@MattPirkowski @AnalyticSpinors @meditationstuff what do you think of this? 👆 resonates a bit for me with junctured awareness tubes
May 2024
@loopholekid I remember reflecting in like 2015 or 2016 that the bay area rationalist social fabric would be unworkable if everybody were monogamous people made way more time to hang out with partners than friends, so only via poly could there actually be a well-connected network graph
@Radikal_Dreamer @AIandDesign @mkobach this is why - parents with similar values need to find each other - parents need to help their single friends find people to have kids with otherwise
Replying to @AIandDesign
@AIandDesign maybe because musicians already mostly make money from merch and playing live 😅 (if they make money at all)
Retweeted @pragueyerrr
this is the only kind of rizz (overwhelming sincerity and love) that matters and the kind of rizz i employ and teach. ever…
Thread · Cultivating a baseline sense of ease with a prospective spouse
one of the most important senses to cultivate with your (prospective) spouse is the sense of ease. the sense that there's nothing wrong, right now if you don't have at LEAST as much of that with them as you have on your own, don't get married
Matthew notes that getting to ease can sometimes require freaking out for a bit that's why part of having a sense of ease means having a sense of whether your partners' weird sounds are a problem to be dealt with or the shaking off of an old problem
but also you want a sense of baseline ease/safety that's there in the background—what you return to at minimum you want to feel this most nights, falling asleep together. whatever difficulties & stresses they can wait until tomorrow, when we're rested. we've got this.
but that's the minimum. the more of this ease you have, the more every interaction is smoother and you can have a calibrated sense of how problematic things are, that lets you collectively put attention where it's needed
this interpersonal ease is what allows trusting your partner when they go "ugh" and you say "you okay?" and they say "yeah" and you both know they ARE ok—that they'd ask for your help if they needed it so you can relax and return to what you were doing
if you don't have that calibration, then those tiny little moments can't get discharged. she makes a weird sound—and it actually wasn't about you at all!—but you can't get to ground with her and trust that things are good (let alone after an actual substantial conflict)
@faeriella67 for marriage? Passionate Marriage by David Schnarch talks about the interplay between sex and honesty & about the need to differentiate your perspective from your partner's amzn.to/3UGV2ei
@kevinsimler I've been in and out of the bay — only just recently properly moved here
@TylerAlterman Karl Friston chose stupid words for all of his stuff because he's a particular kind of weirdo
@TylerAlterman imo the conflation of "predictive error" and "what I want" is an absurd is/ought confusion
@michael_nielsen Reinventing The Sacred is one of the most interesting books I've read on the topic of why the "laws" frame is confused in brief, laws suppose that you can actually "predict" things, when in any evolutionary/creative domain (biology, technology, &+) we have only constraints
Retweeted @visakanv
I would pay $20/mo for this (most people wouldn’t but it would actually make sense for me)
@visakanv I feel like you have a "can't be bothered to" tweet as well maybe this
@AskYatharth justified, perhaps, but still obviously an error visakanv.com/blog/most-peop…
@eshear @TylerAlterman I think Friston is scoring an own goal for team "words mean things" and we shouldn't let him pollute our language 😛
@eshear @TylerAlterman > there is no fundamental diff between an expectation to have body temp at 98° and an expectation to continue to feel the pull of gravity citation needed. they seem obviously different to me!
@faeriella67 haha way too general "can you recommend things that are helpful?" "helpful for what?" "you know like, what's the best tool?" "well what problem are you trying to solve?"
@faeriella67 what's under the question? what's going on for you as you ask it?
@robertskmiles based and sunpilled
@davidad @TylerAlterman what do you mean by this? (I know what a dirac delta function is I just don't see how it applies)
no-fault divorce, sure but people shouldn't be able to get a marriage license if they've had 2+ divorces
@visakanv @AskYatharth this is offensive to the institution of marriage and honestly to the institution of literally meaning anything you say ever. (re the latter, this assumes he said some sort of "til death" thing and didn't just have a civil service with cheaper vows)
@blurrybound elaborate
it's not about whether the utterance is "true" as a logical proposition... it's about whether it forms part of the speaker's sense of things and whether it integrates with the listener's sense of things
@TimothyMaksim Relevances aren't a mass-produced product that just works or doesn't work. They're all contextual.
@michael_nielsen nice! curious what it's connecting with for you
@averykimball @aleksil79 this video makes a pretty good case from game theory for a self-evident and relevant fact about the cosmos that "god is love" might refer to (and in the process gets more clear about the relevant "god" and "love"; the rship isn't quite "is") youtu.be/X6MYsKeTjKk
Retweeted @chercher_ai
tfw your internal state is not as internal as you thought it was
@chercher_ai reminds me of this experience I had last year that I still haven't integrated. thanks for the sati youtube.com/watch?v=Tc0j2K…
Retweeted @the_wilderless
I'd love your support on either 'Stack or the Patronage site If you've gotten something out of my work, and want to gi…
annoyed that there isn't a "ignore this device FOR NOW" button on my mac's bluetooth 95% of the time I want my earbuds to only pair to my phone, but it'd be nice to be able to 1-click pair with my computer rather than having to "forget" + "pair"
Replying to @warrenmansell
@warrenmansell mmm, I like this can you lay it out even more structurally? what do "need", "hope", creativity", "patience" refer to?
New blog post announcing my Mating Dance course coming up next month. > I've come to realize that even a relatively ordinary courtship demands a level of skill in non-naive trust-dancing that is (currently) extraordinary. malcolmocean.com/2024/04/mating…
@chercher_ai it still feels fairly accessible when I remember to access it, I just don't do so that often. more the last few weeks than before though.
@FloPopp curious what you make of this thread/post, which talks about some of the structure of how this works:
Replying to @warrenmansell
@warrenmansell "chronic" here means that it's been in an error state for awhile? it seems like in situations where there's confidence about being able to handle some situation with existing organization, the error signal is less like "hope" and more like... a simple request
Retweeted @warrenmansell
The basics of the nervous system are reflected in our lives as: Need, hope, creativity & patience Within a branching c…
@Geoffiam @Face_Almighty44 found a kindred spirit
a periodic reminder that I block people who answer questions with [I put your question into this LLM and here is what it said] unless the answer is of top-tier quality or insightfulness
@newplasticbags @Geoffiam dude SPOILER
Retweeted @Geoffiam
Can somebody give me the brief two sentence summary of the Bible that doesn't leave out any important details, but focuses on…
As people become self-aware, God becomes self-aware—the giant cosmic "I am"—and his first phases of this are possessive, narrow-minded, and jealous. Fortunately, God is also evolving, and he learns how to forgive everybody and create a new social order based on pluralism.
@Geoffiam first sentence Old Testament second sentence New Testament.
@davidad @TylerAlterman "if one's preferences about the future are close to a δ" what would that mean? what are the x & y axis?
Replying to @plains_wraith
@plains_wraith @jamessseattle @eshear this exchange seems to me to be almost entirely argument about word definitions, although it's poking at important questions
Thread · Selling out a first course cohort, seat by seat · 1 of 7 tweets
now up to 12/30 tickets sold! ...after a discouraging slow couple of days of no sales. I'm once again reminded of how moody sales-mode can be.
Replying to @warrenmansell
@warrenmansell @doctorcochrane what do you think about the idea that "reward" on the level of a neuron is better framed as a "that worked" signal? youtube.com/watch?v=0_xFwU…
@nickcammarata @realtimeai yeah reference-class specific divorce rates ARE relevant, because then you can ask "how can I change reference classes?" the overall divorce rate is hiding bimodal distributions and all sorts of other BS
@nickcammarata @realtimeai it's not even quite just "just you". what "homemade" does is it prompts a different set of intuitions, such as looking around to your friends to see if any of them know how to cook well, and what you can learn from them a single role model can be worth a ton
Thread · Why the divorce rate says little about your marriage · 1 of 4 tweets
Also before the divorce rate was high the misery rate was higher. But some people love their marriages! So... can you know which kind you're gonna get, before you commit? Seems to me: not 100% but substantially! I'm developing a framework for it here:
Replying to @slurrrrrrp_
@slurrrrrrp_ > we gotta pretend fintech is real and the economy too UgH 😂😂
Retweeted @dancinghorse16
Marriages are all homemade 💞 🥺 💞 I love it
I spontaneously played/sang a punk-rock cover of The Book of Love at the afterparty of my wedding with the wedding band and now I'm annoyed because I wanna hear that version and it doesn't exist anywhere
Thread · Why the divorce rate says little about your marriage · 1 of 4 tweets
it's not just unique variables and a reference class! marriages aren't picked out of any bag at all, they're created you do "pick" a partner but you also co-create them as-a-partner, via the courtship process you go through to get to marriage
@Pontus4Pope yeah... it's an ambiguous sentence: higher than what? higher than it is now? higher than the divorce rate? I suppose perhaps even though the divorce rate is now a valve on misery, misery rates have also grown!
@Pontus4Pope in any case, it's not at all central to my point. I guess it would have actually been clearer to say "In any case, whether a marriage ends in divorce, the question I care about is whether it's a happy one."
@kenny____chen totally. you might like this stuff about averagerianism:
@onlyfootnotes higher priority is recording my original stuff, if I get studio time and/or a band
wait oh man is @alexmelton on twitter? yes! hi. you made this epic cover of Make Them Gold. I bet you could do a punk-rock The Book of Love. I'm thinking like... Simple Plan, as an artist to imitate youtube.com/watch?v=EebWWO…
Replying to @benwr
@benwr ah yeah I legit want that in the paragraph I copied the original question from, on my course landing page. major omission added. nice. thanks!
@exgenesis @eshear @TylerAlterman huh, well send it to me when you do! (or shoot me a draft to comment on!) I'd like to not have to spend 6mo like Emmett did 😛
did you know if you view a twitter profile logged out it'll show you their top tweets? (by likes) here are some of mine, and some smol observations
some of my top posts are somebody else's meme/image, with a niche caption the caption gives it enough fuel to reach escape velocity out of my circles, then the meme itself carries further
the typical ratio of likes:retweets seems to be about 10:1 between like 8:1 and 12:1
likes & retweets aren't always correlated extreme examples below: - the reply doesn't make sense out of context so why RT it, but it was a good reply to a v popular tweet so it got lots of likes - our wedding post has lots of likes, plus our QTs, plus a RT from our celebrant 😊
main thing that causes the ratio to go in the other direction seems to be quote-tweets, not actual retweets first two below have ~5:1; but closer to 8:1 with quotes removed. third is only 6:1 with quotes removed fourth is my QT king, with 4x as many quotes as likes
@utotranslucence haha I read "parts work" before the rest of the grammar and then initially thought you were looking for like business-specific IFS 😂
@utotranslucence we might want ummm a partial-shade umbrella? I just tried sitting on the sunny porch myself and I had to take myself in because the sun made my skin hot, in like 3 mins
Astounding how many millions of ways we subtly say “I’m in pain. Will you be with me?”
@jessicamalonso I initially read this as the following, which I also agreed with. The avoiding-saying is often also a kind of saying, to those who know how to listen.
@visakanv obviously (we've basically talked about this) call whenever
I'll swoop into your replies to talk excitedly about the related thing I want, which is to have calls where we share some essay ideas with each other then pick which of the other person's essays we're most excited to read, then write the essay FOR the other person in 2h on call!
@jessicamalonso oh absolutely. it's a whole mess. needs unclearly expressed are very hard to clearly meet
@exgenesis @eshear @TylerAlterman haha thanks but I'll wait for the write-up 😆
@aleksil79 huh, felt like I grasped your insight but then it felt apart in my hand seems like merely having power does cause people to want to seek your favour... which I guess in Scott's case does not mean lying to him, lol
@JimmyRis wait imma just delegate this whole thing yo @ChrisChipMonk wanna be cohost for @JimmyRis to walk people through setting up a local LLM?
@michael_nielsen I found the exaptation chapter most mindblowing: Ch 10, Breaking the Galilean Spell could just jump to there if you don't mind a spoiler. I think that's what I did and it made me more excited to read the earlier chapters because I saw where we were going
@visakanv yep. arbitrage
@utotranslucence something that lets a fraction of sun thru
@_Plac3_hold3r totally I wouldn't get married to someone I didn't trust not to do that if you don't anybody not to do that, then yeah don't get married
Replying to @BowTiedFox
@BowTiedFox @faeriella67 I don't have an up-to-date goodreads... but I do have... ...an up-to-date GIANT SPREADSHEET OF EVERY BOOK I'VE READ EVEN A PAGE OF IN THE LAST DECADE it's not annotated with comments or ratings tho malcolmocean.com/bookreading
@faeriella67 doesn't have to be problem->solution but the reason any book impacted me is because I was in a situation such that a particular book answered questions that were alive for me. so without knowing more about you or your situation, I wouldn't particularly recommend any books at all
@faeriella67 like if you even said "I'm vibing on [topic], what book comes to mind?" then I'd have an answer and it might be pretty juicy
Replying to @NoMindToThink
@NoMindToThink I mean it does track. I was worried about a tech guy who got randomly stabbed in SF, like "oh no that could happen to me" but turns out he got stabbed by a guy he knew due to some drama that looked like an honour killing but might have been something else?
@NoMindToThink point is, lots of crime isn't random either, and while it totally makes a difference to live in a safer city (as it does to live in a community with less divorce) there are still specific factors that lead to crimes happening to some people and not others!
@DanseurTabby oof. I mean, oof. idek where I would start there. weight is more relevant in a few ways, as it can demonstrate various attractive traits, but yeah botox is 🙅♀️😬
@the_wilderless black box qui bono
@davidad @TylerAlterman ahhhhhh gotcha. I was assuming x axis was time and that's why I was so confused
@davidad @TylerAlterman (I'd mostly used dirac delta in signal processing)
@Snake_With_Feet unfortunately there isn't one but you can learn how to make it well!
Replying to @acreese4
concepts of marriage are mass-produced but the marriages themselves are not
@VesselOfSpirit and I appreciate you
Retweeted @VesselOfSpirit
san francisco was the guy the city was named after. the name of the city itself is Frankensaint's Monster
@soundrotator the one I have the closest personal relationship with is Stolen Moments, because I learned how to sing it so I could perform it at Jazz Camp at burning man (this version—don't listen if you like the standard to live in your brain with no lyrics) youtube.com/watch?v=AdfPVh…
@adriaandotcom I was the one who pointed this out so you know what I think of it but I'll share the email I sent here to take credit for having first called you out on it. thanks for listening—seriously.
Thread · Why the divorce rate says little about your marriage · 1 of 4 tweets
a way in which the divorce rates ARE relevant: they clearly indicate that getting married doesn't automatically mean you'll have a partner for life. it tells you that having a successful marriage isn't easy or straightforward or the default path. x.com/NoMindToThink/…
Replying to @NoMindToThink
@NoMindToThink absolutely agreed re caution! great point.
@_Plac3_hold3r ah by "easily" I thought you meant social norms, not laws my main law change proposal, idk if it would help here:
@Snake_With_Feet that's one meaning/reason for marriage, but not the reason I did it. I'm 32 and I'm a fool who thinks I can know things about this sort of thing through first principles 😉
Replying to @warrenmansell
@warrenmansell @doctorcochrane mmm, yeah. would you say "something worked!" is more apt? the reason I posited a "that" in the positive case (unlike negative reinforcement) is that it seems so depending on timing. but maybe that's precisely backwards?
@appromoximate interesting! it's helping me see ways in which I might want more of these kinds of smallest-move integrity moments for myself
Retweeted @eshear
This is the single most bearish single for Twitter I’ve seen so far. People always freaking out about dumb things, but the easi…
Thread · When the somethings-larger we surrender to are allowed to bully us · 5 of 14 tweets
society is currently in a grand reorganization process around the extent to which the somethings-larger that we want to surrender ourselves to are allowed to bully us
a marriage is just one example of this and its power to do so came from other larger somethings-larger which coerced people into getting married and staying married despite not feeling a clear sense of "yes" themselves
what gave those larger somethings-larger the power to do that? well, they took it. somethings-larger that did that were more powerful than those that didn't call it "deserved" or not, it outcompeted non-bullying, at the time, and for a long time after
huh... it's paradoxical to try to talk about whether it was moral or not, because in the context of those memeplexes, they're the ones that define morality, and they're obviously self-serving about it!
but these somethings-larger also aligned with other principles, that weren't arbitrary bullshit but were self-evident to people one such principle being that humans want to be part of some sort of something larger and do what makes sense in the context of that
Replying to @ratlimit
@ratlimit @BimboNihilism self-awareness waterline probably rising tho
he didn't say that Hamas had more popular support than the Nazis he said that they were stooping to tactics the Nazis didn't stoop to and he said they had Palestine's popular support (with no comparison with Germany popular support of Nazis) (I make no claim about the facts, just that what you said he was wrong about isn't something that he said. perhaps you're both right)
Retweeted @growing_daniel
Feels like the campus pro Hamas protest movement is this era of leftism jumping the shark. Like does anybody support th…
Thread · The psy-op of defining surrender on behalf of the cosmos · 3 of 4 tweets
a classic psy-op: flow is when you surrender to the cosmos* *and we get to tell you what counts as surrender, on behalf of the cosmos
like many particularly sneaky psy-ops, it's a parasite that infects a deep spiritual truth: which is that yeah there IS a quality of deep flow that comes from surrendering to the cosmos and allowing things to unfold!
but it then confuses you about the feedback loop of learning how to do that surrender partially doing so by fucking with your flow if you get into a flow that doesn't align with it. so you gerrymander your concept of the cosmos until you can flow and obey (or you fail)
Thread · When the somethings-larger we surrender to are allowed to bully us · 5 of 14 tweets
and so then these somethings-larger present themselves as the natural thing to be part of and surrender to
"God will punish you for your own good in order to maintain the social order" metaphysical claims aside, social orders were legit somewhat based on this premise for a long time
anyway okay what's with this change I talked about? the "grand reorganization"? well, first of all I'm talking on really long timescales. glimpses of it in Jesus's teachings, tho Christianity-as-such was still pre-preorg
but then with the enlightenment, reformation, etc, it became increasingly obvious that people should be able to figure things out together and not just accept authority without question.
which gradually makes it clear that the sort of something-larger that you want to be part of is one in which you can figure things out together that supports your sensemaking and also amplifies your sensemaking rather than subordinating it
I'd been feeling bad all day for being scattered and on twitter but now I have finally surrendered to the high branch factor and I've got like 3 threads half-drafted and I'm feeling GREAT
he says, and then before he can even tweet it, his browser crashes (probably due to downthrottling from low battery) and loses a bunch of it
Anthropology as an epistemological problem Epistemology as an anthropological problem from Preconquest Consciousness: ranprieur.com/readings/preco…
Thread · Why "trad" is self-contradictory: there's no choiceless culture to return to
"trad" is a contradiction "the way we do things" is not, but once it has to call itself "trad" it has become self-confused
trad is arbitrary but pretends (incl to itself) that it's not and is actually fixed and known and involves no choices 1950s are one image, but modernity isn't trad Victorian era is another image, but it ain't trad either
< whatever my parents are doing, or thought they were doing > is also a common image same with most of what we think we know about huntergatherer cultures etc etc etc.
lots of inspirations, but you nonetheless have to choose. can't go back to choiceless society, which is the main thing that all of these images of trad have in common!
there is no default culture, in the same way there is no person who doesn't have an accent when they speak
the "choiceless" term is from @Meaningness, who coined it to highlight exactly these issues: > I was looking for an alternative to "tradition," which is semantically overloaded (and therefore confusingly ambiguous). For the reasons you mention! meaningness.com/choiceless-mode
the Preconquest Consciousness article opens by posing this conundrum:
evolution only happens forwards. you can remix elements of the old, you can bring them into the future. you can renew or revive. but you can't go back!
Replying to @warrenmansell
@warrenmansell @doctorcochrane helpful, thanks
@lolalucxy epic! that's really cool. German knows it's a living language more than other languages (whether it actually is more alive is a separate question)
Thread · The psy-op of defining surrender on behalf of the cosmos · 1 of 4 tweets
in illustrated form
Thread · When the somethings-larger we surrender to are allowed to bully us · 4 of 14 tweets
...well, that becomes clear to the extent that you aren't coopted by some sort of pressure that claims that if you had clear sensemaking then you'd do bad things and you wouldn't want to be a bad person would you?
but as I've learned more about some of the cultures Christianity replaced, with their practices we now consider barbaric, it seems like what I'm calling propaganda was maybe *more true* then, than it is now that we've tried more Christian values & can tell for ourselves they work
which brings me to a more general principle of the Grand Reorganization (man it sounds culty when I put it in title case) which is that, given the option, people will gravitate towards what works for them
and so insofar as moral principles (new or old) can be recognized that help people coordinate better (at lower cost), then people will want to adopt those, self-evidently! (if they feel free to) honor is adaptive twitter.com/HephaistosF/st…
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF hm?
@ThamirsView maybe normality is the first stop against that, but the backstop is the rest of society saying "no, we don't like that" and there'd be less BS if we were just clear about that, I think
@AskYatharth @pangea_dove @jessicamalonso I tried an even spicier version:
@MattPirkowski true, tho the meaning/role of self-sacrifice is going through a major transformation
@a_haema @RatOrthodox yeah it's complex because the -cide in genocide generally means killing people (although forced sterilization is a whole thing) whereas gene-editing stuff is about counterfactuals (and isn't forced, at least in principle; social pressures make this trippy tho)
@diviacaroline as in "we record an episode but it doesn't go live for awhile, until there's editing bandwidth"? or it goes live with no edits? I'm defs down for the latter, maybe the former
@visakanv I am SO EXCITED for this part of parenting omg. can't wait to watch entire humans unfold
@arabelladevine super loose as plans go, but: a major global meta-cultural shift, that involves humanity becoming collectively conscious and self-respecting at many more scales than it is now
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF yes! unless we have the ability to collectively orient to the reality that that would suck, and get in sync about it, so it's obvious that we don't want to do that that capacity is the thing I'm working to scale up
@HephaistosF I'm slowly taking in the extent to which the level I'm working on is totally inadequate though (which you've been telling me for awhile and that's been part of what's contributing to it)
@HephaistosF I don't have a clear sense of something having shifted recently. there's no big step-change. I'm just gradually noticing scales of agency more or something, and noticing how small mine are and how my first and second derivative are also shit and my 3rd & 4th have shit feedback
@PradyuPrasad is this an essay yet?
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF if I try to read between the lines here... you think I'm bottlenecked on my project due to lack of shadow integration? that's probably not how you'd put it
@sunofdopamine @_brentbaum @utotranslucence and I are looking for advice. we have a lot of international plane travel with kids in our future! 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇨🇦
@visakanv good work assembling, packaging, selling
Retweeted @IkkyusDen
Apparently, each leap of insight uncovers some dysfunctional patterns that become acutely highly painful. Healing them can s…
Replying to @IkkyusDen
@IkkyusDen ohhhhhhhh yep that makes a lot of sense and uhhh huh. I had noticed that before as well. trippy.
vibeclipse graffiti > The way people treat you is a reflection of them, not you Projection 101 ⤴️ but! the more advanced move is to see that there is a reason they are projecting their mom on you not their boss you don’t need to take it personally but if you only have the…
idk who needs to hear this but: you don't have to keep doing it
me & @exgenesis jamming about church and how to speak in first person language about the Free Energy Principle & active inference FEP stuff starts 23mins in youtu.be/NuXjGsBBOdY
@exgenesis @eshear @TylerAlterman (update: me & Xiq had a convo about it that was pretty juicy! recorded & uploaded here 👇)
@exgenesis this convo is a pretty good example of two people trust-dancing in the realm of philosophy, actually we're engaging with ideas and the ways those ideas shape our sense of who we are, and tensions around that, while both listening deeply & subtly, and respecting each other
@delia_burgess the particular case that was present for me was something like... breaking out of the spell of refreshing twitter and replying to a bunch of random stuff 😅
@Alphiloscorp @the_wilderless oh man if you're into bicameral mind stuff you might really dig Iain McGilchrist
@AaronEstel get a distinct genital tattoo but don't show anybody, so that you and your lover both know that any AI-generated naked photo of you is not of actual you my guess is that many celebs will do this (probably some already have)
@ungatedlife fucking does something for me (very upbeat, not just uplifting. I recommend dancing to it the very first time you hear it, and just letting the song tell your body what to do (I also do this knowing the song, but it's fun to be surprised)) youtube.com/watch?v=dVuupi…
@aleksil79 you can only choose to once you realize you don't have to
@AdamGravois totally. I've been hosting some experimental church services and one of the core tenets I'm bringing to it is the idea of playfully negotiating with ones' own sense of what shape the divine is that would be worthy of worship
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
evolution only happens forwards. you can remix elements of the old, you can bring them into the future. you can renew or…
@mattxcurtis it hurts tho like it's psychically painful which is not to say that people don't seek it out but I would like them to see it hurts and to see there's another option
Replying to @IkkyusDen
@IkkyusDen you might like this sequence I wrote, which is very much about the tension between one's own sense of things and consensus reality malcolmocean.com/2023/11/i-can-…
@sympatheticopp I'm gonna go with no but my dad regularly told me to cut my hair for a decade before mostly relenting and now we can kinda joke about it but it still clearly irks him and my mom and grandparents often comment that I look good
almost all neuroscience I've read has been life-changing tbh: - Norman Doidge's the brain that changes itself - holy shit neuroplasticity what - Perceptual Control Theory - whoa, my experience is constructed by a flock of thermostats, and sometimes they get to fighting - Iain McGilchrist's brain hemisphere model - ohh, the god that works in mysterious ways is my own right hemisphere fucking hilarious I see better how to let go & vibe - emotional brain stuff - so THAAAAT'S why I have to take my fears-etc seriously otherwise they refuse to learn. that makes so much sense
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@DefenderOfBasic almost all neuroscience I've read has been life-changing tbh: - Norman Doidge's the brain that changes…
@AskYatharth re worse, also: - meaning crisis - architecture making bullshit dead buildings - people living far from their families - overwhelmingness - more dangerous psychofauna - microplastics and sequelae - atomization - lack of shared reality with fellow citizens - more addictive things
@AskYatharth re better, also: - incredible amounts of amazing music - supply chains meaning trade w anyone - also food from anywhere - relative freedom from coercion/slavery - less war probably/mostly - access to books/information - safer surgeries, vaccines, antibiotics - talk around world
@wirmgurl totally. my friend @Morphenius has sometimes specifically helped coach people on math trauma. like they look at the actual math too but the focus is on healing the panic he has a thread on it:
@eshear details need to be fleshed out but this is one articulation of my approach:
@eshear or, perhaps equivalently:
this is a trippy analogy / connection idk if his plans for immune-computer interface are wise, but it does seem good that someone's thinking about it
Retweeted @eshear
@deepfates @getnormality Unfortunately, it turns out that there’s something like ideological target fixation. If you arrive at…
Thread · Selling out a first course cohort, seat by seat · 1 of 7 tweets
15/30 — halfway! 🥳 but not evenly distributed the evening cohort has only 5 spots left morning cohort has 10 spots left
@DefenderOfBasic yeah in fact specifically the whole deal with transistors is that there's a platform-independence to them the magic of software is that it doesn't matter what physics is doing at all because (unless it breaks) not matter what the transistors are made of, they work the same
“All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics.” — Steven Weinberg, articulating (strong/strict) reductionism
this view is demonstrably false, a notable counterexample being that computer software behavior is independent of the material of the transistor, meaning that the explanatory arrows bottom out at a level well above physics!
this is the "multiple platform" argument from Leo Kadanoff (which I got via Stuart Kauffman's reinventing the sacred). wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2015/11/leo-ka…
@DefenderOfBasic this is actually a conclusive takedown of some forms of reductionism, if seen clearly (Stuart Kauffman makes a detailed case for it in Reinventing the Sacred)
there's an archetype that's like... "your attacks only make me stronger" 💪🤪 what are some of your favorite characters that have this? (historical, mythological, fictional) ..."stealing your magic" ones totally welcome!
Replying to @poetised
@poetised may it be so
@simone_s_86 @kenthecowboy_ true. you might dig this article on how it's possible to be simultaneously liberal, progressive, and conservative, once you let those words mean specific things and not just be teams everythingstudies.com/2018/12/06/i-l…
@aleksil79 totally
what motivations, or what information but "someone like me"
@AskYatharth yep! material & existential coercion
Thread · Two aspects of coercion: material and existential · 1 of 18 tweets
put another way:
@AskYatharth also I've been calling this "fundamental freedom" but it's quite arguably "existential freedom" (especially since part of my inspiration for it is from Jean-Paul Sartre's talk Existentialism Is a Humanism) marxists.org/reference/arch…
Retweeted @yashkaf
marrying well isn't a life-complete problem but living a good life is a wife-complete problem
@primalpoly @orthonormalist would you recommend the movie?
Retweeted @__drewface
during my conversation with @tasshinfogleman he said something that really influenced me (paraphrasing): "I learned the co…
@__drewface @tasshinfogleman > byzantine generals problem only happens if the generals are insufficiently intertwingled
@aleksil79 huh what was the mechanism of this? feels related to something about aligning with rightness/wholesomeness, but I'm missing some pieces
new subtitle for the Mating Dance course: finding your center in courtship previously it was "graceful courtship at every step" but on reflection, not only is that not something I can promise, it's not even good to aim for!
Thread · A collection of useful tautologies · 1 of 18 tweets
this isn't quite a tautology, but (for what I mean by the words) it's as true as 1+0=1, like it's sort of a definition of zero and plus
@mounica_v8 what can I say? 😉
there's only one insight, and an infinite number of ways to have it
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF yep. (and that does seem like your situation to me)
Replying to @HephaistosF
Thread · Getting salesy enough to get pushback, and rethinking teacher status
had a neat experience this week: got salesy enough that I got a bit of pushback from my friends! this is a huge win, since I'd previously been kind of holding back in a fearful unable-to-play kind of way. movement that never finds the real limits.
as I started getting into posting about my course last week, I noticed flashbacks to middle school when I didn't know how to flirt and felt uncool, in relation to feeling like I didn't know how to sell even tho I've gotten first customers many times!
and the voices in me were saying: "I shouldn't even be here" "I shouldn't be trying to get sales" "...it doesn't feel like a safe learning environment, for some reason" but then I noticed that in naming that, it shifted. like "oh, my twitter scene is actually pretty safe"
and so then I fucked around... and I found out! and I feel SO GLAD! to have stopped holding myself back, so I could find the actual limits in the environment.
here's what happened: one friend, who I'd already been thinking seemed maybe a good fit for the course, DM'd me saying she felt like I ramped up from "nothing" to "pay $200" too quickly, without really building credibility first with lower-cost offers, writing, etc
and in particular, that I was making a claim to teacher status, more than my actual credentials. rather than more like "hey I'm going to create a learning context for this and share some stuff"
I reflected on this and noticed a few things. one was that I was getting a bit of... audience capture? no, algorithm capture? sort of 🤔 my dating/courtship takes fairly readily go viral, compared to other stuff that I tweet about. but so far virality ≠ sales anyway so 🤷♀️
the conversations also prompted a shift in the course framing. it's not really about being graceful. if anything, skillful Mating Dancing is about being willing to be awkward rather than going along with something that doesn't feel right to you. hence:
I also reflected on my qualifications. They're a bit patchwork, and have very different flavours. I have a few experiences of my own (janky and beautiful) and a few from talking to friends, but it'll be decades before I could even possibly say "it lasts"!
until I have 100 more of these conversations and see how things play out over years... with regard to my experience re courtship, my current role is less like a teacher, certainly not an elder ...at best, more like an older brother. a bit ahead on a similar path
but in parallel, I'm also wearing my "Non-Naive Trust-Dancing" hat, where I do feel like a spiritual teacher: I'm conveying a deep insight that I've had that has transformed my relationship to almost every interaction and made me dramatically more sane.
it's a weird mashup, especially because the NNTD framework is stuff I'm very confident about in part because a bunch is grounded in self-evident tautologies of how trust necessarily works (but that most memeplexes/cultures constantly implicitly deny)
anyway, recognizing this tension is helping me see why it's been confusing to figure out how to talk about the level of experience I'm bringing but inspired by the convo with my friend, I added a paragraph to the site making it clear I don't have impressive results yet!
and I'm going to experiment with more sharing my story and confusions and where I'm at with all of it, and what I'm hoping to learn from working with people, and so on ...and less guru vibes (but still a little, as a treat)
huh, as I say "guru", I'm reminded: this course is definitely about learning self-trust but one of the main guru traps is averted because the feedback loop for whether the person is in touch with their self-trust doesn't go through me. malcolmocean.com/2024/01/guru-d…
but also key to avoiding guru dynamics is A) having friends who will call you on your bullshit and (can't skip this step) B) listening to them so thanks friends 🙏
@ricvolpe also I've saved almost every thread I've written since then (>100) to my roamblog, somewhat tagged by topic. probably not easier than searching twitter, but seemed worth mentioning: intertwingled.blog/#/app/malcolmo…
@ungatedlife @m_ashcroft @the_wilderless I'm here for this!
Thread · Selling out a first course cohort, seat by seat · 1 of 7 tweets
on reflection I think it'll actually be a better experience for everybody if I cap it at 12 per cohort instead of 15, because people will get more attention and I'll be more able to track everybody deeply so I'm gonna do that. meaning now 7 & 2 spots remaining!
@_brentbaum 3 min song that I composed in 2012 when I first learned metta. singing helps me stay with any sort of instruction or whatever: soundcloud.com/malcolmocean/f…
@SurenVynn evil is good tangled into knots
Retweeted @tasshinfogleman
everywhere i go is the monastery, everyone i meet is the teacher, every road i take is the path
@algekalipso beautiful. yeah I'm very interested in the shapes of collective-organism that happen on an energy-body level etc Alex Grey definitely felt into these questions
Retweeted @Jeanvaljean689
you can try to even your wrongs by suffering or you can try to even them by paying it back or you can try to even them by creating more beauty than you can keep track of
@lolalucxy @noampomsky turns out this doesn't work at all it just ties the knot tighter
just discovered via total accident that if you hold X on your keyboard and click on a tweet it'll open up a prompt to block the user who sent the tweet. this is gonna be game-changing
this continues to kind of mindblowing to me every time I go to rearticulate a tweet from memory—even my own tweet—I come up with something quite interesting that is clearly not what the original was but has its own life do it below 👇 gib from-memory quotes! 💬 🫴
@mvongutt nice, yes, great rearticulations!
@thom_ivy_1 I elaborated on the profound renegotiation here:
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF or you can try to even your wrongs by explaining in very painstaking detail the systemic factors that created them until through self-understanding they untwist themselves
@mattgoldenberg mmm, appreciating you sharing this! yeah, I'm kinda learning in public here. I do feel like the thread on sales, in the absence of sharing more of my ideas publicly, is a bit stingy. I'm writing a thread now on some of the ideas
Thread · Mating Dance: keeping the right distance while escalating intimacy · 5 of 18 tweets
the premise of my Mating Dance approach to courtship is the idea that there's always a right distance between two people, and that if you get closer than feels right then you'll be a jerk or resentful or something. TL;DR: don't do that.
but concretely, how does that work? one principle is that if something feels off... slow down. escalate slower or not at all. and if it keeps feeling off, back up.
two reasons for that. one is that otherwise if you do eventually commit, you'll basically be committing to the off feeling. and there are tradeoffs, but you want to be stepping into them consciously, not grudgingly accepting them since you seem to have already implicitly decided
the other reason is that if something feels off then something IS off. you don't know what it is, but it matters to you because it's part of you, and that matters in each moment, not just as an eventuality
another concrete specific suggestion is: if you have an unresolved conflict at your current level of intimacy, don't escalate intimacy until you've resolved it.
Thread · Being able to laugh together as the standard for resolved conflict · 1 of 10 tweets
my standard for what it means for a conflict / rupture to be resolved between parties is that they can laugh about it together, easefully, without an edge
Thread · Mating Dance: keeping the right distance while escalating intimacy · 1 of 18 tweets
different couples will fight/resolve differently. some do it hot with some shouting (🥵❤️🔥) some do it slow & calm with emails & docs & diagrams (✍️💟) either can be healthy if it works for both of you and you reach a satisfying resolution!
Thread · Being able to laugh together as the standard for resolved conflict · 2 of 10 tweets
conflicts you can't laugh about are conflicts you're not sure aren't a threat to the relationship
sometimes the only way to get to being able to laugh about something is by having way more distance from each other eg breaking up, quitting a job, leaving a group house
Thread · Mating Dance: keeping the right distance while escalating intimacy · 1 of 18 tweets
if you move in, without resolving... the political argument from your 2nd date or the fight when you missed the train or the scene she embarrassed you or the time he was contemptuous you make it more important AND more difficult to get that ease
Thread · Being able to laugh together as the standard for resolved conflict · 1 of 10 tweets
💯 one-sided laughter is not at all the resolution I'm talking about in fact, it's further from it—progress from onesided laughter looks like the laugh-er seeing the way in which it's NOT funny... taking the rupture seriously
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF I think you mean the non-laugh-er?
if possible, only get as close as you can be while feeling like you and the other person are enough for what's expected of you at that distance
zone of proximal development of course. if you can lean into a level of performance and just barely do it, but you're learning and you feel good, great
but if you're straining and still falling short, or you're coming nowhere close to adequate and you have no idea how (or same with the other person) then you're making the relationship be based on a kind of debt you have no basis for assuming will ever be dischargeable
Thread · Mating Dance: keeping the right distance while escalating intimacy · 3 of 18 tweets
a third heuristic: if you discover that a past experience that built trust wasn't what you thought it was, allow that surprise and dismay to create more distance until the person feels acceptable again
don't keep someone in your heart 💘 then complain at them for not being qualified to be there! you let them in, mistakenly, so show them the door and tell them you'd love to have them back if/when that feels right
and if you're in the other role, you may need to be the one to step out of their heart "it seems like I no longer seem to meet your criteria for person you're happy to have as boyfriend, so I'm going to stop asking you to see me as your boyfriend. we'll see if I can requalify"
tfw when you watch your own youtube videos
Thread · Mating Dance: keeping the right distance while escalating intimacy · 4 of 18 tweets
warning signs ⚠️ 😠🫸 you feel default-annoyed by them and want them to be further away 🍽️🗳️ you're fighting over little things, and those fights feel like a referendum on the relationship 🥰🫂 you don't feel simple joy that they're as close to you as they are
if you're not married, & those signs are present, then I'd encourage you to see the default future as one where you break up. maybe you can sort these out, but if not, do you want to commit to these things being true of your relationship forever?
but you may not have to go all the way to a breakup. you just need to back up far enough that you can fully accept the person being as they are, and vice versa. then those signs should reverse! then you can address conflicts, and see if you can find a NEW closer that feels good!
in some cases merely acknowledging the reality of the dealbreakeriness of present conflicts might be sufficient "backing up". it makes it clear the courtship is default-no instead of default-yes, which eases certain pressures in other cases more substantial distance needed.
Retweeted @nvpkp
ᴀɴʏ ꜱᴜꜰꜰɪᴄɪᴇɴᴛʟʏ ᴀᴅᴠᴀɴᴄᴇᴅ ᴛʜᴇᴏʀʏ ᴏꜰ ʜᴏᴜꜱᴇᴡᴏʀᴋ ɪꜱ ɪɴᴅɪꜱᴛɪɴɢᴜɪꜱʜᴀʙʟᴇ ꜰʀᴏᴍ ʀᴇʟɪɢɪᴏɴ
Thread · Mating Dance: keeping the right distance while escalating intimacy · 4 of 18 tweets
in summary: find the right distance between you and whoever you're dating/courting, so that you aren't subconsciously jabbing each other & threatening to end the relationship feels off -> slow down conflict -> resolve before escalating disillusionment -> remove from heart
I made mistakes on all 3 counts in the confused courtship that led to me having a first marriage which was painful & kinda traumatizing for both of us, a ton of work for both of us, and that I ultimately left when I realized I had no positive vision for it I could get behind
for much of that relationship I was a jerk. it's easy to assume it was because I am some sort of intrinsic jerk, but I was trying real hard to not be a jerk and I was still a jerk now I'm in a new relationship where it's easy to not be a jerk. the jerkness was tryna get me out!
if you're interested in exploring these ideas & principles in relation to how they apply to your own life situation there are a few seats left for my online course on listening to yourself during courtship, starting next week! mating.nonnaivetrust.dance/?tw=jerk
@aleksil79 dope, I recognize these ideas. enjoying seeing them rearticulated
@4confusedemoji mmm yeah. it's helpful to be like "okay I don't know what's wrong or where the wrong is, but something's wrong"
@aleksil79 woaaaaaaahhhhhhh holy shit. had not actually taken that in when I saw that earlier tweet.
Retweeted @aleksil79
@Malcolm_Ocean if scapegoating works the way i think it does, persecuting & publicly executing christ-like people would only…
@EthanReeder feels nice to see you here 🥰
Replying to @IkkyusDen
@IkkyusDen haha like the header is overwhelming? hmm... could be time for a new site design soon. this one is a decade old and doesn't match my aesthetic as well as it did when I made it
@MJPiercello @paul__is__here okay but we can start planning the demos now. who is good to demo with? what level of abstraction of disagreement? you and I could try but it would probably be meta to the point of absurdity and maybe better for you to be facilitating rather than one of the agreers/disagreers?
@MJPiercello @paul__is__here I'm down to be on the call if that would somehow help (I could imagine it would since my approach is v similar and might unstick things or something) but maybe it's an unnecessarily logistical complexity
@yashkaf a submission: twitter.com/BudrykZack/sta…
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF hm. seems to me I'm seeing somewhat like this... which I'm assuming is a quote from a leverage researcher... not known for pollyannaish views? but maybe you think they're also confused in the same way?
@realtimeai @ConradBastable @diviacaroline I've done a mix, in my dozen or so podcasts: - some zero-edit post-the-zoom-recording podcasts - some light-touchups-we'll-fix-that-deadend-tangent - some more seriously chopped up and/or had the audio mixed to be nice
getting someone's joke is humbling
Thread · Being able to laugh together as the standard for resolved conflict · 2 of 10 tweets
the laughter is a sign that the situation has come to a place where the meaning-making isn't full of jabs and stabs and guardednesses
the alternative is to have things you can't freely talk about, parts of the relationship where play is not safe
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF hmm, makes sense. thanks, will digest.
@HephaistosF like yeah you're right, I haven't integrated that, or even really started integrating it
@4confusedemoji yeah, one suggestion might be not to fixate on "find it" but just like, not pretend it isn't there somewhere, and move appropriately slowly but take that with a whole handful of salt, as I don't feel like I have a very clear sense of what you're saying here at all
Thread · Day 5 of courtship: refusing to be "not enough" for a partner
my now-wife & I had an experience on day 5 of our courtship. she was talking about a way in which she didn't like our dynamic and I said "if you're saying I'm not (mature.,) enough for you, I'm out. I'll go travel. maybe my own growth arc will lead me back to you, or not."
this was especially important to me given how much I'd spent years in past relationships (romantic but also other) trying to live up to some standard I didn't know how to live up to and constantly feeling like not enough and I was done. with. that.
...there isn't a particularly juicy story of how that resolved. she could tell I meant it. we paid close attention over the coming days and it seemed like some mix of: - I managed to show that I was mature in ways she was discounting - "you're not enough" wasn't what she was saying (I think she was more frustrated with herself too than I initially realized, not just me)
so we kept going! we had a few more arcs over the following months that were similar to that in various ways. we've had to do a bunch to bridge spiritual values and we still have a lot of parallax work to do there, but we both know we're game for that! 🤩
anyway, it was a ballsy move, that I was emboldened to make because I had a clear sense of how I wanted my courtship to work. if this resonates with your sense of what you want, check out my course starting next week on my approach: mating.nonnaivetrust.dance/?tw=enough
I don't always drink discipline-based approaches but when I do I prefer @jockowillink youtube.com/watch?v=jHnX-n…
fuck I forgot how good it feels to wake up early and work out and do stuff
Thread · Hate as the feeling of being helplessly trapped · 2 of 9 tweets
the main defining characteristic of hate is a feeling of helpless trappedness
I may fear bears I may growl at a small dog that's being aggressive but I HATE mosquitoes. an individual mosquito, I do not hate, I merely kill. (unless I'm trying to sleep and it's buzzing and I can't quite get it, and then I do hate it!)
Retweeted @made_in_cosmos
This is also why I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they found the one true key to happy marriage. Every couple has to…
Thread · Hate as the feeling of being helplessly trapped · 5 of 9 tweets
a kid who says "I hate you mom!" is expressing this sense of trappedness. most adults, if they don't like their parents, mostly just ignore them, not hate them. and "hate" mostly shows up in relation to the remaining inescapability (plus you can't get new parents)
when someone says "I hate myself", this is reflective of that fact that the part of them that is hating some other part, is stuck with that other part!
when there's hate between the sexes, same thing. people are trapped both by the social reality of men & women being part of all societies, and also by the push-pull tension of their lust & love of the other sex, but being unable to navigate the resultant intimacy
I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup kind of makes the same point it's being stuck with some group that is different that causes you to hate them slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-c…
to get a little bit spicier... what's going on with hatred of queer people? one rough guess is that the presence of queer people fucks with peoples' ontologies in a way that people find dysregulating and desperately, panickedly, wish would stop
@AnneSelke beautiful
Retweeted @Jeanvaljean689
@Jeanvaljean689 yeah I'm learning that. the vibe feels better. just gotta figure out which other stories I feel comfortable sharing in public
@sandra_sobanska I for one will let you know! especially after having read this :) and some might just distance themselves, but insofar as you want the kinds of friends who DO give you the feedback you want, well, that's sad but also kind of a filter.
@HephaistosF but it is part of the name of my quest, for sure
@AnneSelke gonna tack this on here, rather than on the main thread. different imagery for a similar thing
Retweeted @mattgoldenberg
it's a beautiful miracle that when we do the wrong thing, it hurts us that society has done everything it can to break…
@4confusedemoji @HephaistosF > Evil is never intended as evil. Indeed, the contradiction inherent in all evil is that it originates in the desire to eliminate evil. seeing more clearly how goodness works allows goodness to unfold in ways that seem more good to you AND to others
@the_wilderless much better as a first-person observation: "huh, then I noticed there's nothing to fix, nothing wrong, I am perfect exactly as I am" invites inquiring into what that might mean for that person, what state of mind & affairs might have made it possible to notice, etc
@the_wilderless "huh, I just noticed that pain is pain and that I don't like it, but it isn't worse than it is and I don't need to have made it not happen in the first place and it doesn't mean I'm a bad person"
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@the_wilderless "huh, I just noticed that pain is pain and that I don't like it, but it isn't worse than it is and I don…
Retweeted @_Jarrad_
It's not a new skill you need to learn. You are always already executing on your personal taste, with your attention alone S…
This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That
@the_wilderless @exgenesis I'm pretty interested in a serious exploration (minimal talk I guess haha) of what the bottlenecks are here for realizing these compelling ideas in ways that blow our minds or bust our assumptions
Retweeted @metaLulie
some people get married in order to avoid an emotion sensation
"I can tell what type of usb cable a device needs just by smelling it"
hot off the press: 7 takes on falling sanely in love Conclusion: Love is not safe from heartbreak. malcolmocean.com/2024/05/7-take…
@faeriella67 what books have you read since the last time you asked me that?
Replying to @ilidemi
@ilidemi Mmmm.
In a sense, the definition of "too fast" is "in a way that doesn't build real shared context (aka non-naive trust)". Otherwise it's just fast. (it can also be slow but also still too fast!) twitter.com/ikkyusden/stat…
Thread · Selling out a first course cohort, seat by seat · 1 of 7 tweets
evening sessions have sold out! but still 5 spots remaining for the morning sessions
want guidance on doing dating/courtship from a place of self-love, non-coercion, etc? the morning cohort (aka europe cohort) of my course still has a few seats. starts tomorrow! learn more & sign up: mating.nonnaivetrust.dance
Retweeted @kenthecowboy_
The only reason adults don't want children around in public is that kids mog you by breaking rules. They sing and dance…
@eshear I'll go with this one. vibes with my "it's all about depth perception" approach
hot take: premarital sex was a sin before we had good birth control but isn't now
@meekaale @RichDecibels wow huh I did not realize that as of last November I would have already been saying "I'm working on a church" we're now on week 8 of weekly sunday services. still a ton of work to do but it's going well
Thread · Hate as the feeling of being helplessly trapped · 1 of 9 tweets
hate is when you can't get away, so the anger ("go away") turns into hate ("i must destroy them")
@AskYatharth yes, exactly! I almost said this in the thread but forgot. have now remixed your tweet into it:
@AbstractFairy yeah I think part of what's going on is that there's a use of "natural" which is like "of the natural order of things" aka "wholesome". or maybe it's more about how "natural"="normal"="normative". human-natural, but memetically encoded
this applies to both ontologies you think are crazy and to your ontology if someone else thinks it's crazy!
@my_nm_is_jns if you read the early psalms, many of them are basically war poems saying "our god kicks your god's ass" — don't quite deny the existence of other gods, they just say not to worship them (although yeah they also do make a claim about the universality etc of The God)
Breaking News: The Old Ideas Had Something To Them, And Are Still Somewhat Relevant and Useful
Replying to @hgggrA
@hgggrA not denying that. there's downsides to everything (and some things more than others). I'm just saying in terms of whether something is categorically always a sin, it does seem plausible/likely that premarital sex made the switch from "yes" to "no" in the last hundred years
Retweeted @hgggrA
If you don’t like my replies and I’m liking yours, you’re losing the argument.
Replying to @quotidiania
@quotidiania yes (my immediate response without thinking about it at all)
@utotranslucence can't explain systematically that which does not function systematically
writing some threads this morning and finding it so fucking tedious that 280char tweets only show 4 lines when quoted. @X (accidentally?) broke this at some point. for fucks sake what a terrible regression. please fix this.
@JimDMiller hmmm using birth control at all: still not a sin not seeking to find a person with whom you want to stop using birth control: a sin (I want to give a dozen caveats here tho)
@MarkovMagnifico yeah that's why I'm making a new memetically-literate church
although hmmm premarital sex does sometimes cause people to pairbond in a very short-sighted way that then ends up either with janky heartbreak or people getting married who aren't a fit so let it not be said that all consensual premarital sex is sinless
@hgggrA reflected a bit more and added this caveat
@ewu_wtf basically a request is "things need to become different" and a not-enough is "things need to already be different in order for this moment to be acceptable" more thoughts in this thread:
if you have not forgiven yourself, you are confused about who you are
you can forgive yourself you can forgive yourself for not knowing how to forgive yourself you can forgive yourself for not knowing how to forgive yourself for not knowing how to forgive yourself but it's okay if you can't
@AskYatharth nice, get entangled
Thread · Being able to laugh together as the standard for resolved conflict · 3 of 10 tweets
a nuance here: if you are in fact trapped with the person, and you can recognize this, then it IS possible to forgive without getting space. it's when the space COULD be gotten but you're not letting yourself that bitterness grows
in this sense, all hatred is downstream of confusion
also this is why it's always possible to forgive yourself
huh this is entirely caused by original spin "if you do X, you'll get result Y" ↳ result Y means I'd be a bad person, so I MUSTN'T do X
@MarkovMagnifico yeah. curious whether it seems like a good sign or bad sign to you that it's a joint project between me & my wife (monogamous)
@DoroisDoro say more?
@Morphenius also "trees" and "grasses" are two modes that plants show up in, but they evolve back and forth all the time so there are lots of grass-tree pairs that are closer relatives than tree-tree or grass-grass pairs (I forget the thread I found on this)
Thread · Sin as parts destroying the environment they depend on · 20 of 24 tweets
"sin" as: doing something that might be locally good for you but destroys the environment on which you rely
the simplest prototypical example of "sin" in this sense is cancer. cancer isn't selfish. it doesn't "take over" in any glorious/victorious way, it merely replicates until it destroys its environment, then oops—dies
lying to friends, family, allies, is a sin because it undermines the commons of honesty, integrity, etc lying to nazis is not a sin
adultery is a sin because it undermines stability of families & marriages greed is a sin because the desire to possess & control wealth messes with its ability to flow in a living way wrath is a sin because it creates a more violent environment that comes back to bite you
huh, this explains why a lot of moralizing these days is happening about climate change etc. the most obvious way in which humanity is presently sinning is that it's destroying its environment, polluting etc. tho directing this at individuals is mostly the wrong agency-scale
sometimes something that used to be a sin is no longer a sin because we've found ways to mitigate the ways in which it harmed its environment (tho sometimes this is itself hubris and there are other harms not mitigated)
this is part of why conservativism tends towards seeing more things in terms of sin (whether or not it uses that word, which ofc generally has a religious connotation that I'm not intending to imply here)
because yeah, this doesn't presuppose an external god who punishes you for sins like a parent striking or grounding a disobedient child reality's natural consequences punish you for your sins, but later—perhaps generations later
if it gets you generations later, then in some sense the entity that is sinning is arguably not even quite the individual but the family or bloodline or company or community or society or something like that... but humans care about those thriving as well.
in choiceless societies, rocking the boat at all is a sin because the social environment is fragile to destruction from any questioning of the norms on which it's based
this is instructive: it highlights that sometimes sin at one scale creates new wholesomeness on a larger scale the destroying of an old order can also be part of making way for a new order (but not always!)
part of Jesus's wisdom was in highlighting ways in which things that were considered sins in specific Jewish law no longer needed to be but meanwhile other things that were considered fine were actually sins—and people could recognize this!
another part of Jesus's wisdom was in highlighting that most sins don't need to be punished BY HUMANS. the consequences are meted by God (read: the natural unfolding of everything, not sky-daddy)
but part of how the consequences unfold is THROUGH humans. if you're a jerk, people won't want to hang out with you. and we have courts of law. if you bother a cat, it will claw at you and/or ignore you
but as an ego/self, you want to forgive other selves, in order to create space for your learning and their learning it is, in fact, a sin not to do so (and I forgive you!)
and of course you also want to forgive yourself!
Matthew 5:14-15 with God as Everything, not as Some Guy who won't go first in the forgiveness game > For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, Everything will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, Everything will not forgive your sins.
sometimes the reason it's hard to forgive is that the grudge is carrying a way in which you aren't in integrity in the situation you're in, and you need to get out
but when you can't get out, a different kind of forgiveness is both necessary and possible
me & @Morphenius preach forgiveness of sins without the need for believing anything about Jesus (you can see an intro here, which is super rough but some people have found it helped them!) youtube.com/watch?v=6Ykr2X…
@sstuartevans @MarkovMagnifico conveniently, I just wrote up a detailed thread on it
for those wondering what I mean by sin, this tweet+thread is my best attempt to articulate it:
sorry to whoever might have been reading the version of this thread that I deleted minutes after I published it; it erroneously QT'd the premarital sex tweet as part of the OP and I wanted it to stand alone so people could RT this even if they disagreed re premarital sex 🙏
@yashkaf what idiot called it semen retention and not seed-banking
Replying to @r4t_l0rd
@r4t_l0rd @theresaverity @jk_rowling @PeterTatchell I don't think it'll reach people because it doesn't engage with their actual concerns, which are real and matter. if you want to reach people, you need to find a way to bridge between their view and yours (which also matters, it should go without saying)
@Conaw mmmm this is a good point. hmm hmm.
@Conaw it seems to me that indeed this is a different error mode than my thread explores, tho they're related—lying, for instance, will corrupt your sensibilities hugely as for whether this is best framed as another kind of sin, another aspect of sin... not sure. what do you think?
@Conaw maybe more accurately than it even quite corrupting the environment is like, it corrupts your relationship with the environment and therefore you need feedback from the environment to know that your ability to be part of sane-mind-ness is getting diminished
Replying to @quotidiania
@quotidiania @Conaw how is it different from simply "mistake"?
Replying to @quotidiania
@quotidiania @Conaw 1) in which direction? lol "sin" as contrasted with "an honest mistake" where you don't know you're moving away from ultimate good? or "sin" as contrasted with "an obvious mistake" because with a sin you can't see the costs yourself?
I keep coming back to
I keep coming back to
as a properly quined tweet:
ah here we go, I knew I had articulated this before I wrote a whole thread even, about the problems with punishment:
on the importance of being able to vote with your feet
as humans, we need other people but if we don't like our current "other people" we can get different "other people"
bad takes are like plants 🌱 you might feel superior when you take a dunk on them 💩 but it only helps them grow 🌳
@codepublish @visakanv somehow inspired by your tweet
@NPCollapse yes and no. social hells are places people get sent to, and some are basically born there because unfortunately some of the sins of the father are visited on the sons
Replying to @quotidiania
@quotidiania @Conaw it's true but uhhh oh man that's how they getcha
Replying to @quotidiania
@quotidiania @Conaw "forgive them father, for they know not what they do" seems to me that it's possible to have major insights about what creates wholeness and that this increased knowing is what makes it easy to not sin, whereas trying to track down one's self-deception becomes a witchhunt
@quotidiania @Conaw this is, by the way, something I sense Jesus roughly understood but most of Christianity (downstream of Paul & Augustine) absolutely did not
@diegocaleiro yeah, most atheists reject the conceptions of sin they're presented with because they come with a memetic payload that says "and you can't make sense of it and figure it out yourself"
Thread · "Nissing": when a whole violates the parts that compose it
if sinning is where parts violate the whole that they're part of there's an inverse error (let's call it nissing) where a whole violates its parts in a way that undermines its health eg autoimmune disorders, exploiting workers/citizens, abusive relationships
it's hard to point at nissing, in a way, because it's hard to point at what the "whole" is doing, since in most cases you can say "well isn't it the other parts that are doing that?" if the king abuses his subjects, is the whole doing so? what exactly is? monarchy-culture?
and I don't want to say that it's "justified" to sin against a whole that is nissing against you but it's sure understandable! and I think, in practice, inevitable to some degree. eg a group that will mock your desires isn't one to be honest to.
humans, unlike cells in a body getting attacked by an autoimmune disorder, can physically leave a group, on various scales
some scales of this have been blocked for most of the history of civilization, as part of how civilization has maintained its power but a lot is opening up, which is changing culture
huh, this shift into globalism & pluralism creating space for people to move around is actually recreating an element of the context that enabled preconquest cultures to be so wholesome
coercion is impossible to the degree people feel free to just leave
sinning, even against a social order that doesn't respect you, corrupts the mind/soul, and makes you less whole
thus in general, even if a whole is nissing against you, you will be saner if you leave than if you sin back
if you want to help the others who are living in corrupt wholes, make ways for them to leave as well! whether underground railroad or worldview-offramps
a good heuristic for healing wholes that can't separate, which fundamentally is "individuals" and "everyone" (all things in between less-so)
Thread · Sin as parts destroying the environment they depend on · 1 of 24 tweets
@Morphenius if you like this thread on sinning, you'll love this thread on nissing!
"I notice I have an impulse to make any whole I encounter a better version of itself, even if I'm not part of it and don't want to be" — @Morphenius
I still want this and would still pay for it
would you like to learn about how to listen to yourself and leave nothing behind when dating/courting? my course starts tomorrow! (4 weeks long) still 3 seats left link right here: mating.nonnaivetrust.dance
a thread specifically on how to surf the edge of intimacy with someone, only getting as close as feels right, and how to know if that's working:
nerdposty thread on mating dances in birds and humans and what it means to go through a process of reciprocal opening (aka "falling in love")
and some thoughts on questions I don't have answers to (and why not)
@MasterTimBlais oh man I have so many things to say about this this is the first one that comes to mind but if you want more links lmk malcolmocean.com/2023/07/supere…
@MasterTimBlais oh or here is a bunch of links I recently collected
@MasterTimBlais but like if you wanna have a call and jam about it I'm super down
weird take: the fact that humans, genetically-speaking, have a kid every 1-2 years if sexually active, could literally be due to having developed contraceptive and abortive methods in the ancestral environment that made them more capable of not having kids.
if anyone wants to investigate further, this paper has more data about bonobos. I have shit to do today tho and am getting off twitter. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35142939/
@MasterTimBlais huh yeah great point I wasn't per se intending my comment to apply to earlier phases with ancestral wisdom! just like... civilization. but good critique.
@DoroisDoro yeah I have not been assuming it's a sin for basically my whole life. so for me, the hot end of the take is the "was a sin". but for someone else, the hot end would be "isn't anymore"
@DoroisDoro and I think relatively few people hold both positions (particularly with the word "sin", which depending on your view you might see my usage of as very idiosyncratic or more central) so in that sense it's a hot take
what would you do if you felt free to make mistakes and learn from them? where in your life don't you feel that?
@_StevenFan what mistakes do you not feel free to make? what do you feel like you're already supposed to know how to do?
@MasterTimBlais right, exactly looks like bonobos also ovulate about monthly? (slightly longer on avg, like 33 days) so it must be some other thing that makes for the interbirth period being longer
@eshear hate is what happens to anger when there's no available away
@eshear oh interesting your model is it's actually fear+trapped that makes for hate that kinda checks out... hm
Thread · Hate as the feeling of being helplessly trapped · 1 of 9 tweets
a great diagram+thread from Emmett. also has hate as involving trappedness (maybe inspired by my thread?) but as fear+trapped rather than what I would have assumed of anger+trapped
distrust is sacred
beautiful articulation of the core of my Non-Naive Trust Dance framework by @Morphenius: > distrust is sacred. every place where distrust is disrespected is a hint of where a tautology is being treated as false
@RomeoStevens76 @Morphenius @loftbruk Michael says elsewhere in the thread that avocado has too high of a smoke point
@RomeoStevens76 @Morphenius @loftbruk but maybe... you just need to get the pan hotter? 🤯
@__drewface this is the yes-and zone
@__drewface yeah much better is to write a standalone tweet that you'd like to quote-tweet in as a reply something that makes the point you want to make clearly but doesn't directly engage in argument
@__drewface better still is the pol.is vibe: write a tweet that synthesizes their view with yours
@experiment29a idk what your cultures are like but any amount of baby eating would make my environment worse
Retweeted @nascentwisp
all this time people were telling me "you can just do things" but that information was useless until I realized something…
Thread · Rearticulating an idea in your own words is creative · 1 of 5 tweets
I believe in the power of using your own words but I gotta say it's really cool to be able to embed other peoples' words in my own utterances too:
I came across an article on morning affirmations, ie repeating a statement like "I am comfortable with the unknown and trust that everything will fall into place" or "I am at peace with my life as it is right now" and I'd kinda dismissed these sorts of things as counteractive since learning BioEmotive, where you say all sorts of negative things like "I am worthless" and notice how they resonate but it's occurring to me now that maybe insofar as these affirmations work it's via this mechanism @mattgoldenberg names: > to create a belief, find MANY memories for one meaning like if you gently repeat the affirmation, not trying to force it to seem true but just collecting examples of it seeming true, then that produces a new, clarified, more workable sense of self? what do you do when you name it though and you notice a contrary memory arise? gently see if you can find a new meaning for that contrary memory as well?
distrust is sacred, trust-dancing is worship
@magicianbrain @tasshinfogleman yeah basically! I don't quite like the word though idiosyncratically, of course:
@magicianbrain @tasshinfogleman trust-dancing is basically the word I want for the whole collection that goes in that second space but a few other words maybe...
@magicianbrain @tasshinfogleman distrust is sacred, boundaries are worship
@magicianbrain @tasshinfogleman distrust is sacred, self-trust is worship
@mattgoldenberg so you start with an affirmation / something you want to cultivate, and when counter-stuff comes up you integrate it? nice. similar to starting with a plan of action and integrating+incorporating resistances, tweaking the plan where necessary
What is a blossom anyway but a fist saying I can't do this anymore?
@WoohkaStylie saying the obvious
@itinerantfog seems to me that you could later acquire information that would cause you to know that as of the earlier time, it was knowably not possible that it would go another way... or you might acquire information that would cause you to conclude it WAS in some sense possible.
@itinerantfog if you mean something else then I think you're making an error in relating to counterfactuals that @aphercotropist would critique
oh no. that's such a good point tho. as a kid I grew up without a TV and was way saner than my peers (not the only reason lol). but there's no way to "no TV" now. screens are for everything. unless... TV? wat. no, we need devices that only create. or something.
saw an article called "An End to Psyops" and obviously had to read it. it's good. not particularly novel (to me) but phrases things well and has some good examples. blog.exitgroup.us/p/an-end-to-ps…
> As the colossal public organs of fact-accumulation, sense-making, and consensus-building become clogged with ever-more convincing and unfilterable simulacra, your grip on reality will be a matter of your connection with God, and with other sane, honest, competent people.
Retweeted @exgenesis
corporate wants you to find the difference between these pictures
it's quite hard to find the correct referent for "faith" and this is fundamentally what underlies the "faith journey"
"faith as object permanence of God" — @pythonandpanda
highly recommend asking your parents to tell you the story of how they met & courted—in separate conversations! I did this last summer and it was illuminating how different the stories were (my parents split up when us kids were all grown)
@myceliummage I read this as "type of guy who"
Retweeted @myceliummage
so many people get tripped up in language thinking someone must be Correct or Wrong when nearly all language is actually…
link below a track I can listen to that: - slaps - has lyrics you want to let deep into your soul here's my contribution: youtube.com/watch?v=lMyZ46…
@EthanReeder I'd like to do more poetry/songwriting. not sure if the thing I need for it is a crew, but keep me posted
fuck you @SubstackInc for abusing a moment of my inatttention to subscribe me to two random other substacks that were recommended by the one I was intentionally subscribing to fucking dark patterns. I was moving fast and my eyes jumped down to "continue"
then it was harder than I expected to even find exactly where my list of subscriptions was so I could unsubscribe from these new ones. I thought it'd be its own page but I had to scroll way down in general "settings". but alpha-sorted, so I had to figure out which ones they were
and I didn't pay enough attention while rapidly clicking to see the names of the things I was getting subscribed to, so I had to go back to the main page of the one I intended to subscribe to in order to view their recommendations but many people will fail at this!
all of which makes me basically hate substack. I don't want people subscribed to me who didn't want to subscribe to me! I don't particularly want people who subscribe sight-unseen just based on a reco & I DEFINITELY don't want people who got tricked and can't be bothered to fix!
I had been thinking of switching my main blog to substack but I've now decided I won't. too shady. I'll stay on my own decentralized situation, thanks I'll take fewer subscribers who mean it I do have a newsletter tho btw:
@DoinMahBest @nat_sharpe_ @_rossry @jonas_hellman @soundrotator @rgblong @mari_lasilva @peakexperiments @FrankaMedic @thankyoudando @rpborkowski @fordoglunk @riboprotein (tagging people who replied to a related music request! reply to quoted tweet 👇 not this tag-filled one)
Retweeted @exgenesis
idea: ecosystem work retreat I invite a group of brilliant, kind, agentic twitter people who I spot as working on sufficien…
@exgenesis I kinda wanted catalyzbon to be more like this but it was: - too short - too cramped quarters - too hot
@visakanv see people see people
well shit this seems important. civium time
cities are alive but they aren't particularly awake New York is more self-aware than most cities, but this is different from awakeness
@benlandautaylor @viemccoy this is the article I mentioned last night
Retweeted @aleksil79
everyone so busy hyperstitioning science fiction into reality they wont see high fantasy coming
@__drewface if you're using gmail then when you have a thread open it has a url and you can totally copy that url somewhere else for your own purposes more annoying is there isn't a link to the email you can give someone else who's in the same email thread
@EthanReeder remember that they can't directly see your blindspots, they can only see the effects your blindspots have on mindspace around you stay close to your own experience don't let them gaslight you into acknowledging something that doesn't make sense to you
Replying to @alexishelping
@alexishelping sometimes other times it's more a fantasy of fucking the person or benefitting from their power
@TheAnnaGat not that obscure but I quote it often and rarely hear anyone else quote it
@mimi10v3 somewhat* | somewhat** *(Jefferson Bible, Robert Alter's psalms translation) **(actively experimenting with a post-Christian church)
@mimi10v3 fool scheduling it for tomorrow instead of next week. it's one of the rare kinds of lies one can make true.
@mimi10v3 in uni, I met a founder at a party who I hoped might hire me, and he asked if I knew Ruby or Python and I said "I'm learning Python" and when that party's keg ran out I went home immediately and started playing with Python while still drunk. it was great. didn't end up mattering
@chercher_ai @IkkyusDen even better than volunteering at a food bank (which, the one time I did it, I didn't really feel much sense of difference made by me being there) take some food you have and go find a homeless person to give it to. has slightly transformed me the few times I've done it
the mere act of justifying something is always a form of rationalizing, therefore always a form of bullshit
@TylerAlterman because it corrupts the sense that is being used for steering, via justification and bullshit
@dschorno intend.do/rooms kinda has this, though it's not optimal for a full-on screenshare
@eshear hm, true. I feel like cities/neighborhoods can be more or less awake though eg Black Rock City is probably the most awake city
@CactusBrahmin @SubstackInc haha wasn't your fault. but yeah I wondered if you'd notice the screenshot
@inkolore_ I'm sure also that back when they were together, their stories would have sounded more similar, because (A) they had more attention towards maintaining shared reality (B) they had reason to rationalize away the things that would later appear obvious red flags
@exgenesis hey look I found a third copy of the same picture
@exgenesis (specifically)
@Conaw very actionable but I'd Iove to actually have a model of why they pair up these ways eg connect it with this:
@the_wilderless oh this is cool. I might want to do the same thing! wouldn't be hard to build a custom payment system for this, if it's what you really want. like stripe has built-in subscriptions but it'd be pretty straightforward to have a server that just initiates decreasing 1-off payments.
@eshear @ElytraMithra here's a pretty interesting thread on Christianity in America positing America wasn't founded so much by Lutheran protestants but by radical reformers (neither of which are catholic)
Replying to @RalphWaldo77
@RalphWaldo77 depends on what awakeness means are there contexts in which it makes sense to you to talk of groups of humans as awake or not awake?
@uncatherio something here feels good, tho idk if this is quite what I'm looking for I more want a version of twitter where I start writing and it offers me tweets & links from friends that are relevant, but doesn't just have a random scattered feed
Retweeted @the_wilderless
@visakanv @NielsHoven when I first read "vacuum" I though you meant like "the void"
@visakanv yessss this is one of my fav things to do with babies so glad your kid's tongue works
Retweeted @lisatomic5
does anyone ever say like "god I've been having such a weird difficult time recently" and then a woo person is like "oh wel…
@mischiefanimals bigger issue honestly is that it's May, not September
Retweeted @Prigoose
twitter creates mutual situational awareness with your social scene
charity is a very important part of my life the main thing I give people is the benefit of the doubt
looked up a christian hymn on spotify and found a carrie underwood version and was like huh and yeah she's the one who recorded "before he cheats" about getting revenge on a lover who she assumes is cheating on her and uhh I really don't think the bible says that's how to best re
briefly entertained the idea that maybe she turned christian later but no, "jesus take the wheel" is from a year before "before he cheats". my sense of jesus is raising a massive eyebrow at her 🤨 ...forgiving her, ofc, but also like "uh what?" (neither written by carrie btw!)
ofc, part of christianity's deal is a kind of goodself-vs-badself tension, which is part of what's going on in "jesus take the wheel"—the righteous goodself asking for help to take over from the depraved badself.
so maybe she'd decry the vengeful behavior? but the song doesn't at all decry it, it feel very righteous my guess is that that song, given that it was a chart-topper, has inspired at least a few people to also slash tires or key cars of partners they suspect of cheating
gotta say there's a certain je ne sais quoi to watching humanity try to make sense of theological questions in the youtube comments of a traditional hymn* used in a comedy-drama movie soundtrack** *Down To The River To Pray **O Brother, Where Art Thou?
my suggestion is to tune into the felt sense of that gut punch (and have others do it too) and see what else it wants to say first thing I got was this is your life but it's not as punchy my guess is that there's a bold claim about joyful motivation you can make
@mattgoldenberg evoking death and the preciousness of life definitely has a relevant potency "you are free to not waste your precious life"?
@mattgoldenberg high-level suggestion: find a way to make the book title be a powerful phrase that will itself encode at least one core insight and change peoples' lives
@frideswyth @wholebodyprayer oh yeah “The unbearable lightness of being” has mildly fucked me up as a phrase for years and I just weeks ago realized it was a novel
Retweeted @Morphenius
This is why “let go” is anti-helpful as advice.
@reasonisfun healing from trauma amounts to learning that it is okay to think what you think! 🤔
look, the problem is that every so often it does
@Morphenius gently notice, if it feels right to do so, what (if anything) is gripping, and see if you can understand why it's doing so and whether it needs to keep doing that and find out together if, given that, it lets go
@Morphenius ...I sounds like @meditationstuff haha meditationbook.page/#p2
@the_wilderless yeah that sounds awesome honestly
Retweeted @chercher_ai
I can blame my parents And they can blame their parents And pretty soon the bacteria are blaming the rocks The rocks are…
@chercher_ai on behalf of the universe, you're welcome
on behalf of the universe, you're welcome
@chercher_ai went and made it its own tweet:
I had not heard this or seen this, but given everything I do know about the world I would have been shocked to discover it was otherwise
death is not what makes life precious death is what *reminds us* life is precious
Retweeted @Kir_Lev
just SF vibe
@QuantumG yeah moments after I tweeted it I realized I wanted to say "death reminds us", to not imply it was the only thing it's one of many things that reminds us
@LyonCurio The Master and his Emissary is the first one that comes to mind helped my mind see that it was a mind
this article makes a cool analogy between the kinds of simple, fast strategies in games like MTG (I'd add Big Money in Dominion) and uhh war, in geopolitics. both are the foundation the metagame must relate to radimentary.wordpress.com/2022/11/07/agg…
enviberonment
@__drewface yessssss hello tiny rose
@__drewface LFG
just updated a blog post 9y+ later because I don't stand by the commitment it proclaims. turns out if you start a post with "scrupulosity triggers" then unless it's about healing your shames etc, you're probably attacking yourself & encouraging others to! malcolmocean.com/2015/02/iron-r…
neither in middle school nor in my 20s was bending myself out of shape trying to be "cool" helpful. shout out to @tasshinfogleman for this beautiful lil reparenting vid youtube.com/watch?v=i1ZNdz…
@erikfromalaska what do you mean? this post is making the case that that's sort of not possible, because all decks need to respond to the fastest decks, for pretty inherent reasons
you can accept all of reality as it is, but unless you've convinced yourself into thinking your desires don't matter, then sometimes honestly accepting reality also involves changing it
your desires are part of reality if you try to accept things and leave them all as they are, you are denying the reality of your desires
Retweeted @Gena_I_Gorlin
But contra the explicit aims of attachment-based parenting, my goal is not to get her securely attached to *me*; it's to…
Thread · RLHF as a coercive environment for a developing intelligence · 1 of 4 tweets
from a thread on parenting kids to have secure attachment, and how that's largely about helping them relate to the world on their own terms, rather than be at your whims (= RLHF)
beautiful thread on attachment styles as being about relating to the world (what happens when mom leaves the room?) and about how to parent in a way that supports that unfolding
Sorry—I am what I am.
on behalf of the universe: we're doing our best to meet you where you're at and welcome you fully as you are and as you unfold
@meekaale true but also both is good x.com/tradingMaxiSL/…
Thread · Why the X rebrand is a worse name than Twitter · 2 of 5 tweets
welp, they finally switched from twitter.com to x.com on desktop realized it when my dozen userstyles broke
sad about this. twitter is the superior name. X doesn't make sense, it's empty, it sounds too much like other words, you can't search for it. it has no metaphor:
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
on behalf of the universe: we're doing our best to meet you where you're at and welcome you fully as you are and as you…
@xuenay love didn't have to exist but if it didn't we wouldn't be here to notice
Thread · Why the X rebrand is a worse name than Twitter · 3 of 5 tweets
like facebook trying to call itself "meta", it's also overreach. nobody gets to own a letter, or a prefix (ex-). piss off. big brands take advantage of media claiming neutrality, and being willing to call them what they call themselves. fight it
just checked all the other one-letter domain names q.com redirects to quantumfiber.com which sells internet. they own, but don't use, the one-letter domain z.com claims to be "Japan's #1 Internet Group". I think it's just the oldest (1999). all others don't exist.
huh, interesting, z.com claims that only 3 single-char domain names exist—apparently all the highest-scoring scrabble letters, for some reason I'm having a dinner party now—bye! if you're inspired to research the history of this, share it in replies :)
so nice to have the privilege to mostly not have to deal with people who like to play "check your privilege" cards
as an adult, I'm regularly making sure I'm drinking enough electrolytes but I feel like this just wasn't a thing when I was a kid. gatorade for sports, yeah, but... did times/culture change? did I not need it? was my food enough?
@Meaningness have you seen this thread? resonates with something I recall you writing about years ago
@eshear totally. this is also why even though a stick isn't per se me and your jacket isn't per se you, if I'm holding the stick in my hand and the other end makes contact with your jacket... then obviously "I. poked. you."
@eshear @Morphenius and I have been playing around a bunch with putting the "I" pronoun in different places, and it's a remarkably powerful psychotechnology for something so simple. in particular, "I" as "my body" vs as "my mind"
fuck yes
"my relationship with God" as kinda like "my cells' relationship with me"
saw a sticker in Berkeley "no borders. no nations. just humans." and I kinda like the sentiment but it also hits a bit like "no skin. no animals. just cells."
@ZenoRogue oh wow this is so cool (also I've played hyperrogue and enjoyed it a lot! thanks)
"you're more coherent than God"—totally. I noticed this in a conversation where someone was talking about how his relationship with God doesn't change even though he sometimes forgets about it and I was like "ohh, by relationship you mean..."
@PatrickDFarley for the last 10,000 years or so, yes. before that, much less clear. and the concept of "nation" has itself evolved a LOT over time. eg sovereignty over its territory used to be more merely de facto, not something that was considered a right of a nation.
@RokoMijic lots of isms are more or less cancerous
@RokoMijic but yes, leftward isms tend more towards sinning where rightward isms tend more towards nissing
@stephsoussloff @TylerAlterman cc @LordChisholm
Retweeted @stephsoussloff
the multi-cult solution: 1. be your own favorite cult 2. only join cults who are excited about the fact that you are p…
Retweeted @stephsoussloff
Skeptical of ppl whose morning practice is something someone told them to do. It’s not your morning practice til you’…
whoaaaa
on behalf of the universe, thank you
@meansinfinity Ananta is as Ananta does
> Evil is the termination of infinite play... to eliminate the play of another regardless of the rules. Evil is never intended as evil. Indeed, the contradiction inherent in all evil is that it originates in the desire to eliminate evil. ♾ Finite & Infinite Games, James Carse
@the_wilderless Jason Mraz is a great poet, lots of wordplay my fav album is Love Is A Four Letter Word but his latest one is also great here's one of many fav songs: youtube.com/watch?v=aRN5ig…
@johnsonmxe @Morphenius is this the thread you've referenced in conversations a few times? it's great. I don't think I actually got to see it til now super related to our work in memetics
@johnsonmxe awesome thread. here's my take on some of what's going on with the latest waves of predatory superorganisms. stoked to hook it up with your vasocomputation etc stuff. malcolmocean.com/2023/07/supere…
Retweeted @johnsonmxe
In the beginning there was sensation Humans developed the ability to freeze sensations, then used these frozen pieces to c…
everything does not have an environment in which to be an agent — @levity, in convo with me & @divinewelcome
Thread · Two Gods: "everything" versus the supercooperation cluster
it's common to see God as "everything", but if so then this is necessarily a non-agential God, because everything does not have an environment in which to be an agent
this God—"everything"—has a direction in which it unfolds. in that sense it has something like will, desire, intent, purpose, preference physics has studied some of the small-scale & simple patterns here: entropy, gravity., free energy minimization is about larger-scale
but the God called "everything" does not match our normal intuitions or frames for talking about agents, because part of what makes an agent is the boundary between it and not-it (its environment). eg when I'm using a tool, me+it become a new temporary agent
the God called "everything" is also not a dissipative system in the usual sense, which most other agents are (certainly all living ones, including in some sense companies and cities) the universe is, ultimately, the only true closed system we can find
another main sense I have of God is the "supercooperation cluster", ie the self-organizing coordinated* collection of agents making the world a better, funner, more collaborative & workable place to be an agent, for all *in-part-atemporally-acausally
this semi-coordinated collection of agents is itself an agent, not just because it has agency within it (the "system" of {me, peru's youngest lawyer} is not an agent) but by - having some capacity to coordinate - having a shared purpose & shared skin in the game
the supercooperation cluster is not merely an agent, but necessarily the LARGEST agent incomplete sketch of a proof by contradiction: cooperation scales better than defection, so any larger agent would also know how to cooperate thus would itself be/join the cluster
the supercooperation cluster is more able to be aware of its existence and its nature than it used to be, thanks to (among many many other things) people like @RomeoStevens76 combining modern game theory with ancient buddhism and sharing their findings
the supercooperation cluster's capacity to coordinate is limited, but it's substantially more now in some ways than it was decades or centuries ago, in part thanks to global connectivity of humanity (tho maybe in *other* ways less so as religions have broken down)
note that the supercooperation cluster agent is super loose and incoherent, and in many ways WAY less mature than a toddler. arguably about as mature as a fetus, in some sense. not yet born. but again, way less coherent. distributed and stretched thin.
a 3rd notion of God I have, which maybe bridges these two, is God as the universe's creativity. which is both an aspect of how the everything unfolds, AND centrally the means by which open-ended supercooperation is possible
but even if bridged, they can't be quite the same. the universe does everything that happens the supercooperation cluster has vast but limited agency cosmic creativity creates both beauty & banal harms the supercooperation cluster's will is to love
I almost contrasted it as "cosmic creativity can be used for evil", but I really like James Carse's point that evil originates in the desire to eliminate evil, which might actually be the behavior of a sufficiently confused attempt at supercooperating
I can tell there's something I'm missing here, which is holding me back from surrender because I don't quite trust my sense of what to surrender to. I feel good about that, for now, tho I want to get more clarity and be able to gently share it
there's a deep connection between the supercooperation cluster (who) and the metaprotocol (how)
as Romeo says in the original supercooperation cluster video, the test of whether you're ready for first contact is the extent to which you've derived the obviously tautologically necessary first contact principles
and we're still figuring it out. this moment—me writing these words, and you reading them—is us participating in that creative unfolding. hi 👋
@eshear @levity @divinewelcome does everything maintain homeostasis though?
just wanted a noun form of "posit" and I was like "position"??
@levity @divinewelcome I wrote a whole thread on this, plus other ideas of God (including some positing on the largest possible agent)
@the_wilderless @palmerish if you like Hide & Seek, you might like 22, A Million, by Bon Iver (also look up Francis and the Lights, who helped develop the vocal fx tech and has his own album of similar vibes) open.spotify.com/album/4bJCKmpK…
@RichDecibels I'm getting increasingly excited about looking at microsolidarity stuff now that I've got my main dyad solid and I'm looking for similar fuckyeah on the crew & congregation level
@SomeBrashAtom in the beginning is the word in the beginning things began by making sense
@nosilverv doing the lord's work 🙃
@CalebFiggers I really don't get the trinity at all. do you have a good intro that allows perception of the trinity via gnosis? how could I tell for myself there's a trinity? malcolmocean.com/2023/11/i-can-…
@eshear @levity @divinewelcome depends perhaps on if things are defined by their wholeness or their boundaries youtube.com/watch?v=DG4JMK…
psychosomatic ally
nice #twiptych
bangers and mash is when you make a bunch of really good tweets so good that someone else remixes them with other memes
@staglynn the versions we've had so far, which have tried and partially succeeded, have failed to be more complete & stable because they function via distorting their members' sanity/preferences which creates friction, dis-integration, etc
@staglynn I'm bullish on ones that don't do this (investigating bottlenecks to this is one of my main projects)
Retweeted @staglynn
Chesterton's fence is about breaking down existing barriers without understanding why they're there, but there's a corollary…
"it seems you're creating problems for me until I do the thing you want me to do... and that's one way that people sometimes try to motivate each other... but it also makes me not want to interact with you at all" youtube.com/watch?v=Oz9h5i…
@MasterTimBlais @Morphenius this might be useful for your project of helping people access their own gnosis in the context of math
there's a lot of great work to be done hyperstitioning saner, wiser, kinder egregores
my arc rn: letting go of the idea I need fixing, but also learning to recognize that sometimes under the voice that says "I need fixing" is a voice saying "I'm in pain and alone, come find me & love me". and responding to that voice feels so different than trying to fix myself
@SaraBollman yeah, totally. thanks for this tweet, which prompted me to write up this one (drafted as a reply but I decided to let it stand on its own)
idea: tandem computer for use while snuggling
@undo_hubris depends on the skill and on the scale there are lots of things where you can go from zero to one in a year. like "cannot juggle" to "can juggle well". this is at least a 37x improvement in my books.
Retweeted @tszzl
NDAs that disallow you to mention the NDA seem like a powerful kind of antimemetic magic spell with dangerous properties for bot…
Retweeted @KelseyTuoc
You can read some email exchanges between OpenAI and ex-employees over at vox.com/future-perfect…. There are a lot of forms…
having transparent oversight of experts has its own issues (see paper below) but having experts not allowed to criticize their former employers is madness
if you build a system that has a way to accelerate but no brakes or ability to slow down or steer, it will almost certainly crash into something if you punish people for pointing this out, then you remove the ability to even fix the problem
@SpencrGreenberg There's a thing that's related to 1-4, which is like, the perception of your or others' intention. Like if I stare at someone in a particular way, someone who observes this (or me or the staree) might comment that I'm directing (or even "blasting") a lot of energy at them
@SpencrGreenberg ^ that description is a gross version, for illustration, but more subtle forms of this exist as perceptual experiences that people can have—a kind of sense, not epiphenomenal to others senses—that can inform how they interact
@SpencrGreenberg it's relevant to eg energy healing because sometimes someone can have this kind of intention-energy basically stored as a pattern of muscle tension which is kind of like your type-2-interoceptive and someone who is sensitive can perceive this
@SpencrGreenberg this kind of perception is no more inherently woo or metaphysically weird than a soccer player having a sense of where he expects the other players to move or a person having a sense that their friend or baby is upset (or even perhaps why they're upset)
@SpencrGreenberg I forget the source but my impression is that "the brain stops developing at age 25" is actually a misrepresentation of a study that was attempting to find when the brain stopped developing, only studied 18-25 year olds, and found only that it DIDN'T stop BEFORE 25
@SpencrGreenberg I don't trust averages unless I've seen good reason to think that averages are relevant to the situation (which is very rare for the study of humans, though is less rare for eg measuring of star positions, which is part of where they first took off)
huh maybe the reason sam fought so hard to get reinstated after the board fired him was he didn't want to lose all of his equity or be unable to criticize openai
@RomeoStevens76 @cube_flipper I finally read this today and it's trippy and delightful. thanks for the reco (here and in person iirc last fall)
@mslapik @IAPCT @warrenmansell interesting depictions of neural circuits which remind me of the early chapters of B:CP
@the_opnpc well not like that they can't! but there are various reasons to think that egregores that systematically gaslight their hosts and mess with their critical thinking faculties will eventually be outcompeted by ones that nurture clarity and sanity
Thread · When meanness serves group boundaries, and how much is enough
good thread on the constructive role of meanness as part of group↔️individual trust-dancing
worth noting there's a huge difference between active punishment (shaming, etc) and something more like simple exclusion but sometimes it is also good to tell a person not just "you don't have to stop being an asshat but you can't asshat here" but "stop that. we all hate it"
talked to a young gal who had had a young guy (both early 20s?) super-awkwardly expressing his attraction towards with her incessantly at a party she kept trying to be polite, but like... buddy needs a "look, imma be relatively nice about this, but [forcefully] your behavior might get you beaten up elsewhere" not to say she was obligated to confront him in this way (fwiw, kid was naive tiny timid nerd, basically zero risk of him being violent in this scene) but I wanted her to notice that NOT confronting him is NOT a favor to him. the next person he creeps on might not be so understanding! (nevermind that also actually being like "fuck off" as opposed to "thank you, you can go away now" might actually have gotten her more of the peace she was looking for)
being mean to someone for merely liking a sport/anime you don't is just cruelty. nothing noble there—live & let live. but being mean to someone because they won't shut up about that sport/anime despite nobody else around them being interested IS part of how they get the message!
in general, you don't need to be any meaner than you need to be in order to get your message across though and learning how much that is is a whole calibration process
@RichDecibels you inspire me to write a lil thread here:
Replying to @sashachapin
@sashachapin @Romy_Holland @SarahAMcManus haha briefly thought I was one of only two followers on some new account before realizing that no, the follower count got cached in a borked state during your time away
I think this highlights something powerful about how everybody's experience makes sense from their own perspective... and what narrative generally does (videos, books, etc) is share someone's perspective
also don't forget that a lot of the bullies are themselves bullied and don't actually feel very powerful most of the time—especially at the times they're most violent
Wicked is, famously, a retelling of The Wizard of Oz from the Wicked Witch's perspective Less well-known is Twisted, a retelling of Aladdin from the perspective of the evil vizier Jafar. hilarious and well worth watching
is it possible to gaslight a chimp? 🙈🙉🙊
@worstyouknow I mean fair
@MasterTimBlais how many self-trusting chimps have you seen?
@pomatious yeah the ladder-banana-hose story was one of the ones on my mind as I was thinking about this sense of "that doesn't make sense but we do it anyway" or something. definitely related, if not quite the thing
@RichDecibels imo the subtle thing here is like, whether it's extra or gratuitous pain, or contains a SHOULD, vs if it's more like the way a cat will claw you if you bother it sufficiently (but may then back off and even be friendly, unless you bother it again)
Retweeted @the_wilderless
i think there's a horseshoe where profound selfishness comes back around to full bodhisattvahood
@phokarlsson (requires relative safety maybe) notice their tiny laugh or a moment where they awkwardly cut themself off and gently ask what it was about (@visakanv had a tweet/thread about this)
@itinerantfog I tried it a decade ago and they just came back sneakier. My latest approach, which works way better, is to find the pain underlying the should, and embrace/grieve that instead of hitting myself with it. youtu.be/baXQzPpDZwU
@richardludlow BioEmotive is really great for doing with friends. Really benefits from facilitation but doesn't require tons of skill or wisdom to facilitate decently (tho "amazingly" is also possible) tasshin.com/blog/the-bio-e…
@postreptilian sure but how do you convert this into gaslighting—like causing a chimp to go crazy and doubt their own senses?
best answer so far I think. that it could be done by manipulating their sense of the stability of reality / object permanence
@the_opnpc I have never uttered that phrase and probably won't but I do approximately think we can build a society that has basically zero of it. it requires some grokking what it is and why it's counterproductive tho, otherwise you're trying to bully away bullying
@the_opnpc as for my take on what coercion is, I have a thread on that which is pretty subtle (and does not, for instance, include holding a baby down briefly while changing them. or pickpocketing. coercion must get someone to DO something)
Retweeted @the_opnpc
there is a way of working powerfully on the good-ness of future minds that is more pressing than ‘alignment’
@AskYatharth cigarettes were like this for awhile stimulants in general give the badself a chance to rebel/indulge while satisfying the goodself's intention to be productive (riffing on The Guru Papers' chapter on Addiction)
taking John Gottman way more seriously now that I know he wrote this paper in 1999 with these dope charts modelling nonlinear dynamics in the effects of certain parameters on marital stability
interesting thread on how the art world (of cinema at least) doesn't seem to be particularly keen to set films in a timeline that has covid in it (please post counterexamples!)
@the_wilderless uhhhhh I would have initially thought yes, but I don't actually see a "make payment" endpoint in the @lmsqueezy API, which is very odd if I think of them as a stripe competitor but there's also eg @PaddleHQ as a merchant of record, that markets itself as a replacement for stripe
@the_wilderless @lmsqueezy @PaddleHQ but maybe with eg Lemon Squeezy you could do it by subscribing the user, then applying a different coupon each year
got slightly more clearly just now why the mind is not good for storing intentions. my mind has too many strategies for bothering me about them and spooking me if I consider letting them go, rather than just being a storage space. and it tries to initiate multiple at once!
@CharlesFLehman in my experience (and from anecdotes) being smarter than the teacher often results in abuse from the teacher
@CharlesFLehman being forced to sit still & in some cases not even allowed to read a book quietly at my desk is in one sense worse than prison, where you're trapped but you can at least spend your time how you want while you're there, reading any books you can get your hands on (or working out)
light is particles, light is waves
Retweeted @VividVoid_
We didn't kill God. We just took him apart to see how He worked and now we're putting Him back together
@the_wilderless not a movie but The Steerswoman Series of novels has a cool depiction of a 4-5 transition amzn.to/4e7qSbM
@MichelleAkin @RichDecibels likewise, that's been my arc the last 4-5 years in order to collect all 4 dimensions so I can Wise Action yall aint ready
@siahsargus @RichDecibels in general I agree but in this situation I feel like it works tbh like it's already only interested in the intersections, not bothering to name anything that's only in one circle, so it's almost more like a 2x2 that just also offers a transcend-and-include
Retweeted @the_wilderless
If you break down the ego before transcending the superego, you’re gonna have problems ESPECIALLY if your adopted supe…
@BarbettiJames @the_wilderless @cosmictealatte this blog post (and the exercise in it) might help! malcolmocean.com/2023/07/supere…
@BarbettiJames @the_wilderless @cosmictealatte also mine+@Morphenius's work on Original Spin is very much about this:
Replying to @Wangleberry
@Wangleberry everything is monocausal gets cited in my circles weekly at least (which is about how often it takes one of us to be on about something new) x.com/eigenrobot/sta…
@VividVoid_ we're tryna get the spigot open
@VividVoid_ yupppp and consensually this time
Thread · Trying to find unbiased reporting on trans prison policy
read some disturbing articles about male prisoners lying to take advantage of laws designed to protect trans prisoners as I go to tweet about them, I notice much of what I've been reading is ideologically biased. but I can't find anyone talking about it who isn't somehow, so 🤷♀️
first: a meta-thing. I am confused about how culture-war-hooked I am here. I notice I'm concerned about stuff. then I read things that resonate with my concerns. and the biggest part of my concern is less even what's happening specifically (prison policy is not an arena close enough or important enough to me) and more about a sense that there's a conversation that people are afraid to have here. but the arena of difficult conversations is one that is very immediately important to me, and where I can make a difference, at least in a local sense—the same way that reading others' perspectives has made a difference for me. so I'm here, talking about it. there's something post-culture-war that I'm trying to do here, although admittedly not as well as I would like to be able to. but I am showing up, as I am, here to make sense of stuff with those who want to make sense of stuff with me. and hopefully not stepping on too many toes in the meantime. thank you for whatever patience you can have for me, and for whatever open-mindedness you can bring to the timeline today, in this thread or elsewhere.
first article I came across was an interview with a prison guard. this site has a whole series of interviews with women who've been in cells with uhhh big aggressive people-with-penises who are not making any point of female gender presentation iwf.org/cruelandunusua…
that site is from a very conservative org—not itself a problem. conservativism is one virtue that could help people avoid this situation!
but when I looked it up... seems like IWF is not exactly known for adhering that well to the truth themselves. and I could observe myself that the articles lacked any perspective on (let alone from) actual trans people who have transferred peacefully, etc
found this piece on a nonpartisan gender-abolitionist site talking about a lawsuit (which maybe got dismissed 2 weeks ago?) their gender-abolitionism is quite radical tho, not conservative. it sees gender itself as an oppressive tool of the patriarchy!
of course, gender abolitionism, while not "left" or "right", IS opposed to not just to trans ideologies but even relatively non-ideological trans ontologies. ...meanwhile, in my quest for others' perspectives, I found this law firm praising SB-132 and dissing the lawsuit as simply anti-trans (which again, maybe it also is?) it would be nice if I could trust that the phrase "basic rights" in this context from a law firm meant things like food, water, shelter, and not things that are actually deeply non-obvious as to how to apply them when gender is confusing... ...but I don't trust that—particularly in the context of them simply declaring the lawsuit bogus rather than citing specific errors, and not empathizing with any possible real concerns that the people behind the lawsuit might have. the way they speak of it here seems ideologically captured to me (or pandering, if the point of this article is to appeal to a certain demographic, and they speak differently elsewhere).
it would be great if there were some non-partisan independent journalists to investigate these topics or maybe this needs adversarial collaborations, between opposed folks who are willing to come together and see what they can agree on?
anyway, I looked up the uhhh not-exactly-nonpartisan-either but at least law-in-fact text of the bill itself, and it doesn't take a lot of red-teaming to see how this could get abused eg: calling yourself nonbinary is sufficient to access a women's prison legiscan.com/CA/text/SB132/…
this excerpt notes a less-obvious issue in the wording of the bill: those moved based on gender are given extra rights to single cells etc. makes sense for eg trans men now in a men's prison! ...but ends up making women 2nd class citizens to lying men iwf.org/2023/02/27/nig…
bill issue # 3: taking cross-sex hormones not required. seems to me that'd help stop liars, even if not usual policy for trans self-id'ing in other contexts this bill says it's about "respect, agency, and dignity", but uhh lack of agency is kinda the central deal with prisons 🤨
most prisons have way more men who are willing to lie than they have trans women so unless the screening is very good, this law will transfer more lying-men than honest trans-women
although even if there were 10 relieved trans women transferred for every 1 horny-and/or-violent lying-dude that would still have a terrible effect on women's prisons! it changes the whole vibe. one fox in a henhouse is a big difference from zero.
theoretically, the screening is sufficient. in practice? I'm not invested enough in this whole thing to go look first-hand, but there's lots of interviews with women suggesting otherwise, including multiple quotes of men calling their old buddies and saying "get over here!"
why mightn't the screening be sufficient? interviews from IWF (conservative group) suggest that people are afraid of losing their jobs for doubting peoples' gender self-id are they really? would they actually? I don't know. sounds plausible given the climate around this stuff.
if the screening were perfect, this would still only MAYBE be a win afaict. it's still probably quite triggering for women who have been raped by men to now have to deal with having people around who have masculine silhouettes and penises (but are trans and not violent)
ironically there's a DIFFERENT law which says that the problem is not allowed to be solved by putting transgender people in a third prison, because that would violate some discrimination clause from a FAQ about the bill: cdcr.ca.gov/prea/sb-132-fa…
part of why I'm tweeting about this is that I'm trying to understand how trans activists are managing to make themselves (and trans people) look so bad here like here 👇, no-brainer response is "holy shit some people are lying!? we need better screening" latimes.com/california/sto…
but instead, in response to seeing the lawsuit as denying the existence of actual trans people (and maybe it is, separate from what should happen with prisons) ...the "LGBTQ+ advocates" seem to be denying the existence of liars but surely there are both! (where by "surely there are both", I'm not intending to directly agree or disagree with a gender abolitionist ontology or an LGBTQ ontology, about what is or is not a trans person or eg a "woman", I'm just noting that pragmatically it seems obvious to me that there are at least some people who want to move from men's prisons to women's prison's because they experience themselves as women and would feel safer & more at home there, and others who want to move to take advantage of women)
I genuinely wonder what's going on here! I often suspect filter bubbles: subcultures don't realize how out-of-touch their ontology is from most people's and how many people who are happy to live and let live, don't see gender self-id as top dog
there's furthermore ofc a failure to red-team / apply security mindset / consider how the system could be exploited but I find that hard to buy here because some advocates for this bill were trans prisoners. surely they'd met psychopaths in prison!
is it selfish tribalism? these activists don't care if women get groped by lying men, only that trans people get to be where feels right? if so, that would suggest these activists are also very short-sighted, as it seems to me to be very bad for trans causes medium-term
anyway, the other reason I'm tweeting about this is because I feel crazy seeing obvious things about gender only being said by people with extreme or partisan takes—in both directions. so I show up, trying to be a kind-enough outlaw to have dialogue.
and I would like to find more people who are willing to say multiple obvious things in contexts where there's a lot of pressure to pick a side and to be against someone. so say hi! or introduce me!
one principle that helps a TON with this endeavour is being able to agree with everybody that the problems they're concerned about are real and matter, while simultaneously disagreeing with everybody that their proposed solutions are viable
@the_wilderless on which note, it looks like @rkirstein is on twitter! not to nag but... any idea when books 5-7 are coming? I've been awaiting them for 8 years!
🇨🇦 any Canadian expats got a good recommendation for an accountant to handle the final tax return? exit tax and stuff
every now and then I look up a random word in google drive and I find all sorts of cool docs I forgot my friends had shared with me eg lately: "My telos for unfurling" "Setting Your Worldview Free" "Synthesizing religious and singularitarian eschatologies"
all this is to say that if you have my personal email because we're moots, and you wanna share a manifesto or rant or ontology-boggling or some other unpublished piece of writing with me, go for it. I love that shit. if I read it I'll probably even leave some comments!
@MarkEstefanos missed this but some amount of both, leaning towards teaching
I really want 3D spreadsheets I want eg time as one axis, & people, books., as another then in each cell, I want to be able to put in multiple types of data, some of which display as color/bold/., others of which are just usable for filtering elsewhere who's building this!?!
@eshear I mean I really do want that color visualization etc but maybe pivot tables are the thing? can you show a video of them that will blow my mind?
teach your kids about principal-agent problems before someone who's not acting in their best interest does
@SimoneHCollins it's true, but there's a key difference, which is that for most people (not all! but almost everyone using the word "trad") ...their cultural situation is already so atomized and remixed that there is no simple answer to "how we do things"
@nickcammarata "things that try to optimize you too hard if you take them too seriously, but have a lot of good points when included as part of a balanced diet" (see also "totalizing worldviews")
Retweeted @m_ashcroft
something I'm really enjoying about working with @findradiance is that their approach and underlying belief seems to be the…
one of the reasons I hate astrology so much is for causing me to distrust a bunch of things that aren't bullshit because they smelled similar
instagram delenda est this is batshit insane. not just different posts to different users (fair) but different comments, which give people a different sense of what everyone THINKS about the exact same situation x.com/julesterpak/st…
and like, sure, twitter's algo will also give you widely different takes about today's main character (or news or whatever) but it gives way less of an impression that you're seeing the takes everyone else is seeing. which I think people expect from comments.
moreover, she said she couldn't even FIND the comments that were shown to her bf—when she tried! probably only an issue for super popular posts; if only 10 comments, you can just see them all but search a topic (eg "trump") on twitter and you get a very wide range of posts!
@GrantSlatton @DefenderOfBasic @eshear "import a file from the sample datasets" I clicked on "import" but I'm not seeing sample datasets. clicked around to homepage and looked elsewhere a bit and still nothing. curious tho! just need better instructions
@eshear nice. yeah seems to me that something like this is necessary to prevent the whole thing from turning into a rationalization game moralities that don't ground out in "what do I actually care about?" are hackable
Retweeted @eshear
The only possible secure basis for morality is care.
@eshear "secure" here both means "not hackable" and also "it's the convergent fixed point"
Replying to @nullpointered
@aphercotropist totally. (my tweets here probably inspired by you)
ever experience a delayed-release tweet? you read it or kinda scroll past it and then minutes/hours/days/weeks/months later you're like "...holy shit"
@aneeshm yeah I basically grokked that at the same moment. maybe inspired in part by this:
@aneeshm delayed release tweet haha
Retweeted @EthanReeder
who are the most game-b ish politicians or leaders of our time?
@DefenderOfBasic @tonyaajjackson @hankgreen haha nice
looks like CubeWeaver might be the thing? I haven't played with it at all yet cubeweaver.com cc @_rossry
oooooh excited to check out this new exa.ai search tool
first attempt google: nada exa: found one! 16th result is just "CubeWeaver" wikipedia/Spreadsheet
wait it is sort-of-the-thing. definitely solves problems I have solved very hackily with gsheets but my guess is that it doesn't have the kind of color/format visualization I'm looking for, for instance. like it unfolds 3D onto 2D, rather than showing it another way
attempt 2 "excerpt from chapter 9 of Creativity Inc that talks about how having power messes with your information flow" (I've read the book, so I know it's there. not certain I got the ch # right) google: exa: summaries but no match listings + cool ebook?!? the book that showed up in the exa results, "Culture & Empire", is not directly relevant at all. I have no idea how it got there. but it's fascinating. I read the Preface and it's got really interesting thoughts on accelerating technology and its effects on culture & empire, and posits there won't be a singularity but it will keep getting faster
when was the last time you launched a new project? 🚀 (doesn't have to be finished, just has to be published and/or sign-up-for-able in some form!)
Replying to @rpborkowski
@rpborkowski music totally counts! especially the sense of the new project of "post iterations" (but I'd also count a new album or single or something like that, depending)
@rpborkowski (actually that's complex. if a musician was already putting out singles every month, I wouldn't count a new single as a new project, since there's already sort of an established pipeline outputting them. but if someone went from not shipping music to shipping, then yes!)
@rpborkowski (but if that same musician was like "now I'm into modular synth, here's my first modular synth livestream" then even if they were pretty bad and didn't go anywhere, it would still count for me in relation to this question. some non-obvious change in trajectory or something)
hey @getPrinternet (/ @onlyfootnotes) is there a way that me and N friends could sign up for shared-content issues of printernet where we each pick one piece to include?
@onlyfootnotes what is Cubicle? also I love this vibe:
@onlyfootnotes also you might like this article: robinsloan.com/notes/home-coo…
Most experiences of insight seem like one thing but are actually 3-10 distinct things all at once. In this paper, I will use Principle Component Analysis to
@RichDecibels @made_in_cosmos uh oh blog.livenearfriends.com/instigating-10…
@onlyfootnotes @getPrinternet Yeah I would love that. Just gotta figure out which crew I wanna do it with. But suppose I had a group of people, what's the next step for experimenting? (@Prigoose @__drewface what if we had a cross-household issue? 🤔)
"yo dawg I heard you like fractals" — @Morphenius "...that's the whole joke" — me
to those who are saying Israel should stop the war in Gaza... ...what would you do to protect yourself against Hamas, if you were them?