of a mess, visually, but it seems to show 2-layers of replies now! @visakanv
Oof. Part of the mess is that if you click eg the @ghuubear tweet, then it moves out to the left, but this makes it look like the @b_cavello tweet is replying to @ghuubear, when it's actually a reply to @visakanv 🤦♀️ That'll need to change. Cool to see the experimentation though!
thanks i hate it
whoooaoaaa this is completely breaking the linearity of @visakanv's thread, and it's only obvious that's happening because the tweets are numbered. otherwise it'd just be a clusterfuck and I'm still not 100% confident the thread ends at #9
@Jeanvaljean689 yeah that also fits the model!
@Jeanvaljean689 Yeah! I'm excited to have these tweets available to QT elsewhere, too!
@utotranslucence @visakanv I feel fascinated by this because it's like.... I basically haven't had the sense I would need a career, for... a long time. I think probably partially because in high school I read a bunch of lifestyle bloggers (zenhabits, scotthyoung, &+) so that always felt like a real path
@alexeyguzey there was a subreddit for this I used a few times... sometimes for a single paper I REALLY wanted I'd ping a friend who I thought'd also dig it tho also even when I was at uni logging into elsevier etc was so much of a pain that I'd usually try to find papers some other way
Retweeted @profplum99
I’m speechless. When a “group leader in systems biology at Oxford” believes “science runs by consensus” we have utterly fai…
@profplum99 @wolfejosh "consensus means we decided to agree on something, so it's always political. the truth is either controversial or obvious" - my recollection of something @algekalipso said in a recent podcast interview on @thegoodtimeline...
Retweeted @DanielleFong
Chart Hero. twitter.com/max_arbitrage/…
Retweeted @maxkriegers
🗨️ can we augment our online chats with new affordances? 🧠 what does a conversational medium that supports *thinking* loo…
@maxkriegers Whoa, fuckyeah. The "splitting" tech reminds me of this new app prototype by @callumflack
@maxkriegers @utotranslucence this reminds me of our recent conversation about notifications etc
@maxkriegers Ha, this is how twitter works already
@maxkriegers @KHPavle check this out
@maxkriegers As I continue pondering this, it seems to me like its development will likely follow a similar trajectory as @RoamResearch... 1. basic idea already solid. 2. a lot of iterating (years?) on tweaking the interaction design, with little real usage 3. alpha testers who GET IT 4. 🤑📈
Replying to @jstanotherview
@jstanotherview re 4 & 5 - apologies don't fix problems, they just create a temporary détente based on an agreement to disown the person or behavior that is deemed the source of the problem actual change comes from being able to reveal to oneself & others what's going on, without shame & blame
@Jeanvaljean689 Yeah! Really fascinating stuff. See also Victor Wooten in The Music Lesson, who talks about learning music like you learn a language as an infant—you jam constantly with experts (people who already know the language).
Thread · Meta-thread of threads on McGilchrist's brain hemispheres · 1 of 38 tweets
Apparently summarizing a very short book still produces a very long thread. This is the best introduction on twitter so far though, as far as I know!
@Jeanvaljean689 Make sure you see this clip too
@Alex_Danco 🧠 The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist (brain is not in plain sight but is "right under your nose" in a different sense)
@Aryeh___ @QiaochuYuan @visakanv my latest post-regret mantra is "we can build on this" it's always true because it has to be always true, because you can always build and you can't build on anything other than what is so. see also this intense version by @jockowillink 😆 youtube.com/watch?v=CGh3KD…
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@Aryeh___ @QiaochuYuan @visakanv my latest post-regret mantra is "we can build on this" it's always true because it has…
@HunterBergsma @jim_rutt @cognitivepolicy Yeah, there's a missing piece here that's like... ...a population problem can't be solved by suicide or individuals choosing no kids—instead, the world simply becomes populated by those not making that choice. Prototyping earth regen may involve no-internet, but endgame won't.
Retweeted @uberstuber
now replace "physical wellness" with any complex topic
@spiral_virus @FutureThinkers_ @OortCloudAtlas Yeah 3 seems super interesting was thinking about that this morning, actually
Having trouble seeing the overall structure of the meaningness.com table of contents? Try out my new userscript that makes it collapsible like WorkFlowy! gist.github.com/malcolmocean/1… (@Meaningness if you want to incorporate this code into the site itself, feel free!)
@samykamkar OMG this is amazing. Two Qs, because I want to make some myself: 1. What sort of vacuum do you need? Is it enough to pump the air out of a bag, or is something fancier required? 2. would the little lenses in these paper glasses work, or (again) something fancier?
@bryan_leblanc @samykamkar r/bearsdoinghumanthings reddit.com/r/bearsdoinghu…
Retweeted @Meaningness
🆕 Why-should-anyone-care introductory page of the chapter that is at the heart of the Meaningness book. …
@Meaningness I really dig this paragraph. There's a general heuristic I like, basically "if someone's trying to tell me something and it sounds naive, then trust my rejection of the naive thing, without rejecting the idea that there might also be something useful in what they're saying"
If there's a way to do something that takes 1.5× as much time and is three times as pleasurable, which is more efficient?
Retweeted @literalbanana
Nobody voted on what things are called - people who needed to refer to them just gave them nicknames until one stuck
Replying to @hugovk
You know how multiple smol lenses can be used to simulate having a larger lens? (...maybe you didn't know this. it's a thing & it's cool) Is this the reason why I can read lower lines on the eye chart with both eyes? Does my brain do synthetic aperture? Tagging uhh #optometrist
@whitecoatHTN Yeah I get the part where the separation gives 3D depth perception, what I'm wondering is if they *also* allow me to resolve flat distinctions that I couldn't otherwise with lenses the size of my actual eyes... like Rayleigh criterion style
Thread · Resolving contradictory perspectives with higher-dimensional thinking · 7 of 8 tweets
If you're still using an epistemology (rationalist or otherwise) where if two statements or perspectives contradict each other then one must be false, then today's your lucky day to learn about resolving paradoxes using higher-dimensional thinking!
Your two eyes have different perspectives and thus contradict each other constantly about what's closer and what's on what side of what... ...and—usually—rather than wasting energy on an argument over which 2D view is right, the brain integrates them into DEPTH PERCEPTION 🤯
Similarly, when two people each have a different perspective on something, they can waste energy arguing over which limited 1-person perspective is right, OR they can seek to integrate their perspectives into something deeper & richer.
This isn't just "oh, you have this part, I have that part, discard the falsehoods & keep the true parts". If I think this object looks like a square and you think it looks like a circle, then neither of us is mistaken about what we're seeing. We're just missing the larger whole.
That example (the image at least) comes from this great article by Daniel Schmactenberger. civilizationemerging.com/higher-dimensi…
A longer and more evocative depiction of the same thing is in @Nsousanis's book Unflattening. I've shared the main 2 relevant pages below, though they're richer in the context of the whole book.
I'm not thoroughly certain of this, but it seems possible to me that just like a single eye can't see in 3D, there may be thoughts that are too complex for a single person to hold at once, so it's not just about answering some question then distributing the answer to each person.
Thread · A 2×2 of sensemaking vs controlling in conversation
New 2×2 I'm exploring. It's important in any convo to be able to: - report reality as one sees it - find out what others know Whether you do that in a sensemaking mode or controlling mode will affect what's possible emotionally, relationally, AND on the information level.
Backstory: 10 days ago I shared the right half of the 2×2 and got a ton of diverse & intriguing replies suggesting what to do with the rest of it. I've refined the ideas since then, & I'm still very open to feedback/critique/suggestions on this thread 🚀
A lot of the ideas (including mine) for the left side ended up being about lying or bullshit, but of course there are more things one can do in a conversation than lie or tell the truth: one can ask questions!
And when that clicked into place, it illuminated with much more clarity *why* the right side of the 2×2 had felt valuable to me in the first place: I knew I wanted to report reality as I saw it, but found I was getting confusing these two kinds of *how*.
I've long had an assumption from my STEM/rationalist background: as long as I'm reporting reality as I see it, I'm... communicating in good faith, essentially. This has tripped me up when I have confused it with the "revealing" move that's central here at @liminal_agency
This confusion has been a mess for everybody involved. For instance, me saying "I want to reveal something" but then proceeding to speak in a way that's still hooked into trying to control the other person, not recognizing (in the moment) that that's antithetical to revealing!
So! Distinguishing these explicitly (which I was starting to do before the 2×2) is helping a lot. I'm learning to feel the difference between saying something: 🔴 "so that you'll change behavior / see I'm right" (arguing) vs 🔵 "to create more shared context" (revealing)
Then likewise, when seeking to understand why someone is doing/saying something that makes no sense to me, I'm learning to feel the difference between: 🟠 trying to expose how they're confused/wrong vs 🟢 trying to see what sense it DOES make to them
Noticing when I'm doing 🔵 vs 🔴 (/ 🟢 vs 🟠) and what the impact is of each, has been insightful. Also I've had times where I thought I was spaciously revealing, but then I didn't get the response I want and I got frustrated, and realized I was still fundamentally arguing.
I've also been exploring consciously practicing them, particularly treating 🟢 as a skill to hone by conducting explicit interviews with friends & colleagues. The frame helps me be really clear that I'm there to draw out the coherence in their thinking, not to invalidate it.
If you try any of this yourself, I would love to hear what you learn from doing it. Btw: My previous tweets were originally phrased in the imperative ("so, when [you are] seeking to... notice whether you...") but then I decided to reveal it instead rather than try to convince
There are some subtle phrasing bits here—you'll notice I said "convince" in the previous tweet, not "argue". I think "convince" better fits what 🔴 is *trying* to do, but eg we can't say "I am convincing" unless I *succeed*, whereas we can say "I am arguing".
OT1H, words are just handles... OTOH, they do also matter! On the gripping hand, I can't ultimately control what people will call things.
Here's a version where I tried putting more words in each of the boxes, possibly with the bold one representing the action, and the other one(s) representing more like... the overall dynamic? idk, it's kinda messy Internally, I feel clear on what 4 dynamics I'm pointing at.
I also found myself noting that those who are coming from some other culture or set of personal patterns might benefit from seeing some more power-UNDER options for the either/or region. Not sure what exactly to call them (the 🟤 & 🟣) but here's what I've got—what do you think?
This alternate power-under version of the chart also helps illustrate how "revealing" is NOT "confessing", to anyone who might have been making *that* confusion (an easy one to make within either/or thinking)
For more context on the term "revealing", you might check out this blog post of mine from 5 years ago (!) malcolmocean.com/2015/06/reveal…
Oh and here are some slides with the graphics, that have commenting/suggesting turned on. Feel free to expand on these & develop your own ideas! Credit appreciated (~CC-BY) because it deepens the context etc, but if you have a reason to do otherwise...🆗 docs.google.com/presentation/d…
We hope you enjoyed this Penultimate Draft Edition™ of Malcolm working with the garage door up 🙃
@maybegray @maltybegray @QiaochuYuan @danlistensto @Aryeh___ @visakanv @SarahAMcManus @joyurge @TheGodlessNorth @SemanticV0id @mathonwy
@spearofsolomon @DGozli @peternlimberg @RichDecibels @cognazor @JaredJanes @vervaeke_john Yeah I haven't dug deep into Vervaeke's work myself yet but that resonates with what I *have* seen/heard (@Morphenius, chime in if you're on twitter these days?) and it seems like a niche that deeply deeply needs quality stuff in it.
@maxkriegers @RoamResearch @tangjeff0 Yeah, though open source too early could make it really easy for the original* concept to get diluted by people carting in truckloads of their old metaphors. *original here means both: - new, not seen or done before - the origin of the genesis of whatever new project
@Meaningness Depends on what "critical" means. There are ways of implementing collapsing trees where without JS they just show up as not-collapsing trees (eg my userscript) But if by critical you mean "people will get lost without it" then... 😬 that may be an issue even JS can't solve 😆
@Jeanvaljean689 Yup.
@BinaryOption @Alex_Danco Yeah! You might dig my various threads exploring connections & implications of the model 👇
@HunterBergsma @jim_rutt @cognitivepolicy Yeah, David Deutsch convinced me that pessimism or "sustainability" orientations won't work, though I also think optimism that simply says "we'll solve all the problems as they come up" doesn't understand how quickly fragile systems can have cascading failures.
@HunterBergsma @jim_rutt @cognitivepolicy Put another way, there's absolutely no guarantee that the new problems created by solving existing problems can outpace our ability to solve them. (One could even argue that we're actively pushing towards the attractor where we *do* get outpaced)
Replying to @jstanotherview
@jstanotherview regarding "asking directly" & revealing, you might value my latest 2×2! (it's a whole thread)
@spearofsolomon @DGozli @peternlimberg @RichDecibels @cognazor @JaredJanes @vervaeke_john @Morphenius It's on my queue! Does they explicitly articulate Vervaeke's work in the way you did, of explaining to the LH its limits?
@maybegray @nosilverv *𝙋𝙎𝙃𝙃𝙃𝙏* <𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑐> Commander Gray, please report: what is in the "not good, also not bad" sector?
@RobertHaisfield yeah, the vertical axis is pointing at two different stances... stances? "both/and" and "either/or" kind of capture them... honestly the top one also kind of maps onto @Meaningness' "complete stance" meaningness.com/complete-stanc…
There's an illusion that I've sometimes been under… that it's possible for my thoughts to not have a texture, or to have a "neutral" texture. I increasingly think that when this appears so, then that mostly means that the texture is hiding, which means it's probably fearful.
This insight 👆 brought to you by this excellent recent @Meaningness post "Textures of completion" 👇 and an uncomfortable conversation a few weeks ago. meaningness.com/complete-textu…
@Michaeljon Ah man, great question. Of course, one possibility is that you're fooling yourself, like this tweet below.
@Michaeljon One confusion I've sometimes had is thinking that it's enough to be "neutral". To be *not* trying to control, or something like that. But there needs to actively be a stance of spaciousness & connection, not just an absence.
@Michaeljon Having said all of that, it's also entirely possible that at least sometimes when this is happening for you, the main factor is that the other person doesn't feel safe and is projecting past experiences of interrogation onto your attempted interview.
@Michaeljon In any case, the question to ask yourself is probably ~"how can I make this scene safer for both me & the other person?" If something feels at-stake, can the pressure be eased off? Can y'all get in touch with some shared purpose, even if just "maintain & deepen relationship"?
@meditationstuff @vgr @lou_keep testing this out - @readwiseio save thread
@meditationstuff @vgr @lou_keep ahh, trying again now that I've auth'd - @readwiseio save thread
@callumflack I just discovered @readwiseio has a feature that lets you save tweets & threads! #ThisChangesEverything (I also now copy-paste into roam fairly often; this will supplement that very well)
@readwiseio @Michaeljon Whoa, Readwise has a twitter integration?
@threadreaderapp unroll this for printing plzthx
The choice of orientation of axes on a 2×2 is political. t.co/o6eYyQprHX
@danlistensto Ah indeed.
@meditationstuff James Carse comes to mind.
@Aryeh___ I really love the sunglare one
@visakanv I like this article 👇 (& my thread on it) as a take on one dimension of this... trying to do a Systems Thinking both-and move.
@TurtlingB honestly I wouldn't recommend it at this point
@visakanv Speaking of systems thinking, @NoraBateson has among the most mature takes I've seen on the necessity and non-immorality of interacting with(in) dysfunctional human systems while building new ones. I don't have a specific reference, but eg Emerge interview & recent Rebel Wisdom
@collinofzion @ssica3003 @m_ashcroft @jstanotherview @nibrasibn @Neats29 Let's coordinate our timing maybe
@jack_meditates @QiaochuYuan @visakanv Inasmuch as I am trying to get way more money, that's what I plan on doing with it.
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing @eigenrobot Yup! I have been talking about this extensively for over a year!
Retweeted @eigenrobot
brains, the things the thing the universe made to see itself uses to see, seeing themselves
@context_ing @eigenrobot All part of my plot to get everyone to read it, because I had a similar sense of "whoa, this is really important, everyone needs to be talking about it."
@alth0u @eigenrobot Meanwhile I keep thinking there's a niche for machine learning practitioners to understand what's going on with the brain hemispheres and design AIs with way fewer blindspots.
@ryamcdoogle @eigenrobot @KevinSimler has a cool article that talks more in depth about this (not directly about hemispheres though) meltingasphalt.com/music-in-human…
> the entire notion of “externalities” is absurd from a living systems perspective Huh, hadn't appreciated til now that "externality" is an epicycle-like concept, in that it comes from trying to correct an error downstream of confused assumptions (closed systems)
@bbaue @HunterBergsma @jim_rutt @cognitivepolicy
@whitecoatHTN I think I'm referring to the whole works: the lens, the retina, the rest of the eye, the optic nerve, and the visual cortex. Though of course Rayleigh's criterion is basically just a measurement of the size of a lens.
@Nsousanis A lot of my work is in collective intelligence, and this possibility and the metaphor more generally was a profoundly helpful piece that I got from reading Unflattening 🥰🙏
@RichDecibels @round trrrruuuuuuu see self, this is why it made sense to tweet this thing before making it a blog post (not that an image couldn't be changed in a blog post, but I think people treat blogs as more final and give less feedback, idk)
Although sometimes the 3D shape might also just be fucking with you
@andaVargas Ahhh great analogy
@andaVargas I am adding that to the page on my roamblog called [["unnatural" is unnatural]] roamresearch.com/#/app/malcolmo…
Retweeted @diviacaroline
Also: “You might have captured some of it, but don’t forget that a lot of wealth you created is out there in the world,…
Thread · Earning wealth in the context of society and infrastructure · 1 of 15 tweets
Really really really vital corollary by @diviacaroline. Part of the both/and.
@diviacaroline I'm am 100% with you and I have appended your tweet to my thread and I think the thread is substantially better as a result. (and also guys look these memes are wealth and we created it and are sharing it and enjoying it together)
Further thoughts here
@diviacaroline Also it would be even better if threads were editable such that I could stick Divia's tweet in near the start instead of just at the end.
(typo: should be "my externalities"; I originally wrote it in second person probably, but then decided to own it as my own perspective shift rather than stating it as a claim about "you", but missed that "your" in the edit)
@coyotespike @jack_meditates @QiaochuYuan @visakanv Oh nice, I remember reading about this.
@krzhang @visakanv @NoraBateson I think that's probably due to a sense that "dysfunctional systems shouldn't exist / should be destroyed" which is a harder thought to have about humans due to the obvious uhhh moral implications. That didn't stop people as much in the past, ofc.
Huh, @jn3008 has a lot of really great simple visual examples of strange loops, where something loops around and comes back at a different level than it was before, implying a weird infinity.
Thread · Efficiency in transactional systems vs generative ones
Reflecting on this more... (thinking aloud) 🏭 In a dissociated, transactional system (eg typical corporation) efficiency is ~external: output per input (widgets/h, energy/$, etc) 🕸️ In an integrated, generative system, efficiency is ~internal: value & meaning per unit struggle
What I'm pointing at here is: if you have one system (eg boss) measuring the efficiency of another system (eg worker), that it considers to be separate from itself, it will tend to try to extract maximum output, with minimal regard to the health & flow of the system in question.
This is the basic way-of-thinking that our society has been built on basically since agriculture. Robert Gilman calls it the Empire era. Videos here: context.org/foundation-sto…
If you read accounts of cultures not based on this (eg in Jean Liedloff's The Continuum Concept (1975)), you can see that they're approaching life in a totally different way than this.
Here's an excerpt from Christian de Quincey's Radical Knowing quoting someone talking about a kind of culture based on a "lush sensuality", and caring for well-being. (The challenge for culture crafters is to simultaneously have this PLUS grokking the value of science etc)
It's possible to run a company as an integrated, generative system (a fuckton of contemporary business books are trying to point at this) though by default the attractor basin for most companies doesn't really care about human experience, due to measuring efficiency as out/in.
I'm tentatively putting struggle as the denominator of the generative system efficiency... I basically mean internal friction or dukkha. Clearly time or energy isn't it—at ecstatic dance, spending more time in flow or burning more calories isn't a "cost"
Ultimately, even in integrated generative ecosystems, one does still need to track efficiency in a sort of input-output sense, particularly EROEI (energy return on energy invested). It's not that that goes away, but the relationship to it changes.
I feel like there are a bunch of dangly threads & half-thoughts here and I am just gonna leave it like that because it's time for dinner and getting off twitter. I'm enjoying leaning more into thinking out loud and being a little messy 💦
@callumflack I'm pointing more at economic externalities in the sense of like "CO₂ emissions are an externality of this process" and the confusion is in the drawing of system boundaries to create an inside and outside in the *first* place
Replying to @not_nothingmuch
@mHaGqnOACyFm0h5 idk I think it's pretty easy if you only recognize certain kinds of value and ignore others (related in the sense that this is what "externalities" are, however you draw the boundaries)
Retweeted @aesthetikeit
trying to get my lacanian fashion brand off the ground
@stayinrhythm What particularly vibes about it for you? Seeing resonances with global information situation, or something personal?
@shumushi1 I think confession is like "here is what is so for me, now please absolve me or punish me as much as I deserve" applies to both catholics and courts and also to personal relationship tangles; structurally usually kinda apologetic because submissive
@MenanderSoter @Buddh_ish @OshanJarow @VincentHorn @coponder @webdevMason @Tipsycaek @drethelin @AE_Robbert @Kairos0101 I'm following @Buddh_ish, probably since seeing this tweet:
@MenanderSoter @Buddh_ish @Buddh_ish isn't currently following me! Here's a thread you may dig:
Replying to @eigenrobot
@eigenrobot @context_ing @selentelechia It's a fascinating thing: if a source is awesome enough and you mention it enough times from enough angles, eventually most of the people in your surrounding circles will check it out. But it does take time, and I've found best to follow my appetite rather than being strategic.
Replying to @eigenrobot
@eigenrobot "good enough for government work" originated in World War II and originally meant it could pass the most rigorous of standards. Over the years it took on an ironic meaning that is now the primary sense, referring to poorly executed work. yourdictionary.com/close-enough-f…
@eigenrobot Oh wait, this source actually says the original meaning was ALSO pejorative! > But let’s talk about the phrase itself, “Good enough for government work.” The original phrase was “CLOSE enough for government work” and it came from the machinist trade. funraniumlabs.com/2017/01/good-e…
…I think this explains a game I enjoy playing called "Really—No" Goes like this: - I say an absurd but plausible thing (often a fake etymology) - someone says "Really?" - I say "No." (Satisfying game to be able to generate stuff like this, but I don't want to actually mislead)
@DegenRolf Also @nosilverv somehow this feels related to shitposting as an art-form.
Retweeted @samsax1
All morning I’ve been thinking of this Jane Hirschfield poem
Replying to @bonkerfield
@bonkerfield I think the leverage is in grokking deeply how they're not one axis but two dimensions that can both me maxed out simultaneously.
@whitecoatHTN I understand the physics not a lot but a bit. What I know is that the eye has physical limits of how tiny of a distinction it can make, due to lens size, which can't be addressed by changing shape (though shape-change does epic stuff for changing focal depth etc)
@posobin @Twitter @visakanv OMG, stoked for this to hit desktop web. Though it still desperately needs the ability to actually SEE in advance which tweets have been QT'd, so you know to check.
@Morphenius Say more about the horrifying part? I think I basically only do this with trivia, which might make it less horrifying... @SarahAMcManus do I do this with things that are important?
@Buddh_ish @MenanderSoter @Buddh_ish wasn't following me when I tweeted the tweet QT'd below 👇, but *is* following me as of... uhh... pretty soon.
Replying to @SamoanEll
@SimonLovegrove @liminal_warmth Link me to Paul?
@visakanv @posobin @Twitter Hmmm... I like your thinking, but to some extent that seems kinda *more* complicated than just having a separate QT icon & count. But wait, this is actually in the spot in the UI where it's spelled out (not an icon) so it could be more like: 12 Retweets (6 QTs)
exams that allow not just a cheatsheet but a cheatroam
@utotranslucence ~Artificer (for me) (assuming you're not construing your list as exhaustive) I'd also add: - Storyteller - Scholar
@taintedavenue @visakanv Protip: you're actually already incentivized not to QT *nor* SS a perspective that you don't want to amplify.
New #Twiptych featuring @fortelabs, @QiaochuYuan, & @meditationstuff. Fucking gold. Sometimes I swear Twitter's algo is set up to put related tweets next to each other (the first 2 here; 3rd is a delightful bizarre punchline)
Addendum: twitter.com/TheOrangeAlt/s…
This has got to be a great metaphor for something about learning & feedback. (Specifically, the part where practicing using this would potentially make you WORSE after awhile) Umm… hang on, I've got it. A 2×2, with this and Bike Training Wheels in two adjacent boxes… and… 🤔
@visakanv @taintedavenue Related, this thread where I discuss my policy of basically only replying to tweets that I want to ♥.
"Here's Part of a 2×2 Who Has the Rest?" twitter is best twitter
let's go around and introduce ourselves... say your name & proverb
courtship stenographer
@DRMacIver Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It by @KamalRavikant Link: amzn.to/3cB8UxW Although this graphic from Kamal's bio says "revised and expanded" so it might not be so pithy anymore! 😂
@DRMacIver @kamalravikant The 2012 edition also has a much more arresting cover image. (Looks like Amazon still has one copy of it: amzn.to/2T5Ugax)
@DRMacIver @kamalravikant Yeah when I got it, iirc, it was like a $3 kindle ebook. And the paperback copy I got for a friend last year was $7—Canadian, so actually more like $5 USD.
@DRMacIver Without looking it up, my brain reports a distinction I learned from @DougTataryn last year (prior to which I had none) which puts emotions as basic circuits (similar to panksepp) and feelings as more meaning-based/contentful experiences such as "hopeless" or "betrayed".
@DRMacIver Not quite as self-defeating, but there's something absurd about making your book available as a free ebook but telling ppl not to print it due to carbon footprint. …especially if the book has the potential to produce paradigm shifts… if it's worth reading, it's worth printing!
@DRMacIver I am subtweeting Steven Wineman and his powerful book Power-Under: Trauma & Nonviolent Social Change
Retweeted @DRMacIver
There's something very funny about writing a book because you want some ideas to be widely available and making it only avai…
@coponder @DRMacIver OMG TODAY IS YOUR DAY 🥳🎉 It's an illustration of Donella Meadows' famous systems thinking essay: Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System donellameadows.org/archives/lever…
Replying to @joyurge
@joyurge Oh yeah, this is totally an embodiment of the sparkly pink purple ball thing! And I feel it does help differentiate the signifier from the referent here. Like I'm not talking about the concept "arguing", I'm talking about [this quadrant of this 2×2] malcolmocean.com/2016/02/sparkl…
@norman_tran Yeah, the y-axis is definitely a *way*, and it's a way that is notoriously hard to point at clearly.
@DRMacIver @kamalravikant It's also simply not *for* everyone, at every time. If you wanted my shortest-book-recommendation that I think would be worth everybody reading, that would be Ways of Attending by Iain McGilchrist. Also weirdly priced but 🤫👉 scribd.com/document/39727…
@utotranslucence Oh man a scholar who explorers books all day feels like a different archetype from someone who explores physical uncharted territory. Likewise a storyteller around a fire, telling the tales passed down generations... totally different from a brooding artist in a cabin/loft.
@pepijndevos @utotranslucence Yeah, Artificer=Craftsman+Mage seems decent from my perspective. Probably some can be created by doubling up basic ones. eg Shaman=Healer+Mage Still feels to me like we're missing a few orthogonal basis vectors though, that eg Scholar and Storyteller point at.
@utotranslucence Here's a twitter list I'm keeping called Deep Design that is essentially present-day artificers. (Fwiw, I don't have associations with the word "artificer" either... I found it trying to look for old-timey synonyms for "inventor" or something equivalent) twitter.com/i/lists/125671…
Yo @Twitter, why can't I add myself to my own list?
@diviacaroline WHOA. Yes, now we're talking. And maybe it could... give some indication (color, sound, etc) of the amount (& direction) of its correction each time. Which you can kind of see, but it could still help.
Replying to @JamesWords
@nullary @meaning_forge Relatedly, the "flow channel" and deliberate practice. Tech like this could be used to help people ride the wave of something being optimally challenging. malcolmocean.com/2013/06/flow-v…
@SarahAMcManus @Morphenius Mmm, yeah. I'm recognizing that if someone doesn't ask "Really?" then I usually either say "FYI I just made all of that up" or sometimes I just keep adding progressively more absurd details until it's clear.
@whitecoatHTN s'all good! cool to interact with someone from another corner of twitter :)
@DRMacIver The short one is so short you could easily print it out, fwiw. The physical books cost the same so yeah probably just go with Master and his Emissary. It's worth it—Ways of Attending is basically intended as a teaser (why the fuck is it so pricy?)
Retweeted @meditationstuff
There's a norm I love on twitter where people are =280c terse & cryptic & so you don't ask them what they mean but cha…
@fortelabs the patriarchy is soluble in male tears but only tears freely offered and welcomed not shamed
@SarahAMcManus @QiaochuYuan "Bombylius major" What a fucking playfully majestic name. "They call me Major Bombylius, I'm super supercilious"
@maybegray @DougTataryn encourages doing Bio-Emotive on dreams non-coincidence re:
@Aryeh___ @QiaochuYuan @visakanv Yeah, I need to write it into a full blog post. I have a few scraps of drafts but blogging has been weird lately. I guess I could start with expanding on it on Roam and/or in a tweetstorm.
@maybegray Exactly, and you also don't necessarily remember the specific content that is being activated when you have an emotional flashback while awake.
Replying to @sonyasupposedly
@sonyasupposedly I have just one generalized quibble in this space:
Today's #Twiptych - @Plinz & @sonyasupposedly
Replying to @warmbott
@warmbott @nosilverv yeah to be clear I mostly also think this is a bad idea 😆 but it's also intriguing, and a sufficiently hard idea to implement that it's worth discussing, since the vast majority of failure modes will simply be nothing getting off the ground in the first place, not a 🛬💥
Retweeted @meditationstuff
Only 4 options ok. Not in ancient grecoromania. U r: 1) heteroromantic heteroflexible 2) homoromantic homoflexible…
@AtaraxJim @Aryeh___ @reweirding some from last year (me & @Timber_22 & @meditationstuff)
@SarahAMcManus @ssica3003 Oh yeah that reminds me I was gonna post that to /r/bookshelfporn Done! reddit.com/r/bookshelfpor…
@SarahAMcManus @algekalipso Haha, "I'm going for a walk in Illusion Park"
I would like to have an option when QTing (or photo/video/linkcard tweets too, tbh) where the embedded media goes 🆙🔝👆 This is perhaps a much humbler way to QT, as it puts the other perspective first, so you don't get to frame it. #TwitterReplacement #ConversationalTwitter
But mostly I want this because often I want to comment on the thing I'm quoting, but like, *after* the reader has read it, but like, I don't want to do that in the next-tweet-in-thread, because each tweet wants to be a modular unit of [media+commentary]
@andy_matuschak @Meaningness Me too! This post has been quietly blowing my mind for the last couple of days. Stoked for the other 5 textures.
Retweeted @andy_matuschak
@Meaningness's sensitive new explication of wonder made me feel wonder… at wonder! "Wonder is the prerequisite too fo…
Replying to @magghu
@magghu Do you have something like BioEmotive to work with the feelings, or do they just feel overwhelming? Here's a couple pages from the BioEmotive ebook All About Healthy Crying bioemotiveframework.com/shop/ebook-all…
@magghu Gonna tag in @QiaochuYuan as his experience at OAK is probably very relevant here.
I have thought about this and my answer is a race on the kinds of boulder-breakwaters that I grew up running around on. I think I'd be able to go at a faster pace than 99% of other people, without tripping and smashing my face in. Not sure ideal distance, probably 100m-200m.
@Aryeh___ @QiaochuYuan @danlistensto @Yokai_Parade @coponder didn't know about Donella Meadows… …maybe you don't either!
Excellent thread on Lord of the Flies twitter.com/Scholars_Stage…
you can take the boy out of the society but you can't take the society out of the boy twitter.com/Scholars_Stage…
there's no natural, uncultured state, for a human the natural state of a human is cultured …different cultures are possible! but you don't get there by ditching the old because you can't ditch the old without a replacement you just get more of the old twitter.com/Scholars_Stage…
there's one human cultural platform different from LotF dynamics it is ancient cultures on that platform are not "more natural" in the same sense that a fish is not more natural than a horse they *do*, however, see themselves as *part* of nature tho, not as-contrasted-with-it
there's another human cultural platform different from LotF dynamics it is nascent it is based on systems thinking, which also doesn't see society as outside of nature, while recognizing why one might its members reflect regularly on their own culture, auto-anthropologically
Replying to @Scholars_Stage
@Scholars_Stage @sebastmarsh based on the stories you talk about in your newsletter etc, I think you'll appreciate the story of Sima Qian in this "History is written by the losers" article 👇 scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2016/11/histor…
@SarahAMcManus @maltybegray uhhh my new take is that this thing 👆 is structurally equivalent to this thing 👇
@TPCarney Hmmm…… yeah. In my original "I have thought about this" I was imagining a context I'd prefer to be in if someone was desperately chasing me, & in that scenario this seems acceptable. But yeah, I wouldn't want to set people up to smash their face in as part of a weird contest
@sam_kirschner @RobertHaisfield @davidklaing @kevinakwok +2 to Kinesis Freestyle 2 I also own two, 6 years on a wired one then last year also a bluetooth one. I don't have the fancy kit but I can usually find something to prop them on 👇
@aaronzlewis Ahh yeah @aaronzlewis probably needs to go on my Deep Design list
Retweeted @visakanv
tweets are containerized thoughts
Thing that would be cool: 🗺️ a map animation, showing the relative changes in currency exchange rate over time 💸 probably I'd start all countries the same color at the start (could also start with colors based on PPP, but it'd be harder to see changes then)
Replying to @IanBearder
@IanBearder @cappture_cc I've passed this on to my friend who was looking for this!
@MenanderSoter @QiaochuYuan @tasshinfogleman Ha! Neat to see @jim_rutt, @NoraBateson & @cognitivepolicy all in the same circle—the 3 of them are all featured in this Apr8 video! (Not talking directly to each other; @WisdomRebel interviewed each of them then edited it together.) Well worth watching. youtube.com/watch?v=C6JdLW…
🎶 🎶 🎶 and if you love your friends then teach them all the difference between reason and reasons youtube.com/watch?v=_vHGAU…
@callumflack Oooooooh yeah. I have recently been paying a lot of attention lately to the value of not having reasons for the decisions you're making.
@PeterorjustP I've used this approach extensively for prioritizing features & bugfixes for complice.co, and on small scales one utterly vital thing you need to do is add a constant to your time estimates, otherwise tiny projects get done too often but end up taking way longer.
Got excited when I saw this 🤩 It illustrates a creative use of the basic architectural of non-editable threads to produce something remarkably well-organized.
I think I'd buy stock in @PeterorjustP 🤑🤔
me, musing: I want to have a thing… where other people can invest a bit of time & energy in it, in a way that feels good to them, and that generates money, that they could have some of… also me: "sir, that's called a company"
"I've got your back" is kinda like "I've got your nose" but weirder
#SobSquad Achievement Unlocked: cry so hard you get an eyelash in your mouth (I think via the tear ducts, not down the front of the face... was actually 2 eyelashes and they showed up in the middle of my mouth, not on my lip)
Retweeted @SarahAMcManus
Fascinating to see how every stroke gets interpreted through the lens of "turtle", once that model is in place https://t…
@maltybegray @selentelechia exactly the original tweet was brought to you by @SarahAMcManus somehow generating the phrase "prosthetic back" and us discussing the bizarreness of such an idea ...and then instead of saying "goodnight" I said "I've got your back!" ...then ☝️🧐
midichlorian epigenetics
There's a thing I read about how certain in person cons/manipulations can work on 2 friends as long as they don't look at each other long enough to mutually recognize that the guy is full of shit. Source? I have a memory of a vid clip illustrating this, maybe near a beach.
@visakanv @MimeticValue you guys seem like you might have done a deep dive of research into influence & manipulation at some point
Thread · The kinds of intelligence that show up in interviews
Huh, interesting. Seems to me these are different kinds of smartness, and in a sense it's possible to be *more* smart in interviews than in books, by skills like: - deeply tracking if the person you're talking to understands - generating new metaphors appropriate to the situation
And there's a thing where in a podcast interview, you're kind of talking to everybody, but magically you're also kind of talking to only the interviewer! So as long as the interviewer understands, you seem roughly sane & savvy and like you're saying something reasonable.
If someone listening to the interview thinks what you're saying is dumb or confused or whatever, they then have to doubt not just you but also the interviewer, who seemed to think what you were saying made sense. Sort of the opposite of this:
Example: a full year before I wrote this tweetstorm (needing to anticipate & respond to many critiques) I easily laid out my thinking on a podcast interview (which was never released 😕) and the person I was talking to was like "yeah, totally, makes sense"
Back to different types of smartness: obviously someone is not going to be as *polished* or as *well-cited* in an interview as in a book. But they can be smart in other ways: - fresh & lively - emotionally nuanced - speculative & innovative (at the edge of their thinking)
This perhaps has implications for interviewers—what kinds of questions will most access someone's knowledge & intelligence that's appropriate to an interview context as oppose to a book? @cognazor @JaredJanes @eriktorenberg @collinofzion @IonaItalia
@jacobmorse @kwharrison13 @Conaw @heysamwoods @supaaronpaul Pretty straightforward to build a conversion script like I made for workflowy (github.com/malcolmocean/w…) but I think it depends on exactly what you want the end result to look like. If you're doing each book/chapter as a page (as here 👇), then...
@jacobmorse @kwharrison13 @Conaw @heysamwoods @supaaronpaul Then the JSON will looks something like this, with a top-level page object for each chapter, and then each verse as a child. Fun-fact: if you're importing roam data, you can use whatever you want for uid (afaik) so you could actually make them semantically useful like below!
@jacobmorse @kwharrison13 @Conaw @heysamwoods @supaaronpaul As for including the epic NET translator footnotes, it's kinda tough because (afaict) the notes are like, practically on a per-word basis and roam has no way to cite substrings of a given block. But maybe they'd go in their own page, something like this?
Replying to @abhayance
@AbhayPrasanna @Conaw Neat. I gave some suggestions 👇
@PeterorjustP Time is usually an underestimate, and can be under by 1000% but at most over by 100%. This means you need to add a *constant* not a percentage. Pick the typical smallest duration estimate, and add 2 units of that to every duration estimate before dividing.
@PeterorjustP For me, I had 100s of features in a spreadsheet based on Geoff Ralston's B*D/C equation (breadth*depth/cost), and the shortest tasks were estimated at ~0.5 pomos. They kept sorting to the top, but sometimes they'd take 2-3 pomos, so not actually a good bet. Instead: B*D/(C+1)
@PeterorjustP Previously, I had added some other columns trying to account for how some items seemed to be underweighted compared to my subjective impression of importance, and after I added the constant the whole thing felt truer. Here 'tis 👇 haven't updated lately docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…
@iamsaleman @cognazor @JaredJanes @eriktorenberg @collinofzion @IonaItalia Hmm I'm not talking about assessing someone's intelligence, but inviting it out to play with you. This move seems likely to inhibit the latter in many cases, if they aren't already clear about safety of such joking, especially in the context of a podcast or something.
@Morphenius @SarahAMcManus Hmmm doesn't seem necessarily foolhardy, more playful, like... foolsofty. In many cases it's just my explaining mind trying to generate explanations, but instead of the internal rejection process censoring the silly ones, I try pitching them to other people earnestly.
@meditationstuff I said yes. Didn't think about it too hard, but the fact that you included "environment" suggested to me an adequately intertwingled system that consciousness would be part of it. What would be missing, from your perspective?
classic game theory is irrelevant to any situation in which the participants care deeply about each others' well-being it bakes in the assumption that they don't, and reasons from there this is not an adequate model of human beings
pretending game theory (formal or informal) is appropriate to human beings reinforces the idea that people don't care about each other which reinforces the fear that if I don't try to win, others will leave me to rot which, broadly speaking, is not how relationships work
@meditationstuff "With training" - what kind of training causes your body to do this?
@Conaw @jacobmorse @kwharrison13 @heysamwoods @supaaronpaul I'm an OG
Replying to @TetraspaceWest
@TetraspaceAdmn yup! if you do this, you will tend to find that the apparent conflicting decision about what to do goes away! there's just an obvious mutually-best answer yet people try to make decisions by still using the zero-sum payoff matrix, mentally for fear of being taken advantage of
@DoqxaScott in principle it could be but the entire field is based off a concept of a human being that doesn't care and it turns out that once you've gotten rid of that assumption & the fear of others are making that assumption the game is easy to win, together
Replying to @abhayance
@AbhayPrasanna Yeah it never fully launched publicly due to various things that came up in my life, but it's still live and can be played with. If you use it for something lmk! I've been musing over the past months about rebooting it URL: complice.co/purposes complice.co/purposes
@meditationstuff ...does it matter if you do the jogging not-just-after meals, as described above? that's I guess part of what I'm wondering.
@QiaochuYuan @yoshikischmitz @visakanv Yeah I think I may be the originator of making custom search engines for this. *uses very same to find tweet below* Yeah, Visa's quoted adjacently as using a text expander to turn `fvv` to `from:visakanv`. & @joyurge gets credit for asking us about it
@Meaningness Ha! And collapsed by default. Yes, I expect that to feel a lot more approachable to people newly finding the site.
@meditationstuff and so it's only at that stage, when the fat burning machinery gets exercised that one is training oneself to burn fat. gotcha.
@jondubin sometimes phone + {do not disturb / focus mode / airplane mode} + bluetooth keyboard is actually even better for this, because single-tasking is easier to do on a tiny screen that doesn't easily maintain state of multiple apps/tabs
this is a pretty cool thread thinking about the implications of different technologies lots of it involves the corruption of mediums that used to be trustable got any speculations yourself?
this is what I'm trying out for now facepaint + blacklight + digital edits idk how long I'll keep it but it's at least a change
I think on some level I actually incorporated almost all of the suggestions I got in that other thread, though not directly.
@VVbrags @visakanv @QiaochuYuan @yoshikischmitz @joyurge
@VVbrags @visakanv @QiaochuYuan @yoshikischmitz @joyurge
@VVbrags @visakanv @QiaochuYuan @yoshikischmitz @joyurge Also there's a strange loop thing going on. Isomorphism: - that fractal 👆 - individual consciousness - collective consciousness which is happening here on twitter, facilitated both by: • the medium (QTs) • our self-aware auto-anthropological behavior
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
@sashachapin @tferriss i bookmarked this tweet to read this and i'm glad i did 👍
@QiaochuYuan @yoshikischmitz @nosilverv is working on this
@nosilverv how we gon do this
@QiaochuYuan @visakanv @yoshikischmitz @joyurge Also this thread, which talks about ideas evolving live
Thread · Upward spirals of ideas and why quote tweets enable convergence · 1 of 14 tweets
Further discussion of the huge impact a single tweet can have 👇
@nosilverv I could give you the email address that pipes directly to our wifi printer what could possibly go wrong
@meditationstuff representation is different than instantiation
Replying to @eigenrobot
@eigenrobot "y" sounds great until you realize that the second stage is that the people with representation vote to flip who gets the taxation
@Aella_Girl I mean, any con: - ponzi schemes (from the perspective of the person running it) - tell a dozen famous people you're having a party with that other dozen people coming, before the others have confirmed - propaganda / ideological manipulation
Most of human activity consists of games with unclear rules.
(partially an insight about humans and partially an insight about nebulosity) twitter.com/FioraAeterna/s…
@kaburicrab OMFG I HAVE BEEN WANTING TO HIT THINGS AND HEAR DRUMBEATS ...but not to own a drumkit, both because uhh roommates and also like, even a little electric kit would take up space
Currently attempting to coherently & powerfully summarize each of the 12 points in this essay into one tweet each for a tweetstorm, and it's profoundly highlighting to me areas where I nodded happily while reading it but don't actually understand it. donellameadows.org/archives/lever…
@visakanv @QiaochuYuan @yoshikischmitz @joyurge
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing talking about how science is not consensus-based
@maybegray Yeah this (the facepaint, which was blacklight activated) was what I wore to a sort of artsy indoor rave/burn event a few years ago and at one point someone was like "whoa, your face!" and I was like "so the drugs must be working then 😂" and they just gave me this L👁️👁️K.
@nosilverv I mean,,, what else could people think in?
@DougTataryn Yeah, I really wish the photographer at the event had gotten a shot of me smiling. The lips didn't have blacklight paint so they're naturally dark here, and it's hard to brighten them (I just tried) without it looking like lipstick. Here's an attempt, partially just reddening.
@DougTataryn Just made another tweak, darkening the shadow around the blue eye. Obvious that that eyebrow was weak; blue just can't possibly glow as bright in RGB as green, red, or yellow. Darkening the bit next to the green dots helped a lot, I think
Thread · Donella Meadows' leverage points for intervening in a system · 19 of 20 tweets
Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System by Donella Meadows Made into a thread for QTing, by me! 🧵👇
Some Systems Theory terminology: the state of the system is some key stock, eg "water in damn", "money in bank", "trust in officials" inflows increase stock, outflows decrease inflow > out ↔ stock goes up, & vv an agent may compare perceived state to goal & adjust accordingly
For example, imagine filling a bathtub with water: inflow from the faucet, outflow through the drain. Turning the faucet fully open doesn't immediately fill the tub—it takes time for flows to accumulate. You control the inflow & outflow to make the water level match your goal.
Of course, in reality there's also a temperature variable, with a delay to get hot water from the basement, etc and this applies to other systems, from global climate feedback loops to $ to perceptual systems in your own brain okay: enough systems theory, time for the list!
PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM (in increasing order of effectiveness) This list evolved from a flash of insight D.M. had during a meeting. This version's from ~1999—she indicated it's a work-in-progress & intended to invite co-exploration. Maybe twitter's the medium for that!
Leverage Point 12: constants, parameters, numbers eg - tax rates - wages, prices - pollution limits - funding availability - which person is in a particular role Parameters are only high-leverage to the extent they affect other items on this list, like loop gain or goals.
Leverage Point 11: sizes of buffers & other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows eg difference between 🔵 a lake (mostly buffer) ↩️ a river (mostly flow) More buffer usually means more stability & margin-for-error, but can be costly & less agile. Often hard to change.
Leverage Point 10: structure of material stocks and flows eg Hungarian road system send all traffic thru Budapest—that creates a lot of air pollution & commuting delays that are not easily fixed by 🚥, ⚠️, speed limits Low leverage to rebuild; higher to design well in 1st place
Leverage Point 9: lengths of delays Delay can be in perception or execution Often issue is too much delay (overshooting oscillations, eg shower temp🥶🥵🚿) but too little = overreaction (eg 👻➡️😱) Delays are RELATIVE to rate of system change—often easier to modify the latter
Leverage Point 8: strength of negative feedback loops these self-correcting loops maintain equilibrium (dynamic or status) some usually-inactive but vital (eg fuse) RELATIVE to disturbance size: eg thermostat+furnace can handle a cold winter day but not if all windows opened
Leverage Point 7: gain around driving positive feedback loops these self-reinforcing loops drive exponential growth eg more sick people, more transmission of virus: WAY costlier to fight each instance than reduce gain #StayAtHome eventually will hit a limit (sometimes 💥)
Leverage Point 6: structure of information flows (who does & does not have access to information) usually the leverage point here is in restoring the flow of information that has been blocked to avoid accountability eg companies may pollute less if required to publish emissions
Leverage Point 5: the rules of the system (eg incentives, punishments, constraints) All previous leverage points are subject to the rules of the context they're in. The real incentives: de facto, not de jure. > "Suppose a class got graded as a group, instead of as individuals"
Leverage Point 4: the power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure eg - evolution - technology - cultural change More self-organization = more resilience & creativity & learning, but harder to externally control so often resisted (in govt, corp, edu, family).
Leverage Point 3: the goals of the system. All points so far are subject to "what is system trying to do?" Often "control"/"power-over", which undermines self-organization, as above. One of the ways people impact systems (govt, corp) is by aligning people around new goals.
Leverage Point 2: the mindset/paradigm out of which the system arises The meaning-context in which to debate goals, rules., is in the shared ideas in the minds of society, unstated because everyone already knows them. Hard to change but (unlike 🚉🏭🏦) can flip in an instant 👁️
Leverage Point 1: the power to transcend paradigms to realize that NO paradigm is “true” to “get” at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, & see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny to let go into Not Knowing
D.M. concludes ~ > so much has to be said to qualify this list [this goes 10× for this tweetstorm] > It is tentative & its order is slithery… exceptions to every item can move it up or down" > The higher the leverage point, the more the system will resist changing it
Paradoxically, > In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go. Full essay: donellameadows.org/archives/lever…
@garybasin @tjrwriting Hmu. I've done this professionally, had others do it for me at times, and can probably model you-Gary-specifically better than most coaches? Based on shared experiences on various levels.
@AnuragBaveja and positive & negative feedback loops! they're both so profoundly underappreciated for being such simple & ubiquitous structures
@heckinwild Hell yeah it is, you with your bio all like "calvinball is next to godliness."
Retweeted @joyurge
Thread of conceptual isomorphisms 🧵 "Conceptual isomorphism" = these two ideas have the "same shape" (to me). They are identi…
Retweeted @joyurge
Epigraph of Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows
Replying to @joyurge
@joyurge Yessss these sorts of things are a huge reason why I want to be able to make tweets that QT 2-3 tweets at the same time. Until then, there's screenshots I guess, like my #Twiptych tweets and this juxtaposition:
Woo! Just saw that Emoji 13.0 is here! Stoked to have 🥲 , though other happy-cry variants still needed Hoping 🫂 doesn't make me do gif-hugs less A few I've wanted just as icons: 🪞 🪟 🪵 🪨 🪢 🪜 Canada's doing pretty well for itself: 🫐 🦫 🐻❄️ 🦭 🦣 (Also 🐻❄️= 🐻+❄️ lol)
@QiaochuYuan @nosilverv @42irrationalist @maltybegray Damn. 🥲 The part that really got me was 1m10→1m30, where the kid so clearly is like "I wanna be held." And in the meantime he makes a bit of light contact but is *clearly not trying to control the kid's behavior*. That's the most important part.
weird to feel how differently I experience myself composing a tweet now with this avatar ↙️🌌 instead of this one 😁↘️ that I've had for 3+ years
@garybasin @tjrwriting My default model of this stuff is it's some sort of self-limiting thing where people stop doing something because they know it'll work if they keep doing it and they aren't fully bought into the success (or their concept of what the success would include). idk if that's you.
@QiaochuYuan More are coming! (this is the same person, I think, who got 🥲 approved)
@garybasin @tjrwriting Yup. See the green image in this quoted tweet below, for @xuenay talking about this and how it relates to buddhist taṇhā. Full long thread: twitter.com/xuenay/status/…
@garybasin @tjrwriting @xuenay Also, this excerpt from @Meaningness' awesome old AI paper: "What are plans for?"
@coponder @DRMacIver Also now it's a tweetstorm! 🤯 Though the original is way more in-depth and worth reading.
Replying to @MimeticValue
@MimeticValue You might appreciate this absurdly deadpanned interview that a guy from the funk band Vulfpeck gave to CNBC on the eve of Spotify's IPO 2 years ago. Just watched yesterday & it had me in stitches. He's performing awkward & trolling the interviewers. youtube.com/watch?v=LB1sTH…
Retweeted @MSlavin
I don't know man, giving kids amphetamines to help them focus seems more than questionable. Why is it there brain that needs…
@egocv Bizarrely I have found ffmpeg to be more useful than most GUIs. Doesn't have as tight feedback for some things, but if you look up "how to X" you often get a command you can just RUN, rather than dealing with your computer trying to manage a whole interactive video experience 4u
@egocv Here's an example for cropping: Source: video.stackexchange.com/questions/4563…
@schala163 @nosilverv @mauve_sky This tweet, and really the whole thread may be of interest 👇
@schala163 @nosilverv @mauve_sky Also The Guru Papers.
If you're gonna compare me to famous Malcolms, this is my guy. > His truck was sat still for 8 HOURS on THANKSGIVING waiting for his cargo to be unloaded when he realized… > "Why not take the WHOLE trailer off the back of my ship rather than unloading + reloading each item?"
Retweeted @george__mack
Tobi states that almost EVERY DECISION your business makes can pivot on JUST one question: "Are you optimizing for ever…
Thread · Scotch snaps, amphibrachs, and how long stressed syllables really are
#NowPlaying Better by Cody Fry (with Cory Wong & Metropole Orkest) It's gonna go on my "Heart Soaring" playlist. youtube.com/watch?v=5S3bTo…
Cody Fry's "Better" is, I think, my favorite instance so far of "scotch snaps", the pattern of little pairs of short syllables (here [if I] [let you] [love me] [better]). Usually in Gaelic music & recently hiphop. I usually don't like them much—they seem overwrought/affectatious
this rhythm's recent popularity in hiphop has some people accusing white singers of cultural appropriation or something when they use them, which... lol, my ancestors were singing these rhythms back in scotland centuries ago 🤷♀️ @AdamNeelyBass w/ the scoop youtube.com/watch?v=i7cG9Q…
DAMN. Just watched vid 2nd time & was struck by something I hadn't picked up on before. Spanish amphibrachs (eg "tequila") are unstressed-stressed-unstressed, with the stressed one long, like in latin music English ambhibrachs (eg "implicit") are u-s-u, but stressed syll short?
@AdamNeelyBass kinda says this 1min into the vid, but it's easy to miss there. trochee = 2 sylls, first stressed, second unstressed English (particularly American) compared to various European languages has remarkably short stressed syllables!
But I think when I first heard this I was thinking of it as "short but still longer than the unstressed syllables" And now... I'm pretty confused. Sometimes "unstressed" syllables are literally called "short" & "stressed" called "long". Paging internet linguist @GretchenAMcC
@thepericulum @PascalPrecht @Conaw @fortelabs I think the question is "is it a kayfabe rivalry?"
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
@goblinodds @m_ashcroft that’s just how the A L E X A N D E R technique’s meant to be, a way to free yourself from your ch…
Replying to @abhayance
@AbhayPrasanna It's a pretty eclectic mix of stuff. 95%+ of my playlists are more like tags than actual like... a thing you'd put on all at once in a row. Anyway, here's Heart Soaring: play.google.com/music/playlist…
@AbhayPrasanna Also, just gotta give a shout out to this live concert I've played over a dozen times in the last 2mo. Vulfpeck's rhythm guitarist (Cory Wong) is the same guitarist that's headlining the act that the Better recording is from. And it's a riot.
Replying to @alt_visa
@alt_visa Maybe "I stand by what I said" or "I feel in integrity with what I meant there" Depending on what you'r trying to do, you might also want to simultaneously acknowledge the impact it had, w/o that being an apology. Relevant maybe-helpful post of mine 👇 malcolmocean.com/2013/12/apolog…
@OperationMoksha Twitter is evolving into a really cool platform, and @QiaochuYuan & me & @Aryeh___ are among the folks spearheading that evolution. Click here 👇 then click around for a rabbit hole around how this is going down. 🕳️🐇
Retweeted @AliceFromQueens
An Endangered Species Act but for Twitter. t.co/oKSNBsNoRN
@QiaochuYuan @Aryeh___ @OperationMoksha Tagging @TheOrangeAlt as a particularly potent case study of this
Retweeted @DRMacIver
Because Michael and I are scheduled to beef about doing vs nondoing, I would like to suggest an alternative interpretation:…
@QiaochuYuan @csvoss Seeds & eggs, inasmuch as they have caloric & nutritional content, are optimized to be eaten by the same organism later. Not quite the same as a fruit or milk, but still a different class than muscle or leaves.
@QiaochuYuan @csvoss Other classes might include: - rock minerals, eg salt, which isn't optimized to be edible or not - eg capsaicin, which is optimized to be aversive to mammals & fungi but not to birds
Just saw this as a sponsored tweet on an alt, and clicked it. I like... never click ads here. It's just a spinny shape. So initially I was like "well: unskippable indeed" But then came here to retweet it and realized I'd already blocked the account from some other obnoxious ad
Replying to @liminal_warmth
@liminal_warmth goat
Retweeted @AndrewYang
Remember when I seemed like a futurist? Those were the days.
While working on streaks feature for complice.co I looked at my own streak and saw that I'd missed a day back in Dec—a day I'd spent on a personal emotional processing retreat with a friend. Was satisfying to go fill that in—I recalled vividly what I did that day! 🥰
Wrote this thread on the Complice twitter account today. Considered publishing it here as Malcolm but figured it would be cool to develop that account separately and see what can happen there long-term.
Interesting to see how my use of very-threaded twitter is starting to carry over onto that account. No reason for it to stay flat! Eg this tweet quotes someone saying "i broke my 100+ day duolingo streak guess its time to quit duolingo forever"
Curious about others' thoughts on this, from pretty much any perspective honestly. or maybe @visakanv has some deep insight into how Complice & threadland might intersect.
Thinking about how @QiaochuYuan pointed out to @Conaw that there needed to be a @RoamResearch account.
Complice isn't growing like Roam (nor would I want that!) but it has some potential for a smaller cult following, or something. Hmm...
@vgr Whoa neat, some new feature to tweet only to ~mutuals? I'm feeling pretty good. About to get on @utotranslucence's Relational Exegesis call on thestoa.ca: group reading of an excerpt of Impro together. Spent yesterday & today building 👇
@Aryeh___ This song is called Starmachine, and is one of the most high-energy ~happy songs I know. youtube.com/watch?v=rEeiRX…
@vgr @utotranslucence What up for you Venkat?
Replying to @liminal_warmth
@liminal_warmth unfortunately I'm guessing this is BS vogue teens don't know what they're talking about
Replying to @abhayance
@AbhayPrasanna YESSSS Me 20 minutes after that: "And I... put it in my pocket put it in my pocket in my back pocket put it in my pocket in my pocket in my back pocket... whoa-oa-oh"
@Conaw @QiaochuYuan @uncatherio @visakanv I have now QT'd @Conaw's "this is a new app" tweet many times, and in the absence of a "view QT" button so far I think it prudent to give people a link to see the various iterations of it: twitter.com/search?q=twitt…
@shannamann @AbhayPrasanna Twitter has improved as a platform (despite a few attempts to mangle it) And also a group of us that very adjacent to #roamcult (and that I think could be said to have incubated #roamcult) are using the app in new ways 👇
@anthrocypher @utotranslucence Yeah, it's cool how in platforms.fyi @RobinSloan highlights the importance of negative feedback loops, not just runaway positive feedback loops.
@TheOrangeAlt @QiaochuYuan @Aryeh___ @OperationMoksha shadow ~= whatever parts of yourself you can't own as being parts of yourself so you exclude them from your identity but they're still doing their thing. Often sex & violence, but eg a gang-member might find their tenderness suppressed, or an office-worker their playfulness.
@jack_meditates Important key step often is to tap the love within yourself to hold the fear within yourself.
@QiaochuYuan @jazfloot yup, re: letting out your own laughter being laughed *at* against your will can *create* trauma tho excerpt from Impro
@DanielleFong 🪨 actually just got here
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing Almost entirely 100% computer, except my IFTTT widget for tweeting random thoughts. I've also recently set up a stayfocusd cap to keep twitter mostly between 2pm & 10pm. Seems to mostly be working well at curating my attention, but not quite sustainable.
@jack_meditates Pretty much any system has unwritten rules, but in the top-down controlling systems, one is more likely to be prohibited* from exploring what they might be and what else might work *officially may be encouraged to do this, but unwritten rules will prevent
@QiaochuYuan @OperationMoksha @DougTataryn also mentioned at MAPLE last year that your vision part plays the role of the (usually implicit) context from which most core feelings arise... like as a contrast between the present/past & the vision. Not sure how to operationalize beyond general tools for that.
@cognazor @MonasticAcademy > it turns out hope has all of the same problems as fear
Retweeted @GretchenAMcC
i knew that some parts of Because Internet were going to age quickly, because that's what happens when you write a book a…
@DanielleFong Damn. I'm on desktop where Twitter rolls their own emoji. I guess on iOS they let the phone handle it and your phone doesn't yet have the latest. (Btw the one I posted to your other thread was a rock, in case that wasn't very very obvious 😂)
Replying to @abhayance
@AbhayPrasanna @shannamann Mmmm I feel appreciated 😊 Yeah, I don't have the resources to build a full-on software alternative to twitter atm, so I'm implementing my vision in the form of cultureware.
Replying to @abhayance
@AbhayPrasanna @shannamann Re Lists: say more about what you're imagining? I feel like I have a couple very hazy senses of it. Would be neat if everybody got one "this is the most important tweet (mine or someone else's) today" per day button, and you could subscribe just to *that* from someone.
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing Not a think but a feel. I gave myself 3 minutes so I can grab links & not have my tabs nuked... But I've watched myself creep into antipatterns like using it with another window focused so the timer doesn't tick. Which means I'm fighting myself a bit, hence unsustainable.
@nibrasibn Cool! Deeply I'm working on a page about the Complice philosophy based on an essay I wrote back in 2015... maybe I'll explore making it a tweetstorm as part of that process, to pithificate the articulations. You might dig this thread in the meantime:
@Conaw @jimrandomh @csvoss @VincentLuczkow I'm not aware of any CFAR staff active on twitter atm. Various former staff members have been various levels of active over the last year or so
@Conaw @jreighley @karlodizon I mean yeah it would probably have something to do with ~~brain hemispheres~~ though I don't actually know how, in part because I don't understand much of what's going on with the relationship between hemispheres in left-handers (sometimes same as RHers)
@Conaw @karlodizon Yeah I'm not even inclined to vote—those all seem good. Pick roughly equal N from all of those categories.
Replying to @abhayance
@AbhayPrasanna @shannamann I mean in principle that's what the #roamcult #hashtag does... I think they beta-tested an ability to subscribe to hashtags, but that wouldn't deal with the issue of like... huh. you could have it like @-mentions where if you start tweet w/ the hashtag it only goes to those ppl
@OperationMoksha @QiaochuYuan @DougTataryn Yes, tell us all about it ...wait.
Replying to @ryn__x
@context_ing I mean, Focusing, but that's kind of cheating because the book (in audio form or otherwise) contains essentially guided meditations and those are obviously easier by voice.
@visakanv This evening, working on a write-up about fluidly traversing abstraction ladders. More generally atm, I'm really close to shipping this (chill)streaks feature for complice.co. Thread 👇
@QiaochuYuan playful saw the word nearly first, and was just like "yep"
@diviacaroline "don't touch your face"
@OperationMoksha yeah people don't realize that trying to avoid emotions creates an (oscillating) amplifying feedback loop
WYR
Retweeted @RichDecibels
I think a lot of the pushback against social justice comes from a subtle confusion: social justice demands you stop domi…
@RichDecibels I'll chime in with "definitely both" here's me a few weeks ago, sharing myself having a structurally-equivalent confusion:
@RichDecibels That whole thread, actually, is relevant to this thing you're talking about here regarding an alternative to dominating & submitting.
@m_ashcroft @nibrasibn @DougTataryn @QiaochuYuan Make an alt with just a dozen followers! I have one, we can be friends 😊
Replying to @innerstitial
@AndJohnsonAnd @eigenrobot @SarahAMcManus check out these clams ☝️😂
@PeterBorah @vgr this this this ☝️ ☝️ ☝️ Here's @nosilverv talking about the fixing mindset, on the individual scale, but it applies to cultures & societies as well 👇
Retweeted @PeterBorah
@vgr Fixing the world is an inherently rearguard-action frame. Instead, gotta work on building new bits of world. Lay the t…
I really resonate with the perspective in the quoted tweet, and I would love to see @m_ashcroft do a thread on how Alexander-Technique inhibition is somehow different from this. It seems clear that it *is* different. I have one guess, which I'll hint at with these emoij: 🧠↔️
@natural_hazard @TurboRational Re video games, check out this Game Engine someone made for Non-Euclidean worlds. Has a lot of really cool shit in it. youtube.com/watch?v=kEB11P…
Retweeted @Conaw
@verohecko @KevinSimler This post in particular probably changed more of my beliefs and models than anything else I've read in t…
@VitalPixel @cwodtke @veradrawer @daveixd @impactology I really like how @Conaw puts this in terms of metaphors. Metaphor design is deeply underrated. Our brains do work in some embodied ways, and the metaphors we have available digitally are relatively impoverished. Agreed digital can also surpass analog!
@RichDecibels Somehow wanting to connect this tweet about two kinds of hypocrisy:
@diviacaroline maybe because it's an unskill that requires unlearning & unteaching
Replying to @johnloeber
@johnloeber @RoamResearch @Conaw Yeah, also many other elements also were designed decades ago by Engelbart, Vannevar Bush, etc... but people get really narrow-minded in their metaphors.
OMFG this. something something slack heroin something something something something #roamcult something something
Retweeted @rsnous
i think there is real power in the fact that PDFs are essentially uneditable by normal software. exporting a PDF is like ritual…
I think that Adobe would actually do well to capitalize on this metaphor and make a... a blockchain? something that user-friendlily dates a particular version of of a PDF in a trustable way.
Replying to @abhayance
@AbhayPrasanna I threw it on in the background and mostly didn't notice it although this came up in the next-up and I'm jamming out to that. youtube.com/watch?v=yxAnp2…
I'm working on a metacognition module for complice.co and wondering what questions/prompts you find are most helpful for any of the following: 🧐 noticing when you're stuck 🤦♀️ noticing *how* you're stuck 🚀 getting unstuck Comment below!
@visakanv @jdunck Wow. I am discovering that I'm shocked that I have more followers than you had 2y ago / before the boring dystopia hit. Idk, really hadn't taken in the nonlinearity of it all or something. I think I also didn't start tracking your follower count til after that.
@visakanv @jdunck Also my follower growth has started being visibly superexponential, which is both exciting and also kind of scary. I've noticed once or twice having a shitpost idea that seemed like it could go viral & 2× my subs, and actually being like "I don't want people from that shitpost"
@ClayNichols Yeah this might have interesting effects on waking dreams as well 🧐🧐🧐💭💭💭
Retweeted @coachnateb
Subjective well-being is a better term than mental health. Subjective Well-being & mental health are both terms that have…
@HunterBergsma @maybegray @QiaochuYuan @qorprate @mattdiamond @utotranslucence not sure if this is quite your wavelength but figured you'd appreciate the tag
@chapmanjacobd Not for signing, just to be able to like idk hash the doc version into the archives so that it's really clear that a particular version comes from a particular date. Maybe it's incoherent.
@tmhall99 @Conaw @RoamResearch @Mappletons AHEM
@Mappletons @Conaw @tmhall99 @RoamResearch Yeah it was basically a precondition of my switching to Roam from WorkFlowy 😂 Had all of these tags (& more) I was already using there, using hacky [title*="Filter #tag"] syntax
@m_ashcroft @haideralmosawi Sweet, link the thread here when it's live 🙂
Retweeted @Conaw
Thank you to @Malcolm_Ocean for the request to add data-tag html attribute to # based links in @RoamResearch. Opened the door fo…
I think we're well on our way to this with @RoamResearch and it's going to be even better than what I'd imagined.
see that's the thing what you need to get is not "your head around Roam" but "Roam around your head" #roamcult #roampoem @RoamResearch
@m_ashcroft got any Alexander Technique -inspired unsticking prompts?
@utotranslucence en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi
@cwodtke @VitalPixel @veradrawer @daveixd @impactology @Conaw I'm not saying it'll surpass in all ways… …not sure how to engage here. Sort of feels like you have a kind of skeptical stance? I feel a disinclination to try to respond on the content level. I'm guessing you feel not-appreciated about something related to value of embodiment.
@cwodtke @VitalPixel @veradrawer @daveixd @impactology @Conaw For myself, I feel a deep synergy between physical embodiment & digital space. Knowing what to search to find something feels like knowing where it is. I have a proprioceptive third hand that feels "full" when there's something important on my computer clipboard as-yet-unpasted.
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@cwodtke @VitalPixel @veradrawer @daveixd @impactology @Conaw For myself, I feel a deep synergy between physical embodim…
@VitalPixel @cwodtke @veradrawer @daveixd @impactology @Conaw I think also just like, better concepts for some of the basic moves that happen in conversation. Like what would it look like to have a conversation app that explicitly distinguished these: malcolmocean.com/2016/05/honing…
Retweeted @natural_hazard
you can have people try to grab actually disks arranged in the illusion format. "Size-contrast illusions deceive the e…
@cwodtke @VitalPixel @veradrawer @daveixd @impactology @Conaw This but for digital & analog:
@VitalPixel @cwodtke @veradrawer @daveixd @impactology @Conaw Also this
Retweeted @dilefante
@BarbaraFantechi @stevenstrogatz I always assumed that the English word "is" was short for "isomorphism" :-)
> “Honing & jamming sounds like explore/exploit.” I can see why you’d say that, but as the guy who coined the terms, check out this 2×2 showing how you can have all 4 combos.
Context 1: this article I wrote malcolmocean.com/2016/05/honing…
Context 2: this tweet in response (not sure if response to the article or just the vivid preview graphic)
@MrWingChan @VitalPixel @cwodtke @veradrawer @daveixd @impactology @Conaw Congrats, you have inspired a 2×2!
@jondubin @Timber_22 @QiaochuYuan I love how desaturated the photo is except for the rainbow.
Replying to @hormeze
@Aryeh___ @QiaochuYuan Eeee this just made me smile so much. Hi!
@Jeanvaljean689 @ClayNichols All problems are psychological problems. & as in dreams, somehow the weirdness of this mashup goes unnoticed
@QiaochuYuan waterloo skipped straight from winter to humid-summer so I am shirtless and my face is a bit shiny from as-yet-unevaporated sweat …hi!
Yo @Conaw I'm already starting to think about the inevitable @CompliceGoals+@RoamResearch integration. Can you throw out a couple high-level tweets about what sorts of features/endpoints you expect v1 of the Roam API to have?
Wishlist (to be solveable directly or indirectly) - use one db or many dbs that a user has - search for eg {{[[TODO]]}} - search for blocks that are on a given date page - ability to easily convert {{[[TODO]]}} to {{[[DONE]]}} - get transcluded blocks - link to page by title
@jeremyqho yo hmu
Aha! Here's proof that I'm not just saying this about my app Complice because *I* think it's innovative. Here's a user talking about what they learned from just using the complice.co free trial, and how that was valuable.
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
"Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It's enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everythin…
@aditipar Nice, that's great, it's like, either there's a clear answer, and you can move on getting the answer (or reorient if you're blocked on solving that by eg a team member or the laws of physics) or there's no clear answer, and so you need to take a step back or something.
@LeroyAlmeida23 I'm talking about the API. Obviously could just send a "rename this block" but would be nice to have a built-in for complete. Though I guess that could also just be built-in to whatever npm module we build for interacting with the Roam API.
Retweeted @andy_matuschak
@Malcolm_Ocean David Krakauer has a framing here I enjoy: cooperative vs. competitive collaborative artifacts. The abac…
Retweeted @Conaw
First walk I took with @andy_matuschak we talked about how there are 1,000 startups making 10% improvements on status quo with p…
@utotranslucence @QiaochuYuan lol I probably took the power jaw thing lulie mentions here too far (probably because I'm leaning out a window to catch dat sunlight without having to take my ad hoc blinds (read: a couple sheets precariously hung from my window frame) down)
@utotranslucence This is my top contender for "most meta thing I've ever done" which is a pretty cool feat. I don't know what the other contenders are; probably some ridiculous fucking sentences self-referential I've uttered at various points. (flavor: similar to this ⬇️)
@VitalPixel @cwodtke @veradrawer @daveixd @impactology @Conaw real-time ↔ async digital ↕ analog ?? not yet haha
@ARozenshtein @Conaw @RoamResearch @Mappletons yeah maybe like "data-contains-tag" on the full block itself
@Conaw @kwharrison13 @andy_matuschak @CompliceGoals @RoamResearch It's not intentional. It's… I tried making a youtube video awhile back (edited by a user) and it was decent but still too overwhelmingly full of irrelevant details. Here if you're curious 👇 youtube.com/watch?v=dR20Fb…
@Conaw @kwharrison13 @andy_matuschak @CompliceGoals @RoamResearch Yeah I think I've been stuck in funny chicken-egg things where I keep wanting to make more UI improvements before spending time making a video illustrating things. Which… probably doesn't make sense given that the fundamentals haven't changed in 6 years 😂
@Conaw @kwharrison13 @andy_matuschak @CompliceGoals @RoamResearch I think I'd been thinking about it as conveying the UI, but you're right, the thing that needs to be conveyed is more like the philosophy/paradigm, and the core workflow(s). And that won't change. I've got an old essay I'm starting to edit to answer that: complice.co/philosophy
@Conaw @kwharrison13 @andy_matuschak @CompliceGoals @RoamResearch I'm thinking another interesting way to do this might be to have someone basically interview me over zoom about the system, and I do some live demos to them on screenshare, then we just post the interview.
@visakanv @jdunck Yesterday me: "now 2923, up from 2906 yesterday... so yeah, I think expecting to hit 3k followers before June" (literally verbatim from my notes) Me today:
@visakanv Nothing to report eh? twitter.com/alt_visa/statu…
@visakanv @jdunck This growth came from the best best possible source. Someone who I deeply respect tweeting about how much they respect my work. Also brought even more than 92 new signups to Complice, which is pretty sweet.
@Conaw @kwharrison13 @andy_matuschak @CompliceGoals @RoamResearch Oooooh yeah, that sounds great. Tomorrow or wednesday would work better but I could do tonight. (esp if we could do more like 7pm pst either of those days, since you and I can get really fucking excited and my housemates start winding down by 8pm (11pm my time))
Retweeted @PeterKolchinsky
Viruses are hoody-wearing hackers, but SARS2 is hardly the cleverest. My votes go to HIV, rabies, and herpes. Here are…
@andy_matuschak Related to this comment by Shopify founder @Tobi Lutke:
@Conaw @visakanv @jdunck google sheets plus data I've been logging manually. I don't know if twitter offers a place to look up your follower count over time. (I vaguely think I recall seeing something like that in the place where you can go to buy ads?)
@Conaw @visakanv @jdunck I used manageflitter.com awhile back to unfollow a ton of ppl, & they had the followers etc sorted by date so surely the data exists. Seems like they offer charts but idk if those charts go into the past. Their free plan doesn't show anything anymore, but it's only $12/mo
Retweeted @utotranslucence
Software Soft wear Software that drapes around your shoulders; that slinks cozily around your fingers and presses…
Retweeted @krzhang
Thread: The Grey Book of Cults Inspirations: Borges, Calvino, @factoryweather "And they lived, not as people, because they'…
@nosilverv @visakanv @utotranslucence @verohecko
@jazfloot @QiaochuYuan @nosilverv Oouu, say another sentence or two about the McGilchrist connection?
Just got off a call with @Conaw and I just want to say: That guy was already in my head as "one of the most visionary people I know" After this call my sense of the depth & breadth of his vision has increased by at least an order of magnitude, maybe two.
@Morphenius you were asking about how I search twitter. This thread contains some of my tips. There's also some advanced queries like: to:username from:username since:yyyy-mm-dd until:yyyy-mm-dd
Difference between upward-spiral twitter & downward-spiral twitter: - 📈 do you make a point of connecting things in context? - 📉 do you make a point of taking things out of context? Twitter is better than most apps at both. Up to you to decide what game you want to play.
@Morphenius this thread collects most of what I've tweeted about parallax
@QiaochuYuan @wordpaley @Aryeh___ @Timber_22 Also here's a playlist, sorted by feeling/theme, if you don't have many ideas of your own.
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
friendly reminder that youth would absolutely not be wasted on the young if we didn't keep them in child prison for 12 yea…
@QiaochuYuan @orpheaskk Stoked for this.
@jazfloot @QiaochuYuan @nosilverv Whoa, cool! I haven't read the original books, wondering if it would work to dive in starting with The Secret Commonwealth....
"A tool addresses human needs by amplifying human capabilities. It converts what we can do into what we want to do. A great tool is designed to fit both sides." — A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interaction Design by @worrydream One of my favorite rants! worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTh…
@Jeanvaljean689 @JoelChan86 @fortelabs @Ceasar_Bautista @Conaw Hmmm... this strikes me as false dichotomy. Humans are incredibly adaptable so if you make something that's powerful enough to be worth mastering, people will readily learn. Roam's learning curve being an example.
@Jeanvaljean689 @JoelChan86 @fortelabs @Ceasar_Bautista @Conaw Maybe it needs a 2×2 or something... Adapting to the user's concept of what the solution space looks like based on their existing solutions, and assuming no learning involved—no. Adapting to the user's needs & capabilities-including-learning—yes!
@spearofsolomon If your epistemology isn't a meta-epistemology, you have a whole nother issue.
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@spearofsolomon If your epistemology isn't a meta-epistemology, you have a whole nother issue.
Replying to @eigenrobot
Replying to @m_altcroft
@m_altcroft first thought that comes to mind is like, get out of rational neutral mode by going non-verbal. see if you can make sounds (animal, baby, whatever) & body gestures that express & dramatize the mehness (or your experience of wanting strong emotional waves & not having them)
@m_altcroft Lots of great tips over here also:
@_StevenFan @worrydream Yeah tru, would be more accurate to circle not just the head/tip of the hammer but the whole length of it etc in highlighting "this part fits the problem"
@visakanv @maybegray @Conaw Check out this essay with detailed explorations of the parallels between OT God & abusive parenting, by @s_r_constantin (I'd've named the essay something else, just because the title at first glance seems way less interesting than the content in fact is) srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/pat…
@elzr @eirikbakke @ultorg @jlongster @actualbudget @maxkriegers Hmm... seems somewhere in between 1D & 2D. Which... it's basically a branching tree fractal… …which implies it might be best modelled as having fractal dimension, probably around 1.26 (depending on other factors? I don't understand this well) math.bu.edu/DYSYS/chaos-ga…
@Conaw > He's either Lord, Lunatic or Liar I feel like "the fundamental forces of the universe speaking in human form" is meaningfully different than all 3 of these Lewis' trilemma options. A "Lord" is actually in some sense insecure in a way the universe isn't
@danlistensto syndrome
Oh @Morphenius this 👆 also relates to what we were talking about today and the stuff you're working on around parallax & habits.
I made an online pomodoro coworking room for #roamcult. If you want to meet & chat with more like-minded @RoamResearch users without getting too distracted by twitter, this is the place. (I named it Colosseum, cause it's a forum where the action happens) complice.co/room/roam
Thread · Design notes for a conversation-optimized Twitter replacement · 12 of 17 tweets
Here were some early #TwitterReplacement/#ConversationalTwitter thoughts about being able to interact with tweet-tree-structure, nonlinearly, including replying. I realized I'd put money towards something that solved this, and said as much.
This thread is me thinking out loud about densely networked twitter threads, and the emotional experience of being *lost* on twitter being analogous to chaotic malls optimized for impulse buys.
What does twitter need? One thing is something that right now they're in the process of rolling out, which is better support for Quote Tweets (QTs) No idea if this was influenced by me & @visakanv & @micahtredding & others tweeting loudly about it. 🧵👇
QTs are such a powerful feature. They need: - their own notifications tab - visibility: so you can see when someone has QT'd the tweet you're viewing - better systems for composing QTs (more like "RT with comment" UI, where it previews link) - &+ Context.
Twitter is currently very divergent: you can't bring 2 tweets together by replying to both or by QTing both at once. That's a HUGE limitation to what kinds of thoughts we can represent here. Ends up as screenshots—cumbersome & loses context.
@garybasin asked me about how to get network effects on a twitter replacement, and I figured it'd be best to start with a plugin. Various folks (@metamitya, @nosilverv, &+) are working on this. Reply to this tweet with links to others!
We've got an emoji-picker and gif-search for tweeting. Why not also a tweet-to-quote-search? This would be especially valuable for mobile.
Oh! And way more conversational notifications. Smoosh together all notifications from a given thread. Don't want ability to mark unread because then it's an inbox aka a todo list aka work aka 😒 But better overviews of what convos are happening, 🔥💯🤩
Negative feedback loops. @robinsloan illustrates this beautifully with platforms.fyi—there's no inherent reason why something going viral needs to get huge fast. Could be a mix of automatic dampening plus a button to disable RTs on your tweet.
Some sort of retract/reconsider button. This is tough, but clearly something like this needs to exist. Somewhat concerned that outrage mobs would start demanding retraction, but that's not really worse than now, and prevents spreading outdated stuff. twitter.com/groundedSAGE/s…
What else does Twitter need? Last idea for tonight: maybe editable threads? (Though NOT editable tweets) This is also tough, for related reasons, but here's a case for it:
Ok 1 more: two types of tweets... By default they aren't editable, but you could specify certain tweets that can be updated later, which would look different so it's clear. Synergizes with QTs: can update event details, a forecast, top answer to Q, etc.
Hello new followers who showed up from @Conaw's tweets this week! Also hello other new followers. I was planning to do a thing when I hit 3k and I just blew straight past it, but if you want to get to know me here's a thread of me ideating apps/companies:
Also I'm coding all day today so I won't be on twitter, but I'll be working in the Roam Colosseum and you can come cowork with me there! Link to the room: complice.co/room/roam?r=nf…
> (“belief” is a very problematic concept. latent and actualized bodily anticipation is a bit better, sometimes…) it’s less about what you say, less about even what you think, and more about how everything preflectively *seems* —@meditationstuff meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2020/05/27/epi…
Before UI design, or UX design, is something like "semantic interaction" design, which is the design of the experienced meaning of using a system. This is done not visually or by talking about interaction patterns or features or goals-to-be-done, but by talking about metaphors.
I wrote this 3mo ago, and discovered it today when I went to block reference a @RoamResearch node in which I was *independently* coining the term "semantic interaction" to use in a different context! And... the meanings & context enrich each other! Very cool #roamcult miracle.
Incidentally, the context for the block reference was a *third* usage of the term "semantic interaction", this time by a guy designing data analytics software. @Conaw you may want to check out this 10min video—it vibes with roam's roadmap! youtube.com/watch?v=bHNAEe…
Retweeted @lifeandlimbo
No joke, @CompliceGoals is the only to do app that I've been able to use consistently for more than one month. I am seria…
@fraserdeans Here's my draft roam page where I talk about metaphor design: roamresearch.com/#/app/malcolmo…
@thisisneer Mmm! You might similarly dig my breakdown of "interviewing" as distinct from eg "interrogating". (there's a full thread exploring it and some other implications here 👇)
@thisisneer > Every word that you say is a potential node of inspiration for the other person to explore. This makes me think of @maxkriegers' Glue
@thisisneer @maxkriegers And more generally about meta-threada twitter! Which you're probably already aware of on some level but if you haven't explored it explicitly then I think you'll really dig it. Here's a good jumping off point 🕳️🐇
@divideby0zero Great reminder, just downloaded all my tweets again. Link for others reading this: twitter.com/settings/your_… Definitely hmu when you want to jam, even if just on the Semantic Interaction Design level
@RobertHaisfield Some. It's technically possible but actively discouraged by how the twitter API works. Hopefully they'll find a different way of relating to this as they explore shifting the twitter incentives.
Replying to @codymclain
@codymclain @Conaw Complice+Roam integrations of various kinds, mostly. But on a larger scale, um... I'd say we're considering collaborating on the whole thing 🌎🌍🌏
@ofmorningshift > Most crucially, it is the right to treat other humans – out-group members – as as much a natural resource to be exploited as ore to mine, timber to log, game to hunt, or livestock to domesticate. Separate question ofc of whether it makes sense to treat *nature* this way 🧐
@ofmorningshift Yeah, I think there's also value to finding a way to think about these dynamics beyond "good" & "bad" I talk a bit about post-good-and-bad value systems here, including some juicy stuff below Hunter's reply to this tweet 👇
@ofmorningshift Second juicy bit starts here, for ease of reference:
Just realized that this paradox…
…maps onto this paradox:
@ofmorningshift Also if you haven't yet read The Guru Papers, specifically the section on goodself/badself, check it out. Relates to how the good & bad cocreate each other, which seems apt in relation to these modes too. The thing to aim for can't just be "Mode 1 wins" docs.google.com/document/d/1HK…
@ofmorningshift Mmm! A much more achievable goal, given the inseparability of good & bad. And increases my sense that you'd get something valuable from reading this excerpt:
Re-reading this @Meaningness tweet after now having read McGilchrist, I find myself wanting to say something like "the left hemisphere's territory IS the map" which is surely an oversimplification but ultimately not far off from how McGilchrist puts it (see next tweets)
eg here's a couple excerpts from The Master and his Emissary (these are concluding statements to long case studies & reasoned arguments; I implore any would-be critiquers to check out the original rather than arguing with these sentences out of context)
And all of this is calling to mind this connection with the buddhist "mind-as-a-sense-organ" frame.
@misen__ @reasonisfun @QiaochuYuan Hmmm I'm curious to what extent this is about the framing of #SobSquad as such, vs like, back before last fall when the term was coined and QC was just tweeting a lot about his own crying, was that also distasteful in this sense?
@Conaw @nibrasibn @DocAyomide @RoamResearch @QiaochuYuan @utotranslucence yeah, I think that your opinionatedness is a huge part of what has allowed Roam to be as awesome as it is, and that that sort of dovetails with the cult leader concept though we're already seeing non-cult-like diversity & creativity on top of Roam which is encouraging
@reasonisfun @QiaochuYuan Uhhh, you just do? Like that's like saying "but how would you enjoy the taste of food if nothing is good?" Or "how do you cherish your loved ones if nobody is good?" Burden of proof is on whoever says that the judgment is a necessary component, not on me.
@reasonisfun @QiaochuYuan Put another way, the grackles living in the trees outside my window defend their young from hungry crows without categorizing them as bad. (You might argue that the grackles *are* categorizing the crows as bad. If so, that illustrates a difference in what we mean by judgment.)
@reasonisfun @QiaochuYuan Important clarification ⚠️ "you just do" isn't intended to imply that it's easy or straightforward to give up judgment, just that giving up judgment makes it no harder to take a stand or protect the innocent. I'm answering on the philosophical level, not the practical level.
@reasonisfun @QiaochuYuan On practical level, consider "how do you move without bringing in a ton of extra self-frustrating muscle tension?" if you ask that Q as defense from change… unlikely to learn how asking it sincerely & spaciously & curiously is the foundation of Alexander Technique! @m_ashcroft
@callumflack @galtenberg @uberstuber I don't have a consistent workflow with this, aside from like, take screenshots & post on twitter. Don't worry about your bunch, just start with one and try reading it and keep notes on what happens when you try. Then try some other approach if approach #1 seems meh.
@ofmorningshift It's explicitly not badself=shadow. Both goodself & badself have conscious & unconscious parts.
@ofmorningshift Yeah I'd say that the "polarized unconscious system" here is the shadow. I'd suggest reading the rest of the chapter as it includes some great case studies. Broadly if you've ever experienced like, doing something ~"bad" then after a bit you're like "ENOUGH!" & switch modes?
@ofmorningshift That "ENOUGH!" move is made *easier* by the increased excess of the bad thing. I used to notice this in myself waking up: I'd be like "ugh it's 9am I should get up" ... "ugh it's 10am" ... "ugh it's 11am" ... "FUCK IT'S NOON OMFG WHY THE FUCK DID I SLEEP IN SO LATE?"
@ofmorningshift Yeah, talks about it a lot, including lots of fascinating discussion of addictions of various kinds (including nicotine, which often doesn't get covered in some convos about addiction, because it's legal)
Retweeted @m_ashcroft
I'm a few days in and @CompliceGoals is already working really well for me. If your current approach to task management is…
Twitter's testing a "Schedule Tweet" feature. Seems they're branching out from "NOW", but going into the future rather than the past (which is where the memex value lies) I wrote this tweet at 2020-05-28 @ 15:30 ET, 24h before it went live.
@benschecter @Conaw Re incentives, I'm not worried. @RoamResearch wasn't built by being preoccupied with short-term incentives. I've known @Conaw since 2015 and he's been working on this the whole time.
Retweeted @Conaw
This is pretty wild. Haven't ever heard of a SaaS company offering 5 year plan before, and in just over a day almost 900 folks…
Retweeted @visakanv
I always thought “attention whore” was an interesting phrase, and that it implies other classes of attention workers Attenti…
@diviacaroline @__rowboat__ You might dig the clip one tweet up from this one 👇, which features a movie-dad becoming aware of his own clichés.
@Connoropolous Hmm yeah. Also there's not (in the current UI) any way to see that the tweet was drafted in the past, which seems very odd. I would want that visually distinguished even if very subtly.
Thread · Running list of people doing deep design work · 5 of 14 tweets
Yup, @azlenelza needs to be on my Deep Design twitter list.
Here's another thing @azlenelza has been designing
Also recently added @thisisneer to the Deep Design list, based in part on this tweet below and other visualizations.
Further re @thisisneer—you don't need funky visualizations to get on the list though. This tweet just points at something that needs to exist, with a touch of metaphor design ("breadcrumbs" isn't a totally novel metaphor, but not typical for bookmarks)
Here's the Deep Design list: twitter.com/i/lists/125671…
@azlenelza Oh man I would love to sub to that and also to generate something similar from my own roamblog Which is here 👇 roamresearch.com/#/app/malcolmo…
@azlenelza Whoa @SarahAMcManus he's got an idea for Chladni patterns to visualize intertwinglement complexity! notes.azlen.me/cri6tvov/
So first of all, there's a @zoombachelor show. Secondly, apparently it's also encouraging its contestants to take useful real world actions as part of contesting, like donating to @GiveDirectly. What are you incentivizing with how you go about choosing potential mates?
@otter_ai @_SimonLau how do I rename a speaker? I accidentally typo'd the spelling of someone's name and I want to fix it everywhere they're tagged. (I also have a friend who changed names and I'd like to tell your AI that that voice now belongs to "someone else")
Retweeted @azlenelza
There's growing opportunity to build better search as Google slowly drowns in its own algorithm All the search engines I kn…
So stoked about getting custom css for my intertwingled.blog hosted on roam (Now I just need proper support for that domain, rather than it just being a redirect!)
I was one of the first people to put custom CSS on my roam, and holy shit it has taken off way more than I could possibly have expected. The #roamcult is a creative powerhouse.
Here's an old thread where I talk about feature requests for roamblogs! It's cool to see that one if these is imminently happening.
Oh and @azlenelza's notes.azlen.me is a homebuilt instantiation of this 👇
And he's thinking about newsletter stuff too!
@nbashaw @visakanv This was my first thought. On PCs it's ctrl+left = jump to beginning of word ctrl+right = jump to end of word (again add shift to select) idk if PCs have an arrow-key based home/end equiv Also! On either PC/mac, can use these modifiers with backspace or delete instead of ←→
Retweeted @cognazor
Do you play more of a positive feedback loop (self-reinforcing mechanism) role or a negative feedback loop (self-correcting m…
@ponekarl wondering what it makes possible
@cognazor @ericlinuskaplan it's not about colloquial "positive" & "negative", it's about whether the more you get of something the more it makes more (+) or whether it's tracking deviations from a target and honing in on them (−) can't swap signs on this physical system example by reframing:
Retweeted @chrismasterson
Honestly embarassed to say I ever worked at Facebook. Learned a lot from some great people, but wow, fuck that company.
@nbashaw @visakanv It's fucking vital! And it's a nonlinear change—you can have a single thought "I want to delete those 3 words" and just press ctrl+backspace 3 times, but if you want to delete them 1 character at a time, you have to slow down to get the char count right.
@nbashaw @visakanv Okay, and while I was writing that earlier tweet, I noticed different times when I would mistype a word, and sometimes I would edit it by hitting backspace a few times manually, but other times I would just nuke the word and start over, and this was faster! Watch live 👁️👁️👇
@Conaw @Mappletons @anthilemoon @fredericrenken @houshuang @linuz90 @johnataylor @ViktorTabori @_jonesian My themes themselves are pretty mediocre compared to the new ones but if anyone wants to tip me for inspiring much of these css shenanigans in the first place with data-tag request, dark theme & colors... here's my hat: paypal.me/complice
@Michaeljon Jump straight into TMAHE. Ways of Attending is nearly redundant once you've read this thread (which was the point—the core ideas needed to be liberated from that weirdly expensive 35-page book)
meta-workflow for developing workflows
@RobertHaisfield @vgr @QiaochuYuan @Meaningness @visakanv @RoamResearch Yuppppp all of these are vital. I didn't appreciate the speed thing when I first wrote that thread because I had almost nothing on my roam and it was faster then.
@RobertHaisfield @vgr @QiaochuYuan @Meaningness @visakanv @RoamResearch @Conaw how hard would it be to load the database into memory piecemeal, starting with only the content on the current page then recursively resolving block refs? Hm, that sounds like it might be awful actually haha. But something like that maybe needed.
@RobertHaisfield @vgr @QiaochuYuan @Meaningness @visakanv @RoamResearch @Conaw Probably immediate term thing is actually just like, the ability to somehow "publish" a given page, and doing so would mean that page would get: - a google-indexible url (maybe with a friendly slug too) - pre-rendering of the entire thing so it loads quickly - auto-shown in ToC
@RobertHaisfield @vgr @QiaochuYuan @Meaningness @visakanv @RoamResearch @Conaw And then once you load the page, it loads the rest of the DB in the background and then activate full roam mode once you click on something to go elsewhere. To be clear, this could also be used for the author, kinda similar to the current quick capture feature.
@ofmorningshift @nibrasibn @natural_hazard I spec'd this out years ago. I'm sure some of my answers are different now but honestly skimming this chart it still looks pretty accurate broadly speaking. Blog post elaborating: malcolmocean.com/2015/12/why-i-…
@ericlinuskaplan @cognazor Nonono it's not assuming anything—except that gravity goes down. A ball in a ⋃ is stable—a perturbation produces self-correction back to bottom (neg feedback) A ball balanced on a ⋂ is unstable—even a tiny perturbation produces amplified runaway change (pos feedback)
@vgr @RobertHaisfield @QiaochuYuan @Meaningness @visakanv @RoamResearch @Conaw Yeah I just mean for the workflow of loading a page. Beyond that, keep everything in-memory for sure.
@RobertHaisfield @vgr @QiaochuYuan @Meaningness @visakanv @RoamResearch @Conaw Ooooooooooooooooh I bet a third party could build a chrome extension that would intercept roam link clicks if a database already open and navigate within there. Maybe even an alt+click thing, idk. (Now who will build it... maybe @Conaw will retweet this idea and we'll find out!)
@ericlinuskaplan @cognazor Every positive feedback loop encounters limits to its growth, whether: • static (eg virus can't infect more people than there are people) • self-created (eg fire uses up the very materials it needs to keep burning) • agent-reactive (eg monopolistic company gets antitrust suit)
Me attempting to create a taxonomy of kinds of limits-to-growth. Curious to hear others' ideas, either things I've missed completely or further disambiguation within these 3.
Replying to @ponekarl
@ponekarl I'd have appetite to not just wish you luck but also cothink with you about how to approach this, on whatever scale makes sense!
Retweeted @reasonisfun
📃 NEW: Introduction to Alexander Technique – It's Not Posture lulie.co.uk/alexander-tech… Explaining these key ideas: 👁 Awar…
I've actually purchased the domain intertwingled.blog for my roamblog. Currently just redirects, but I'm delighted to own it.
@utotranslucence @chaosprime Alexander Technique probably relevant. Linking to latest thing about that, even though it's probably noncentral and I haven't read it yet 👇
Thread · Designing apps for common knowledge and shared media context
I think there's WAY more design work to be done for common knowledge creation in our apps. Gonna ideate in this thread and see what I come up with.
Twitter already does a thing where it shows you "Fred liked this", but it doesn't go back and tell Fred that you then liked it. Even if it did, it would still need to tell *you* that it told Fred, then it would need to tell Fred that it told you that... ∞
Exhausting. But what if you could make some sort of team (or pair) and then within that team it would periodically notify you in some sort of simultaneous way "you guys all liked/retweeted this!" such that the whole team would know that the whole team got the notification.
I've been thinking about this in relation to shared media consumption & its role in context setting for a team. We have a #media channel on our slack where we post links, and there's generally a rough assumption that everyone in the core team is caught up to the last few days.
At one point I tried to systematize this a bit with a spreadsheet where one axis was people and the other was media items, and people could then check off when they'd read/listenedto something, and what they thought of it. Could be used to generate a list of common readings.
Super hard to scale stuff like this though... upwards of N² complexity, maybe even N! depending on what you're trying to do with it. (I don't understand this in-depth but it's part of why music recommendations based on common listening still aren't yet blowing all of our minds.)
@utotranslucence's Relational Exegesis zoom events produce a similar powerful effect somehow, by having people read a book aloud together & comment on it. Rich convos afterwards, from a common meaningspace created by the collective.
Having people read aloud & comment on a google doc together live dramatically increased the sense of the others BEING THERE. Contrast with a call where a speaker presents then people discuss. Conceptually we know we heard the same content, but you don't feel it in the same way.
(There are other issues w speaker presentations too, in that they tend to invoke Q&A and thanking dynamics etc, rather than people connecting deeply 1-on-1 & in small groups. Weird authority stuff, that was actually topic of 1st Relational Exegesis event)
Anyway, I don't feel like I have good answers but I'm seeing ways in which truly-common knowledge (on various scales) is a profoundly scarce resource atm and I think whatever companies figure out how to generate & organize it will make a lot of value & maybe even a lot of money.
@KevinSimler @MatjazLeonardis Here's my contribution:
Retweeted @MelancholyYuga
Some say "as rodents, so with man", Some say "IN MICE". From what I've seen of pharma plans I'd want to test my drugs i…
@Conaw @RobertHaisfield @vgr @QiaochuYuan @Meaningness @visakanv @RoamResearch Ohhhh right, so it wouldn't even per se have to be particularly cached like "in advance", you could just get the server to render the relevant subset, *using the same code* and send that. (I know the feel—Complice uses Node and we have a bunch of shared JS files which is 💯)
Retweeted @utotranslucence
Debating whether it’s better to make decisions with your intellect or your feelings is like arguing about whether you…
@Mappletons @EBoodnero @RoamResearch I've got Phillips Hue lights set up with webhooks to Complice, so that some turn 🔴&🟢 for pomodoro work&break periods, and others change to the goal color of my current next action. Will send pics once I figure out how to deal with my Hue Bridge having gotten confused.
Replying to @today4evr
@jrigarza Sure! Here's the link, you can make a copy. If some of my mutuals wanna play around with having a version of this that we're actively using, that could be fun! docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…
@meditationstuff 1 × a lot I have a spatial synesthetic mapping of my own experience of time. I know when things are like you know where objects are in your room. Not that good with third person history though, as... it usually doesn't have enough detail for me to really create a navigable map.
Replying to @today4evr
@jrigarza @ericlinuskaplan @cognazor Yeah, I felt like the first two had a deep connection, but it also felt worth distinguishing them. I don't think my examples are ideal for illustrating the difference though.
@Conaw @azlenelza Pretty sure the site with the zoomy horizontal stuff is completely separate, and it's just the basic chrome that matches here. Take a short walk then go try to get some sleep again man 🙏
There are way too many dimensions that want to be represented here for a 2D spreadsheet to be remotely adequate. I think @RoamResearch will ultimately (1-2 years) answer this by allowing data to be entered in a kind of natural format, then visualized in many different ways.
eg I have a *different* sheet in which I track minutes towards a given book on a given day. It's 6+ years old, and it's been really cool. Link to chart: malcolmocean.com/bookreading Has incentivized starting books & also dropping ones that aren't worth it: malcolmocean.com/2014/07/focus-…
Then there's also a beyond-2D-ness in the original chart above, where for each person I have a "status" column and a "rating" column. And there could be many more but it would get too cluttered!
In Roam, I think it would be workable to track the reading over time & rating of the book using pretty simple natural language like [[May 30th, 2020]] - [[Malcolm Ocean]] read the first third of [[The Box by Marc Levinson]] - #solid learning about [[Moloch]] re globalization
And then there would just need to be a module that could parse all of that data and display it in a spreadsheet. And that sort of thing is on @Conaw's roadmap, both internally and in terms of roam-as-a-platform-I-could-build-that-on. Hence:
@Conaw @azlenelza Hmm yeah... might be possible with just-css to like, convert the way that currently sidebar items stack vertically into something more like @andy_matuschak's thing. Though the overall vibe would be very different I think.
@rjgoodin Yup, was thinking of netflix problem when I wrote this next tweet. Had half-forgotten til I saw your tweet above that I learned about the netflix problem from you! (next to the KI symposium room)
@diviacaroline Huge appreciation for you talking proactively about the error! This, combined with my general expectation of your epistemic standards etc being quite high, is generating a kind of second-hand humility. Like "oh, I could make such an error too"
@danielfschmidt "vibe"
Retweeted @AdeleDeweyLopez
wish at least one city would experiment with just letting the protests/riots run their course without opposition, and…
Welp, that's enough twitter for tonight. I'm not getting anywhere trying to relate to today's USA news thru social media, from my room in Canada. I'm gonna go read a book about decade-scale stuff. To everyone reading this & everyone who needs to hear it: