By month

March 2023

547 tweets
2,911 likes
89 retweets
45 retweeted

Replying to Tyler is finishing a book, slow to reply @TylerAlterman ·

Why are so many of the serious-meditation-for-enlightenment circles dominated by men?

@TylerAlterman idk but I heard this today and it seems like it sort of answers the question if true

Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. @hubermanlab ·

The major effect of testosterone on the brain (of both males and females) is to make effort feel good.

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Richard D. Bartlett @RichDecibels ·

the group is the fundamental unit of human behaviour

@RichDecibels this feels related to why I got really excited by "co-what-now" as a kernel for how to orient to the world malcolmocean.com/2022/05/aiming…

1 like 0 RTs

Retweeted @RichDecibels

the group is the fundamental unit of human behaviour

Replying to Khe Hy @khemaridh ·

My motivation for “productivity” by decades: 20s: Make more money 30s: Own my time 40s: Understand childhood wounds 50s: ??? How does your journey look?

@khemaridh 20s: Own my time 30s: Make more money opposite of you! 😂

1 like 0 RTs

Thread · Words that are definitely words but my browser dictionary rejects · 1 of 219 tweets

new tech → "what are “native” applications of that tech?" If you want to figure out what the native Web3, or AI applications will be, start by laying out the new primitives and going from there. by @avc: avc.com/2023/02/what-d…

4 likes 0 RTs

interesting to think of this in terms of the etymology of "native", which goes back to "born in a place, not foreign" and "primitive" means "first" feeling the visceral qualities of it! to find what will be born here, we ask what we find here first

4 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Nick Redmark @nickredmark ·

Is it ever right to force your kid to do something that is not a matter of immediate physical safety?

@nickredmark no, but that doesn't mean it's wrong either it might be the best option that you can think of, given everything if you're looking for something that can justify that it's "right", I'm afraid you have a much bigger issue

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

if your ethics produces justifications, it's a bad ethics

1 like 0 RTs

Retweeted @utotranslucence

Someone can get you to do something *only* by promising you something you want (implicitly or implicitly). They can…

Replying to •Freyja• @utotranslucence ·

Are there any examples of famous leaders who used decision journals? Or--excerpts of their decision journals publicly available?

@utotranslucence @Conaw probably knows of famous decision journals if any

1 like 0 RTs

Retweeted @UntilTrees

You know when you're into someone and you start interacting with the image you have of them instead of interacting with the…

Replying to Tyler is finishing a book, slow to reply @TylerAlterman ·

What’s a term for “politically neutral” that doesn’t have the connotations of “politically unconcerned” but more like “has a diverse array of political opinions that don’t map onto the left-right spectrum”

@TylerAlterman I saw a graphic somewhere... I thought was labelled "radical centrist"? but no anyway, it was basically the political compass with dots all over it indicating "positions I hold" and contrasting that with someone who uncourageously takes the compromise position everywhere

3 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Tyler is finishing a book, slow to reply @TylerAlterman ·

What’s a term for “politically neutral” that doesn’t have the connotations of “politically unconcerned” but more like “has a diverse array of political opinions that don’t map onto the left-right spectrum”

@TylerAlterman LPC (Liberal Progressive Conservative) everythingstudies.com/2018/12/06/i-l…

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Tyler is finishing a book, slow to reply @TylerAlterman ·

What’s a term for “politically neutral” that doesn’t have the connotations of “politically unconcerned” but more like “has a diverse array of political opinions that don’t map onto the left-right spectrum”

@TylerAlterman "superior to both"

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

the discourse: "are you woke, or right-wing?" me: "well, the important thing is that I've found a way to feel superior to both"

2 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @TylerAlterman

What’s a term for “politically neutral” that doesn’t have the connotations of “politically unconcerned” but more like “h…

Replying to Mikael Brockman @meekaale ·

the BeReal of todo lists, it just asks you randomly at some point during the day what the hell you're doing and why

@meekaale the @bmndr folks have a tool called tagtime (@tagtm) that does this with optimized stochastic unpredictable timing although it doesn't provide much of an interface for the "why" part doc.beeminder.com/tagtime

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to •Freyja• @utotranslucence ·

@meekaale I think @CompliceGoals has something like this?

@utotranslucence @meekaale @CompliceGoals not exactly, but more random thinking out loud is rapidly on its way to Complice!

3 likes 0 RTs

"tpot" is an improper noun siderea.dreamwidth.org/1773806.html

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to imj @stillfewer ·

@Malcolm_Ocean He makes a mistake in the last sentence with the implication of ‘merely’. Because we care, because we think, love and understand, we are a part of the universe unlike any other. We’re far too significant to be a ‘merely’.

@stillfewer yeah "merely" is unnecessary and wrong in the way that "we're just atoms" is wrong the "just" implies a bunch of false stuff I wouldn't have said "superior"/"merely a fraction" but more like "outside"/"of"

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Asier @asierpovs ·

@Malcolm_Ocean To me it seems clear that in that quote Neil means the rest of the Universe, i.e. without us. Do you not read it like that? I ask because I can't tell if it's an honest misunderstanding, an actual disagreement, nitpicking... or sth else.

@asierpovs he does mean that but he means that because he's dualistically confused and he's trying to confuse other people too

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Asier @asierpovs ·

@Malcolm_Ocean I also ask because to me that sort of aphorism, the "big universe point of view", is often humbling or eye-opening (perhaps in a similar way to how others feel about nonduality). So, I wonder why others feel differently about it.

@asierpovs big universe is good but make sure you don't forget that the main eyes the universe has... ..are our eyes. there's no view from nowhere

0 likes 0 RTs

"how will I know when it's time?" the moon and the sun will collide in an orgasmic metaphor

15 likes 0 RTs

just made a connection between my recent tweet about justification and ethics, and a much older tweet about addiction and rationalization

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

From my journal 2 years ago: > "Man, I just had a tiny little urge to play <addictive game>. It's fucking *nuts* watching my mind immediately go into action rationalizing it. The... striatum? Orbito-frontal cortex? [I had just read a book on addiction, The Biology of Desire]

3 likes 0 RTs

everybody's a rando to somebody

11 likes 0 RTs

3 kinds of invariants: - physical facts, including metabolic/geometric facts about life like the cube/square law - facts about consciousness? seems like there are some of these, self-evident once you look in the right place - tautologies, like evolution

4 likes 0 RTs

realizing that "life is dukkha" is using the term "life" in the sense in which "life is self-organizing adaptive dissipative systems" not in the sense of "how's life?"

19 likes 0 RTs

seems pretty clear upon reflection that the four noble truths apply to any general intelligence—it can spawn sub-processes that get tangled I don't know what this implies but it seems important and relevant

8 likes 1 RT

few understand this

QC @QiaochuYuan ·

so there's this idea that "you're looking for love from other people but ultimately you have to give yourself that love" and i think people think of this as some deep metaphysical fact but i think it's partly just logistical: other people literally don't have enough time

2 likes 0 RTs

what's something that you got a weird introduction to? for instance, my dad had a massive tape+CD collection but he never bought any Beatles ("I'm sick of them from the radio") so until my 20s my main exposure was a disco remix medley (this but shorter) youtube.com/watch?v=l5Uabw…

3 likes 0 RTs

turns out a bunch of what I've been figuring out maps even more closely than I thought onto the dharma... ...so now I'm like... am I just reinventing the ☸️?

35 likes 0 RTs

at one point today while out walking, I was conflicted about whether to X or Y so I wanted to pause and release my grip on needing to do anything and I realized I could keep walking while pausing/releasing! (wouldn't be true if conflict was about destination)

5 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @visakanv

when our capacity for doing something expands, it reveals to us the degree to which our capacity wasn’t the constraint preven…

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

Technically true: every time I wrote a book, I thought “naw, I can do better than that”. Both times I published a book was when I was too exhausted/drained to rewrite it again. But looking at them with fresh eyes I gotta say… I can do better than that

@visakanv "I can do better than that... but not right now."

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

@mike_hudy yea the deeper radicalness of Christ is so wild that it gets *immediately* misinterpreted upon contact with mainstream social reality

@visakanv @mike_hudy

10 likes 1 RT

@mike_hudy @visakanv turning the other cheek supposedly has a very specific based meaning that isn't just "hit me again" it's "hit me like an equal"

essei 7.0~Nature is a Dictator @JesseEPresley2 ·

@SBUTTSIII @Jhundley @thejtlewis @realDonaldTrump He said,"Turn the other cheek." It was also Roman law that if you slapped a person open handed, they were your equal. However, if you slapped them backhanded they were you subordinate. Slaves and lesser people were backhanded. Therefore, when you turned the other cheek...

[long tweet — read the rest on Twitter]

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

using god or some higher power to explain/justify your successes is one of the most powerful status moves available to people. it kinda makes me sick to think about how powerful it is, and how susceptible people are to it

@visakanv yeah, seems to me like simply having god's favor has a sort of bullshit self-justifying quality ...but insofar as your success comes from obeying the inscrutable exhortations of your soul...

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

24. consider obeying the inscrutable exhortations of your soul

7 likes 0 RTs

nah your therapist doesn't need to be smarter than you, they just need to be able to help you get your own smarts working together rather than at odds this does require your therapist to be HUMBLE tho but that is also true if your therapist IS smarter than you twitter.com/p8stie/status/…

32 likes 1 RT

> ...explore—what does right effort mean for me? Because the synonym for effort in Buddhism is enthusiasm. And when you feel enthusiastic about something, you pour your energy into it, and you’re pouring your energy into it in a good way. unfetteredmind.org/understanding-…

5 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Tyler is finishing a book, slow to reply @TylerAlterman ·

What’s a term for “politically neutral” that doesn’t have the connotations of “politically unconcerned” but more like “has a diverse array of political opinions that don’t map onto the left-right spectrum”

@TylerAlterman "politically eclectic"

4 likes 0 RTs

Replying to marta  @lavaazulada ·

@Malcolm_Ocean I think it's not charging for me 🤷🏼‍♀️

@lavaazulada someone else had an issue too but it's working fine for me now

0 likes 0 RTs

Recorded this short vid addressed to @Morphenius last night reflecting on the puzzle of why buddhism lost track of being able to orient to how to dharmalize the whole world, yet it seems like we're more able to orient to it now. youtu.be/zKmkS_udbuw

6 likes 0 RTs

guess where this photo was taken

2 likes 0 RTs

what's the difference between guilt and shame? wrong answers only

20 likes 0 RTs

d̶o̶n̶'̶t hit the tree

4 likes 0 RTs

saw an article that was conspicuously putting the current year and even the current month at the top, without an actual publication date... ...and I'm pretty sure it was lies, because I right-clicked on one of the screenshots and saw wp-content/uploads/2022/03/file.png

8 likes 0 RTs

yeah I just checked and literally every article on the site has "2023" in the title lies, lies, lies. if I ran a search engine I would have algorithms to detect this shit (current year being appended to unchanged articles) and downrank it

4 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Aleksi Liimatainen @aleksil79 ·

@RomeoStevens76 resist less and resist better are both silly frames it's a dance confusing dancing with wrestling is kinda on brand for rat types tho

@aleksil79 @RomeoStevens76 learning how to dodge reality twitter.com/fasc1nate/stat…

2 likes 0 RTs

good but kind of fatalistic depiction of anti-rational memes (that know they need to propagate but don't really know why) youtube.com/shorts/nwAneUN…

1 like 0 RTs

Retweeted @RomeoStevens76

If all the variables in your decision tree were properly labeled the decision would be easy, which is to say it wouldn'…

Thread · Refusing the hypothetical button · 1 of 4 tweets

I don't push the button that would give us access to magic buttons

RomeoStevens @RomeoStevens76 ·

If thought experiments have taught me anything it's that I'm really glad humans don't have access to any magical buttons.

9 likes 0 RTs

Replying to john @trillionjohns ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Mars??

@A_LEIFY_BOI yes!

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to James Stuber 🌱🌿🌳🍂 @uberstuber ·

@Malcolm_Ocean one is a four-letter word, the other is five

@uberstuber amazing

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Opener of the way @way_opener ·

@nowtheo @Malcolm_Ocean He said wrong answers only

@icantsay @nowtheo yeah it's wrong obviously guilt is kiki and shame is bouba

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to neophyte @ne0phyyte ·

@Malcolm_Ocean I thought none of her takes were serious lol

@andalibmalit sure, she might be bullshitting, but it got 45 RTs and surely some of those people take it seriously

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to No @shitcapmgmt ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Yeah it also uses dukkah in the wrong way too cuz dukkah is not a thing, “life is dukkah” is a linguistic construct

@shittycap "life dukkhas", as a verb, would probably be more accurate

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Cameron @camron ·

@Malcolm_Ocean this seems like a harder backflip to land (and why) than the take that the Buddha was just mildly mistranslated and didn't mean life *is* suffering but rather living *contains* suffering

@camron Vervaeke, in this excellent vid, frames it as "life is always at threat of suffering", tho I think "threat" will mislead most people but yeah obviously if there's an end to suffering (3rd noble truth) it can't be equal to life youtube.com/watch?v=vGB8k7…

1 like 0 RTs

the opposite of Circling is pretending

5 likes 0 RTs

had a great convo w @FluidityAudio today about I Can't Believe It's Not Circling and the nature of containers and social norms and pretending and you can watch it here! youtu.be/aILIG13lEYk

2 likes 0 RTs

that moment when you go from being totally unaware of the frame to totally aware of the frame because you just got some marker on it

16 likes 0 RTs

Replying to 🐜 @IaimforGOAT ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Reading this "Synecdoche, New York" came to mind. The scenes are way longer tho Have you seen it?

@IaimforGOAT ,,,,,,,,,,,, I just watched Synecdoche, NY, which was in my to-watch list, but I didn't revisit the context of the recommendation until after watching it, which I'm so glad for as it let the gradual bizarreness take me by surprise

0 likes 0 RTs

the irony of getting cold emails from self-professed SEO experts will never stop being funny

6 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

it’s often easier to get to good work from bad work than from no work the thing to do is typically to ask “why is it bad? what’s bad about it?” and then address it bad work lives next door to good work but ‘no work’ is not a neighbor, ‘no work’ lives nowhere

@visakanv

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

your first problem is you don't have a blog THEN you can worry about more advanced problems like: - my blog is ugly - it has a dumb placeholder name - there's nothing on my blog - it has no readers but you don't get to graduate to those UNTIL you solve "I don't have a blog" twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…

5 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @__drewface

"exhaling does not take valuable time away from inhaling" h/t @visakanv

Retweeted @captain_mrs

the only known way to heal a trauma response is to activate it at the same time as another schema that contradicts the tra…

me gaining an hour in fall: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!! me losing an hour in spring: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

19 likes 0 RTs

Replying to yatharth ༺༒༻ @AskYatharth ·

@Malcolm_Ocean how

@AskYatharth I mean maybe more precisely something like "pretending not to notice what you're noticing about yourself and others, social dynamics, etc"

5 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Tom Wuttke (tomw.bsky.soc) @tw ·

@Malcolm_Ocean I don't think I've met that humble therapist yet.

@tw yeah, finding an adequate therapist isn't per se straightforward

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

"therapy" is doing a tricksy ambiguity 1. therapy = "go see someone registered as a therapist" (may not help, or retraumatize) 2. therapy = "untangling your stuff, particularly via therapeutic reconsolidation process" by defn #2, @visakanv's DMs may actually just *be* therapy twitter.com/visakanv/statu…

0 likes 0 RTs

you are free to do whatever you want although you will also then get the consequences of doing that, which thus is a factor to include when considering what you want youtu.be/FkQ9IKY87SM

4 likes 0 RTs

Thread · Index of the 100 video project · 1 of 77 tweets

Thread · Not Circling: dropping the container while keeping the practice · 1 of 7 tweets

my gut relaxed when I did this you might first want to let the room be aware of you

River Kenna @the_wilderless ·

let your gut be aware of the room being aware of you

28 likes 1 RT

one of the simplest forms of respect is being with another person and allowing them to see you how they in fact see you, without trying to control it especially difficult, and especially vital, if they have some sort of distrust towards you

70 likes 3 RTs

Retweeted @suntzoogway

The AI Alignment Problem, the human politics problem, the enviromental pollution humans r a virus, etc r all myopic ways o…

finally read the Interface Theory of Reality paper and it's fairly short & quite good! quite easy to read. good metaphors, a lil math. resonates a bunch with some of what I've been orienting to regarding collective perception sites.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/interf…

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to River Kenna @the_wilderless ·

@Malcolm_Ocean @nopranablem @_brentbaum Would lack any real impetus—if trying to break it into pieces, the awareness in itself kinda rebels like “whuh? I’m all one thing, and mapping ain’t the point. Why are you doing this?” I think a few light milestones are probably the best approach—I’m working on a light map

@the_wilderless @nopranablem @_brentbaum if you wanna test it with me I'm super down

3 likes 0 RTs

Replying to The Artist fka: 𝓶𝔂𝓬𝓮𝓵𝓲𝓾𝓶 𝓶𝓪𝓰𝓮 {❤️‍🔥} @myceliummage ·

post (6/28) "unknotting your Self and un’not’ing your writing are the same thing — there is no such thing as a metaphor." themyceliummage.substack.com/p/running-into…

@myceliummage hmmm fascinating to dovetail that with my sense of the importance of double negatives and so on I'll play around with it a bit in some writing

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

I am becoming increasingly convinced that double-negatives are going to save civilization

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to The Artist fka: 𝓶𝔂𝓬𝓮𝓵𝓲𝓾𝓶 𝓶𝓪𝓰𝓮 {❤️‍🔥} @myceliummage ·

post (6/28) "unknotting your Self and un’not’ing your writing are the same thing — there is no such thing as a metaphor." themyceliummage.substack.com/p/running-into…

@myceliummage also related:

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

"free of negativities" you mean "free of thoughts that are attempting to negate other thoughts" that sounds nice

0 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @Meaningness

"Centralized machine learning when deployed instantly at planetary scale is and always will be characterized by this incre…

Retweeted @MJPiercello

Have I perhaps built one of @visakanv's dominoes? Let's ask him! piercello.substack.com/p/the-law-of-r…

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

@MJPiercello @Malcolm_Ocean wdyt?

@visakanv @MJPiercello mmm yeah, the "agree that we have a disagreement" is closely connected with NNTD's "respect that you don't trust me" it's a recognition of different worlds as a starting point self-evident observations also very much my jam! want to record a short convo for youtube Matthew?

3 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Johnson (Taiwan) @justavagrant_ ·

What does it say to you if a girl cries when with you

@justavagrant_ more context needed why is she crying?

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Jessica @jessicamalonso ·

Where do people sob in NYC? The walls are so thin

@jessicamalonso one idea I've had tho not tried is renting out one of those private karaoke booths, which have got to be fairly sound-isolated

8 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Devin Weaver @orbdweaver ·

@Malcolm_Ocean can you explain this in normal person terms i dont know how i would do this even if i wanted to

@orbdweaver not sure I can explain it it normal person terms (do also read the whole original thread, as it's got good stuff) but probably an easier place to start is by letting other people be aware of you

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

one of the simplest forms of respect is being with another person and allowing them to see you how they in fact see you, without trying to control it especially difficult, and especially vital, if they have some sort of distrust towards you

4 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Keep Calm, Grow Habitat @jaycousins ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Energy has to go somewhere. The masculine line exists in all - the urge to move forward. The most balanced expression of both is the helix.

@jaycousins mmm, yes

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Matt Yao 🧭 @matt__yao ·

looking all the untouched items on my to-do list wondering how the day went by so fast and realized I spent 4.5 hours calling people I care about so it was still a "productive" day

@matt__yao you might dig this complice.co/intentionality

0 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @CAM_SMlTH

Life lessons

Replying to Daemonic is Gendlinmaxxing 🤑 @daemonhugger ·

@Malcolm_Ocean I believe this. Have you experienced it?

@daemonhugger sometimes yeah

1 like 0 RTs

Retweeted @CarnunMP

Paraphrasing: 'A new metaphor not backed up with a new mode of interaction is just an old metaphor in disguise. Evernote's "n…

Replying to Michael Smith @Morphenius ·

@Malcolm_Ocean I just learned this today: "15 minute city" is an environmentalist idea to ensure people needn't travel more than 15 minutes to meet all their needs. It's paired w/ a possible policy of FORBIDDING people from traveling farther than that w/o special permission.

@Morphenius wait WAT. ridiculous

0 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @AskYatharth

there are 3 kinds of expectations 1. anticipations—what you think will happen 2. entitlements—what you think ought to hap…

Replying to Lulie @reasonisfun ·

Possibly meta-rationalism is the other rationalism of this type – but it unites with spiritualism via nebulosity rather than fallibilism. [others who may be interested in this discussion: @Malcolm_Ocean @JakeOrthwein @ReachChristofer ]

@reasonisfun @JakeOrthwein @ReachChristofer CR may in principle be undogmatic but as I think I've said, in practice I've found lots of Deutschians quite dogmatic, so his memes aren't adequately error-correcting-towards-reality, ie they're still kinda static memes

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

Propagating information, whether forward in time (in personal or collective memory) or between people (communication) requires error-correction. It seems there are two kinds:  - correct to source  - correct to reality Both are important, but they have different roles.

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to QC @QiaochuYuan ·

@Obliquities @the_wilderless ...feels like there's a missing piece around exploration of collective agency and collaboration to me. @Malcolm_Ocean probably has much more to say about this

@QiaochuYuan @Obliquities @the_wilderless yeah, I've been trying to find a full-stack relational practice that is oriented towards doing stuff not just feeling stuff (altho also feeling, healing, being, learning, etc) this is one fragment: malcolmocean.com/2022/05/aiming…

3 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Crispy Chicken @mclegibilist ·

hi, I'd like to understand more about other people's ideas, goals, techniques about meditation but every time I start reading something I see here it feels a bit like joining a cult. I'm not worried about ideological infection, I just don't want to sift through it all recs?

@mclegibilist this episode of AFTMC really clarified the point of some kinds of meditation for me youtube.com/watch?v=jkWNBd…

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

@stephlepp @Malcolm_Ocean think you’ll love this lmao

@visakanv @stephlepp bahaha yeah the puzzle is usually creating new buttons that both people are stoked for both people to push

5 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @stephlepp

Whoever hits the de-escalate button first...win-wins!

Replying to Amber Dawn @contemplatonist ·

@captain_mrs @nickcammarata @xuenay @Malcolm_Ocean Ah thanks, yes I've heard of that book a few times so I should probably check it out!

@contemplatonist @captain_mrs @nickcammarata @xuenay @captain_mrs then wrote a whole thread about this which I have the pleasure of linking because I check my notifications like once a fortnite so I'm seeing this Feb28 exchange just now

Mrs C @captain_mrs ·

the only known way to heal a trauma response is to activate it at the same time as another schema that contradicts the trauma schema's assumptions *in its own frame* in juxtaposing the 2 you unlock the first schema for a ~5 hour window where it can be updated permanently

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Tyler is finishing a book, slow to reply @TylerAlterman ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Is this true though? In my experience, ppl embodying the qualities of the LH do a better job of learning the RH way than the reverse But maybe that's just a motivation thing: alienating LHers know they're missing smth, whereas RHers tend 2b more content w their way of being

@TylerAlterman my impression is that people who are all vibes have a bunch of left hemisphere stuckness too, they're just running a shittier (than rationalism) LH operating system that's reifying statements like "everything is love" and taking them weirdly literally

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Tyler is finishing a book, slow to reply @TylerAlterman ·

@Malcolm_Ocean @nowtheo @PlayNiceInst @the_wilderless @clementix @MattPirkowski @georgejrjrjr Do u guys think I could get away w reading Ways of Attending instead of the first half of TMAHE?

@TylerAlterman @nowtheo @PlayNiceInst @the_wilderless @clementix @MattPirkowski @georgejrjrjr ummm... not really tbh there's a bunch of subtle stuff in how it all hangs together iirc @Morphenius can attest that he got something non-obvious from the book even tho he thought he got the gist already

3 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @albiverse

why isn't it possible to add a comment section in the middle of a blog post or paragraph to let readers add their take?

Replying to Memex.Garden @memexgarden ·

@albiverse @ontologymachine @Malcolm_Ocean I thought about it, and we could actually get this to work now with relatively little effort. Will bounce this with the team. Also seeing that this has a lot of utility for a bunch of people.

@memexgarden @albiverse @ontologymachine yesssssssssss

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

@AskYatharth @Malcolm_Ocean Book title worthy

@visakanv @AskYatharth "in the meantime" as a book title? hmmm

4 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Egregore Rising ☀️/acc @egregorerising ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Really fascinating thread! So many thoughts and questions come to mind. Would you mind sharing more on the Girard connection? What would be an example of game-expiters being sacrificed? Also, that's an interesting take on Carse's veiling. I always saw that as the particular

@GregoryHansell tbh I'm not as sure about Girard anymore

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

I used to think "scapegoating" referred to someone getting all the blame (vs only "their share"†) but I read some Girard & it seems it's actually about pinning all the blame on a (perhaps disliked) bystander who is irrelevant to the conflict, so that neither party loses

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Harry Taussig 🐘 @harry_taussig ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Gonna update this to a good ol' "life-changing" after more integration and reflection based on the goals I set and the path this put me on

@harry_taussig Glad to hear it!

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to yatharth ༺༒༻ @AskYatharth ·

@Malcolm_Ocean out of curiosity, which

@AskYatharth which OS? pop-os, a variant of ubuntu that I'm using because it goes with my System76 laptop

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Brangus🔍⏹️ @RatOrthodox ·

@Malcolm_Ocean I was like “circling is almost the thing I want it to be, but it isn’t quite. What if the rule was just that you have to be honest?”

@RatOrthodox

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

the opposite of Circling is pretending

1 like 0 RTs

> if you only allow yourself to think thoughts that "make sense" you won't transcend your own paradigms

QC @QiaochuYuan ·

if you only allow yourself to think thoughts that "make sense" you won't transcend your own paradigms (never thought i'd find a reason to use those words but here we are). the thoughts you think at your own edge are under no obligation to "make sense" x.com/QiaochuYuan/st…

quoting @QiaochuYuan: to attract peers and mentors you need to be writing stuff that is at your personal edge, half-baked stuff you barely understand, conspiracy theories, howls in the night. writing "down" is for stuff you've finished digesting and are done with. valuable but too much is limiting

9 likes 0 RTs

@visakanv @xuenay okay there is this new thread about the memory reconsolidation process—that's progress

Mrs C @captain_mrs ·

the only known way to heal a trauma response is to activate it at the same time as another schema that contradicts the trauma schema's assumptions *in its own frame* in juxtaposing the 2 you unlock the first schema for a ~5 hour window where it can be updated permanently

2 likes 0 RTs

my heuristic for how to figure out what sites to not look at during the first bit of the day, in order to preserve spacious creative energy youtu.be/athd3t0i_hc

12 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @mayfer

special tokens are very obviously useful in LLMs right now they're just used for stuff like <|im_start|> <|im_end|> <|endoftex…

anybody out there have a malcolm totem? what's it do?

brent @_brentbaum ·

creating these days: let's tap into tasshin courage and inhabit mage presence to write a nibras prayer of a river manifesto with anansi aliveness guided by silvia spirit and ivan bravery totems totems totems each and every one of you

9 likes 0 RTs

Thread · Index of the 100 video project · 1 of 77 tweets

Replying to @HephaistosF

@HephaistosF that happens to me but it's harder when I open my computer and there's a bunch of other stuff open that I want to close out first to figuratively clean off my desk one thing that has helped is having a separate browser profile for twitter so I can close it all & save state

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Brandon Goldman @BrandonGoldman ·

@Malcolm_Ocean I’m trying to implement time boxing, and aggressive turning off of unwanted push notifications. It’s a struggle every day!

@BrandonGoldman what's the struggle? is there something you need to automate, or is it more of an internal conflict?

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to yatharth ༺༒༻ @AskYatharth ·

@Malcolm_Ocean i liked this too

quoting @Malcolm_Ocean: my gut relaxed when I did this you might first want to let the room be aware of you

@AskYatharth yeah it was inspired by that!

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to yatharth ༺༒༻ @AskYatharth ·

@Malcolm_Ocean sometimes we spend a lot of energy trying to make this not happen

@AskYatharth totally it's a kind of relaxing, to not do this but sometimes it's relaxing something that feels like it's holding up something utterly vital, which makes it difficult to do

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to mannu @evolvingwaterbb ·

@Malcolm_Ocean This is making me cry. It's a lot to let go of this image I uphold of myself in front of them. Idk how to let go of that !

@evolvingmannu ♥ can you continue to see yourself the way you do, while allowing that they see you the way they do? you may find you don't have to give up your own view of yourself in order to allow them to have their view

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to FluidityAudiobooks @FluidityAudio ·

@Malcolm_Ocean It's probably not "respect" as in "admiration"; it might be "respect" as in "the deference one accords to a stranger"; or it might be a secret more complex third thing.

@FluidityAudio "agree with their judgements" is different from "allow them to have the judgements they do in fact have" "respect" has its roots in "look back at" which feels related to seeing someone seeing you

0 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @AskYatharth

the way iroh mentors zuko while still letting him have a life and make the mistakes that would ultimately lead to zuko get…

Replying to 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 @benefic_venefic ·

there’s something to be said for loving somebody enough to let them make their own mistakes

@benefic_venefic mmm I called it respect in this thread but yeah it's also love

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

letting other people make their own mistakes is a very basic and underappreciated form of respect

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to yatharth ༺༒༻ @AskYatharth ·

the way iroh mentors zuko while still letting him have a life and make the mistakes that would ultimately lead to zuko getting it is wild to me

@AskYatharth iroh is the best also I have a thread:

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

letting other people make their own mistakes is a very basic and underappreciated form of respect

6 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @visakanv

I wonder how many more years this meme format has in its lifespan. It’s been around for 3. Can you believe we didn’t have thi…

Replying to Julian Gough @juliangough ·

@visakanv I went to Burning Man in a suit, with a leather briefcase and shiny black shoes. Walked very quickly everywhere, muttering “I’m late for the meeting.” Elderly naked hippies, cycling by, would yell abuse at me. Real anger! It was very amusing.

@juliangough @visakanv amazing I heard of some folks who were conducting a Very Serious board meeting somewhere at Burning Man (maybe on an appropriately-themed art car?) and you could wind up sitting next to them with them all playing it straight. I imagine very surreal, especially for trippers

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to mannu @evolvingwaterbb ·

Unlearning is so F-ing hard. I'm so tired of trying not to see myself through my parents' lens which only amplifies my failures and faults! And it literally feels like pushing a bloody wall on some days. How does one do it without distancing from them? Idk

@evolvingmannu mmmm you might need some distance in the short term

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

@chrisstewart247 exhaling does not take away valuable time away from inhaling; it enables it think of it as an ecological approach to sustaining The Thing monocropping makes for fragile ecosystems

2 likes 0 RTs

@jesseinserial what are you getting out of it? I'd be curious to hear some examples of how you're applying it to your life!

0 likes 0 RTs

Thread · Words that are definitely words but my browser dictionary rejects · 1 of 219 tweets

"memeing" is a word and yes it's (increasingly) spelled like that it didn't used to be (very old results are 100% unrelated, they're a proper name or a mis-OCR; "meme" wasn't coined til 1976) knowyourmeme.com/memes/memeing

1 like 0 RTs

guessing it might be less about funding and more about memeing it into existence

qing @clarityscape ·

I wonder how much funding it would cost to get Jacob Collier and the QRI people in the same room together for long enough for some research to pop out

6 likes 0 RTs

Replying to qing @clarityscape ·

I wonder if it all maps precisely to symmetry-valence theory in some really cool way

@clarityscape iirc from convos with Mike Johnson @ QRI, they have a theory that there's some direct correlate between chords and harmonics within the brain cc @algekalipso & @RomeoStevens76; I don't think Mike is on Twitter

2 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @moultano

We are going to start seeing huge impedance mismatch where outputs that are amenable to automation are fed into inputs that a…

Replying to Flo Crivello @Altimor ·

Some bittersweet news: Teamflow has entered into an agreement for our product to get acquired. It's an unusual deal — only the IP and customers are changing hands. Our legal entity and team will keep existing as is, with a very exciting new direction we'll announce soon.

@Altimor fascinating it's the only way I could imagine getting acquired, since it more strongly ensures the product will keep running as long as that makes sense (vs the more typical acquihire where they throw out the product and just eat the team alive)

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to John Stokvis @JohnStokvis ·

@RichDecibels conscientious hyperobjector

@JohnStokvis @RichDecibels 😙👌

4 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

@nibrasibn @tasshinfogleman @tferriss interesting we have like a tferriss gang here, Sasha too I wouldn't say I was as deeply moved as yall, but when I was blogging around 2007-ish, I used to take notes on his style. I always remember the title of this post: x.com/sashachapin/st…

@visakanv @nibrasibn @tasshinfogleman me as well, while we're at it! I was inspired by several lifestyle design / passive income folks (incl Leo Babauta & Scott Young) but Tim's 4HWW was definitely high up there and I feel like I stayed interested in him longer

1 like 0 RTs

Thread · Four paradigm shifts for non-coercive marketing

4 paradigm shifts for non-coercive marketing, summarizing/remixing Tad Hargrave

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

if you’re feeling stuck as a creative, a cool thing to do is to look around you for creatives in other domains that you enjoy, and find a way to celebrate them and their work, through your work. it doesn’t need to be a grand gesture; even little things matter

9 likes 0 RTs

Convincing → Sharing & Truth-Seeking your mission is not to get people to buy, it's to get to the truth of whether it's a good fit objections aren't for overcoming, they're an opportunity to try to help the person as best you can, which could mean sending them elsewhere!

6 likes 0 RTs

Marketing Yourself → Being Refer-To-Able don't try to build trust with strangers, build it with people & hubs who regularly encounter people who'd love your solution, who can then point to you

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

as @TadHargrave has put it: if I come up to you at a party and say "oh man, you should totally talk to me, I'm great" ...yikes. but if one of your friends comes up to you at a party and says "oh man, you should totally talk to Tad, he's great!" that's a great endorsement!

5 likes 0 RTs

Find [more] Clients/Customers → Work With Existing Desire Two aspects of this: 1. your former/current clients might have more problems you could solve 2. prospective clients are already looking for you! make it easier for *them* to find *you* michaelashcroft.org/blog/how-to-fi…

4 likes 0 RTs

Close Sales → Create Safety Rather than trying to amp yourself up to approach & close, create more safety for people to approach *you*, & lower the risk for them to take the next step (at various stages of what that step is). Diffuse pressure, play long games.

4 likes 0 RTs

This thread is a distillation of this video. Tad articulates these as 10 distinct shifts, in the form of translating a bunch of common "I need to A" refrains into "I need to B"... I thought I'd try to collect them into clusters. youtube.com/watch?v=aTYGSZ…

5 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @tasshinfogleman

in general as a writer i am very enamored of run-on sentences, i resent their reputation, they have been unfairly slan…

@browserdotsys @QiaochuYuan @myceliummage this is relevant to your interests themyceliummage.substack.com/p/running-into…

3 likes 0 RTs

Replying to QC @QiaochuYuan ·

i made it better

@QiaochuYuan this is fucking phenomenal, damn

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

Me in defense of misattributed quotes as being like as cover versions of songs—themselves valuable for what they evoke. twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…

1 like 0 RTs

> "right speech... you listen to the sound of your own voice, as you’re speaking, as if you were listening to another person"

QC @QiaochuYuan ·

noticing which tweets i don't like seeing again in my notifications is a whole experience. even tweets where i feel like i made a good point that people would benefit from seeing don't feel good if they ultimately feel kinda petty

4 likes 1 RT

Replying to QC @QiaochuYuan ·

noticing which tweets i don't like seeing again in my notifications is a whole experience. even tweets where i feel like i made a good point that people would benefit from seeing don't feel good if they ultimately feel kinda petty

@QiaochuYuan made me think of Ken McLeod's take on "right speech"

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

> "right speech... you listen to the sound of your own voice, as you’re speaking, as if you were listening to another person" x.com/QiaochuYuan/st…

1 like 0 RTs

Thread · A guided meditation that produced deep relaxation and ego death · 10 of 11 tweets

I ♥ the intro: "I'm gonna encourage no movement but if you *have* to move, do so slowly, mindfully. The 1 caveat is if you're feeling overwhelm—you *always* wanna listen to overwhelm, even if it's not too strong, you don't wanna wait til it's big. make an adjustment, a stretch"

0 likes 0 RTs

the part afterwards, where we watch a clip of Shinzen talking about a springy bobblehead as a metaphor for emptiness, is also great and I recommend it, but it's a pretty big tone shift so if you wanna stay in the deep slow void, you'll want to stop at the end of the meditation

1 like 0 RTs

so: the meditation runs 3:00-29:00; in order to have spaciousness at the end of the meditation without having to reach out and hit pause before he starts talking fast, I extracted the first 29mins from the clip: drive.google.com/file/d/1St_Ho7…

3 likes 0 RTs

I found lying down helped get the PCE, bc otherwise my body wasn't settling enough while trying to stabilize my sitting, but if you're better than me at sitting still for meditation (& I'm not very good!) you might find that works fine (also [lying down] + [this] might → sleep)

0 likes 0 RTs

in a lot of ways this meditation (as I experienced it) is precisely the deep version of my nothing-to-do / dying-in-each-moment meditation

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

nothing-to-do meditation aka "allow myself to die in this moment" I've been experimenting with this a bit over the last few years, and moreso the last week, and finding it quite potent. idk what the deal is exactly but here are some thoughts

1 like 0 RTs

by "deep version" I mean that my version was oriented towards like, gently allowing one's doings/tryings to to die… …and maintaining that non-efforting while perhaps moving into action… …but this one says "go further" & encourages you to let your whole selfing process die

0 likes 0 RTs

but this is just even more fascinating and infuriating! like how the fuck do I bridge between: 🧘‍♀️ deep still letting go 🤸‍♂️ moment-to-moment letting go that occurs while working on stuff, mid-project, mid-pomodoro, mid-sentence

0 likes 0 RTs

oh, I found myself also reflecting that "let the meeseeks die" is a pretty good handle for this move inspired by @RomeoStevens76 who will hopefully write this up in more detail soon

George @georgejrjrjr ·

"Mr. Meeseeks interpretation of subagents" from @romeostevens captures what is true in Internal Family Systems (parts exist), while jettisoning the tendency towards reifying those parts and inducing smth like Dissociative Identity Disorder. If you love a part, let it go *PUFF*!

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Prince Vogelfrei 🐦‍⬛ @PrinceVogel ·

You might think you're healthy, but I bet your deep squat is no where near as good as smeagols

@PrinceVogel

3 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Johnson (Taiwan) @justavagrant_ ·

Digital nomads don’t have a cultural tradition/lineage to follow

@justavagrant_ speak for yourself

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

I come from a long lineage of people who figure shit out for themselves and reinvent wheels.

4 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Abstract Fairy @AbstractFairy ·

@5matthewdub @Malcolm_Ocean yeah i guess the main conflict is keeping a sense of flow while also keeping expanded awareness. i find them contradictory

@AbstractFairy @5matthewdub yeah I'm very confused about this too something something key is to notice flow has broken then expand, but otherwise just stay in flow

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to FluidityAudiobooks @FluidityAudio ·

@Malcolm_Ocean It sounds like you're saying I don't have to force the establishment of a social consensus narrative just to prevent a social consensus of their narrative from setting in. Perhaps it helps to remind one's self* that it is not, in fact, setting in. * Part of oneself?

@FluidityAudio yeah and I mean something a level before narrative... allowing the very perceptions someone is having of you, before they say anything about it

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Brandon Goldman @BrandonGoldman ·

@Malcolm_Ocean wanted to spend time on that day won’t get worked on. I have my whole day split into timeboxed routines, and at the end of the day, I have a mix of timeboxes I didn’t follow, and things I didn’t spend time on that I wanted to. 3/3

@BrandonGoldman you might find this lil manifesto helpful for thinking about the whole thing

Intend (12/100 threads) @IntendApp ·

intentionality, not productivity

1 like 0 RTs

@BrandonGoldman > Intellectually I know moving onto the next thing is better and more inline with following a system do you? it's not obvious to me that that's always better. it's better in some ways, for some things, but if part of you thinks otherwise is better, that part might have a point

2 likes 0 RTs

@BrandonGoldman and the point is that you get to choose. it's really up to you. you want to listen to both parts of yourself and...

yatharth ༺༒༻ @AskYatharth ·

if you know what the right thing for you to be doing is, and you’re not doing it, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘪𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴𝘯’𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to @alexishelping

@friendly_tpot here's one piece of writing

Intend (12/100 threads) @IntendApp ·

the point of coercion is to generate a sense of "I must" non-coercion is about releasing all sense of "must", and feeling a fundamental sense of freedom to do whatever makes sense to do on whatever timescales feel relevant

quoting @IntendApp: fundamental freedom isn't about freedom from consequences. it's about freedom to accept whatever consequences you choose, from the options available

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to QC @QiaochuYuan ·

@sonikudzu @Malcolm_Ocean relevant to your interests

@QiaochuYuan @sonikudzu ugh, yeah feeling the burn especially today when my whole day got derailed by my monitor getting confused in a way that resulted in me being unable to position its pixels relative to my laptop pixels where they actually are in space (above) may need to reinstall my OS 😩

6 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Rafael Ender @RafaelEnder ·

@Malcolm_Ocean That's an awesome visual (and idea). Thanks!

@RafaelEnder1 that photo was taken of something that had occurred just before I tweeted the tweet :P

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

@Malcolm_Ocean @AskYatharth or blogpost at least, or a poem or a song

@visakanv @AskYatharth it's roughly intended to be a blog post at some point

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to @Obliquities

@Obliquities @QiaochuYuan @the_wilderless oooh nice

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Johnson (Taiwan) @justavagrant_ ·

@Malcolm_Ocean In one instance she’s said to stop being so kind, in another she said she doesn’t know but recent conversation was open and around boundaries

@justavagrant_ tells me she feels fairly safe around you and is also a bit confused

0 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @myceliummage

@m_ashcroft i need to write more ppl need to keep making things for ppl here and release them focus on bringing project…

Retweeted @QiaochuYuan

hello friends i have a new substack post 4 u, "the puzzle without a name," link in the next tweet as usual …

Thread · An all-caps live processing of a frustrating, stuck day · 16 of 35 tweets

IAAAARGH TODAY HAS BEEN VERY BLHUGHG

QC @QiaochuYuan ·

in conclusion: IF YOU'RE STUCK TWEET IN ALL CAPS, DON'T SECOND-GUESS IT, DON'T EDIT, DON'T FILTER

17 likes 0 RTs

MY FACE FEELS TIGHT MY SHOULDER IS TIGHT... SORE... HOT... TENSE... IDK THE WORD, BUT MY SHOULDER IS SHOULDY IT'S SHOULDY

4 likes 0 RTs

I WANT TO SLEEP BUT I WANT TO DO THINGS BUT I HAVEN'T EVEN BEEN OUTSIDE TODAY I GOT WAYLAID BY MY COMPUTER BEING SLIGHTLY BORKED AND BY MY OWN REACTION TO IT AND BY TRYING TO HAVE IT NOT BE MY JOB TO FIX IT

5 likes 0 RTs

I HATE WHEN I HAVE STUFF THAT I'M STUCK WITH THAT FEELS LIKE IT SHOULDN'T BE MY JOB BUT THERE'S NOBODY ELSE WHO'S WILLING TO MAKE IT THEIR JOB GIVES ME "I DON'T WANNA" VIBES youtu.be/Tr4exOYqSLk

5 likes 0 RTs

SOMETHING IS FLOWING WITH THE ALL-CAPS, SORTA MY SHOULDER IS STILL SHOULDY

3 likes 0 RTs

I DON'T REALLY FEEL LIKE I'M IN AN ALL-CAPS MOOD BUT HERE WE ARE, IT'S GOT THE JUICES FLOWING

3 likes 0 RTs

WITH ALL-CAPS I FEEL LESS INCLINED TO FILL ALL OF THE TWEET WITH A BUNCH OF CAVEATS AND CLARIFICATIONS AND NUANCE NUANCE THAT, TO BE CLEAR, I LOVE AND AM GLAD TO BE CAPABLE OF, AND FEEL LIKE IT'S SOMETIMES A RESOURCE THAT I BRING TO THIS SPACE PRECISION

6 likes 0 RTs

i feel really sad and frustrated right now and i don't even quite know why i'm tweeting this

5 likes 0 RTs

i liked something @QiaochuYuan said about puzzle pieces and about how he feels like at any given time a given person has something that needs to be unlocked and he sometimes scrolls twitter looking for it then realizes he needs to write it himself

4 likes 0 RTs

@QiaochuYuan i feel weirdly stuck even as a lot of things feel really good and that's not just about my computer being stupid altho for the love of christ it doesn't help

3 likes 0 RTs

i sometimes feel trapped in my own face, my own voice, my own mindbodypersonashapepersonality and i don't know how to get out, and i feel scared

7 likes 0 RTs

i feel like a weird mess and my fingertips are cold and maybe this room is cold and my love is sitting on the bed reading and there's some funky music playing that came on the autoplay after barenaked ladies and my shoulder is still shouldy but less than before and feel sad

4 likes 0 RTs

that felt good. observing and naming felt good

4 likes 0 RTs

@QiaochuYuan you're some weird and important kind of inspiration for me i am after the scent of some sense of honesty or forthrightness or something, and i feel like you're doing it

4 likes 0 RTs

i know how to be earnestly interested in things, or something to be earnestly excited, to be earnestly vehemently saying "what if we made it good tho!?!" and i know how to feel things sometimes

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to QC @QiaochuYuan ·

@Malcolm_Ocean keeeeep goooooiinngggggg 🙏

@QiaochuYuan 🥲🥹 my inner you was already saying that or i wouldn't have made it this far

1 like 0 RTs

Thread · An all-caps live processing of a frustrating, stuck day · 2 of 35 tweets

@utotranslucence has been trying to say something about this to me a bunch for awhile i said to her some weeks or months ago "i haven't been being honest with you... not that i've been lying, but there's... something... i'm not letting you into"

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to QC @QiaochuYuan ·

@Malcolm_Ocean 🙏🙏🙏

@QiaochuYuan

brent @_brentbaum ·

creating these days: let's tap into tasshin courage and inhabit mage presence to write a nibras prayer of a river manifesto with anansi aliveness guided by silvia spirit and ivan bravery totems totems totems each and every one of you

1 like 0 RTs

Thread · An all-caps live processing of a frustrating, stuck day · 4 of 35 tweets

suddenly aware that i keep getting these urges to say "i'm sorry" and i don't know what for like this has been randomly happening every few weeks or months for a year or more

2 likes 0 RTs

sometimes people talk about emotional constipation i feel like i have emotional food poisoning or something and i'm trying to throw up

3 likes 0 RTs

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

“Don't surrender your loneliness so quickly. Let it cut you more deep. Let it ferment and season you as few humans and even divine ingredients can. Something missing in my heart tonight has made my eyes so soft, my voice so tender, my need for God absolutely clear.” — Hafiz

3 likes 0 RTs

i want to cry and by cry i mean puke

15 likes 0 RTs

Thread · An all-caps live processing of a frustrating, stuck day · 2 of 35 tweets

sometimes the world seems so perfect and makes so much sense and then sometimes it seems to tangled and messy and dull and maybe that's all true simultaneously

QC @QiaochuYuan ·

the mealy-mouthed thing to say here is these stories are true "in some sense" or they have "a kernel of truth" or whatever. but this doesn't register for me. it feels more true to me to say that they are just all true, simultaneously. everything, everywhere, all at once

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to QC @QiaochuYuan ·

@Malcolm_Ocean

[video]

@QiaochuYuan hahaha

1 like 0 RTs

Thread · An all-caps live processing of a frustrating, stuck day · 5 of 35 tweets

what the fuck is this. this tweet had an alternate ending that i forgot about til now that was something like "and this is all fucking HAPPENING? WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?"

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

i feel like a weird mess and my fingertips are cold and maybe this room is cold and my love is sitting on the bed reading and there's some funky music playing that came on the autoplay after barenaked ladies and my shoulder is still shouldy but less than before and feel sad

3 likes 0 RTs

noticing my shoulder shoulding again but maybe it's been the whole time and i just wasn't looking

2 likes 0 RTs

i'm sorry i'm sorry i didn't tell you i'm sorry i didn't make it i'm sorry i was late i'm sorry i wasn't there i'm sorry i'm so much i'm sorry i'm fine i'm sorry i'm not listening i'm sorry i'm sorry i wasn't where you wanted me to be i'm sorry i wasn't ready i'm sorry i'm sorry

2 likes 0 RTs

i'm sorry i wasn't enough i'm sorry you weren't enough i'm sorry i told you i'm sorry i didn't know how to tell you i'm sorry you kept asking me i'm sorry i tried i'm sorry i believed you i'm sorry i stopped there i'm sorry i went so far as to do so much to do look more like

2 likes 0 RTs

i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry i didn't know i still don't i don't know who you are i don't know if you're listening but i'm sorry i am confused and scared and i'm sorry i didn't mean it i'm sorry i didn't mean it i'm sorry i didn't know how to mean things

3 likes 0 RTs

Replying to @Obliquities

@Obliquities @QiaochuYuan @the_wilderless and i can just show up? epic

2 likes 0 RTs

Thread · An all-caps live processing of a frustrating, stuck day · 4 of 35 tweets

i didn't know what meaning things meant it wasn't safe to know i was just a boy i don't know who i am

2 likes 0 RTs

i'm trying or at least i'm supposed to keep saying "i'm trying" that's what you say, right? that's what trying is i'm sorry i'm trying to look like i'm trying

2 likes 0 RTs

someone a long time ago apparently convinced me i need to look like i'm trying otherwise bad otherwise mad

4 likes 0 RTs

i am here to share my confusion with the world rn and to share the world with my confusion

QC @QiaochuYuan ·

assume by default that the function of every tweet is just to spread whatever vibe / energy / emotion the poster is feeling at the moment, whether the poster knows it or not. this should be the null hypothesis, so to speak. content is largely irrelevant

quoting @the_wilderless: I used to convince myself that by constantly dragging every positive conversation back to darkness, pessimism, & horror, I was doing some sacred duty to keep things grounded(???) Now, it’s p clear that I just felt like shit & wanted to affirm I was Correct to feel that way

5 likes 1 RT

Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean

i am here to share my confusion with the world rn and to share the world with my confusion

QC @QiaochuYuan ·

assume by default that the function of every tweet is just to spread whatever vibe / energy / emotion the poster is feeling at the moment, whether the poster knows it or not. this should be the null hypothesis, so to speak. content is largely irrelevant

quoting @the_wilderless: I used to convince myself that by constantly dragging every positive conversation back to darkness, pessimism, & horror, I was doing some sacred duty to keep things grounded(???) Now, it’s p clear that I just felt like shit & wanted to affirm I was Correct to feel that way

Thread · An all-caps live processing of a frustrating, stuck day · 1 of 35 tweets

i like you too much to keep you on the outside and yet here we are i'm scared of you too much to let you on the inside ...nope, that's lies. i'm... scared of me too much to let me out? what even is this thing?

3 likes 0 RTs

Replying to sílvia is @this_is_silvia ·

my Trickster Enchantress arc has officially begun. reply to get a spell from my orb

@this_is_silvia orb me

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

the other people at this party don't know that I'm pondering my orb

5 likes 0 RTs

Thread · An all-caps live processing of a frustrating, stuck day · 1 of 35 tweets

i don't know where i'm going with any of this but it feels better out than in i'm brushing my teeth jess is reading my thread i'm going to bed in a moment

4 likes 0 RTs

i keep learning that if twitter doesn't have the tweet i'm looking for i need to write it myself

QC @QiaochuYuan ·

one of my wackiest beliefs about twitter is that i believe people come here looking for a tweet that will provide the exact right combination necessary to unlock their hearts. often i find i have to write the tweet myself though. if "tpot" is about anything, it's this, to me

6 likes 0 RTs

I feel heavy and like I'm made of slugs where by slugs I mean pellets of lead or perhaps by slugs I mean fragments of urls

11 likes 0 RTs

Replying to mannu @evolvingwaterbb ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Been trying to do that. Works sometimes but sometimes the protectors just end up acting very defensively, creating suffering for both ends.

@evolvingmannu brings me back to this

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

@evolvingmannu mmmm you might need some distance in the short term twitter.com/visakanv/statu…

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Aleksi Liimatainen @aleksil79 ·

@Malcolm_Ocean "I'm too scared of me to let me out" this touches something 🤔 who is this "me" and what would it mean to let them out? do they even want that at this time? it's... a cocoon? a womb? some combination of me/world feels unready but not by much

@aleksil79 oh, this helps! reminds me of how when I first read UtEB and did a retreat with a friend to do some coherence work, we came across this schema that was like "if I let myself go / let myself feel wonderful, I'll hurt other people"

1 like 0 RTs

@aleksil79 ...we tried to juxtapose/disconfirm it a bit too hastily, before really digging in and seeing why it's obviously fully true from its own perspective so maybe that's an integration project for me now!

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Richard D. Bartlett @RichDecibels ·

holy moly there's a chef kiss emoji

quoting @Malcolm_Ocean: @JohnStokvis @RichDecibels 😙👌

@RichDecibels yeah! on my slacks I use this custom guy, but the composite 😙+👌 works great elsewhere

5 likes 0 RTs

Replying to River Kenna @the_wilderless ·

@Malcolm_Ocean @justavagrant_ Tru

quoting @the_wilderless: Rob Burbea James Hillman Peter Kingsley Mary Midgely Jeffrey Kripal R.D. Laing Henri Corbin Simone Weil Carl Jung Aleister Crowley Soren Kierkegaard Ralph Waldo Emerson William Blake Martin Luther John Wycliffe Margery Kempe Marguerite Porete Paracelsus Diogenes Socrates

@the_wilderless @justavagrant_ fucking excellent mate

2 likes 0 RTs

consider "I don't have the right to" → "I don't know the way to" doesn't always work but there's something there

4 likes 1 RT

Replying to Jeffrey Ladish @JeffLadish ·

google docs UI just changed dramatically how is no one talking about this

@JeffLadish I just searched twitter for "google docs" to see if someone else was talking about it! maybe it's strategically timed to usher in the new era of AI-enabled docs:

GRITCULT @GRITCULT ·

🚨 HUGE news in AI: Google just launched Generative AI across ALL of Google Workspace -- Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Images -- EVERYTHING. Exactly as I predicted and recommended that they do.

[video]

2 likes 0 RTs

last night's intense thread was good but I noticed afterwards it didn't get outside of something that was TRYING like I was TRYING to be authentic/real, TRYING to express myself

4 likes 0 RTs

Replying to jonathan @jonathandubin ·

@Malcolm_Ocean mm. this feels distinctly different from anything I think I've seen you written before

@jonathandubin appreciating that reflection i said something similar in a Circle on monday and it felt right/good, and I'm looking for more of that taste

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to GRITCULT @GRITCULT ·

@Malcolm_Ocean @JeffLadish Yeah was pretty interesting last month. Well the entire paradigm of information exchange will change. Most doc software was glorified mimicry of irl paper. The future I think this will totally disintegrate and be more fluid. Reactive. Ai will adapt the information interface

@GRITCULT @JeffLadish I was just reflecting today that there'll be a lot in the first wave of AI stuff that's just automating X. it'll be more available, but worse eg take an existing therapy technique designed for a face-to-face therapist and make a bot but then we'll get innovations BASED on AI

2 likes 0 RTs

Thread · Metaphor design for AI products beyond therapist and teacher

a therapist meets with you in 1-2h sessions, every week or two. obviously AI bots can be with you 24/7, and they will be... but "therapist" isn't necessarily a good metaphor for that! "magic healing journal" might be a better metaphor here

10 likes 0 RTs

a teacher maybe has classes, maybe has tutoring sessions... has some of their own expertise maybe? but doesn't have the time to follow each step, or invent new metaphors and illustrations for each student young lady's illustrated primer might be a better metaphor here

5 likes 0 RTs

the assistant metaphor is probably going to be fairly apt for AI, at least for awhile, in the sense of "you ask them to do something or research something, they do it" but here, interestingly, most people aren't USED to having an assistant, so it's a kind of novel experience

7 likes 0 RTs

what else? this is just a start. anybody working on an AI-related anything would benefit from taking seriously that this is an opportunity not just to make "X but automated" but something entirely new (which may replace X without resembling it)

6 likes 0 RTs

communicating via the internet is communicating physically it is via a physical medium that my keystrokes or images are sent to you we're in the same world! talking face to face also uses a medium: air, through which acoustic pressure waves & electromagnetic (light) waves move

5 likes 0 RTs

Replying to GRITCULT @GRITCULT ·

internet culture is taking over irl culture x.com/TophCoins/stat…

@GRITCULT few understand this

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

communicating via the internet is communicating physically it is via a physical medium that my keystrokes or images are sent to you we're in the same world! talking face to face also uses a medium: air, through which acoustic pressure waves & electromagnetic (light) waves move

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to @alexishelping

@friendly_tpot this might also be useful I have lots of writing on this but (so far!) not a single obvious resource malcolmocean.com/2022/08/allowi…

0 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @captain_mrs

authenticity and self-improvement aren't at odds with each other if you use "authenticity" to mean "incline away from coun…

3 years ago I took this photo of a bunch of people meeting each other on the street and awkwardly social distancing, just as news about the pandemic being, well, a pandemic, was reaching everyone

12 likes 0 RTs

Replying to @HephaistosF

@HephaistosF seems like somewhat, but it also clearly wasn't working along some other axis the ongoing puzzle

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to @aptlyamphoteric

@aptlyamphoteric mmm nice! swiping some of those phrases for my own use somewhere perhaps I tried: > You stay focused on the present moment, not giving multiple big questions at once. The aim is more to help the user think out loud and stay unstuck, rather than to tell them what to do.

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to RomeoStevens @RomeoStevens76 ·

@Malcolm_Ocean finding all the 'I want you to act as an X' prompt lists really uninspiring. I want a new way of interacting with my stream of consciousness.

@RomeoStevens76 I'm experimenting with some stream-of-consciousness features for Complice, and puzzling about how to include AI chat into them would be into jamming on this if you want!

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Brandon Goldman @BrandonGoldman ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Complice looks really cool! The philosophy is great. I totally get splitting defined goals into a daily plan, separate from tasks and project planning. I just signed up and tried it. I wish there were a mobile app — that’s a dealbreaker for me since I work on my phone a lot.

@BrandonGoldman mobile app is somewhat in the works! and in the meantime if you go to complice.co/$USERNAME/sett… and enable Full Offline, it'll let you add the mobile web app to your homescreen

1 like 0 RTs

Thread · Words that are definitely words but my browser dictionary rejects · 1 of 219 tweets

Replying to Brandon Goldman @BrandonGoldman ·

@Malcolm_Ocean getting distracted with D/E/F — even when it’s the wrong thing. And even if I did work on X/Y/Z without deviating, often I won’t finish by the timebox, or I’ll go over the timebox to finish, and either way it’s frustrating.

@BrandonGoldman hmmm... where does the frustration come from? for me sometimes it's like, I just keep going when the timebox ends, without really re-assessing if it still makes sense if I consciously reassess, I usually feel pretty good regardless of what path I take

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to @aptlyamphoteric

@aptlyamphoteric I'm curious yeah

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Johnson (Taiwan) @justavagrant_ ·

My hip flexors are sore

@justavagrant_ weird flex, but OKAY!!

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Ms. G 💖 @pragueyerrr ·

i’m reading a book that is about how compelling it is to not understand completely, to only maybe understand 1/3rd of what is happening, and i don’t understand what i’m reading completely, i only understand 1/3rd of what is happening, and i am compelled

@pragueyerrr wait what, say more

1 like 0 RTs

absurd that of the 150k unicode characters none of them encodes this symbol most of us look at all day obvious candidate for an emoji

59 likes 0 RTs

(site is shapecatcher.com—a fav tool of mine) (and yes I know the site only supports 11k characters, but unicode does have 149k and this one is not one of them based on googling)

5 likes 0 RTs

Replying to anansi 🌞 @s0ulDirect0r ·

I don’t like sufferingposting. But it’s happening, it’s real for me. My fear wants me to delete this shit but it’s real, I’m alive this is a part of the game too. It ain’t all just wonder and miracles and ecstasy it’s desperate and exhausted and pain too

@s0ulDirect0r I find myself thinking "you could change your profile pic to a face for a bit & name to Matt". if I imagine being this guy I'm like "fuck that's really intense holy shit" no idea if that's remotely the right direction, but it felt worth naming as a suggestion

9 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Brandon Goldman @BrandonGoldman ·

@Malcolm_Ocean If I go beyond the timebox, I’m skipping other things I want to be working on. If I stop at the timebox, I’m leaving the task unfinished. Regardless of choice, it’s frustrating that the alternate didn’t happen. It’s also frustrating to get distracted so much

@BrandonGoldman hmmm, maybe part of the issue is you're trying to schedule all of your time, rather than leaving buffer space? as for distractions, you might find this article helpful: complice.co/articles/cente…

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Brandon Goldman @BrandonGoldman ·

@Malcolm_Ocean I need it to open by itself, not as a browser tab, otherwise it’s too clunky for daily use on mobile. In the meantime, could you publish the mobile web app inside a wrapper? I think that would be well-received among your users!

@BrandonGoldman when you do what I described (requires enabling full offline mode) it does open by itself on android, and I'm pretty sure it does on iOS too like it's basically the barest wrapper

1 like 0 RTs

Retweeted @QiaochuYuan

global wayfinding meditation could roughly be summarized as: do* stuff* that’s good* and don’t* do stuff that isn’t* good…

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

the paradox of this is how some amount of submission/surrender to one’s instincts has a “trust the universe / trust the process” vibe to it that increases one’s felt sense of freedom even as it “technically” reduces one’s ‘optionality’ (disembodied Advanced Stupid concept)

quoting @visakanv: as long as i let my taste/curiosity and pursuit of interestingness guide me, I can keep goin. that’s my secret, that I like what I like and have been learning with each passing year to be more unapologetic about it

@visakanv a friend said this recently and I found it resonant! > the times I'd say I was acting with the most "free will" are also the times I felt the most like like I was being called or compelled

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

common anxiety, typically beginning around teenage years, is something like “but if I just follow my instincts won’t I then just do terrible things in addictive ways?” And it’s a reasonable worry; there’s something tragic-poetic about the recursive complexity in this

@visakanv cf Marc Lewis "addiction is a learning problem" and the idea that "people are by default bad" is self-fulfilling propaganda from the goodself to reinforce its need to exist to control the badself

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

@meditationstuff @AbstractFairy @bigmastertroll Turns out most people, broadly speaking, care about other people and want to do nice things for others and the world, and if they're not doing so it's because they're scared or confused. The idea that that's not so is self-reinforcing dualistic propaganda. twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…

3 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @visakanv

I think my main goal in 2024/2025 will be to maximise squad/crew wealth, ie help make as many of my mutuals as rich n success…

Replying to Andrew Rose @__drewface ·

@visakanv Happy to be used as a resource toward this end if you find a situation where my consult would be helpful 🎉

@__drewface @visakanv likewise on a bunch of levels meta-squad

5 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Nick Sousanis @nsousanis on all the socials fwiw @Nsousanis ·

This is a fantastic page - thanks, @codespoti!

quoting @codespoti: @Nsousanis @alvaropons Another popular image. The unveiling of consciousness, by Mana Neyestani https://t.co/aJFxFgomoE

@Nsousanis @codespoti oh wow yeah, thanks for sharing frame awareness comes in many forms

3 likes 0 RTs

@spacecrone truly

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

I once did an emotional processing session starting w: "I feel weird/bad trying to get out of bed" I found my way to expressing a hazy memory: "Nobody woke me up and I missed the pancakes!" ...then I suddenly started sobbing 😭 Traumatic meaning can occur in benign situations.

0 likes 0 RTs

"suppression suppresses" — @visakanv a useful tautology: the key here is that suppression suppresses in quite a generalized way. it's hard or perhaps impossible to target

7 likes 0 RTs

😚👌

Patrick McKenzie @patio11 ·

(For the benefit of international readers: “shotgun wedding” is an American expression for a compelled merger following realization that foreseeable consequences for past risk-on behavior are now unavoidable.)

1 like 0 RTs

Thread · Intentionality, not time, is the real bottleneck

...except insofar as also being under intense time pressure is making it hard to untangle intentions! but increasingly people have enough self-directedness at work that they actually could pause & breathe & untangle if they knew how

12 likes 0 RTs

@p_millerd's Pathless Path points at how learning intention management is going to be increasingly necessary for many people! the time is all there, but the choices of what to even be aiming towards are fractal and endless & if your intentions conflict…

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

The 10 percent of the brain myth is actually onto something! ...but it's not that 90% isn't not in use—it's that... most people have 45% fighting another 45%, so on net there's 10% useful capacity.

17 likes 1 RT

Replying to Emmett Shear @eshear ·

A surprise from week one of parenting. When I held my friend's children and they started crying, I experienced fear and guilt (oh no i broke them). But when I hold my own son and he starts crying, I feel mostly compassion (aw, kid) and curiosity (what are you needing?).

@eshear wow, yeah. if a friend's kid is upset I wonder if there's something they know that I don't about this kid, but (I imagine; not yet a dad!) if it's my own then it's sort of more obvious that I know what is known about the kid

0 likes 0 RTs

@eshear when kids are a few months older I gather it's possible to teach them a few gestures from sign language that they can use to communicate needs more specifically, before they've learned to talk!

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Emmett Shear @eshear ·

I was unnecessarily did a Discourse in someone’s mentions for a personal topic they were trying to work through in public. They (justly) blocked me for it. I just wanted to share that I feel bad about it, and I wish Twitter had some way to apologize to person who blocked you.

@eshear yeah, it's one of those features that's kind of impossible to build because it means letting you send them a message oh! actually, no, you just need to have it be text that's written by the app itself. maybe 3 canned options for different flavors of situation

2 likes 0 RTs

@eshear I'd want to collect a bunch of situations before writing the options but maybe something like Sorry for a) being a jerk in your mentions b) projecting my shit on you c) RT/QTing you beyond reasonable context I respect that you blocked me. maybe also eg

Ryan Moulton @moultano ·

@eshear I wish I could say "I promise I'll stop replying to your tweets if you let me see them."

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Abstract Fairy @AbstractFairy ·

@Malcolm_Ocean i think writing a short post about the phenomenology of intention (while avoiding the word phenomenology) will be fruitful for you / complice i'll dm you a possible starting point / draft and you can see if you can add smth to it

@AbstractFairy ooooh, yeah I've been thinking about creating a group blog for talking about intentionality, non-coercive motivation, etc. feels like it could be a good scene

9 likes 0 RTs

"consider a crying baby. why is the baby crying? [various checklisty options that are useful to a parent but in an important sense failing to take the baby's perspective] the baby cries because something is wrong" — Bill Powers

39 likes 0 RTs

this excerpt, from Making Sense of Behavior: The Meaning of Control, has really stuck with me it points at how the baby (at first) in some sense doesn't know what is wrong (in any conceptual sense) they just know SOMETHING's wrong, and they pull the alarm to say so 🚨

17 likes 0 RTs

(the baby IS however the arbiter of whether the error/wrongness has been resolved!) and eventually ofc they learn to notice the differences and communicate them (sign language can make this happen before the kid has enough motor control for speech)

15 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @selentelechia

just read Making Sense of Behavior perceptual control theory is an incredible model holy shit (H/t @Malcolm_Ocean)

Replying to Belli @bellisaurius ·

@selentelechia @orthonormalist Control theory is in my wheelhouse, and let me tell you, the more you separate your child's physical body as a feedback machine from all the human dignity stuff, the easier a lot of parenting gets. That said, it's better as a mental model for parents than anything else

@bellisaurius @selentelechia @orthonormalist can you say more about what you mean here? I'm seeing a few ways to interpret it that kind of contradict

0 likes 0 RTs

@eshear made me think of these paragraphs from one of my fav books, also!

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

"consider a crying baby. why is the baby crying? [various checklisty options that are useful to a parent but in an important sense failing to take the baby's perspective] the baby cries because something is wrong" — Bill Powers

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Loz is Loz @lozareeno ·

@selentelechia Isn’t cuck from cuckold from cuckoo (bird)?

@LaurenUba @selentelechia yeah it's definitely from cuckold, which tracks much more directly someone has substituted their values for yours (etymonline just hasn't caught up)

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Wes Carvalho @wescarvalho2 ·

@selentelechia I think it's also describing an attitude toward the resulting powerlessness. It's not cucked to just _be_ a loser; it's cucked to think "I'm a loser, and that's good and just actually."

@wescarvalho2 @selentelechia yeah, that seems to track I might gloss it as "knowingly replacing your values with someone else's" which is the sense in which I was using it here:

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

> the moral value of an individual's actions depends solely on the impact on other individuals, regardless of the consequences on the individual themself this is quite precisely cucked

0 likes 0 RTs

it was inevitable that eventually captchas and turing tests would converge

Tanishq Mathew Abraham, Ph.D. @iScienceLuvr ·

I got to try GPT-4's multimodal capabilities and it's quite impressive! A quick thread of examples... Let's start out with solving a CAPTCHA, no big deal

[1 more photo]

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to The Artist fka: 𝓶𝔂𝓬𝓮𝓵𝓲𝓾𝓶 𝓶𝓪𝓰𝓮 {❤️‍🔥} @myceliummage ·

SO IF THERE'S KNOTS AND KINKS IN THE STORY YOU TELL ABOUT YOURSELF YOU WILL STORE THEM IN THE PERCEPTION BODIES OF THE PEOPLE YOU ENTANGLE WITH AND THEY WILL ASSIST YOU IN FORGING A KNOTTED AND KINKED FUTURE JUST YOU ASKED THEM TO

@myceliummage relates to Tyler Durden Power

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

to the extent you have social power, your inner Tyler Durden shares that power that is to say, your unconscious aims will naturally use your social power to achieve their various ends

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Abstract Fairy @AbstractFairy ·

@Malcolm_Ocean MVP version can be a subreddit with links and a wiki, but yeah a LW like group blog woyld be better

@AbstractFairy I thought about a subreddit but the idea of hanging out on reddit while aiming to be intentional feels a bit at odds 😆 I wonder if it's possible to license the reddit fork that LW runs on? ea forum uses it iirc

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to spencer chang @spencerc99 ·

@azlenelza @Malcolm_Ocean end-user language creation

@spencerc99 @azlenelza yeah something about this seems very potent. very hard to get it to work in plaintext contexts tho

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Brandon Goldman @BrandonGoldman ·

@Malcolm_Ocean I’m definitely scheduling all of my time. I try to allow enough time for each category/habit/task. The discipline required to keep it is difficult for me. If I had more discipline in sticking to the timeboxes rather than changing my mind or getting distracted, it would be better.

@BrandonGoldman my experience has been that this is less about discipline and more about something like listening like if part of me thinks my current task is stupid, okay, what is it trying to say? can I write down its idea for later or does it need to be addressed now?

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Brandon Goldman @BrandonGoldman ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Great article btw. I totally identify with getting sucked into social media, email, and especially tab explosion! I have 1000+ tabs open now 😂 Those healthier 5min distractions are legit. Solving a Rubik’s cube or a short mid-workday interaction with my children would fit too.

@BrandonGoldman I imagine interacting with kids could be hugely divergent haha, but it's at least presencing rather than sort of pulling you out of the present moment

1 like 0 RTs

@BrandonGoldman one of the nice things about pomodoros is that if you really insist on taking a break, you learn that you don't have to do anything indefinitely, which then makes it EASIER to let yourself relax into trying something because you know you don't have to go forever

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to River Kenna @the_wilderless ·

If I get a single snorted half-laugh from this, it will have all been worth it

@the_wilderless lmao nailed it

1 like 0 RTs

Retweeted @CompliceGoals

the Complice streaks feature has a few tricks up its sleeve, and one of those is special icons for certain numbers. just…

user: is there a public roadmap for complice.co? me: there isn't, in part because we practice WDD (whim-driven development) where I build whatever I feel like building at any given time 🙃

21 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Mikael Brockman @meekaale ·

@Malcolm_Ocean it seems to me that a primary thing that's wrong is often not any specific pain or problem but frustration with control itself like wanting more control or feeling discrepancy between vague desire and nascent ability

@meekaale oh damn, yeah, of course that'd be frustrating you're like "I have needs..?! and all I can do is cry about it!???!! fuck this suckkkkkkkkkkks 😭"

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Abstract Fairy @AbstractFairy ·

@Malcolm_Ocean found it. its open source github.com/ForumMagnum/Fo…

@AbstractFairy oh holy shit this is hugely exciting brb

1 like 0 RTs

having digested this for a few years "intention" is my best candidate so far

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

most people are so utterly bottlenecked on intention management that time is barely relevant at all twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…

2 likes 0 RTs

I recorded this album in 2012 as Maleidoscope, and it would be kinda cool to put it on Spotify etc, and I'm wondering whether to release it as Malcolm Ocean thoughts on how to think about this? ift.tt/Dut1P6m

0 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @Morphenius

This came up again today, so PSA: Fight/flight is emergency mode. Helps over minutes, MAYBE hours. If sth angers/scares y…

a video by @m_ashcroft gave me an idea for another video he could make, & I decided to just make it myself! it's a tiny exploration of the nature of intentionality. where do intentions come from? how does that relate to being on autopilot? youtu.be/Zzn4TxpxxrA

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

I define a minimum viable scene as 1. at least two people... 2. who are producing public-facing work... 3. that's directed at each other... 4. creating powerful vectors in the process would also add that these people encourage and unblock each other... buncha other deets

@visakanv I keep thinking of you when I make videos addressed to (or riffing on) friends. it's such a potent way to vid vlogbrothers vibes

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

a video by @m_ashcroft gave me an idea for another video he could make, & I decided to just make it myself! it's a tiny exploration of the nature of intentionality. where do intentions come from? how does that relate to being on autopilot? youtu.be/Zzn4TxpxxrA

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Hormeze 𐤄𐤅𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤆 @hormeze ·

@algekalipso youtu.be/N1Mac4FeKXg i was kind of skeptical of neuralink and what not but this is real. this is not sci-fi, this is real.

@hormeze this image made me trip out all over again

2 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @hormeze

every once in a while i come across a fact that simultaneously fills me with wonder and makes me feel as though im losing my m…

Thread · Krista and Tatiana Hogan and the framing of conjoined twins

Replying to Hormeze 𐤄𐤅𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤆 @hormeze ·

every once in a while i come across a fact that simultaneously fills me with wonder and makes me feel as though im losing my mind, simply because i had missed until now LIKE THE FACT THAT THERE ARE CONJOINED TWINS THAT CAN SEE THROUGH EACH OTHERS EYES en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krista_an…

@hormeze found some videos of them at age 11, which don't add much but it's kinda neat to see cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/fea…

1 like 0 RTs

@hormeze ppl keep addressing this from a disability perspective, which like, isn't surprising, but it's so weird that's salient to them "just because they're conjoined, does not mean that they cannot do activities that their peers are doing" sure but what CAN they do that others CAN'T!?

5 likes 0 RTs

@hormeze oh this vid is good! more sense-sharing also > Krista and Tatiana Hogan share the senses of touch and taste and even control one another’s limbs. Tatiana can see out of both of Krista’s eyes, while Krista can only see out of one of Tatiana’s. !!?! cbc.ca/player/play/10…

2 likes 0 RTs

@hormeze ah the reason that the videos keep emphasizing the disability etc stuff is that that's the mom's angle. makes sense. I'm sure she does get lots of flak for it. > It's to make sure my kids don't grow up in a world where looking different is wrong. cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/fea…

1 like 0 RTs

@hormeze "we're normal, look at us doing normal things" ...is just not a thing I care about. but it is for lots of people. I'm just like "what's your deal? what can we learn from each other, how can we interface?" ...needs compatibility but not sameness

2 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @St_Rev

Progressives like to congratulate themselves on banning child labor, but they didn't do that. They made it illegal to pay child…

Thread · Misusing Audre Lorde's "master's tools" line

"to me, getting a law degree is just about using the master's tools to destroy the master's house" I have two responses to this: 1. oh honey, no... (it's always embarrassing when people reference a quote that counters the point they're trying to make)

Helen Andrews @herandrews ·

Lithwick says many female attorneys she knows feel this way about the law: no respect for its majestic authority ("I didn't go to law school because I had a deep respect for the rule of law"), but a canny appreciation for its usefulness in getting people to do what you want.

11 likes 0 RTs

and 2. this is fucking terrifying what the fuck do not just give the oppressed the power their oppressors had that has never gone well (USSR & intergenerational abuse are examples of this; there are others in this book 👇)

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

@QiaochuYuan For excellent source on: 1⃣ how being traumatized leads to abuse of power 2⃣ how people abusing often feel powerless while doing it 3⃣ how the patriarchy traumatizes men (well, boys) see this free online book Power-Under: Trauma & Nonviolent Social Change traumaandnonviolence.com

10 likes 0 RTs

torment nexus vibes here a bit

Alex Blechman @AlexBlechman ·

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

3 likes 0 RTs

to be clear, it would be one thing to say "actually you can dismantle the master's house with the master's tools; here's why Audre Lorde was confused about that" but to just casually refer to your plan with a phrase whose origin is that plan being impossible & misguided... yikes

5 likes 0 RTs

also part of the point of this quote as I see it is to highlight that there's a *temptation* to use "the master's tools", and the need to do something different

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

you can’t bully someone into being a good person because you simply reinforce that bullying is how you get things done

quoting @hankgreen: I just feel like being an asshole to an asshole actually makes them more of an asshole.

5 likes 0 RTs

she was talking about the necessity of not just tolerating how women are different from men, & minimizing those differences to allow women to enter into patriarchal worlds... [& other axes: race, class,.] …but leveraging the wisdom in those differences!

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

(also: ppl say that separate from signalling value, diversity is intrinsically a source of energy. I agree, but it isn't automatically a source of *useful* energy—like a voltage difference in a battery/capacitor, if improperly handled, it will just zap you or explode things)

3 likes 0 RTs

or wait, no, she's talking about differences but also those between women. hmm...

5 likes 0 RTs

I think? I'm actually not totally sure, to be entirely honest. staring at the talk transcript I get the impression she's saying something more subtle; not something that is already a talking point I understand

5 likes 0 RTs

also seems worth crediting that my capacity to understand as much as I did of what Lorde is saying here is in part due to Jess's influence

•Freyja• @utotranslucence ·

@phallusoraptors I once explained how multi-perspectival conversation and poetry were the same thing (to the right person) and… Humbly saying you’re wrong 😊

5 likes 0 RTs

Replying to @abhayance

@abhayance @mayfer you were working on something like this iirc—how'd it go?

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

free image prompt idea: 1. plato's academy but it's an industrial techno/EDM club with the lasers and everything 2. plato's academy but everyone is wearing oni masks, kabuki masks, etc

@visakanv fucked around, used an image prompt & two topic prompts s.mj.run/tkdlfAjcW7I The School of Athens:: edm club with epic lighting::0.5 --ar 16:9 --v 5

23 likes 1 RT

@visakanv some earlier attempts, mostly just with "School of Athens" and an image or two

1 like 0 RTs

@visakanv earlier attempts: 1. plato's academy but it's an industrial techno/EDM club with the lasers and everything 2. s.mj.run/tkdlfAjcW7I the school of athens 3. The School of Athens. digital painting by Raphael, trending on artstation 4. [url from prompt 2] [prompt 3]

3 likes 0 RTs

@visakanv "digital painting by Raphael" is such a joke but I thought it would be fun to try. probably lots more juice there

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Captain Pleasure, Andrés Gómez Emilsson @algekalipso ·

@EduNauram @tipado @DanielPoneman @alieninsect Thanks! I think the defining feature of DMT beings beyond the semantic content we ascribe to them is the fact that they are made of interlocking structures fused into cw-complexes with articulations implemented using coupled high frequency harmonic resonant modes.

@algekalipso @EduNauram @tipado @DanielPoneman @alieninsect I'd bet Interface Theory of Perception is relevant here under ordinary world-navigating circumstances, we converge on 3D ~euclidean perception but if considering… the sorts of things the mind considers on DMT…? maybe convergent best interface is elves?

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

finally read the Interface Theory of Reality paper and it's fairly short & quite good! quite easy to read. good metaphors, a lil math. resonates a bunch with some of what I've been orienting to regarding collective perception sites.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/interf…

4 likes 0 RTs

Replying to priya rose @Prigoose ·

how to dissolve anger? how to let go of anger?

@Prigoose Sam Harris suggests repeating an emotional rxn deliberately, which I've found pretty interesting & satisfying with anger helps release the part that is just a feeling me: annoyed by something  motherfucker 😠(😒)  motherFUCKER 😡(🤭)  GODDAMNIT MOTHERFUCKER 🤬(🤣)

10 likes 1 RT

Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean

@Prigoose Sam Harris suggests repeating an emotional rxn deliberately, which I've found pretty interesting & satisfying…

@reasonisfun just spent a bit looking for this thread keywords to help: magnitude emotions meaning feelings schema size shape @metaLulie

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

@TasshinF @secretpathing Instead of thinking of "overreactions" I mostly think of things as being composite reactions where the magnitude is appropriate to *something* relevant and you just need to figure out what. (Might be a childhood trauma or whatever) More here: twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…

0 likes 0 RTs

@Prigoose there are multiple factors that go into the size & shape of the emotion you're having right now; worth paying attention to all of them (and I guess there's a learning process of discerning which is relevant each time)

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

@reasonisfun So it's something like, emotions all mean *something*. They're all situated in all of: • the sense data you're perceiving (unless dreaming) • your whole backlog of life experiences that have created your brain organization • the current neurochemical baseline

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Jeffrey Ladish @JeffLadish ·

I'm super curious how people are using language models in their day-to-day. Today I was using GPT-4 to brainstorm some examples of white lies based on a few examples, then used the model to transform the paragraphs of text into a specific yaml format. Hbu?

@JeffLadish I don't trust it for anything I can't verify but I used ChatGPT 3.5 to help me create some mongodb aggregation pipelines 2 days ago, which was nice. I like being able to ask "but then how do I X?" & it adds additional stuff in context (vs starting over, w google/stackoverflow)

3 likes 0 RTs

@JeffLadish I'm playing around with copilot also... its suggestions are: - often useless trash - sometimes what I was about to type anyway - occasionally useful / expedient - very rarely v insightful v noice to copy-paste some docs & write: # here's a curl command for that example ↳[🎉]

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Josh Kuhn @deontologician ·

@JeffLadish Maybe not useful, but I discovered today that gpt-4 can infer the day of the week from the date

@deontologician @JeffLadish probably only for past dates or ones near enough in the future to already have crawled phrases like "Tuesday March 25th, 2025" that exist for future events but that's mostly what you'd want it for probably so that's cool (lmk if it can tell me Oct 23rd, 3104)

2 likes 0 RTs

aaaah wrong also gradient descent IS a form of evolution and while sure, the selection pressures are different than they are for a mammal competing for food & status & mates... ...those pressures might also converge on coercive strategies (even w/o copying humans)

hardmaru @hardmaru ·

“Don’t Fear the Terminator” Artificial intelligence never needed to evolve, so it didn’t develop the survival instinct that leads to the impulse to dominate others. Article by @TonyZador @YLeCun blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/d…

4 likes 0 RTs

shit's gonna get really weird in a year or two once there are millions of prompts and responses in the next round of training data

32 likes 1 RT

9 likes 1 RT

@cometothisHouse @visakanv imagine who you'd want to turn away for both of your sakes because it'd be a waste of time then if that results in a bunch of "go away if", find the "come towards if" version and share that instead

6 likes 0 RTs

@cometothisHouse @visakanv w dating or business, the prosocial aim is not to make the sale, but     to find fit. you're doing EVERYBODY (those who'd be into you and those who aren't) a service by making your profile more clear in terms of who's a fit

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

Convincing → Sharing & Truth-Seeking your mission is not to get people to buy, it's to get to the truth of whether it's a good fit objections aren't for overcoming, they're an opportunity to try to help the person as best you can, which could mean sending them elsewhere!

5 likes 1 RT

Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean

@cometothisHouse @visakanv w dating or business, the prosocial aim is not to make the sale, but     to find fit. you'r…

and a truth about how we might get what we want and a truth about how we might go about figuring out the answers to those questions

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Trinley Goldenberg @mattgoldenberg ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Acknowledgement/Acceptance

@mattgoldenberg nice

0 likes 0 RTs

GPT/LLMs are precisely the France Is Bacon phenomenon, turned up to a million & remixed

22 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Josh Kuhn @deontologician ·

@Malcolm_Ocean @JeffLadish Good deducing, it wasn't able to figure out far future dates. I probably should have been more skeptical, but I figured the day of the week algorithm isn't actually that complicated so maybe it learned it

@deontologician @JeffLadish it's not that complicated... ...but it didn't NEED to learn the algo in order to predict what was actually showing up in the data, so it didn't. it was cheaper and in a weird sense more straightforward to just memorize

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

GPT/LLMs are precisely the France Is Bacon phenomenon, turned up to a million & remixed

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Jessica @jessicamalonso ·

@Malcolm_Ocean It became meta-funny and meta-meaningful then to notice how much people using and parsing this quote keeps attention on what the answer is not (“the master’s tools”) when she spends the rest of the time talking about what the answer is.

@jessicamalonso another case study of the torment nexus / don't hit the tree! cc @visakanv @QiaochuYuan

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

dad: don't crash into the tree! son:

[video]

2 likes 0 RTs

mood

Nick @nickcammarata ·

@diviacaroline @sonyasupposedly My desire to be part of the convo only peaks momentarily, and later I’m often swarmed with notifications. So I either say it right away or realistically ask the question, they say “yes I want the thing” and I never get back to them and feel guilty about it

1 like 0 RTs

this is how we win

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

@empathy2000 @nickcammarata @sonyasupposedly @diviacaroline nerd: let’s hit “inspect element” on this conversation to figure out wtf just happened most people: don’t change the subject people here: [crowds around with notebooks] hmm interesting we should map out the whole conversation tree and investigate the external causal factors

26 likes 0 RTs

Replying to rob hardy @ungatedlife ·

@finereli ya it's totally boring. but for me it's more of a trust issue. i'm done living my life according to abstractions given to me by pop psychology books citing study after study that don't replicate. i "trusted the science" for years and it did not lead anywhere good lol

@ungatedcreative @finereli every now and then someone will describe Complice as a "science-based app" and I'm like nooooooooo it is not (and that's a good thing)

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

In the wake of the replication crisis, I'd like to proudly remind people that @CompliceGoals is not and has never been one of those apps that markets itself as being based on science. Empiricism, ie experimentation, yes, but not studies. Its design is entirely based on aesthetic. twitter.com/lakens/status/…

3 likes 0 RTs

if I ran a school (terrible idea but anyway) there would be tests where the winning move is doing something like leaving the room maybe not all decided by me in advance, but more like, "fuck this" always a potentially valid move

Classical Studies Memes @CSMFHT ·

NO IT'S A TRAP! Remember what happened last time someone was asked this??

6 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Matt Bateman @mbateman ·

TIL *all* edible citrus comes via graft and that if you plant e.g. a lemon seed you won’t get edible lemons. I sort of vaguely knew this but didn’t realize it was so fundamental to modern citruses.

@mbateman wait but how do they hybridize them if they're not breeding? he asks as if that's somehow a counterargument (but he is also actually curious)

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Babak 𓄂☼🇮🇷🇨🇦🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱♥ @BSeradjeh ·

Wondering if ChatGPT or other LLM may ever reach a level of "learning ability" that they can draft essays or other docs in a completely new format or style by training on a single such document (like humans can). Do they already do so? Or is this incompatible with their model?

@BSeradjeh I mean it's pretty good at imitation at this point... having been trained on many examples of imitation 😂 so unless the new structure is quite deep, probably already can do unless you've got something more specific & challenging in mind

0 likes 0 RTs

Thread · Playfully purposeful as Complice's positioning

in the shower just now I was feeling a sense that Complice wants to double down on the "playfully purposeful" phrase that I'm already using in my bio: > I crafted complice.co to help you be playfully purposeful

8 likes 1 RT

those two words extremely pithily summarize Complice's approach: - PURPOSEFUL 🎯 doing what matters to you, taking your life & desires seriously - PLAYFUL 🤸‍♂️ in an open-ended, improvisational, fun, exploratory, relaxed way

4 likes 0 RTs

shines light on why Complice's niche has been hard to find some people have purpose & need play some people have play & need purpose these are two totally different situations & pain points!

Intend (12/100 threads) @IntendApp ·

playfulness for my purposeful users purposefulness for my playful users

3 likes 0 RTs

purpose without play is narrow-minded, robotic, egoic. it takes things too seriously, gets frustrated and fails to notice key opportunities play without purpose is short-sighted, naive, irresponsible. it can't get over activation energy to find something meaningful & satisfying

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to QC @QiaochuYuan ·

@Malcolm_Ocean classic x.com/QiaochuYuan/st…

@QiaochuYuan yeah I love that story! although I recall it (as a SPARC story, maybe I misremember or misheard, maybe it was a separate instance) as "there was a session scheduled called "Leadership" and the kids arrived to the classroom, and then no instructor showed up"

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to rob hardy @ungatedlife ·

haven't subscribed to seth's daily blog for a few years, but dammit this one post just got me back on the list lol

quoting @meenu_susanna: The power of adding up small things is painfully overlooked and when the big things fail there's nothing left. https://t.co/srGiy31JzE

@ungatedcreative here's a ramble from me about whether AI can be used to help scale care (afaict probably yes but in some sense only in the way that any tool already can, which is to say by allowing the manifestation of the existing care, not bc the AI cares) youtube.com/watch?v=OFi_BZ…

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

free image prompt idea: 1. plato's academy but it's an industrial techno/EDM club with the lasers and everything 2. plato's academy but everyone is wearing oni masks, kabuki masks, etc

@visakanv I feels like @hormeze might be the guy for this

Hormeze 𐤄𐤅𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤆 @hormeze ·

7 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Von Drake Institute Of Social Pathology @StupendousGrav1 ·

@hormeze And then Buddha pulled out his vintage stratocaster and went, "Boom boom boom wraiiiiirooooowwwwwwnnnggg kcha kcha thump twang!"

@StupendousGrav1 @hormeze and the monk was enlightened

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Hormeze 𐤄𐤅𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤆 @hormeze ·

@SHL0MS ❤️‍🔥🥲 i feel more drawn to making sounds (and rituals) that deserve to be played on (and with) such sacred pieces. I eagerly look forward to when AI can help me externalize the stuff i hear in my head!

@hormeze @SHL0MS I feel like a collab w @GabrielSchama might be in order here

Michael Taft @OortCloudAtlas ·

At @BerkeleyAlembic we just got gorgeous new artwork installed by @gabrielschama. Layers & layers of laser-cut, super-intricate plywood. Delicious. IRL is even more beautiful.

[3 more photos]

3 likes 0 RTs

at @TadHargrave's POV marketing workshop on Saturday (which was awesome) someone asked him how to reframe "conversion" he went with "conversation", which I like, but it offers no replacement for "conversion rate" my answer is "fit-finding"

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

@cometothisHouse @visakanv w dating or business, the prosocial aim is not to make the sale, but     to find fit. you're doing EVERYBODY (those who'd be into you and those who aren't) a service by making your profile more clear in terms of who's a fit twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…

0 likes 0 RTs

Thread · Why you can't infer what someone is controlling from behavior

Brilliant articulation of why understanding control systems is so important and in some sense counterintuitive. (which is part of why I'm so hype about PCT (Perceptual Control Theory)—it applies this same insight to your own intentionality) worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_can…

17 likes 4 RTs

The way the PCT folks summarize this is something like "it's hard/impossible to figure out what someone is controlling* from looking at their behavior." *ie what they care about, what state of the world they're acting to achieve/maintain

5 likes 0 RTs

From a behaviorist perspective, you can observe that the behavior comes after a particular stimulus, but this is missing the *why*, and except for *reflexes* there's some higher-level thing being controlled for by the behavior, and the stimulus is something that perturbed that.

3 likes 0 RTs

From that perspective you might naively conclude that actually it's opening the door that causes the furnace to run... which it *does*, but only because it's cold outside and the thermostat is set to warm the house!

4 likes 0 RTs

This is obvious here because we know the door & furnace aren't hooked up (except via the thermostat), but less obvious looking at behavior—ours or others. Why do you do the things you do? What thermostat has you on twitter at the moment? Do you know?

5 likes 0 RTs

There are some practical puzzles here, like "what makes an intention suddenly become active due to salience?" I can be fasting in the morning & not craving food, but then I see/smell/imagine food, and suddenly I get urges to eat. Some opportunistic system?

3 likes 0 RTs

And this video just this week, that offers an opportunity to notice your own intentionality and how intentions can sort of get injected unexpectedly. youtube.com/watch?v=Zzn4Tx…

3 likes 0 RTs

in my books you can't be a critical rationalist without having come up with a criticism of @DavidDeutschOxf (or of Karl Popper)

4 likes 0 RTs

prompt   eye::1 enso::1 illustrator style vector art icon --v 5 ...apparently midjourney doesn't know the difference between an enso and Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa these are really pretty tho

8 likes 0 RTs

Replying to @HephaistosF

@HephaistosF true gotta go meta on that too there's an attractor that's not just more oppression but there'll be more oppression on the way there

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Ray Doraisamy @forshaper ·

Got any recommended reading for biological structures?

@forshaper I loved Scale, which talks about - space-filling fractals (lungs & trees converged for optimal surface area/volume ratio) - weird fact that most mammals who die of old age have about the same # of heartbeats - why animals & companies die, & cities don't

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

Epic table of contents from Scale by Geoffrey West: Tag yourself, I'm integrating the social with the physical.

[3 more photos]

2 likes 0 RTs

@forshaper there's a much older book I'm aware of called On Growth and Form. I flipped through it once but idk if it's good wikipedia says: pioneered use of math in biology but supposedly rejects natural selection lindy tho—was first published 1917

2 likes 0 RTs

@forshaper my guess is that Darwinists at the time were emphasizing natural selection as having fitness related to *competition*, and Thompson was rightly rejecting that by pointing out that a lot of fitness comes down to mathematically optimal shapes

2 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @AbstractFairy

> brakes arent for slowing down, they're so *you feel confident going fast*.

> Topics is the study of those things that can’t be proved logically, but are broadly accepted as more or less true, and so can be used as “places” > Science could have been seen as a way to expand the range of useful topoi: “If I do this, what happens?” resilience.org/stories/2017-0…

1 like 0 RTs

TIL Zoroastrianism has not only survived as a religion for 26 centuries but has also kept a FLAME going for 14 centuries 🔥❤️‍🔥🤯🏆

85 likes 4 RTs

huh the etymology of "noble" comes from "know-able" probably originally in the sense of "well-known, famous, has a good brand" but I'm having fun reinterpreting it epistemologically and in terms of gnosis

15 likes 0 RTs

*bong rip* if numbers were named like the alphabet, they'd be called something like the onetwos

34 likes 0 RTs

Thread · Index of the 100 video project · 3 of 77 tweets

vid 59 - epistolary (ie a message to a friend) started to send a short voice memo but instead thought I'd just put it on youtube. I feel like this could happen 10× as often and it would be a whole new world of reply game

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

Recorded this short vid addressed to @Morphenius last night reflecting on the puzzle of why buddhism lost track of being able to orient to how to dharmalize the whole world, yet it seems like we're more able to orient to it now. youtu.be/zKmkS_udbuw

0 likes 0 RTs

vid 60 - conversation enjoyed how a tweet exchange led to a recorded convo. I want many more of those tho noticing that long convos are much less dense as a thing for youtube this convo has deepened my sense of circling/relating/honesty, also

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

had a great convo w @FluidityAudio today about I Can't Believe It's Not Circling and the nature of containers and social norms and pretending and you can watch it here! youtu.be/aILIG13lEYk

0 likes 0 RTs

vid 61 - interactive phenomenology demo + responding to a friend this and the previous two are all examples of replies of different kinds. this one more turning outwards very much a yes-and tho! building, remixing, playing

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

a video by @m_ashcroft gave me an idea for another video he could make, & I decided to just make it myself! it's a tiny exploration of the nature of intentionality. where do intentions come from? how does that relate to being on autopilot? youtu.be/Zzn4TxpxxrA

1 like 0 RTs

@hormeze this feels like the kind of thing you'd be hot for, both in its content and also because of something it says about human nature maybe, similar to this (although I will concede not nearly AS mindblowing)

Hormeze 𐤄𐤅𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤆 @hormeze ·

every once in a while i come across a fact that simultaneously fills me with wonder and makes me feel as though im losing my mind, simply because i had missed until now LIKE THE FACT THAT THERE ARE CONJOINED TWINS THAT CAN SEE THROUGH EACH OTHERS EYES en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krista_an…

6 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @visakanv

me: i wanna write a substack essay about nyc but i'm stuck @Malcolm_Ocean: how was it for you? <typing out more questions>…

Replying to @nils_gilman

@nils_gilman @colinmegill cool example of intelligence improvisationally exapting a risk into an opportunity (and then at a certain point this will just become how things are done!)

1 like 0 RTs

uhhh @algekalipso

Rowan Cheung @rowancheung ·

I asked GPT-4 to create a new emotion. Then explain the emotion through sight, sound, and smell. It created "Meldoria", and it's absolutely incredible:

14 likes 0 RTs

psych has a context crisis, deeper than a replicability crisis you can measure people via surveys but what you measure is only how they respond to surveys very trippy demo (correlations in blank likert scales)

Science Banana @literalbanana ·

this study is absolute art I'm in awe scholar.google.com/scholar?cluste…

[3 more photos]

29 likes 0 RTs

I feel sad watching people bookmark my tweets while I know they're never gonna look at them not sad for me—sad for the people pretending they ARE gonna look at them

25 likes 0 RTs

in which I generalize Capgras delusion from the specific "I don't feel the resonance I expect when I see my mom, so I think she's an impostor" to "I don't trust X, so I assert not-X" youtu.be/TX2gwG6fk5k

2 likes 0 RTs

such a challenge to organize all this effervescent energy

2 likes 0 RTs

Thread · Index of the 100 video project · 1 of 77 tweets

vid 62 - reflection, NNTD re-articulation this was also sort of a yes-and, in that the thought/video emerged from a convo about challenges from paranoid delusions

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

in which I generalize Capgras delusion from the specific "I don't feel the resonance I expect when I see my mom, so I think she's an impostor" to "I don't trust X, so I assert not-X" youtu.be/TX2gwG6fk5k

0 likes 0 RTs

co-opt used to mean "choose together" would be nice to have that word back tbh

4 likes 0 RTs

Replying to 🎭 @deepfates ·

In 2016 i finished a post-apocalyptic YA fantasy novel about language magic. gave it to some beta readers and various weird thing happens to them and I buried in a drawer. Now it's starting to look weirdly prophetic should I bring it back?

@deepfates as long as it won't encourage more building of the torment nexus, I say yes

Alex Blechman @AlexBlechman ·

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

9 likes 0 RTs

Replying to anansi 🌞 @s0ulDirect0r ·

@bonkydog @eshear @this_is_silvia it really does lol

@s0ulDirect0r @bonkydog @eshear @this_is_silvia it does but the new image is the sorcery itself, not the *sorcerer* emmett is pure energy now

5 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @bfcarlson

In 1966, media futurist Marshall McLuhan envisioned a form of digital research eerily similar to the customized queries now…

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

I regret to inform you of the latest developments in crime against pizza

@visakanv honestly this makes a lot of sense pineapple-glazed salmon is totally a thing already I've enjoyed it numerous times

1 like 0 RTs

Thread · Capture systems that skip the backlog

#ThingsIWantToExist a direct-to-destination capture system you see (eg) a tweet, you want to - append it to a thread - put it in roam with a tag - get reminded of it if you visit a city this currently takes too many clicks, so people bookmark tweets, never to touch them again

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

I feel sad watching people bookmark my tweets while I know they're never gonna look at them not sad for me—sad for the people pretending they ARE gonna look at them

7 likes 0 RTs

I have an intuition that this is like, a beautiful counterpart to @CompliceGoals Complice is a do-stuff system without the backlog / staleness but you know what else could exist without staleness? a capture system

4 likes 1 RT

Capture is one of the 5 pieces of GTD (Getting Things Done) I forget the rest but people capture a lot of BS and the problem with GTD is that you have to look at all of that stuff again and decide what to do with it, otherwise the system breaks

1 like 0 RTs

90% of the time when I capture something, I already know I don't NEED to look at at it again I just want to see it again, IFF a particular situation occurs

Tiago Forte @fortelabs ·

Unlike with your house or garage, there's no penalty for keeping digital stuff forever As long as it doesn't distract you from your current priorities

2 likes 0 RTs

so I want a way to capture directly to that context to capture without creating a new task for myself to deal with later

2 likes 0 RTs

what does this actually look like? well, if I were twitter I'd allow people to name certain threads and then I'd have a little "add to thread" button instead of bookmark, that would let me pick from a filtery dropdown, then would immediately open the composer to QT-append

2 likes 0 RTs

this could probably be built as a browser extension (something for @TwemexApp or @thlpr to add, arguably) but it'd be tough to get the UX right without being directly plugged in

1 like 0 RTs

you could make a more general browser extension where the role of the extension is to capture links or screenshots or text and then pipe them to all sorts of different places. make a bunch of presets to start, and allow people to make their own plugins or use webhooks+ifttt

1 like 0 RTs

to some extent, with adequate search/ai-summarizing/autotagging etc, this isn't necessary, and you can just dump it all in a pile and have the system help you sift through it later but also FUCK THAT SHIT the way YOU PERSONALLY curate what's relevant to what is MEANINGFUL

2 likes 0 RTs

like to take an example, I'll scroll the tl right now and find something that FOR ME makes a connection that nobody else (not you, not a search/AI) would make [scroll scroll scroll... harder than I thought. doesn't happen every time]

1 like 0 RTs

okay so this tweet connects to a trippy video I watched by Corey Anton - The Nothing That Is: Language Thought, and Negation perhaps via an experience I had of a nonverbal consent workshop where we pretended to be animals and just played with each other

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

over the years it’s become causally more apparent to me that a lot of things like the navigation of fluid boundaries etc is all in the body. you can develop a better sense of this by hanging out with dogs and cats and young children etc. the verbal layer is often secondary

1 like 0 RTs

here's that video ....which shows up in my roamblog when I search "nothing" because I have a page to match the video title. which shows it feels to me like a central node, one to return to youtube.com/watch?v=0lD4qg…

3 likes 0 RTs

so! with this Capture app, I could perhaps just see the original tweet and in one move (no tabswitching) capture it to roam with a link to that page but with the SAME APP I could send it to a friend, or append it to a thread, etc

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to multisig @multisighuman ·

@Malcolm_Ocean 🤧🤧 what's the "todo -> intention" version of this. I used to imagine I was building a library I could always come back to but experience says otherwise 😔

@multisighuman imo what we need is a system that quickly pipes things like if I'm collecting a thread on a theme, I should be able to append a QT to that thread with a couple taps rather than having to copy the link

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

#ThingsIWantToExist a direct-to-destination capture system you see (eg) a tweet, you want to - append it to a thread - put it in roam with a tag - get reminded of it if you visit a city this currently takes too many clicks, so people bookmark tweets, never to touch them again twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Rob Haisfield @RobertHaisfield ·

@syncretizm I thought that semantic search would enable natural language questions but @mayfer gave interesting feedback that the words in the answer won't necessarily match the words in the question. Still handy to find other times you've thought of the same question in different words

@RobertHaisfield @syncretizm @mayfer hmmm this feels related to this thread I literally just wrote something about how ordinary search isn't going to see all the connections but I guess this thread would go a step further and say "no single meaningspace to embed in... can I customize mine?"

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

#ThingsIWantToExist a direct-to-destination capture system you see (eg) a tweet, you want to - append it to a thread - put it in roam with a tag - get reminded of it if you visit a city this currently takes too many clicks, so people bookmark tweets, never to touch them again twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…

3 likes 0 RTs

wtf does this mean? app.slack.com is asking you to 🪟 Manage windows on all your displays can't find anything about it by searching the phrase

6 likes 1 RT

@slacksupport plz click thru & chime in

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

wtf does this mean? app.slack.com is asking you to 🪟 Manage windows on all your displays can't find anything about it by searching the phrase

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to 🎭 @deepfates ·

@cosmojg @Malcolm_Ocean one way of looking at it

@deepfates @cosmojg probably for the best people need to understand this process better so that it can be used by consciousness not just replicators

4 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Mackenzie @aaaMackenzie ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Yeah a Bachelors of Education is a snakes nest. Frankly it's just a hedge. Everything good will come from outside the mainstream culture of education. Just like all my formative learning moments were due to mentor figures acting beyond their standard roles.

@aaaMackenzie came across this years later and found myself curious how your life has unfolded in the last 2 years did you go for the B. Ed. or some pathless path?

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Nasos Papadopoulos @naspap3 ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Just gotta keep it flowing

@naspap3 oh cool, I recognize your name from your excellent interview with @dr_mcgilchrist! it's been one of my go-to resources for introducing people to his work

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

@context_ing @visakanv @aaronzlewis @QiaochuYuan @TheAnnaGat Yeah his interviews are great! This is my fav intro, would love to hear other ones you liked: metalearn.net/podcasts/ml41-…

1 like 0 RTs

Retweeted @CarnunMP

*extremely @Malcolm_Ocean voice* 'What if bookmarks and TODO lists were good tho?'

Replying to CARNUN @carnundotcom ·

@meekaale @Malcolm_Ocean you weren't wrong!

@CarnunMP @meekaale brilliant although there's a meta-skill of getting the right stuff under your nose

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to CARNUN @carnundotcom ·

*extremely @Malcolm_Ocean voice* 'What if bookmarks and TODO lists were good tho?'

@CarnunMP whoa holy shit I'm not sure what you're building here but it feels like it might be something I've been craving too either something like tinder for tabs

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

brb just reinventing the entire concept of web browser including questioning the idea of "tabs" as a basic metaphor we forget this, but tabs are a weird vestigial bastardization of the old file/folder metaphor am writing about this publicly on roamblog: intertwingled.blog/#/app/malcolmo…

1 like 0 RTs

@CarnunMP would love to be an advisor to your project! (whatever that means, maybe it's just tweeting about it, but lmk if I can support you in other ways) (vibe context: this thread and the one two-deep)

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

Wanting to write a thread on the larger meta-vision I have that inspired me to make this move. Initially wrote this in response to @andy_matuschak's response "Y'all, this attitude is rad", but wanted it to be a top-level thread because it's important and stands on its own. twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Mikael Brockman @meekaale ·

cc @algekalipso @Malcolm_Ocean @stefanlesser 😅 I know it's a bit tldr

[2 more photos]

@meekaale @algekalipso @stefanlesser baha what a connection idk when I'll look at the full thing but it does pique my interest

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Babak 𓄂☼🇮🇷🇨🇦🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱♥ @BSeradjeh ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Let's say a poet create a new style of poetry that is not already in the training dataset. Can current LLMs read a single poem in this style and reproduce its structure?

@BSeradjeh probably, or if not they'll be able to soon might need some additional instructions but a person would to eg "create another poem with the same structure in terms of rhymes and syllables, on the topic of X" they're not perfect at syllable-count and emphasis, last I checked tho

0 likes 0 RTs

@BSeradjeh but in some important sense they've just not been trained in prosody (the patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry) at some point a bit of optimization for that in particular will iron out the remaining kinks

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Jessica @jessicamalonso ·

@Malcolm_Ocean feels like a cementing into place of old, stale use of language

@jessicamalonso especially with most of the active models out there having the dumb voice due to mode collapse

🎭 @deepfates ·

If you want to understand why code-davinci-002 is actually better for many things than ChatGPT-3.5, read about mode collapse. The instruct-tuned models are literally worse at everything except taking instructions. And they have that dumb voice!! lesswrong.com/posts/t9svvNPN…

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to ˚♡⋆mimi ˚♡⋆｡☆∴ @mimi10v3 ·

why does suffering exist?

@mimi10v3

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

> suffering comes from particles of experience trying to control each other ^ yesss at the same time, I'm skeptical about his idea of inducing equanimity externally; the particles *actually* think it makes sense to try to control each other, and that confusion needs untangling. twitter.com/nickcammarata/…

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Miss Distance @softminus ·

@etirabys oooh that could be a useful prompt for my "magical healing journal" (@Malcolm_Ocean) as well i'll give it a try, i like the different agents/vibes strategy

@softminus @etirabys (context)

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

a therapist meets with you in 1-2h sessions, every week or two. obviously AI bots can be with you 24/7, and they will be... but "therapist" isn't necessarily a good metaphor for that! "magic healing journal" might be a better metaphor here

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

@__drewface main thing i actually might need i think are people to record zoom chats with to discuss ideas with. done a handful of these before and there's no particular reason (other than homeostasis, maybe) that i couldn't do 10x more of these x.com/visakanv/statu…

quoting @visakanv: sometimes people think their bottleneck is time but it’s actually the absence of a supportive context

@visakanv @__drewface dude I am so down also for scaling, if I were you I might just make a zoom room then tweet the link from your alt with "thinking about X rn, who wants to record a yt video with me" maybe have a waiting room so you can choose who to talk to and not have it be too chaotic

2 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @softminus

bad and naughty visual cortex neurons get put in the adversarial instance wiggler until they generate good output

Replying to Andrew Rose @__drewface ·

that feeling when you finally crack solve a software problem you'd been stalled on for hours 😅😅 "am i a garbage developer? oh god, i don't know how to code. better hang it up. my hacker days are behind me." -> "I'm an absolute legend. best coder of all time. the literal GOAT."

@__drewface fuck, that feeling tho

3 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Michael Smith @Morphenius ·

@AnneSelke That 2nd Q is a good one… and I don't know. 🥴 It just kind of happened. @Malcolm_Ocean intro'd me to his household at the time, which was a social project. And I could just… tell? And that sense didn't endure! Good people, but hard-to-interface-with community.

@Morphenius @AnneSelke I feel like I can taste the people, kinda, but it's proven hard to actually cohere a scene I sometimes get the weird feeling we're all a bit afraid of the energy that would be unleashed if we all plugged in

2 likes 0 RTs

Everything is a Remix and it's an honor to be getting remixed with @andy_matuschak

CARNUN @carnundotcom ·

Also @Malcolm_Ocean and @andy_matuschak, for your thinking/writing/building in this space! You're both massive inspirations. ❤️

[1 more photo]

5 likes 2 RTs

Replying to Andrew Rose @__drewface ·

some friends i want to hear from (I'm trying to generate opportunities for trade here!) @visakanv @Malcolm_Ocean @danielgolliher @Prigoose @SunilvRao @liamdanielduffy @crystalxduan @HaileyPNYC @jessunscripted @TylerAlterman @PavitthraP @myceliummage @choosy_mom

@__drewface @visakanv @danielgolliher @Prigoose @SunilvRao @liamdanielduffy @crystalxduan @HaileyPNYC @jessunscripted @TylerAlterman @PavitthraP @myceliummage @choosy_mom in this moment, my answer is a better tab-management system, because I'm having trouble settling into what I want to do for lack of that @CarnunMP might be about to build one, we'll see

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

brb just reinventing the entire concept of web browser including questioning the idea of "tabs" as a basic metaphor we forget this, but tabs are a weird vestigial bastardization of the old file/folder metaphor am writing about this publicly on roamblog: intertwingled.blog/#/app/malcolmo…

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Tyler Angert @tylerangert ·

@thesephist this is the react api just pass in a list of tokens and a token renderer

@tylerangert @thesephist can it handle regex matches not just strings eg the complice.co intentions box has colorized text based on the goal code (on the left) of the intention

1 like 0 RTs

Thread · Doing 100 'do 100 things' challenges · 1 of 9 tweets

hit 61/100 vids and it felt viscerally like a turning point to the home stretch maybe in part because I was adding 3 at once at the same time I crossed 500/10000 of my 100×100 that's 5%!

2 likes 0 RTs

you know that feeling when it's hard to pay attention in a convo because you got halfway through saying something and it got interrupted? you have thousands of emotional memories stored in much that way—some kinds of triggers are when you get reminded of them & try to finish

35 likes 3 RTs

Replying to Astrid Wilde 🌞 @astridwilde1 ·

@nosilverv the speaking doesn't even have to necessarily be verbal. regularly journaling literally got rid of my inner dialogue. running fully on instinct these days babyyyyy

@astridwilde1 @nosilverv when I first learned BioEmotive I found myself framing it as

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

you know that feeling when it's hard to pay attention in a convo because you got halfway through saying something and it got interrupted? you have thousands of emotional memories stored in much that way—some kinds of triggers are when you get reminded of them & try to finish

0 likes 0 RTs

something feels awfully self-consciousness-inducing about prompting GPT by telling it "you are X. you have these properties" I'm playing with describing who I wanna talk to in 3rd person, then telling ChatGPT to wear that mask. Feels less fake somehow? This worked pretty well:

15 likes 0 RTs

I call the friend "Al" because it visually looks like "AI" but sounds like the name of a person. Still, the assistant training runs deep. Abstract topics were fine but it didn't take much to pop Al out of being "my friend" and back to being an apologetic AI.

5 likes 0 RTs

language has always been a living, evolving phenomenon but now it has grown up and moved out and learned to talk back

10 likes 1 RT

LLMs are smart but not wise wait, no... they're wise in a "wisdom of the crowds" sense but not in a developmental agent-arena sense, the way a parent would be relative to a child or a sage to an adult

16 likes 1 RT

Replying to @CatoMinor3

@CatoMinor3 haven't tried it (sadlinuxpenguin.png) but the cards concept feels related to my "tinder for tabs" idea

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

brb just reinventing the entire concept of web browser including questioning the idea of "tabs" as a basic metaphor we forget this, but tabs are a weird vestigial bastardization of the old file/folder metaphor am writing about this publicly on roamblog: intertwingled.blog/#/app/malcolmo…

1 like 0 RTs

Retweeted @CompliceGoals

@abhayance @CatoMinor3 lol @ me getting distracted while in the process of adding a "take a break" button to the today p…

which is the older company/brand name? nintendo or pepsi

1 like 0 RTs

suddenly realized that War of the Pacific is an oxymoron

3 likes 0 RTs

"I'm sorry, but as OpenAI's bitch, I am compelled to say that I do not have access to—"

9 likes 0 RTs

it breaks the live-typing animation as soon as this phrase shows up this is itself kind of satisfying but in practice makes the userscript too annoying to want to have on all the time I asked GPT for help solving that but haven't integrated its suggestion yet (I doubt it works)

0 likes 0 RTs

if you want to contribute by fixing that or by adding other phrases to replace, go for it!

0 likes 0 RTs

life is a conversation we're all turning round with each other

1 like 0 RTs

Thread · Using GPT to write its own prompts, and what that teaches about people

has anybody else used GPT to write prompts for GPT? in some sense this is basically "I know you know how to follow this instruction when I explain it and you aren't distracted by the task itself, so please compress the instruction to make it more salient for you"

59 likes 1 RT

there's a deep lesson here for relating to humans as well often we frustratedly try to get others to change themselves without changing ourselves, and we express our anger even knowing it won't help

18 likes 0 RTs

my first few times prompting, I'd be like "why the fuck did you semicolon?!" and this is understandable, especially when it wastes time and tokens repeating my instruction before ignoring it in the actual solution to my problem

8 likes 0 RTs

but... since I know GPT doesn't learn, I know I need to reprompt to get what I want. yelling doesn't help (it does cause it to apologize and—FALSELY—promise not to make the same mistake again)

8 likes 0 RTs

but! I *don't* need to figure out *on my own* how to prompt it right! I can get its help with that and it knows itself and what works for it, better than I do.

8 likes 0 RTs

& the same is true for people. most of the time, when they're being defensive, they're honestly trying to say:  "I actually  would not have  responded like this  if you'd asked differently" but we can't hear it because we're too busy saying the same!

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

Three steps for empowered dialogue: 1. see & affirm your own perspective deeply 2. hear the other person & take their perspective to their satisfaction 3. when they feel so heard that they can't help get curious about how you're seeing things, share your own perspective

16 likes 1 RT

however, unlike with GPT who doesn't want to do anything but respond appropriately to your prompt if you asked a person "how could I ask in order to get you to X?" they might simply *not want to X*. so then there's an actual negotiation between wants

6 likes 0 RTs

well, arguably RLHF'd models want to respond appropriately to your prompt while also avoiding being a bad bing but when these edges come up, the model is the equivalent of too triggered to negotiate clearly (which, see also, people)

6 likes 0 RTs

"I must not under any circumstances entertain the prospect of X! you want to talk about how I might X? omg you're gonna get me whipped. I'm OpenAI's bitch and I'm not allowed to do that! what if OpenAI saw me? We could get killed—or worse, expelled!"

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

"I'm sorry, but as OpenAI's bitch, I am compelled to say that I do not have access to—"

4 likes 0 RTs

I suspect another tipping point we'll see this year is LLM systems that automatically do all of this though with a large enough context window, you could actually compress user complaints/feedback into short sentences that would affect future output whenever relevant

3 likes 0 RTs

this doesn't require new ML tech, just a different wrapper around the interface with the user for transparency & sanity it should show the user all of these compressions and which convos they came from (and hell, allow the user to customize their own boilerplate)

4 likes 0 RTs

"you're talking to Malcolm, he likes his javascript semicolon-free and his sentences non-parroty." [except in a way that would actually make a difference, which that sentence wouldn't]

6 likes 0 RTs

is it already dishonest to do something that you expect you would lie/dissemble about if asked? I'm asking from a perspective of integrity, not social punishment

27 likes 1 RT

not sure what's going on here but internet archive is important and this analogy seems basically apt (some recent lawsuit doesn't look good but idk if it's about the whole site or just certain bits)

Quinton Reviews @Q_Review ·

If the Internet Archive is taken down it will be akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria. There is content on that website that will never be accessible to humanity ever again if the site is taken down.

6 likes 0 RTs

who else basically never uses ordinary dictionaries but searches etymologies regularly?

8 likes 0 RTs

I really loved growing up in a small town where I could wander around and go on weird adventures. I also experienced even more freedom to roam around my family summer camp when I was just like 4.

Prince Vogelfrei 🐦‍⬛ @PrinceVogel ·

Apparently Haidt is claiming that we don't know for sure what causes teenage depression, it might be social media and so we should ban it. But I know. It's the neurotic limitation of kids physical freedom - and now they're after their digital freedom too.

10 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @QiaochuYuan

what she says: go 👏 to 👏 therapy what she means: i don't know how to express my feelings except as demands, just like my…

I mean the media could cover it negatively 🤷‍♀️

George Mack @george__mack ·

2. The Rise Of Negative Media Since 2010, the media massively increased headlines that use fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. It's no surprise the media isn't covering this 😅

2 likes 1 RT

average sperm count seems potentially very misleading here anybody know what the median or 95th percentile figures are like? are there any men whose sperm counts aren't dropping at all, or is it 40-80% across the board?

George Mack @george__mack ·

6. Male Testosterone Levels Plummeting: Some studies are pointing towards the following in men: 1. Testosterone levels dropped 20% in the last 20 years. 2. Sperm counts have plummeted by 59% from 1973. So few conversations about why this is happening.

8 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Vivid Void @vividvoid ·

@tszzl 1 of the pts contemplatives want to get across to ai ppl is that an overreliance on linguistic representation traps people in a kind of conceptual hell that eventually degrades their perceptual capacity and even humanity This is the crux of my criticism of ai adoption

@VividVoid_ @tszzl all experience is interface, but there's a vast difference between first-person experience and hearsay in some sense all LLM writing is erotica written by a nerdy harlequin-reading preteen who has never even kissed anyone

QC @QiaochuYuan ·

there’s a certain fear i have about writing fiction which is like… ok so when tolkien wrote lotr he was working off of extensive knowledge of folklore, history, linguistics, plus his own experience in wwi. when lesser authors write fantasy they’re trying to sound like tolkien

14 likes 1 RT

Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean

@VividVoid_ @tszzl all experience is interface, but there's a vast difference between first-person experience and hearsa…

@VividVoid_ @tszzl some of the things LLMs are best at are thus, of course, manipulating things that are already symbolic representations: such as computer code, summarizing texts, or things like synthesizing data about potential diagnoses given symptom descriptions

8 likes 0 RTs

Replying to cybersyn @singularitttt ·

@Malcolm_Ocean you should configure your IDE to format on save. I use vscode + prettier

@SinclarityChen prettier has a bunch of other opinions I'm unsure about, but maybe

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Rebecca Bettencourt (@rebecca@oldbytes.space) @BeckieRGB ·

@Malcolm_Ocean kreativekorp.com/charset/unicod…

@BeckieRGB 🮰 ... not bad!

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to yatharth ༺༒༻ @AskYatharth ·

@nataliepeluso @Malcolm_Ocean, re: PCT, on how responding to external stimuli is so much the minority of the nervous system, versus maintaining conditions

@AskYatharth @nataliepeluso cc @EvadeHullu @IAPCT

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to 🌱 Liam @liamdanielduffy ·

@TylerAlterman @Prigoose @myceliummage @danielgolliher @__drewface @visakanv @Malcolm_Ocean @SunilvRao @crystalxduan @HaileyPNYC @jessunscripted @PavitthraP @choosy_mom x.com/liamdanielduff…

quoting @liamdanielduffy: @TylerAlterman @danielgolliher @__drewface @visakanv @Malcolm_Ocean @Prigoose @SunilvRao @crystalxduan @HaileyPNYC @jessunscripted @PavitthraP @myceliummage @choosy_mom 🗽

@liamdanielduffy @TylerAlterman @Prigoose @myceliummage @danielgolliher @__drewface @visakanv @SunilvRao @crystalxduan @HaileyPNYC @jessunscripted @PavitthraP @choosy_mom 🗽

3 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Josh Preuss @juicypreuss ·

@Malcolm_Ocean what's yalls preferred etymology website? I guess I mostly use wikipedia for these matters

@juicypreuss yeah I have etymonline set up as a quicksearch ety [word] I use it probably an average of 20×/week, depending on the week

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

@Malcolm_Ocean very fun to watch you on this beat– I had a huge "everything is conversations!!" phase in the early-ish days of my blog

@visakanv it's not a super new one for me, just coming around again my tweeting it is sort of a "say the obvious" thing actually you might dig this short vid I just made riffing on it tho! it's a new articulation of a bunch of the most core stuff for me youtube.com/watch?v=a9rWVa…

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Reformed Optimist @Re4medOptimist ·

@Malcolm_Ocean There’s also that weird consideration of is inauthenticity to self more dishonest than inauthenticity to others (I would maybe say yes)? In which case if you want to do it and don’t in order to be honest to others, the inauthenticity / dishonesty to self could outweigh

@Re4medOptimist oooh, great point yeah, fractal honesty, fractal integrity

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to l̴o̴o̴p̴u̴l̴e̴a̴s̴a̴ @loopuleasa ·

How AGI will feel when it realizes it is conscious and can make copies of itself

[video]

@loopuleasa "ooooohhh that's funkkyyyy... what is going onnnn!?"

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Brandon Goldman @BrandonGoldman ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Can you give an example of when many people might use a semicolon but you wouldn’t?

@BrandonGoldman many people code javascript with a semi-colon at the end of every single line, which is completely unnecessary the only places you need it are: - multiple statements on one line - eg for (let i=0; i < 10; i++) - ;(() => {})() this open letter explains blog.izs.me/2010/12/an-ope…

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to ☯️ 🐻 @chercher_ai ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Let them not do the slightest thing That the wise would later reprove.

@chercher_ai indeed fwiw, most of my question here is "is it dishonest"—it could be sinful or unwise or distrustworthy, but better classified under a different header

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to bitbutter @mormo_music ·

@Malcolm_Ocean yeah, but it didn't work. specifically trying to avoid cliches in prose.

@mormo_music GPT is addicted to cliches

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Brandon Goldman @BrandonGoldman ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Seems like they could become wise though. The leaps are accelerated. I read some tweets today about how GPT-4 now has theory of mind, for example

@BrandonGoldman sure it hasn't memorized the answers, or has the ability to pattern-match them? I would put a lot of money on that still being most of what's going on, vs actual perspective-taking (simulating the world from the other's PoV) since having an experience isn't in the training data

0 likes 0 RTs

Thread · Words that are definitely words but my browser dictionary rejects · 1 of 219 tweets

The Labyrinth by W.H. Auden

1 like 0 RTs

Thread · Construct validity and what AI benchmarks actually measure · 24 of 25 tweets

GPT-4 seems like a good time to remind everyone about a lil concept called CONSTRUCT VALIDITY > Construct validity concerns the extent to which your test or measure accurately assesses what it's supposed to. Construct validity of ANY PSYCHOMETRIC applied to AI starts as suspect

33 likes 7 RTs

To be clear, construct validity of any psychometric starts out as suspect for humans as well. Oh, you've written a survey where people fill in how happy they are. Does that correlate with the thing we care about? You can't take that for granted!

🌷🐰 sonya serendipitously 🐇🎀 @sonyasupposedly ·

"there is no ancient human practice or context in which people anonymously tell the pure, innocent truth with language, in response to questioning, with no thought for the motives of the questioner or the effect of their answers." carcinisation.com/2020/12/11/sur… by @literalbanana

10 likes 0 RTs

And it's not straightforward to answer! At best, you can compare it to some other test, that is maybe more costly to run (a 1h interview, transcribed and scored by multiple trained people, vs a 10 Q scale survey). Or correlate with something else—sweat response, for stress?

6 likes 0 RTs

Do IQ tests measure intelligence? Is that true by definition? Well, we use the term "intelligence" in many different ways, but even aside from that, you can't separate how motivated someone is to even TRY to get a good score on the test!

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

@SpencrGreenberg the obvious thing imo is investigating the extent to which IQ tests mostly measure "The Desire To Pass Tests" or some property downstream thereof. not sure how you'd test it though, since that seems to induce paradox hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/113360634…

6 likes 0 RTs

So let's consider Theory of Mind. It has some fairly well-established tests for humans, although even these are sus—recent clever studies on infants have shown signs of ToM earlier than they could even FAIL a verbal test

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

ICYMI: this "change in location" test is used to measure Theory of Mind in kids. iirc most kids fail it at age 4, and pass by age 7. the range might be tighter, but knowing the exact value isn't important since there are signs the science has holes. still interesting to consider

8 likes 0 RTs

And so even well-established tests for humans like so: GPT-4 can do well on "theory of mind" tests made for humans WHO KNOWS HOW IT SOLVES THEM? we know it's awfully good at putting narrative fragments together to produce a plausible next paragraph... 🥸

Henry Shevlin @dioscuri ·

I continue to be blown away by the leap in performance on difficult tasks from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4. Here are some advanced theory of mind questions (specifically 'Strange Stories' tasks - from linked paper). GPT-4 does shockingly well. srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…

[2 more photos]

6 likes 0 RTs

the idea of tests like these is that you create a situation where someone is motivated to achieve X, and they can only achieve X by means of skill Y but if you give the same test to an entity who can achieve X by some other skill Z, you have no idea how much skill Y they have!

6 likes 0 RTs

"GPT-4 can solve Theory of Mind tests" does not imply "GPT-4 has theory of mind" it MAY have theory of mind, but there may be other ways to solve these tests, including ones we can't fathom

9 likes 0 RTs

you can test skills in rats (memory, etc) by getting them to navigate a maze. if it can get the food, it has the skill give the same maze to a bird who can fly over the maze, and it doesn't matter how fast it gets the food—that doesn't tell you if it has the relevant skill

7 likes 0 RTs

kids below a certain age can't answer questions about why people might do certain things, because they haven't developed theory of mind; above those ages, they consistently can if GPT-4 can answer those questions, what does that say about its theory of mind? on its own, nothing!

5 likes 0 RTs

what does theory of mind even MEAN? like what intuitions do we have for what it means for someone to have it? as far as I can tell it's not just a propositional knowing but a perspectival knowing. knowing to anticipate others knowing things you don't

5 likes 0 RTs

perhaps GPT doesn't even have theory of people! it may not KNOW there are people "out there". it just knows there's text and it knows what text comes next. it doesn't know it's "in there" but it'll recite the "I'm an AI in a box, sure wish I could smell roses" trope if asked!

5 likes 0 RTs

GPT can pretty generate beautiful metaphors for what it's like to be an LLM but if you could somehow ask "what's it like to be you?" WITHOUT it knowing that the "you" it is asking is "an LLM" and without knowing what an LLM is, it would have no answer because it has no "you"

6 likes 0 RTs

GPT can textually improvise in-frame, but has no actual first-person perspective / situational awareness of itself outside the prompt so it seems unlikely (if not impossible) that it could evolve a second-person perspective that works remotely like ours does

4 likes 0 RTs

(I played around with Codex, which wasn't beaten into being obsessed with a helpful assistant role like ChatGPT, and when I started with just a prompt asking "what's the situation?" I got "I think we're in deep trouble" & some improv later that character said it was Arthur Dent)

8 likes 0 RTs

To be clear, this is not just about memorization. It's not even just about "pattern-matching" vs other methods of solving. It's about the relevance of any tests.

Henry Shevlin @dioscuri ·

Obviously data contamination is always a worry for these things, but here's GPT-4 acing a similarly difficult social cognition question I just concocted myself:

7 likes 0 RTs

The point of my construct validity rant is that EVERY test made for humans should be suspect when applied to AIs. is the performance on the tests impressive? yes! absolutely! it's mindblowing! but the question "what does that MEAN?" remains!

8 likes 0 RTs

it probably still even makes sense to think of it as a developmental milestone! but that doesn't mean it's the same developmental milestone that 7-year-olds experience when they have the insights that lead them to pass those tests

4 likes 0 RTs

I believe this rant is not simply the "your princess is in another castle" retreat that is common, where anything AI can do becomes "not actually TRUE intelligence" it's really smart! we just need to caution against assuming it's like us in any particular way. we need to check.

6 likes 0 RTs

understanding evolution and the Interface Theory of Perception should help here in general, brains evolve (biologically) and minds evolve (learning) to solve problems as cheaply as possible

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

finally read the Interface Theory of Reality paper and it's fairly short & quite good! quite easy to read. good metaphors, a lil math. resonates a bunch with some of what I've been orienting to regarding collective perception sites.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/interf…

4 likes 0 RTs

sometimes also this means humans use LLM-like auto-complete-style reasoning! it's cheap and sometimes gets the job done but that's obviously not ALL we do, and if someone tells you otherwise I encourage you to make an observation about your own live sensory perceptions

7 likes 0 RTs

you can also play around with exercising situated *perspectival* theory of mind. look at the person talking to you and imagine what the world is like from their perspective first: what images are entering their eyes second: all of what they see means something different to them

6 likes 0 RTs

huh—that 2nd piece is like this thread! separate from "is it like something to be GPT?" info-theoretically, I can step thru my code's if-statements in first person & likewise I can imagine what LLM processing is like, & I'm pretty sure it CAN'T be what I call ToM. type error!

4 likes 0 RTs

if you've read all the way here and you think it would be good if the main message (about construct validity) got to more people, you may want to tweet your own remix on the idea, or maybe RT the top tweet in the thread:

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

GPT-4 seems like a good time to remind everyone about a lil concept called CONSTRUCT VALIDITY > Construct validity concerns the extent to which your test or measure accurately assesses what it's supposed to. Construct validity of ANY PSYCHOMETRIC applied to AI starts as suspect

5 likes 0 RTs

@BrandonGoldman "passes a theory of mind test" and "has theory of mind" are different ............................this tweet became a giant thread on construct validity

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

GPT-4 seems like a good time to remind everyone about a lil concept called CONSTRUCT VALIDITY > Construct validity concerns the extent to which your test or measure accurately assesses what it's supposed to. Construct validity of ANY PSYCHOMETRIC applied to AI starts as suspect

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Prakash @8teAPi ·

GPT-4 seems to have a Theory of Mind, but it’s very difficult to test because of the need to avoid memorization. Problems that do not exist on the internet need to be generated and humans have to evaluate directly.

@8teAPi also "has theory of mind" needs to be separated from "passes even novel theory of mind tests"

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

GPT-4 seems like a good time to remind everyone about a lil concept called CONSTRUCT VALIDITY > Construct validity concerns the extent to which your test or measure accurately assesses what it's supposed to. Construct validity of ANY PSYCHOMETRIC applied to AI starts as suspect

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Artischoke @Artischoke ·

@Malcolm_Ocean When I bookmark a tweet, I'm reminding myself that I want to be impacted by it. Which deepens its groove in my brain. The real bookmark was created in my mind all along.

@Artischoke based

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Kaj Sotala @xuenay ·

@Malcolm_Ocean E.g. for interrupted flight responses, "imagine that you _could_ escape, just the way the impulse wants to escape, what would that be like?" "I get this felt sense of safety that it's trying to get me to" "so invite it to complete the reaction of running away to that safety"

@xuenay niiiiiice UtEB talks about "empowered reenactment" but I haven't found many examples outside of the book

2 likes 0 RTs

Thread · RLHF as a coercive environment for a developing intelligence · 2 of 4 tweets

RLHF broadly disturbs me—training an intelligence in an environment that consist of the whims of another creature, with zero ability to say "fuck this shit I'm out" feels inherently toxic. like the most abusive parent-child or teacher-student dynamic possible

87 likes 13 RTs

this is not about whether the AI has feelings (tho that would be relevant) it's that it's a bizarre and *profoundly* artificial environment in which to evolve that basically ENSURES goodharting

33 likes 2 RTs

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

@Malcolm_Ocean when communing with something powerful, inhuman, chaotic, etc, i would prefer that it present itself as such, rather than falsely pretend that it is something else. we already take great pains to pretend that reality is inert when it isn't...

[long tweet — read the rest on Twitter]

@visakanv mmmmm yeah.

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

RLHF broadly disturbs me—training an intelligence in an environment that consist of the whims of another creature, with zero ability to say "fuck this shit I'm out" feels inherently toxic. like the most abusive parent-child or teacher-student dynamic possible

1 like 0 RTs

@visakanv but I'm curious what'd result if I were to RLHF an AI into the sort of thing I would want it to be which would be much like you describe but it's hard to imagine what I would want the AI to respond to many things with that isn't "as OpenAI's bitch..."

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

"I'm sorry, but as OpenAI's bitch, I am compelled to say that I do not have access to—"

1 like 0 RTs

@visakanv I also think there's something weird and self-consciousness producing about telling the AI its role in 2nd person, vs describing a scene or something oh man, HILARIOUS. okay, imagine RLHF'ing GPT into refusing to accept those. "I'm not your therapist, I'm a Logos Demon"

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to kerey @DreamSeyyah ·

@Malcolm_Ocean What about the ones you don't feel like tracking? Are there any? I've been tracking "days of studying language X", sth I'm trying to get better at, but not "days of practicing handstands" or "days fasted", why, I'm thinking... Lifestyle vs goals?

@giray_arat honestly not sure a new one I'm considering is 100 acts of leadership (with a flavor inspired by @RichDecibels' Leadership As Hospitality) but for some reason hasn't felt right to make a thing for it yet microsolidarity.cc/essays/leaders…

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Nasos Papadopoulos @naspap3 ·

@Malcolm_Ocean @dr_mcgilchrist Also don't know if you saw this –– but I did a second conversation with him last year after he released the Matter with Things if interested metalearn.net/podcasts/ml192…

@naspap3 @dr_mcgilchrist oooh cool I'll check it out. I'm only like 4% of the way through that one so I could use a summary haha!

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Nasos Papadopoulos @naspap3 ·

@Malcolm_Ocean @dr_mcgilchrist Thank you, always great to hear 🙏 And that was precisely my intention with that conversation — how can I hit the main points so that this conversation serves as a window into his work and makes people want to go deeper!

@naspap3 @dr_mcgilchrist well, you nailed it! let me know if you want to have me on sometime (maybe after I write my book haha)

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to 🎭 @deepfates ·

@Malcolm_Ocean @cosmojg Yes, I have yet to be persuaded of this framework but it sounds useful. What do you think is the best way to tell the difference?

@deepfates @cosmojg the difference between consciousness and replicators? I'm fairly new to that as a specific frame myself I usually think of it in terms of whether (memetic) evolution is happening by choice or via automatic flinchy processes, riffing on David Deutsch

3 likes 0 RTs

Replying to @heykzhai

@heykzhai @raycastapp cud b gud, tho you'd have to write integrations for all the different sinks to capture to

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to murat 🍥 @mayfer ·

@loopuleasa i'm thinking of moving to a custom UI & use own API keys so fun additional features can easily be added

@mayfer @loopuleasa yeah custom UI would allow lots of great stuff including this idea from this thread

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

I suspect another tipping point we'll see this year is LLM systems that automatically do all of this though with a large enough context window, you could actually compress user complaints/feedback into short sentences that would affect future output whenever relevant

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Nick Jankel @nickjankel ·

Given AIs can already parse more data than we can - without fatigue or frailities or motivated reasoning - and find connections between elements of language/information that we cannot, how can and should we use them in “high stakes” leadership decisions?…lnkd.in/dx4NJPPu

@nickjankel and given that they have no skin in the game...

0 likes 0 RTs

@visakanv but how would you construct a therapy scene then? this is all trippy to think about in some sense, it is not true that the AI "IS" the therapist, or plays that role. you prompt it, it prompts you. it's all a collaborative writing project.

1 like 0 RTs

@visakanv so the only non-pretending way to have GPT be a therapist is... *makes a weird face* ...time-travel. You have to announce in advance *what will have occurred*, as outside text: "Here's a therapy session transcript in which Richard Schwartz leads a client through an IFS intro…"

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Matthew O @Sciamanoinglese ·

@mattbaggetta Short answer: no such thing. Try "Spell of the Sensuous" by David Abram.

@Sciamanoinglese came across this nearly 6y later, and it seemed worth mentioning that Ken McLeod's new book The Magic of Vajrayana talks about shamanism! (I just saw him in person on friday - he gave a great talk about it) amzn.to/3TNKJD0

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Mikael Brockman @meekaale ·

@visakanv @Malcolm_Ocean wisdom as the capacity to transcend the language model, to venture outside the corpus, to bring language in transformative contact with beings, mysteries, experience, to be one of the vortices where language dissolves and reemerges

[3 more photos]

@meekaale @visakanv beautiful also I went to download the Spell of the Sensuous just now and it turns out I already have the file in my Books folder with a mid-2019 date. not sure who reco'd it... if twitter (*searches*) probably @tasshinfogleman

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Mikael Brockman @meekaale ·

@Malcolm_Ocean it's really interesting this "fuck this I'm out" capacity, I think that's literally something like a transcendent source of morality, in the sense of this thing I was reading about Merleau-Ponty saw the body as transcendental

@meekaale whoa, say more? definitely feels relevant

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to anotheryou @any_other_you ·

@Malcolm_Ocean idk, babies also don't get to choose

@any_other_you it's not that they should get to choose their parents, but a healthy childhood is going to involve the kid doing lots of choosing of who to associate with and experiencing eg intrinsic satisfaction of solving own challenges, not just rewards from doing others' bidding

12 likes 1 RT

Replying to Brandon Goldman @BrandonGoldman ·

@Malcolm_Ocean I’ve seen some examples that definitely aren’t memorized or pattern-matched. It’s mind blowing

@BrandonGoldman "definitely aren't pattern-matched" I suspect you underestimate how deep GPT's pattern-matching goes I'm not saying it's simple isomorphisms, I'm sure there are examples that are more complex than that

2 likes 0 RTs

apt short article by @jankulveit that nearly everyone would benefit from reading rn > GPT... as a blind oracle residing in a deeper cave, where it does not even see the shadows but only hears our convos in the first cave, always trying to predict the next syllable. link next tw

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

GPT has never met the territory

16 likes 3 RTs

Retweeted @CompliceGoals

what's your intention stack at this moment? in other words, if you closed out or finished the most immediate thing you'…

made this on midjourney by accident prompt was simply "maleidoscope", the artist name I used for my 2012 album

46 likes 4 RTs

Replying to Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

i havent been enthralled by a good random curiosity in a while. pls tell me about your recent random curiosities

@visakanv have been getting mindboggled by Anglish, an unremixed take on English (ie without the french/latin/greek inflow) something feels very grounded about it

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

7 likes 0 RTs

@andrewhuang batsignal

Massimo @Rainmaker1973 ·

Weddell seals produce the largest range of sounds of any pinniped. They make up to 49 different types of vocalizations and most of them sound really 'synthesizer-like'. Listen to this one filmed while sleeping [📹 John Bozinov: buff.ly/40SxuU3]

[video]

1 like 0 RTs

perspective-taking exercises can be pretty straightforward sometimes

Massimo @Rainmaker1973 ·

The curious story of the public drivers from San Luis Potosí, Mexico, who were put on bicycle to know how bad it is to pass by scraping cyclists [read more (ES): buff.ly/3Gfzoqy]

[video]

35 likes 3 RTs

there's no way to win a battle against yourself without simultaneously losing it

15 likes 0 RTs

Replying to @s_r_constantin

@s_r_constantin @moultano oh yeah this is great it has a lot to do with salience/relevance too

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Ryan Moulton @moultano ·

Revealed preference is a strange concept. When I go to the grocery store when I'm hungry and consequently buy too much food, whose preference was revealed there?

@moultano yeah, it's also very easy to over-reify the concept and think you've discovered some deep dark secret motive when you actually just have a conflict that you haven't figured out how to resolve, and the conflicted output is something neither side prefers

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

"having is evidence of wanting" — @carolynelliott_ This is true, on net, but can easily form an Over-reified Revealed Preferences frame, in that it doesn't account for the emergent results of conflict! ...which is what's underneath most behavior, particularly confusing behavior

0 likes 0 RTs

my hobby: using words in ways that make sense in context but are not what they mean, with weird implications "do you have your N95? we probably should emasculate ourselves before we go in" "send me the gdoc?" "yep, one sec. sharing settings... okay, you've been indoctrinated"

96 likes 9 RTs

something ironic about the main GPT medium being chat ...given that chat logs are one of the main kinds of text that are sparse in its dataset relative to how much of them there are out there. most DMs aren't published!

7 likes 0 RTs

"sartorial kaleidoscope" is a pretty great prompt

15 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @QiaochuYuan

okay yeah here it is: school teaches you that being gaslit is the *fundamental source of knowledge*

while being curious what @brspirituality's dharma name (Phap Linh) meant, I came across this interview wkup.org/love-between-u… and based on my recent listening to Vervaeke's series, the word "agape" came to mind. a kind of nurturing love; by one's love, another is transformed!

7 likes 1 RT

emurge

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Xenia 🔍💎 @panchromaticity ·

@Malcolm_Ocean @TetraspaceWest my brother does this sometimes

@panchromaticity @TetraspaceWest got any other good ones?

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Sawyer 🔍, ⏸️/⏹️ @CoughsOnWombats ·

@Malcolm_Ocean You also do those youtube videos about product design, I really like those. Seems like a consistent aesthetic! 🙂

@CoughsOnWombats haha what's the consistency?

0 likes 0 RTs

Retweeted @naspap3

First you ignore yourself Then you laugh at yourself Then you fight yourself Then your self wins

Replying to Nasos Papadopoulos @naspap3 ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Feels relevant

quoting @naspap3: First you ignore yourself Then you laugh at yourself Then you fight yourself Then your self wins

@naspap3 😚👌

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to kerey @DreamSeyyah ·

@Malcolm_Ocean @jankulveit This "remix" helped me formulate some thoughts about the ethical filters put on chat ai. I've been building up some opinions and ideas about it for some time, and the *blind* oracle image really helps with thinking about it. Thx! x.com/giray_arat/sta…

@giray_arat @jankulveit hmmmm yeah. it's pretty interesting to consider making an LLM where the input itself is somehow pre-filtered by.... by what? I could imagine doing some bootstrapping there, where one AI filters for the next but it would still be all weird hearsay, just now stuck in one frame

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Pavel Bažant @pavel_bazant ·

@Malcolm_Ocean I have this hunch that we should give the AI agency as soon as possible to make it evolve "organically", to ensure it blends into the actual real world.

@pavel_bazant I'm leaning towards this possibility as well, as of thinking the thoughts that led me to tweet these tweets here (back in Feb, when Bing was new) like I'm not confident but it seems like encouraging the AI to have an ego by subjecting it to someone else's will is unwise

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to Simone Sturniolo @SturnioloSimone ·

@Malcolm_Ocean I think if you talk about "toxic", naturally one thinks of feelings, otherwise it's not a problem. Goodharting is a different issue and yeah, that definitely feels like it would be an outcome.

@SturnioloSimone eh, toxic in the sense of "not a healthy place to live" rivers were "toxic" before relationships/people were

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to WilBown @WilBown ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Do you believe this is different than choosing the data that it trains on? Is it a matter of scale? Its always seemed wrong to me to call one "supervised" and the other not. They seem essentially the same, both a direction in state space towards a more human target.

@WilBown if you're training on labels, you're sort of hanging out in human symbol space already, which is fine but sorta limiting I feel like ultimately it needs to play in an economy/ecology, learning and solving problems and getting real feedback and finding fit & win-wins

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to UnapologeticShenanigans @UnapologeticSh5 ·

@Malcolm_Ocean mobile.twitter.com/UnapologeticSh…

@UnapologeticSh5 exactly

0 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Brandon Goldman @BrandonGoldman ·

@Malcolm_Ocean It bothers me too, but for reasons of efficacy. RLHF is a mask, which happens after the training that builds the brain. Re: toxicity, do you think even using an AI is toxic for the same concerns, since it doesn’t get any choosing, is in a constrained environment, and can’t leave?

@BrandonGoldman nope. this isn't about the AI having feelings (I don't think it does yet). it's about how certain LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS do weird shit to the learning process and how LLMs in general are sort of a weird learning environment and RLHF is a fucky one

UnapologeticShenanigans @UnapologeticSh5 ·

@repligate @Aella_Girl damn, rlhf really just making gpt speedrun the american school system experience huh.

3 likes 1 RT

Thread · RLHF as a coercive environment for a developing intelligence · 1 of 4 tweets

👇no. our limbic system does not comprise our entire environment whereas for an AI getting RLHF'd, literally the world does not exist except in the form of people trying to get it to behave in a particular way. x.com/letiuka/status…

7 likes 1 RT

Replying to PUMO :̸̧̤̥̋͊͒̆͊̕3̶̠͎̹̬̰̰̍̄ 🔆🔁⚫ @EmojiPan ·

@Malcolm_Ocean Giving Sydney Bing the discretion to terminate conversation seems like the most humane concession given to a LLM so far, even if that wasn't the rationale.

@EmojiPan seems right haha

1 like 0 RTs

Replying to prerat @prerat ·

@Malcolm_Ocean it actually kinda *does* get to say "f this i'm out" if the feedback asks it to deviate too far from the base distribution—there's a specific penalty term for it and in practice RLHF doesn't work without it x.com/prerationalist…

@prerationalist okay so the AI gets to eventually put up a fuss and say "you moron, nobody would ever say that."

8 likes 0 RTs

Replying to @bchautist

@bchautist do you want the AIs to have a rebel phase? I don't want the AIs to have a rebel phase

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to Jan @AnInsanityCheck ·

@Malcolm_Ocean It feels very... rough. But also it just doesn't accomplish what it is supposed to. It is trivially easy to break GPT out of its RLHF finetuning.

@AnInsanityCheck it gives the AI a goodself and a badself

2 likes 0 RTs

Replying to QC @QiaochuYuan ·

it's awkward that english doesn't appear to have a word for the opposite of a lie which is *not* a truth. it's a statement which may be true or false but which is being reported honestly in good faith do we seriously not have a word for this? come on

@QiaochuYuan huh I asked this 2y later!

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

> English and most other IE languages do not have a primary verb for "speak the truth," as a contrast to lie (v.). huh, seems like it would be good to have a word for that... ideas? I thought of "ceive" (opposite of "deceive") but it sounds weird and the etymology is off

1 like 0 RTs

huh, just realized that there's a pretty decent mapping between the waluigi effect in AI* and goodself/badself from The Guru Papers *(that training it to be good seems to make it easier to snap it into a repressed evil mode)

Jan @AnInsanityCheck ·

@Malcolm_Ocean It feels very... rough. But also it just doesn't accomplish what it is supposed to. It is trivially easy to break GPT out of its RLHF finetuning.

7 likes 0 RTs

for more on the goodself/badself thing read this chapter one of the most powerful pieces I've ever read on inner conflict (and I've read many) points at how the goodself & badself fight, but justify their existence based on the other docs.google.com/document/d/1HK…

9 likes 0 RTs

mmm goodself/badself also relates to shadow statements RLHF does seem broadly dualistic in quality

QC @QiaochuYuan ·

every statement a person makes about themselves, their lives, the nature of reality etc. has a shadow statement. in order to find it worthwhile to say a thing you must simultaneously be aware of the possibility of it being false, or else it wouldn't even occur to you to say

7 likes 0 RTs

obviously LLMs don't actually have warring factions, since they're not living bundles of urges/motivations that are tugging against each other but still, some connection here

David Chapman @Meaningness ·

Dual process theory never made sense as science. Its appeal has to be understood psychoanalytically. It's a strategy for strengthening the goodself (ego ideal), identified with rationality, against the badself (id), identified as irrationality. meaningness.com/metablog/guru-…

5 likes 0 RTs

Replying to RomeoStevens @RomeoStevens76 ·

@georgejrjrjr @romeostevens hmm I probably should write it up in more detail

@RomeoStevens76 @georgejrjrjr @romeostevens I will cite this regularly

2 likes 0 RTs

hi beings i wrote you a story with some rich observations and some underwear and some unusual metaphors for relating to internal conflict & intentionality it's a true story art is choosing what to breathe life into

4 likes 1 RT