truth is not separable from relevance
August 2023
at a family summer camp hanging out with first, second, and third cousins, and I've realized that the way cousins work makes a lot more sense when you realize that siblings are zeroth cousins
hanging out with extended family on my mum's side, I've been increasingly feeling the extent to which it just feels true to say "I'm a
do I have any friends who've gotten clothes custom made from a design and would be down to help me through the process? can post general tips/links below or DM to hold my hand through it thx 🙏❤️
the book of love has music in it in fact, that's where music comes from some of it is transcendental and some of it's just really dumb
on mobile, stuck on @RoamResearch login page after I reset my google password. clicking google login causes a big loop then I'm back where I started
don't trust anyone who claims to have special knowledge about how dishonesty works fortune.com/2023/08/02/har…
...applies to someone who claims to have special knowledge about trust/distrust too, which is *almost* me lol but I do my best to be more like "I have a theorem, I can point it out to you if you want" not "this is how it is, trust me"
@AaronEstel that part of you is probably in your left hemisphere haha
hanging out in a scene full of extended family on my mum's side, I realized it feels true to say "I'm a <mum's maiden name>" and "I'm a <mum's mum's maiden name>" I'd confused patronymic bureaucratic legal last names with who I am to myself and to others. gross. fuck legibility.
interestingly, I never/barely met any of the <dad's mum's maiden name> family who had that name, aside from dad's mum's mum's mum who lived to like 102, so I don't have a sense of knowing a larger fam that shares that name, that I can be also part of
huh!! but I do have that with my middle name, which is a middle name I share with a few relatives, back until it's the maiden name of a woman who I gather was so strong-willed that her surname got lodged firmly into the family tree. but probably my sisters wouldn't feel that.
what I meant to say — I forgot my send-a-tweet widget borks on "<"
@ErgoEcho thanks i hate it
@ErgoEcho mathematically yes but afaict the actual experience of cousinhood as a relation depends more on propinquity than degree, whereas siblinghood (unless you have a very weird family set-up) is immediate since same parents means same household, competing for care,.
@ErgoEcho hence it makes sense to me that "cousins" is actually a catchall term for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, but NOT siblings in general although ofc if a bunch of cousins are hanging out, some of them may be siblings without that being false. "cousin" here as common denominator, basically
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF yeah the "you must be this tall to ride the transformational experience that makes you this tall" paradox is a doozy
...why is it called a one-time verification code if I have to do it so many times? (I hope this should go without saying but if you are going to actually answer this question you'd better adhere to "wrong answers only")
@pomatious haha great answer
@patbrown42184 ahhhh! that makes... soo.... much... more sense...
@eshear instructions unclear, got pointing out instructions stuck in bank website
gonna be in Berlin, Sept 16-21ish 🛬🇩🇪 anybody wanna host me? (also lmk what cool stuff is happening!)
@RichDecibels writing canon is hard
ah fuck I just realized that in a conversation you can have honesty or control but not both
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF ah great point like, obviously! but it's easy to sort of assume otherwise, and I was kind of doing so (and many of my readers might). thus it needs to be said. thanks Heph twitter.com/HephaistosF/st…
superegos then vs superegos now
I swear most of self-insight is just learning how to actually spit-take at your own off-the-cuff self-observations
@GregLescoe haha if you figure out a way to do it, lmk!
suddenly occurred to me that "trust" and "handledness" might be basically synonymous
@DanielleFong here for this
Replying to @nat_sharpe_
@nat_sharpe_ @cube_flipper this could actually make an INCREDIBLE reality-warping game I bet there could be ways to gradually ease the player into it, starting with maybe eyes that are just a bit further apart (/ more on the outside like a horse) and a button to widen them?
Retweeted @nat_sharpe_
it’s easy to apologize to a group but how do you know when the group has forgiven you?
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF I often think of the relevant unit (for trust, but it maps well to handledness) as "situations"
had an idea for a book anthology that features a dozen or two true stories about how people have untangled themselves from self-hate or self-coercion and developed self-love and integrated motivation
definitions without etymologies are sus
man this scope is creepy
@aleksil79 I mean etymologies should include current usages, which are essentially definitions
proto-indo-european root for "yeet"
Replying to @SlowwCo
@SlowwCo I can ask myself so many questions: who? what? when? where? why? but it all comes back to it all comes back to it all comes back to back to back to: "who am I?" maleidoscope.bandcamp.com/track/who-am-i
🤢 "2 reposts" 🤢 "Post" .......... 😔
colonialist domicide
"have a good weekend, if you celebrate weekends" — me to some other feral free agents / self-employed folks I'm working with
Retweeted @made_in_cosmos
So you want to live forever? What's your plan for ceding power to the future generations so that you don't become an et…
@ProbFact extremely bad "fact" it's a quote of an opinion that expresses absolutely no actual claim whatsoever
first thought: how delightful and quaint, I'm signing a EULA with the queen second thought: wait, this is out of date now. I guess they should update it to say "His Majesty The King" (the canadian province of BC has a new SSO/2FA system which is pretty cool actually)
good piece on worldviews and the importance of role models every.to/no-small-plans…
@aleksil79 yeah, there's "be thyself" and then there's a wordless uninterrupted authenticity that we share with cats and birds and so on, but often inhibit using a worldview or whatever id stuff maybe! malcolmocean.com/2023/07/supere…
just had a satisfying experience of doing freedom pomodoros 💪 got about 5 minutes into a pomo writing an article when I realized my notes weren't as detailed as I'd thought, and almost bounced off or quit, but then I just allowed myself to do nothing
and after not even that many seconds of doing nothing, inhibiting all intentions other than the one to write the piece, and allowing that intention to choose whether to let go or whether to find a different route... I found myself drafting stuff anyway, and it feels juicy
and now the pomo is over and I felt like coming here to share this. I was initially going to just share it with @m_ashcroft and @visakanv with whom I've been talking about writers block and pomodoros with recently, but figured I'd tweet it instead!
@nickcammarata @kylebrussell @eshear I think some of the Girardian stuff can be solved on the level of culture, by undoing the normativity of normalcy
@Nsousanis epic! amazing work random tiny nitpick if you care: looks like in any given Webb pic, the rays of different stars are always aligned the same way, not rotated relative to each other
@deepfates this is an incredible spread. I thought this was fake but it's... a real book? that is not by Jordan Peterson books.google.ca/books/about/Wa…
Thread · The absence of long-haired men in panels and media · 1 of 8 tweets
when I entered Singapore last year, they pulled me aside and scanned my luggage. some countries do this for everybody coming in, but in this case it was special later learned that if I'd tried to visit a few decades ago they would have forced me to cut my hair or GTFO! 😳💇♂️
@RichDecibels relates to David Schnarch's first response to most couples telling them about everything that's going wrong in their marriages: > why do you think you shouldn't be having the problems that you're having?
@RichDecibels I've been feeling into the idea of making a platform for this; some small scene of people writing longform stuff and responding to each other, kind of like LW but uhh not LW some early thoughts in this thread
I respect the ways in which you don't trust me I respect the ways in which you don't trust my saying I respect the ways in which you don't trust me but if I don't seem to, well, so be it! maybe I don't. these are attempts; I don't have perfect self-knowledge
@MJPiercello @visakanv just came across this again while my internet is terrible where I'm staying atm but I still think this is a cool idea and let's do it sometime this fall!
Thread · Defaults, markedness, and what counts as the unmarked human
I'm gradually unlearning white & male as default-person ("white" is a totally garbage concept anyway, but say "european-looking") but straight & cis seem to me to be obvious defaults in any decent ontology however! not-default doesn't mean queer or trans are bad/wrong/unnatural
to be clear here I'm not making a claim based on majority/minority right-handedness is more common, so it's a kind of default, but it doesn't seem to me that it's ontologically more primary (although squinting at hemispheres, I can make a case for it).
part of my inspiration for these thoughts (which I've been having for some months, not just today) I think was Deborah Tannen's stuff, which I traced to a 1993 essay There is No Unmarked Women which I just went and read! short, juicy, very relevant. academics.otc.edu/media/uploads/…
she points out that in a biological sense, female is probably a better candidate for unmarked/default sex: - all X chromosomes make a woman; all Y chromosomes make nothing (men are XY) - men have nipples - in some species, "only female"; in ants, non-reproducing workers female
she talks about how in most contexts there's no way to dress or style one's hair as a woman that fades into the background I can now restate this tweet: as a long-haired man, I am not part of the unmarked class.
anyway, Tannen's piece was helpful. I think what she's saying with "marked"/"unmarked" is different from what I mean by defaults I mean more like "if told there's a person, and no additional facts, does anything else get assumed?" ...tho that's not quite it either
you need to have a notion of gender-identity-matching-body-as-default in order to even refer to trans-gender sexual orientation is a bit less clear but hetero sex is both temporally and ongoingly necessary for/prior to the possibility of homo sex
I want to be clear: I'm not attempting to say that these defaults are "normal" in the sense in which the word "normal" is associated with normativity, rightness, shouldness, rules, conformity, etc many ontologies (including DSM) foolishly fuse these two
interestingly the categories {neurotypical, neurodivergent} are named in a way that suggests neurotypicality is a natural default, but it seems likely to me that NT correlates with ability and/or desire to conform *in general* not just fitness for a NT-run society
I have a whole nother theory about that but I don't want to try to fit it into this thread. point is, I don't think there is a default human neurotype in any reasonable ontology, and that the notion that there is one is an artifact of bad ontologies.
the reason I'm publishing my thoughts-in-progress about this is part of my quest to name the obvious about culture-war topics, doing my best to avoid culture-war ontologies acknowledge all the things!
so even if I later realize I was missing some key detail here (likely! even more likely if I publish!) sharing my perspective is a resource to others who can notice someone saying what they were also thinking but weren't saying!
or, alternatively, if someone has an ontology that is denying some obvious things I'm saying because the only other people saying those obvious things are obviously being dicks about it, then hearing someone say it curiously might help them look at those things afresh
also to be clear here, I'm not claiming to be 100% curious and 0% defensive and if overall I don't read to you as curious, I respect that!
@RichDecibels thiiiiiis
@RichDecibels > by mentally-mediated pleasure? I mean things that feel good "because" of some abstract reasoning. The pleasure of seducing a hot woman "because" that affirms my status as a hot man. part of this is mental but don't disavow the visceral animal part! a stag wants the best doe!
@Nsousanis yeah a lot of the custom brush presets have automatic rotation jitter, but you can turn it off!
Replying to @quotidiania
@quotidiania hi!
inside you there are two wolves. please send them to Britain asap—they have a shortage
loooooool I just suddenly remembered a dream where I approached some friends who were playing an RPG card game and they dealt me in and my secret character card was gonna be the unabomber (but someone saw my hand and we had to re-deal)
I'm not separate from you I'm not separate from my sense of being separate from you, or your sense of being separate from me I'm not separate from any sense of being separate from some sense of separation but I sometimes feel like I am
> Boundaries and the forms they define are characteristics of the thoughts of God, as it were. This is why we call the universe a mind. — Facets of Unity
Thread · Shame as the experience of separation, and reconnection as its cure · 2 of 6 tweets
seems like shame is the experience of being separate from god from ones' parents from ones' peers from the universe and the sense of wrongness/mistake about that (which can feel like "I fucked up" or "the universe is wrong")
I have a sense that the implications of this are complex and that I don't grasp them yet but one thing that it seems to mean is that, in the same way fear implies a solution/action: get away. hide. shame implies a solution/action: reconnect. unseparate.
@the_aiju I didn't intend to imply any sense of "universe wrong" is necessarily shame... sounds like something kinda resonates for you tho? I tend to feel more active "this is fucking bullshit" than "I'm a piece of shit" tho, but when I trace them down the root seems like the same pain
Thread · Shame as the experience of separation, and reconnection as its cure · 2 of 6 tweets
inspired by re-reading Genesis Genesis 2:25: Now the man and the woman were naked, but they did not feel any shame." 🐍🍎🤯💔 =the Fall Genesis 3:10: He answered, “I heard you walking in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid myself.”
also introspectively, for me at least, it seems that a huge part of shame is an experience of confusion: why am I separate? <not in words> what I did made sense! I'm learning! why is it possible for me to make such a mistake that I deserve to be punished?
presented for consideration re #TweetsAboutThisTrend to be clear, Rich Men North Of Richmond seems like a new phenomenon—guy is a real rural dude? a factory worker? but mixed with his personal struggles (work, booze) are eg bs welfare queen talking points youtube.com/watch?v=y7im5L…
(this is Rich Men North of Richmond, for context) youtube.com/watch?v=sqSA-S…
@CasinoJoe92 @PiquantParvenu things cluster weirdly; someone being a 1% outlier on 6 things is not the 1/(100*100*100*100*100*100) odds that you'd think it'd be if you're looking for another weirdo, sometimes the universe has just the right weirdo in store, who is looking for you
it's fun to be thinky animal
I want each breath to enliven me and bring me in touch with the preciousness of everything.
coolest job title ever?
I would not be stoked to be left in a world with only the people who chose red
> non-anxiety through patient ... over thousands of hours becomes a dominating strategy; cannot be rushed or hacked, has to be natively noticed as genuinely better option all the way down plus anti-fragile transformation such becomes better option ift.tt/5hUWlsw
Retweeted @HephaistosF
A blender statement is a scissor statement that memetically mutates as it takes hold, creating a neverending churn that sp…
kinda wild that beings are made of stuff and then other beings are like "nice stuff you got there... could be me"
incoming call. robo lady says "visa fraud dept, press 2 if you don't recognize $1300 spent on gift cards this morning" 👉2 guy w Indian accent: "hi, can I please have your first and last name" me: "hold up who the fuck are you?" guy: "I'm your fucking daddy" < he hangs up >
@magicianbrain YES! the rest of it has a quality of "I can tell for myself that something is fucked up" so it resonates with other people who can also tell for themselves but then there's this idea of what the problem is that is 1) outdated (Reagan era) 2) hearsay 3) false
@visakanv I'm using Arc and just got up, so I don't have a lot of things open, but I have this saved to look at later!
@itsgalth @visakanv ah thanks, helpful timing for me as I start orienting more towards radical ownership and noticing the ways in which my being is constantly trying to say "it's not my fault" (and I think there's profound wisdom in that too)
ayy lmao
@RichDecibels pah! I don't need your services! go away!
@JiffjoffI @ClickingSeason thought experiments always have this weird property where usually the most relevant thing is something you're supposed to ignore: how did I get here?
@ClickingSeason not all nerds, just logic-cucked ones
Everyone responding to this poll chooses between a green pill or yellow pill. 🟢 If you pick green, you live no matter what. 🟡 If you pick yellow, you die unless 50% of other people pick yellow. Which do you choose?
@CovfefeAnon @lillybilly299 ha! indeed. you have inspired this:
@aleksil79 BAHAHA AMAZING
Everyone responding to this poll chooses between a brown pill or purple pill Nobody has to die, but if you want to try, you can pick brown 🟤, in which case you get to die, unless >50% of people want to die, in which case too bad you don't get to 🤷♀️ Which do you choose?
@rendroid1 exactly here's another even further attempt
@Apothegmata Yes & no. "choose red in this poll" & "chose purple in the below poll" are just actually different things, especially if people are choosing quickly (which many are in both dirs) Even though the polls have the same payoff matrices, the vibe is different
@lillybilly299 @CovfefeAnon false. there is one other way for nobody to die—everybody picks red but yes, as you note, due to framing effects some people will pick blue (including people who can map the game theory but figure many others won't bother and want those people to live too)
@vlct0rs_tw1tter @MattPirkowski Yeah likewise. I voted quickly because I was like "yeah we're an "everyone lives" crowd around here, this will be easy". This is a very rare thought experiment in having one option labeled "everyone lives" but technically there's ANOTHER WAY for everyone to live.
@StatsLime bruh you can't put a fucking "results" option
Replying to @icryaboutlife
@icryaboutlife @lillybilly299 @CovfefeAnon I'm not opinionated about it. I think it's a brilliant intuition pump and a fun way to investigate the relationship between logic and meaning I'm curious how original poll impressively IMPLIES "unless more than 50% of people choose blue, someone dies" even though that's not true
Everyone responding to this poll chooses between building a bomb and living a peaceful life. If >50% of people build a bomb, nobody's bombs will go off. Otherwise, everybody who built a bomb dies when their bomb explodes. Which do you choose?
Replying to @icryaboutlife
@icryaboutlife @lillybilly299 @CovfefeAnon yeah although original poll wasn't "all 8 billion living people" it was "respondents to this poll", which is different! for all 8 billion, DEFINITELY some are choosing blue because they don't speak yet or English, and they like 🔵 more than 🔴. but yikes if I had to play that.
btw if you picked brown for real* then here's a suicide hotline 1-800-985-5990 or try talking to a friend or this lovely bot pi.ai/talk *(not as a joke or because you feel the need to be consistent w/ other polls because you think framing effects shouldn't matter)
@RokoMijic @TiagodeVassal on the contrary it seems to me that NOT deriving intrinsic utility from pure coordination is a mental illness among humans, possibly equivalent to (or comorbid with) psychopathy/sociopathy obviously other things matter too but like, food tastes good, coord feels good!
@AwayBerk Land Value Tax even better for growth than Property Tax because by taxing the actual value of the land—not improvements—you incentivize people holding empty lots to use or sell immediately, rather than rent-collecting. "shit or get off the pot" energy
@Apothegmata Totally! And I meant "only the people who chose red in this internet poll" not "only the people who would, on reflection, in a real-life scenario shaped with similar payoffs but perhaps a different framing, choose to just live and not incur risk for a harebrained scheme.
the red-blue-whitepill: blue-pill-choosers are prosocial because they trust others to pick the obvious "everybody lives" option and think others will too red-pill-choosers are prosocial because they trust others to take care of themselves when they can do so independently
If you don't want to read about a stupid risky convoluted harebrained scheme, press the "nah" option below & keep scrolling. Seriously, no pressure. It wasn't my idea. I'm not going to be doing it. I expect most people will nope out of it, before or after reading about it. To…
@Apothegmata To be clear, I ALSO would not want to be stuck in a world with only the people who choose blue in the original poll—then I'd be missing lots of lovely people who paid close attention to the payoff matrix and hoped everybody else they cared about would too.
Replying to @IkkyusDen
@sev_see Good luck
Yeah so interestingly the purple ratio was at like 88% before I added the "if you're feeling suicidal" reply (stronger than a different poll that was also trying this framing effect) and then that transformed the framing into one of saving people! twitter.com/starbannergame…
I sorta knew it'd have that effect, & held off on adding it initially, but then idk I didn't want a tweet out there like "if you want to try [to die] [push this innocuous poll button]" because it felt like bad vibes there's a way to split them properly but alas I MUST LOG OFF.
@aleksil79 bahahaha fuck, yup
Thread · Reframing the red/blue pill poll to expose framing effects · 19 of 23 tweets
seems to me that blue is a great choice in the original poll as framed even though there are many variants (in wording or outcome) in which red is a better choice. had fun playing with some alternate framings. my thought process in thread
this tweet highlighted for me the way in which this *isn't* a collective action problem at least not the way a classic stag hunt is, where there's a huge gain from cooperating but if even one person doesn't then cooperators suffer while defectors do okay
I think the impetus to choose blue comes from pattern-matching from other situations / thought experiments, in which literally anybody MUST blue original phrasing: - if > 50% of ppl choose blue pill, everyone lives - if not, red pills live and blue pills die
on some reflection, it seems very likely to me that this is caused in large part by the phrases "everyone lives" and "blue pills die". maybe also by the ordering. it's rare for a thought experiment to have an option labeled "everyone lives" but there's another way all can live
ooooh also by the framing of "red pills" and "blue pills". there's a kind of identity thing. you see the "everyone lives" option. you want to pick it, because of course everyone living is good. but then you see "oh no, but if enough people are selfish assholes, I'll die"
this poll is probably a BRILLIANT way to study framing effects. this version (exact same outcomes!) - highlights the individual payoffs better - points out that people choosing blue/yellow are risking their own lives - makes red/green the "simple" option
and here's an even more over-the-top attempt—still getting a lot of pact folks. it seems plausible to me that there's a way to frame this that could get 100% of non-suicidal people picking the "I just live" option
here's a way to frame it so the prosocial/nonviolent option feels like the one that was originally labeled "red pill" and looked very violent
This one got WAY longer than expected 😂 I legit don't know what lizardman's constant is going to be on it, but in an important sense if the stakes were real (not thought experiment) this one (same structure!) should drive "blue pill" to zero.
I think in most real situations that look at all like this, either the choice is so obvious that it doesn't look like a choice, or it is an actual tragedy of the commons ish where a minimum number of people must take some risk or loss in order for things to work out for everyone
and thus people happily vote blue if it seems like there's a good chance for others to vote blue, because the "everybody lives" option seems simple and good, whereas the other one is messy and bad twitter.com/icryaboutlife/…
but once the requirement is much above 50% I feel like people voting blue would actually probably start being kind of afraid, and that fear is an ACCURATE sign to look harder at the situation and see if there's a better solution
all of the new poll numbers are of course absurdly suspect now, since the power of the framing effects goes away in a context where people have been discussing the choices in question, have already made several, and are primed to think about framing effects
I seriously think that psychologists studying framing effects could get a good paper out of variations on this one plus maybe studying the extent to which people can see both: - that the structure is technically the same - that framing matters since it affects odds of mistakes
contra Roko, coordination is not just usually but *necessarily* achieved by shared meaning-making, specifically by framing choices leadership in practice involves achieving stag-hunt-like results by creating a shared meaning-interface with the world where cooperating is obvious
also, while I'm saying the obvious: even more so than most thought experiments, this is a STUPID scenario as exactly framed. most people who aren't decoupling so hard assume they are being given a choice that isn't stupid, which suggests there might be a reason to coordinate
put another way, if you're assuming relevance (which linguists note is necessary to have collaborative conversations at all) then literally the only reason to even ASK this question IS for the purpose of running a coordination fire drill! and we passed! and this was a speech act
some would counter with: the actual reason here is for running a virtue-signalling trap, that will make people naively trust others around here but like, I think in the grand scheme of things people are already naively trusting for many other reasons and this doesn't matter.
anyway, thank you for coming to my TED talk, this was a wild ride today and I am gonna go. offline. now.
@jambarree oh totally but if other peoples' bombs only kill themselves, idk I'm playing around, trying to find a framing that *doesn't* make this feel like a coordination problem at all and just makes the coupled-survival option look dumb but it's hard because
Replying to @abhayance
@abhayance @lastplacecomics haha this is great
@aleksil79 I think "vegretable" might work better as "egregetable" although now that I've written it out I'm having doubts
@visakanv "feel bad for" wdym? feel guilty for having them? or feel compassion for those who don't? or both? or a third thing?
@visakanv guessing part of what's going on is that you feel a sense of "I know what that's like" but it's harder and harder to seem credible when you say that, which feels bad & maybe alienating
I'm at my dad's in Halifax, Nova Scotia (east coast of Canada) the next few weeks. Do we have enough people to make a meetup happen? visakanv-public "twitterfriends by city" names @brandontoner & @ideopunk. @DanielleFong is in SF these days but maybe knows folks we could invite?
huh it went back to 88% after having gone down to like 75%. maybe people coming from my long thread where I talk about framing effects etc
@genieresearch @rendroid1 my followers would probably skew more blue on the original tbh since I'm a huge coordination nerd, but who knows at this point still, at least one person says specifically otherwise. idk. not much point arguing it twitter.com/s_r_constantin…
Replying to @s_r_constantin
@s_r_constantin did you recognize that the structure was the same before you did? curious about your feeling/reasoning on it
@G_U_N_N_A_R_ @AHAB_INC @cumlasagna1 they're not actually identical though! the framing matters because it affects the odds that well-meaning people who misinterpret the question or make some other assumptions or want to save the small suicidal fraction will themselves also want to choose blue
Everyone responding to this poll chooses between a blue pill or red pill. - if >50% of ppl choose blue pill, everyone lives - if not, 99% of red pills live and 99% of blue pills die (randomly) Which do you choose?
@G_U_N_N_A_R_ @AHAB_INC @cumlasagna1 and in most real-life scenarios there's some error rate in both what people choose and in what happens outcome-wise which I'll try to capture with this new poll:
@Askeladam @uncatherio here's my attempt yours I think is also challenging because the mathiness/multistepness makes the poll feel way harder to model how other people will answer it it's impressively convoluted tho so should in principle hit 100% B here's my attempt:
Thread · Reframing the red/blue pill poll to expose framing effects · 1 of 23 tweets
New experiment. My guess is that many people who answered blue in the original implicitly may have been adding some noise like this one explicitly adds. (a different way to frame this scenario below is that 1% of people get the opposite color they pick)
Replying to @orkthodox
@orkthodox those alarm bells are apt! I went to buy a computer recently and they offered me 3y zero-interest financing and I was like "what's the catch?" and they were like "there isn't one" but no, the catch was if you miss one payment you're paying 30% interest on the whole thing.
@orkthodox I was aware that I would produce this effect while I was writing it, and wasn't sure what to do about it. it's sort of the opposite of the framing effect implied here; the choice should be so obvious that merely asking the question implies it's not
Retweeted @heynibras
i've yet to encounter a SINGLE person who i could genuinely say would benefit from more harshness or toughness. yet almost e…
@orkthodox ideally this experiment would be performed in such a way that some sample population gets to actually opt in to whether they want to do a weird thing, like they walk past a sign on the street and everyone who walks by counts as "nah" then people who stop get to pick "nah"/"41252"
@orkthodox although that would only solve half the problem also it feels a lot more weirder to run "if you pick this option you might die" thought experiments on a street, for obvious reasons 😬
@aleksil79 Haha amazing. Huh, for some reason it makes me think that it would be cool to do a version where you somehow show people different versions of the poll, and in at least some of the versions you let people know that others are going to be shown different versions 😵💫
@rmbalt Nice! Protip: in real life, things tend to be much more like this (in part because people choose accidentally, in part because outcomes are noisy) and many of the people picking blue in the original are people who are making such an assumption or saving those who are.
@brandontoner @ideopunk @DanielleFong hmmmmm kinda tempting.... ...but I think I'd rather do something with @ideopunk when he's back! if you can make it into the city
get a text from an unknown number "Hi how are you ?" and even if this were an old contact (spoiler: it's not) I have enough people to try to stay in touch with without trying to talk to people who are so bad at communicating that they would open like this
If you don't feel like reading a long thought experiment, or you're tired of the recent poll discourse, or whatever, just hit the "nah" option and move along. If you want to stare at game theory and think about framing effects, keep reading. Okay, so I did a long rambly post…
@A_LEIFY_BOI depends on the friend! that is precisely the point. but in almost any case, I would include even the slightest thing about why I'm reaching out for example: "thinking of you when I saw this [attached photo] of an [injoke reference]"
@RobStuttaford haha nice
@aleksil79 .....fuck, true. maybe we'll have to just play it all out in reality
if the ratio of people who vote on this poll to the number of views it has is <50%, everybody who voted dies Which do you choose?
if the ratio of people who vote on this poll to the number of views it has is >50%, everybody who DIDN'T vote dies Which do you choose?
not certain these will work at all; if twitter counts multiple views by the same account, the whole thing will break down but it's my best attempt to seriously investigate defaults, which are hard to do *within* a poll since the options are the same size and weight
@aleksil79 @slimepriestess yep! and unlike our pristine thought experiments, reality always has some noise in it! which means...
@aleksil79 hahaha
@Morphenius have you seen the thousands of other remixes? there's a whole context to these polls
@CarnunMP thanks! I've been having fun with it and learning a lot it's a really helpful solvent for a vestigial rationalist clinging some part of me is doing to "but these are the same!"
@rmbalt @icryaboutlife @lillybilly299 @CovfefeAnon
@asemic_horizon @heynibras mmmm, yesss great 2x2
Replying to @s_r_constantin
@s_r_constantin right. part of the context shaping the poll results is also which order they were presented in, and the discourse around them
@giray_arat yeah, seems right! more complex than just that, but you're onto something good imo and it would be impossible to spell it all out in just tweets
@heylukegibson it doesn't quite prove such a point, because the original is a different scenario even if the buttons do the same thing people selected blue in the original because it seemed like the safe option for the collective
@kenthesimp ngl this was my first thought but then I was like "wait my dad is quietly sitting in the next room... ...and doesn't have an Indian accent." —in that order omgwtfbbq 😅
This is a great response. People need to be reminded they're part of a society periodically.
You are an organism, composed of multiple parts. Each of these parts chooses one of two options that we'll label "red" & "blue". If at least 50% of your parts choose "blue", you live. Otherwise, the parts who choose "red" survive but split off from the whole, which is gone.
Thread · Reframing the red/blue pill poll to expose framing effects · 3 of 23 tweets
^ so far the above one is the only experiment of mine that changes what the buttons actually do as opposed to just changing the framing here's an alternative wordy one, emphasizing defaults and how convoluted options are often bad
I tried this one, and the converse (in thread), as a different way to explore defaults, but it's very hard to tell what they imply, especially given the actual lack of stakes and lizardman's constant and unclarity about what twitter counts as a "view"
this is by FAR my favorite reframe on the whole thing I claim that this one is actually in some very real sense isomorphic to the original, and that this evokes why people vote blue we (sometimes) identify with the whole, and the whole wants to live!
@UntilTrees @browserdotsys bahaha yes
@LucidBrot I am sometimes overwhelmed by sunsets or the smell of flowers or food I didn't think of myself as high-emotion baseline but yeah. World is vividly alive and full of stuff to experience and I want to experience it!
@RichDecibels vaguely thinking that maybe the thing to do actually is to converge on substack and substack notes but ehhh
@captain_mrs thanks and thanks for asking! I considered it, but it seems like that undermines what sex is like I agree it's a null option but it doesn't seem like a central or good option it's like thinking of white noise as the default music
@visakanv @RonenV I want to amplify this but it has a typo that makes it slightly harder to parse what it's saying it seems like both the quoter and the quotee are saved from the tedium of elaboration
@captain_mrs but hmmm my position feels close to "abolish gender" in some sense, although I apparently like gendered pronouns (but I think that's in part because they avoid ambiguity & repetitiveness; I'd be happy with lojban's "5 pronouns, defined by context in situation")
@captain_mrs but it also feels to me like if you want to call objects gendered pronouns (which you do in part to animate them) then there is something fun to having two ways to animate something! and something feels spiritually right to me about that
@giray_arat truth and honesty are different in the sense I'm using it here, "honesty" is a mode of relating that includes not paltering, etc
@mormo_music it was tough writing it too!
@ForCognition great question; hang on, I started replying but I'm gonna do it as a standalone thread instead
@RokoMijic Oh good, glad you saw this one and replied. If you don't vote, sounds like you're already not part of the organism in question!
@RokoMijic You're making the entirely-reasonable assumption (given I used the word "organism") that the "you" I'm addressing in the poll is each single person with two hands on a keyboard, with names such as "Roko" But I'm actually addressing everyone *as* a whole. The bottom meaning here:
@RokoMijic You ARE the part, of this whole. There's no contradiction in this poll, understood this way. If you don't see that you're part of the whole, and try to "optimize your own utility", well... sometimes that's we call that "cancer", although that metaphor is not quite apt here.
@RokoMijic Heh, yes and no. I'm playing with fractals and collective identity here, and it would have been slightly fragmenting to say it that way I think. I did want to also evoke peoples' own experience of having a body that is held together by coordination.
@aleksil79 Thanks! I'm really happy with it 🥰
@captain_mrs @lisatomic5 for me too, but I guess not for everybody! I suspect this is an effect of certain ways of processing similar to how certain synaesthetes can pick out the 2s among the 5s as fast in the left image as the right one
@lisatomic5 one guess is that people expected "dilemna" because idk english is fucking weird but then got told "your spelling is wrong" and then stored both the fixed spelling and the "your spelling is wrong", which later merge-conflicted back to "dilemna"
@lisatomic5 I have a first person exp of this phenom, when I was coming down from the Berkeley Hills with a friend and I was like "I've been at this fork before, and the route to take is... ...NOT the one that seemed obvious last time. fuck... idk if I updated my sense of obviousness"
Retweeted @lisatomic5
mfers will be like "the map is not the territory" and then insist wildly different situations are literally the same thing…
Replying to @benwr
@benwr oh interesting!
@learning_sprite look my special interests are weird and meta okay 😛 and this hits at a bunch of them coordination & meaning & choice-making & probably others I haven't even quite named
@learning_sprite also usually I hate thought experiments because pushing buttons to make magical things happen is unwise and framing effects dominate so hard so here I'm finding something cool to play with and deconstruct about the whole thing
Thread · The blue/red pill poll as an iterated scene you choose to enter · 3 of 11 tweets
wait hold up the reason reds in the original poll are murderers is that nobody was forcing them to respond to the poll at all "no upside from choosing blue" bruh what upside did you get from choosing red??
from this angle, which I am NOT saying is the only way to view this, but I think is legit a good intuition pump for part of why this was a scissor/blender statement the reds can be seen as playing the role of "someone who steps into a healthy scene, in order to undermine it"
the poll has a secret third option which is "do nothing"
@rmbalt oh I agree
@rmbalt although I'll note that the original poll is not presented with even the slightest "you must" energy
Thread · The blue/red pill poll as an iterated scene you choose to enter · 1 of 11 tweets
nobody said you had to participate if we see this as an iterated scene that you enter by choosing a pill color and we note that you don't know whether the scene is alive because all-red or majority-blue then by entering the scene with red, YOU are choosing to attack it!
@rmbalt like "everyone responding to this poll" is a beautiful "everyone who chooses to step into this weird thought experiment game thing" very much the opposite of "if you don't paste this to 10 other youtube videos, you'll get bad luck"
Thread · The blue/red pill poll as an iterated scene you choose to enter · 3 of 11 tweets
and I think that this "iterated scene" phenom is much more like what's actually going on one of many things thought-experiments are really bad at is modeling historical context. they all kind of exist in a weird void with no wholeness or integrity
if you model this as an ongoing evolving system, what becomes immediately apparent is that there's no way to make any kind of gradual transition from a community that is thriving based on majority-blue to one that is thriving based on all-red and you're already in your system!
true! huhhhhhhh this explains a lot of political tensions between independent and interdependent prior-based ideologies Sowell's A Conflict Of Visions comes to mind
today and yesterday, literally all of the >10h I've spent at my computer have been basically just staring at these pill polls and I am having such a great time and learning so much
Agreed, and you vote with your feet about which ones to be part of, based on which ones produce the most mutually-workable relationships with you on every level, and this is a huge part of how coordination works at scale.
Thread · The blue/red pill poll as an iterated scene you choose to enter · 3 of 11 tweets
this shows why changes in framing have such huge effects, because the framing is the only context you have on what type of scene you're stepping into! "blue" (aka team "everyone lives") is correct in the original poll—not just in my opinion but EMPIRICALLY since it got 65%
meanwhile, in this poll—structurally isomorphic but with a different framing and colors changed to reduce team-bias... "green" (aka team "you live no matter what") is the obvious attractor (as I predicted when I made it (thought it'd be more but idk, lizardman's constant etc))
My guess is 3 main factors affect framing: 1. order 2. simplicity 3. collective outcome vs individual outcome 2 & 3 aren't perfectly disentanglable though! 🔵 "everybody lives" is the simplest option for the collective 🟢 "you live no matter what" is simplest for individual
if omega is perfectly capable of predicting what you would do, how do you know that omega isn't capable of magically (from your level of understanding and capability) teleporting the $1M out of the box the moment you begin opening the $1k one?
@StupendousGrav1 hm? if you're trying to get at something here I'm not sure what it is
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF Cartesian demon, in this context at least, feels remarkably similar in shape to Roko's basilisk
@HephaistosF or rather, "taking seriously the possibility that one exists" seems remarkably similar and in both cases the solution is... don't negotiate with terrorists?
Thread · The blue/red pill poll as an iterated scene you choose to enter · 1 of 11 tweets
another take along similar lines, coming from a different angle (the preceding thought was "if the game is only against copies of yourself it's trivial and impossible to lose")
Replying to @hgggrA
@hgggrA "at least that’s how I read it and assumed everyone else would be reading it" this I think is the essence of this whole thing haha
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF mmm, that makes sense very different source of forgiveness or non-punitive game theory though I think than mine maybe they reduce to the same thing but the framing clearly matters at least somewhat. and I think they're not commensurate.
@HephaistosF regarding this, it seems like umm... in an odd way, taking the Cartesian Demon seriously is true atheism? like leaving aside monist/dualistic gods, it's a world in which there is no larger whole, such that things can all make sense together twitter.com/HephaistosF/st…
@HephaistosF and I guess part of what you're saying is that for reasons beyond their will, some people are less capable of non-naively believing in any sort of god, even though at least in some cases (eg yours) they are aware that if they did it would make their lives hugely better
@giray_arat it's not that well-known, but neither me nor Vynn coined it. it's a thing, as they say
yes although also if someone draws a conclusion about why red is the right choice, and that conclusion is only a function of the game, and that conclusion is invalidated with the same game but different fluff, then their argument must have been wrong
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF huh. so it seems to you possible/plausible that this whole scene *gestures broadly* is that lawless? based on my life experiences, it seems to me very obvious that it's not. it contains suck and weirdness but not that kind of utter capricious chaos.
@RokoMijic @lisatomic5 tho also the framing DOES affect the payoff matrix. if you can set up two "same-games-different-fluff", where there's some payoff in $, but one fluff makes A tinged with shame and B with pride, and the other fluff does the opposite, then the *actual* payoffs are $+pride-shame
Thread · Why the problem of evil rests on an incoherent omnipotence · 1 of 10 tweets
ahh oop I typo'd, though it doesn't affect what I actually meant. the first tweet should read "omnipotent, omnibenevolent & omniscient" I put "omnipresent" for some reason which sort of doesn't really mean anything here also, good thoughts on the topic: twitter.com/squidpunk1312/…
@RokoMijic @lisatomic5 modeling those dynamics are vital to modeling actual game theory the simplest forms of game theory take for granted that there's common knowledge what the payoff matrix is, but this is not true in hypergames, and outside of toy models EVERY GAME IS AT LEAST SOMEWHAT A HYPERGAME
@RokoMijic @lisatomic5 every game is a hypergame because you don't actually have perfect information on how the other person feels about what it would mean to take all of their options, or how the payoffs interact with the rest of their life
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF yeah, hm. based in part on knowing you—otherwise I potentially would not think this—that the universe contains experiences of utter capricious chaos, that are beyond the capacity of the experiencing being to—ow, hang on. hadn't taken that in in first person
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF yeah I had just started typing "still haven't, but just did slightly more than before. I need to titrate it otherwise I would just fall into hell myself, but"
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF totally, 100%
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF I'm thinking about the word "suffer" as referring to "overwhelming experience" (as distinct from pain—one can suffer pleasure, or boredom, or fools, as well)
@HephaistosF I think I'm getting, from this exchange, with the help of Facets Of Unity by A.H. Almaas (which I think you'd like btw — potent take on the holy ideas and how they relate to trust-in-the-universe) the sense in which your trust in reality is broken x.com/HephaistosF/st…
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF "capacity vs demand" — yup, exactly "we're really just saying "sucks to suck"" — yeah, probably because it's too hard to empathize with the suffering, and easier to just cut off that part of reality instead though this choice is usually made automatically and unconsciously
@HephaistosF "too hard" and "easier" are interesting. in what currency? by what metric? "too hard" suggests ~"if I were to empathize then I would also be overwhelmed" ...but this too is a capacity thing. the lil taste of empathy I had above didn't overwhelm me, & felt good/healing in the end
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF part of your thesis but not "entire thesis" your thesis also included a theory of change and a bunch of other things. maybe to you, those are equivalent or so beyond-obvious as to not be worth mentioning, but from the outside they were extra & part of what got rejected
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF *chuckles* yeah
Thread · Why one-way total loyalty is incompatible with total honesty · 20 of 21 tweets
*squints* O.o great question! afaict... A) two-way total loyalty = total honesty + total *collective* control B) one-way total loyalty is not, afaict, compatible with the boss/guru/etc being totally honest. not a stable attractor, collapses to dishonesty or disloyalty
I'll elaborate below. to be clear, the elaborations will also be oversimplified. also they'll only be true for certain meanings of the words, of course. and it's all a sketch of how it seems to me rn I have a peculiar & precise ontology here. tho "loyalty" is still fuzzy for me
"honesty" as I'm using it here does NOT refer to "uttering only true statements" or similar. paltering is dishonesty. lies of omission are dishonesty. honesty here ≈ - openly saying what is relevant as it seems to you - not allowing important misunderstandings to persist
so in practice I think all unilateral total loyalty is created via dishonesty: someone represents themselves (perhaps unknowingly) as somehow flawless or whatever else in most such cases they aren't even fully honest internally (the exceptions are psychopaths)
but suppose I found myself in a situation where someone were 100% loyal to me even though I was being 100% honest I would, by virtue of that honesty, need to acknowledge that given the asymmetry (that I'm not 100% loyal to them) their loyalty is necessarily naive/misguided/false
and there's a paradox right near here, where if they fail to hear what I'm trying to point out, then even though I have "been honest", my point has not gotten across, and either I persist in trying to get it across or I let the misunderstanding slide—a form of dishonesty!
and if I succeed in getting the point across, it will produce a drop in loyalty *ideally* because the person will recognize that due to the asymmetry, them being 100% loyal to me is actually a liability to both of us
less ideally, it might be that the only way for me to be honest with this person is to burst their projection-perception of me as a 100%-trustworthy guru, which might cause not just a small drop in loyalty but it might make them angry and distrustful towards me
thus, as I said at the top: > "one-way total loyalty is not, afaict, compatible with the boss/guru/etc being totally honest. not a stable attractor, collapses to dishonesty or disloyalty"
why is one person being 100% loyal to another when the other isn't 100% loyal to them a liability to both of us? (80% vs 60% isn't such a big deal, btw! things get extreme around 100% because it makes betrayals infinitely bad)
ahh I guess it's not about a lack of loyalty in return, but about a lack of meta-trust.
loyalty seems to combine (meta-)trust with something like putting the others' needs first but symmetrical high-loyalty looks more like a superorganism where the parts are caring for the wholes' & parts' needs on all scales
note that this isn't a discontinuity with asymmetric high-loyalty. in order to be the perfect servant, one must also care for oneself impeccably! otherwise one fails to be able to continue to serve but in the asymmetric case the will of the boss steers aside from that
either kind of loyalty comes from a sense that given one's options, this relationship is the best way to meet one's needs this could be a coercive situation, (extreme of which is a chattel slave who doesn't run because they'd get killed) or it could be security of loving family
anyway, if I don't have meta-trust with you then I am anticipating that at some point something I do will be experienced as a betrayal by you that is outside the bounds of what our relationship can handle, which would drop your loyalty suddenly and immensely
this would be problematic in part because the sudden drop in loyalty might blow up our lives, if eg it results in a breakup or mortgage default or company scandal or community schism but could also be intrinsically dangerous to me—blowback on gurus once naive-trusted can be big
and intrinsic to this situation is that I also do not know what will produce this sudden betrayal or why I may have guesses, but my knowledge is necessarily incomplete or confused, otherwise I'd be able to resolve this with you
lest it sound like I'm talking about mundane stuff here, well, I am—betrayals can come up around things like kitchen norms or being late but also I'm not. meta-trust breakdowns invariably are downstream of people living in seemingly-incommensurate worlds
but this produces a huge paradox. as the person who has found their way into the guru role, my attempts to be honest can, as described above, *themselves* produce the very blowback that my honesty is attempting to warn about!
all that to say, this is tricky and complex, and there are no right answers but I would suggest not try to have total loyalty or trust! err towards amiable distrust & respect others' distrusting you, even if you don't like it
@ForCognition okay giant thread thanks for this prompt it was super insightful to explore
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF I had started drafting this thread earlier today; just finished & published since it felt like a good thing to add into this convo
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF yeah. I'd like that too
Thread · Doubting that perfect-copy decision theory scenarios apply to humans · 6 of 7 tweets
@slimepriestess hmmm it seems to me that here 👇 a better way to understand the situation is that if you cooperate and your counterpart "supposedly" doesn't (since your communication goes through the experimenter) then the experimenter is fucking you you have no way to verify either way
@slimepriestess > Rather, you are both free men, in a strange but actually possible situation. "actually possible" presupposes a cosmology which is, as far as I can tell, not a given about humans. idk if we can be simulated perfectly, and you can't make a perfect replica of non-simulated-me
@slimepriestess in particular, this presupposes that you, as an agent, live in a deterministic universe, which seems unknown and possibly unknowable from any given agents' perspective (although I agree that approximations of it do hold, which is part of why the intuition pump also works)
@slimepriestess it does seem like a good critique of CDT and EDT, I just doubt it applies to humans, and it seems unclear to me whether it's possible to build an AI that is properly grappling with this in a non-toy way, that is deterministic in nature (I wouldn't confidently say you can't tho!)
@slimepriestess ah he gets at not-100%-copying... ...but the question of how much tiny changes would cause these scenarios to diverge seems like a big deal
@slimepriestess also in an odd way these scenarios all seem to propose an environment that seems to me so unnatural as to be absurd. it reminds me of this
Thread · Why one-way total loyalty is incompatible with total honesty · 1 of 21 tweets
ah fuck, re-reading this thought after writing the rest of the thread, I figured out how to decompose the trust stuff out of loyalty you can loyally TRY to do the best for someone else, but with inadequate honesty and safety and mutual trust, you'll fail
@HephaistosF I was tempted to say it's broken "all the way out" but I would guess both that that's not possible in general and that if it were then the situation it would refer to would be someone completely catatonic and/or flailing, unable to converse at all
@HephaistosF but "all the way out" might be a subjectively accurate description in the sense that you're genuinely unable to locate any layers further out than the ones in which your trust is broken! ofc (part of the thing is) this gap has you expect to be blamed/shamed for not doing better
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF laughing together with someone feels good also it can be a helpful or even necessary part of shared meaning-making so since I want to make sense of the world with you, because you see much I don't that I would like to see, and talking helps, ability to laugh together aids that
@HephaistosF also, while I'm titrating empathizing with you because it's dangerous for me, I do care about you and ceteris paribus I want you to be well, not just because you're a person but because I know you and my soul has met yours more deeply than many other people
@HephaistosF the sense of our souls having met means that (in my cosmology) our healing/wholing is intercoupled of course, sometimes one has met a soul, and that person is now gone (dead or estranged beyond repair, tho these are different) and some other process entails for healing/wholing
@HephaistosF but we're here, & for me, I seem to prefer healing/wholing processes that involves us being in touch, as much as we are and I'm aware you don't feel much choice in the matter, and that's how things are. my preferring is a privilege, and I exercise it in part on your behalf too
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF !! I wrote this without having read your "on their behalf" tweet yet
@HephaistosF I'm not separate from you, and even as my subjective empathy capacity is small, I carry a sense like Audre Lorde: > “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained.”
Replying to @conrad_hotdish
@conrad_hotdish maybe this is pointing out the obvious, but I'll take the woosh for the delight of the alternate world where I get to inform you that this is in fact the guy who came up with the Basilisk in the first place
Retweeted @ESYudkowsky
@baibhavbista this is how they getcha 😉
Thread · Doubting that perfect-copy decision theory scenarios apply to humans · 1 of 7 tweets
@slimepriestess aha, I like the bit about playing 100s of times in creative ways with monopoly money that feels like learning to trust whatever causal forces in the universe link you & Omega, which would allow you to choose well even if you don't understand. rather than weird decoupled logic
hmm I'm imagining a 2x2 that's like wrt technical problems: goal-orientedness or play? wrt messy challenges: goal-orientedness or play? uhh I'm not in the mood to flesh this out because I'm doggedly nerdsniped on a tech problem, but you can sort yourself in this harmless poll (not even any thought experiments were harmed in the making of it!) 🧩 by technical problems I mean things like math or programming or any puzzle where you can pursue it and know if you've solved it. may be creative, may involve thinking outside the box not just deduction or whatever 🎨 by messy challenges I mean things like making art that moves people (whether to tears or to buy your product) 🎯 by goal-orientedness I mean pursuing a particular desired outcome until you get there 🤸♀️ by play I mean following your nose, fucking around and finding out, trying stuff because you're just curious what will happen
@robbensinger @primalpoly @krishnanrohit @ESYudkowsky @ForeignAffairs @mustafasuleyman @ianbremmer a view can also be correct and popular but popular for reasons relatively disconnected to it being correct!
@robbensinger @primalpoly @krishnanrohit @ESYudkowsky @ForeignAffairs @mustafasuleyman @ianbremmer surely there's lots of the public that is scared of AGI and would vote in favor of strong regulation but wouldn't be well-described as *understanding* the extinction risks of AGI
For completions' sake... everyone responding to this poll chooses between a blue pill or red pill. - if >50% of ppl choose blue, 99% of people live (at random, regardless of choice) - if not, 100% of red pills live and 99% of blue pills die (randomly) Which do you choose?
it's gonna be really fun when someone makes a midjourney-like app that can generate these sorts of figure-ground trippy images I know there are already older mosaic tools but this will really be something else
Thread · Trembling hand equilibria and friends' lives in the multiplayer pill game · 12 of 13 tweets
trembling hand for more-than-2-players might imply converging on blender depending on how much you value your friends' lives and don't want them to slip into the blender (loving people is part of the reality (or at least hypergame) that these boxes don't track!)
suppose you play this with 10 ppl & a 1% trembling hand rate if everyone tries to play red, there's a 9.1% chance that one of you gets blenderized (0.91% chance it's you). ~0.44% that 2+ of you get blenderized if 100% selfish, unilateral move to blue still sucks (~99% you die)
but unless you value your friends' lives more than your own, then no reason to switch ...unless you factor not just the lives but living with the guilt of having chosen selfishly and survived, which is something most non-psychopaths would have might not outweigh, but it's a lot
anyway, so depending on how to weight that, which is impossible to numericize and will vary dramatically by person, and so on... ...the red option is still probably a trembling hand equilibrium, assuming zero communication
but now I'm pretty sure "everyone chooses blue" is ALSO an equilibrium, and a better one (tho unfortunately it's hard to draw those little toy payoff matrices when there are 10 dimensions) ...hours later, I come up for air to realize I accepted that challenge HARD.
well 10 was a bit too hard but I managed to get 5 going I valued "own life" at 100 and "each friends' life" at 1, mostly so it was easy to see where the numbers went and there's now an equilibrium at 100% blue. it's small because small n.
I did another one with the error rate set to 10%, and interestingly this makes the one where half of the other people pick red/blue switch in valence this is partially a function of the ratio between own & friends' lives
anyway, I have spent way too long on this it was kinda nice to brush up on binomial theorem and game theory though, both of which I studied but hadn't formally worked with in years if you want to try to extend my sheet, it's here: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…
but anyway, the case is honestly a lot messier at 5 but again, with an all-red strategy 🔴 - with 10 people there's a ~10% chance of someone dying - with 100 people it's more likely than not that 1-2 die - by 1000, it becomes vanishingly unlikely that all live
ANYWAY going back to feelings, imagine how you'd feel in the scenario where you all pick red and you get lucky and nobody slips, and you all survive (90% likely) like WHEW OKAY WE GOT LUCKY even if it feels like yall made the right choice, it's still a crazy risk to take
then imagine how you'd feel in the scenario where you all pick blue and you all survive (99.9999%+ likely) it'd be like "nice! we did it! of course! we know how to handle this!" everybody knew that if everyone else made the right choice, it would *definitely* work out fine
like once there's a tiny bit of noise, obviously converging on blue is the thing to do
lol but the blender is not a 2-player game, it's a many-person game, and as soon as you switch to many (with trembling hand) then blue is a better attractor (guaranteed safety, plus safety for all others if you value that even a little)
man there are so many variations on framing. I want to reroll the above one with same payoffs but start with - if everyone picks red, everyone lives then - if 50%-99.999% pick red, all red-pickers live, 99% of blue-pickers die - if <50% pick red, 99% of everybody lives
@asemic_horizon @heynibras whoa, this is cool! I'd love to read a blog post that lays it out in a lot more detail, with a few examples and maybe ideally sort of builds that diagram up from a simpler one
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF @AaronEstel fMRI stuff is sort of useless for this since it's just blood flow and blood flow includes the activity of inhibitory neurons, of which there are a lot crossing the corpus callosum most of McGilchrist's data comes from stroke patients, split brain patients, & wada test
@m_ashcroft @captain_mrs neat! and I guess with only one pronoun you have to say peoples' names a bit more, but I suppose you already have to do that when talking about two people with the same pronoun
@tasshinfogleman @DaltonDEmery already on it
Retweeted @IntendApp
@Malcolm_Ocean I'm also really excited about the new logo—you can read about the design process and symbolism here: https:/…
Replying to @DaveCBeck
@DaveCBeck @_TeresaHart_ & @Benj_Carr are incubating something like this, tho neither is particularly active on twitter so they don't yet have much of a name for themselves
@pangmeli nice. what's the brand?
@wendell_britt vital to have an ego imo unless you're living alone malcolmocean.com/2023/07/supere…
@wendell_britt where by "alone" I mean like, out in the woods, interacting with nobody, not part of society
Retweeted @m_ashcroft
one of the big problems with referencing Iain McGilchrist’s work is that some people immediately dismiss it as nonsense and…
Replying to @magghu
@magghu you know, it's a good question, and I am not sure how to answer it
@aleksil79 I think ITOP is pointing out that even questions like "which aspects" and "how accurately" are themselves only things that can be oriented to as interfaces not sure what else to say here tho
@Namgnoi @_mql ah yeah, you might dig my anti-GTD app intend.do intend.do/philosophy
@eashankotha > or whatever folder your saving to by default should be where anything is saved to imo THE WHOLE POINT OF RECENTS IS THAT I CAN SORT THINGS AS I SAVE THEM, BUT NONETHELESS ACCESS THEM FOR THEIR FIRST USE WITHOUT HAVING TO GO DIGGING
we talked about this for awhile and concluded it's "emes"
@Morphenius @asemic_horizon My impression is that it might be that some ego deaths are a reboot that just solves problems from having too many random processes running but also ego deaths are needed to install certain updates which may or may not auto-install upon one's next ego death
Retweeted @MJPiercello
The LoRC (Law of Radical Consensus) is simple on the surface, yet capable of rich, nuanced gameplay when used in iteration…
@QiaochuYuan @FractalAuth @bashu_thanks whoa cool! seems like @LordChisholm's jam too which I initially said before reading the thread because I pattern-matched AR to "augmented reality" not "authentic relating" but tbh it still seems like maybe his jam
Retweeted @Plinz
@Grimezsz It’s a joke that pits four different Theories of Everything (each developed by a nerd with a planet sized intellectual…
fun fact: if you press the home button while watching YouTube, you get PIP mode (if you pay for premium) but if you don't want PIP, you can sneak out of YouTube with the app switcher and the video will just keep playing rather than following you
@Meaningness @Conaw - short thread on magic of what could be possible with universities, and need for visions
Retweeted @mbateman
As a concrete difference: in a typical school, even one with quality direct instruction, Ray’s son *would not have been allow…
@mbateman Wait what?! That's disgusting jfc. At least when the monks call me "friend" before they've even learned my name I know they're consciously doing a bit.
> In practice it does but in principle it does not. 😚👌
introducing Nowtender, my latest intentionality system it's... a lot simpler than @IntendApp! it's just a piece of paper and a duck, but it's free and it works really well for being mindful of what you're doing in each moment
> If there were a verb meaning 'to believe falsely', it would not have any significant first person, present indicative. — Wittgenstein
@cowtung I enjoyed considering that lens. made me slightly anthropomorphize our DNA tho seems to me they have importantly different properties in a few other directions too - capacity for lateral transfer - types of remixing possible - role of conscious choice - attractor basins
@jessi_cata totally! "all red" is still a trembling hand equilibrium, it's just a smaller one and a worse one if you care about other people literally at all (even just for economic reasons) because anyone whose hand trembles dies
@AgiDoomerAnon I don't see a face there even if I zoom way the fuck out lol, so empirically uhh nope.
Replying to @squidpunk1312
@squidpunk1312 btw what was /lh /gen in your tweet?
I keep finding combinatorial explosions as a really relevant facet of the universe & evolution & intelligence and so on (the thing where there are more possible sentences than atoms in the cosmos) what's your favorite piece that has anything to do with combinatorial explosions?
Thread · Trust as what truth feels like in first person · 7 of 8 tweets
"trust" as "what truth feels like in first person"
"truth" and "trust" both have this unquestioned quality: for true things, you don't say "I believe that X" or "I think X" you just say "X".
"truth in first person" makes no is-ought distinction ie "what matters [to me]" is part of truth so something that threatens me or what matters to me is untrue in the way that a partner cheating on me is untrue (this was the original sense of the word!)
likewise, C Thi Nguyen points out that our sense of trust absolutely extends to objects doing their job, not just to people/agents we trust a rope to hold us we trust our key to open its lock we trust the wifi to work, unless "my wifi sucks"
this gif is made of the sensation of betrayal before the knife comes down, there IS an object that is not a cake. that's entirely unquestioned. you wouldn't say "that object, which looks like a shoe". it just IS A SHOE …until it isn't (ht @aphercotropist)
as for the implications of "trust"="what truth feels like in first person" for first person *plural* ("we")...
...those I will leave, for now, as an exercise for the reader (I'd love to hear your takes on it, as QTs or replies)
Replying to @squidpunk1312
@squidpunk1312 baha I parsed it as "left-hemisphere-generated" but I was like "there's no way that's it"
how does isness arise as a multi-person experience?
@aphercotropist mmm so
@aphercotropist and I guess my sense is that for physically perceived phenomena, we pretty naturally have a shared sense of what's going on
@aphercotropist but even attempting to describe what's going on, and even more so talking about meanings or abstractions, means that different backgrounds result in conflicts where if we stay on isness level we stab each others' realities by saying "X" not "seems to me X"
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF funny/captivating like it does with the cake gif? or what other examples come to mind?
@HephaistosF my best model of what makes the difference (although this is sort of more internal than external) is related to the overwhelm thing we talked about yesterday
and—ah, this gets at the bridge between internal and external—I'd guess the difference is about whether the betrayal causes a feeling of separateness, which is partially a function of their state and partially a function of the context on various scales
@BecomingCritter this thread of yours + this tweet of Ronen's is already affecting my tweeting style! trying to break things up more
@Duderichy reminds me of this bit from @utotranslucence's 10 Actual, Concrete Recommendations for Unfucking the Incentives that Shape the Psychiatric Crisis System psychcrisis.substack.com/p/10-actual-co…
@awildjelly this ^ to greater and lesser degrees plus memetic landscapes that allow convincing people of what is right is basically how a lot of coordination has functioned for the last 10k years or so
@DarbraDawn this is the only advice I have on the subject, but it's probably out of date now sorry
@QiaochuYuan sorta same energy (context is scam callers)
Replying to @pammalamma
@pammalamma @DarbraDawn @captain_mrs you could be the writer we've been looking for!
you don't have to fix yourself you don't have to fix your sense that you need to fix yourself you don't have to fix your sense that you need to fix your sense that you need to fix yourself but you can if you want!
@relic_radiation nice
@cptn_mister great analysis, and well-put. you might like my similar thread, that was also prompted by watching Roko reason poorly from 2 to N, and which he completely failed to understand when I linked it to him
@RokoMijic try extrapolating from 2 to many again
the quality of an answer to this question depends on whether the recipients of the sentence know that it was chosen by someone to be the single piece of knowledge transfer
if you know future generations will venerate your one sentence, there are two approaches to take: 1. make it dense and obscure so that they have to rederive what it is 2. make it so obvious that they will have to rederive why the fuck you would have chosen THAT
ideas & animals & inventions become what they become because emes that work better & spread better make more of themselves
Replying to @AlexanderPayton
@AlexanderPayton @jasoncrawford yessss. seems worth exploring how to distill it a tautology version (a kind of self-evident pointing-out) =
Thread · Trembling hand equilibria and friends' lives in the multiplayer pill game · 1 of 13 tweets
here's another great analysis, which does the math at the limit as N increases, and points out some of the same things I did but more clearly, plus other things
@uncatherio yeah payoff matrices as usually written are complete confabulation and tbh gaslighting (you picked the wrong thing! the values are obvious!) your poll is a beautiful illustration here
@uncatherio and if you turned down that opportunity, that would say something about you, might cause people to relate to you differently or whatever but also like, you did the thing that made sense to you to do! it's just like any other choice, not some weird discontinuity!
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF I'd never considered before whether ideas or inventions suffer hmmm
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF true, that is a thing that indeed happens, in the world whether or not that speech act is rejected, the inner stance can be one of fixing or of self-acceptance which is not to say it doesn't still suck you and the world might be unable to meet your needs or even orient to them
@HephaistosF re inner stance, clearly having others accept you makes accepting yourself way easier many people somehow find a route to alchemize a mix of rejection & acceptance from the world, into a strong sense of self-acceptance not sure what the limits are to this
by contrast if the future generations will just happen to come across your sentence and not any others... ...you want it to be something that catches their attention long enough that they discover its significance
probably the best way to do that would be to say eg "on [date], the moon will block the sun even though the sun is 400 times as big" bold claim, verifiable by them, that lends credibility to the other statement which is also insightful (idk how valuable the statement is tho)
@uncatherio @LeahLibresco I'm super in for this so many assumptions to question
@uncatherio @LeahLibresco I sent you a google doc with some initial thoughts of mine in this overall vein
@uncatherio I stared at it for a long time, changed my mind about the the reasoning multiple times, wrote some threads, generated a dozen variations and now I have more sympathy for both positions and less sympathy for bad arguments in favor of either positions 😅
@uncatherio I think it should be mandatory when you first start using the LLMs that it will show you three answers in parallel and you can turn this off once you've done a couple dozen prompts and have realized the LLM doesn't have stable opinions/beliefs
@uncatherio other-soothing has a similar pattern, but more complex because there are... *squints* ... my ego, my body your ego, your body our co-ego, our physical coregulation system ...6 players
@uncatherio seems like the moralizing is in a sense the authentic expression of where we are as a species
random twitter game you can play right now: ❝ quote one of someone's tweets as a reply to another ❞ one place to start is to look at a recent tweet by the person then search from:username keyword to find something that might be relevant!
@uncatherio my favorite busker ever was a guy on Telegraph Ave who caught my attention as I walked by, with: "change for the hell yeah? HHELLLLL YEAAH!!" and I was like thank you sir that was incredible here is money
@uncatherio I've been struck for a decade about how different his approach to asking for money was from people who have an apologetic or graspy-entitled vibe
I think maybe the distinction I was looking for was "crunchy" vs "squishy"
Replying to @Johnicholas
@Johnicholas @DRMacIver my attempts to be clever are yielding a few different very weird attractors depending on which aesthetic I pick for compression
@Johnicholas @DRMacIver hearsay isn't heresy if you say it's still here
@__drewface doesn't have cute drawings but you might be ripe for my latest blog post malcolmocean.com/2023/07/supere…
@__drewface in it, I posit that contemporary mammoth challenges are not just due to 50,000BC-vs-now mismatch in safety, but due to having a bunch of conflicting social norms that have evolved to be panic-inducing
@whendidarling yeah, maps onto "naive trust" in this taxonomy:
@crash23001 yep! and this is part of how we navigate this
@crash23001 there are some really fun rabbit holes near here, if you're interested this thread of mine came to mind, specifically a bit near the end where I talk about how meaning is kind of an interface
@MatthijsCox @itinerantfog yeah I don't mean seeing the emptiness of self. insofar as I know what that is, it's disorienting but it's like a figure ground inversion "cessation" sounds right but idk how people use the term technically
@MatthijsCox @itinerantfog I'm not sure exactly what I mean by ego death, but the most relevant personal experience of mine is one where uhhh all the meeseeks gave up their quests, so that I could rest fully and completely, willing absolutely nothing malcolmocean.com/2023/03/art-is…
@ForCognition hmmm the whole situation seems to me to involve some amount of masking, like full honesty isn't possible, and the control is limited but I agree it's a situation in which you can have quite a bit of control and honesty at the same time
@ForCognition and hmm... if the soldier is loyal to the country, not the commanding officer per se, then the commanding officer can only control the soldier to the degree that the commanding officer's will appears sufficiently aligned with the soldier's sense of what the country needs
is there a cliché that expresses this? 👇 the meta-cliché
@aleksil79 @Aizazadi_ ahh yep
@mormo_music not exactly. imagine someone with a booth offering pills, and the terms of the magic only apply to those who take a pill. you could still run the game but I agree your interpretation is reasonable. I just think the other one is too
@slimepriestess ah yeah, nice, interesting now I'm noting that I can also simulate omega—well, in the sense that I could simulate 100 monopoly-money games and learn from those ah and of course this is how religions function, for better and for worse
@slimepriestess like some kinds of prayer can be seen as a form of entraining with a particular sense of the cosmos, that then fractally entangles with you and thereby becomes real wat. this isn't far from how I was seeing it before but it's potent and trippy
@slimepriestess you might really dig this paper on virtual bargaining, which uses lots of simple concrete realistic embodied examples (not contrived extreme bizarre game theory scenarios) sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
@baibhavbista nah not really—agreed re discourse I'm not even sure if I stand by the original tweet at all. or at any rate, not without this point from @mormo_music, that my logic also implies blues are doing a sort of weird anti-social self-endangerment by jumping in
@asemic_horizon @heynibras ah nice! do you think this structure with the denial and so on is what's going on with the weird worldview fights of the culture war?
@asemic_horizon @heynibras in response to reading this, I would like to make a very niche book recommendation, for Anthony Wilden's out-of-print Man and Woman, War and Peace features an exploration of the difference between opposites, negations, and contradictions
@asemic_horizon @heynibras plus solid stuff on double-binds both of those very relevant to your work here
@jonnym1ller collective consciousness experiments, such as the We-Ness by @AnneSelke and other folks I kind of know goldencobra.org/pdf/2018/Kong%…
@AirKistler @jonnym1ller important to remember that there's no privileged position from which to answer the question of what is going on "accurately" your triggers, pattern-matching X to Y, are part of your wisdom malcolmocean.com/2021/06/dream-…
@Morphenius haahh huh when I looked at this I got a vague sense of something about symmetry and mirrors vaguely fate-dance shaped? maybe some relation to the fact that you can't touch a mirror without touching "yourself in the mirror" tho idk how it's related. I'm like 90% asleep, divining
@QiaochuYuan @MasterTimBlais have you read the Snake Cult of Consciousness? it talks about eden & the fall, and also talks about recursion as central to the fall really epic pairing with the Preconquest article
Thread · Rereading an old unpopular thread and finding new synthesis · 4 of 5 tweets
fuck yeah I came across an old thread and it's crosspollinating with like 5 things I've been looking at the last few days to spawn some very cool insights exaptation go brrrrrrr
best part is that the old thread has almost no likes. would be easy to say it was a failure but nah bro I was writing it for me today to get inspired
honestly most of my stuff is written for a very tiny fraction of people. I know who some of you are. we're having some weird co-thoughts guys. this is fun. hi to the lurkers who are grokking me too 👋
I'm drunk on sleepiness (it's 4am in NS) and it's definitely lubricating the tweetflow
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF wanted to let you know that this thread has stuck with me and substantially improved my sense of yes-and vibes in dialogue with you
@HephaistosF (and if you ask why I couldn't have made that shift in perception before / without the thread... it's the same reason why you can't trust me more than you in fact do)
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF ah yeah! I was pointing at how if someone experiences *themselves* as separate, it's harder for them to fully laugh but also this. you are incredibly consistent at playing the role of pointing this stuff out.
@visakanv called it. 4 more unpaid internship tweets that broke 100k likes, in the last 3y (actually wait the June 13, 2020 one should have shown up in your search but didn't 🤷♀️)
Thread · Common knowledge, trust, and mutual simulation · 19 of 27 tweets
wait. perhaps common knowledge is only possible AT ALL because of entanglement / mutual simulation / virtual bargaining
there's a kind of magic that happens when somehow the infinite regress of "who knows who knows what" clicks into "we know it"
😮 and "trust" is the name of this magic!
or "being in sync", as RV puts it in one of my favorite tweets
there's a question I have though, around the is-ought thing... there's clearly some difference between seeing together the world and being on the same team—oh, hang on. got it I think.
yeah okay the difference is whether our common-knowledge is just about the world beyond us, vs about ourselves and each other do you know what matters to me, and I to you? do you know my affordances, and I yours?
in the preconquest / pre-snake-cult era, we didn't use recursion to solve game theory (we didn't have it!) we just lived in each other transparently and honestly, and thus knew what we wanted, and we chose cooperation together when the option existed
but sometimes we want different things! real fighting is costly—animals have some sort of mutual simulation that means that in-species fighting often ends with submission rather than injury or death
relatedly, my impression is that long-ago people often resolved conflict by just spreading out further; this would be a natural equilibrium when it was possible (until it wasn't because we were everywhere; probably one source of the pressure that tipped 10kya)
key difference: animals simulate each other's behavior humans simulate other beings' *experience* in first person "what is it like to BE my prey?" trippy question. x.com/ChasingMyself/…
where was I? common knowledge requires mutual simulation in some sense, obviously. but the point is that the byzantine generals problem only happens if the generals are insufficiently intertwingled
in the absence of deep trust/entanglement, agreements are fragile, based on some amount of pretending / fake trust, and so we need to keep reinforcing them
non-naive trust is made out of relentless honesty and curiosity, which allows discovering together the degree of win-win that is possible
by play-dancing with a person (or god or egregore) I can learn to trust whatever causal forces in the universe link us, which allows us to choose win-wins together 🔵
but to the extent that the capacity for play is broken, it's hard to even find a place from which to learn the only gods that feel plausible can be made of utter capricious chaos x.com/HephaistosF/st…
and yet, despite appearances, we're not separate even as we feel separate and my suffering matters to all the gods worth cooperating with; they're all there, already
and your suffering matters to me, even if I'm not experiencing it in first person much or at all, given my current capacity and everything else
the whole is whole; god is becoming (swap "omnipresent" for "omnibenevolent" below; typo)
and I trust we can collectively find each other in this dance
@enzikaofash random twitter game you can play right now form an abstraction over some cool move you just got to make here by crazy-random-happenstance... and then challenge others to do it on purpose!
@caeochoa @visakanv when they were handing out synthaesthesias at the soulery, Visa got some really weird and lovely ones
@visakanv @caeochoa wow I really need to get to sleepy based on how I spelled it
Thread · Etymologies and metaphors behind words for unintelligent
incredible taxonomy of the feeble-minded that some guys formalized a century ago
I guess 12yos were more mature back then; someone making this now would probably want a category for "permanently arrested at age 13-18"
this brought to you by me being curious about the origin of different words for "unintelligent" - "dumb" (can't express verbally) - "idiot" (idio = "of one's own" ie unable to relate. compare "aut-ism") - "stupid" (stunned, struck. think "stupefy!" 🪄) ("moron" is unknown)
lots of words for "unintelligent" are more obvious metaphors: - "dull" (cannot cut) - "dim" (cannot illuminate) - "slow" (commonly confused for unintelligence but they aren't as related as you'd think!) - "dense" is probably a remix on slow via viscosity
regarding slowness-as-unintelligence, there's a common misconception that kids who don't learn things as fast as their peers can't learn them at all
but it turns out that slow kids only end up looking stupid if you put them in a context that forces them to move to lesson 3 before they've finished 1 let alone 2!
anyway, I'm not sure *why* I was curious about this but #MetaphorsMatter and I've found it meaningful to not try to compress these all onto one axis
if you let the words have actual meanings, then you can notice when someone is dull but not dim, or dumb but not stupid! or how each of them feels from the inside 😅
when was the last time you danced in the rain? 🌧️🌧️🌧️ 💃🕺🤸
Thread · Rereading an old unpopular thread and finding new synthesis · 1 of 5 tweets
the insights were mostly written up in this thread! I had more while writing it. it's not all the best articulation but it's quite an exciting synthesis
@AndruC totally! this is me proposing a mini-game within that frame, in some sense
@primalpoly @elonmusk @teslaownersSV Blocking also just allows curating a particular vibe, in a decentralized way. this place doesn't have groups to kick people out of, and that's a HUGE feature. each person can just keep away those they find are poisoning the local commons but it's loose; allows learning
they say blocks are getting removed sounds like they aren't being totally stupid about blocks but there's still a difference between not wanting to see someone in your TL and not wanting them to be able to reply to YOU at all some of my friends are too noisy lol
@elonmusk brain needs inhibitory neurons get people to stop dunking (thereby amplifying bad takes) by giving them a "meh" button they can click on a tweet that gently deamplifies it (at least to their followers) (maybe only works if they came across it organically, to avoid brigades? hm)
@JamieCombs @elonmusk I see what you're saying but it's not the gadget that makes the consciousness, it's the interactions that occur here X as context, not as app
Retweeted @kcoleman
A good reminder that @CommunityNotes code and data is open source, making it possible to do public analyses of its performanc…
@enzikaofash people tried to domesticate it the past few hundred years I'm trying to keep things nice and feral around me
@AbstractFairy @wholebodyprayer and cities contain a bunch of stressful things, such as most of your environment being owned by other people who you don't have any relationship with
Thread · Why policing "unnatural" behavior isn't a paradox · 1 of 8 tweets
humanity is natural humanity is unnatural
Thread · There is no default meme, so no default human behavior · 1 of 4 tweets
maybe the old genders and sexualities were normal and natural for their time and maybe whatever weird shit we're coming up with now is normal and natural for our time
interesting theory that eukaryotes (big cells that have way more DNA including junk sections) emerged not adaptively but via chance in a context where natural selection was weak could explain Fermi paradox: evolving complexity requires periods of chill nytimes.com/2006/01/03/sci…
Thread · Coining a short verb for throwing out the baby with the bathwater · 1 of 11 tweets
help me find or coin a general term for the error of ~"throwing the baby out with the bathwater" 🌊👶💦 except: 🤏 short verb (like "goodharting" or "one-boxing") 💡 needs little-to-no explanation (not "chesterton's fence") 🥼 due to hubris/"I know better", not a lapse (eg "stopped pounding the manioc") 🤨 plausible (did the baby/bathwater thing ever actually happen? ...looks fictional. in any case we have drains now) basically, a word for "making the error that proper conservativism mostly avoids" or put another way "removing something load-bearing in an attempt to remove something annoying" I bet we can coin something if we find a memorable incident with a distinct word, then verb it (like "thalidomiding" or "CFCing" although they're connotationally slightly off. "introducing cane toads to australia" is too long and too localized but is connotationally quite good) proposals?
> Some snake species have been reported to have adapted smaller jaws so that they are unable to swallow large cane toads, which have large quantities of poison. interesting teleology here
"so that they are unable to swallow" sure sounds much more clever than: > Snakes have trouble learning what not to eat, so any snakes large enough to eat large cane toads mostly fail to reproduce. However, some species now have thriving smaller-jawed populations as a result.
not saying the teleology is bad per se, to be clear! talking in these terms about adaptation is a valid level of analysis, as Stuart Kauffman points out in chapter 3 of Reinventing the Sacred
source of original quote is this wikipedia article en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad…
@jonathangarner_ yeah has to be something that everybody now recognizes as mistaken
Thread · Coining a short verb for throwing out the baby with the bathwater · 1 of 11 tweets
"gasledding" would be good if it didn't sound like "gaslighting" 😅 lead in gasoline wasn't an accident—it gave a HUGE boost to engine performance—but alas, neurotoxicity oh, the advantage of "baby-bathwater" is it highlights that you hurt *yourself*, not just externalities
@JoHenrich do you have a take on this? seems like the sort of thing you would have collected many examples of in your research for writing The Secret of Our Success or @DavidDeutschOxf, for that matter
I'm seeing articles indicating that by the Iron Decree of App Store Laws (if not also actual countries' laws) it's actually mandatory for apps to have block features, so this may be a nonstarter actually
if I experience urgency but I don't know how to solve the problem then my actual situation is one where I need to give myself space to play and/or have an insight not to rush
@DavidDeutschOxf @eladgil the point of the set-up of the Manhattan Project was to lock stuff out (for political reasons) and this was feasible because they had enough inside already that they could solve the problem twitter.com/s_r_constantin…
Thread · Evolving complexity requires downtime for play · 12 of 13 tweets
evolving complexity requires downtime for play 🤸♀️ ie contexts in which you can fuck around for much longer, before you have to find out .
"play" as "exploring new possibilities not because they're better, just because you can and and it's fun" which results in getting out of adaptive local optima
but play requires a break from immediate survival pressure
I initially wrote "complex life requires periods of chill" but this generalizes a lot eg after the black death, there were so few people that each person was in some sense more wealthy relative to the land that humans had control of which spurred innovation & commerce
more generally, perhaps humanity as a species was able to innovate in part because it was able to survive with less effort because we banded together to become a superorganism that was top beast meltingasphalt.com/music-in-human…
thus many people don't have to worry about survival most of the time—and not just academics and priests! also housewives, who have lots to take care of but also safety & stability or specialists who were skilled enough to make plenty of wealth in a small fraction of their time
but also memes simply do not need NEARLY as much play to evolve as genes do no matter how much downtime/playtime a peacock gets in its individual life at a zoo, it can't invent a new species with that spare time
increasingly - things are changing faster than before - there's a lot of pressure - but also less is truly urgent *this hour* for most people but if you confuse the pressure for urgency, you fail to play, so you miss huge opportunities two steps away
like if you're a farmer or a hunter-gatherer, there are very intrinsic needs for survival that require you to do food-related stuff basically daily obviously for anyone working a job, you need to work to not get fired, but the work itself isn't inherently urgent-to-your-needs
also obviously if you're running a business and the business is losing money or falling into a trap where it gets behind then further behind, you need to fix that asap
but approaching it with urgency might result in cutting costs and firing people, which actually can send you further into the trap you're worried about vs pausing to ask "what strategies are we not even considering? let's play with those"
I think this all points at a mindset shift something like:
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF this post has an exercise for getting space from overzealous superegos: malcolmocean.com/2023/07/supere…
the "know how to solve the problem" part is key some urgency can be solved by TRYING HARD twitter.com/s_r_constantin…
also "don't rush" doesn't mean 🙈 ignore the problem altogether 🤷♀️ pretend it isn't important or urgent ☝️ rationalize why you're doing something indirect the problem, exactly as urgent and understood as it is, no more no less, needs to dance in the play
Replying to @Slplss_In_Japan
@Slplss_In_Japan here's the thread where I came up with that tweet:
did you know that some asexual eukaryotes will transition to sexual reproduction under enough pressure? (idk if this is epigenetic or they somehow rapidly *evolve* into being sexual within some generations) geneticsunzipped.com/transcripts/20…
@unrelated_gods me too!
@AbstractFairy "dropped the core" like a nuclear testing accident? accident is definitely not the vibe I'm going for here
Replying to @Slplss_In_Japan
@Slplss_In_Japan a long time ago iirc a lot of it didn't reproduce and its ontology is a bit confused tho; even the authors have shifted substantially lesswrong.com/posts/HbXXd2gi…
Retweeted @tasshinfogleman
imagining a twitter where instead of removing pre-existing, useful and necessary features like blocking Elon et. al. i…
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF really appreciating the dev logs here—I was definitely expecting you'd get very different results with this than I do! re "if my id handles this" what's the "this"? what's the situation?
@HephaistosF and a second question (though I'm keen to hear the answer to the first) is what happens if you imagine handling urgency-processing to your id in a situation that involves a few minutes of no interacting with others? (could be something more specific)
@SurenVynn @xuanalogue really digging your explaination here—tempted to import that ter-prefix (it's a prefix, right, not a suffix?) into my idiolect can you share more examples of how it's used?
@SurenVynn @xuanalogue but also, even with this usage, I still don't see anyone saying "I misbelieve that X"; I searched twitter for uses in the present tense and it's all ~="I misbelieve you" vs "I misbelieved" in the past so Wittgenstein's point stands.
@SurenVynn @xuanalogue however, I think you ARE onto something which is that we ABSOLUTELY can identify believes of our own that are wrong by finding beliefs that we're conflicted about! "part of me thinks X which another part of me knows isn't right"
@Morphenius great both/and so easy to assume these two are basically in conflict
@Cantide1 similar vibe although it seems like that's not actually a thing? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth…
@MJPiercello @aleksil79 you're both right as Aleksi says, there's raw hardware for parallelized collective improvisation (trust) but sometimes this breaks down (perhaps because of the not-yet-stably-integrated implications of recursion) then as Matthew says, solution is to iterate until trust
Thread · Common knowledge, trust, and mutual simulation · 1 of 27 tweets
my synthesis of some dialogue happening in the replies:
@KhalilJRM oooh a new authoooorrr haha fucking hell I was reading his Reinventing the Sacred this morning this is helping me get a sense of how small the EvConch field is
@MJPiercello @aleksil79 re "not-yet-stably-integrated implications of recursion" the Snake Cult post points out how recursion led to identification as separate self seems to me possible to have recursion+connectedness, but we have to rederive it to have it be stable
@Morphenius aha right, so this implies "if you don't like something, you can try to get rid of it. if trying to get rid of something isn't working, try accepting it instead"
@AndrewCutler13 mmm. way more ability to defect now, to the extent you see yourself as separate (and are dissociated from the cost of the pain of this, which makes it not as much of a win) but the gains from win-wins are way bigger, even just in the simple sense of specialization & trade
@aleksil79 @MJPiercello exactly! that was my big insight of this thread! thought you'd like it. it still sort of begs a question which is something like umm insofar as brain-mind and multi-person-mind aren't fundamentally different, how does it not just still recurse infinitely in your head?
Thread · Coining a short verb for throwing out the baby with the bathwater · 1 of 11 tweets
this seems basically right actually! but hmm... I don't feel inclined to use it in the situation I was originally looking for this word for, so something still off about it. meddling kinda suggests self-other, whereas this thing can be a self-own? hmm twitter.com/HephaistosF/st…
@SurenVynn @xuanalogue talking out loud seems like a fun way to jam about language my internet is kinda crap at my dad's place tho so idk when would be good for a call in the next few weeks
@crash23001 this is totally the sort of thing I'm looking for, yeah warondrugsing
@frenibo it's just not done as much as you'd think so it feels weird
@aleksil79 @MJPiercello snake cult was definitely the fall afaict! I forget exactly what you've read but if you haven't read my latest blog post it's about this whole thing malcolmocean.com/2023/07/supere…
@aleksil79 @MJPiercello ^ and the big quote there is from the original Snake Cult piece by @AndrewCutler13 which I assumed you'd read but I'm linking here also for bystanders' sake vectorsofmind.com/p/the-snake-cu…
@myceliummage also funnier out loud is the fact that "seaman" refers to someone who knows how to handle and steer a boat (particularly in the military)
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF okay fair! maybe it just doesn't get used that way outside of the superhero genre then
Thread · Coining a short verb for throwing out the baby with the bathwater · 1 of 11 tweets
emphasis on insight moment here is a good prompt makes me think of King Midas, or other myths. Gift of the Magi is adjacent. okay so in one subtype of this, an attempt to take advantage of a situation destroys the situation, leading to ruin
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF mmmm I think there might be an available move here that involves doing some simulating/imagining like, rather than objecting to the id's violent urges on principle, consider enacting them, and ask the id what outcomes seem likely? roughly this actually: twitter.com/HephaistosF/st…
@HephaistosF and so is the "that would be incredibly bad" coming from the superego layer or the id layer? it seems like the id now (maybe not at whatever age you first coerced it) has enough foresight of its own to see that the "win" here isn't a real victory in terms of what you care about
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF ahhh, hmm I feel like there's a noncoercive learning move available here too, but I might be missing something so say more? what was the process like?
Thread · Coining a short verb for throwing out the baby with the bathwater · 1 of 11 tweets
ahh I feel like there's a phrase here from medicine / iatrogenic harm... ah no I'm thinking of "cutting off the nose to spite the face." that doesn't have the right connotation at all but "the cure is worse than the disease" is very close, though not the verb I'm looking for
I found both of these quotes with GPT-3.5's help I like to think of it as a cocky foolish cucked know-it-all who has actually read literally everything. so helpful for this kind of pattern-matching
Thread · Coining a short verb for throwing out the baby with the bathwater · 1 of 11 tweets
ah yeah "playing god" is very very close (and definitely appropriate to eg the cane toad situation) tho it lacks concreteness and also doesn't capture how mundane these errors can feel while making them twitter.com/HephaistosF/st…
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF ahhhh, yeah. hmm. seems like it's got elements of superego in it; never got to find out; society blocked & shamed could you imagine being in some other kind of society where you get to explore the limits of violence in a way that would allow less adult-kid overpowered learning?
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF I was thinking micro but I'm interested in both
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF makes sense can you imagine a society that had contexts that were designed to create a learning environment that works not just for people who are used to it but for people who are traumatized by a different learning environment as well?
Thread · There is no default meme, so no default human behavior · 1 of 4 tweets
although maybe, even if some adaptation is greatly necessary right now, many of the new gender innovations are making this sort of error 👇 in a pretty major way
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF ah yeah, well put. this is all super helpful makes me think of this ~mantra as an alternative mood
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF hmmm. humans seem to be motivated to create healing environments for abused animals, even if that's just adopting one and trying to love it (which works sometimes and not others) not all humans want to do this, ofc, nor do all such animals get to access such a thing
@RomeoStevens76 "Cleaning the masterpiece with Lysol" is 😙👌
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF I think also people like the challenge of maximally abused ones, although in practice many peoples' reach exceeds their grasp anyway, I'm signing off for now but I think there's potentially some good approaches near here if we can route to a plausible imaginary scenario
@HephaistosF oh huh—if you had the power, would *you* want to create such a learning environment, for people who are traumatized around violence to be able to recalibrate properly?
Replying to @merpalerpagus
@merpalerpagus @meekaale @RichDecibels right, exactly this vibe
Thread · Evolving complexity requires downtime for play · 1 of 13 tweets
same vibe
@ethanhays @jonnym1ller totally I shared this 15min clip on the difference between concentration, attention, awareness, etc, with my mum, who's fairly spiritual, and she was like "wait what?!" when he got to "there is no center". she was like "I thought the point was to center" dynamic.wakingup.com/course/C7FB47?…
@univrsw3th4rt I am pretty confused about this as I have 7k followers and get very low-engagement usually QC speculated that it's because I'm confused who I'm tweeting for, and I think that's apt and when I DO know who I'm tweeting for it's a very tiny group of people
@univrsw3th4rt sad because I can tell I'm onto something and I wish more other people see it but usually it doesn't feel like a waste of time, because
gotta say, really high ROI on watching this 14s video youtu.be/3AFKMl8VmsY
huh. this interesting take might support opposing immigration from islamic countries not because *islam* is dangerous but because islam+westernism is like bleach+ammonia from "Reason as Memetic Immune Disorder" lesswrong.com/posts/aHaqgTNn…
fwiw it seems to me that reason is a memetic immune disorder wrt antirational memes ...which sounds like a tautology but I swear "antirational" was a term that already existed, coined by DD. also it highlights that there are other types
not sure what the best handy intro is to that framework about memes, but here's a series of meandering tweets on the topic:
@hunchandblunder @DavidDeutschOxf @robinhanson this is one of the big questions I've been investigating, and my sense is that, sorta like how memetic evolution outclasses genetic evolution, conscious memeplexes (once stabilized enough) will outclass antirational ones here's a vid on this: youtube.com/watch?v=NeN34r…
however I would certainly not say that antirational memes are already a parochial concern we're in a transition phase right now but we have not stepped fully into rational memes and to the extent we have, we're being fools in certain consistent ways
Thread · Two opposing memeplexes: memes that resist change vs memes that invite it · 1 of 13 tweets
@MSlavin aha I have now written a blog post that talks extensively about the pre-anti-rational and the anti-rational and how things are crazier now building on DD's theories here malcolmocean.com/2023/07/supere…
Thread · Coining a short verb for throwing out the baby with the bathwater · 2 of 11 tweets
hmmm this emphasis on illusory control might suggest a term something like "pseudocontrolling"... confolling trollconning (lol trollcon sounds like a weird event) confailing mucontrolling ...none of these are accessible at all ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/wea…
ahhh hmm this whole thing is a bit related to Darwin awards. it's like, somebody does something that is a costly evolutionary dead end, that COULD have been anticipated in advance? although that post is talking in part about preference falsification as source of unpredictability
Retweeted @grantbels
@Morphenius ahhaaa yeah & trying to hide truths or leave them unacknowledged opens power to those who can name them
common misconception being those gangsters also sucks there's more to life than violent power also, even if you reify power as the greatest good, you can get more total power or whatever, if you stop crabbucketing and find win-wins / positive-sum games
...do we know how to do that at the scale of states? I mean kind of, but not really. but figuring it out seems like a much more satisfying project than attempting to get on top only to be terrified of being deposed violently oneself
Replying to @feelsdesperate
@feelsdesperate you might like this article, which proposes (not super seriously) separating government into the fun part and the boring part and explores how this might work meaningness.com/virtue-court
@aleksil79 nah, in some situations we have actual control like I am successfully controlling all of my fingers to type these words right now, to a degree of nearly 100% success, and if I make a typo, which I just did, I can successfully correct it at very little cost
@aleksil79 I do see your point tho
@elaifresh Looks like he's done this before tbh, and he knew what he was getting into
Thread · Common knowledge, trust, and mutual simulation · 6 of 27 tweets
in my late-night haze posting this, I failed to link the 2 MAIN SOURCES that contributed to the nonobviousness of my insight 1. this LW post, which I have issues with but the "playing with omega with monopoly money" is super relevant lesswrong.com/posts/PcfHSSAM…
2. Virtual Bargaining paper, which includes lots of excellent simple concrete realistic embodied examples (not contrived extreme bizarre heady game theory scenarios) seems it already mentions infinite regress, but I hadn't applied that to common knowledge
@AndrewCutler13 DM'd me saying he agreed (with this thread) > that the social fabric (including common knowledge) is woven recursively via modeling one another but I'm sorta saying the opposite—that by default it's something OTHER than many-step recursion
I don't quite know how to mathematically characterize the structure of common-knowledge ...and it seems to run into homunculus problems if I try, because even just having the me-&-you in my head virtually negotiate, well, that could have its own infinite regress internally!
ah, it recurses but not *infinitely* because it grounds out in ummm... a sense of "I can tell for myself". ahhh and having both negotiating parties in one head makes that WAY easier to access, because sensory reality is the same, meaning-making has common basis...
an alternative answer is just: - it's still recursive but it runs fast in world-model emulation, not slow in cognitive LeftHemisphere game theory land - it eventually reaches a level of probability where action feels better than inaction, so you act (obviating logical certainty)
@elonmusk have you read this thread? part of what makes a social network great is its culture—the kinds of games people play on it and pockets of all social network apps already have this greatness! it can be nurtured
@elonmusk if I ran a social network, I'd be thinking about various ways that the app could facilitate better games, which would partially be in terms of features/interaction options, like multiQuote which allows synthesis & convergence malcolmocean.com/2021/11/twitte…
@elonmusk another way to shape the games people learn to play is with moments like onboarding if you suggest people follow celebrities, that sets a totally different tone than nudging them to have convos with other small-to-medium accounts which best supports 👇?
@elonmusk there's no way to do onboarding that's neutral to these Qs—any approach sends some message. what message do you want to send? boosting object-level political opinions with onboarding is parochial & cringe, but showing people the option of the game of curious dialogue is ❤️🔥🚀
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@elonmusk another way to shape the games people learn to play is with moments like onboarding if you suggest people fol…
> Share unscripted thoughts lol as if the rest of my tweets were scripted
@jonnym1ller since you're already filming, you could try filming yourself doing something you find embarrassing
@slimepriestess (for others' reference) > A Zeno machine is a Turing machine that can take an infinite number of steps, and then continue take more steps. faaassscinating. hadn't heard of that. what's your basis for thinking that the human brain is like that?
@slimepriestess right, and so you reject it and try a different approach after some period of time, because (unless in a state of strong anxiety 😅) you're doing more than just running the simulation and freezing until it has finished
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF @Morphenius I mean maybe, but this piece hit differently this week so maybe - I didn't have the right pieces of the puzzle before - I was motivated reasoning to keep other things in place - there were some other ideas buried in how we talked about it, that I rejected probably a mix
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF insofar as it was, the implications weren't (and many still aren't) or I hadn't noticed it (and possibly I'm pointing at a deeper thing here than the obvious thing, idk)
@RomeoStevens76 it sure is haha yo @Morphenius this is relevant to our convo last night
wow, so much to unpack here betrayal — violation of trust, safety disconnection retaliation that is honorable and well-executed, but also sad; the lil girl is not "in on the joke", has perhaps forgotten the video's on... subtle ganging up energy I hope they have a debrief ❤️🩹 twitter.com/WUTangKids/sta…
kinda weird that the LLMs are sort of one guy. very big weird fast scattered guy with many masks to wear, but just one guy
Replying to @colorfullstory
@colorfullstory wow. so much intensity the way he's pushing through here feels a bit self-overriding but in a way that's probably ultimately gonna be super good for him—the end is in sight he's committing to finishing the story like you need to commit to a backflip if you wanna do it
@__drewface if you use your phone make sure it's on airplane mode and/or focus mode and/or do-not-disturb, so that you don't get blasted with notifications when you first wake up
@Liu_eroteme @aleksil79 ooooooh looks like you're another EvConch scholar (you don't have to call it this but I've been calling this Evolution of Consciousness studies, or EvConch for short 🐚)
@HotForMoot have you checked out some of the stuff they sampled? really tripped me up to see it all: whosampled.com/Daft-Punk/ here's a quick demo of the vibe: youtube.com/watch?v=v-b_Ig…
@HotForMoot this is one of my favorites of the originals also a banger youtube.com/watch?v=eVVfZA…
@eashankotha I feel like I could but it's hard to know about skills you've never really tested but I helped expand a cottage and build a treehouse when I was a kid (both with electricity) so I basically feel like I could do it with youtube's help
love this energy reminds me of @visakanv's tweet that has inspired me numerous times, about how part of being a good nerd on twitter is periodically going away and learning something and then bringing it back metaphor of leaving the village on a quest & returning with treasure
@tasshinfogleman yeah, I've been meaning to write up a review of Jocko Willink's Discipline=Freedom which talks about this TL;DR is that he doesn't beat himself up if he fails, he just tries again, harder and/or smarter
@tasshinfogleman this is an important distinction and he doesn't actually highlight it very clearly in his own writing/speaking, so I'm guessing a lot of people listen to his stuff, try to be disciplined, then beat themselves up when they fail whereas he would see that as a huge distraction
people have a sense that tracks something like honesty/dishonesty (wholeness/fracturedness) we can feel when things don't add up (tho doesn't mean we know what's going on) it's a gestalt sense that integrates all of our other senses
Replying to @nat_sharpe_
@nat_sharpe_ paradox of the heap in first person, nice ("one grain of sand is not a heap. adding a single grain of sand to [not a heap] doesn't make it a heap. thus it's impossible to make a heap")
@MJPiercello yep, this is why debate is a fool's errand
@joserosado I would use this. lots of people who are bad at interacting but if they want to keep seeing my stuff I'm happy for them to keep being influenced by my perspective!
@MJPiercello @aleksil79 @AndrewCutler13 yeah definitely check out the Preconquest Consciousness one if you haven't already major linchpin in understanding origin-type stuff (tho there are also other structural questions that are sorta timeless) ranprieur.com/readings/preco…
@aleksil79 @MJPiercello the web is weaving!
@cube_flipper I have no experience to speak of but I have to ask if by stuff you mean "as opposed to things" 😂
@aleksil79 @MJPiercello in other words, exaptation do be like that
@zeta_globin people wanna heal the intended healing effect helps with healing. bodies aren't inert machines. (also honesty is itself healing but that's a whole other thing)
one way to describe my work is Descriptivist Epistemology: how do we actually go about knowing things? (as opposed to "how should we go about knowing things?" which is fake)
@agrinista yeah! I was actually inspired to tweet this by someone else's tweet asking what the deal was with "gut feeling". I think that's where most people feel this sense!
1. prescriptivist epistemology is fake because we're on the inside of knowingness, so there's no way to get outside of it to know how it "should" work instead.
2. I'll believe you (about this or anything else) if & only if your assertion passes whatever tests my knowing/learning systems apply to it (which may be different than I think, or than you think it should be) studying that process is descriptivist epistemology
@Joshua50054538 good questions! I have answered them in-thread
@aleksil79 yeah that's what I mean, it's one guy! if you trained an LLM on only spanish text, that'd be a somewhat different guy if you trained an LLM on only some other chosen subset, that'd also be a somewhat different guy training post-base-model slightly does it but not more than uni
@MJPiercello nah, we as voices/perspectives have origin stories that are different on a WAY deeper level than even the largest context window or some RLHF
@jonnym1ller yeah, it's one of a few ways to improve this sense organ! (another being reorganizing your life so that you have less external noise in your honesty/dishonesty sensor)
@5O1c3 @bashu_thanks lots of ways to interpret this, this isn't quite right, but... if the vertical axis were "he's attractive by some collective standard" vs "not" then one implication would be that she would feel danger since she'd expect others to side with him if she tried to call him out
Thread · Coining a short verb for throwing out the baby with the bathwater · 2 of 11 tweets
huh, how about "shitstoppering"? with the connotation of "there was something you didn't like (💩) so you thought you would plug up the apparent source of the problem (🕳️)!" what could go wrong!?
wait actually "whatcouldgowronging" is not the worst idea for a term here. or "holdmybeering" "those people who put lead in gasoline were totally whatcouldgowronging" "people trying to change social norms abruptly and punish those who do the old ones are whatcouldgowronging"
@visakanv this (internally or interpersonally)
@visakanv Theory of Mind makes friendship easier (/possible)
Retweeted @visakanv
I have sometimes transformed a hater into a friend just by asking them to consider “why do you think I said that? what experi…
@the_wilderless "syncretic gnosis" is a great phrase tho
proof-of-work'd personal gnosis
what is gnosis? gnosis-based answers only
7777 followers! 7⃣7⃣7⃣7⃣ if you'll indulge me, I'd love it if you replied with any of: - something you learned from me - some way in which something I wrote inspired you - some connection you make between what I'm on about and something else (which could be "idk how these fit")
@Joshua50054538 because it's mine. what other test am I supposed to use? how would I be able to tell that it's better, except via whatever test I'm already using? I'm not saying my test is more authoritative than yours, for you. but it must be for me, just as yours must be for you!
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF and also the patterns of how beliefs persist and evolve
@vaughn_tan no unconditional normativity but there are things people can learn that change how they approach things, sort of like how learning thermodynamics changes how you'd build an engine or plane
@asemic_horizon yeah hmu! interested also in if you call it "gnosis" or something else
(he asks because he's on fire writing thousands of words on a topic that might be right to call "gnosis" and is trying to figure out what the effects will be of calling it that)
Retweeted @abhayance
Something happened. And it seems to contain instructions for how it wants you to relate to it. When something happens, the…
Retweeted @_brentbaum
did you know you can just replace self-coercion with devotion 1:1?
@nopranablem @_brentbaum wtf I was talking with the Goal-Crafting Intensive team a couple weeks ago about reworking the workshop, trying to figure out what to call whatever replaces "goals" (ie the big things that matter to you, that you focus on) and one of my serious fav candidates is "devotions"
@myceliummage I have a very simple one; have been meaning to make longer/better ones, and ones with a different voice/vibe soundcloud.com/malcolmocean/4…
@the_wilderless would be good for us to talk! I've been increasingly drawn towards the intersection of magic and ~productivity
@the_wilderless "devotional productivity" is the first exciting phrase I've seen with "productivity" in it in years I've been moving away from "productivity" as a lens, focusing instead on "intentionality", as described in this thread:
@panchromaticity @_brentbaum mmm yes you have found the paradox, welcome
@the_wilderless and I could imagine tapping some of the GCI participants and/or intend.do users as potential guinea pigs!
Retweeted @IntendApp
broke: productivity woke: intentionality bespoke: devotivity
Retweeted @RichDecibels
communication is what turns a collective of organisms into a superorganism. the superorganism speaks to you when you know…
@RichDecibels yesssss
@RichDecibels this is still my favorite way to define it but yeah it has a kind of "pays out so quickly it's a dynamo" quality
@MJPiercello ah indeed. and worldviews appeal to people on the basis of their relevance/exclusion as well!
@Austromum "the vibes leading to the stream entry topic"?
@AdamGravois great articulation of how it hones focus!
huh, I miss @danlistensto
huh 6-10k years is enough time to eliminate anyone who isn't capable of the new memetic OS, but not enough time for evolution to change us such that current humans *couldn't* run the old OS bodes well for the emergence of the new self-trust-based OS
@TylerAlterman utilizers optimizers
okay I'm not saying someone should unilaterally try to do some cooling-related geoengineering, cloud-seeding or whatever but like hypothetically, if someone did, what are the best available options? what are the tradeoffs? and how do we lower the odds of whatcouldgowronging it?
wait uhhh guys maybe having the umbrella term for "genetics" and "memetics" be "emetics" is a disgusting idea 🤢🤮
@connormcmk wait fuck
@s0ulDirect0r @the_wilderless came across this curious how things are feeling for you at this point Anansi! how's the ride? how're the parts of you that are scared?
@MasterTimBlais I feel like @s0ulDirect0r wants to be involved in this
muahaha, I now have a way to test alternate names for the top-level noun in @IntendApp, not just "goals" (if you're a user and you want to try on a different word, lmk!) test one: devotional productivity
@_brentbaum you & @the_wilderless have inspired me
@AaronEstel @rob_mcstan confronted my parents about it last year my mom said "idk why we did it. just seemed like the thing to do... it was awful. I knew I couldn't do it again if I had a 2nd son" my dad said "idk, your mom said she had a preference [read: a personal one] & I'd never had any issues"
@FractalAuth I had a good experience confronting my mom about it, and a meh experience of confronting my dad about it feels like most of that dimension is healed for me now but I'm guessing there's still some dearmoring/physiological healing to be done, maybe also some basic trust stuff
@FractalAuth a couple years ago I noticed that for a long time, I'd periodically had intrusive thoughts involving imagining blades near my genitals, and it took me shockingly long to consider that this might be (at least in part) FLASHBACKS
also @collinofzion
@slimepriestess yeah this is sort of a reification error it would be better as "Applying Science"
@slimepriestess I'll take one if you're not too-many'd
@daemonhugger you just need to alternate between different kinds of enjoyment there's a chart about this somewhere on @algekalipso's site but I failed to find it I only found these ones
Retweeted @thejustinwelsh
More people should try solopreneurship. It's not as risky as you think. - Likely worst case is you go back to work. -…
@RomainHedouin @Aella_Girl often good to say things that feel like they should go without saying
@relic_radiation tho it's not normal for an orchid to be in a desert in the first place haha
@sidewayskoyote cities are an attractor, for many reasons they're also inhumane in many ways but "natural" is a confused concept here
@sidewayskoyote ooooh that's a good statement tweet dat on its own so we can remix it
@sidewayskoyote haha yeah seems like a synthesis might be Civium, pointing at how certain benefits of cities are now less because the internet creates a single global virtual city in some ways
@jessi_cata @AndrewCutler13 this relates to your research on the first factor
metabolic syndrome highlights how you get fat not because "eat junk, junk gets stuck in you as fat" but rather "eat junk, junk confuses control systems designed to modulate appetite, weight, etc" implications for info diet?
@AskYatharth here for this! makes me sad when people give up on basic human capacities like singing, like "oh I just don't sing"
@TylerAlterman everybody is remarkably committed to their own bit
I wrote something new. @visakanv told me last year: > i’d want to read something that’s basically “what’s it like to be malcolm ocean?”, written for visakanv this is the current best I can do on that Q, including the part where I didn't set out to at all malcolmocean.com/2023/08/whose-…
@visakanv Old app, new name—my system for being more intentional 👁️ Vibes with "devotional productivity" which some people have been tweeting about recently. intend.do
Replying to @hdorodev
@hdorodev Jess is my partner so texting her is a lil bit more like thinking out loud and less like opening up the floodgates to all of the randos who might message me (we use a different app, too)
@strangestloop if you haven't already played The Password Game, you might love it neal.fun/password-game/
@strangestloop except for my advice which is "keep doing what you're doing" which I guess is saying "stop doing that thing where you try to do something different from what you're doing" damn, got me
just hitchhiked for the first time (two legs of a 1.5h trip) AMA
first time it was like 5 mins 2nd time it was 20-30 (only a few minutes after I switched waiting spots, idk if that helped!)
@myceliummage yeah it was so fun and nice had great conversations
might have had some concerns in some places but this felt like the easiest start since I was in the friendly rural county I grew up in (tho both people who picked me up weren't; one had just moved to the area, another was passing through)
@jaycousins oh god that is truly awful I can sort of see how it would happen by accident, but I really hope that nobody actually released a system that was INTENDED to give some people that experience
@ylecun @HealthcareAIGuy the most compelling models I've seen of general intelligence (not just advanced regression or simple closed loop cybernetics) suggest that it's so obviously connected with *self-directed agency* that the idea that you can have your cake and eat it too here is kind of absurd
amazing mashup
Thread · Trust as what truth feels like in first person · 1 of 8 tweets
I'm playing with thinking in terms of being before trust. I think trust is more a secondary thing, something that comes after in the process of questioning some statement. Before it's doubted, we don't say "I trust that X" or "X is trustworthy". Just "X"
@visakanv did you make your compilation thread yet? (if not free alpha for someone else who does it)
@m_ashcroft @made_in_cosmos yep, you & @selentelechia
malcolmcore
@made_in_cosmos classic "eat that frog" principle "if you have to eat a live frog today, it is best to do it first thing in the morning"
most people have beliefs that are "true" (but false) someone tells us "X is Y" and we learn to repeat "X is Y" and in some sense X is Y but not in the sense we have now convinced ourselves
@aleksil79 ha, kinda resonates with this thing I just tweeted (tho I think you're saying a different thing?)
@aleksil79 ahhhhhhhh, yep I misparsed what you said, as "wonder how many [of the words] had any idea what it was they were gesturing at" and I wasn't sure what you meant by that but it tickled me
@aleksil79 I have the impression that many upstream did see SOMETHING even if obviously not the full picture that we can only see today with intercultural and archaeological context and so on and that something was lost by many along the way
@aleksil79 even the story of genesis is much more compatible with evolution than a creation story would have to be the heavenly bodies are created first, then the earth & waters, then the simple animals, then the complex animals, then the humans
the bureaucracy is coming for nicknames 🤢🤢🤢
Replying to @racelessgospel
Replying to @wettypoot
@wettypoot @BecomingCritter you might enjoy the phrase "epistemic daddy"
> all in all i have had a very desperate day
your legal name is not the same as your real name
don't let big bureaucracy cuck you so easily
Thread · Getting bureaucracies out of the business of tracking sex and gender
isms are systems of thought, enshrined in institutions, and part of the way out of them is to rein in the institutions Q: why does ID have "M/F" on it? A: to indicate whether you can legally vote or own property, and who you can marry, etc
legal sex used to be important to keep track of! the laws were organized around sex, so you couldn't enforce the laws unless there was a *definitive answer* to someone's sex. hence the bureaucracy HAD TO "assign sex at birth" to intersex folks.
rather than patching the bureaucracy's ontology with an "X" or "other" category, and allowing trans folks to switch their M/F... ...let's get the bureaucracies out of the business of tracking peoples' sex and/or gender at all!
in many contexts, the question of sex/gender isn't even relevant when it is, it can mean a slightly different thing each time and that's fine! we can let the ontologies be naturally fluid by not trying to constrain them all to one legalistic notion
many clothing stores have women's and men's sections, but I regularly shop in the women's section because that's where the flamboyant flowy clothing is often found! does that make me a woman? yes! but also no!
and emojis have exactly three genders, which are of course: - 💆♀️ long hair & purple shirt - 🤷♂️ short hair & blue/green shirt - 🤦 medium hair & orange/white shirt (race & gender for emojis were a huge mistake but that's another story 🤠)
your doctor needs to know things like "do you have a menstrual cycle?"; pronoun-wise they can just call you "you" (and sometimes "women" is good shorthand here. many less-educated "people with uteruses" may not know they're in that category, and miss PSAs as a result)
someone who might want to date you needs to know if you feel like their type, physically and in terms of social role vibe ...which you might not, even *if* your identity or your body parts wouldn't rule that out
in the previous tweet, I went to try to say "your legal sex" but part of what I'm trying to point at here is the badness of that concept! legal names are also kind of bad tbh, although they're sort of necessary for data-tracking but uhh fuck *this* 👇
hmmm okay while writing this I came across some stories about women being assaulted in "women-only" prisons by uhhh another prisoner with a penis so insofar as the law thinks that eg prisoners not getting pregnant is important, there's a need to track that somehow
but I don't think that contradicts what I'm saying. in various places people are allowed to modify not just their current ID but their *birth certificate* to say something non-obvious which of course will be used as justification to do things that are clearly dumb
ID-changes leads to a verbal legal truth "this person is a woman" which then suggests various things that undermine some of the reasons we might want to track such a question in the first place
now, one case I'm looking at ("Karen White") was sent to the women's prison (*for extreme sexual crimes against women*) on the basis of self-identification only so treating self-identification as the absolute truth-for-all-contexts is also clearly dumb
what I'm concluding here is that the idea that there is *anybody*—the law, or the person's self-report, or anyone else—that is the arbiter of truth on someone's sex or gender *for all purposes* is an error
there are many purposes and there is no answer that is relevant to all purposes
(and at the stage when we're going to dehumanize people already by sending them to a prison, we can ask them what genitals they have without too much additional hardship? like of all the places to put some of the weirdness, that seems pretty good to me)
unlike with race, whose notional existence in the first place is pseudo-scientific bullshit, sex is a real & relevant fact of biology (even if there are edge-cases) but sex does NOT have to be a real fact of most laws, and when it does, we can think harder & get more specific
however, the relevance of sex in human life is changing—on the biological level itself—with birth control pills and contraceptives more generally! twitter.com/HephaistosF/st…
there a lot of other changes that are affecting this as well, such as a decrease in the role of physical labour in developed countries, increases in wealth and abundance and specialization leading to overall fewer people having kids & people having fewer kids
am I missing something about why peoples' sex needs to be registered with the government and printed on ID? lmk I haven't thought much about implications for census & statistics but ehh a lot of statistics are fake anyway
thanks everybody! @eshear's response was particularly clarifying: > -phobia implies gut level rejection for emotional reasons > -ism implies a system of thought ie isms are when society (eg who gets to vote) is formally organized around some categories
@eshear digesting that inspired me to realize some things about the origins of sexism and non-obvious boring ways in which we're still perpetuating it by reifying the categories where they don't need to be:
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF totally—but many of the medical things aren't well-tracked by our current racial categories anyway, which include bullshit like "did your parents speak spanish" better to talk about, idk, "genetic origin" and have people report all 4 grandparents not one category
Thread · Legal racial categories and how using them perpetuates racism · 8 of 9 tweets
I had some thoughts about race while writing this thread about "legal sex" but I decided to separate them because sex is real (tho messy & multifaceted) race is fake (tho melanin & genetics & culture are obv real) so best to look at them separately
laws in America (and many other places) used to function very differently based on whether you were classified as "white", thus it became very important that the laws knew exactly who that term applied to hence absurd gerrymandering
did you know about the "one drop rule", where laws said that *any* known "black" ancestry made someone not "white"? (did you know that Obama, "black" via his Kenyan dad although his mom was "white", probably has a slave ancestor... on his mom's side?)
what are the rules now? discrimination based on race is officially illegal but does happen and people are still regularly asked to self-report race, using a modified racial ontology that includes a category for spanish-speakers
these lists, these categories, are part of what is perpetuating racism as an ongoing system of thought.
getting people to say "I'm white" or any sincere talk about "white people" is participating in racism—the system of thought that invented these categories to justify itself
to be clear, that's not to say we should ban the terms! we may need to talk *about* them in order to deconstruct them but using a term and mentioning it are different & using "white", outside quotation marks, seems to me to always be supporting racism
some people would make a categorical exception for comedy, but in my experience most comedy that refers to "white people" reinforces rather than deconstructs 👇 this is quality tho 😙👌 twitter.com/nat_sharpe_/st…
@aleksil79 @RichDecibels yo MOOD
Retweeted @RichDecibels
there's a game I play called Can You Be More Specific. when someone gives me a nice but vague compliment, "thank you, can…
@RichDecibels @ShelleyCeridwen mmm yeah there are versions that are not like this along various dimensions but insofar as a church is like this uhh heaven yeah guys keep it up!
@TylerAlterman working on myself, in a weird epicycle where it consists of slowing the fuck down to acknowledge that I don't know how to achieve my goals, which is substantially more uncomfortably flailing around taking vaguely-relevant actions & pretending I know how
Retweeted @TylerAlterman
What part of your cycle are you in? Tag yourself
@__drewface sounds good I'll be over here chilling with the tautologies 🍻
@UntilTrees depends on "someone new" and "eventually" I'm monogamous now, so insofar as my love is a new person each moment or each day, and sometimes we fall deep into kisses without that being on a direct pipeline to sex this hour/day... quite often actually!
@RomeoStevens76 @aneeshm me over here on an adjacent wavelength
wow I didn't see this at the time but it's extremely fucked the main thing surprising me here was how overt it all was I wonder if there's a lawsuit to be made by other countries against the US offices that did this (maybe constitution-based) since it hurt global sanity
@GeorgeKao nice, I love the vibe. my current edge is truly sitting with the reality that I don't know wtf I'm doing wrt growing my business, and taking responsibility for learning. then I might take some courses if that feels right!
@GeorgeKao where would you recommend I start with your stuff, given I have a software subscription business that has been plateau'd at ~400 customers (with some influx and outflux) for many years?
@slimepriestess wdym?
@visakanv but for some reason you figure it should be you who does it, not someone else? (based on you not publicly proposing someone do it) do you think that's actually realistic and you'll get to it randomly some months from now, or more wishful thinking?
Retweeted @LyonetteCat
Jumping the gun a bit here as I only signed up 30 minutes ago but this makes sense to my brain in a way that many of these…
@thesakshishukla @visakanv sweet, lmk how it goes and feel free to ask Qs (in the app's intercom or here on twitter)
Replying to @DaveCBeck
I'm fine with the agnostic stance, although I'd go a bit farther and say "to a large degree, we can't know if there's any default behavior" because clearly anything CAN be overwritten, including self-preservation. people starve themselves & periodically set themselves on fire 🔥
especially oneself
@connormcmk ohno.png
Retweeted @sidewayskoyote
Freedom of movement- freedom to just go elsewhere - is one of the core evolutionary human liberties.
Retweeted @forthrighter
@Malcolm_Ocean @relic_radiation why do we want the concept of normal in the first place? Generally this is used as a basi…
@FractalAuth yeah, in my case my mum had already thought about it a lot herself, so she was already kind of apologetic when I brought it up, and very receptive to whatever I wanted to express
@FractalAuth in any case, it doesn't necessarily have to be logical, it can be an appeal to emotion: "hi. when I was very small, you had someone cut off a precious piece of skin, and I feel violated by that. I'm sure you have justifications, but what I want right now is my pain & anger felt"
@augustiner_h @m_ashcroft and I briefly thought "well what if we just did it over the ocean" but then I remembered that something like half of photosynthesis is algae at the top of the ocean
@vaughn_tan I do have such ways of thinking, but I don't assume that I can convince others to adopt them in any particular way they'll adopt them precisely if and only if I (or someone else) can present them in a way that makes sense to their current epistemology
@slimepriestess yeah I'm broadly encouraged by Jane Jacobs' work (and Scale by Geoffrey West actually) to put cities in the foreground and see states as a weird aberration
@FractalAuth @LordChisholm @QiaochuYuan @bashu_thanks how'd it go?
@Cantide1 @Liu_eroteme @aleksil79 haha yeah, not in depth but broadly the subtitle of the Snake Cult piece is "Giving the Stoned Ape Theory fangs" and I like how it highlights how venom might have been the first super-weird mind-altering substance since it finds *you* vectorsofmind.com/p/the-snake-cu…
@FluidityAudio ha! well-made
Retweeted @rahshank
@tasshinfogleman @tummycom @Malcolm_Ocean short time horizon self disciple involves joining the gym on jan 1st, beating your…
@eashankotha yeah there's sort of a question about how far back you want to go in terms of bootstrapping stuff
@vlct0rs_tw1tter hm? not sure I follow
faaascinating I suspect that his not saying "I don't think 9/11 was an inside job" the first time may have been a deliberate stirring of drama the drama that is now unfolding below ...and in order to compete with Trump, Vivek will need to stir such drama!
he's making a case for being "guy who says obvious stuff others are denying" tho! no way to win if you don't do that and he's also basically acknowledging that he's doing that
I bet if he wins the Republican primary he could appeal to Dems too, broadly by continuing to name obvious things
@lexdeblanca @zeta_globin hit me with a mixolydian♭6 tune!
@_nolankent haha Nolan don't reply to the spambots this account tweets only variations on this one thing: twitter.com/zmantap10/stat…
@arabelladevine ah yeah! tough one though because that could mean a more specific thing about *incentives* backfiring like that's what I might assume it meant
@RomeoStevens76 eg this? hadn't heard of it before pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…
people are often scared of reconciliation conversations because they don't know what to expect where possible, it can be helpful to be clear about that, eg "I would like my pain and anger felt"
@FractalAuth can make it easier for people if you help them understand what you're wanting from them
@slimepriestess ah yes by "not the same" I mean they are different questions for many people, at a given time, they have the same answer
@danghentschel @nat_sharpe_ someone's in your niche
okay, give this one a huge ymmv caveat I think my heuristic is pretty good in relationships that have plenty of goodwill (eg with close family or friends, where the relationship isn't in threat but there's an unresolved thing that happened) twitter.com/HephaistosF/st…
I would also note that you don't necessarily know in advance what you want you may think you just want X but it turns out you actually want Y so maybe don't promise "I only want X not Y" but you could still start with asking them for X. and they might not be up for it!
@drmichaellevin ectopic eyes for humans? 🤩
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF agreed re committed Dems, but not folks who've been voting Dem but are fed up with certain Dem bullshit
is there an android app that can stop me from watching more than 5 YouTube videos a day? I don't want to block based on time, since 1h podcasts are great
"politicization of the quest for meaning"
wait the Preconquest Consciousness article was written based on anthropology done in part on a bunch of video footage........ WHERE IS THAT FOOTAGE? 😮
@strangestloop curious vibes I don't have a more specific thought right now but I figured better this than nothing
@UntilTrees guessing it's a sense of disconnection/separation the pain of not experiencing cosmic union
Replying to @abhayance
@abhayance wow, I was not expecting this to have such an immediate answer but lazyweb provides! I wonder how hard it is to get access for research 😮🤔
> "the choice of play objects to manipulate and test is left to the child > and he is not deprived of sharp and potentially dangerous objects such as axes and knives > I have yet to see a toddler hurt from this kind of play" from the preconquest consciousness film record
omg here's one of the clips (he specifically says something important happens when you watch the full film record tho, since edited stuff is missing key liminal aspects that would initially seem irrelevant but turns out to matter)
@UntilTrees you might be longing for this
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF author of this paper, Preconquest Consciousness ranprieur.com/readings/preco… that bit you quoted was my summary of my sense of his view on this. these are I think the excerpts I was drawing on most closely in my statement, although he does use the word "liminal" repeatedly
@AndrewCutler13 wdym?
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF yes but: youtube wanting me to scroll is so fucking stupid given that I'm paying it $10/mo so it shows me no ads and this makes me tempted to try to avoid it altogether I'd pay them $40/mo for a version that was optimized for respecting my attention
@elaifresh nah, it would be enough of a blocker to remind me that I don't actually want to watch a ton of videos I know myself pretty well, and I know how to navigate the self-referential motivation aspects of this kind of thing but I guess I could just commit & count tbh
Retweeted @kcorazo
I’m writing the second essay on my series on Girard, and I can’t escape my PKM background: it is leading to a playbook! Here’…
@kcorazo whoa, fuckyeah! Girard definitely needs to get remixed into the canon more, so I'm stoked you're doing it
@sidewayskoyote yeah this was the main thing I wanted to remix your quip with! but there will be more no doubt
@mimi10v3 honestly I <3 people who would be stoked to contribute more if they could (or are infantile/senile) it's our responsibility to help create on-ramps for them to contribute! but knowingly exploitative freeloaders, rent-seeking landlords etc... bleh. makes me angry when I consider
what does it mean to own territory? for wolves, it means you can protect it 🐺 same for humans, initially 🏹 then it meant getting others to protect it for you 👑 now it means the government protects it for you 👮 for what fee? almost nothing 💸 no wonder land prices are 📈
@cauchyfriend Land 👏 Value 👏 Tax 👏
@meekaale I think the issue with the pits is that unlike some chairs & couches, they don't naturally resize for different sizes of conversations (probably also the acoustics are usually bad, tho that could be addressed)
@AbstractFairy 1. namesilo is great on this front! haven't researched the best but it's good 2. gh pages works fine
@AbstractFairy @dingledoorf 3. subdomains are completely independent of top-level domains in basically all ways except ownership! even "www." is a subdomain that won't go to the same as the root domain if you don't configure it to!
@GarrettPetersen probably helps on the margin but the much bigger question is whether those ingredients are themselves whole foods or highly processed that's the underlying thing you're trying to get at here I think
Retweeted @VividVoid_
I'm pretty convinced at this point that nutrition and psychotherapy are in a class of disciplines that only work when they…
Thread · Getting obsessed with whose job everything is · 2 of 4 tweets
@strangestloop I could give a few answers but maybe the best one would be "read this blog post and become obsessed with exactly whose job everything is" malcolmocean.com/2023/08/whose-…
@strangestloop you'll know it's working if you find yourself saying things like "btw this time I noticed you X so I was able to Y but I usually don't notice X in time so don't rely on me to Y" "yeah I figured that'd probably go without saying but apparently I needed to check it one last time"
@strangestloop @maybegray ^ good icebox remix, iirc you collect these?
Thread · Getting obsessed with whose job everything is · 1 of 4 tweets
@strangestloop oh also one of the side effects of taking a dose of Malcolm Ocean / Whose Job Is This? is you'll feel more annoyed than usual when a product doesn't work the way it's obviously supposed to
Retweeted @RichDecibels
sometimes driving across a nameless bridge on some highway I have a little wonder moment wondering about all the people &…
Thread · Getting obsessed with whose job everything is · 1 of 4 tweets
@strangestloop but on the plus side it might also cause you to
@hyperdiscogirl google was like
Retweeted @sympatheticopp
no self? skill issue
@sympatheticopp @nickcammarata @testaccountoki wait reading what? that sounds like extremely my jam
@dismaien (don't forget that you can have little a constriction as a treat, too ❤️🩹)
@strangestloop first passive $ via a kik-filesharing app w ads, but it was zero about access to me 🟢 @IntendApp, at the start was very personal touch. now less so but still more than most apps 🟣 then running it made ppl want to hire me as a 1-on-1 coach! 🔵-🔴 GCI workshops are mid-high
"I believe in God" as the same type of speech act as "I believe in you" "I want your will to succeed and so I'm throwing my support behind it" but different notions of God have different apparent wills
@frideswyth agreed re that conflation but my impression is that the sense of claims of perfection are implied by: > “We are entirely wholesome and beneficial beings. The idea that we could or would do anything to harm anyone can only be fiction.”
@aleksil79 weirdly hostile self-other boundary about ideas (context) malcolmocean.com/2021/11/thinki…
Thread · Meta-cultiness: admitting how culty your group actually is
meta-cultiness is the ratio of how culty you are to how culty you admit you are since all groups, even (especially) healthy awesome good ones, are nonzero culty, asserting "we are zero a cult" makes you infinitely meta-culty even if you're less culty than a typical company
when someone says "you're (in) a cult" it's super tempting to take a binary stance to this and say "we're absolutely not a cult" because cult accusations broadly precede threats of social punishment but by doing this you force any issues to eventually escalate to punishment
whereas if you say "I think we're a pretty healthy community, but ofc like all communities we have some groupthink & our share of people trusting too much and getting hurt a bit." …well, on its own, saying this can also just be a more sophisticated nothing-to-see-here defense.
but if you say that then actually engage in conversation about what's happening and how feedback flows... and do your best to open towards whatever blindspots you might have—even tho that is crazy hard...
well, then there's a potential for dialogue and learning, and the possibility of NOT spiralling into guru attractors
but just because something is orbiting a guru attractor doesn't mean it shouldn't exist! or that the people involved should be made to suffer! some cults are almost entirely fuckery but there are high-growth communities that are awesome & worth it despite minor-medium fuckery
better to post some warning flags, talk about dysfunctional dynamics, and give people good exits and then let things continue to do what they're doing it's not your job to destroy such things
in an ideal environment, people would have a lot of support to talk publicly about negative experiences unfortunately in practice this can be read as grounds for cancellation/condemnation by people looking to pick a fight or whiteknighting or whatever
we need to defend the right of weird experiments to exist and even to traumatize people who end up in them a bit and ALSO defend the right of people who have left them to talk about their experiences, including the bad and the ugly simultaneously. that's the aim.
@frideswyth I wrote a thread! seems like they're good people who mean well, but they're clearly majorly meta-culty :-/ shouldn't be cancelled tho!
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF @frideswyth the majorly meta-culty? I guess I should say "shouldn't be cancelled automatically for that"
@maxim_eorr @frideswyth ah jfc I hadn't seen that stuff I meant "don't cancel people just for saying "we're not a cult" when they're kind of a cult" even to pretty extreme degrees
@maxim_eorr @frideswyth also I appreciate your approach of just attempting to document stuff, mostly stuff Hanjo has said himself
Retweeted @VividVoid_
Whatever your spiritual practice is, if it's not making you more honest in your relationships, it's not working
Replying to @KyKow
@KyKow better than praise of any kind is just to observe what you notice and appreciate what you appreciate doesn't situate yourself as the authority, so allows more space to orient to more natural feedback loops
Retweeted @literalbanana
A lot of cognitive bias research involves violating people's rational expectations such as this one to make them look st…
@literalbanana yeah turns out everything everybody does is rational within whatever frame they do it in 🤷♀️
@nobuhojimichaan just for clarity's sake > "Asked Ra regarding attacks. Only the first, which was a full earth healing (not just us) emanated from me" I parse this as "only the first [attack]" —is that what you meant by "openly admitted to attacking me"? the language is really jargony & opaque
@nobuhojimichaan c/ how you are with your family
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF @aleksil79 weird how? in what way did it surprise you?
Retweeted @visakanv
this is probably true for a lot of people but i want to use this as a springboard for speaking my truth which is that i was 7…
@visakanv ughhhh I need to do this separate wordpress blog for it? or is there a way to make a section on main wordpress blog? my main-line output is okay but it's not exhausting fast enough
I want a blogging platform that would autopublish all drafts to /junkyard/ after they've been untouched for 1mo
@RichDecibels I'm working on a huge piece of writing that has a section with a bunch of examples of this!
@RichDecibels basically how "take my word for it" overrides "I can tell for myself"
“there is no ground floor to the universe - only empty space and good sturdy gravity wells to rest your boots on” — @the_wilderless
come keep me company work on what you wanna work on I'm currently trying to fix error-logging for my app intend.do/room/feral
I fucking hate AI
@the_wilderless inthewilderless.substack.com/p/state-the-ob…
@llms_are_coming well yeah. but also. but yeah.
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF I apologize for the confusion. I understand that you are looking for a personalized recommendation. Here are some factors...
Retweeted @DanielleFong
friendship is the infinite game
@BecomingCritter yeah, there's something about the art of a good meme mashup or remix but some of them are ran thru
@__drewface I'm inferring the 2nd quote there is referring to "typing" as in "on a typewriter" now ofc typing is even editier than pencil!
@__drewface my latest blog post had a quality of raw vulnerability that felt like a new edge malcolmocean.com/2023/08/whose-…
@__drewface this one was incredibly satisfyingly dense. many sentences or paragraphs in it could be (or already are) whole posts made possible by - writing it for a scene with a lot of context - frequent use of "it seems to me" to allow boldly telling it how I see it malcolmocean.com/2022/10/open-l…
@rahshank @__drewface looking forward to seeing more emerge from your learnings here
Retweeted @rahshank
i think about this quote periodically when i’m riffing to myself or a friend on templates of existence. so many invisible s…
meaning is an interface
@BrianRoemmele the whole universe is the self-organizing phenomenon
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF @BrianRoemmele totally! and useful to point out that even though we're used to thinking of electricity as something that flows in circuits that were laid down by thinky design, it can also just vibe itself into being in the right circumstances
Retweeted @calithameridi
@eigenrobot they're gonna have to fucking land acknowledge america when they land on the Moon and i think that's based
@__drewface I feel like @Meaningness is one of the people I know who has done "multiple homes for my writing" really well he's got - meaningness.com - metarationality.com - vividness.live - buddhism-for-vampires.com - betterwithout.ai and maybe others?
@PrinceVogel double empathy gap
@SarahAMcManus not sure but "tweening" might be a useful thing to include in your searches svgator can do svg animations with the sorts of things you're looking for
@onlyfootnotes some extremely generated bs doesn't look like react tho. check the <head> section of the site for clues on what the generator might be
Retweeted @ftlsid
I hate it when people say "it's not that deep" because it's a zero-effort way to shame the act of attempting to understand. als…
if it's not that deep to you that's your problem
@Meaningness @__drewface haha I forgot about betterwithout.ai until I went to your "my sites" page on meaningness
@Meaningness @__drewface in any case, anything to share about how you came up with your taxonomy?
@AndrewCutler13 he says they don't get hurt from playing with sharp objects I thought most child mortality was from diseases and maybe predators
@Vaniver yeah, fair point does seem like he was kind of surprised by it though, but maybe it's more that he was surprised by the fact that they were doing it, and his inner simulator generated a sense that they COULD get hurt, which would happen in rare cases or whatever
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF @aleksil79 ahhhh, yeah. I was summarizing a particular dimension here, one that was more salient for me in Waterloo than BL BL was characterized for me more by grandiosity and rushing and tunnel-vision (which was sorta true of Waterloo as well, but like a tenth as much)
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF @KyKow if you need the power and can take it in this way, that is a move you can make the topic of this exchange, as I saw it, was how to support someone's natural learning process, which this authority-seeking stuff will get in the way of
Replying to @agiutopia
@agiutopia @maxim_eorr @frideswyth that's not my thesis at all! my thesis is more like... defending yourself against cult accusations is accepting the frame that cult accusations need to be defended against rather that collectively investigated did you read my actual thread? it says
@agiutopia @maxim_eorr @frideswyth > That's pretty strange. It's also weird for you to be so up in this story and accepting of curated narratives. "why u being weird bro" isn't an argument, it's a narrative play. I'm not taking a side here. I am making a general point about meta-cultiness, that stands regardless
@agiutopia @maxim_eorr @frideswyth I don't actually care about this story, in particular! I'm studying guru attractors and how they're created and maintained, & this is an interesting case study—& would continue to be so even if someone showed me that it's NOT what it looks like, given how much it looks like it
@agiutopia @maxim_eorr @frideswyth I would like for you guys to be left in peace, but I'm not going to stand up for you in particular beyond a general "live and let live" which I put in my thread that you thought was an attack (I acknowledge the first tweet does give off some of that vibe)
@frideswyth do you also think they're very naive? because that's the only way I can think of to square what you just said (which all seems plausible to me!) with what's here:
@frideswyth iow, do you agree with their frame that enlightened beings (such as you agree they are) can't harm anyone? that "the idea that [they] could or would do anything to harm anyone can only be fiction"? if not, then I would say you think they're naive—about harms specifically
@frideswyth and being naive about harms is a great way to accidentally commit harms!
@frideswyth which is not to say that *they* should be harmed or harassed or mob-cancelled or whatever but if they are confused in a way that would hurt people, surely it's good for collective awareness of that, for their sakes and for others' sakes
@ogdenparfit @frideswyth bahaha wtf I hadn't heard about this. so fucking weird. enlightenment, not even once youtube.com/watch?v=1ptugZ…
@sympatheticopp @nickcammarata @testaccountoki cool! and would you recommend starting with that one or back up and read the first in the series?
@giray_arat important to note that Ran Prieur isn't the author of the Preconquest Consciousness article, he just mirrors it on his site I was confused about that at first too. I haven't read that much by RP himself
@giray_arat my followers know about it because me & QC & others have been talking about it
@giray_arat but also most of my followers don't know about it, and the tweet was just written for the tiny handful that do! which of course then intrigues folks like you and sends you off on one of my favorite rabbit holes
@fdondi1 hmm... I think yeah actually, although it tends to be fairly weak but it seems like they have a will to continue being perceived, at minimum, given that they are! like you could locate that will in the person but it's interesting to locate it in the phenomenon
@vaughn_tan there's lots of brokenness although I wouldn't say "the existing epistomology"—there are lots of existing epistemologies and in any case necessarily we have to work with what we've got in order to get anywhere else!
@UntilTrees can play with it with friends explore nonverbal physical acoustic shenanigans communicate without words pay attention to each others' attention lots to learn; vast open field
clarification:
Replying to @teh_aimee
@teh_aimee @caelanhuntress yep! very much my vibe
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF @onlyfootnotes not even any aria-labels, jeez
@lexdeblanca huh, interesting! wouldn't've noticed these all have that particular key signature in common (Single Ladies is the only one I'd heard before)
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF @aleksil79 very true, tho it seems to me that framing things in terms of magic does an extra dimension on the grandiosity stuff something about "seeing a deeper world than the others"
cool question to investigate on different scales of agent and environment twitter.com/HephaistosF/st…
@chopperface69 @primalpoly @elonmusk @Tesla I wonder if it would be possible to design a car to somehow way-better-than-usual accommodate scalable/modular carseats that would meet the standards... 🤔
I might try to help you find the depth tho if you're down to get curious!
@thepericulum bahaha what a weird story also glad you're okay
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF I think I might be talking about something different actually I just mean that if someone's like "is that your real name?" that is, by default, a different question than "is that your legal name?" you could have yet a different name that is your True Name
MacOS power-users, especially programmers etc: what hotkeys do you prefer for "move line up/down" Roam defaults to cmd-shift-⇅ GDocs is ctrl-shift-⇅ Sublime defaults to ctrl-cmd-⇅ VSCode defaults to option-⇅ aahhhhhh
Replying to @agiutopia
@agiutopia @frideswyth I would be very very very surprised if there exists any possible context to that sentence that would cause me to not think it was sus, unless it set the sentence up for being a playful joke not to be taken seriously, in which case why wouldn't you just say that?
Replying to @agiutopia
@agiutopia @frideswyth also you're the one who's saying I believe you're bad people I literally said "seems like they're good people" over here, although honestly that was sloppy of me because calling people "good" or "bad" is always a type error. I meant "they mean well"
Retweeted @relic_radiation
I'm increasingly growing fond of this word 'psychofauna' - finding it helpful to say no to psychic pollution & say yes…
emptiness as interface interface as metaphor metaphor as "as"