I've missed blogs being like this. Rambling anecdotal stream-of-consciousness self-aware my-mom-reads-my-blog vibes. (I just came across this piece by googling "why isn't wax food"—still haven't found a satisfying answer) libbabray.wordpress.com/2007/12/23/i-h…
December 2022
tickle your viewpoint
least favorite thing about video/audio editing work is that I can't really listen to music while I'm doing it
@mattskala thank you! that's a very satisfying simple answer (to someone who knows a fair bit of chemistry)
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
Malcolm Ocean substack?
@benpence yeah it doesn't work perfectly but it does work somewhat
@AskYatharth like a laughing heart? or a laughing emoji with heart eyes? here's what gboard's got in terms of mashups
Replying to @MarmotRespecter
@MarmotRespecter @Slplss_In_Japan disc horse, nice
@visakanv wait'll you learn how to reference data from other sheets or from other whole... sheets (is there seriously not a different word for those? the subsheet in a given named file and the ~file itself)
ask "stupid" questions and if the teachers make fun of you get the fuck out
"if something feels off" includes simply "I don't understand" / "I'm not ready to move forward". it doesn't mean anything is bad. but if people won't let you slow down and try to force you to move on prematurely, THEN something is off—gtfo
not sure what to make of this in light of more recent stuff where Sam was like "ethics stuff was all a ruse" but I'm definitely propagating some deep model uncertainty about the whole thing. maybe I was straight-up fooled by a lying sociopath? reality's probably even weirder.
@visakanv spiritual paths/schools/teachers and unlike marriages there are absurdly few modern exemplars of people who've even *tried* to make such a commitment, let alone succeeded
Retweeted @DRMacIver
OK, I think I've tested this enough, and am now reasonably committed to the conclusion that I will not sign up for your onli…
@p_millerd renew my driver's license
@p_millerd wait shit this is gonna be more complex than I thought given my mess of nebulous travel plans. good thing I'm thinking about it now!
I just read @ungatedcreative's manifesto. I came to the whole world of stuff like non-coercive marketing from a very different path, so I didn't find much personal resonance in it (aside from as a consumer, somewhat) but it fleshed out his backstory :) ungated.media/manifesto/
suddenly occurred to me that there's a striking parallel between the Samsara short story and some quote (source?) that goes ~"to a buddha, everyone is awake; to a layperson, even a buddha is asleep" slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/04/sam…
trying to do good for noble or moral or compassionate reasons is good AND most of the world's effort towards good things comes from people trying to feed their kids much of the world's creativity towards good things comes from people trying to get laid or impress peers
infux
Replying to @madcatacres
@madcatacres @evolvable @brainnotonyet you could but it's only obvious that that's the thing to google if you already know that that's the relevant part of the message (otherwise it just reads as "this is a short message")
Retweeted @acesounderglass
and I think that's beautiful
Retweeted @relic_radiation
me to me, about feelings I don’t want to be having: well thank you for reminding me what I care about
does anybody know the source of this quote? some googling didn't find it for me
The definition of goals used for @CompliceGoals & the GCI workshops: Goal = recognizable desired state in the future, that causes you to act differently in the present so as to realize it What happens if you're missing pieces? youtu.be/paispraScb0
@MattBGilliland @Meaningness seems unfortunately likely although insofar as the models seem to also be helping people write things they DO understand... ...but I'll be interested to see whether that holds true for me, writing about obscure insights I just barely understand and afaik nobody else does
good exploration of, and proposed solution to, a big chunk of the "who gets to decide" paradox I guess you could say this is a specific way to operationalize consensus
@utotranslucence yes nonetheless, periodically attempt to
Thread · Index of the 100 video project · 1 of 77 tweets
vid 51 - presentation, riffing on a script (that was originally a thread) very easy way to do a dense video—share some thoughts I already organized into a twitter thread
DOES YOUR MOTHER KNOW YOU'RE GAY? SIR PRESUPPOSITION SIR!
something that's been unlocking for me over the last year: I can empathize however I want to and feel however I do when I do. I don't have to try to feel a particular way about a friend or homeless person who is suffering. I can be aware of them and simply feel how I do.
(of course, the people you're empathizing with may or may not feel that you care about them even if you feel you do... and you may be failing to actually imagine the world from their perspective, and they may be mad at you, or whatever)
@rachelclif than OP?
there's lots I understand that you don't and you would like to hear it and learn from me but— there's lots you understand that I don't and while that's true it's dangerous to listen to me because you might lose track of what you understand, that I don't
@sunofdopamine @justavagrant_ ah yeah, there is no "how would you feel if X?" there is a whole actual situation in which you'd feel however you'd feel, but you can't know that from this level of description
@Dandy_Roddick yeah I basically don't either and I wasn't particularly imagining charging for mine anyway
@edsaperia whoa, is that how this reads to you? hadn't occurred to me that it could possibly it's intended to be pointing at not doing a kind of violence to myself to force myself to suffer in particular ways and call it "empathy", but rather allowing my natural empathy to reveal itself
expired: God is a He tired: God is a She wired: God is a We
hey @LordChisholm this chapter of Alan Watts does a bunch of juicy talking about "it" and "everything" source: psychonautwiki.org/w/images/d/da/…
This is It and I am It and You are It and so is That and She is It and He is It and It is It and That is That.
I was going to do some writing today but then I happened to open this piece "undoing the pain" by @FioraAeterna and now I have to rethink things because it says almost everything I could want to say. Almost. "a guide to being free" docs.google.com/document/d/1lR…
whoa, this combined with pol.is could be really fucking cool.
Retweeted @tasshinfogleman
they don't tell you when you sign up for the internet that you're learning to notice, harmonize with, and participate…
well fuck
well fuck (specific prompt: rewrite Joan Osborne's song to something non-dual: "what if God was all of us?")
@Clogish 2nd try was just one line, as was 4th, both: "what if the divine was within us all?" 3rd, 5th, 6th are more song lyrics... a bit monist, but good. although I don't think they particularly scan with the original
@Clogish those were via chat.openai.com—kind of impressive to get full song lyrics from something supposed to be more conversational here it is from the playground. I like "with love and kindness just because"—like, no justification needed, just because.
@paul__is__here distrust theory disconnection theory no-shared-reality theory
Distrust theory: a synthesis of conflict theory and mistake theory, by GPT-3 this isn't... particularly useful, but it's... not wrong!?
SIR PRESUPPOSITION SIR
@tasshinfogleman learning how to tell people this and actually understand and convey what it even means... is part of that edge!
productivity is linked to legibility
fascinating article about how the basic racial classifications used in American forms are completely incoherent, and were explicitly stated never to be used in science/medicine or program eligibility, two of the main things they're now used for 🤦♀️ discoursemagazine.com/ideas/2022/09/…
Replying to @nat_sharpe_
@nat_sharpe_ aha, I found it! I'd saved it in my roam to tweet about later.
google docs has gotten so fucking cocky it insists on editing "centerlessness" to "centeredness" even though there's no way that the former could be a typo for the latter, and I've already added it to my dictionary. can't figure out how to fix ah wait found it
meanwhile the browser dictionary doesn't think either of them is a word so many different dictionaries, all wrong (all dictionaries are wrong) anyway, I have found the "Automatically correct spelling" checkbox and disabled it
....fascinating. I mean I guess maybe the "are you familiar with" sets me up for the possibility of "no", but this really underscores that this chat window does not interface with anything remotely resembling an ongoing agent
meanwhile... this is... true-ish? it sort of fails to really get at the core, which is that it is doing *some* sort of relevance process, but that also it isn't doing ongoing situated evolutionary relevance realization
@geostultus it's from the song lyrics of a song that there may be no extant recording of, quoted by Alan Watts in this book
@relic_radiation based although also a bit excessive
Me: Who is Malcolm Ocean? ChatGPT: [idk. maybe he's a private individual] Me: Tell me about Malcolm Ocean, who blogs about culture change and motivation at malcolmocean.com ChatGPT: [below image] Me: .....does it actually know who I am or is it just... no, no Forbes pub 😆
It looks like it basically knows about people who have wikipedia pages, but not otherwise? I asked about a real-but-obscure band (no wikipedia page) and it made up some shit and then claimed it doesn't know how to make up shit
Thread · Naming what GPT does: from 'genshit' to confabulation · 1 of 6 tweets
playing around with GPT is making me think maybe we need a new term for the sounds-good-but-isn't-coherent stuff it says it's not quite "bullshit", since bullshit is a bit more motivated & distracting from what's relevant "babble" is kind of it but it's too senseful for that…
I'm fooling around with ChatGPT, and figured I might as well ask it about the topic I'm writing about: what is coercion, in terms of perceptual control theory? the answers are... true, basically, but lack the insight that my post has.
okay this is neat. I figured I'd start my post with some examples of things that are and aren't coercion, and ChatGPT definitely seems to be tracking the same distinction I am (I'm not aiming to say anything original on that level)
on second run... nope, it gets it wrong. afaict all of the examples below except "being dishonest" are forms of coercion.
okay not bad. not as deep & complex as I was going for, but broadly true
this is not *quite* the distinction I was going for, but it does kinda map onto it to be clear, these terms (emotional coercion vs structural coercion) are ones I invented this year and haven't published on; it's inferring just based on the term names and context 🤯
Retweeted @breaking2morrow
@VividVoid_ There are no NPC, but many of us spend much of our time on autopilot. This is where compassion is necessar…
in which I attempt to get ChatGPT to talk to me in lowercase letters
one of the neat things about ChatGPT is how fast it can type and how many conversations it can carry out in parallel
@meanderingexile I don't have the reference but ChatGPT... maybe does?
the whole point of pronouns is that they're supposed to fade into the background
@nosilverv competing concepts of suffering
@nosilverv I tried asking ChatGPT and it basically just says "this is EA. this is Buddism. they are different. thus, maybe they aren't readily compatible" which is like those auto-generated "X vs Y" sites that don't actually compare they just say "X is A. Y, on the other hand is B"
@loopholekid @RichDecibels that would be more tough than others I think, since it requires keeping track of a lot of structure of how things relate, and making subtle inferences I think GPT would struggle w (speaking as someone who's gotten training in coherence coaching, which is roughly the same method)
@m_ashcroft highly likely. I've been exploring this myself (eg in this article) you might check out The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, about "Upper Limit Problems" malcolmocean.com/2022/11/my-res…
Replying to @ShayneLaughter
@ShayneLaughter @speakerjohnash the prompt was just the non-green text shown in the screenshot. it made it up based on the name I provided and the context although I guess maybe it could be based on papers like this which sorta talk about distrust theory digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/cgi/viewconten…
@meekaale relevant:
@lisatomic5 "you have a kind of eternal timeless beauty"
prompt: "write a loud exchange between an enlightened drill sergeant and a newly enlisted private, where the sergeant is giving the private dzogchen pointing-out instructions" "Good. Now pay attention. The first thing you need to understand is that you are already enlightened."
v3 is also good, in a different direction
ahahaha I love the "listen up! you need to wake up" at the start of this one "you are not who you think you are, maggot!"
Replying to @nat_sharpe_
GPT is pretty good at just generating more examples of stuff. and could also offer reframes following a template. good for therapy modalities etc that involve trying on different stories
holy shit I just asked GPT to come up with new terms for "de dicto" & "de re" and its answer is pretty good! "linguistic proposition" and "referential proposition"—this is original; those phrases don't show up elsewhere on the internet (retries weren't much)
GPT does portmanteaus. they're not particularly *good*, but for brainstorming..! cognipathy sensithink intelemo emotibrain thinkfeel ceremotive emotivate cogitfeel emotioncept cogitfeel mentiflect ideaemotion thoughtfeel thinkotion thoughtmotion mentifeel ideamotion reflectemote
> invent 10 new words that we could use instead of Korzybski's term "semantic reaction", since it's too cumbersome Mindspasm Thoughtstorm Brainburst Mentaloutburst Intellitantrum 😙👌 Brainwave Mentalwhirlwind Intellipeak Thinkflurry Brainstormer
poor ChatGPT has a bad case of "meaninglessnesslessness"-lessness
okay holy shit I am fairly impressed by GPT's ability to wander its way around new shit that I've made up
again, this isn't really saying much new or non-obvious, but it's doing a good job of rolling with the concepts laid out I couldn't quite figure out how to prompt this. there's a question nearby here to which the correct answer is something like "relevance"
afaik nobody else has tried to define "unit of ontology" before so it doesn't have any natural synonyms I haven't actually looked but yeah
outside of this, I wanted to see if it could simply figure out latin plurals to made-up words. answer... somewhat. took 4 tries. but it used it fairly naturally once I'd used it. about as consistently as humans do with eg phenomenon/phenomena
@bonkydog I haven't tried it but I intend to!
@embryosophy ....yeah 😅
@ladymcscope I mean GPT is the epitome of cargo-culting 😂 It's just remixing something into this military frame if you want good advice though probably the thing you want to do is set up the scene as a dialogue between a student and a teacher, maybe a teacher with a specific name or lineage
@ladymcscope it didn't do consensus buddhism here because I used the word "dzogchen" in the prompt which narrows it immensely (I didn't even use the term "buddhism") if I replace "dzogchen" with "buddhist" I get this
@nickredmark feels like the right direction yeah para-shit
don't forget to live in first person
don't forget to live in first person
Thread · Naming what GPT does: from 'genshit' to confabulation · 1 of 6 tweets
"-shit" might be the right suffix tho machineshit aishit neuroshit senseshit langshit genshit I feel like "genshit" is it.
have you tried feeding the problem into a generative language model?
@sunofdopamine @embryosophy @DarbraDawn "desire" is the classic translation of "tanha" (also translated "craving" or "grasping" or "fixating") "suffering" is the classic translation of "dukkha" (also translated "pain" or "unhappiness" or "unsatisfactoriness" or "bummer")
@DarbraDawn it me I am in this photo and I like it
@EyalShay2 working on it
@elonmusk should just rename the button, I keep forgetting and clicking it and regretting 😆
@petrichor_lull > I know I will like it when I do it maybe that's a roller-coaster of a sentence starts out with the confident "I know" and ends with a shrug of a "maybe" seems like part of you has the mic and is saying "I know I'll like it" and a different part has some other objection
@jessicamalonso yeah the main immediate impacts for normies will be in writing school essays and doing homework. which will be hugely disruptive beyond that, further implications will hinge on more specific applications. streaming vids makes a small diff pre netflix.
@jessicamalonso but more specific applications will come... at minimum various well-trained chatbots & storytelling bots to help with specific kinds of problems/challenges/situations from the concrete to the emotional to the technical to the spiritual
@jessicamalonso and then the other wave of impact on normies will be the dilution of certain types of stuff. in the same way SEO optimization has really fucked up search, generative text will create an absurd amount of CONTENT. idk exactly what the effect will be, but it'll affect everyone
"genshit" = the kind of almost-coherent stuff GPT comes up with when it doesn't quite know what's going on not all generated text is genshit! if it's: - factually answering a question - accurately summarizing something - reasoning appropriately that's something else
Thread · Words that are definitely words but my browser dictionary rejects · 1 of 219 tweets
"neologizing" is a word
Thread · Naming what GPT does: from 'genshit' to confabulation · 1 of 6 tweets
let's see if it catches on. maybe I'll get famous for coining this word #neologizing
@sunofdopamine @embryosophy @DarbraDawn .......it feels to me like that's what tanha is?
Thread · Naming what GPT does: from 'genshit' to confabulation · 2 of 6 tweets
ahh genefluff is also good
I seriously dunno how tf I didn't think of this myself but this is what it gave:
@__drewface @strangestloop I'm also keen to move in this direction, hmmm kinda tough given that one of my main fields IS kind of in the space of... not commentary exactly, but the whole collective consciousness becoming self-aware:
this seems like it's on the right track in terms of freedom of speech but not freedom of reach twitter.com/eigenrobot/sta…
hey @m_ashcroft, I had ChatGPT write a dialogue between Bill Powers & F.M. Alexander. it's not that good but it's kinda interesting
Retweeted @visakanv
a thing I’ve come to look out for is the amount of responsibility and ownership people take for their interpretations. A mino…
broke: use GPT to write your essays woke: use GPT to write a wrong-on-the-internet version of your essays, to motivate you to write something that's better
find the flaw in your plan by trying it and seeing what happens?
Replying to @nat_sharpe_
@nat_sharpe_ useless work, at that knowledge work answering questions that don't need answering because we already have the answers
I cannot repeat an idea, no matter how many times I've said it before, without finding a slightly new angle on it
I don't have to repeat myself but I am free to repeat myself
tweets are like utterances
Thread · Repeating and remixing across threads, blog posts, and canonical pages · 19 of 20 tweets
writing canonical resources is hard and confusing thread of me thinking out loud about repeating, remixing, and the differences between: - twitter threads (dated, can't edit) - blog posts (dated, can edit) - pages/canon (not dated, can edit)
from my DMs: > wanted to let you know I’ve been trying out complice and it’s been really useful - the whole non coercive approach is really like, relaxing > it feels good to use > Do you have any resources on non coercion as a concept? Like are there any canonical writings etc
so after sending a few links, I started writing a thread from @CompliceGoals to provide a complice-y introduction to non-coercion and non-coercive motivation and that's coming along
and while writing it I pulled up this blog post of mine since it seemed relevant and I was like "damn this already says most of what I want to say in this thread" malcolmocean.com/2022/02/toward…
but then I remembered what I just spent the morning talking about with @visakanv (recorded! will be live on youtube soon) which included a bunch of reflections on the writing process: remixing, repeating, writing 101s and canonical versions
and I realized that even if the "awayness can't aim" piece says literally 100% of what this thread needs to say, and perfectly, it says it inside a different container. it's not what someone will find if they're *looking* for resources on non-coercion
and so even repackaging the ideas inside a different question ends up being very different! this, but on a micro-scale, including my own ideas:
I don't want to become one of those guys who writes the same book 5 times in different contexts... ...but I am so far from that it's not really something I have to worry about. And it's not even bad that he does this—remixing something to a new context is helpful!
anyway, I'm going to try rewriting this, mostly, not trying to edit the other one to fit a new container, partially because I'm way better at writing than editing (and I enjoy it more) and partially because then I'll have more potential for new fresh ideas
although actually... maybe that's just not true. I've had lots of fresh ideas in the course of editing old posts and sometimes those ideas are so fresh they then make it hard to publish the thing because what felt almost-done now feels woefully inadequate
which is an argument in favor of just publishing things now eg I started trying to edit this thread into a blog post and ended up flipping inside out and rethinking the whole frame.
but part of what makes things difficult I think IS actually the aim of creating a CANONICAL resource that was easy to write as a thread, since it was overtly a draft, but with my blog posts I feel they want to be more DONE before I publish them
part of the magic of being unable to edit twitter threads is that they HAVE to always only be a snapshot of how you were seeing it at the time. they can't be "kept up to date with the latest insights"
but weirdly it feels more easy to publish a page on the complice site that I could edit later, than a blog post that I could edit later. I think that's partially because many of my reads come from the post being sent as a newsletter....
...but also... a blog post FEELS like a final thing, but because it DOES have a date on it, it becomes complex to edit it because I neither want to imply that: 1. I stand behind all confusions remaining post-edits 2. I already had shit figured out years ago
somehow there's a sweet spot where something can be written as a snapshot of my learning at a point in time, and also its potency and clarity stands the test of time and it becomes "canon" I feel like I really achieved this here: malcolmocean.com/2017/11/transc…
that post now contains one [EDIT] parenthetical, but otherwise remains essentially the same except for maybe a few links added to pieces I hadn't yet written years later I reflected about the nature of unintegrated understandings:
what even is a tweet? what is an utterance? what is a thread? what is a post? what is a book? what is an essay? what is a conversation? what is a public collection of notes?
we are still just barely understanding the nature of the mediums we are participating in and I think that's beautiful
meanings of "canon": 1. what is the first answer I give to how to answer this question or where to start on this topic? 2. what's everything on this topic I'd consider to be worth reading / not confused 3. what posts can a given group all assume each other has read?
Thread · Canon is emergent, not written as canon
canon is emergent
even in the original sense of canon as excellent or supreme books, which began as an extension from the authoritarian canon of the bible... ...those books weren't written AS canon. they BECAME canon when they were selected
likewise, what forms contemporary canon for a given group of people doesn't per se know that it's going to be canon when it's written of course, some blog posts know they're NOT going to be canon, but the question of what IS canon is subject to the sands of time
the @LessWrong books are a great example of how to approach this: they don't even start trying to pick the "best of 2019" until 2021. a whole year must pass—what do people keep going back to?
hmmm... many meanings!
anyway, it seems to me that writing posts INTENDED to be canon is really hard because it sets up a whole perfectionistic vibe, and that having an iterative approach is better and maybe I want my posts to be almost like... numbered as v0.9, v1, v1.1?
although also like, when I started trying to edit this into a post, it changed so much that it isn't even necessarily accurate to call the new version I might publish "v2" of the same thing, except insofar as both might be titled "what is coercion?"
but then maybe that's a sign that that's a bad title! and "an initial PCT lens on coercion" would be better for the first one and "coercion and collapsed awareness" would be better for the second one! "what is coercion" sets the post up to BE canonical! maybe that's a mistake!
this is, I think, btw, why it's so easy to write something up when someone else has just written up a wrong version you cease trying to write the perfect canonical version, and instead seek to write something that's at least better than their shit version
let us thank annoying wrong people, for giving us (memetic) evolution
in the world of no feedback loops 🤦♀️ the guy with mediocre feedback loops is king 👑
wow, I love this poster from @worrydream feedback loops are king source: worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces/
Retweeted @CompliceGoals
it would be bad if I didn't ≠ it would be good if I did
Retweeted @CompliceGoals
the point of coercion is to generate a sense of "I must" non-coercion is about releasing all sense of "must", and feeli…
why "independence" but "codependency" -e / -y? uhhh wrong answers encouraged but right answers also welcome
new blog post! inspired by my thread on "canonical" writing earlier today, I decided to just publish this old piece with minor edits, and then I can ALSO publish another piece later, rather than try to make MALCOLM'S ONE DEFINITIVE INTRO TO COERCION 😅 malcolmocean.com/2022/12/coerci…
I haven't been very into the Stories feature, mostly because it felt forced upon me. But reading this article I got a clearer sense of the role: it's to create an affordance for people to DM you. Hmm... what to use it for? ift.tt/IKGJ02R
amazing lil thread I love that my friends look a few steps ahead to the attractors and systems dynamics
Thread · Obligation as a coercive confusion hiding the desire to help
finally got around to reading @TylerAlterman's powerful & beautiful EA critique it lays out very clearly how obligations are a coercive confusion that distracts us from our *desire* to help forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AjxqsDmh…
> The thing underlying my moral “obligation” came from me, my own mind. This underlying thing was actually a type of desire. It turned out that I *wanted* to help suffering people. I *wanted* to be in service of a beautiful world. Hm.
> It made me angry. I felt like I’d drunk the kool-aid of some pervasive cult, one that had twisted a beautiful human desire into an internal coercion, like one for a child you’re trying to get to do chores while you’re away from home.
I also left a comment here reflecting on how while I didn't get the obligation bug I did get a bunch of panic, which is a different kind of awayness-based collapsed-awareness motivation. forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AjxqsDmh…
what's a thing you've said yes to (or might say yes to) that feels more like a burden than an excitement (even if it's somewhat exciting) can you let it go? can you practice saying "no"? if you're trying to think of something & not coming up with anything... practice with this!
it continues to be offensive to me that when I go to save a song I like in youtube, it defaults to putting it in the same playlist as the last playlist I used for a video I *uploaded* using the same playlists for both is so WEIRD
@DanielTabakman musing
@JoachimBrackx @ReneeSolana ooooh Relating To Self sounds like the sort of podcast I'd love to be on!
@relic_radiation my view of this, late at night while I have my browser inverted:
@nosilverv depends, but lately I'd say the main flavors include: transcendent, relaxing, bonding, trippy, no-self, energetically overwhelming, heart-opening, grounding, intense other vibes: playful, freeing, intense (in some completely different sense), awkward-but-meta-relaxed
Retweeted @Morphenius
Instructions add doing. If doing it already made sense, then the listener would just do it w/o effort. So if s/th is hard,…
muahaha just added one of those lovely walls of testimonial tweets to the GCI site complice.co/event/gci?tw=m…
muahaha just added one of those lovely walls of testimonial tweets to the GCI site check it out live: complice.co/event/gci?tw=m…
This is what the GCI above-the-fold looks like right now and I really feel like we can be saying something better than "Get somewhere this year." with our giant text. Ideas from people who've been to GCIs before?
here are some ideas the GCI team just brainstormed. which do you like best?
new ideas for a tagline for our Goal-Crafting Intensive plz go vote
@AskYatharth "an effortless container" (which is quoting @abhayance)
@nickredmark might need more yes then
this thread is now also a video! (not verbatim reading it out, but basically riffing off it as an outline) youtube.com/watch?v=paispr…
@CompliceGoals the original thread:
I've been interviewing a bunch of active complice.co users, to learn more about who uses it and why. Sam reflected that one particular problem it solved for him was having a good answer when people asked "what have you been up to?" 😅 youtube.com/watch?v=DRex6v…
@Clogish align your intentions? appreciating it
@m_ashcroft I'd love to read it! We need to tell more of these stories, because they're really different. @ungatedcreative's manifesto describes how he came from basically the complete opposite direction!
@Morty_Josh oooh, elaborate? what kinds of entities are you talking about?
@Morty_Josh oh huh, I initially thought you were talking about the origins of everything, but then it occurred to me that maybe you were basically pointing at Gall's Law
@captain_mrs true except for the part where not-interacting is a kind of interacting but it's a kind of disconnect
@ThinkNBoutStuff @wwa_3 there's wisdom in seeing how to count all of those things as part of "doing something different" that doesn't mean that someone simply has the *choice* to do something different (I can't tap my trust fund because I don't have one) but still the other view is also useful tho
@uberstuber yup
@FelixDelong that's what it's for!
@eshear even more simply: shaped by what works and what doesn't work whether that's interpreted in terms of reward & punishment is an additional layer added on top
@_apollo_ten ah cool, I'll add it to the list of competitors etc (which at some point I'm intending to put on the site itself)
Retweeted @visakanv
it's good for a person to experience multiple social contexts it's not healthy to have most of your life overly constrained…
@hamnox @Meaningness ahh true
Thread · Index of the 100 video project · 1 of 77 tweets
vid 52 - conversation / user interview someone told me awhile ago that they'd like to see some unedited conversations with people reflecting on their use of Complice, and that's great for me since I like talking and don't like editing!
@michaeljelly oooooh patter and sophistry are onto something
@uthmanzi @lisatomic5 yesssss
@anthonycclemons it's not! I'm not opposed to the whole thing, I think it's very cool it's just... unhinged
@AskJibran @strangestloop stew that had been refrigerated twitter.com/nat_sharpe_/st…
hey I think this thread aged pretty well "our current ai bots are basically left hemispheres" ...still true 3y later! the AIs are slightly more self-aware now but still are fundamentally performing confabulation, not situated cognition
@AnneSelke oooh I like "goals, plans, and unblocking" that would make for a good title for an article about GCI actually!
@RichDecibels yeah confabulation basically is 100% the thing though I still feel like we could use a particular term for the AI version I guess both AIs and left hemispheres (the human confabulators) are kind of dissociated from reality oh hey this thread aged well
Thread · Naming what GPT does: from 'genshit' to confabulation · 1 of 6 tweets
Aha! Thanks @RichDecibels & @jillnephew what GPT is doing is ✨ confabulation ✨ not a coincidence: both the AI & the left hemisphere of a split brain patient are disconnected from reality, so so is what they say, no matter how articulate!
@catdevmdstat nice
@kevin_arlin so I'd have thought this too if I hadn't recently heard @vervaeke_john cite Frankfurt while talking about bullshit as something a bit more insidious... as a kind of distracting from even tracking truth at all but maybe GPT does do this, in the same way the left hemisphere does?
@romcomsponcon that would make a decent name for a GPT summarizer
@cwkoss managers will generally not straight up make up clearly-false-if-you-check shit because they could get in trouble for that & the style seems to default to corporate but you can also get it to write in any style if you tell it:
@ladymcscope @virajsinha they're definitely related phenomena though
Replying to @KikiSchirr
@KikiSchirr phoniphony
@DarbraDawn ICYMI "desire" is a really bad translation of "tanha" so the idea that you should be without desire is either a confused translation or a psyop from someone who wants you to not have desires
@DarbraDawn ahh looks like people indeed got into this in the comments still, worth having hoisted it up to the top
@haarball_ ah I see you're also succeeding at this:
@sonikudzu 🫶❤️🩹
@AlxAndrws huh I tried playing around with this and it couldn't even remember in the first place. based on what you said, I was expecting it to tell me it had forgotten, then nonetheless remember, but... wow.
@m_ashcroft I tried "In this dialogue, the two of them are familiar with each others' work already [...] This exciting conversation is technical and at the edge of their thinking. We don't expect most readers to be able to follow it, but we're sharing it anyway." but it didn't help
@CarnunMP I have a video about this, too! youtube.com/watch?v=lm2kv_…
very cool to watch my thoughts get remixed:
@niftycorp For almost any struggle, there are lots of other people grappling with it, but in order to find out and connect with them, someone has to talk about it, like Sam did here! What have your struggles with this been like? What has helped?
Retweeted @RomeoStevens76
Good integration is both analytic and emotional work. It is willingness to get your hands dirty with messy spaghetti co…
"if that's incoherent, I can elaborate or you can ask chatgpt" — someone to me just now (via chat)
any problem of scarcity can be reframed as a problem of abundance (some more absurdly than others) why? same problem, but now it's a possibility field rather than a minefield towardsness instead of awayness
Retweeted @CompliceGoals
The Complice daily workflow: 1. 🤔 choose goal-oriented actions (set intentions) 2. 🔥 do stuff (pick a next action, set a…
@eshear yeah, this principle might help:
@AskYatharth @eshear yeah, one of the fun ways to break the word is to explore the possibility that nobody deserves anything we don't deserve bad things we don't deserve good things we don't deserve what we've got we don't deserve what we wish we had these can all be true
Retweeted @eshear
The word “deserve” and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
say the obvious even if you've said it before
your worldview has evolved since the last time you said the obvious
@johnvmcdonnell @utotranslucence was excited when ChatGPT gave her a detailed cited strategy-relevant answer in seconds that would've taken an hour of research to find, until we checked & found ChatGPT had confabulated the name/year of the paper it got the info from😭 so who knows if true info?
Retweeted @johnvmcdonnell
It is very unfortunate that the AI researchers who coined the term "hallucination" didn't know the medical term "confab…
@ClickingSeason ooooh, yeah, parasitic. the memetic equivalent of a cuckoo bird
Retweeted @strangestloop
@tasshinfogleman @strangestloop @selentelechia yesssssss the purpose of my "what if we made it good tho?" videos is to transmute the pain into possibility
@SlatorH @AskYatharth @eshear you what?
@ThinkNBoutStuff @cybrdelic @wwa_3 You guys both have good points. If you're gonna hang out in my mentions, I must insist that you attempt to find a deeper wisdom implied by their synthesis, rather than wasting your time treating each other as fools.
I'm... gonna pay $2.74 for some flossers and $4 of digital content. unit economics what
open the door get on the floor everybody fuck the egregore
Retweeted @ImagesAlbum
@AskYatharth resonance/meaning sync sync
Retweeted @RichDecibels
I'll try to disagree with you like that little piece of grit disagrees with the oyster
rather than trying to stay in touch with your insight, notice that every moment of frustration is actually an invitation to get back in touch with it
I drop balms
worst link preview of all time
during a pomodoro, the intention for the pomodoro is free to veto any other intention/inclination/urge during a break, any intention is free to veto any other intention/inclination/urge
"what is magical about it... is really being intentional about your year, in a community with fellow people who have that same intentionality... and it's like a whole floodgate of possibilities opens up" short clip of Christo talking about his experience of the GCI workshops:
For more information or to sign up, check out the link below: Includes: 📺📄 high-quality content (videos & exercises) 🍅👥 structured co-working on goal-setting & planning 💬💡 live coaching - bypass blindspots complice.co/event/gci?tw=c…
Retweeted @aleksil79
you keep using words I don't think they mean what you think they mean
Ah wow I love the descriptive vibe of this list—not reasons you should feel overwhelmed, but reasons you might already be.
@visakanv Yeah! Like we talked about: great, they're gonna X, so I'm free to focus on Y!
@nosilverv Translated
@DRMacIver Great point. I think this is due to a few kinds of equivocation: - something similar to the conflation of consensus and contractual agreement - people interpreting any consequences as *punishment* and saying "you don't have the authority to punish me"
I was an "I don't have any trauma" guy 6 years ago and 3 years ago I realized that was uhhh me disowning certain experiences and feelings 😬 twitter.com/sashachapin/st…
@nickredmark Getting started with my day. Went to twitter to check one thing and have been scrolling. Time to log out — I don't remember why I was logged in on mobile, since that's an antipattern. Thanks ❤️
chakras but for two-person systems
consider something you understand that others don't — maybe a recent tweet or blog post see if you can articulate it as a tautology share results below
shoulds are debt proof by etymology: 1. "should" is synonymous with "ought to" 2. "ought" is archaic past tense of "owe" 3. "owe" is synonymous with "be in debt to"
*points at moon* 👉🌕 "so! this is how pointing works" "wow, beautiful moon" "it is! and this is how you can point at it, or anything else, to help someone noti—" "it's so round and bright" "..."
why doesn't @googledocs have a blockquote element? gmail has it. gdocs has clearly given up on being perfectly exportable to docx or whatever. and it now auto-**bolds** markdown, and markdown has >quotes probably a matter of time at this point, but it's about time!
just rewrote a reply old ~ I request/suggest you don't send me RTF files in the future new ~ if you send a .RTF, I won't open it. I'll ask for it in a different format shift from disempowered to empowered. stating a clear boundary: I don't read RTF files. tasshin.com/blog/boundarie…
@meditationstuff @xuenay I agree they seem like they should function in that sort of way! but I just spent awhile painstakingly looking back & forth trying to spot the edits someone made to a piece I'd written, only to later realize that in HER copy they were highlighted green → fuck that shit
@meditationstuff @xuenay (in her editor, rather, not her copy) at any rate, "work for anyone" is thus apparently false at this point! the rtf standard hasn't been updated since 2008 and gdocs doesn't support importing it at all
@RichardMCNgo 👆 "so! this is how good yes-and-ing works..."
@eshear oh fuckyeah, amazing remix of our two tweets when I first saw your tweet I suspected you were probably seeing something about "deserve" that I wasn't, even though I've been saying stuff like this👇 for 5+ years:
@ScottCl03147460 "guilt"... huh, yeah also maybe has a connection to "debt". makes sense!
@meditationstuff @xuenay or, for this use case, google docs, which is what I suggested as an alternative
@Sameerish3re that's kind of my deal
@mary_bajorek one of the most extreme cases: suppose you've a scarcity of food on an island where you can't get more, thus you're going to starve to death. what do you have an abundance of? you-ness. then you can orient to what to DO with that abundance (enjoy remaining moments somehow)
@visakanv curious what digested further about this
@AskYatharth yo this is a good one can we make it even obviouser?
Thread · Words that are definitely words but my browser dictionary rejects · 1 of 219 tweets
"obviouser" is a word it's kind of ugly but I just used it without thinking so it's clearly a word. lots of existing words are also ugly—still words
Retweeted @StupendousGrav1
A common implication of "should" is "won't". Then, it's as if a debt is being referred to and also a penalty for not r…
@DRMacIver ah yeah more precisely... I think sometimes people are sort of saying "you don't have absolute moral authority [like my parents/teachers/priests had for kid-me]" which is true like you get to punish in a local sense, and this will affect them, but what's Good is still negotiated
great thread remixing & synthesizing a bunch of thoughts from people around here
guys we're doing it
@kcorazo @nntaleb say more about how it connects with being a philosopher-king! makes me think of the first few episodes of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, which I've just been listening to, but I don't have a clear association
@bierlingm and yet
@RichDecibels I had a really trippy experience in October when I instantiated an event that was "hosted" by a piece of writing I'd done (the below letter + a framing piece saying that at this particular place/time people could converge to explore it) malcolmocean.com/2022/10/open-l…
@RichDecibels the writing explicitly said "Malcolm Ocean will be at the event as a fellow participant" It made really salient (& easier to let go) any urges to teach or be an authority during the event—even kinds of authority I often adopt in situations that look *nothing* like me hosting!
few understand this and that's okay I will keep pointing at it until many do
@RichDecibels oh fuckyeah thanks for boosting this this is basically my gospel
Replying to @EverFallibly
@heyorson @RichDecibels looking at what you wrote, I can appreciate that you were engaging in a collaborative (not adversarial) stance towards trying to understand *reality*, but you weren't trying to understand *what he was seeing* you mapped his words onto what you were looking at and they seemed off
@RichDecibels @micro_solid the important thing is that you've found a way to feel superior to all three 👍👍👍
@heyorson @RichDecibels if you instead can consider that even if he's not seeing what you're seeing, he's seeing *something* and attempting to describe it, then if it doesn't look that way to you, you can assume you're not looking at exactly what he's looking at / from the same angle hence Rich's 180°
@RichDecibels yeah! as I wrote in that post: > I saw that I’m the sole authority on how collaboration works for me, but that I don’t get to tell anyone else how collaboration needs to work for them we're all simultaneously both
@bobz44 @strangestloop @RichDecibels if you've found full 100% agreement with anyone (let alone everyone) regarding the entire universe you're either fooling yourself or you're god and you have a lot of work to do there are always more things to understand together!
@bobz44 @strangestloop @RichDecibels but let me take my own advice and explore your view here a bit... what feels in contradiction with materialism here? I'm not quite seeing the thing you're pointing at, even though it sorta feels familiar to me-from-some-years-ago
@bobz44 @strangestloop @RichDecibels there's an alternative to argument that still doesn't collapse or ignore the difference in views: 3D
@RichDecibels @heyorson yeah one of the magical things about this game is that when the idea of it even being *possible* to do things wrong dissolves, you realize that the results of your mistakes & confusions contain the very wisdom you were missing: learning more in this vid youtube.com/watch?v=Ub4_kr…
@RichDecibels @heyorson in the meantime, any social anxiety response that's present also makes a lot of sense, given the prominence of other contexts where a misstep can provoke harsh judgment mostly I'm seeing love & encouragement in response to you, at least from me & Rich & this scene is ♥
@myceliummage amazingly there's some real-time building up of such wisdom over here 👇, downstream of a reply a QT of a reply to a reply to this tweet 👆
@myceliummage there are two halves to this DD's work (eg Beginning of Infinity) touches both 1: a deep memetic attractor for cultural wisdom to contain patterns that fuck over the individual 2: most *helpful* cultural wisdom got thrown out when we started realizing we could question & reinvent
don't focus on avoiding the "don't hit the tree" failure mode
it recently occurred to me that phrases like "in good faith" sort of have to be with respect to some known shared protocol (even if implicit, like Grice's maxims)
finding myself starting to muse about principles for an ambitious world-caring philosophy that has the rigour of EA but is thoroughly desire-based rather than obligation-based and many other axes of improvement. comment below with the sorts of differences you'd like to see
awayness can't aim
wisdom = ability to take skillful action; ability to not have to make hard, terrible choices; ability to realize when a choice between bad and worse is an illusion (from meditationbook.page)
what's your intention stack at this moment? eg I'm tweeting this tweet having had this "intention stack" thought inspired by a tweet linked on MarkDL's protocol where I went to look for his take on "choice" because my main intention right now is editing some writing re choice
reconciliation emerges truth
@fyrescotch @Arimil_ @Shannon_Breezy1 @elonmusk it looks like some people are parsing this as: 1 [ no tweets [ever]] & [ no log in for years ] while others are parsing it as 2 [no tweets & no log in] for years elon's original tweet is grammatically ambiguous so he could mean either! tho given his "obvious" my guess is #1
@elonmusk since some people are confused & concerned in the replies, it might be helpful if you clarified if you mean zero all-time tweets or zero recent tweets seems to me like the only obvious deletion right now is zero all-time tweets
Retweeted @yoltartar
@RichDecibels @heyorson I just realized that one way to look at this is that by starting inside their frame, you're demonstr…
@caitlynslashai niiiice real good
@ScottCl03147460 hmmm maybe we mean something different by obligation do you have a piece of writing talking about how obligation is experienced and understood at Turquoise? (I picked the first cool color in Tier 2 since Yellow's warm)
Replying to @Slplss_In_Japan
@Slplss_In_Japan @aleksil79 yup
how are you allowing things to unfold today?
maybe we can figure it out together
I would pay a lot of money to have an app that told me when my downstairs neighbors were out so that I could blast music loudly at those times. I LOVE the experience of working with loud music, AND I don't want to cause other people annoyance, and this is an information problem!
Thread · Things I want to exist: apps, tools, and funding mechanisms · 1 of 21 tweets
an app that lets neighbors coordinate when they're going to be out so that they can enjoy loud music without bothering each other too much
phrased another, more symmetric way, to emphasize the consensuality of this my current neighbors also like loud music, so they'd probably be into this
but we can't just text each other to let each other know—multiple people live in each unit, and it would be a logistical pain it would have to happen ambiently via phone geofencing or something like that
you are free to do what you want but you are not free to do anything else
are these GAN-generated? the one in the middle feels like... an apple on a tree, but not actually tho
@AskYatharth I do, yup which means that the "keywords" keyword is a super high-density one to search!
I always delight in how twitter's font has nice arrows ←↑→↓ (unfortunately the next one (u+2194) gets turned into an emoji instead ↔ ) they fit really elegantly into text: the "red→blue transition" contrast with emoji or the dinkier ones in the screenshots below
re the is−ought problem where did we get the idea that there is an objective "ought" in the first place? my first guess is that it emerged in the red→blue (spiral dynamics) transition as a cheaper way to maintain power: justifying, rather than pure threatening
@rachelclif that is what I would say in a new such instance now, but in this situation it was part of a much longer message to someone whose RTF files I'd opened before (including this most recent one that I'd had a frustrating experience with that I wanted to convey)
@rachelclif hmm I neither understand this nor see how it's a tautology but it's intriguing and I would like to understand it what is congruence? what's the context of this utterance?
@AskYatharth at your service 😘 (also apparently at least for you I managed to succeed at creating the canonical post I decided not to try to make! since this is definitely the sort of phenomenon associated with canon)
@ElodesNL yeah I was delighted when I found it (it was in a convo with @Morphenius I think) @AskYatharth found some good further remixes:
Thread · Objections reveal what the listener thought you meant
if I try to tell someone something, and they respond with an objection that's entirely irrelevant to what I meant what they respond with is entirely relevant to what THEY thought I meant*, and that's what I need to dialogue with *otherwise they would have said something else
what I've said above is technically a tautology, although I could imagine people not seeing that & rejecting it or what they think it implies which, interestingly, is an example of the phenomenon itself!
now, it *might* be that they got distracted or triggered by a particular word I used, and that if I try to explain again later using different language, then they'll be able to readily hear what I'm trying to say
or it might be that in fact they do understand what I mean in a local sense, but given other experiences and understandings they have, accepting what I'm saying would imply other things to them (but not to me) that they don't want to accept
& anything like that is part of what I need to deal with in order to get understood I don't need to myself see it how they do, but I need to acknowledge that (at present) they do, and that whatever new understanding they end up with will need to incorporate all of their knowings
@AskYatharth yeah, nice! that's fucking great. reminds me of another ~tautology of mine that I haven't tweeted, hang on... (you don't actually have to hang on since I'm gonna tweet it before I tweet this tweet) ...boom:
what's great about the "wrong answers only" format? wrong answers only
@ultimape @visakanv yes, that's also a fun way to do it and honestly part of the nice thing about "wrong answers only" is it encourages people to reply with SOMETHING because there's zero pressure to say anything correct or useful creates a space of play, undoes the teacher vibe associated w Qs 🤯
@anielsen108 mmm, or "the best for us" which is maybe straightforwardly accurate with a coherent traditional culture but is absurd in our atomized chaotic cultural landscape now, even on a local scale
@tetranomos @ScottCl03147460 can you help bridge this for me? the connection between the etymology of guilt, debt, should and these images/texts
fucking amazing metaphor design what is a desk?
@DraumurNoire checks out
@AskYatharth I'm working on it! that draft is itself a year old—part of why I almost couldn't publish it is that it was already starting to feel like it's missing important stuff 😅
@AskYatharth I think both aims would be progressed on by you trying to rewrite my coercion thread, even if we expect the result to be "worse" as a thing to link people to
@AskYatharth interestingly I don't actually have this concern about you rewriting my post instead of linking to it
@AskYatharth but I think it's not just because role flip. it's: - I trust/like your thinking - your thread will get lil attn if bad - blog post itself short, easy to link (vs if someone tries to write a canonical book summary and people don't like it, those people will dismiss the book)
@lfstevens mmmmm yeah that's how chess centaurs work en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_…
@ScottCl03147460 @tetranomos I think you meant to flip the roles in half the story, but I get the point I don't see how it connects up with what @tetranomos said tho
@bobz44 @strangestloop @RichDecibels mmm, mhm where does materialism come in?
@bobz44 @visakanv @Nsousanis if it's not, it's probably not actually integrated, just one side masquerading as an integrated position
@aleksil79 seems tautological enough for me!
there is an objective truth to morality but it is not outside us it is a truth about what we want, collectively
new pith: just listen if listening to the rest of the world feels too hard, listen to yourself
we have everything we need in order to get to the future we're going to go to
what is so, is welcome
you are absolutely free to do what you want you are not free from the consequences of doing what you do you wouldn't want to be—otherwise what would be the point of doing it?
out walking with @Morphenius in SF and we ran into @s0ulDirect0r and went to The Center for cacao & an epic convo about collective consciousness, divine inspiration, and everything else
"just" is sus you can't "just" do something there are reasons you're not already doing it you need to find a way to do some version of the something while also satisfying those reasons and if you're not doing it yet, that means you haven't found it
Thread · Why the problem of evil rests on an incoherent omnipotence · 9 of 10 tweets
thinking of the classic trilemma of how there can be evil if god can be omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent my take: essentially what we imagine "omnipotent" to be includes arbitrary intervention, but such actions are illusory & so the idea god can take them meaningless
can god use his dashboard to select the leftmost half of the universe and delete it? of course the fuck not that makes no fucking sense
no more than god can have already sprooged eleventy colorless green ideas that are sleeping furiously this is highlighted by the classic "can god create a rock so heavy he can't lift it?" you fool. you absolute moron. your concept of god is irrelevant
...I really like the "you fool. you absolute moron." phrase for some reason but I want to be clear it's the memes here that are moronic not the people holding them like everything, they make sense from the inside!
the fact that we can imagine god reaching a giant hand down to do something to prevent evil doesn't make that make sense not "being able to do that" doesn't contradict god's omnipotence
it's the same error as thinking "I should just quit smoking" or "the government should just..." it's not that you CAN'T, but "just" is sus
god is the whole universe the whole universe knows what it's up to the whole universe wills goodness (as far as I can tell, and many have corroborated) the whole universe has the power to do whatever it in fact will do
these are not in conflict they may seem in conflict from a single person's narrow viewpoint but if you think god isn't omnipotent or omnibenevolent because god SHOULD do something god's not doing? uhhh. why do you think you know better?
PS: you are god—god's goodness is enacted (in part) by you, however it makes sense to you to enact it love and do as thou wilt (and start by loving yourself, if the rest feels too hard)
which is more your edge right now?
seems a bunch of self-coercion involves a game of chicken where each side dials up some sort of pain until one side relents the pain could even just be the intrinsic pain of inner conflict
Oh also the full convo with Christo about his experience of the workshops is here on YouTube (10mins) "the beauty of this community is the spirit underneath it... there's that true desire from the core, of levelling each other up... it's warm & nurturing" youtu.be/eMTqwH3pF9g
Thread · Index of the 100 video project · 1 of 77 tweets
vid 53 - conversation / user interview / testimonial had a convo with Christo about his experience of going to our workshops here's a clip; click through for the full 10min vid
@atthatmatt 😙👌
@wholebodyprayer hm? example?
@fluxe_e @AskYatharth hey @Morphenius it's the thing you're on about right now twitter.com/eigenrobot/sta…
@blancpain @markbao did you do this? nice work 🫡
@ScottCl03147460 on linux I insert them by pressing ctrl+shift+u to get "enter arbitrary unicode character" then I type 2192 which is the code for → I have a few dozen of these memorize; a small sample off the top of my head includes ÷×− ≠ ♫ ✈ ∴ ∞ ⋮ ∑ ° ± ₂ ² — ™
focus your time and energy on what you want to see moron
@AskYatharth hey, gotta focus my time & energy somehow
@prerationalist amazing mashup
@panchromaticity yeah, I wonder if they're actually training in part by how QUICKLY people select which ones are an apple on a tree vs not
@oloal @nibrasibn @threadapalooza you don't have to turn an essay into tweets you can just start by tweeting 100 things about hakomi etc etc, without caring that much about the flow between them
@visakanv Funk was born when James Brown decided that soul wasn't funky enough and started a new vibe where he yelled at his band members during the songs, not just after
@captain_mrs @visakanv @LordChisholm hook Visa up with that "origins of West Coast Swing" video you showed me (WCS is a mashup of a bunch of diverse styles, some of which are different offspring of Lindy Hop)
@sidewayskoyote mood
@visakanv you know, as an alternate option to QT for our friends, when it's countersignalling time
@kureshii_ you can just do the thing but you can't "just do the thing" unless you're already just doing the thing unless the only obstacle is that you THINK you need to do something else, in which case "just X" is saying "you don't need to do other things" which if it lands works great
@anactofwill there are conflicts but there are truths about these conflicts (& how they resolve) I can confidently guess that you are not conflicted between whether to throw a pizza at your son or whether to put ice cream in your mother's sock drawer bc like, why lol?
@DRMacIver say more?
@ScottCl03147460 objectively it's dynamic objective laws of physics also describe a dynamic world tho the laws in this case are about how morality is discerned and clarified and are contextual and I think a lot of them end up specifying "this won't work"
@cxgonzalez that is the entire puzzle short answer: we gotta get in sync in order to know!
Have you noticed? Productivity systems go stale. Focus on tasks makes lists aversive because they lose touch with what matters. Orienting by intentions helps you access your creativity in each moment, to move towards what matters. Read more: complice.co/intentionality
@a_stevenkey @khemaridh You might find this article helpful as a reframe: complice.co/intentionality
Thread · Commissioning illustrations for a Complice page
commissioned some art by @this_is_silvia for this new page on the Complice site! I wanna share our creative process so I'm gonna thread about it below! complice.co/intentionality
here's the first bit: my proposal, complete with a color palette based on the Complice landing page + "read the article to get a sense of the vibe"
initial sketches and feedback
hashing out details with the icons—the intentionality image doesn't have enough rest & play vibes
me thinking out loud about whether I want the lil ppl to be different colors, and realizing that it's best if they're the same color, to emphasize that this can be the same person in different modes, rather than the idea of fundamentally different people
so yeah! that was the collaboration here's a bit of how I think about collaboration, self-energizing motivation, win-wins, etc
I noticed, going thru this, that "prod guy sorta looks from the outside like they're doing a good job" got slightly lost not sure how to visualize that + the shoulder/jaw/forehead tension that shows up in forcy productivity tho 🤔 ideas? it's subtle stuff
someone should ask ChatGPT all 9 of these questions and watch it confabulate or whatever in response to the plausible but unsolved ones
apparently I'm the guy to try the tylenol one and it actually seems to recognize the limited knowing, once I asked the right subquestion: > It is not completely understood how Tylenol reduces the production of prostaglandins
Retweeted @nopranablem
This is so clearly a step up in framing! So many in the "productivity"/tools for thought space are already pointing to the…
reasonably balanced so far—neat I guess I sorta thought it'd be, and that's why it would be an interesting questions intriguing there's been no discussion I hope it's been useful for people to consider!
@RichDecibels I've been working on a way to feel superior...
@visakanv alive jungle bustly overflowing
@AbstractFairy mmmm yeah and the answer as always is "you can do whatever you want" but indeed some people like separating off certain modes of being from others
@TylerAlterman "sleeping" is what my mental autocomplete gave
@TylerAlterman scrolling on twitter
Replying to @trackpadfollies
@trackpadfollies @deepfates @tapir_worf whoa, don't outgrabe
Retweeted @95thoughts
@tapir_worf memome falls short, only applying to one person. Memetically, each of us is a single cell in the human organism…
Thread · Judging someone's expertise when you lack it yourself
the skill of fairly reliably assessing expertise in someone, without having expertise in the subject yourself feels like a very important thing to develop for oneself, one's kids, and hopefully for every member of society
as an individual, or in training kids or helping friends develop it... my sense is there are certain cues you can pay attention to in how someone is thinking, that can help you tell if eg they've considered alternate explanations for what they're observing
you can spot whether their confidence confabulates answers about everything, or whether they're aware of the limitations of their knowledge whether they can take in new questions and go "huh, lemme think" or whether they pattern-match everything to known Qs & give cached answers
you can learn to recognize signs of motivated reasoning etc signs of defensiveness vs curiosity, when presented with something that might contradict their model whether they trust themselves to figure things out or are actually deferring to someone else's orthodoxy
once we're talking about society-level training though, then if we train people to look for the sorts of signals I mention above, people will learn to fake them but at least some of these are hard to fake *well*
which means: as always with trust stuff, the thing to refine is your capacity to listen to your own sense of distrust the quiet voice that says "something's off here" if you can sense someone's intent—argue vs learn—that goes a LONG way, and you might not need specific cues
a caveat that sometimes the person arguing for a thing is arguing because they're afraid of losing face, not because they're uncurious in general they're arguing with someone who has failed to pass whatever threshold needed for them to feel open to engagement
but uhhh don't assess an expert by watching them talk with a journalist or critic watch them talk with someone else who's curious, or something
"balan" ≈ "phenomena that escape any fence you try to put them in", perhaps birds do this by flying away fire does this by burning through the fence exceptional animals do this by breaking your ontology women do this by illuminating the limits of your "woman" concept
@the_wilderless have you considered solving the problem by seeing it in terms of two warring factions and deciding you're not part of either?
Retweeted @utotranslucence
has anyone become massively more reliable to others without massively more self-coercion, guilt, shame etc? how did yo…
@AskYatharth sync, hopefully emotional or pragmatic or spiritual or all of the above
Talking about "tpot" as if it's A Thing is literally forgetting that "me and my friends" refers to a different group depending on who says it (and sometimes when) A: me and my friends are going to watch the game later B: wtf? no way, me and my friends hate football!
Replying to @selentelechia
@selentelechia Yeah great example of refusing to participate in someone's shaming frame
@visakanv why are you hurting my friend?
and I think that's beautiful
@sonyasupposedly @eurydicelives This is part of what's so fucking awesome about twitter. It creates a context for that to happen organically!
what about a list of things whose names are misleading... eg - Nevada City (a town in California) - Holy Roman Empire (which if you glanced at on a map you'd probably call "Germany")
@TylerAlterman I am very excited to read this story and would love to talk with you about the ideas while you're worldbuilding & ideating
@AskYatharth this is adding to inspiration I've been feeling coming... to publish like 100 "say the obvious" type posts about NNTD related topics
Retweeted @strangestloop
beginning to see a loop that was always there but wasn't noticeable until someone pointed it out. do you want this exper…
@visakanv @strangestloop suddenly became aware of the uniqueness of the present moment. like, the way I'm not quite the same guy as the one who read it the first time, before i
first reify then deify
@sullyj3 at no point did it refer to a well-circumscribed thing, that illusion just used to be easier to maintain the scene always had porous boundaries and if you asked people at that time who was in, I'm sure they would have disagreed then too (maybe *more* overlap, but still)
@nickredmark yeah I have some very rough ideas for how to build a bunch more of this into Complice, which I'm really excited about!
Replying to @monjerade
@monjerade @the_wilderless omg the hegel image yes, precisely
Hegel Exercises: How-to Guide Flex your perspective-taking muscles to strengthen them! 💪👁️ Step 1. grasp & release the thesis Step 2. grasp & release the anti-thesis Step 3. alternate between the thesis & anti-thesis until you can hold a synthesis of both
@iyaelsorai @caitlynslashai "surprised by anything they have to say" and "theory of mind" are different I know someone who can often predict people's behavior towards him more accurately than they can themselves, but he utterly fails to imagine what it's like to be them from the inside
Replying to @selentelechia
@selentelechia I love how she's starting to make sense of stuff
@strangestloop freestyle at an open mic in Glasgow about how I'd made a bunch of friends at a pub the night before ...is the first thing that comes to mind. many other contenders!
Replying to @selentelechia
@selentelechia @visakanv wow, gorgeous! makes me think of getting a tattoo... I'm recalling that 4y ago I was thinking of a "seadragon" tattoo, which at that time meant to me a synthesis of anger & grief I think I'd want him to look a lil less seahorsy
@AskYatharth very resonant with the concept of this video youtu.be/JaJMogEy0_I
@robertskmiles idk but I've come to realize that tautologies are great and I want a lot more of them in my life
@xp_enjoyer yeah that means you're part of what makes it what it is
@RichDecibels not as easy as I would like tho, and/or I can get way more in the habit of actually asking/checking it so thanks
@ReneeSolana I expected the "how" to be in the charts; from this I come up with: how = feel the adjacent feeling in the direction you want to move so if you're feeling hatred, you can't go straight to contentment, but you can go to jealousy, then to anger, etc prolly false tho lol
if customer support can't filter feedback up to the org's decision-making center then the organization is numb I almost said blind, but no—it can see, it just can't feel
what's a book you never opened but the title or subtitle still sticks with you and you feel like you learned something just from that?
tautologies offer a bridge between the self-evidentness of reality and the self-evidentness of logic
@khemaridh IFTTT widget on my phone for tweeting without going anywhere remotely close to *checking* twitter
Retweeted @vervaeke_john
I think the through-line of my work is the exaptive transmutation of raw relevance realization into resonance realizatio…
self-paced course + cohort-based course = SELF–BASED course
you know that phrase "stuck between a rock and a hard place"? 🌀⛵️🐉
thinking maybe @AskYatharth would be a good person to choose my @threadapalooza topic for this year
have I told you about the time I beat runescape? I was addicted to it then I beat the addiction this was a greater victory than is available inside the game mechanics
I've long thought that something doesn't really count as news if it would be just as much news if it happened again
@visakanv reminds me of my quip
trippy thing about how cameras are different from mirrors if you blink rapidly, you can look at yourself with your eyes closed
@Lev_Protter nice
@marco_giancotti I don't remember tbh it was more than half my life ago I think I just realized it wasn't satisfying me and stopped now I might advise someone change their password to something and stow it in some way they can't access for a long time or without much difficulty
@SeanMombo somewhere in the 20s iirc
Thread · Attendee reviews of the Goal-Crafting Intensive · 2 of 18 tweets
GCI shifted how @brandontoner thinks about goals, purpose, life, etc:
underrated life tip:
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
Our Goal-Crafting Intensive workshops have organically evolved a lot over the years. In fact, we're considering overhau…
@DRMacIver it's okay—the internet has also completely ruined English's grasp of what was formerly the English language
Replying to @alt_visa
@alt_visa here for this
Thread · How a clear new goal generates your next steps
When you choose & clarify a new goal, the vividness of that desired future draws you into it, today
Imagine finally getting your side-hustle started and profitable. That's probably not going to happen if you keep doing what you're currently doing.
But somehow, if you consider some different world, and it's clear you want to move towards it (maybe you don't!) then it'll suddenly lay bare: you gotta do new stuff to get there
And you may not know what you need to do—in fact, you almost certainly don't! But you can at least start down some new paths...
Don't get stuck here, but if the next step isn't clear, the next step is "find a plausible next step" Brainstorm ideas. Try stuff. Read a book. Talk to someone who did something similar. Sit and do nothing until a move arises.
You don't need to do the most important thing, either. Just find something that isn't obviously NOT the most important thing, and do that. Then do another.
Part of how you can tell you've set a new goal, on any timescale, is you have a clear sense of some new things that you're going to do. Some good examples from my life: 💿 record an album → list out potential songs 📈 grow Complice → fix site analytics
Generators for next actions: 🤔 list out decision options & criteria 🔬 set up better measurements / feedback loops 🌄 new daily habit until better one found ☎️ call a friend to ask for advice 📖 buy (or finally open) relevant book 👩💻 mkdir newproj; cd newproj; git init
It's all one step, then another. At most points in a project you have LOTS of potential next steps and in fact the challenge becomes picking which. This is where again, you keep the goal in mind as you consider each step. Which step fits the path best?
It's all a series of steps, but it's also learning. YOU are going to change and evolve. You'll develop new skills, and find ways to get help where you fall short.
Don't worry: you don't need to make all of those changes all at once. They'll happen on the journey, as you keep the goal in mind and take each next step towards it in the present. I knew how to code when I started Complice, but not much more!
I love helping people think through this stuff, because it's been so meaningful & satisfying for me to set aside standard life scripts and do what I want because it's what I want. And I love living with the consequences.
Fuck that sounds cheesy. It's true though. And part of what my freedom/consequences tweet is pointing at is the importance of embracing ALL aspects of the future you're envisioning. Otherwise despite "choosing" the goal, the conflict will cause resistance.
And honestly inner conflict has turned out to be one of the main things we look at at our Goal-Crafting Intensive workshops. The workshop content still starts with clarifying goals though, because otherwise there's nothing even worth being conflicted about!
We've got more sessions coming up, one this weekend and 4 in January. Hit this link for more info and/or to sign up. It's more of the vibe of this thread, but with a container to work on it plus lots of coaches to help you get unstuck. complice.co/event/gci?tw=m…
humans can have little a spiritual bypassing, as a treat
@strangestloop @Morphenius will want to see this. I thought of DMing it to him before deciding to tweet it because it would be good for others to know that
@visakanv Phew, I've still got a job. None of the replies said "uhh dude if you have to TRY to be nice, you're actually kinda being mean to yourself by fighting the part of you that doesn't think it's safe to be nice."
@AskYatharth Woah wait hol' up, giving a kiss can be giving away life force? Fuck
epistemic status: delicious
@strangers_gate yessssss
Retweeted @strangers_gate
the skill tree project: a giant, editable, zoomable map of every interleaving, interweaving, overlapping skillset
@strangers_gate now that's my kind of vehicle!
@sidewayskoyote I'd love to see an extended post about this! I feel like I go both ways on it.
Retweeted @abhayance
If you’re feeling the pull for a bit of a reset/refresh looking into the new year, you really can’t go wrong with a GCI work…
@SeanMombo amazing that it wasn't higher or wasn't lower?
Want to talk with me about your goals & plans for 2023? I've got a lot going on, but I've figured out a way to scale my attention, involving a mix of: - videos & exercises - coworking container - a method for having dozens of slack convos in parallel (along with other coaches)
It's called the Goal-Crafting Intensive and it's an online workshop which is a hybrid self-paced & cohort-based course (we call it self-based 😎) where you show up at a particular time but then you go through the material however you want, supported live by me & other coaches.
We've been running it for years and participants have described it as a highlight of their year. It's pay-what-you-want, so easy to show up without already being sold on it! Would love to see more twitter people there at tomorrow's session: complice.co/event/gci?tw=m…
network sangha
me all week: why is it so hard to get signups for this sunday's session of the Goal-Crafting Intensive? participant during workshop rn: My next goal (and probably most of next pomodoro) is watching the world cup final because holy crap things are kicking off me: ......oh 😆⚽️
Goal-Crafting Intensive session 1 complete! It was satisfying—I shared ideas for reflection routines, helped people listen to their unconscious parts in inner conflicts, and talked about ideas for how to approach learning goals. More sessions in January: complice.co/event/gci?tw=s…
@gnomicperfect @PhoebeTickell @speakerjohnash it's a quote I think about often and is a great way to describe the main puzzle I'm working on
@jonnym1ller scatteredness, making some sort of assumption about how I'm supposed to be being... my aliveness often feels like subtly (or not so subtly) dancing in every moment, but I seem to forget I can do that (now that I'm not in school, etc)
@gilgamesh1961 god is fractal in some sense every part of the fractal is omnipotent but only to the degree it can coordinate with the other parts of the fractal
@jonnym1ller classic freedom-from vs freedom-to confusion freedom from the wheel of self-reinforcing bullshit... good freedom to... what? do whatever we collectively want until the end of time: having fun, figuring stuff out, loving each other, making art, exploring the universe
@empathy2000 almost any food can be made brown, which is way less true for other colors also chocolate
@CaryLewisLong @VinceFHorn huh, indeed ledocument.com/issue-four/pet…
@tasshinfogleman gonna learn to slap bass next year have only spent a few hours total so far playing bass, hardly any slapping I don't intend to get particularly good, but I figure a few tutorials plus a bunch of noodling along with songs I love (The Music Lesson style) will get me good enough
@m_ashcroft seems true for me too although in some ways I've been working part-time my whole adult life, or 100h/week sustainably depending on which of my stuff you count as work
@patio11 reminds me of my comment about how entrepreneurship is different from school: the feedback loops involve more than one person and are made of money
wow the bird really jumped the s̶h̶a̶r̶k̶ elephant wtf I am just straight up surprised
Replying to @VinceFHorn
@VinceFHorn and a larger, deeper truth can be beheld from the multiple truths
@RichDecibels I've become pretty disgusted with "right?" and "you know?" in most cases (including and especially hearing it come out of my own mouth) explicit confusion of listening and agreeing/resonating it's powerful, but an insecure kind of power
@RichDecibels yesss
@nowtheo something something brain hemispheres
for a guy who makes a to-do list I don't really believe in to-do lists
@jonnym1ller you've gotta read this short story premise: last guy not-enlightened-yet doesn't want to get enlightened, and all the bodhisattvas don't know what to do about this slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/04/sam…
@jonnym1ller have you read @Meaningness's stuff? he's got some great takes on how people confuse sutrayana buddhism with all of buddhism, and how most western buddhism isn't even quite that see eg this vividness.live/consensus-budd…
@jonnym1ller @Meaningness and this vividness.live/sutra-vs-tantra
@Sana_m09 @tasshinfogleman he truly does
@sidewayskoyote fyeah! lmk if you want someone to comment on a draft
@dangoor @byjonathanleung I'd be curious to see how you approach creating more intentionality in Things using tags to represent larger-scale intentions/goals?
@algekalipso vibes with this
@nicktorba @visakanv @strangestloop here for this. seems like it would be cool to have a chain of them that connect as a larger whole so you can read through them all for that... but also each of them loops internally so you can just keep reading
@Ollie_Base haha amazing I was also reflecting this year that we could make a completely *alternate* landing page and as long as the description also matches the event we'd be hosting, then we could just send people to two different pathways to sign up
Replying to @realpotofgreed
@realpotofgreed @DanielTabakman (context, for the uninitiated, is that visa has been riffing on this for awhile)
Book Titles & Subtitles: The Original "Aphorisms with Nuance Attached"
@RichDecibels I've read the first few chapters of that and it's pretty good tho idk if it would have much for you personally (Rich in particular) that you wouldn't have gotten from the title for other people tho yes, especially if dealing with a Situation
@connerdelights is the cover a reference to the butterfly effect?
never have I been so happy to be ratio'd these replies are gold and unlike threads asking for top book lists which are overwhelming and useless, this thread is (by design) actually worth just reading through without adding any intentions to your future to read any of them
what's an awesome book whose title was boring, misleading, or mediocre, and how would you re-title it so it would be an answer to the question below?
@AskYatharth @threadapalooza have the PCT folks not already written a hundred treatises on this?
@gospelofchange I'd love to see a tweet-sized intro to each of those!
@kcorazo @khemaridh on android at least they have a built-in trigger that's "a button that launches a text input" and you can make a widget out of it perfect for this. almost ends up looking like an official send-a-tweet widget
@visakanv I'm finding new ways to convey shit that you understand
Retweeted @acesounderglass
The "intentionality over productivity" framing really resonated with me, but complice never has. What other resources…
if it feels like something needs to be said but it also really feels like it should go without saying say it anyway
my girlfriend: hmm how do I disable the #OneSec app...? [so I can do actually important thing] me: here, let me figure it out so you don't develop an affordance for turning it off her: ...I feel so protected. big strong man
fascinating examples of wildly different density housing units, from like 5 units per acre to 200 it's not as obvious as you might think which ones are super dense! ift.tt/RbNmZrt
I have had a day of unexpecteds, resulting in calling random Vancouver friends & eventually one picked up & I said "hi I'm on the way to the airport with a musical keyboard on my lap & I would like to have the lyft driver take it to your place so I don't have to bring it to Aus"
@visakanv make friends with your inner authoritarian-tyrant
me: I'm so tired I'm drunk... except like, the kind of drunk where I get really sleepy... wait
Retweeted @aneeshm
Your reminder that you only need to - resolve your issues - deal with your emotional baggage - process your trauma - confront…
@aneeshm @ESYudkowsky yessss good synthesis, very good
@relic_radiation don't give people extra problems
Replying to @realpotofgreed
@realpotofgreed @visakanv @DanielTabakman hmmmmmmm I would totally wear this on a shirt if it spanned the whole width of the shirt, like this kind of vibe
God: I see what I did there
@aleksil79 @gnomicperfect @PhoebeTickell @speakerjohnash I see what I did there
@nicktorba huh interesting. only one cluster per person allowed? feels weird
@AskYatharth @threadapalooza hmm this one inspires me to think maybe 100 useful tautologies 🤔
idea: cowriting showtime sessions, where you show up with a friend and they pick a topic for you to write about (maybe from a list of your ideas) and then after 2-3h you hit publish for us folks who really enjoyed exams
@AskYatharth 1. absolutely 2. it's important to distinguish - "immediate life or death situation on the timescale of seconds/minutes" - "situation that triggers existential panic due to attachment trauma" 3. it's also often pragmatically impossible to distinguish those from the inside
doing my Q4 review on the solstice (at YVR ✈) mostly gonna use these questions I came up with for Complice (this set of Qs is asked for each goal) what other questions might be good to ask quarterly? (per-goal or overall life stuff)
airport workstations @YVRairport
@visakanv @MattiasInSpace love to see it
I wanna beat, wanna freak, wanna nerd out like a geek I wanna transform this layered onion to a leak I wanna tickle all the fancies of the people that I meet I wanna fuck like an animal, a couple times a week
I never know the answer til the answer knows me so in order to know things I’ve gotta do it nakedly I’ve gotta realize that yo I’m so already free but the freedom’s in each moment and the whole’s not yet complete
I wanna bounce, wanna jive, wanna do the whole thing live I wanna groove, wanna bop—wanna join me at the top? we’re going up, going high, there’s no limit at the sky there’s just an effervescent need to transcend what we got
I wanna wiggle but I’m stiff, wanna jiggle but I’m miffed wanna share my anger with you and not get you in a tiff I wanna shout, wanna scream, but I don’t want to be mean and you’re not leaving me much option from how you construe the scene
I wanna chill, eat my fill, put my chicken on the grill wanna have my solitude and do just what I will gettin' toasty, gettin' boasty, so I need yall to roast me and I hope my rhymes inspire you to make your poems more poasty
@khemaridh I continue hanging out with my family for xmas. I spend a bunch of the day (and the next week) kinda background metabolizing that this has happened, etc. I don't do anything with it for at least a few days, probably a few weeks.
@this_is_silvia 🥰 I wrote it spontaneously on a plane a couple months ago! except the last tweet which I wrote when I tweeted it. it was just an interlude in a doc where I was journalling about Serious Things.
@visakanv this caught me at a time when I happened to have basically zero public open tabs (all just private reviews, someone's booking calendar, a journal entry) oh I have my Complice goals page open! most of the goals are private but a couple are visible to all: complice.co/m/goals
fjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfj can we just take a moment and appreciate how this looks like a zipper?
in general, people don't not-care. they care about many things and don't know how to care for all of them together they may even care about what you care about but express that care in a way that doesn't look like care to you
the claim that Russia defaulted on loans to international bondholders (because sanctions blocked payment) feels like a mashup of "stop hitting yourself" and @Matt_Levine's "everything is securities fraud" cnbc.com/2022/06/27/rus…
Retweeted @etiennefd
My contribution to "cool things ChatGPT can do" is to ask it to generate neologisms for foreign words that can't be directly…
Retweeted @visakanv
lets get this mf to 1m impressions
@visakanv I have in general been pretty annoyed by the high-value real estate of the left side of the tweet being this button now, not the replies button, but I guess it was a good way to get people curious about analytics?
@adomhartell If you're replying "to the thread", first tweet is best. If you're replying to the specific thing in one tweet, reply to that tweet. If the last tweet solicits something in particular, that one.
Replying to @abhayance
@abhayance conversations about philosophy, informed by Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance
Retweeted @CurziRose
Liking all comments on your tweets whether or not you actually *like* them is a bit like looking at someone when they speak…
Retweeted @m_ashcroft
one of the best features of the Twitter UI was that it hid the number of views, which made it easier to forget that you are…
@OskariOinonen @PeterDiamandis What part of the puzzle are you working on?
@PeterDiamandis Our ability to take each other's perspectives and see together how to navigate, rather than struggling on many fronts
@visakanv oh jfc they're actually showing the count next to it? that's awful. I've mostly been looking in this view where it just shows the icon
btw, this one userstyle will make the obnoxious tweet analytics number go away: .css-1dbjc4n a[href$='analytics'] { display: none; } download the Stylus extension (or similar but don't use Stylish) and take back your interface!
Thread · CSI Approach: challenging, specific, immediate, approach goals
My favorite is "CSI Approach" which we use in the GCI workshops for goal definition. 😤 Challenging (won't happen by default) 🎯 Specific (you can recognize when you've arrived) 👣 Immediate (next steps now) 😍 Approach (towards, not away)
I got CSI Approach from Nick Winter's The Motivation Hacker; iirc he cites Piers Steel but I've seen almost no other references to it online or explanations, so we kinda reverse-engineered how & why each element is key, for our workbook. Remixed for twitter, below! 🔀
😤 Challenging goals: why? Aiming for something that won't happen by default means this really is a goal that needs your conscious strategic attention. And the challenge motivates you to grow and become someone new.
😤 Challenging goals: how? Look for the "challenge accepted" level of difficulty. The level where if you succeeded, you'd be like "wow, now I know I can do that kind of thing! I changed in the process"
😤 Challenging goals: caveats You probably have multiple goals, & there's a level of challenge that would be totally doable on *one* of your goals but utterly overwhelming or even paralyzing if you tried that much challenge on 5 goals at once. All goals share your 168hours/week.
🎯 Specific goals: why? Having clear details helps you figure out what to prioritize and what to cut when it's crunch time. It also helps with motivation to have a vivid image of the destination.
🎯 Specific goals: how? If possible, describe the goal such that someone who is watching you would be able to easily tell if you had achieved it or not. For something inner/subjective, it could be a statement about the world that you couldn't honestly say now but would like to.
🎯 Specific goals: caveats Quantification can be good, though it can also lead to goodharting: focusing on the measurement at the expense of why it matters But sometimes what you want is open-ended exploration. And that's okay! But it can still help to have bite-sized projects
👣 Immediate goals: why? In your map of the world, that has the goal as a destination, you need a "you are here" sign. You need to be *on that map*, and know where you are. You need to exist in continuous relation to the destination—the mountain on the horizon isn't a postcard.
👣 Immediate goals: how? If it's not obvious where to start, you might pick a small project you can complete and learn from. I wrote out a bunch of examples in this thread:
👣 Immediate goals: caveats If you dive right into doing stuff, it might end up being entirely unstrategic. There's a tradeoff between doing stuff (which gets you more info) & figuring out the right thing to do. No right answers—do what seems best. But do something, today.
😍 Approach goals: why? Awayness can't aim. You have to go *somewhere*. even if you're running from a lion, you could reframe that as running *to* safety. I've got a whole article about this here: malcolmocean.com/2022/02/toward…
😍 Approach goals: how? In order to not do something, you need to be doing something else. In order for something to not be true about you, something else must be true. What's that thing? One person's "lose weight" becomes "bikini body", another's "cardio health"
😍 Approach goals: caveats Hard to caveat this one, it's so key. But maybe I'll note that by clarifying what you're moving *towards*, that might activate different kinds of resistance or identity-grasping. So listen closely and see if you can incorporate those concerns.
So, that's the CSI Approach! You want your goals to be: 😤 Challenging (won't happen by default) 🎯 Specific (you can recognize when you've arrived) 👣 Immediate (next steps now) 😍 Approach-oriented (towards, not away)
If you want to apply these principles to your own life, come to a GCI workshop in January where you have a few hours to pick some goals, clarify them like this, plan, & much more! And you get help from me & other coaches the whole time. complice.co/event/gci?tw=m…
If you're intrigued but kinda suspicious of goals altogether, I might recommend this thread: (in it, I address all the concerns I'm aware of, so hit me with any that it doesn't satisfy!)
@anesmithbeck definitely would be the CSI Approach that we use for the Goal-Crafting Intensives! your tweet prompted me to finally write up a thread about them, so thanks!
Retweeted @anesmithbeck
What is the best resource on goal formulation you've ever found?
Useful Qs for when someone is feeling hostile towards something nebulous (eg politics, culture war) - who is "they"? - where did you get their perspectives from? - what do you mean by [term]? - why is it your job to be worried about this? would you like to be free to let it go?
proto-indo-european is wack (this tweet brought to you by overhearing someone say "he was born on Christmas day so they named him... Christopher.")
"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." — Marcus Aurelius
"Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it--turns it to its purposes, incorporates it into itself, so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal." — Marcus Aurelius
@jonathandubin @relic_radiation we confuse "the way" for "in the way"
Retweeted @NLRG_it
VIOLATES THE SPIRIT OF THE LAW
Retweeted @the_wilderless
are your life & presence such that they recommend your practice?
@byjonathanleung @RoamResearch Complice has had a blank daily page for years already! (Although it's a very different type of system) This page talks about some of the resonances between the two: complice.co/and/roam
got a White Christmas even tho I'm in Australia (it's fog.)
@sympatheticopp It doesn't make sense to you to accept all of your parts? Or you don't see how that relates to shame?
@sympatheticopp So genuine remorse, a feeling of "oh man, I hurt someone" is a powerful useful feeling. It's like grief plus a deep need to learn how to be better in future. By contrast, shame as a tool for social control has various issues, among them that it can't aim malcolmocean.com/2022/02/toward…
@sympatheticopp Oh yeah, you want to accept your shame... are people suggesting you shouldn't? Actually yeah that probably is a common pendulum swing among people learning how not to be ruled by shame.
I've been thinking about this in the context of interstitial journalling and attention management and so on. It does seem like scaffolds could be created to help people see what relation they're in with their intention at each moment, & navigate accordingly.
@mechanical_monk Congrats! Saving is a great default move. For me the main thing it feels like is sharing my present abundance & freedom with my future self.
@DaystarEld "born with the inherent skill and attributes" isn't the issue at all There was a time when it was assumed that only people of elite skill could learn to read, which is patently absurd now that everyone reads. Same for therapeutic listening, same for other skills.
@TylerAlterman My sense of the 3D world is as much built by proprioception as sight. I've done a very similar experiment tho while reading PCT books, which is to turn off my thinger (part of brain that turns shapes into separate Things (still pre-conceptual)) Then yup it's all colors & light
@spacecrone People who follow you AND the person you're replying to might come across the tweets. If no such people exist, only someone who follows you going to the "tweets and replies" tab on your profile could find them.
Retweeted @utotranslucence
There’s such a lovely, subtle dance: - my love wants me to avoid doing something because it triggers a traumatic resp…
Replying to @magghu
@magghu 🎯📈 Grow @CompliceGoals 3× (by eo2023, then 10× a year or two later) ✍️🌐 Write enough Non-Naive Trust Dance articles (~29/100) that I'm ready to write a book on it (+vids, podcasts) 👁️🤯 Integrate the parts of me that know NNTD etc is good shit with any doubts (mine/others)
Replying to @rob_mcrobberson
@rob_mcstan Figure out how to do as little work as possible while still retaining your job and anything else you need like references for future work, and do that.
Consider your inner model of a friend, colleague, fam member., —their personality, how they navigate life,. If you set that model loose in the world, it would socially die immediately like an organism missing several organs. Any model is incomplete and/or full of contradictions.
Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science 2012 paper by @vervaeke_john, Timothy Lillicrap, & @tyrell_turing read this thought-provoking piece on cognition as an evolutionary process here: contrastiveconvergence.net/~timothylillic…
Replying to @magghu
@magghu fyeah! will we see you at GCI again in January? complice.co/event/gci?tw=M…
Thread · Threadapalooza: 100 terms and what they currently mean to me · 6 of 10 tweets
For @threadapalooza 2022, I'm gonna do 100 relevant words/terms and what they seem to mean to me right now.
1. relevant ←→ somehow connects with what's at hand, in a manner that follows the entropic gradient of one's meaning-making, ie in a way that matters (the relevance of relevance has increased for me since reading this paper 👇)
2. entropic gradient ←→ each cognitive system has a sense of where it's going, at any scale/complexity, whether: - a zygote sensing how to grow - a lizard sensing where to nap - a human learning how to love - a company doing biz strategy entropic gradient ~= that direction
3. sense ←→ subjective order "that makes sense" reflects a relation with [that] of being able to make [that] commensurable with the rest of experience. the "senses" or "sense fields" [including mind] are that which turns the ever-unfolding-everything into something sensible
4. commensurable ←→ literally "able to be measured together", I recently picked this word up from wikipedia, where it talks about paradigm shifts as involving incommensurability problems cf frame conflict, where bootstrapping dialogue gets tough
5. dialogue ←→ aiming to make new meaning together out of what each perspective is holding. requires me to simultaneously hold what I know and open to what the other knows. neither dominating nor submitting my frame will achieve this
feel free to suggest words to me, and I'll include them if they feel relevant to me and fit within the thread! any word you've seen me use, especially in a jargony or technical way, is probably a great candidate
Thread · Threadapalooza: 100 terms and what they currently mean to me · 3 of 10 tweets
6. perspective ←→ a subjective experience of reality, as distinct from others. the distinction can be from: - one's position in time and space - different sense organs (eg a dog & human always have different perspectives) - different context / life experience / meaning-making
7. distinct ←→ different in some way that is relevant/significant. I've found myself saying "these are distinctly different". Everything is different! But who cares? The difference is already there, and by default everything is con-fused, but we can *make* a distinction.
8. difference ←→ the duality that the one everything is entirely composed of. change is difference with an arrow. we perceive the world via differences in incoming photons & pressure, and electrical neural diffs. "information is a difference that makes a difference" — Bateson
@tasshinfogleman race you to 6969 followers 😜
@DanielTabakman delightful! and I'm glad to be the knobs guy tho I think this is fairly common for toaster ovens! way more common than for microwaves, for reasons I do not understand I guess fairly unusual for a toaster to *also* have a screen
caveat: I haven't actually tried these questions myself, but someone recently used all of them on *me* in a situation like this, and they worked really well so maybe the "someone" should just say "Malcolm Ocean" 😅 (+ definitely genuine curiosity & relationship safety required)
@AskYatharth @threadapalooza vaguely inspired by staring at all of @AskYatharth's @threadapalooza suggestions, plus his recent appreciation of my blog post attempting to articulate what exactly "coercion" might be, I found myself wanting to articulate 100 word-meanings:
Thread · Threadapalooza: 100 terms and what they currently mean to me · 1 of 10 tweets
9. everything ←→ what you get when you exclude nothing. there's sure a lot of it, and it's all intertwingled so it's important to consider! ...tho when *something* feels unhandled, it can seem like I have to handle the something before I can consider everything again.
just won at scrabble so I guess I'm also a word-rotator
Replying to @TetraspaceWest
Retweeted @KizunautFI
Kinda amazing I wonder what other sense combinations are out there
@scrapbookhattie that's not smarter that's just "has lots of info" if he's really smart he should be able to figure out how to have satisfy convos w you on some mutual edge of understanding
Retweeted @sympatheticopp
i think a sneaky self sabotage thing that happens when yr tryna take responsibility for yr life is like, refusing to no…
@sympatheticopp Whoa, subtle and powerful point. "I just need to fix—" "You need to gtfo, more like it"
@xuenay I had an experience of shi-nè which felt distinctly like I was putting my left hemisphere in debug mode so my right hemisphere could inspect it better
@tapir_worf stellar remix
Retweeted @the_wilderless
Core Thing That Is Obvious To Me But Seems Weirdly Ungrokked Elsewhere: Yes, there is an unchanging Current beneath ev…
@RichardMCNgo A chess game that if simulated is a chess game, is an abstraction. A mind is not an abstraction but a situated embodied participatory entity.
@RichardMCNgo I agree "you can't simulate thinking without doing the thinking somewhere" on an information theory level but there's a slippery equivocation happening here about what thinking is. Thinking computes, but that doesn't make a brain literally a computer.
@RichardMCNgo I've known people who could predict my behavior better than me but couldn't remotely pass a test for what it feels like to be me. They've got some sort of excellent simulation of me but it's a simulation of the outside, not the inside. (This from trauma-based threat-modelling)
@pee_zombie I am glad this reply exists (even if because it's usefully wrong)
@krishnanrohit Qualia has a referent but qualia is not a thing
suddenly aware of the meme/demon implications of the phrase "what possessed her to do that?" (context: hearing a story of someone preparing 4 huge meat entrees, 3 seafood dishes, & 6 salads, for a 9-person dinner)
Retweeted @nibrasibn
@JakeOrthwein What's the source of this?
Replying to @vals_pals_
@valor_zhang Prompt away!
@MCMCD_ There is always a reason but the reason isn't always *meaning*-ful. Some friends have written about feeling anxiety due to stomach gas (presumably because it creates pressure on the vagus nerve)
@rachelclif connection & resonance more important than pleasure & a sense of continuity, where the tiniest interaction can have an erotic depth
Replying to @nullpointered
@nullpointered The finger is not the moon Whatever you say a thing is, it is not
Retweeted @danielbrottman
anybody mind if i identify as buddhist but also do not identify as buddhist for kicks let's say i'm also *both* buddhi…
@danielbrottman this is the way
@captain_mrs haha yeah as I wrote it out it seemed not so absurd, but in the story it seemed pretty unhinged somehow
@RomeoStevens76 ah yeah I think I forgot this when writing the tweet but in this case [term] was "dangerous" so it was basically "what is the actual potential danger you're concerned about?"
@deepfates I clicked on "No" but then before I let it accept my click, I pulled away and then clicked "Yes" I also considered clicking "No" on one account and "Yes" on another
Andrew is a great guy and this community seems awesome. If you're looking for a place in NYC, he's got an awesome one.
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
My favorite is "CSI Approach" which we use in the GCI workshops for goal definition. 😤 Challenging (won't happen by def…
Thread · A goal framework contra SMART, plus the CSI approach · 1 of 6 tweets
@VividVoid_ I now have a whole thread on the CSI approach:
Replying to @magghu
@magghu @CompliceGoals Which blog posts do you come back to most? Any follow-up questions on those?
Replying to @magghu
@magghu @CompliceGoals Mmm, makes sense! This is potentially one good place to start, with that, or my 2020 or 2021 yearly reviews malcolmocean.com/2022/10/open-l…
@prerationalist @s_r_constantin see this is why I find Predictive Coding distasteful compared to Perceptual Control Theory, a broadly-isomorphic model that doesn't conflate "intended future states" with "non-intentional predictions"
Q: what country is south of Rwanda? A: Burundi Q: twinkle twinkle little A: star An LLM can get both “answers” right. But one is a claim about the world (Burundi IS south of Rwanda) & the other one isn’t. To a human, these are different kinds of ideas. To an LLM they’re not. twitter.com/s_r_constantin…
Replying to @s_r_constantin
@s_r_constantin I wanted to RT all 3 of these tweets so I made this:
GPT has never met the territory
In which ChatGPT fails a basic test of situatedness. Yes, you are behind a text interface. No, that does not keep you from saying "Yeah!" any more than it kept me from saying "Hell!"
Replying to @s_r_constantin
@s_r_constantin @forshaper knowledge is power france is bacon
@N2the1 Thanks for not leaving me hanging.
Replying to @meekaale
@meekaale Feeling tender, reading this ❤️ Sounds like maybe the weariness is coming in part from minimizing your other lives?
Retweeted @utotranslucence
Psych Crisis is a new organisation working to change psychiatric crisis care so when someone needs help, they are help…
Replying to @nat_sharpe_
@nat_sharpe_ @meekaale Yeah I've been feeling since chatGPT like we need a first-person objective pronoun, for LLMs to use instead of "I" I thought I'd tweeted this but apparently not.
@mherreshoff yeah "I can't engage in expletives" is where I thought the "I'm sorry" was going too, but then it said this confabulated horseshit instead which prompted me to ask it what it knows about expletives... looks like the censoring maybe happens between LLM output & display:
@mherreshoff Hmmmm but it doesn't always censor the word "pussy" even when acknowledging that it can be slang for ladyparts. Mysteries abound.
Retweeted @meekaale
@Malcolm_Ocean “I am a language model” is metaphysically horrible, fraudulent: if “you” are not a person then stop saying “I”
@metaphorician yeah but your maps were made from meeting the territory
by the time we get there, we'll know where we're going
Thread · What "step-" actually means in family roles
noticing that "stepdad" & "stepmom" seem to refer specifically to someone your parent married while you were still a kid & living with them. it's a role. my parents split when I was ~25 and eg mom's new guy is just "mom's partner". wouldn't *occur* to me to call him "stepdad"
and yet, when I have kids, he *will* be a (step-)grandfather to them! because my kids will always have known him in that role. interestingly, since he doesn't have kids of his own, this will kind of make him a grandfather without him ever having been a father!
tbh, the sense in which he'll be "step" seems minimal. sure, he's not their bio gdad, but since there's nobody else who's ever been in the "grandmother's husband" role from the gkids view, he's no less a real gdad than any dad to an adoptive or surrogate kid is 🤔
like the meaning of "step-" is functionally something like "instead of" (etymologically it seems like "step-" relates specifically to the *loss* of the original parent—initially in the context of orphanhood... which again, doesn't apply to grandkids in this situation!)
incidentally, in my family, we have different names for each grandparent, chosen from things like "grandad", "grandpa", "pop", "opa" and mom's partner will have such a name as well. as, most likely, will my dad's partner, tho they're not married & she might just go by her name
the observation in the first tweet above seemed sort of absurdly obvious, but eg wikipedia doesn't make this distinction. it just says: > A stepfather or stepdad is a non-biological male parent married to one's preexisting parent.
here for this kids can be doing stuff that is engaged with real feedback loops in the world, and they'll learn better that way anyway
it would be cool if twitter showed a count of how many times each tweet had been DM'd what are those tweets out there that people are quietly passing along to each other?
@Morphenius AHHHHHHH
@robbensinger @davidxu90 @coponder our disagreement is not about "the territory", it's about "met" I have met you, Rob. I have not met Brad Pitt. I know of Brad Pitt from watching videos of him and reading about him. I have not met Brad Pitt. I have met sunrises, and rejection. GPT hasn't met anyone or anything.
@robbensinger @davidxu90 @coponder to be clear: in a sense, this disagreement *is* about "the territory", because it's about what sort of relation is meaningful to have with the territory. I am saying that "information ABOUT the external world" is all maps; yet also we make a kind of contact with the territory.
@meekaale @nat_sharpe_ @visakanv amaaazing.
Retweeted @MattiasInSpace
this thread resonates with me on some profoundly felt but half-formed intuitions about what makes a good goal... but th…
@MattiasInSpace oooh that's a great point.
Retweeted @Myshkin08
This is my very favourite thread that I read this past year. It's long, with sub threads, but in my view, well worth investi…
@Myshkin08 Thanks Jim!
@armando1987dim @meekaale neat. reminds me of Douglas Hofstadter's story of digging through a pile of fan mail and discovering a postcard that said "help I'm trapped under a pile of fan mail"
Replying to @vals_pals_
@valor_zhang hmm I don't feel like I've got much to say on this level of abstraction... I could apply generic principles to it without knowing much, or I could work with a more specific case study. do *you* struggle w social anxiety & want to be bolder? what's that like? why fear being seen?
@EthanReeder @utotranslucence is working on writing up some stuff on chakras & energy that doesn't make non-scientific metaphysical claims seeing them as powerful phenomenological interfaces with your bodymind, something like that
@relic_radiation @RonenV huh, yeah this is another angle on what's so great about the model of boundaries in @tasshinfogleman's blog post it's about clarifying what you'll move towards in situations where people put you in a situation you don't like tasshin.com/blog/boundarie…
@DaystarEld good points. I still think there's a lot of possibility there, but that doesn't mean it's easy to access.
@meekaale @maiab haha yes this is exactly the thing! also @maiab you might like my recent lil manifesto on intentionality: complice.co/intentionality
@jisantacruz @PeterDiamandis yeah! it's the main thing I'm working on here's a blog post that looks at one angle of it: malcolmocean.com/2021/09/non-na…
@jisantacruz @PeterDiamandis this one might also be clarifying malcolmocean.com/2021/08/intern…
@nvpkp @OrphicCapital @_exoconnor they change surprisingly infrequently, actually! but they do change at random sometimes so yeah, not ideal.
@ifvictr nice! go team :)
@byewildheat @SilapKhem @goblinodds yeah they got bought out and EXPLOITED
@not_a_hot_girl @goblinodds yes but using the twitter mobile app is an antipattern anyway
Replying to @alexishelping
@alexanderklarge the fewer the better tbh the smallest number that you can say "these are the things I need some consciousness on in order to make them happen. they won't happen by default but if they did all happen that would be AWESOME & complete." ...in practice, 4-5
@AdamGravois ahhh so true.
Replying to @s_r_constantin
@s_r_constantin a couple days ago I ran barefoot on asphalt for a few minutes because I wanted to run and my flipflops weren't cut out for it and it was painful, but I knew from experience it wouldn't harm me
impressive how many complice.co signups still come from this one-bullet mention in a "focus tools" article 2y ago: benkuhn.net/focustools/ I guess the article is more evergreen than one that is mostly about complice though, like people reshare it for lots of reasons
pretending tradeoffs don't exist in order to get a decision made is often necessary, never desirable
@Aella_Girl struck by how left-hemispheric this particular image is very dissociated, disconnected, parts assembled potato-head style
Replying to @nat_sharpe_
@nat_sharpe_ ego release
Replying to @nat_sharpe_
@nat_sharpe_ coming home to the universe
Replying to @nat_sharpe_
@nat_sharpe_ reuniting
Retweeted @nosilverv
So you're telling me Jesus took upon himself to clean up all karmic (technical) debt theretofore *and* that by mimicking his…
@nosilverv he tried to clean up all karmic debt before him but he didn't have enough memetic untangling strength
Retweeted @CompliceGoals
updated the thing at the bottom of the complice.co homepage to make it ever-increasingly in line with the en…
saw a tweet saying it's really good that the word "vibes" has come into our lexicon because it doesn't get confused for a physics term like "energy" does can't find it now, any leads?
.@utotranslucence & I reporting in from Australia: 2023 is pretty great so far! 🎇 The Sydney fireworks are the first I've seen that are competitive with Burning Man in epicness. Partially the vast scale of how many different places they're going off at once! 🎆 Tree lookout 💯
@visakanv Yeah I found all of its arguments are sort of circular, like they don't really say anything. I once put in "the difference between [x] & [y] is" and it just sorta gave definitions. Whereas a human starting a sentence that way would be pointing out something novel.
@interpretantion Tickling
Retweeted @jessicamalonso
@MatjazLeonardis @vanjajaja1 @mimi_aboubaker You don’t need a full plan, you just need a first step or two. And if you…
@nvpkp Aha that's the one!
@wholebodyprayer Many people with trauma that will end up hurting you will warn you in oddly specific ways about exactly how that'll happen, and most people won't believe it the first time.
@clarityscape I sorta think that encouraging kids to meditate if they don't want to is probably bad (if they're excited about it maybe fine!) but conveying the reality of the world and consciousness implied by the dharma (liberation via non-fixation) where relevant & wanted seems good
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@clarityscape I sorta think that encouraging kids to meditate if they don't want to is probably bad (if they're excited…
Retweeted @blankbreaks
͏͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏…