undercover agency
February 2024
Retweeted @eshear
AOL Instant Messenger got presence and status messages correct, and we have been slowly trying to crawl our way back ever since
@AskYatharth @thesfcommons @brimmingvessel well, that's... a cool opportunity if you wanna participate or coach at the event! but inconvenient for us hanging out haha 😛
@AnneSelke @thesfcommons oh awesome! will be a cool time to be orienting to SF, plans, etc
gorgeous intro to The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, by Christopher Alexander about putting perspective & value back into science, so we can rigorously investigate the nature of harmony, aliveness, selfhood, etc
gorgeous prologue to The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, by Christopher Alexander about putting perspective & value back into science, so we can rigorously investigate the nature of harmony, aliveness, selfhood, etc
@eshear have you checked out Christopher Alexander's work? I just read the preface in The Phenomenon of Life and it's about exactly this:
Retweeted @eshear
It was the job of the scientific revolution to date to exorcise the spirits and ghosts from the world, to replace intentionalit…
it's not even a continuum tho, it's a false dichotomy as dumb as whether something can be big and lightweight at the same time. like yes, ceteris paribus bigger things are heavier, but ceteris is emphatically not paribus!
@KyleBowe4 like yeah there are tradeoffs to be made—it's harder to make something big and light than it is to make something small and light, but it's not impossible (I deliberately didn't pick two irrelevant dimensions like "colorful" and "big")
if a society is moving away from liberalism towards something else (eg totalitarianism) then conservatism & liberalism are not only compatible but literally identical
@KyleBowe4 here's an article describing how someone can care about both of these at once and in fact,
here's an article about what those words mean as actual virtues that aren't just vague ever-shifting coalitions: (also "progressive") everythingstudies.com/2018/12/06/i-l…
@KyleBowe4 oh wait here's the actual link to the article everythingstudies.com/2018/12/06/i-l…
Thread · Self-hatred is a contradiction and self-love is inevitable · 5 of 6 tweets
...same.) good question @eshear! depends on what we mean, but the view I'm speaking from is that love is an experience of understanding and non-separateness, thus self-love is inevitable when you see clearly—it permeates everything, under the confusion
I've gone and looked and found this self-love-permeates-everything thing is self-evidently true—something that any person could tell for themselves! (and in fact, not just "any person" but any sufficiently self-aware part of a person as well) malcolmocean.com/2023/11/i-can-…
and this recognition is the basis of my philosophy, my metaphysics, my approach to life, my way of being an agent of love in the universe
of course, you might have stuff to say where you want to use the phrase "self-love" and "self-hate" differently, and I totally respect that. (there are perhaps other phrases I'll fight to keep precisely tracking their True Nature, but not these)
in essence, what I'm saying here about self-hate & self-love is a koan or something maybe it resonates with something deep in you and you get the joke, maybe not. possible you'll recognize it in some months/years. I can kinda explain it but only kinda
@shakaz_ @eshear yeah I've been ~offline at a sort of retreat (not a meditation retreat; a context where I'm barely on my computer and I'm just firing off a couple tweets a day from a widget on my phone, without actually being on twitter)
@ChanningAllen yeah this is probably the best critique of what I'm saying here
Retweeted @AskYatharth
there's so such thing as "hating yourself". it's always ever one part hating another as soon as you begin to name what h…
@AskYatharth "name what hates hate"? I can parse this a few ways. can you vibe it out a bit?
@visakanv challenge accepted!
@touchmoonflower if you truly grok self-love then the move most people want to call "self-forgiveness" is unnecessary because you already see that you always did exactly what made sense to you at the time, AND you're deeply motivated to learn how to make better mistakes
Retweeted @alexisgallagher
when i retweet something i am fully endorsing that idea, that person, and all other ideas they've ever had, and all ot…
my retweet policy also
👀 psst! we've sold only 12 tickets to our saturday Feb 10th session of the Beyond Goals Intensive... & we have 12 coaches lined up... so it's a chance to get an absurd amount of coach attention (obviously this tweet becomes false if too successful 🙃) intend.do/event/bgi?tw=m…
@eshear relates to realizing other people actually think different things than you vs like "yeah you would say that" but without empathy as to why that actually makes sense
Thread · Predicting people is a distraction from loving them · 4 of 6 tweets
the skill of predicting people better than they can predict themselves is impressive but usually a distraction from learning how to love them and/or have satisfying interactions with them
to the extent that you have a satisfying interface and can take the other's perspective, you actually want other people to be very UNpredictable, because that's more fun and interesting and at the edge of knowing
A: "you have this pattern where you try to make people like you and then deny it" B: "that's not how it seems to me" A: "I knew you would say that." ...so what? if you can't invite the system into a better dance, who gives a shit if you're right?
but the person who gives a shit is you, of course. this pattern arises, I gather, from someone experiencing a sense of unsafety regarding those around them, and attempting to predict these hostile entities to protect themselves and avoid the worst of the damage.
@eshear also being surprised by people is related to not fixating on hyperpredicting them
@eshear idk japanese at all but it seems plausible to me that a language described as too polite might be one in which it's functionally impossible to be direct or blunt or whatever
@meditationstuff a few examples of the kinds of things you're asking for and/or relationships in which this is hard for you might help me generate my solutions for you!
can't seem to sign into twitter on @brave (eg for @IntendApp or alts — I'm still logged in to my main where I was already logged in) I turned shields off, and this browser profile has no extensions 🤔
@injuliasworld how's it soaking in so far?
@Algon_33 yep! I-it relationship rather than I-thou
@captain_mrs mmm nice. yeah and if you're grounded and chill about it like you have a sufficient map of their ooda loop or whatever that they can't outwit you, so you can point out the thing you're hiring them to point out good stuff as long as you honor their unspoken careabouts too!
Thread · Predicting people is a distraction from loving them · 2 of 6 tweets
ah! yeah exactly, the reason people get fixated on their prediction success is that it's too scary to do this:
and to be clear, the solution (afaict) is not to try to just naively trust other people, but to bootstrap your own trusting process, listen to yourself more closely, build trust where it can be built, and so on
@visakanv ooh cool. I kinda do that in this recent post, "I know what Knowing isn't" malcolmocean.com/2023/12/on-kno…
@visakanv what's the four cursors?
@mauve_sky works better if you say "if you frame it that way, then you're absolutely right about what you're saying... - but framing it that way will cause you this problem - but I have good reason not to frame it that way - but if I frame it that way I want to puke"
Thread · Trusting your own sense-making, even with surgeons · 2 of 4 tweets
> Hot fuck I wish I knew this in my last relationship (a friend of mine, reading my writing - link in next tweet)
quote is from my recent essay "I can tell for myself": malcolmocean.com/2023/11/i-can-…
me n who?
Thread · Trusting your own sense-making, even with surgeons · 2 of 4 tweets
depends on the surgeon! given a choice between two surgeons, I would strongly prefer one who doesn't give me a feeling of "wait that doesn't seem right" when they talk! especially true of diagnosing doctors—it's a sign they're missing something
but also, suppose your choice is between surgery and not... you could choose to get the surgery even tho you think the surgeon is full of shit in some ways you don't have to believe the surgeon's words in order to choose to let them do surgery on you! it's a separate act.
@delia_burgess @Mihoda sub in "understand" or "respect" or "appreciate" for "love" in the original tweet and the point stands just the same
@timd_ca oh no @aphercotropist they're "zooming in" (this is legit cool, but also it's probably making one of the confusions you're often complaining about)
if you don't trust your ability to tell if you can trust a situation, then you can't trust that situation
@Mihoda happy to if I get the chance :)
@davidbirsen mmmm I like that also if you wanna trip out about the nature of "I", you might like this article of mine and the Snake Cult of Consciousness article it cites malcolmocean.com/2023/07/supere…
if you've a conflict between what Zeus is telling you to do and what Athena is telling you to do... ...at least the two of them are still in the same world and know of each others' existence!
incredible pretending-to-be-not-self-aware thread I'm very amused also imagining it as completely fabricated performance art written by a guy who in fact had no informant
oh man that would be super weird actually, then they'd have to publish an actual credible account or recording of what happened or nobody who wasn't in the room would believe the live-tweeting was fake!
it's possible that he didn't care — there are lots of factors, looks totally matter but they're just one thing. maybe ex is prettier but new girl more his type. whatever. but clearly she does care, and since she cares—and is framing it this way—it's not gonna work (lies or not)
a better response from him than silence would have been a playful "what's it to you?" (probably there are better words) something that would get her to reveal her actual hand here. possibly she feels insecure & there's a way he could validate her, but her Q made that impossible
Retweeted @LaillaElgohary
The best thing about having ADHD? You have a cool idea, then you do it (even if it sucks). That's how I got a comic pu…
"Deep Yin & Yang, The First Iteration" by Myrrh
@eshear vibes
the world's a reflection of how children play
@visakanv this is why people pay you $500 for consulting sessions
@visakanv see also "we won the superbowl!"
@visakanv although right, you're noting that here there's a statement of *value* on behalf of this we, not just fact
great alternate questions. I think if I were (advising someone who is about to be) the dude here, I'd try a playful/warm/mischiefy "ooh, that's a spicy question" then some of these:
hard to convey this in a tweet there is totally a tone that says "ooh, that's a spicy question" which suggests the answer is bad, and I would not recommend that one but there's a different tone that kind of highlights how it's a spicy question independent of the answer (true!)
@sha_zng @utotranslucence this seems like our kind of person! (I found her through Priya's tweet 👇)
sometimes people think that... we're done?!?
definitely the weirdest product description I have ever read, and I wasn't even tracking that question before tonight! uhh @bananagrams u ok?
Retweeted @Morphenius
Your mind was literally designed by a child.
Thread · Memetic literacy propaganda posters · 3 of 4 tweets
I'm pretty here for memetic literacy propaganda posters
"flush superego with cold water"
source of the image:
@tasshinfogleman this is adorable and hilarious and amazing and watching you hit your head in the way that you have been lately... continues to feel bad in this godpocket over here
if someone wanted to do a set of Malcolm-themed valentines I'd be very tickled 🥰 here are some random photos of me that might work well: twitter.com/finalperigee/s…
my take is that one of the most dystopic things about modern society is how babies often AREN'T worn while working, and that if there's anything to fix in this photo it's the background not foreground (eg awful fluorescent lights) (click for thread by a mom about all this)
also good chance this woman is the franchise owner which highlights that it's actually a luxury that she *gets* to do this, not oppression that she *has* to. good chance the other employees aren't allowed
@MCMCD_ wow. I'm doing research on mating dances — how people quickly, confidently, & correctly answer the question of whether it's wise for them to be life partners — and would love to interview you two if you're down!
what's happening to palestine is clearly fucked up but I keep being suspicious when ppl call it "genocide" geno = race cide = killing it seems like the aim is more "gtfo" than "die" & the who is defined by a mix of location & religion, not a genepool …oh. well fine then:
in other words, this would be called a "genocide" not to say that it's trying to kill individuals based on them having a palestinian essence but to say that it's trying to kill the palestinian "people" as a coherent whole. the nation. which seems much more plausible
in my head the central example of genocide was Rwanda, which involved two racial groups who iirc were living side-by-side in every town in the country, not separate nations as such. next-door neighbours who started slaughtering each other. I read a story about it. wild stuff.
.@Morphenius: "I'm really glad I asked about that" me: "yeah! we're doing a multiperspectival thing" him: "as one does" me: 👀 him:😅 us: "..as two does." 😆
"It's possible to get really good at integrating before you try to integrate something like a vipassana retreat." — @Morphenius
hot take: courting couples should sleep together in the literal sense (maybe multiple times) before they sleep together in the sex sense
@lumpenspace wdym? also what set of norms are you coming from as default? I get the vague sense it's very different my intended audience, but I'm not sure how
Replying to @CatoMinor3
@CatoMinor3 yeah this is not the type of thing I would like to need to have detailed taxonomies for different subtypes it's fucked up aggressive shit (my impression is that so is a lot of what arabic/muslim countries have been doing towards israel the whole time, to be clear)
@ifonlyalabama yes & no. I suspect there are many many people who intuitively sense that genocide means something like what I assumed it meant, who are therefore also like "??!" at people referring to Israel's actions as genocide. seemed like misleading propaganda to me, before I looked it up!
@ifonlyalabama the speaker does not get to decide what is relevant. they are responsible for communicating in ways that aren't misleading, even if they're "technically" correct eg pineapples are botanically berries, but outside of that context you're an idiot or asshole if you call them that
this seems right to me and is I think part of why I'm suspicious of the use of "genocide" although I guess it's messy because a military defeat of Hamas requires subduing the whole population more than is true in most wars
my initial interpretation, which I still somewhat stand by, is that if it were Israel's intent to perform "genocide", then they would *also* be targeting ethnically Palestinian people living in the non-gaza/wb parts of Israel (and, arguably, diaspora elsewhere) are they?
@haideralmosawi the 2nd post is saying that yeah, I'm concluding that genocide conceptually has more to do with destroying a "people" as a whole than destroying the individuals that belong to that whole, although obviously they're interconnected
@haideralmosawi it seems to me that if it were ABOUT killing individuals, then it'd also involve targeting Palestinians who have been comfortably living in eg Jerusalem so yes, lots of individuals may be dying, but Israel doesn't seem to be trying to maximize that number
Replying to @s_r_constantin
@s_r_constantin totally! I definitely had a confused impression about that prior to interacting with friends who had babies and kids and since then I've been like "oh"
Thread · Memetic literacy propaganda posters · 1 of 4 tweets
*original* source of the image: @OfficeNormalcy here are more (most aren't my vibe tbh) tumblr.com/preservationof… and here are some pins/posters for sale: ko-fi.com/officepn
good article about how AI search is being presented as objective when it's actually a kind of weird mashup that is often wrong context context context werd.io/2024/stripping…
@lumpenspace I've had lots of cosleeping with friends of varying degrees of intimacy, including in some cases former partners my now-wife and I slept in the same bed a handful of times back when we were friends. (we were poly and with other people, but didn't so much as kiss for some reason)
@lumpenspace curious also what generates the "danger zone" tag as opposed to "but people wouldn't" or something else
@SurenVynn "cosleep" is a verb I've often used (and heard used) so "cosleepmate" maybe?
@AnneOatley bingo
@xZakyJ you learn how much your bodies know how to relax together; how much you're on the same wavelength on a really basic level
@Jeanvaljean689 @prerationalist abridged audiobook also good, tho long one probably better another nice thing is you can just follow the instructions without having to memorize them
@QiaochuYuan it's less of an argument and more of a rejection of the idea that you should NEED any argument for doing what you like doing it's pushing back against puritanical memes which suggest that pleasure IS inherently bad or the only things worth doing are externally-justifiable
@QiaochuYuan insofar as I'm ever trying to say something like "pleasure is good" it would also be to make sure that people in your position don't confuse themselves into calling pleasure itself bad just because things that are themselves pleasurable also carry some other big cost. can be both
@the_wilderless left hemisphere bullshit? or something more specific (for those missing the context...)
@QiaochuYuan because addiction and pleasure aren't the same thing
@nosilverv seems related somehow
@nosilverv I'm extremely dubious on the morality of *trying* to wake people up (separate from what happens if you succeed) as a lot of bullshit is justified in the name of that:
Retweeted @MatjazLeonardis
A question you can ask yourself about someone: do they value me for a strength or a weakness? The answer is usually in…
@visakanv vibes with how if I'm stuck while writing I'll sometimes just hit "italic" or change font color, then write as if to a friend, explaining why I can't write the next bit. often leads back to the next bit.
The Great 👋 off Kanagawa
@shahidnowshad I ended my first marriage a day before my 30th, and that felt pretty fresh wouldn't uhhh... recommend that per se, but maybe there's some other area where creating space for something new by letting go of something old would be good!
Replying to @selentelechia
@selentelechia @QiaochuYuan @meditationstuff my main takeaway here is that beliefs make you crazy
@QiaochuYuan @selentelechia @meditationstuff I was also recently ranting about this in the context of the Nicene Creed
@jay_viddy 100% depends on tone, impossible to assess without tone to the degree that you might as well have said "and the other person responds"
@tasshinfogleman I would say I don't even "give compliments". I just say what feels right. Often it's uplifting but that's not the point.
@this_is_silvia @neats29 @Morphenius this vibes a lot with what we've been on about
@mechanical_monk me & @utotranslucence reporting for daty!
@lumpenspace hmm... there were high school girlfriends I never had sex with, but did cosleep with once or twice (when we evaded parental oversight) a woman in my 20s for whom I was her first sexual partner other relationships that started as cuddleships maybe
@lumpenspace yeah my wife pointed this out too haha 😆 my take might be so hot I don't even totally believe it myself
@lumpenspace ohhhhhhh actually wait there is a slight exception my now-wife and I re-met in person and noticed we were attracted to each other in a situation where it didn't yet make sense for us to have sex, but did make sense for us to sleep in the same bed (long story) and that was great
@lumpenspace yeah I'm appreciating our collectively-thinking-out-loud here right now, you're helping draw out my intuitions and so on!
context: in 2017, I had tried cosleeping with girlfriends but had a hard time co-regulating / relaxing but then I coslept with a new female friend and it just felt so natural & easy years later, once our life visions were more aligned, we fell hard & are now married. a sign imo
Retweeted @AskYatharth
>Thus… if someone tells me something, and it seems to me to contradict something I can tell for myself… if I try to overri…
@meaningfulideas how do you usually frame the principle that people are responding to there? is it literally "never say no"?
@sidewayskoyote @nosilverv oh yeah I'm totally talking 1-on-1 interactions in my tweet, not putting stuff out there
Replying to @quotidiania
@quotidiania @AbstractFairy I also say "every thought is sacred"
@aphercotropist @timd_ca fuck yeah. yeah "see" here is a metaphor. something has been *translated* into vision, but you're not seeing the something
@EthanReeder mmm yep, lots of subskills here!
Retweeted @sean3naes
@tasshinfogleman @reasonisfun @Malcolm_Ocean I'd go further and say that the thing an originator brings into the world hasn'…
@sean3naes @tasshinfogleman @reasonisfun mmmm nice, yeah
@eshear yup yup, totally agreed my original framing was intended to be provocative / koan-like
@AbstractFairy @AscendantPower yep. it's a top 10 book for me here are my threads inspired by it
Retweeted @behaviary
I wanted to shout out @Malcolm_Ocean. I've found myself pointing at that "towardness and awayness" post three times in the l…
@behaviary nice! what were the contexts?
good thing I know better now, so I don't need to make mistakes again
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF externally, yup. there's also an internal frame shift to "I am not inherently too much" that still applies regardless of what the social context is doing
@EthanReeder yeah, there's a kind of letting go of assumptions it can often show up with intercultural things, whether between nations or subcultures or even between men & women
@tasshinfogleman I mean I think if someone was like "damn this Malcolm vibe was so delicious I overate and now I am kinda stuffed and need to go lay down for a bit" I'd be pretty delighted 😆
@OrphicCapital you might dig this thread about math & gnosis (/direct-knowing / I-can-tell-for-myself)
@nosilverv it's okay, the actual issue is having the error too tightly bound from experience to implication loosen that and you can keep experiencing stuff all you want
keywords for future searching: rozzi roomian the mask meme remix
@QiaochuYuan mmm. and the sensations "in" your body are not separate from the phenomenal world
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF go for it
Retweeted @Jeanvaljean689
The first step is to believe in win-win dynamics; The second step is to look for the other people who believe in the s…
@relic_radiation @touchmoonflower yeah totally. there's SO MUCH possible in this space. I'd love to see Santa Fe Institute run a university department or something
@enzikaofash beautiful.
@enzikaofash also I remember that you
@meekaale love it
@StupendousGrav1 mmmm, example?
@Jeanvaljean689 third step is to filter for people with whom there are actually good win-wins available for you better off marrying a spouse who believes slightly less in win-wins but is a way better fit for you-in-particular than one who is gung-ho about win-wins but not your type
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF have you read Zvi's Moloch Hasn't Won? I found it a good investigation thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/28/mol…
"flexible" is better for what I meant than "arbitrary"
@eshear right and often it explodes within hours, so without an until:2024-01-24T04:20:00Z it doesn't really work
@charliedbecker afaict you can post substack links without any problems, they're just downweighted in the algo
@ben_mathes it calls it "fear" not "shadows", so maybe that was my issue in framing it I think there are things that genuinely do disappear once fully embraced
@Jeanvaljean689 @visakanv yeah, I also had another layer, which was partially this and partially "he was MY some guy"
can someone explain the saddle thing here? I sorta get it intuitively but I'm not sure how to put it into words is it that there are two different ups to go to for stuck-guy, so he can't see the clear gradient?
@MatjazLeonardis not sure but I'll ask everyone else
@MatjazLeonardis @jonnybhoy219 oh, huh. maybe you're just really different here! for me, in my first marriage, I was miserable but I had convinced myself so thoroughly that I had to keep trying, that I ignored the misery. I was clinging to trying to make it stay like the few moments when it was 😍🤯
@MatjazLeonardis @jonnybhoy219 and even as it started to become harder to ignore, the habit of rationalizing it away (and my desire to have integrity with my marriage vow) was so strong that it could a couple weeks of concerted effort to realize it would be good for me (and eventually her) if I ended things
@AskYatharth come up to SF and let's go for a walk in Glen Canyon
@QiaochuYuan @utotranslucence mission fucking accomplished :P cams to ticket loud motorcyclists zooming by? fuck yeah
Replying to @ChasingMyself
@ChasingMyself helpful. I was thinking more about where it came from in the first place
@MJPiercello @_arvind @visakanv @RichDecibels what would happen if we just got on a call and tried LoRC on our model of LoRC itself :P might be too meta... better to have an object-level conflict. what kinds of things have you found it works especially well for so far?
good is good better is better best is..... a bit sus sometimes
@4confusedemoji @acidshill ooh yeah, sculpture evokes space in a way paintings tend not to
Retweeted @visakanv
the yin/yang nature of agreeableness and disagreeableness has become clearer to me over the years you can't truly agree unle…
@visakanv maybe, tho sometimes the answer is to break up (sometimes it might be necessary to break up in order to be even able to SEE the stuff in the way)
there's a single word for this expression but DALL-E will not allow it
@visakanv ha, it's a good answer though I was also hoping to provoke a nice meaty response like @RichDecibels reply to this tweet:
@s0ulDirect0r username checks out!
@FANswitchboard hook me & @utotranslucence up with someone who would be good at coaching us together (as a newly married couple) around our blocks/confusions around money we sense we have similar blindspots there so it's hard for us to point them out to each other
@visakanv ah nice you reminded me I wanted to tweet this:
@_tube_talk eh I don't buy it 🤔🤔
@juliangough yeah. and it doesn't have to! we could still get multiQT (you can already embed multiple images) ...we could get tweets embedded in multiple places in longposts (like you can already do with images) we could get so many other UI improvements!
Replying to @IkkyusDen
@IkkyusDen @AskYatharth I don't know much about the history of anarchy actually have mostly had the more punkish dysfunkish sense of it until a few recents events, including Yatharth's thread I like "panarchy" — governance is necessary, but it can be governance of all by all, the way ecosystems do it
M: how are you doing? J: on what timescale? M: ... ...were you starting in the void again? J: what'd you think? M: taking a nap J: well where'd you think the void is? C: is the void also taking a nap? M: that would explain a lot...
M: how are you doing? J: on what timescale? M: ... ...were you staring into the void again? J: what'd you think? M: taking a nap J: well where'd you think the void is? C: is the void also taking a nap? M: that would explain a lot...
@enzikaofash wild. or rather, the opposite of wild.
@jonathandubin @FANswitchboard @utotranslucence @daemonhugger down for a couples session @daemonhugger?
@utotranslucence me just now: wait, I'm/we're at 95-98%?!? her: well yeah, as I said, if we slow down enough me: gotcha, right ...I'm now reflecting this is an example of words being helpful.
@MatjazLeonardis ah nice, this answer's pretty good
ahhhh I missed the bit about the gradient being zero. that makes sense, yeah. because eg if the dimwit at the front moved towards the saddle, he'd still have two equivalent (and forking) better-up-directions, but locally still no flatness
@eshear absolutely possible to violate norms in ways that nobody would ever confuse with jerkishness offering help is abnormal in some situations and may get weird looks but even if unwanted nobody would say "jerk" or eg as a man, allowing myself to cry in a group of friends
@QiaochuYuan @utotranslucence this feels related to your current existential crisis
@QiaochuYuan @utotranslucence (seconds after I tweeted this reply, she commented out loud "I just tweeted about this god-void")
@QiaochuYuan all of these tbh I checked revolutionary tho because I expect it will turn out to be paradigm-changing sorta like the iphone was... and because I didn't read past "meh" before voting 😅 but I'm not personally that excited yet
@the_wilderless here's a relating list I've kept of ways of "pointing at the shift", although it's less mode-oriented and more oriented to a cultural/mindset shift that seems underway in humanity at present (I think some of these DO want to be in balance tho, not shifted from/to)
I've recently felt drawn towards what I've been calling "practicing religion like an immigrant", ie "in my living room with the one other family from my tiny island who shares my culture, since we have no temple" it's authentic, tho small vs going to a church I don't vibe with
@meaning_enjoyer @utotranslucence mmmm I like the phrase "folk religion"
Retweeted @utotranslucence
there's a giant void I can see where God was and looking at 'God' now doesn't fill it. It got too broken in the decade…
@meansinfinity I'd find those examples as given boring but if it were slightly more sensual &/ evocative, like even sentence fragments like "the sun on my skin, and my husband's" then I'd be quite into it
the dim light in our living room as my woman & I burn a little more midnight oil
@meansinfinity hmm now inspiring me to tweet like that
the realization "it's all love" is cheap the realization that there are better and worse ways to organize that love, but no final best way, and that it's up to all of us to figure out together how to do it... that's worth something. we can build with that.
Thread · Taking "why can't we all just get along?" literally · 1 of 4 tweets
Retweeted @meekaale
@sympatheticopp can't get enough of what you don't really want
@DannyVidaud hm. I'm not saying love doesn't have an implicit structure, just that realizing that structure is an additional move beyond trying to spread love the kind of thing I mean includes questions like "who makes good marriage partners?" & "how can we learn to respect our differences?"
@LunacyNow yeah it would need a kind of shared context I'm sort of suggesting this as a cultural norm as part of the dating progression, not as a thing people should one-sidedly try to impose
@perpetuummobula you're not wrong haha. build up the tension, you know
went straight from twitter to sleep, then had a dream I was out walking and ran into @visakanv and we hung out for a bit I'd forgotten how tall he is
trying to set up automatic financial flows and craving a UI like factorio SO HARD
@FrankaMedic @GetSequence oh snap, thanks!
@prerationalist @ESYudkowsky symbols are different from living wholes
Retweeted @SarahAMcManus
Join us for our 50th+ sessions of the Beyond Goals Intensive workshops! ✨Vibe reconnection for our planning friends🔥 🗂️…
huh, just discovered that visionary architect & paradigm-transcender Christopher Alexander was brought on to consult for BART design decades ago ...and they had no idea how to integrate his ideas into station design gregbryant.com/gatemaker/Alex…
@visakanv there's a book called Cultural Literacy which highlights how in addition to knowing the dictionary definitions of words, participating in literate society requires knowing context on thousands of other references, eg "the civil war" 1/3 of book is a list amazon.com/Cultural-Liter…
Retweeted @SarahAMcManus
We're all sold out for the Feb 11 Beyond Goals workshop! There's still time to get a spot for Feb 10 --link in bio & in…
@SarahAMcManus (linking this thread on how the coaching channels work)
thread on 4 conditions for being in flow & how to get them: 1.🧐🗺️ you have a clear sense of where you're starting from 2.✨🏔️ you have a clear sense of your desired outcome 3.🧘👉 there are no conflicting or competing desires in this moment 4.➡️👣 the next action is clear
@AskYatharth how I can beatbox and make some really dope sounds without even a microphone
@TylerAlterman unfold
I want to unfold
@TylerAlterman the ads are worse in a few ways, maybe better in a few others fucking up QTs with ShowMores on 280chars is a big deal imo also just renaming it X like a dictator taking over a country and giving it a foreign name... like bruh you bought the company but you don't own the scene
@TylerAlterman (I don't say "Elon destroyed twitter" fwiw, I just have a few—pretty serious—gripes. and I voted with my 50 twitter shares in favour of the buyout)
@TylerAlterman tearing off a tab or two is actually helpful for everybody because it makes the UI/affordance to tear more visible/available, and this is of benefit to everybody tearing off all but 2 would be more deceitful than helpful, unless you only want 2 clients I guess
@etpuisfume @TylerAlterman I thought about this and concluded that (in my view) even this not necessarily deceitful per se; it visually establishes the context of the jar as being the sort of place that tips go! and this is helpful for all.
Retweeted @diviacaroline
@TylerAlterman Be a part of the whole you want to see in the world.
are going to feel like agitation
Replying to @abhayance
@abhayance @AskYatharth huh, haven't seen it directly and there aren't any cool vids about it that I can see, but premise seems decent!
@AskYatharth it gets motte-baileyed too, like I've had a lot of people question me as possibly-racist for saying I don't want to think of myself as white when this is in fact my best attempt to get out of this historical "white man" mindset, which I can tell isn't good for me or the world
Replying to @abhayance
Replying to @mari_lasilva
@mari_lasilva yeah this is what I ended up rolling with: malcolmocean.com/2024/01/realit…
@EgregoreGalore maybe so! but she's still the sullen & closed-off woman who will actually be receptive to you teaching her how to love again, not the one who isn't ready to open (or won't open to you in particular)
@tasshinfogleman as in you're too busy radiating love to all beings everywhere and everywhen to pick exactly one to put a ring on? seems to me your future wife is looking for a man who is busy radiating love to all being everywhere and everywhen
Retweeted @Thinkwert
Heraclitus replied,
@MJPiercello fun, and sounds lovely great dynamics would be cool to see a vid of all 7 parts main critical thing that pinged for me was that the prelude has a kind of variable timing, rather than the tight 16th notes I expect from the prelude
Retweeted @luinalaska
Thinking this is the time to stop having children when our ancestors continued to build the world despite plague, famine, s…
@luinalaska feeling bad for her for posting on /r/childfree she'd be better off on AITA or another thread that isn't already super biased on the topic I mean maybe she needs reassurance, but she could probably also use different perspectives, someone that'd help her see his view
@tasshinfogleman oh maybe you mean the bottleneck to getting married is that you haven't radiated enough love yet?
@EthanReeder I'm interested in the larger bonding thing, but not if I have to pay a substantial bullshit tax to get it it would make the bonding mostly fake anyway, meaning there isn't really a benefit
@EthanReeder well, Jess was suggesting we go somewhere with other people to watch the superbowl this year—49ers are playing!
@EthanReeder lives everywhere, in everyone twitter.com/HephaistosF/st…
u laugh u lose
have you ever noticed yourself abusing the "I" pronoun by eg declaring "I know THIS" when part of you in fact is saying "I doubt THIS".
you know SOMETHING that is about yes-THIS but also you know SOMETHING that is about not-THIS which means you also KNOW that you are confused and unclear about THIS
(this is usually a shadow statements thing)
Thread · Spotting fake-knowing in decisions about having children
can you spot the fake-knowing? I'll put it in the next tweet
"I know we made the right decision ending it as neither of us will change our mind but I am so sad and scared one day I might and I'll have lost him for nothing" "I know [...] neither of us will change our mind" "but I am [...] scared one day I might" = you don't know you won't!
if you KNEW, if you KNEW with your whole bodymindheartwombsoul, that you didn't want kids, this would not be a hard decision to make instead, you have a desire to have kids. it's hiding somewhere. you also have reasons not to. and currently you are rationalizing the desire away
there's a thing it would feel like to know with your whole bodymindheartwombsoul that this is not the moment for you to bring a child into the world and if you have that, you don't make torn up posts on reddit about how you know it's the right thing to do but want reassurance
to me this reddit confession reads about as clearheaded as a man writing on /r/christian about how he fears he might be gay but he knows that he made the right decision by marrying a woman uhh bruh your ideology made that decision, not you
who is this "I" who knows? and who is the "I" arguing with?
can this "I" tell for themselves that this is true? or are they taking somebody's word for it? are they justifying it elsewhere? malcolmocean.com/2023/11/i-can-…
oh wait lol I wrote a version of this thread already in response to a guy writing a letter to the son he was deciding not to have for similar supposedly-noble reasons that also showed to me clear signs of rationalization hiding lack of integration
to be clear: I'm glad these people aren't accidentally having kids while they're infected with these misanthropic memes, as I think that would be bad both for the kid directly and for their ability to eventually untangle the meme & come to true peace with having-kids-or-not!
@luinalaska a more detailed reflection on the confused thinking I'm seeing here
Thread · Wanting kids: distinguishing fear from genuine lack of desire · 3 of 4 tweets
I think it would be good for more people to have more kids I don't think it would be good for anybody to have kids who doesn't want to I think most who don't think they want to are actually: - confusing fear for lack of desire - rationalizing some external meme as their nondesire
I also don't think anybody should have kids WHILE they're in this particular state of confusion and I'm not intending to sow self-doubt. on the contrary, I'm saying "listen & discern your own fear, desire & received-knowings... and holding all of these together, consider."
(& I'm not claiming that for each person, that if they reflect in this more integrated way, they'll conclude they want to have kids!)
@AaronEstel I'd use it in all sorts of ways but one of them would be to manufacture limited edition art & design products idk how same counts as same tho
@frideswyth I had a very trippy moment related to this sitting in a pub in london when I realized that the experience I was having of some other moment was actually taking place at a pub in london ...an experience I am now having today, realizing that my london pub memory is happening in SF
@nosilverv if you make sacred art it rings deeper when you revisit it I feel this most clearly with some of the songs I wrote in my late teens & early 20s. I keep hearing new truths about the nature of the universe and I'm like "fuck this guy must have known" yet I kinda know he didn't
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@nosilverv if you make sacred art it rings deeper when you revisit it I feel this most clearly with some of the songs I…
@m_ashcroft > It turns out that the desire to have children and the fear of having children are both valid feelings that can co-exist. Being scared of having kids doesn't mean I don't want kids Fuck yeah man. Very much my vibe atm.❤️🔥
@TimeAndParsley oh totally. different people have hugely different surrounding memeplexes among world-changey communities, whether xrisk-oriented or climate-oriented, it's not uncommon for a "this is a bad time to have kids!" meme to be quite loud.
@impliar I'm really not sure how many "most" is, it just seems to me like it's natural for mammals to have a fertility impulse, natural for humans to have a family impulse. there's not a lot I'll guess is natural for a human but this is among it.
@impliar and again, I'm not saying it should win on balance, just that pretending it's not there in order to acquiesce to some other need/desire/etc, is fake
Thread · Wanting kids: distinguishing fear from genuine lack of desire · 1 of 4 tweets
oh or another reason someone might not have a sense of wanting to have kids was that they haven't met a person they'd wanna have kids with yet. that seems to me like totally a thing! (my desire to have kids went from "hmm probably" to "omg yes" that way)
Replying to @jonas_hellman
@jonas_hellman haha what
@Blogsbloke some fictions are truer than others
@Blogsbloke eg some attempts to speak on behalf of the american people are GENUINE attempts to speak on behalf of ALL american people. others are absurd kayfabe.
@mayfer @nickcammarata they sound like left hemispheres who don't believe in the right hemisphere to a large extent
@wendell_britt any understanding that doesn't free me on some level is a fake understanding even if it just frees me to have the problem but be at peace with it (while I perhaps try to also improve things)
Retweeted @sokindling
I think lots of people confidently rejecting “trading up” have never had the experience of being in a committed relationshi…
@sokindling yeah the tone of "trading up" is completely wrong, in part because the mere possibility of commitment precludes trading (although sure, if you're prior-to-commitment, play the field!)
@sokindling but having a new form of connection with someone else can make it unignorable that you aren't satisfied with your current situation at which point you may need to leave that situation! but that doesnt guarantee you that the new thing will work! thus "trade" possibility is fake.
Replying to @IkkyusDen
@IkkyusDen I parsed "I'm not your friggin tissue" not as "I'm not your shoulder to cry on" but as "I'm made of a separate cell line with different organs from you. my pain is distinct from yours" ...and it kinda fits lol.
@liminal_warmth good thing I know I'm not in tpot, I get to just not be part of this
@EthanReeder good shit similar to "I know I don't know" "I trust I don't trust" there's some stuff on this in Entering the Heart of the Sun and Moon, a book on romance as a spiritual practice that's been profound for Jess & me
@MichelleAkin @danielbrottman the possibility of honesty requires safety
Retweeted @itinerantfog
there is nothing you should be doing or should not be doing. those are your conclusions, they’re things that you create.…
@jbella @thechosenberg it's an ideology talking, not intuitive desires this time in history is indeed peaceful and prosperous, and also atomized & alienated. but this kind of justification is disconnected from actual embodied choosing. I have a thread on how you can tell:
@thisisneer hmm, I thought this, but I'm at the "dozens of strangers love intend.do" threshold, and having trouble getting to thousands
@nbashaw yeah, dumb
who do I know who's going to Vibeclipse? 😎 really stoked to experience such a vast cosmic event with friends and memespace-mates
@visakanv @the_wilderless I've read the first few chapters of The Ethical Primate and it's quite good so far! very grounded, direct. calls out other philosophers without the awful contemptuous quality that's so common
@_ali_taylor DSM fallacy you can kinda prove that all parenting styles that the study knew how to control for are equally good/bad, but uhhh something something frame problem
@_ali_taylor also a lot of "good parenting" with respect to certain cultures is literally optimized for creating certain traumas that are appropriate to the culture
Retweeted @_ali_taylor
no amount of “research” or “studies” that you claim are “credible” or “proven” will get me to believe that parenting has a…
@natural_hazard not sure but my sense is that if the higher frequencies are sufficiently larger amplitude then that IS what you hear or maybe even if they're the same volume—consider how the melody is very often the top line in a choir arrangement!
@natural_hazard so my guess is that what's going on is that often there is a fundamental pitch of the vibration and then harmonics on top, whether the formant of human speech or the harmonics in a trumpet's cone or the harmonics on a piano's string and the higher pitch ones ARE lower amplitude!
@natural_hazard but also something like, higher frequencies that are harmonic (ie have a period that's a nice integer ratio with the fundamental) are going to effectively bolster the amplitude of the fundamental, by producing more periodicity around that lower-frequency note
virtual "radio" is a pox my favorite online music service was called thesixtyone and it was deliberately for helping you discover new real artists you'd fall in love with twitter.com/OneFeIISwoop/s…
@Meaningness yeah, something like this seems true I've been staring a lot at my own anxiety lately, and it seems perfectly happy to generate distraction that involves doing things that matter, too (it's just not particularly good at steering) but either way there's a quality of ignoring
Retweeted @Meaningness
This seems like it might be a significant insight; but I’m not sure it is true. What do you think?
@jackinlondon @aleksil79 this is btw one of the things that makes polyamory unstable it's much more possible to start finding out that someone else is a way better match, in a way that initially doesn't seem to be disruptive to the main relationship but then turns out to be
Retweeted @the_wilderless
Hey, quick request, I just spent the past couple days bouncing around the hospital, having needles and drugs and blood…
"and where in your body do you feel this emotion...?" twitter.com/abhayance/stat…
familiar, like the names of the downstairs neighbors I've not met but whose mail I move from the gate to their door
sunday's sold out but there's still space left for tomorrow's Beyond Goals Intensive if you want to come get a few hours of support orienting to your life from me and some of my savvy, kind friends 😊 you can show up & introspect re literally anything intend.do/event/bgi?tw=m…
@AgotaDubi oh sweet, let's hang out! cool to see "trust dance" in your bio ❤️🔥
@visakanv acquire rare early merch, ideally with signatures
@visakanv I have a song called Moving Day which is kind of about seizing today even though you failed to seize yesterday ...I wrote it 10 years ago and have lost count of how many times I've tried and failed to record and release a version of it for those entire 10 years.
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@visakanv I have a song called Moving Day which is kind of about seizing today even though you failed to seize yesterday…
the world is big, and also small, in that it contains an absurdly high number of places that are, all told, not that big
@VividVoid_ app for orienting to what to do today in light of what you care about long-term intend.do/?utm_source=tw…
Retweeted @the_wilderless
no one ever told me the 5 stages of grief are straightforwardly functional denial: yeah, sometimes "problems" are kind…
@the_wilderless reminds me of this vid about how probably one of the reasons people resist doing things is that as a kid people often try to get you to do things for dumb reasons and in fact if you ignore the thing the problem goes away (eg someone else solves it) youtube.com/watch?v=Tr4exO…
@zetalyrae not sure the whole picture but it's almost certainly related to the thing where fear-based motivation kinda dominates desire-based motivation and therefore you shouldn't wire it up to anything but actual threats you can literally flee from malcolmocean.com/2022/02/toward…
Retweeted @TylerAlterman
Hot take: in the same way that intelligence can be context-specific (intelligent at math but not complex social situatio…
Retweeted @utotranslucence
not yet well thought out, but I would really like it if the dudes converting to christianity after realising their uto…
@RichDecibels @utotranslucence lol sure okay but like if you said that about someone who had abused a bunch of their partners......
@RichDecibels @utotranslucence also something like "the aim isn't to just be not worse than any other huge old group of humans" — visionaries with somewhere bold to go (eg "Game B") need to be making the case not just for christianity being okay-I-guess but being salvageable in service of such visions
@weirdomoots - yo @visakanv not sure what your mentions experience actually is given maybe you don't follow my wife but she wanted to send you this
@meditationstuff junctured awareness tubes
@arabelladevine 👏👏👏
@himbodhisattva @QiaochuYuan there's always some randomness but you can see the patterns over time
@literalbanana gorgeous!
@__drewface here for this I've been on an arc of getting more into winning the last few years
@__drewface there's a confusion that's something like "winning is bad because making other people lose is bad" but like... a) making other people lose is not as bad as winning is good b) truly trying to win is what makes many games fun and interesting, and what allows growth/skills/dev
@__drewface but also when the competition is anything actually real that matters, winning is good because getting what you want and figuring out how to do so is good, separate from the actual competition any denying of this is basically bad=good, which uhh yikes
@meditationstuff @utotranslucence maybe relevant to you!
@__drewface play long games, win long prizes 🤠
Retweeted @MJPiercello
@nosilverv We don't think the way we think we think.
@profoundish integration requires respecting the nature of the part-to-be-integrated
@literalbanana looks like you can write a community note for your own post at least (haven't tried submitting it)
@literalbanana the question of whether others will upvote it is a separate issue
had some trouble explaining to the LLM how to write this function in the first place (I was initially taking a confused approach that was going to return mid-loop if it found something) but once I wrote it I realized it could be replaced with a oneliner and it was cool to do that
what I want is what I want
Thread · A collection of useful tautologies · 4 of 18 tweets
good is good & bad is bad not the other way around
this meta one
evolution, expressed as a tautology:
you will tend to notice more of the sorts of things that are better at getting themselves noticed by you
Thread · A collection of useful tautologies · 2 of 18 tweets
you're in the process of making your future old friends right now
😇 naive trust as not Q'ing bc you've never been burned (in this context) 🫡 forced trust as not Q'ing bc not okay to question (says authority or inner desperation) 🧐 non-naive trust as not Q'ing bc you know what distrust here would feel like and you can tell you don't feel it
@AbstractFairy vibes malcolmocean.com/2024/01/guru-d…
Thread · A collection of useful tautologies · 1 of 18 tweets
"The only time you can save is the time you haven't yet saved."
you don't trust what you don't trust
you can get more information that causes you to be able to trust it, it can change to become more trustworthy to you, you could change in a way that lets you navigate it safely... but right now, if you don't trust it... you don't trust it! anything else is pretending or ignoring
to be clear, by "trust" here I mean "non-naive trust", which seems to me to be roughly what we want to mean by default when we say trust (the other stuff is kind of fake)
Thread · A collection of useful tautologies · 1 of 18 tweets
the tautology at the center of my Non-Naive Trust Dance framework and one of the first tautologies that caused me to realize how useful tautologies can be I've often expressed it as "you can't trust what you can't trust"; same truth, words are words
@bashu_thanks haha can you try? I'm really curious 😆
@aleksil79 no proof or argument should be necessary! if A and B are the same tautology, this will be self-evident if one looks in the right place
@visakanv > Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing! paulgraham.com/die.html
high-involvement vs high-considerateness conversation styles be like
Thread · Steering by what seems good to me instead of rationality
what nobody tells you about "trying to do what's rational" is that you end up rationalizing a lot of stuff
the only stable thing I can steer by is: what I want ...to be clear, it's not the words "what I want". it's a type of question-and-answer. other words: - what seems good/right to me - what makes sense to me - what I am drawn towards & repelled from - my own yesses and nos
if I try to steer by anything other than what seems good to me, I'm making a fundamental confusion in my agent-arena relationship
now, "what seems good to me" can totally include: - helping others - repaying a debt - honoring an inconvenient agreement in other words, it's not inherently selfish or whatever. but it also can't get hacked by "you shouldn't be selfish"
also, discerning "what seems good to me" may involve: - calculating probabilities - following advice I don't totally understand from a credible-to-me source - recognizing the cost/benefit of being able to rationally justify something to a 3rd party reasons may be relevant
the key is that I'm the one choosing which reasons are relevant, based on which ones make sense to me given what I want and I'm the one choosing how to relate to my debts and agreements, and how to have integrity. where I want to be kind
"doing kind things for other people", in the absence of wanting to do it, isn't kindness at all but subjugation! this is obvious; if it seems otherwise you've probably got a bit flipped somewhere (or we're using words differently)
it makes sense that rationalists got big into altruism, because of the way that rationalizing goes along with trying to steer in a way that's out of touch with your own desires
it's not that other people's values don't matter but they matter TO THEM the way they matter TO THEM, which is necessarily different from how they matter to you because you're you and they're them!
you care about everything you care about exactly as much as you do no more, no less sometimes this is inconvenient for some other part of you sometimes this is inconvenient for some other part of society you can deny it if you want, but it'll keep being true
and if you're hearing this and are afraid that if you take in what I'm saying here, then you'll hurt people, then guess what?! you care about not hurting people!
irrationals, imaginaries, transcendentals... ...what if there were a class of numbers called the "hypothetical numbers"?
Retweeted @Morphenius
Implicit in this view is that the mind is your friend. It WANTS to help. It’s looking for ways to help. Part of spiritual…
@Morphenius the mind is your friend and is trying very much to do its best to help and is also dealing with a lot of conflicting instructions you gave
@Morphenius also the mind is already hurting you by the time the spiritual cultures get a chance to exploit those structures in order to exert other kinds of control etc they didn't start the fire
Replying to @jonas_hellman
@jonas_hellman @dr_mcgilchrist haha yeah I'm big into McGilchrist's model:
Replying to @jonas_hellman
@jonas_hellman > (how do I link someone's profile without bothering them..?) you could do it with a literal link: twitter.com/dr_mcgilchrist but in this case: a) that account doesn't converse, it just posts his new videos b) you said "paging" which implies you WOULD want his attention :P
Replying to @benwr
@benwr tautologies are good shit
@benwr also it's been awhile, I'm back in the bay now, let's hang out sometime (DM me tho as I can be pretty spotty at checking twitter notifs)
@this_is_silvia u n monk have the same bday (this showed up adjacently in my tl)
commitment, in the context of spirituality, is at best a form of training wheels
powerful move I found recently: to say "I like money" without tarnishing that simple truth with either: 🫣 some childish postmodern narrative around how that makes me greedy and is bad 😈 some edgy dark redpill narrative around how money is my *true* or *only* motivation (in biz)
(can do the same move with power, or status, or sex, or various other things)
...also training wheels often impede learning by removing key sources of feedback while adding distracting ones 😅😬 collectiveiq.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/how…
...now the real puzzle is how to say "I like money" without that simple truth getting tarnished by someone hawking a crypto scam 😑
Retweeted @uncatherio
thinkin’ about some recent dating experiences - available women interested in men: is this true or false for you? “I woul…
BeReal is so fucking confused about what its value proposition is. no I don't want to follow fucking "RealBrands" and be a "RealFan". as the app itself says elsewhere, it's for my close friends. fuck off.
so far in the super bowl I think every single ad except one has been at least somewhat a meta-ad about some people making an ad absolutely zero fourth wall. maybe new levels of bonkers have been reached
way less annoyed about American football being called "football" now I've discovered that "foot" here meant "on foot" to contrast it with sports played on horseback 🏇 (baseball and basketball are also football in this sense)
had a lot of fun watching the super bowl today and getting really into it in part because being in SF it felt easy to identify with the 49ers and be like "we just scored" and "ha our guy got him". such a simple "we"
@iamjoshknox not saying it should be called that, just that taxonomically it is, yes (also ultimate frisbee is footpuck)
@mattgoldenberg it is not known for certain, but there are definitely early references to foot-ball that had no kicking whatsoever en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_…
@mattgoldenberg but good on you for asking! I've got a big Artistic License hanging on my wall when it comes to etymologies 😜
@JimmyRis I liked the one where they wish on the genie for celebrities to show up, then eventually wish to be at the super bowl, then the ad break ends and it cuts to a scene at the super bowl where they're all there in costume that was a fun 4th-wall breaking. put the ad in same cine uni
ICYMI, some research suggests peak bonkers was a few years ago
@the_aiju I think it might have invented the didactic business novel in its current form (more commonly used for management/leadership teaching, later books include Leadership and Self-Deception, Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps, Context Context Context)
feeling good feels good
you want to live in the kind of culture you want to live in
Thread · A collection of useful tautologies · 2 of 18 tweets
calvinists hate this one weird trick
vote with your feet
Retweeted @Coscorrodrift
i like money
@aleksil79 hmmm can I have some of yours then? I'm pretty into it
@HorrorUnpacked new testament is totally postmodern
@meaningfulideas I'm not sure and happy to be proven wrong! I'm pointing at basic intuitions about fairness (which other apes also have) but then applied to money-and-resources-as-often-experienced-by-children
Replying to @S0ulFragm3nt
@S0ulFragm3nt it could be that the class already exists, but any numbers that are in such a class are purely hypothetical
😤✋❌ parts work 😎👉✅ members work
insurance company: "nice house you got there... would be a shame if something were to happy to it..."
Retweeted @visakanv
3. make money from a skill that benefits both you and your art. for example, christopher nolan used to make corporate videos
@QiaochuYuan once again,
@mattgoldenberg @m_ashcroft I've been doing a kind of "activism by example" by quoting this every time:
Retweeted @JakeOrthwein
1. Iain McGilchrist on what he calls “necessary distance” 2. Brian Cantwell Smith on what he calls “middle distance” (or…
@visakanv I have the same affliction and tbh you've been an inspiration for me because of how often you DO repeat stuff (eg your talking points reboot thread)
@visakanv one nice thing about twitter is that repeating is more obviously remixing
@shakoistsLog nice, she hasn't been cucked by Big Reasons
buzz buzz buzz hello I am cornflakes
kinda fucked up that things happening involves other things not happening
@visakanv what's ctrl+shift+` ?
I used to think "that which can be destroyed by the truth should be" but now I miss my job and I don't think my boss needed to hear that
@rachelclif @RichDecibels legend has it she actually wrote this addressed to her label, which was asking her to put another love song on her next record
I made a playlist out of many of the counterexample replies to this, plus a few of my own favourites (it's unordered so far) open.spotify.com/playlist/3uHCH…
"if you, as a metasystematic exister..." — @utotranslucence
(I haven't heard the rest of her sentence yet because we laughed too much at the first half)
@shakaz_ that makes a lot more sense! ...if you assume minds can be separate, which I don't.
@evergrowthadam how many worlds are there though? like my impression was that not everything is a quantum branch point, but also I'm confused about this
@mounica_v8 mmmm. how is that integrating for you? are you coming to a place of ~self-forgiveness with it?
@jackfriks ikr!
Replying to @benwr
@benwr arguably "involved" already means "entangled" 😜
on further reflection, this is probably for the best... because it also means that it's sometimes possible to stop something from happening by making something else happen instead
@sandra_sobanska yeah there's something I really like about the livingness of "members" as contrasted with a more mechanical sense of "parts" like the things your car has
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
@visakanv so the question of how to manage or even heal ADHD changes from “how do i get better at paying attention to thin…
finally an articulation of ADHD that thoroughly resonates with me. it's very frustrating and scary and annoying and confusing.
> it's very frustrating and scary and annoying and confusing. ...by which I meant this ongoing experience of unstable importance, not the experience right now of reading a description that resonates. tho the mortifying ordeal of being known is mortifying as per usual
this is the quote that never ends... it just goes on and on, my friends! some people tried to click through it (not knowing what it was) and they'll be trying to click through it forever just because
this is the quote that never ends... it just goes on and on, my friends! some people tried to click through it (not knowing what it was) and they'll be trying to click through it forever just because
@the_wilderless yeah my response reading it after seeing that it was dissed a bunch was "seems fine/wise taken literally if you read the whole thing & discern" (but I also think that advice that if you only read half of it would suggest doing something stupid is uhhh maybe bad advice)
there's no place called "away" there are only other places where do you want to go?
huh, a literal trust-dancing program get new immigrants and people with different backgrounds etc to dance together and you can make other kinds of communication more possible! batterydance.org/dancing-to-con…
there are two types of path to peace: 1. make your life increasingly intolerable so that you'll be forced to develop equanimity or else suffer greatly 2. make your life increasingly lovely so that the taste of "mmm yes, this" becomes the norm and bullshit becomes intolerable
Retweeted @forthrighter
don't make me tap the sign x.com/forthrighter/s…
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
(an error message from my podcast app but it could also be an interpersonal comment when someone's trying to be playful…
Retweeted @visakanv
at any given moment people are typically dealing with problems that they didn't know how to avoid or solve because if they k…
one of my favorite things about twitter is that the context is always everything
@visakanv "there's a lot that I care about right now" (also, I'm curious if you have a new phrase for this now (especially with fatherhood but also in general))
it's not unwise to take advice from people whose lives are in worse shape than yours ...as long as you're also learning at LEAST as much from making a study of their blindspots
Thread · Rearticulating an idea in your own words is creative · 3 of 5 tweets
the mere act of rearticulating something from memory that you read, whether moments or months ago—without attempting to add anything new—is creative and contributes to our collective sense of things
...appropriately/ironically, I spent 5 minutes trying to find someone else's articulation of this point to QT it 🙃 before eventually cutting my losses and articulating it once again myself. and I really like how it came out!
(there was a funny meta meme some weeks back where at least 2-3 people, maybe many more, were saying this same thing in their own words, maybe QTing each other)
@weirdomoots - keywords: restate rearticulate steal copy original new someone else remix change can't
@DumuStumejas @AbstractFairy mmmm :) want to say more about it? even just restating exactly what you think I and others have said would be interesting to me!
@visakanv I was just revisiting this old top blog post of mine earlier today malcolmocean.com/2017/11/transc…
Thread · A collection of useful tautologies · 1 of 18 tweets
you are at your own learning edge, already and always
@visakanv interestingly, despite having been nurturing this Tautology Zoo lately, reading the word "tautologically" in my post didn't make me think of an addition to the thread but reading your tweet *did*!
@David_Kasten speaking my language
Thread · Almost nothing is actually designed · 1 of 7 tweets
moooooood
you know that feeling when you're using a product/service/system and you have the sense that the person who made it actually took seriously that someone would be in the situation you're now in having the experience you're having?
@forthrighter yeah I did a few experiments with this back when it first came out! here's a very serious one, attempting to actually articulate something recursive/self-referential:
@forthrighter here's one that's an experiment with the medium, exploring not having to make a tradeoff re where the tweet boundary ends:
@forthrighter u can't touch this
@michael_nielsen huh, yeah, whether via an earnest nerdposting rabbit-hole or just trying to figure out what everybody else is referencing that you haven't seen yet
Retweeted @utotranslucence
the delay in average marriage age from early 20s to early 30s is the postmodernity tax; the time we must take to build…
@julianzehr @inflammateomnia @utotranslucence nah, it's a counterintuitive (but useful) chart design. there are 3 groups, each with a different color, that are "attendance". no way to see "attendance by age" but you can see that "ever married" status mostly depends on age, and varies a lil between the groups but not much
I've been getting a bunch of out-of-nowhere kinks in my neck over the last few weeks, like I just turn and suddenly—ow! then it hurts to tilt/turn any ideas for how to: - ease current tension - prevent future such kinks
I write a yearly review blog post every year (almost finished with 2023's — this is way later than usual) and man there are suspiciously many times when something happens in January or March or August that I'm not ready to write about but fortunately don't have to yet.
you can't ever take what authorities say for granted, because even if they're right, you can't take for granted that you've understood them properly
making case studies out of aspects of your life is great but if the main thing a relationship/project/situation has going for it is that it's making a great case study... ...consider that it'd be more useful to have a case study of something that is also awesome on its own terms
“The one anarchist institution” (G. K. Chesterton) It may be said that this institution of the home is the one anarchist institution. That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outside the State. By its nature it is refreshed or corrupted by indefinable forces of custom or kinship. This is not to be understood as meaning that the State has no authority over families; that State authority is invoked and ought to be invoked in many abnormal cases. But in most normal cases of family joys and sorrows, the State has no mode of entry. It is not so much that the law should not interfere, as that the law cannot. Just as there are fields too far off for law, so there are fields too near; as a man may see the North Pole before he sees his own backbone. Small and near matters escape control at least as much as vast and remote ones; and the real pains and pleasures of the family form a strong instance of this. If a baby cries for the moon, the policeman cannot procure the moon — but neither can he stop the baby. Creatures so close to each other as husband and wife, or a mother and children, have powers of making each other happy or miserable with which no public coercion can deal. If a marriage could be dissolved every morning it would not give back his night’s rest to a man kept awake by a curtain lecture; and what is the good of giving a man a lot of power where he only wants a little peace? The child must depend on the most imperfect mother; the mother may be devoted to the most unworthy children; in such relations legal revenges are vain. Even in the abnormal cases where the law may operate, this difficulty is constantly found; as many a bewildered magistrate knows. He has to save children from starvation by taking away their breadwinner. And he often has to break a wife’s heart because her husband has already broken her head. The State has no tool delicate enough to deracinate the rooted habits and tangled affections of the family; the two sexes, whether happy or unhappy, are glued together too tightly for us to get the blade of a legal penknife in between them. The man and the woman are one flesh — yes, even when they are not one spirit. Man is a quadruped.
@mounica_v8 iirc it came from reflecting on how back when I was in an unhappy marriage I used to justify staying in it in part because I felt like there was a lot I was learning and stuff but now I'm in a happy marriage and I'm learning a lot more (and NOT learning that life sucks)
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF oh totally, I'm talking about rationalizing staying in a situation at the point when all you've got left is something to prove, and nothing enjoyable or satisfying
@DharmaRational wow did you remember the exact phrasing, word-for-word? even if you didn't, directly-copying can also be a first step in creativity
@visakanv yeah I went to write a sequel to my Transcending Regrets post, with new insights from the year since I first wrote it, and partway through trying to write the sequel I went and re-read the original and found that all my new insights were already in there
@visakanv baha hilarious mashup with DSM fallacy — "but then it would be normal!"
@visakanv haha what is this from?
@br___ian @_brentbaum @jazz_bard yeah I'm here for this haven't ever done literally what the top-level post says, but the overarching vibe feels familiar
Retweeted @selentelechia
ok ok speculation:
what if society but good tho?
@puheenix mmm reading that gets me back in touch with this ~mantra / deep spiritual intention I adopted a few years ago
@puheenix @inkolore_ oooh yeah, the vasty deep
poker but with spoons bet spoons, win more spoons don't go all in
@jonnym1ller I have a lot of books in the pipeline. current one I'm most excited about is around "how to fall sanely in love"—talks about human mating dances. in a way it's one powerful idea, but it covers a lot of ground an in a different way is like a full intro to non-naive trust-dancing
@RomeoStevens76 @vervaeke_john has a son (maybe other kids, not sure) and he may have been the one who coined the term (and he certainly popularized and expounded it) also @jgreenhall has iirc 3 kids and talks about "the meta-crisis" (and, I'd say, his own grappling about it)
Retweeted @eshear
This is a true fact to think about, but only in the same sense that at some point as someone adds grains of sand they create a…
@eshear evolutionary universe go brrrr youtube.com/watch?v=uXfmn8…
Retweeted @jessicamalonso
It’s a no? Go find yes. The end.
@jessicamalonso and if it's unclear whether it's a yes or a no, it's a "slow"
what if packaging but good tho?
source! the rest of the video is way less interesting. you'd be better off instead just watching a distinct intro to kirigami (origami but you can make cuts) youtube.com/watch?v=BxVGLd…
Thread · A guided meditation that produced deep relaxation and ego death · 1 of 11 tweets
@RomeoStevens76 oh, an update here is that I wrote a blog post about my experience after the 3rd time I did the meditation malcolmocean.com/2023/03/art-is…
focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of
nothing is infinitely important and nothing is infinitely irrelevant
fancy a snuggle?
Retweeted @utotranslucence
Hey twitter. I'm making a course/app that walks you through co-ordinating help for a friend or family member in acut…
@utotranslucence some sort of pun or riff on "care package" could be good Care Package Made Of Friends Air Package Make Care
@utotranslucence something about masterminding something Plot To Help Your Friend idk
okay hear me out: Pronoia
@eshear I wonder to what extent those are trained on @QiaochuYuan's math.SE & mathoverflow answers (he is also a pretty good person to talk to)
....this was to me 😅
finally published my 2023 yearly review blog post. usually I aim to get it out late-Dec or early-Jan, but better late than never. this is the 13th consecutive year I've written one! malcolmocean.com/2024/02/2023-y…
Retweeted @nickcammarata
I think the most powerful quadrant is macro ambitious but micro non-clinging aiming towards large improvements but okay…
@sonikudzu this tweet doesn't preview properly but it's like - other people think different things than me - no actually other people ACTUALLY think those things
Retweeted @visakanv
@youngprotean nah each person should focus on whatever they personally feel compelled to focus on the ecology probably thriv…
@youngprotean @visakanv my take is that your shifting interest towards distribution IS also the kind of "personally compelled" that Visa is talking about it's not that you/everyone SHOULD be distribution-focused, but different people will notice the pain of not solving distribution more/less, and do so
@visakanv @youngprotean and like yes, you might be less personally fascinated with it and happy to let others do it if that's working ...but if it's not working, and getting it working is what you need to do to further your art... then you figure out how to get it working
@visakanv @youngprotean I've been in this tension for years, where I'm much more excited about building stuff than trying to sell it (although I don't mind shilling other peoples' stuff, but that's a whole thing) but I've gotta do some selling too
@visakanv @youngprotean but also to some extent I've been realizing that part of my trouble selling is downstream of a lack of product-market fit and product polish. not all, but some. so then it's like okay, I could maybe solve distribution by doing more design/building, less "marketing"
@visakanv @youngprotean and also a lot of my growth (with intend.do) came from partnerships and integrations, which is a very different path from talking to the public about my offerings, etc
@visakanv @youngprotean re shilling other peoples' stuff, there's a natural reason for this asymmetry
@visakanv @youngprotean mmm yeah that makes sense! so you've been solving for distribution by finding more weirdos and/or getting people more familiar with you
@TrisherTweeter huh, @Morphenius, this is a particularly weird evolution of Original Spin the confusion about needing to defend God parallels the confusion about the possibility of being separate from God
@audereaudere yuppp you might appreciate DSM fallacy (aka "normal-is-functional fallacy")
@AskYatharth @VividVoid_ literally just weeks after this exchange, @Morphenius and I developed some new models etc, that are in part about how potentially-liberating ideas get coopted to reenslave
@reasonisfun @QuietMindPoetry if something feels wrong something is wrong (though it may not be the exact same something)
every obvious thing your worldview denies—or even treats as too obvious to bother acknowledging—is a gift you hand to crazy worldviews willing to acknowledge them
Thread · Why people adopt crazy worldviews, and how to deradicalize · 2 of 4 tweets
How people get crazy worldviews: 1. person has a major experience they can't make sense of in any sane worldview available to them 2. crazy worldview is helpfully like "hey look here's how it makes sense"
this, helpfully, implies much about how to deradicalize people and cultures: • develop sane worldviews that can welcome & make sense of a wider variety of experiences • when you have a relatively sane worldview, publicly acknowledge obvious things
@__drewface yeah very offensive I also think it's been FAR long enough since blue LEDs were invented last for them to continue to seem cooler than red LEDs
@__drewface also the monitor that thinks that moments after the computer powers off, it should light up briefly with a bright blue screen indicating that there's no device connected
Retweeted @__drewface
ban devices that have little LEDs on them everywhere that I can't turn off. I know if looks cool in the store, but *please…
@eshear hmm I feel like America is currently experimenting with undocumented immigration being legal if you can tough out the border crossing and some years of bureaucratic hell probably a better challenge could be issued that would be more exciting and wholesome
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF @eshear all four of Emmett's examples have a kind of wholesomeness, even the bar fight and art heist
Thread · Why people adopt crazy worldviews, and how to deradicalize · 1 of 4 tweets
aha I felt like someone else had articulated this before! (thanks @AbstractFairy)
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF bruh get your "we" in check. some people do this.
I have a beef with when people say "in our culture we're so..." absurd bloated equivocation between microcultures (the people in this room), subcultures (the sorts of people we know), and mainstream-society-at-large name it! which culture are you talking about!?
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF yeah that sounds right, re divergence! I almost added a "some forces in people do this" to account for this part of your view, actually! but I deleted it because it felt clearer to just say my own view
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF I agree if you are willing to add "some" to the front of your middle sentence there. or even "most" although actually maybe our difference lies in what "non-crazy worldviews" refers to. my read is that most worldviews, even mainstream ones, are also crazy
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF 🙏🙇♀️
Thread · Why people adopt crazy worldviews, and how to deradicalize · 1 of 4 tweets
@AbstractFairy this is a pretty good example of someone (rootsmetals on instagram) acknowledging multiple obvious things in the same paragraph: (I don't necessarily agree with all of the frames she's using per se, but it's progress over a worldview that acknowledges only one of these things)
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF btw: while I'm very much in favor of talking about the egregores etc—and really appreciating you helping me see them— this "we" felt representative of a tendency you have, to speak on behalf of egregores even when they hate you, which is mindshattering to even attempt to parse
@HephaistosF I'm sure there's a reason you feel you must do it, but wanted to name it explicitly, for clarity between us and for clarity of onlookers it causes a kind of recoil reaction, appropriately; it's a mental equivalent of a prion or something. a weird twist that begets more twists
@RomeoStevens76 let's me & you & @Morphenius record a call sometime about Original Spin and attachment and so on. I think there's a juicy intersection here (Michael did you have the chance to listen to Romeo's supercooperation cluster piece?) youtube.com/watch?v=X6MYsK…
@natural_hazard example?
@goblinodds @cauliflwr_human yeah will help save others from getting seduced by the blackpill sane worldviews
@chromohomosome yeah I'm talking more in terms of worldly/external mission family has selfness; on the level of a family, I would advise the parents to be attending to "what makes the family come alive", which surely will include nurturing the children
@slimepriestess @HephaistosF do you think it helps? (real question although I'm not intending to hide my take here)
@a_fellow_of @visakanv I was gonna reply this if you hadn't
Retweeted @MJPiercello
@m_ashcroft "Problems with benefits "
@anonynaut it's not about that, it's about the fact that CS degrees are only tangentially relevant to actually building software it would be like if someone wanted a job as a carpenter and they'd studied wood and its properties but had never built anything
Replying to @mccrabb_will
@mccrabb_will also the genius of Alexander Technique (which Reeve studied)
@riversmind @cognazor I might be interested—glanced at the table of contents and it looks juicy—though I already have a lot of Christopher Alexander to get through
@cognazor this is one meta-level religious orientation that has a draw for me right now
the advice is to block out time when you can do whatever you feel like I've made a weekly practice of this (link in next tweet) and it's proved remarkable. last saturday I used that space to fix a longstanding bug in my app! twitter.com/selentelechia/…
I've only been taking in now though, 3y later, the extent to which so much of my motivation has been anxiety-based. I've felt a lot of freedom to do whatever I want, so not coerced in that sense. But very uncomfortable doing nothing, or attending to problems idk how to solve.
the moral revolution we need in our time is not about the courage to be a self-sacrificing martyr... but rather, the courage to live the most exquisitely beautiful and personally-satisfying life you can (while wholesomely loving others)
@slimepriestess @HephaistosF yeah I'm in favor of saying it, but there's a difference between speaking AS it vs OF it
@RomeoStevens76 @Morphenius hm, the stuff on acausal trade vibes with this thread (which is one of my denser pieces, defs worth you reading if you haven't yet)
bruh if your predictions are always right then you could have predicted that your coin flip would come up heads so uhhh nope
@xsphi another riff on this
Retweeted @nickcammarata
people sometimes worry that awakening and surrendering to the present moment sounds like dissociation. but it's more lik…
Retweeted @zetalyrae
sci-fi author: in my book I invented the Utopia Nexus as an inspirational tale activists: at long last, we have banned the…
@zetalyrae worth doing!
@visakanv brilliant. looking forward to using this as a quote reply
huge and hilarious and tragic if true
WHAT... Weather.
@meditationstuff woah wait what then is the sensation we call "heat" internally (eg in the chest) not thermoception but some yet completion different sense just getting analogized as "heat"? (like chili peppers, kinda)
@p_millerd yeah this is largely what I'm doing too usually one take + one shot, though now I've been playing around a bit with descript and might do a bit more editing both in terms of overlays and cuts I play with various different vibes
Retweeted @benlandautaylor
We’ve known for years that recycling plastic is harmful at best and fraudulent at worst. Yet the idea that we should m…
twice, about 2 minutes each, once when thinking about my own vocation and the other when thinking about my future kids' vocation
@AskYatharth let's talk! some years ago I implemented a whole research dashboard for a group in germany that wanted to do some studies, so there are already systems for running controlled experiments (some probably a bit rusty now)
@AskYatharth like you can set up a second server that lets users enroll in studies and sorts them into groups and surveys them every week or whatever
@AskYatharth (or of course we could study the existing userbase or whatever)
Retweeted @MattPirkowski
Musk frames the problem of extending human cognition into the digital realm as primarily a data rate problem. This fram…
best science mystery story
@pr4y3rh4nd5 you're not stupid; it's a weird point I'm trying to make what I mean is like... leaving aside *gender* roles, there are different basic functions that sexes can play. while "male" & "female" are based on gamete size, many other factors vary between species
toxic curiosity is when you keep asking questions and driving the conversation further down rabbit holes you don't actually care about
Thread · How hormonal birth control changed the human sexes · 1 of 7 tweets
here's a related thread puzzling about the ways in which different questions underlying "are you a woman?" often have different answers (and are evolving over time) and why it's bad to consider anybody (or any sub-answer) the sole authority on the topic
@mounica_v8 you might like some of @Morphenius's stuff. he's been investigating a lot how to tell the difference for yourself between operating out of memetic programming vs from your own core
Thread · How birth control and welfare incentives muddled marriage · 5 of 6 tweets
fascinating argument. institutions evolve, marriage already in 2004 was doing many things it didn't use to. I do think western society has made a bit of a muddle of marriage & dating & family over the past century or so, and conceptual muddiness is surely part of that.
I went and found the 1h debate. around 18mins in, Keyes makes an adjacent great point but undermines his own take a bit by framing it as "moral" in a way that Obama could reject as "lecturing". he's making a point about incentives! (which Obama ignores) youtube.com/watch?v=tQG5hI…
here's a thread about how birth control has already dramatically changed our species expression of sexual characteristics (and thus the relevance of marriage)
I read years ago (but have been unable to track it down) a fascinating article about how some social welfare programs in the 60s shifted incentives in favor of eg single moms & how this was problematic (even tho supporting single moms is good!) please share if you know a source!
a related muddle is the rise in "dating indefinitely". (straight) people couldn't do this before birth control. you were either: - courting (answering the Q of whether to commit) - having kids together (at which point society definitely prefers you married, for stability reasons)
@TylerAlterman seems like a lot of the puzzle is the cofounder fit-finding part as well, if a lot of these can't be done alone if the residency is going to support the "discover project" step, then it needs to support that as well
@TylerAlterman maybe would be good to allow people to recruit someone into the residency halfway through, to be their cofounder in the project. and you could tap the networks of all hosts+guests at the residency, to find prospective people
Retweeted @TylerAlterman
I wrote & analyzed a 20-person list of anyone I've seen go sustainedly super-saiyan (i.e., anyone who's become radically…
@ennuiposting @TylerAlterman sounds like fixed mindset pretty sure Tyler checked out what the person seemed capable of before, and noted that if they hadn't taken on this project, they would have stayed about as capable
@DescriptApp you guys had such amazing live support when I was working on my first project last friday, but now I'm just getting a bot that links me articles and offers to let me "get in touch" by "leaving a message". but I tried that, and no response in >24h! wtf?
Replying to @10kStonesPoet
@10kStonesPoet still early days but yes! (I had a first marriage that was godawful in the first 3 months so it feels meaningful for me to acknowledge that this one is lovely and keeps getting better.)
> In a future where AI makes products cheap, investing in distribution will be the wisest bet. every.to/napkin-math/th…
relates to stuff @visakanv has been on about
can you lay out for me how that logically follows? I don't see it at all. I see how it logically follows that birth control is "a big deal", but not "immoral".
@ForCognition negotiating with other people is a different issue imo. if I'm asking you questions I'm fascinated about but you don't wanna answer, we negotiate. and sure, someone could use this frame to try to gaslight me into thinking it's me who's not interested, but it's not an easy weapon
@ForCognition fwiw, I noted the pattern in myself first and foremost, and it's been helpful (I don't particularly use this name for it—I agree the name could be better) to watch it play out and realize I can do something that excites me more
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
fun fact: you can replace "fallacy" with "joke" and it pretty much always works
@ForCognition you seem to be either making, or responding to, the "normal is functional" fallacy and I think that we need to attack that directly
@ForCognition you can use shame "for good" but it still bears costs of undermining internal coherence / gaslighting etc better to simply say "you don't keep driving drunk, or we aren't your friends" and let the person discern whether, given that, they WANT to drive drunk.
@ForCognition if you try to do this with shame, you're trying to coerce your friends / trying to manipulate them into not seeing clearly which is common, but imo fucked up
@eshear you might like the book Resonance by Hartmut Rosa. I'm only a few chapters in (going slowly) but it's been helping me see stuff about this amzn.to/3T7ujqi
do dogs have superegos? elaborate
@JakeOrthwein are we human? or are we dancer? youtube.com/watch?v=PODjfd…
@bencasnocha also, for calls... the latency between your computer and your bluetooth earbuds can often be greater than the latency between your computer and the other person's computer if you want realtime, gotta go wired (or just speakers, which is how I take calls) benkuhn.net/wireless/
@bencasnocha totally
Replying to @radiofreejohn
@radiofreejohn @ibxtoycat @catehall it's countersignalling saying something that everybody in a group knows isn't true as if it's true so that the group can affirm their common-knowledge by laughing about how it isn't true
when do we get to have community notes for countersignalling-based jokes that spread outside of their original context?
@tasshinfogleman yeah I usually don't consciously decide sometimes I notice I appear to be unconsciously excluding someone, often because of some way in which I perceive them as low-status when I notice this, I see if there's a way to include them that would feel good, which there isn't always
ooh @Morphenius this is relevant to some of what you've been looking at lately (seems you've already seen it years ago, idk if worth revisiting)
@TylerAlterman this piece is one of my more manifesto-ish pieces, and I really liked how I had this cadence of "it seems to me that" which allowed me to speak boldly without implying others should already see it my way malcolmocean.com/2022/10/open-l…
Retweeted @utotranslucence
@vervaeke_john I just listened to your excellent interview with Lex Fridman, and find myself wishing for specific re…
@solitary_ps @eshear @scottastevenson even if the universe were "deterministic", it might not be predictable from the inside if you were an agent running on a computer running on a turing machine running on a conway's game of life sim... the only way to know what will happen exactly is to watch it unfold
@eshear Cedric Chin (@commoncog) has a good pragmatic angle on this: how to tell when random events fall sufficiently out of distribution that they represent an unknown force that you could (in principle) come to model, vs simply noise commoncog.com/process-behavi…
@eshear @commoncog (I think he got this from W. E. Deming; I mostly have gotten it not from either of them directly but from heated convos with my wife about it when she asked to see my app's analytics then started pointing out anomalies)
@eshear @scottastevenson sufficiently unpredictable that the only way to find out what will happen is to stick around and watch the system itself unfold
ego death? more like ego reboot
> A lot of advice is some variation on “express your feelings to not be haunted by them forever,” but what do people mean by ‘express’ here? 3 things: - expressing to yourself - expressing to a third party - expressing to the person (eg your boss crush) malcolmocean.com/2024/02/3-loop…
tfw it's blogpost-publishing day and you dunno what to publish and then you ramble into a group chat and your friend is like > Blog post plz 💖 about these three loops. Short and sweet just enough to explain these three things one could be trying to do.
> Due to Personality Disorders being ego-syntonic, 😮... 🤔... 🤯...🫠
reflecting on this a bit more, I'm thinking about how the christian moral regime has become so prevalent that even in relatively secular cultures, people have more sklavenmoral/invy/internalized envy, than direct *fear* metamoderna.org/another-kind-o…
can't spell sklavenmoral without venmo
@phantom_opus did you parse it as a specific reference? I was just trying to express a series of feelings unfortunately there's still no "huh whoa" emoji yet
@diviacaroline @selentelechia the way I use "superego" (which I deliberately omitted from the top post) is something like "the layer of your experience that tracks your sense of what others expect of you (which is distinct from having a trained reflexive behavior)" malcolmocean.com/2023/07/supere…
@Jeanvaljean689 I've heard that the body language is submission behavior, which is different from shame! but in any case, can they shame themselves? that would maybe be a way better test
@Evolving_Ego say more
@diegocaleiro say more? why did whales etc evolve superegos?
Replying to @finalperigee
@TheSteege 🫡🫶♥️ I appreciate you remembering and that you wanted to :)
@visakanv @AskYatharth ahh right it still doesn't distribute itself. it creates the sort of context where others WANT to do the work of distributing it
@visakanv @AskYatharth hhhhmmmmmm this is helpful can you de-psy-op me even further here? 💡 idea: call me whenever you get up and we can record a vid about it
and it seems to me that christianity contains the seeds within it for birthing the new moral revolution but we do actually have to chew the fruit off, plant them, and water them
@babarganesh @sashachapin say more? I sometimes build to do list apps (eg intend.do) so might be able to whip something up
Thread · Tracing original sin and the Fall as an upgrade in consciousness
since coining a meme "Original Spin" I've gotten a lot more curious about the "original sin" meme, so I started looking into it first thing, not surprising: the phrase doesn't show up in the old or new testament!
I didn't realize until quite recently how much of christianity as such was basically invented by Paul, who wrote many letters, the recipients of whom became the names of books of the bible ("Corinthians" is Paul's letter to the folks in Corinth) seems he's in part behind this?
wikipedia suggests that most of the biblical basis of original sin is pretty sparse and vague (and a complete departure from how the Jews viewed it)
I was initially pretty unclear, also, if Jesus himself had the conception that by dying on the cross he was saving people from sin. I re-read each of the 4 gospels' crucifixion scenes and saw no reference to it anywhere.
but then chattyG helped me find Matthew 26, from the last supper: > For this is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed on behalf of many for the forgiveness of sins
anyway. I've been thinking of the Fall Of Man a lot, because it's relevant to my research into the evolution of consciousness
one thing lots of scholars & saints seem to miss (eg A. H. Almaas who I was reading this morning) is the sense in which the development of egoic consciousness WAS an upgrade from the previous mode, even though it had devastating consequences (and involved losing many capacities)
the upgrade was something like "the capacity for self-reference" (ego~=self) which has obviously powerful implications vectorsofmind.com/p/the-snake-cu…
and then some people will say "this then makes you feel separate from god" but as far as I can tell this is a delusion; you can't be separate from god. but there is a pain associated with "I feel separate from god"... so what is that pain?
there is definitely *something* you are out of resonance with... but maybe it's your fellow humans and your collective imaginary...
embarrassing that Google is so well-known for shutting down beloved products that the gmail-sunsetting seemed plausible
@AndrewCutler13 whoa, fascinating! curious to check those out do you have an easy screenshot/link?
Replying to @sashachapin
@sashachapin WHAT A TERRIBLE DAY FOR ME TO BE OUT OF TOWN GODDAMNIT.
@not_a_hot_girl haha these were next to each other:
@AndrewCutler13 huh, are you saying that the other creation stories elsewhere... don't characterize a fall at all? did they not have one? but I thought they also involved a shift into self-awareness?
truly incredible to watch companies throw away money via payment form validation that insists that all countries have 5 numbers for their postal codes (many have 4-7 characters and they include letters as well)
@visakanv @adele_bloch I'd be curious to see the breakdown of each! I'm in the midst of brainstorming ways to diversify my revenue, and obviously our situations are different but uhh you're a better exemplar for me than 99% of people are 😅 (some of the existing brainstorming)
@p_millerd @visakanv haha I crossed mine so early (I've never had a full-time indefinite job) arguably I've been more self-employed than other-employed since I started doing web dev at age 14, though realistically it's more like age 23 after uni co-op terms, when I was already living off @IntendApp
just discovered that Jess's guitar case has a melodica pocket 🤩
you can get monkeys to win at video games by rewarding them with orange juice will they play other games just because it's fun? or gives some sort of other reward? or only humans...?
@eshear DAUq? Daily Active Unique?
oh wow let's talk, I've been thinking something very similar redesigning web-browsers (probably wrong name tbh) to put intentionality first
actually a pretty good lil story the question is "how do you stay present?"
PSA for all the people saying "I love you" to the entire timeline (or for those who've been annoyed by this and have had trouble naming why)
@drmichaellevin oooh @Morphenius we may want to check this out
@the_wilderless ypotinmpot
@the_wilderless that's an old tweet but idk, I feel like I'm mostly on here to talk about the sacred my sense of sacredness is quite connected to collective consciousness etc, so this whole experience of tweeting with yall is itself very sacred to me
Retweeted @algekalipso
"Doomers are seeking power, that's all". "E/acc is reckless and selfish." My friend, we live in a complex ecosystem of m…
Retweeted @suntzoogway
Objective vs Subjective morality is a false dichotomy Morality is intrinsically relative to conscious subjects, thus subj…
😮 pancake
@utotranslucence maybe we've been overthinking how to go about matchmaking our friends
dysfunctional dynamics, particularly reality distortion fields, arise when someone makes an implicit promise to meet a need of someone else's that the person isn't even willing to consciously acknowledge ( = my attempt at a 1-tweet summary of @CurziRose's handshake theory 👇)
seems we got "impossible" responses to this but uhh my wife uses the word "few" in a way that includes "5-7" or something. maybe idiosyncratic, maybe australian? so a $600-per-return accountant is totally fine!
@CurziRose (also this is not necessarily the only way that dysfunctional dynamics arise, but also a remarkable amount of dysfunction is ultimately downstream of people sticking around when so many signs say "GTFO", which is probably because of secret handshake)
@CurziRose also to be clear imo these dynamics can also be symmetric, and they don't necessarily involve a "bad actor" or whatever
Thread · Exclusivity without a commitment to stay together
the invention of "we've committed to be monogamous but we haven't committed to stay together forever" is weird and tbh contractually sus
like implicitly it's "I won't have sex with anybody else while we're still together, but I could break up with you then have sex with someone else and that wouldn't be cheating, but don't worry I won't, but of course we're not ACTUALLY committed for life yet don't be ridiculous"
this prompted by reading the Eliezer "trading up" thing again. the reason it sounds weird (besides exact %s) is because of an equivocation between "committed relationship" as in "committed to exclusivity" and "committed to stay with you"
if death doesn't do you part, a breakup will! either you've actually committed TO STAY TOGETHER (vaguely implicit in eg a bf/gf who move in together but usually totally unstated) or you have no such commitment, which imo IMPLIES you're open to finding someone better
this is based on an assumption I make, that maybe others don't but it seems sort of obvious, which is that most people would be stoked to get married if they trusted that they'd found the best match they were likely to find
and even if I'm wrong (in general or in your case) then I guess like, if you actually think you'd never want to commit to anybody forever... ...then it's a matter of integrity to ensure your current partner knows that and isn't assuming otherwise.
anyway, I guess it's not really surprising that people gravitate towards this weird attractor in the context of being a new weird species with sex-related pair-bonding instincts plus birth control
I find myself second guessing my top tweet because idk, a company can make demands while you're there but then not after you leave, that's a fine contract but I do feel like romantically-emotionally, ppl do be implicitly promising each other forever while explicitly not doing so
as also evidenced by the fact that people in non-marriage not-committed-for-life romantic relationships totally DO feel betrayed if their partner leaves for someone else! not merely sad, etc, but betrayed
hmmm I bet the implicit promise to be together forever is something that's happening on an unconscious handshake level
guessing these ersatz romantic promises are largely about filling attachment holes, which are the sorts of things that ARE supposed to be filled forever, not temporarily (insert long tangent about carrying Mother's Love with you forever in your heart)
so many relationship problems are caused by the accidental porting of courting norms to marriages and marriage norms to courtship VIA the brand-new messy invention of "dating indefinitely but not forever"
@suntzoogway thanks for inspiring me to finally write up my thoughts on this
@CurziRose imo it's pretty simple, you just wait for a proposal you're actually a "no" to, then say "no" to it (which could include "I feel like you're trying to NiceGuy your way into my pants but hiding your true intentions")
@alexrodriguesca maybe overgeneralizing from my own experience but most of my girlfriends were people I was near certain I was not going to marry (in part bc at the time I was meh on marriage in the first place, but also I was sorta just enjoying the experience and not looking for commitment)
Replying to @n8bitt
@n8bitt I mean I thought I was poly for many years but turns out basically I just wanted to sleep with a lot of people and then: A) I had enough of that B) I met someone worth being exclusive with C) monogamy came to seem better in general for what I wanted (kids, stability)
@n8bitt I don't really think anybody "is poly" in an inherent/intrinsic way. people have different libidos, different priorities, etc. different abilities to cultivate a commitment. those show up as different structures depending on context.
@n8bitt what I do know is that I wanted to be poly when I wasn't stoked af about my partner, and then when I met someone I was stoked about I neither wanted nor needed to be poly I started wanting my partner all to myself because I liked her an amount that made that feel right
@n8bitt so if by "cheaters are secretly poly" you mean "cheaters are secretly not that satisfied in their relationship and would rather not take full responsibility for satisfying their partner and would feel a sense of relief if their relationship ended" then maybe I agree actually
@alexrodriguesca but like, moreover I think a lot of people, esp in 20s, are with the person they're with not because they're seriously considering that marriage could be good, but because they're worried that if they leave them that they'll just be alone (even just for months/years, not forever)
Replying to @benwr
ah sorry yeah "until logistics do us part" can be good. I've done that too (eg high-school gf who was a year younger) not just "until I find someone else" but "until something else takes precedent'
@ai_for_humans lovely! that's ideal! I'm talking about all social and emotional agreements though when I say "contractually" tho, not just government ones (which uhh usually aren't involved with pre-marriage monogamy anyway 😅)
@BrandonGoldman > it means the person was likely at least emotionally cheating hmmm this is a decent argument! I like it. will digest. (I still think people are a bit confused about courtship-vs-dating)
@Coscorrodrift yeah I am not suggesting that you necessarily Find Someone Better then Leave in that order but you are open to the idea that you might conclude that someone else (even if you haven't met them yet) would be better
@Coscorrodrift but yeah thanks, you're pointing out a way in which I'm conflating a few things in the course of my rambly train of thought here
@Conaw yeah the premise is basically: court enough to know that it's time to commit then commit (or it's time to gtfo, so gtfo)
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF @CurziRose I think you're arguing from "eventually someone will get blamed and by definition that person is bad" again... which like... has a logical consistency to it but if you're going to go that hard into might makes right, you might as well stop using the word "right" altogether
@HephaistosF but if it's not using that sort of thing as a premise, and you have something you want to share with me, then I'm interested
@AaronEstel seems like you could make a LOT of money, from: - gay couples - old couples - couples squicked by pregnancy but on net I would say the thing sounds cursed, so
@AaronEstel but does the other human have to be still alive? if no, then that opens up all sorts of cool possibilities which might be worth playing with einsteinian kids, von neumannian kids, mozartian kids, idk. kid of Jesus Christ? tho regression to the mean ofc
@BrandonGoldman oh wait but this misses the part that I'm saying about how (reasonably or not) in practice a lot of people feel betrayed when people leave for non-other-exciting-person reasons
@uncatherio I reflect on that a bit here! how you're not a machine and your experience matters
Retweeted @mbateman
Friendly reminder
@mbateman yep! your innermost brain layer has been evolving just as long and in just as many mammal & human situations as your neocortex.
@mbateman @tomhyde_ oh man you're just like me
Replying to @uncatherio
@uncatherio mmmm something directionally right about that potentially!
you can *almost* watch sun shadows move how would you design something to amplify the tiny angle changes so that it could produce a visually-alive kaleidoscopic animation?
desperate times call for desperate measures, which is terrifying because nobody should have his number. you do not wanna meet that guy
Replying to @n8bitt
yes, that's a common view of polyamory! I'm trying to point out that I used to think that I was a person with that deep orientation, but then various things changed and now I'm stoked to be monogamous. and I have many former-poly friends w similar stories—including my wife!
@n8bitt and therefore, I can assume that at least some fraction of self-identified poly people are where I was 5-10 years ago and would benefit from hearing a perspective like my current one not that they should just "stop being poly"—it was a great part of the journey!
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
so many relationship problems are caused by the accidental porting of courting norms to marriages and marriage norms to…
@Conaw wait what is a slut cloud?
@BrandonGoldman > betrayal as breaking the relationship agreement [...] leaving for someone else obviously is that. insofar as "cultivating emotional intimacy" is required for leaving-for-someone... imo either the other emotional intimacy already was a betrayal, or the leaving is not
@SurgeCityDreams yeah that makes a fair bit of sense although also now we have the postmodernity tax
@MaxSoweski mmmm yeah I like what you're pointing at here part of it, imo, is the creation of a WE that can coherently WANT something, including "to see how this unfolds"
@polonius42 yup that sounds right. so what kinds of strategies do you suggest, given that?
@cphrmky marriages aren't a fungible product
@cphrmky but I think that one part of what is making people bad at making lasting marriages is the muddle I'm talking about where people are practicing "monogamy" in a non-eternal context and then settling, rather than waiting til a relationship where monogamy feels naturally F YEAH
I am coming at this from a weird angle, where I was in a miserable poly marriage, and part of what gave me the courage to leave was emotional intimacy w a friend I ended up attracted to so the intimacy was *not* betrayal but it was a marriage, so leaving was (and I don't take that lightly! although huh, it was a betrayal of the vow but not more of a betrayal of *her* than marrying her in the first place was, given how conflicted I was. although it caused that betrayal to become more real to her)
as I'm becoming more okay with simple, open competition, I'm noticing how many systems get stuck via shutting down competition in a way that's sort of fake or too early
Replying to @notnemmmo
@gedougen maybe if a woman feels like a man is wasting her time she needs to tell him she's gonna keep accepting suitors
example one: people stopping romantic competition before they've actually decided they're ready to commit for life "you should stop seeing other suitors now, in hopes I'll offer to wed you later"
example two: the government will protect your land against others using it, at very low cost, no matter how much use you're making of it (even if zoning laws ban you from using it the way you'd like to)
Retweeted @StephenKing
Dear Elon: Twitter. Twitter, Twitter. Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. And so on. Fuck your…
@metaLulie 150 is only one of many Dunbar numbers
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF @BrandonGoldman that last one might have helped! I found myself kinda wishing that people had said to me not "this seems like a bad idea" but "you don't have to do this, you realize, right?" not arguing but creating space, relieving pressure.
@HephaistosF @BrandonGoldman for people who were really up close with me at the time, seeing all the frames I was using at the time about Prime Bonds and Choice and so forth, I think that a bit of helping me deconstruct those concepts would have been helpful that stuff got SO reified
@HephaistosF @BrandonGoldman but ultimately, re "right call to make", there's a way in which I was gunning to sign up for a particular set of mistakes that gave me some learning experiences that I now value even though there was a lot of pain and jankiness throughout it so... kinda glad it went this way.
@HephaistosF @BrandonGoldman put another way, re "you don't have to do this", I felt like there was a lot of social expectation on me to go forward with it and I don't think this was actually that accurate, tbh! I think people mostly didn't care. but in a sense they let me continue assuming they did
@mdaviswilson totally, but also like sometimes it's not about you at all. nothing you can do. or they've tried to ask many times already and haven't been able to get through about it. (I agree when it comes to marriages though)
makes sense! polyamory has a few distinct failure modes: 1. you're in principle open to meeting a new primary, but fail to have enough space to meet someone, stuck too close to someone else because you love them and don't want to have them feel rejected (or, again, not wanting to be alone) 2. committing in a poly way because you're not stoked enough about the person to commit exclusively, but then you later meet someone you WOULD want to commit to exclusively but you're sorta stuck with the first person now
@visakanv there's an ayy lmao here... because there's a kind of long costly mistake that can benefit from being noticed earlier or something or other situations where it's better to learn from someone else's mistakes than your own which feels like another part of mentorship
comforted two inconsolable lil kids at different points today by making up a song on the guitar 💪 ...how's your day going?
atheists and theists alike have been coopted by Big Belief
"having a bunch of people give you proverb-level advice is only one way to find out how the world works" — @utotranslucence
if you don't think you have the power to improve a situation, look for ways you could make it worse, then check if you're already doing any of those things
Thread · How birth control and welfare incentives muddled marriage · 1 of 6 tweets
re the social welfare programs article above I talked to friends yesterday who have a 1yo kid together and are engaged but have been putting off getting married because the social benefits are so much better while she looks like a single mom! 🤦♀️🙃🤡
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
re the social welfare programs article above I talked to friends yesterday who have a 1yo kid together and are engaged…
"sometimes people aren't thinking, they're just having a cognitive-flavored reaction" — @utotranslucence
@forthrighter non-believing is not the same as believing in nothing
@rahshank just 2 days ago!
@RomeoStevens76 hmm I have some traction on 6 & 7... now I just need to figure out what to innovate on :P
@ungatedlife I've been recently realizing that a lot of my activity (including useful stuff) is basically a cope to avoid feeling anxiety and I'm working on learning how to be with the overwhelm, hold it, love it, and move from a place of stillness and peace instead
there's an intuition that it's good to support people who are down on their luck... and then someone will go and invent ALTRUISM which requires a bunch of rationalization to justify
in Soviet Russia, manmade horrors beyond comprehension will live to see you!!
I don't think 21yo me would have been *that* surprised to hear that 31yo me was taking religion seriously but he'd've been shocked to know how many of his friends — same people as then! — would be
@_brentbaum mmmm yeah point out a few rungs of the ladder before you've climbed too much further up yourself! my personal preference would be to hear about stuff that became self-evidently/tautologically obvious and how it became such
@eshear @gabor yeah insofar as "indigenous" means "native to a particular place" I have been playfully commenting to my friends that part of what it means to be indigenous to somewhere in this era is eg you can navigate without google maps (and you know ideal lanes etc)
@isabelunraveled definitely ayyy lmao'ing this tension as I orient towards some absurdly ambitious projects like starting a new religion or inventing an alternative to the web browser
Retweeted @Morphenius
Sure, feeling good in my body and having people admire me are nice side effects of keeping physically fit… …but the real p…
attractor basins rule everything around me
so annoyed that @googledrive insists on confirming every single time I move something into a shared folder "this will share it with the people in this folder!!" yes dumbass that's why I'm putting it there the worst is that it does that when moving to a subfolder w same perms😑
@emiliothegood christianity, primarily, in part because it's culturally connected to my heritage and in part because jesus had some good moves
@visakanv some new parent friends (11mo) recently commented to me that taking care of the baby is sort of very immediate and satisfying, and that the hard part of parenting is continuing to keep the adulting stuff / economic stuff all working
Retweeted @myceliummage
video teaser of some things I've been working on. collab with @christineist
@myceliummage @christineist neat! I barely made it through the first minute, but I liked the last 2 and glad I stuck around
@hyperdiscogirl sure confabulation
@Jeanvaljean689 "let go" can also be a way of telling ourselves or others that this moment should be other than it is I tend to focus on turning towards the moment and how I feel about it and being like "yep that is indeed how I feel"
@Jeanvaljean689 @scottdomes there's always trust on some level, but sometimes it's trust-in-distrust
@AskYatharth I feel like I must question whether this is a function of "the bay area" vs "school". like presumably you've considered this? but idk, something feels odd about it. there are lots of factors.