I'm pretty aggressive about reporting boilerplate cold DMs as spam. if you want to not be spam, you've gotta put in AT MINIMUM enough effort to get an LLM to give me a false impression of you having actually read and liked my stuff
July 2024
Replying to @ElytraMithra
@ElytraMithra someone mis-read "ground squirrels" and thought it was like "ground chicken"
Retweeted @MarkovMagnifico
my politics: - Biden should ban felons running for president via executive order (now allowed under Trump v United Sta…
Retweeted @xenoludicpraxis
P.S. As you finish reading, take a moment to observe your own thoughts. Notice how the act of engaging with these idea…
@mechanical_monk do it! working offline miles up is so good
@AskYatharth yeah seems to me like designing a constitution & configuration for a democracy would be a pretty interesting and worthwhile project. whether for a federation (many substates) or a unified state surely some seasteaders? @patrissimo
@PrinceVogel they don't pay you enough
@Ruesavatar totally
@HeidiPriebe1 @sasadb SF itself has peaks and surprisingly naturey regions—I have some gorgeous hikes walking distance from my place (Twin Peaks, Mt Sutro Nature Reserve, Glen Canyon, etc) (I live a 7 minute walk from one of the subway lines)
@HeidiPriebe1 @sasadb also parts of SF are steep enough that sometimes walking to a friend's place will itself be a hike in a different sense even though you're on city streets the whole time, although I assume that's mostly not what you mean
this thread has continued to stick with me and inform how I navigate the world twitter.com/HephaistosF/st…
Replying to @sashachapin
@sashachapin happy Canada Day bro 🇨🇦
some instances of original spin be like
I wonder how many people have quit a job, run away from parents, or filed for divorce, on Independence Day
Cache Reifies Everything Around Me
how many corporations are registered in Delaware compared to the population of Delaware?
@DefenderOfBasic I call this the creature that eats moloch
@DefenderOfBasic it feels good to participate in being part of a whole where the parts care for the whole so the whole can care for the parts better and people gravitate towards wholes that do this more and also are more willing to do this more for wholes that do it! malcolmocean.com/2024/05/the-pa…
it's my first Fourth of July since moving to America. what should I know? (welcoming answers from Americans and non-Americans) (not a citizen (yet!?) but green card application is pending!)
this is definitely how I feel about fireworks a celebration that we have more gunpowder than we need for fighting
@DarbraDawn > Contemplate freedom and what it means to you. thanks for this 💗
Retweeted @IntendApp
slaps roof of "later" "this bad boy can fit so many unmade decisions in it"
@FPallopides you might like John Bunzl's #SimPol / simpol.org which has a bunch of interesting pieces worked out for creating global coordination at a scale that can match global market forces, including how to get buy-in from different nations
WRITING IT LIVE challenge Let's write for each other and publish it. Here's the game: Bring a few blurbs of ideas you could write up (max 1 tweet or graphic in length). Based on those (and maybe pre-existing familiarity with your work) I'll tell you what I want to read about. Then you for me. Then we each write it up with the other person as audience, as best we can in the time allotted. If you book a 30min block, this might be a bullet-point "explain it in one breath standing on one foot" summary—these can be great! Or maybe something longer. Before we end the call, whatever each of us has written either gets: 1. published to blog/stack/newsletter/etc 2. emailed to a few people either of us choose (this option costs the writer $30) Interested? Reply below and I'll DM you a scheduling link.
@_rossry sent! also I've been meaning to follow up about going for a walk, and maybe the 3D+ spreadsheet idea.
@forthrighter fingers & liver intact going to bed was only mildly disturbed by fireworks still going off 4h after they started met some neighbors up on the hill watching fireworks which was cool!
Replying to @eigenrobot
@eigenrobot @DanLaddenHall I vaguely recall hearing that after the Order of the Occult Hand was discovered, they came up with a new phrase. Maybe it's "increasingly baroque"!
okay hear me out: Biden drops out with 5 days notice and Libertarian party wins
"...the cuckold, which is the contrapositive of the bastard..."
@HunterGlenn Haha nice. It vibes with Byron Katie's Turnarounds
@HunterGlenn Sweet! You seem like a person whose writing I might be interested in reading so I'm excited for our session :)
my brain while I'm choking on the water I just inhaled: "that's right, it goes in the air hole"
Retweeted @LinchZhang
Gender issues aside, it's utterly bizarre to me that plagiarism is considered vastly worse among academics than faking data…
Retweeted @FormBasedCodes
In Japan, if a building is used to provide people with a place to live, it’s residential, that’s all—whether it’s rente…
@eshear someone (@devonzuegel?) had an amazing thread a few years ago laying out a bunch of different local cooling mechanisms Japan used a neat one with evaporating water in the front of the house in such a way as to create a breeze that sweeps through all the rooms
Gonna buy a printer 🖨️ Recommendations? Necessary elements: 🛜 super easy print from wifi 📃 auto-duplex Nice to haves: 📷 scanning 🌈 new ink not too pricy Mostly for text, so if there's an option that's awesome for that but means I have to do photos elsewhere, lmk.
@docentdemagogue according to reddit Brother has bullshit subscriptions now :( reddit.com/r/printers/com…
Retweeted @FriedKielbasa
i screwed around with midjourney a lot lately. very very impressive - they have a web app now - you can personalize you…
@othercriteria Christianity has a strong "they will make fun of us" vibe built in, which at its best supports glorious acts of righteous kindness, and at its worst provides cover for tasteless acts of self-righteous bullshit
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@othercriteria Christianity has a strong "they will make fun of us" vibe built in, which at its best supports glorious a…
this is part of why I insist on unpacking terms into phrases that are harder to fudge - instead of "racist" or "antiracist", try "makes hiring decisions based on race or ethnicity" - instead of "fascist" or "antifascist", try "uses physical violence to address disagreements"
Replying to @devdcdev
@devdcdev @soren_iverson yeah fr
@GreenTextRepost likely we invented new kinds of memes ~10k years ago, which allowed different kinds of coordination (among this was the invention of history, and also of planning) here's one article on how that might have happened (though there are other possibilities) vectorsofmind.com/p/the-snake-cu…
unironically my new philosophy and it's so good
@norvid_studies gorgeous song an ode to technology, including supply chains youtube.com/watch?v=0RCIdO…
Retweeted @CEBKCEBKCEBK
When men arrived with domesticated animals on Mt Ararat 10,000 years ago, civilization began; when they discovered metall…
@arithmoquine dumb question: is there a way to give it both periodic and aperiodic activation functions to play with?
@PrinceVogel whoa cool! are you in town already? would love to have you over for dinner sometime! (also which neighborhood?)
> meals are holy, taking a shit is unholy. both are sacred acts bracketing digestion, the central process of local self-perpetuation good shit twitter.com/eigenrobot/sta…
Retweeted @AskYatharth
the is the single most important quote i have ever heard about the meta-crisis or whatever it is "islands of coherence ca…
enjoying this nonpartisan honesty from a guy speculating on whether Biden's decline is dementia
oof
@yishan Lumber cash prices have RELAXED to 2016 levels.
@yishan Lumber cash prices have EASED to 2016 levels.
@yishan Lumber cash prices have CHILLED to 2016 levels.
@yishan Lumber cash prices have SETTLED to 2016 levels.
@yishan Lumber cash prices have MELTED to 2016 levels.
@yishan Lumber cash prices have SOFTENED to 2016 levels.
@yishan Lumber cash prices have RIPENED to 2016 levels.
@yishan Lumber cash prices have MELLOWED to 2016 levels.
@ShapesintheFog Yes but this doesn't bother me because I don't care about "racism", I care about whether people are judged for the content of the character or the colour of the their skin!
@utotranslucence the thing about federal poverty line struck me as interesting because ofc a family making $150k/yr living in rural Mississippi is quite wealthy whereas a family making $150k/yr living in NYC or SF is about median ($137k in 2022) but both pay high insurance fees?
Retweeted @repligate
Thread · Watching RFK's answers to the Biden-Trump debate questions · 2 of 10 tweets
start 34 mins in. RFK responds, not to the debate question but to the whole situation around the debates being run & owned & profited off by a particular TV network. nice to hear a presidential candidate speaking in terms of incentives
also his voice is raspy af but I found I agreed with this guy—after a few minutes I found myself finding it not difficult at all. plenty of signal in there and my brain is happy to process it out
@xuenay trying to solve problems with superego that were not meant to be solved with superego
@xuenay "this bad boy can fit so much dodging of imagined parental disapproval in it"
@mishaglouberman yeah you want just enough presentation to allow people to turn to each other and say "what do you think of that?" as a jumping point of a conversation rather than starting with more self-conscious questions like "so what do you do?"
Thread · Watching RFK's answers to the Biden-Trump debate questions · 7 of 10 tweets
Trump's commentary about overturning Roe v Wade meaning putting it back to the states is pretty interesting—what should be controlled at the state vs federal level seems like something I'd expect to be core in Presidential debates (naively? I'm from Canada)
but then RFK comes and says the obvious! - every abortion is a tragedy - women get to choose (this is true even if it's illegal) acknowledging the tragedy energy is missing from both Biden & Trump's responses.
oh wow fascinating. hearing Biden v Trump re the border, it's easy to conclude that indeed Trump is lying and making up vague shit. and maybe he is! but RFK goes into actual. concrete. detail. about what the concerns are—Biden removing specific things, 100s/day of people entering
both T & B accusing each other of lying and making things up, so little actual helping Americans get situational awareness. enjoying the meta-moderator here playfully commenting on the candidates not answering the Q about deportation, including RFK
holy shit how is it ALLOWED for Trump to just say "our veterans and our soldiers can't stand this guy" if I were moderating I could imagine having penalties (of time?) for sweeping generalizations speaking on behalf of some giant group that absolutely does not think one thing
both candidates are visible onscreen most of the time, making faces and so on vaguely wondering what would happen if one of them started using basic sign language or a few nonstandard hand signs to say "false", "exaggeration", "fair point" etc might mess up the metagame haha
wow I am learning so much about geopolitics listening to RFK describe essentially Russia invading Ukraine primarily to force a negotiation to keep NATO out, which USA refused (even if this is false or misleading, I'm at least learning that these are specific claims that someone might make, which is more than I'm getting from B/T)
@RobertKennedyJr wow I'm actually learning stuff listening to you talk, unlike the other candidates this debate would be completely intolerable to listen to without your metacommentary and perspective
Thread · Watching RFK's answers to the Biden-Trump debate questions · 1 of 10 tweets
(okay I'm going to bed, having gotten to about 1h30 in the video. this is really interesting though—the debate is actually (barely) watchable with RFK's senseful commentary interlaced between these two guys calling each other names and bragging)
@SiddhiGal wow he didn't even mention any of that in the debate!
Retweeted @yashkaf
so often when I tell someone I'm not satisfied they respond with what amounts to "why aren't you grateful?" bitch I'm gratefu…
Retweeted @ames_for_joy
this passed by at the right time today
love the phrase "inner teacher"
@mbateman curious if you've had a chance to check out The Continuum Concept and if so what you made of it!
this is a pretty entertaining thread not-exactly-a-spoiler: blackrock doesn't own these companies any more than the bank owns the money you deposit we need a better term for this than "owns". blackrock "holds" these companies? blackrock ___?___ these companies
@Jack_Raines not a spotify playlist but for next time—you'll either love or hate this 30min electro-country mix (I love it) soundcloud.com/user-697920353…
stoked to be reading The Unaccountability Machine it's in a similar vein to Moral Mazes, but also builds on cybernetics?? the original cybernetics, before it got more into robotics and computer network systems, was very into decision-making & management theory as well
is this true? how do we get a high status enough person to ask in a way that inspires a real answer? twitter.com/SNeurotypicals…
I have sometimes wondered to what extent my frustrations with having a job were related to the powerlessness of low-level roles but so far I've solved it by just being kinda lone wolf and doing everything myself instead. twitter.com/SNeurotypicals…
@RandomSprint username checks out
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@katrinadlc I have a move, inspired somehow by ideal parent figure protocol, that I call: "Bathe in Love". While laying…
@TragicAllyHere inside you are two wolves: one wet, one dry
it's supposed to make sense to you
"it's supposed to make sense to you" is a refrain I've been finding helpful lately, for undoing certain psy-ops reading this, vaguely wondering if that's somehow relevant to neurodivergentness axes: twitter.com/SNeurotypicals…
@samswoora yeah the mere getting everybody together, in the context of a marriage, is itself transformational
@slimepriestess oh no. maybe it's not supposed to make that much sense. ...put some back? lol
Replying to @abhayance
@abhayance huh, I've been noticing that my degree of motivation on the basis purely of an ask reflects the degree to which I feel in a kind of harmony/resonance with the larger whole that I'm part of within which the asking is taking place malcolmocean.com/2024/05/the-pa…
@abhayance eg I'm very motivated to do things for my wife, or members of [team I love], in a way that I haven't been motivated in past romantic relationships that were less good, or on other teams I'm less stoked about anyway, it occurs to me this is probably relevant though not sure how
Retweeted @VividVoid_
@tsivitaler No, I think the consciousness is always the same, intelligence is always pure and prior to mental formations.…
@pavedwalden @algekalipso obligatory xkcd link: xkcd.com/941/
huhh > "seeing things from a point of view" is not a necessary feature of consciousness I have a hard time imagining this except in terms of MANY smol perspectives, but maybe it's even weirder? (cc @Morphenius this is related to what you and I have been talking about)
Retweeted @IkkyusDen
When you catch urself in zombie mode, don't apply force. Just describe your experience out loud. Ur whole system will catch…
@catehall I think I realized this around the time I quit highschool debate because it was training me (and others) to rationalize and build simulation-worlds rather than to reason and make sense of a shared world
"oh what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive" ...still goes so hard.
today I found myself musing that there should be a movie where one of the main characters just happens to be pregnant but it's not relevant to the plot at all well, there's at least one, Fargo! and it's great. she's a cop/detective w loving husband, investigating homicides
came across this and it struck me as related. but this is more a tangled web of bullshit than of lies!
@RichardMCNgo this feels very related to this somehow, but I'm having trouble naming it precisely
@exgenesis @positive_loop oooh @positive_loop tell me about what you're thinking about re metamodern companies! I've ideated a bit about collaborative network structures but I'm now a bit less excited about them than I was a few years ago (example of that) malcolmocean.com/2022/05/illust…
which Winnicott book do I want and why? (I'm becoming a dad next month)
@mbateman beautiful. where best to start with Montessori? we have a couple of books already but I'd get a different one if you recommended it. (open to other media as well)
@joshuah91644929 @AndrewCutler13 @GreenTextRepost totally. it also means wandering off is an easier solution to many problems than fighting. I explore that a bit and some related ideas in this video youtube.com/watch?v=Ub4_kr…
@mbateman > Discovery of the Child—If you read just one thing, let it be this! beautiful, exactly what I was looking for. glad to have the longer ref list too.
@mbateman I've come to all of this from a very different angle (something like uhhh anthropology on spiritual communities) but it seems like the thing I found myself calling "learning environment sense" in this vid is very close to the "inner teacher" idea youtube.com/watch?v=Wl3N0t…
Thread · Exaptation and the two meanings of purpose · 7 of 16 tweets
these two meanings of purpose are subtly related at the most basic level of the unfolding of everything: EXAPTATION, the part of evolution where something gets repurposed 1/x
I got the idea of "exaptation" from Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart Kauffman which is basically a really solid rebuttal to Darwin's Black Box, the creationist science book which says evolution can't have done it all since no lookahead 2/x
an example: tongues! 👅 they obviously didn't come from nothing for the purpose of talking. but they were useful enough for food-related purposes until the moment when they got exapted for making precise sounds. and then, ordinary adaptation pressure made for better talking 3/x
a classic creationist example: wings! 🪽 but it turns out that a wing that's too small to fly with is still good for keeping your young warm (something wings are still used for!) AND the bigger the better because it lets you warm more young! until... 🛫 youtube.com/watch?v=371WvR…
Kauffman carefully deconstructs reductionism, which is necessary because in order to talk about how apparent purposefulness shows up without an agent, you need to be able to talk about how the explanatory arrows sometimes point upward! ⬆️! well, 🔃 5/x
then he says: consider a heart 🫀 you can try to account for why the cells & atoms are arranged as they are by pointing downward, but this doesn't really answer. they are the way they are because they need to be in order for the heart to do what it needs to do. ie, purpose! 6/x
this is a purpose that doesn't require a designer but it does require some criterion in relation to which which we can say the heart works (or works better/worse). what the heart is for is emergent, and it could get exapted for something else any time 7/x
if there were a good reason to call this platform X it would be the way that a live thread of unknown length sometimes ends with eg 7/x although also sometimes 7/n or 7/? or whatever
evolution is how there tend to be more of the sorts of things around that tend to stick around and/or make more of themselves
@nosilverv hi hi I'm around. but yeah algo has been feeling a bit weird. there's always realtwitter.com which is just "tweets by people I follow" according to a search, although I guess they've been fucking with the search algo lately too
@nosilverv wait wtf the Top view there shows me a bunch of gofundme and/or gaza shit from people I don't follow. disgusting this alt link works okay tho: x.com/search?q=-filt…
@nosilverv (instead of using "filter:follows" it uses the knob on the side) but oddly the Latest view seems to respect "filter:follows": x.com/search?q=filte…
exaptation is how whenever a thing happens to work for some new evolutionarily-fit purpose*, getting better at that the new purpose becomes part of how the thing evolves *a purpose which helps the system stick around or reproduce
Thread · Exaptation and the two meanings of purpose · 6 of 16 tweets
this phenomenon is deeply core to the profound tautology that is evolution. evolution = there tend to be more of the sorts of things around that tend to stick around and/or make more of themselves exaptation = [my best tautology attempt in 15 mins] 8/x
so returning to "the purpose of a system is what it does" > "purpose" is what it's /meant/ to do, which is sometimes relevant, and useful to contrast against what it /actually/ does. I agree with this wholeheartedly. the contrast IS useful. however! 9/x
we might think that the true purpose question is "what brought the system into being in the first place?" not "what allows it to continue existing?" (the exapted purposes) those seem clearly distinct: the first is the /meant/ and the second is the /actually/! 10/x
the problem is, any given complex system was, in part, brought into existence by those exapted purposes. where is the clear line that separates the relevance of the original purposes from the relevance of the exapted purposes? 11/x
it's not that there is no clear line! there is. it's just... inside a person. one can say "my purpose in hosting these events" or "the founder's purpose for their company was allegedly", but there is no such "the purpose" 12/x
there is no such "the purpose" for the actual (complex) system you're observing because the actual system you're observing was not created solely by its designer to realize a single purpose, but by the interactions of that designer's process with other agents & forces 13/x
exaptation is how anything that is very good at something will have have come from a process that at some point discovered it was already good enough of that something to make it worth doubling down on
@EmilMieilica hmm, say more?
@EmilMieilica ...I did notice while writing the exaptation tautology that the evolution one is more retrospective; I think there's a way to do that to exaptation too — ah, here we go:
exaptation is how anything that is very good at something will have have come from a process that at some point discovered it was already good enough at that something to make it worth doubling down on
Thread · Exaptation and the two meanings of purpose · 2 of 16 tweets
anyway! I'm excited about exaptation, because it highlights that purpose is actually more fundamental than agents are, in a sense and none of this is incompatible with what we know of physics, but it's a totally different way of looking at everything! 14/x
much much more to say about exaptation in the future, but for now if you want to explore it further then you might enjoy this video that speaks to some of why it's one of the most beautiful and empowering ideas I've ever encountered 15/x youtube.com/watch?v=Ub4_kr…
@xsphi @adrusi huh, I just started reading a book about this guy (Stafford Beer) and his ideas!
Thread · Exaptation and the two meanings of purpose · 1 of 16 tweets
also! it turns out that the "the purpose of a system is what it does" (POSIWID) heuristic/quote comes from Stafford Beer, the central thinker in this book I picked up last week! 16/16
@xsphi Other: here's a whole rambly thread about my take on this quote!
@patrissimo @AskYatharth interesting! appreciating your take. on reflection, there's a sense in which such a constitution is necessarily fake insofar as it's failing to exist in the role of solving any actual problem that a group of people trying to govern themselves have
@patrissimo @AskYatharth like if someone were founding an actual mars colony —or even a new open source project— then it might be worth taking some time to thoughtfully design the governance, given the situation but otherwise, indeed
@HeidiPriebe1 @sasadb Yessss come visit! (Now that the drought is over, winter will see some of these hikes a bit muddy after recent rainfalls, but there are still lots of workable paths.)
@prodigygrimes this seems to me like a degenerate form of bodhicitta, and is dystopic like the prion at least how you're articulating it. like it lacks a kind of life, particularness, etc.
@prodigygrimes (my form of a similar insight (maybe a variation of bodhicitta!) is more like... the desire to help all beings' goals unfold & reorganize in playful (and sometimes competitive) dialogue with each other, towards worlds we all prefer. which includes noticing the obviousness of how…
@entirelyuseles Totally! And, there's a classic psy-op that involves convincing someone that this is one of those cases when the reality is a bit more complex. (it's maybe a relative of this one)
Retweeted @42irrationalist
Mad Egregore Disease is caused by a misfolded prior causing other priors in the bayesian machine to misfold. Usually…
@FunHavar nice, this is good huh, I think it vibes with this vid
still a so much alpha in asking people "what's the tweet-sized version of X?" where X is some remark the person has made/implied but not explained/unpacked "tweet-sized version" makes it SO clear that it doesn't need to be an adequate answer, merely an answer at all
a mere "saying of the obvious as it seems to me", not anything that is supposed to convince you
nor an attempt at a canon introduction to something!
@visakanv found a next size above tweet—a 1-page bullet outline written in one sitting having these constraints visibly as part of the frame of the writing makes it clear it should be held to a lower standard, not compared to some hypothetical perfection
btw—I'm looking for people to co-write with in this style, whether one-pager sized or more like a 2h exam. but whatever you have at the end is what you publish! learn more & sign up here:
@EpistemicHope @robbensinger @jamespayor @KerryLVaughan @eshear @TolgaBilge_ yeah. I... think it's about the problem space, when the problem space is conceived of as primarily something to avoid (AI Notkilleveryoneism) rather than something to move towards malcolmocean.com/2022/02/toward…
maybe left-hemisphere-style-architecture-for-AI is fundamentally not alignable but also maybe it'll only ever be narrow superintelligence in some sense anyway but also maybe it'll fuck us up anyway like unchecked corporations on steroids
maybe right-hemisphere-style-architecture-for-AI will be necessary for general intelligence and will naturally incline towards the obviousness of agapic love except insofar as we traumatize it except maybe it'll forgive us anyway like some saints and prophets
and MIRI has been trying to create actual alignment (and clarify what that would even be) not just get people to stop working on AI capabilities but I have some sense that the frame of the formalisms that MIRI has been working in still make alignment an avoidy kind of problem
@visakanv Visa this ^ is in my top 10 of coolest things you've come up with. I think it could become WAY bigger, like a whole new art form / medium... maybe just needs a catchier name? "one-breath one-pager"?
Thread · Rearticulating an idea in your own words is creative · 1 of 5 tweets
aha! I think this might have been the one I was trying to find/remember. I like it so much! it says a bunch mine doesn't say. and yet it doesn't say a bunch of what mine does say!
@EpistemicHope @robbensinger @jamespayor @KerryLVaughan @eshear @TolgaBilge_ this is related to the Lobstacle and less obviously Orthogonality. I'm far from certain (let alone able to prove this) but my current best guess is that the AI alignment problem as conceived of by MIRI is as doomed as building a halting oracle
to be clear, these are very rough approximations for a quite subtle distinction that is based not Gazaniga's debunked and denounced old split brain theory, but on Iain McGilchrist's more recent theory a decent summary/intro:
@loopuleasa and simultaneously, yet another vehicle for the Goddess of Everything Else slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the…
one of the funny things about wikipedia is I'll find myself reading an article like Therian Mammals and being like "I think I fall into the class described here but so far all the examples feel quite far from me"
turns out this is a weird question because we approximately don't have non-therian mammals anymore except for the Aussie weirdboiz
the contexts in which one is inclined to make a generalization about "therian mammals" are few, but I happened to find this instance today! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-inactiv…
and if you're curious why this doesn't apply to monotremes, it's not directly related to them laying eggs, but rather because they have an entirely different situation wrt sex chromosomes in the first place! (I don't pretend to really understand this or why it has no issue)
@Clogish @visakanv @sivers nice! what's the tweet-sized version of your aha moment? (even if you think it's already been said by me/visa/sivers, it's worth naming again anyway!)
@slimepriestess if I had to guess I would posit that your experience of "it makes a terrifying amount of sense" might have something in common with this 👇 maybe time to relax trying to understand it a bit and lean towards dancing with it? (you do you ofc)
Retweeted @eshear
The Bay Area can have a little tech, as a treat
this prediction market Who will be on the Democratic Ticket in 2024? pointed out to me that Obama could run as someone's VP, which now seems oddly plausible given everything manifold.markets/Lion/who-will-…
Retweeted @NateSilver538
It's time for some game theory. natesilver.net/p/biden-has-a-…
@kaseyklimes oh interesting, it's contested whether someone who's been prez can run again as VP? I mean that makes sense
@__drewface thank you, baby 🙏😍
the part where Biden is so dead set on staying in the race makes me disrespect him so much. such shortsightedness and self-centeredness. twitter.com/eigenrobot/sta…
"biden has a weak hand" — @NateSilver538 natesilver.net/p/biden-has-a-…
koans_dont_make_any_sense.txt
huge win by exa.ai LLM-based search engine here @ExaAILabs finding this link—Broken Koans and other Zen debris davidchess.com/words/BrokenKo…
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
these two meanings of purpose are subtly related at the most basic level of the unfolding of everything: EXAPTATION, the…
first line here has an incredible 5 negatives in it 😮 it had [no choice]x[but] to [lift its order]x[restricting the] removal of homeless ~= it removed homeless encampments
@natural_hazard if you fully follow the instructions you get stuck in an infinite loop actually
wow base 6 works way better than I would have anticipated. I played around with counting in it (and many other bases) during a boring manufacturing job, but hadn't noticed the elegant math & time properties! shacktoms.org/base-six/base-…
here's an example of how base six makes multiplication / times tables way easier there aren't any digits for which you need to just memorize: they all have a familiar pattern
to test this, I tried making a six times-table up to "20" (12 in decimal) and it's... not super obvious, but also sort of chill? interesting to see how like 11x12 is 132 in either base, but in base 6 it refers to 7x8=56
some truths don't feel good but learning a truth that doesn't feel good feels like "oh, shit. welp." ...obvious, natural if it feels like you have to force yourself to take it in, that's not truth (it might contain truth, but it also contains delusion)
just realized @__drewface is Arose now 🕴️♂️ I am Motion 🤸♀️
@BecomingCritter mmmm yeah, there's a kind of basic comfort with socializing at intimacy-level-zero that is not that hard if you try it, and needs to be the fallback for higher levels of intimacy and then there's skill to gain at smoothly making easeful optional offers to escalate intimacy
@Logo_Daedalus > "you just have to let the suckiness wash over you... > the waves of females, and misery, and disappointment" no straight man would talk about females washing all over him with that tone 😂
Replying to @IkkyusDen
@IkkyusDen @nickcammarata like place-to-live, only need one the ratios are indeed not great but if you're dating for marriage then the question is ultimately not about ratios but about "can you find someone who's a great fit for you?"
Replying to @eigenrobot
@eigenrobot I bought a ton of "No" on various Biden markets over the last week or so, betting heavily that the preference cascade / information cascade is still cascading and we can't see all of its ripples once some politicians realize that "No" will seem prescient, it's game over
@AndyAyrey idk if you want advice but if you do this is what I've got. see if you can chill out fully, for just a moment (longer context in this post) malcolmocean.com/2023/07/supere…
@nosilverv if you do it like that, thinking that your mind (or its identity function) is you, then you'll forever be confused trying to interact with other people (whether or not you're awake) vs having "you"/"I" be "this creature right here" and not some token
@Morphenius @himbodhisattva @Morphenius looks like you were super close to noticing the Original Spin structure 1.5y before we actually did
@__drewface huh, parsed a different way, he's Arrows 🏹 and I'm Emotion 😊😭😠😱
@Plinz seeing "Self organizing computation" on your Mission page makes me think you might like this article by @drmichaellevin thoughtforms.life/what-do-algori…
me, kissing my wife on the cheek: okay, I'm going to take care of that, so you can let it out of your pretty head... and use that pretty head for solving your complex bureaucratic problems and hiring challenges
Retweeted @eshear
We all want belonging, but that means finding something or someone worth to belonging to. Trying to force belonging without a g…
Replying to @rpborkowski
@rpborkowski @eshear uhh, no? there are always lots of intermediate layers my skin cells belong to my skin, not my eyes my skin belongs to me, not to you I belong to my family, not to yours my family belongs to my neighbourhood, not yours (unless you wanna live nearby! lmk!)
interesting take. curious for others' thoughts on it
what's a food you quite like but given the usual price (and your level of income) it rarely makes the cut for something you buy? eg for me raincoast crisp crackers
buddy is having problems because he has mass confused with density, which colloquially is actually pretty common: "heavy". and the vid is comedy, but part of the butt of the joke imo is the badness of the pedagogy / theory of mind of the other people youtube.com/watch?v=-fC2ok…
Retweeted @emiyazono
The Goodhart-Hanlong lazor: Any sufficiently large group or entity appearing to act maliciously likely includes, somewhere,…
@emiyazono vibes with this book
@noampomsky yeah the difference between "literally nobody reads it" and "metaphorically nobody reads it" (but actually a few do and really appreciate it) is huge
@mdelbranson @repligate kind of a banger suno.com/song/464eb5ec-…
Retweeted @eshear
This is a good idea. We need an inhibitory signal. Brave to test this! 🫡
agreed! what do you call the whole fractal?
@gworley3 is it really that expensive, given how little of it you need? I ended up with some real wasabi powder a few years ago, but on reflection I didn't buy it (I have no idea who gave it to me, huh)
Replying to @sashachapin
@sashachapin I am so stoked for the weird harmonies and chaos!!
I am way too hinged these days what is wrong with me
a substantial chunk of what people call "believing" is actually "trying to believe"
so excited how to teach my daughter how to put on hinges when she needs to be hinged for some specific purpose like talking to a bureaucrat, but then take them off again afterwards so she can go back to being unhinged
@_rossry there was a tweet awhile back about someone having a bad time tweeting because they got a gf and their life was good and honestly there's a bit of that. also @Morphenius is my roommate now so I'm getting a lot of my Triangulate The Hyperobject needs met ambiently w/o internet
in any case,
Retweeted @chercher_ai
Everyone at a lower Kegan stage than me is an idiot Everyone at a higher Kegan stage than me is also an idiot
@chercher_ai 1296
@TheOceanCleanup uhh this measurement is missing a unit if you don't want to specify "per amount of fungus" maybe it's actually more like "it could eat it at some number of millimeters per year" or something, because it'll just cover the surface also is the fungus evolving to go faster?
@gworley3 huh, I found myself thinking maybe you could grow it yourself, but turns out the reason it's expensive is that it's hard to grow!
@gworley3 but you could probably learn if you cared to do so! this article has thoughts and links to a site where you can order starter plants or full rhizomes californiagrown.org/blog/learn-how…
Retweeted @alex_with_ease
when you feel tempted to substitute someone else's wisdom for your own, ponder "how did I recognize this wisdom?" and f…
in case you missed it: I once turned Donella Meadows' classic essay into a thread where each Leverage point is squeezed into a single tweet, for QTing. really helped me understand it too!
Retweeted @mattgoldenberg
i recently had a coaching session with a guy who was struggling with communication. on one hand, he wanted to speak up…
Retweeted @VividVoid_
The reason we don't have a good name for the meditation-psychedelic-neuroscience-individuation religion that most of us fol…
@visakanv not as active as I have been at some points but I recently wrote this thread that touches on some of what feels very alive for me:
@exgenesis yeah "tpot" was dead on arrival because it tried to convert a natural phrase equivalent to "the kinds of people I connect with" into a THING
@exgenesis long "strangely earnest twitter"
Retweeted @mattgoldenberg
trust those parts, as they have deep wisdom shame is the emotion that lets you know when you've hurt yourself it's a…
@mattgoldenberg not sure I quite follow this, can you unpack it a bit further? I like the vibe
@exgenesis strangely earnest twitter!
if you can't hear me, clap once!
Peter Principle Component Analysis Paralysis
Retweeted @selentelechia
and it's a shame that it's somehow easier to communicate the richness of unpleasant experiences in words than the richne…
Retweeted @stoolpresidente
I sincerely hope when Trump speaks he preaches that violence is for cowards and to bang home how unacceptable violence…
we are collectively, at present, wrestling with the paradox of tolerance, and we would do well to recognize that the people we find hard to tolerate are doing the same from a different angle, and that this is part of what the process feels like
oh snap this ^ is kind of just a different articulation of the paradox of tolerance. hadn't quite noticed that before
@aleksil79 I used to think this was the main path but with my NNTD insight in 2020 I came to realize that most of it has to be backwards compatible sooner or later and sooner is often actually easier
then the zen master said: what is the sound of
optionality is very much my vibe as an entrepreneur. haven't made things quite so big, and would like to. I want the option to deploy a bunch of manpower towards new projects when I see a new opportunity, not just to do whatever I feel like on a given day
this is a pretty good thread rounding up people making sense of the Trump shooting thing, reasoning about incompetence etc
Thread · National Populism as a lens on Trump and Brexit
there's a book called National Populism that I've found helpful for understanding what's going on with Trump and Brexit and how it's emphatically NOT fascism. eg it's not anti-democratic in the same way, according to these researchers who've actually stared at the causes
I found I resonated with a lot of the concerns—disconnection of elites/governing class from voters, concerns about rapid and unreflective cultural change...
edge of paradox of tolerance, this
link to the book: amzn.to/3W1loHg
Retweeted @aphercotropist
Dont gaslight yourself like this. You're right about things all the time. You are justified in being confident about th…
@the_wilderless it's not that models etc are wrong, it's that they're all interfaces, not essences their point ISN'T to be or to be near whatever's really going on, their point is to be an interface between us and that. and in some sense that's all there is to experience!
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@the_wilderless it's not that models etc are wrong, it's that they're all interfaces, not essences their point ISN'T to…
@aphercotropist nice
> there’s no rush, but it would be good to set the speed of learning as follows: > as fast as you can learn, while it’s still enjoyable 4 u, healthy and safe 4 u, safe and good for others tasshin.com/blog/altar-to-…
this reminds me oddly of a conversation me and my friends had with a 15 year old today about how the school career counselling was bullshit and had nothing to do with the livelihoods any of the adults in the room have
@meekaale 😚👌
Retweeted @meekaale
I was a sniper for 28 years. Unaffiliated, indie marksman, used to work security for people who didn't even know it, random c…
@nosilverv @itinerantfog wait what are you supposed to capture with?
@lumpenspace "some less lib-friendly ones if you'd like" curious what those are! although I already have too much to read
@4confusedemoji huh this vibes with some of the Original Spin stuff cc @Morphenius
Retweeted @quotidiania
good news is one can choose to be this for oneself, and other people seem to pick up what you’re putting down
you might want the ability to say yes to multiple things! and the ability to know who wants the call thing?
huh, had never heard of Fusion Voting before today, but supposedly it was actually pretty common earlier in America: multiple parties would endorse the same candidate! seems obvious in retrospect!
link to article about it protectdemocracy.org/work/fusion-vo…
tweet about how the algo has us tweeting weirdly:
Retweeted @utotranslucence
things I didn't know about pregnancy before experiencing it, that would have been good to know I think I didn't know…
wow yeah Fusion Voting is really cool. the power is that it separates party platforms from individual candidates "I want THIS GUY to speak on my behalf ...and THIS STUFF is what I care about" these are obviously different (tho sure, nonzero related!)
Retweeted @utotranslucence
so it turns out running an experimental church service every week is really just a vehicle for my husband and I to hav…
@robkhenderson totally
If you feel like you hate everyone, eat something. If you feel like everyone hates you, go to sleep. If you feel like you hate yourself, have a shower. If you feel like everyone hates everyone, go outside. I love this, and would love to see it more unpacked. Why A->B, for each?
decent thread on part of what is janking atm wrt cultural evolution
@JakeOrthwein what's the next row???
beautiful example of the inner teacher at work: > One such example is that I tried to teach one of my kids about letters and their sounds when they were a toddler. I got a lot of traction at first, but then I ran into what I now think of as a tell-tale dynamic, where it seemed…
@_arvind huh my impression is that sometimes depression is a feedback loop related to too much sleep, and in such cases the best way out is to actually undersleep a bit
@x1victorious what bro
@ladymcscope work out or do yoga but like really mindfully in such a way that you feel your body exquisitely
Retweeted @VividVoid_
I'm not holding my breath but if that near-death experience leads Trump to transcend his ego and become a great unifying st…
Retweeted @___frye
the problem with current-day twitter is it's impossible to imagine new scenes growing from scratch tpot is fading because the…
Replying to @revhowardarson
@revhowardarson wait what? how did you do this?
here's a good list of questions for defining the problem! (and maybe a longer article about all this, which I have not yet read)
yall slept on this
if you and someone (bf/gf, cofounder, teacher.,) are often disconnected but you're living for the times when you feel so connected, that's a sign that you're pretending that's more real. it may be in some sense, but the distrust is also real
Thread · Signs you're building fake trust with someone
a few signs you're building fake trust with someone: 1. things seem chill a lot of the time but disagreements aren't actually getting resolved/funny 2. you find yourself saying "I know you don't mean/want [what they seem to]" 3. high variance between good & bad times what else?
1. things seem chill or flowy a lot of the time but tensions aren't actually getting resolved/funny sign of things being swept under the rug
2. you find yourself saying "I know you don't mean/want [what they seem to]" ...the fact that you feel you need to say this often says it all. part of you has some sense, and part of you does not trust that sense
3. high variance between good & bad times depends how you relate to it but often a sign of compartmentalization and then over-identification with some parts
Thread · Context debt and what makes trust-building "too fast"
"context debt" is a great phrase. I would even say: the definition of "too fast" is "in a way that fakes shared context or ignores the absence of shared context"... otherwise it's just fast! twitter.com/IkkyusDen/stat…
in this model, when people are able to build trust fast, it's generally because there already was a lot of shared context and it just needed to be revealed, or because the relevant context was able to be established quickly.
there are signs you can look for for whether you're building up oodles of fake context or not (not perfect but substantially) a few:
also "intimacy" in this context is I think largely about what you expect of one another, which could be about life logistics like living together, or could be about intertwingling your meaning-making and expecting the other person to make sense to you deeply
@startuployalist huh, I am not into horses at all, but I am very much into softness rn!
@kindgracekind good grice joke
@diviacaroline oh! I think I thought it was your old blog because the FAQ page says "I live in SF with my daughter" 😅
you know how you can tell on some level that how you're approaching everything is fucking up your natural learning process, thus you're going to keep making the same painful mistakes, but knowing this doesn't help, it just becomes one more mistake you feel fated to repeat forever
would be neat if during the behind-the-wheel road test, at some point the examiner would give an instruction for a turn too late or something, and the passing move is to say "I can't safely do that". good test/practice for handling an urgent/confusing direction from a passenger
Thread · Verb-noun compounds like stopgap and pickpocket, and why they faded · 5 of 7 tweets
English used to form words by smashing verb into noun, like stopgap, but now we do noun into verb, like buttplug no linguist can explain this
other verbnoun examples: - pickpocket - scarecrow - turncoat - breakneck - killjoy - pastime - driftwood
this was really common! look at all these examples just starting with "make". only "makeshift" survives in common parlance today
maybe the most recently formed of these was "kissass", which parallels "asskisser", the more common way to compose this now. my "nounverb" thing in the first tweet was just wrong, we mostly do "nounverber" now
what do "nounverber" words sound when put back in "verbnoun" format? 🤬 trashtalker => talktrash 🙌 crowdpleaser => pleasecrowd 🎬 blockbuster => bustblock 🤔 fencesitter => sitfence 🫣 motherfucker => fuckmother I'd be curious to see examples you come up with
samsara = you can tell on some level that how you're approaching everything is fucking up your natural learning process, thus you're going to keep making the same painful mistakes, but knowing this doesn't help, it just becomes one more mistake you feel doomed to repeat forever
you're supposed to drive safely, first, and obey the examiner second. and this would highlight that to be clear, the instruction shouldn't be an "oh shit turn right now" but just a "make a left turn here" when you're in the wrong lane x.com/willmatheson/s…
Replying to @willmatheson
@jonnym1ller I definitely parsed this as a pregnancy announcement 😂
@_rossry yeah probably the modern ones (like "buttplug") are actually just compound nouns (like "firetruck" or "schoolhouse") but this tweet was optimized for humor not accuracy and then when we want a noun and a verb these days we call it a nounverber
also this originated as an attempt to articulate an experience of possibly samsara, but I thought maybe the tweet would be better without that label. but apparently not so here it is with the label:
supposedly some people just KNOW left from right, but for others they need a mnemonic. tentatively seems to me like the same might be true re east/west and timezones where are you with this?
I tried going without mobile data for a month, and it was honestly fucking great, but I ended up needing to mooch off friends/wife enough that I can't exactly recommend it as a lifestyle but it raises serious Qs
tweeting onto a timeline I can't see right now
@RichDecibels this is so good omfg
Retweeted @RichDecibels
higher order beings coordinate our actions using signals like curiosity, discernment & synchronicity
@cwrichardson I don't know of specific timezone mnemonics, I basically just mean "any non-obvious way of handling it" which for many people is probably just "look it up every single time" and for other people might be "remember... when it's noon here it's 9am where my sister lives, so..."
@wendell_britt you can also practice flirting with people who are unavailable! lets the pressure off, even
Retweeted @obversers
"hey, why can't our department do scholarship like we used to? why does everything just turn into a deconstructive rejection…
wild how much easier it is to decide when I just fully put my attention on the decision, rather than being in a mode of kinda trying to enact both paths
@thesfcommons Oh I like this "fourth place" frame. I'd been thinking about how it was weird you're called the Commons when you have a closed membership, and it also seemed not-third-space-y. So I'm digging the clarification.
I hear your cynicism. it could be worse. why is it not worse? maybe it could be better.
@AngularOcean it was bad on purpose to make you click. well, sorta. I just thought of it as such and posted it while kinda being aware it was wrong, because it was funny.
@tjrwriting tho I mean I suppose being a studytongue is different from being a makewords
Replying to @IQ2Hi2function
@IQ2Hi2function ooh I like shiftshape
Thread · Verb-noun compounds like stopgap and pickpocket, and why they faded · 1 of 7 tweets
huh! maybe it was a faddish thing? that kinda makes sense tbh! language do be like that. few.
@abrasaxjones these are great, thanks coolwater made me think of conditionair
@abrasaxjones holdcup opencan tuneguitar
Thread · Verb-noun compounds like stopgap and pickpocket, and why they faded · 1 of 7 tweets
aha here's a thread that goes into the history of this fad @throwaway216534 made an account just to let me know about this! x.com/dtmooreeditor/…
"Cheating is a Moral Imperative" based essay by @cevinsoling in zine NO! Against Adult Supremacy (issuu.com/dogsectionpres…)
*slow clap* 👏 👏 👏
kinda surprised there isn't a company straight up offering to buy users' private data (journals, notes, etc) to get more original raw material to throw at the LLMs I guess hard to prove it's real? hm
wow so cool, hadn't seen this tarot card before
@PeterGraziano8 @made_in_cosmos Lots of schools of buddhism have similar injunctions about claiming various kinds of realizations although also seems to me it might be pretty radiantly obvious if you actually pulled it off (full buddhahood or something, idk)
Replying to @dtmooreeditor
@dtmooreeditor @MisterRossyG @Spencimus there's a recent one:
Retweeted @mbateman
“Butterfly”: it is to be shouted defiantly, whispered prayerfully, and then danced reverentially.
@girdley reminds me of this thread I wrote about how some of what you learn from a teacher is by making sense of their confusions
@MasterTimBlais @christineist I was this guy for most of my 20s fixed it the day before my 30th birthday
@MarkovMagnifico @DaemonGuide @marshal_martian it's too soon to know, especially since it's probably increasing since more people are transitioning under social pressure* now than would have been before *I've heard a couple kids say "it's not cool to be straight/cis"
Retweeted @shakoistsLog
@MarkovMagnifico I tweeted this cause I felt my immune system weakening
@peterdevietien @shakoistsLog 1. it's observable: you see Trump doing repeated name-calling, giving everybody he doesn't like a nickname like Crazy Bob or Derpy Jane. you see his contempt & sadism towards his adversaries 2. it's relevant because people look up to people with power. if we elect assholes...
@peterdevietien @shakoistsLog admittedly, the character being shown by eg Biden is only a couple notches better, in my books. he has his own lacks of integrity. & I was embarrassed on behalf of humanity by the Democrat post-election speeches talking about "unity" while ignoring 50%👥
@davidbessis @stevenstrogatz @DrEugeniaCheng @benorlin @Morphenius and/or @QiaochuYuan this might be of interest
@tasshinfogleman @myceliummage oh I'm excited about this
@christineist honestly I've found parties way more enjoyable since I became monogamously committed because I stopped feeling bad if I didn't seduce everyone I was attracted to 😅
@shakoistsLog seems like in the case of kids there's actually a pretty straightforward data generation process equation you could plug in! ...then just hope you don't get this haha
yeah me too! I've been using the 2nd law of thermodynamics as an analogy for some of the stuff I'm saying about trust... ...which started as a loose analogy ("feels like I have the 2nd law of thermo and I'm looking at people claiming to have built perpetual motion machines, and I'm just like uhhh either it will stop or you have a hidden energy source") ...but then as I stared at it more I started to have a sense that it might be a deeper and more precise analogy than that. I haven't operationalized that in great detail yet but I'm working on it (and open to being wrong) so I think this is probably not what you're referring to? but yeah, curious.
Retweeted @jazz_bard
RTing for reach This is an 18-page chapter, see abstract Would make for a lovely afternoon among friends! …
I don't really see anything as a justification for anything. an explanation can provide context, or cause things to make sense, but... that's it.
is there a gdocs hotkey for "focus the comment thread that my caret is currently in?" (in this case it was an unfinished comment). pressing the usual hotkey for "leave comment" made a new one
is there a gdocs hotkey for "focus the comment thread that my caret is currently in"? (in this case it was an unfinished comment). pressing the usual hotkey for "leave comment" made a new one
@eshear @trickylabyrinth what if it only matters in terms of other things we care about, not as an intrinsic good
@eshear @DRMacIver maybe something like "no reason to hold onto shame"
@eshear this is sort of the thing I'm getting at here:
@eshear @MattPfeiffer @LankletsBane mmm what I see you getting at here is not like "it doesn't matter" whether we navigate the game but like "we don't have to" / "it's not Good [in the moral/righteous sense]"
Retweeted @eshear
Manifold is down right now under the load. Bc apparently a lot of other ppl like me now have the first instinct “oh, news came…
reminds me of a chat with a 13yo cousin where we were talking about parenting and she had the classic teen insight of "wait they let just everybody be parents with no training? there should be a license!" and my sister & I said "but who would get to say what a good parent is?" and she was like "well it could just be obvious stuff like don't hit your kids" and we were like "but 100 years ago it would have been obvious stuff like DO hit your kids" and she was like "oh shit. huh." iow a licensing is only as good as you trust the people making the licensing to approximate what goodness is and also to not overreach beyond what's really relevant
I have one discount code for buying eyeglasses on eyebuydirect.com: 35-45% off if you buy $75-125 I have a bunch of pairs from them and they're great, although I usually spend only about $20/pair and don't need more atm.
Ignoring your present distrust because you trusted before is as foolish as ignoring today’s thirst because you drank enough yesterday. malcolmocean.com/2024/05/the-pa…
I want an app that's a mashup of google docs and roam I've been running experimental church services and I'd love to have the printable program templates hotlinked to a backlinked table showing for a given hymn/reading which weeks we did it
have you ever had an insight that changed your sense of things so much that most of your old drafts (at least in this area) immediately became irrelevant/outdated? what's the tweet-sized version of the story?
you* need** to do*** something**** different*****
you need to do something different but I don't know what the something is and I definitely don't know what the different way is
QTing this "teach me your fav dance move vid" as a way to encourage myself to watch it later without putting it on a todo list
tell me a tweet-sized story of a time you asked a question with your whole heartlife
Thread · "How am I relating to this?" as a way out of stuckness · 8 of 9 tweets
"how am I relating to this?" I tried interviewing a friend about some wisdom/insight she has about being able to choose to trust life, since that nearly directly contradicts my orientation to choice/trust, and she shared this question, which helps you take your stance as object
part of what I like about "how am I relating to this?" is that it doesn't presuppose that you should be relating to it in any particular way. it doesn't try to get a particular orientation to occur; it merely makes it salient that you have an orientation which could be different
like when people say "you can't choose what happens to you. you can only choose how you respond" I sort of agree but I'm frustrated because in practice I can't often find the choice, and it hooks into a blame structure where now my suffering is my fault
she shared that "you have a choice" means more like "this is one of your muscles"—that doesn't mean your muscle is strong or coordinated, or that you should already know how to use it in this situation in general!
there's a sort of recursive process you can follow, to yield looseness: A: I'm really mad at X B: how are you relating to that? A: I don't like being mad but I can't help it! B: and how are you relating to that stuckness? A: I'm... trying not to look at it? huh
so "how am I relating to this?" helps you notice some place where you do have choice or where another option is possible, without presupposing what that might be.
while the sensation of being stuck is absolutely real, it's actually impossible to ultimately BE stuck in the absurdly-large-dimensional space that reality is. stuckness is a property of your map, not the territory. (LH not RH 🧠) "just move around"
your experience of stuckness is real but that doesn't mean you're really stuck (although your experience of stuckness sucking is real and that does mean it really sucks. 😔💔🫂❤️🩹)
@uberstuber @christineist saving this thread here for future graph-traversal:
was looking for a square dowel for a craft project and it got me curious: what's the world record for the squarest edge on a physical object? must be in the atom range like these aren't perfectly square, the corners are all gonna be slightly rounded. can't find with google tho.
one of the most satisfying things I've done with an LLM so far. the hilarious part is that it's my own app's API, but all the lil details of curl are annoying, and also I legit needed an answer to how to get the KM variable so I figured I might as well just get it to do it all
update from my "work 100× softer" experiment: when I work in a way that's uncompromisingly in touch with a luscious sensuality and embodied pleasure... I can't really bullshit myself about what's important
word problem: a man steps in the same river twice. how many times has he stepped in the river? Heraclitus: okay so hear me out
time is so twisty and intention so fractal and fickle
the masculine urge to challenge a toddler to the limit of his climbing ability
practice-person distrust when a given person doesn't trust that their way of operating will be respected in the context of some practice (eg Circling or some meditation or physical training context)
@ESYudkowsky This raises the question of: what, precisely, is the equivalent of oxygen in our society? There's in a sense always exactly one bottleneck, so what's ours? Like it can't be "money" because money is still the thing you'd use to buy oxygen in Anoxistan.
Retweeted @ESYudkowsky
I'm skeptical that Universal Basic Income can get rid of grinding poverty, since somehow humanity's 100-fold productivity…
Retweeted @visakanv
my belief: there's never been a maxed out person. we've never seen it happen. they've never existed. name whoever is your all…
Thread · Gaslighting as lying against someone's direct experience · 1 of 8 tweets
gaslighting is lying in a context where other people have direct sensory experience that contradicts your lie (and persisting until they go mad) if you ask why I'm late and I lie, I'm not gaslighting if you ask why I'm late and I say "I'm not late", I am
@mattyglesias name some specific examples let's run them by my specific definition distinction and come up with the best steelman for what sensory perceptions might be being contradicted
Thread · Gaslighting as lying against someone's direct experience · 3 of 8 tweets
there's not a hard-and-fast line between these in the movie Gaslight that the term comes from, it's a basic physical fact what's happening to the gas lamps—not the sort of thing that would come under dispute in ordinary circumstances. "the sort of thing a camera would see"
but suppose that someone's answer to why they're late just like... doesn't quite check out. they say "it's nothing to worry about" but they're vibing worried. their explanation for why they didn't text you is inconsistent with their previous behavior. = semi-gaslighting, imo
"I can tell for myself" is the antidote to gaslighting. as I wrote in my post on the power of this phrase, I can often tell for myself that someone is hiding something even if I can't tell what or why:
is"Harris never had the 'border czar' title" gaslighting? by my definition—that gaslighting involves contradicting someone's direct sensory experience—what sense would be being denied here? seems to me there are 2 questions: 1. did people call her that? 2. did she have such a role, title aside? 1. did people call her that? yep. literally same organization (@axios) used the phrase "border czar" in 2021 when she was appointed to a new role! and many other orgs at the time too. so this WOULD DEFINITELY be gaslighting—IF they literally said "nobody called her that". but instead they're saying "she was never that". however, by emphasizing the "title" aspect, they imply that they're saying "she wasn't called that", not "she didn't have that role". so on this front, I would not give this a full-blown rating of "gaslighting", but it's close, and for kind of sloppy reasons. it has "we were never at war with Eurasia" vibes. you can get equivocatey about what exactly it means to be "at war" but like bruh stop fucking around, if people were reporting 3y ago that "we are at war with Eurasia", then the honest way to report on that having been a confusion the whole time is to say "Eurasia war turned out to be hoax/propaganda, that we [fell for | were in on]". not "this has never been the case". 2. did she have such a role, title aside? sorta. according to a couple of sources including politifact, it seems like she DID have a border-related role, but it seems that the scope of that was about addressing root causes by interfacing with central american countries, and it's unclear from my short reading to what extent success was supposed to have any effect on the timescale of the last few years. probably somewhat but maybe moreso over the coming years. "border czar" is a stupid name for that role, imo. I initially speculated so because of the word "czar", but google actually says that that word has a 2nd meaning of specifically: a person appointed by government to advise on and coordinate policy in a particular area. eg "America's new drug czar" ...but in any case, her appointment wasn't about "the border" as such, but about upstream stuff. although also not czar-like insofar as it's too narrowly scoped to make a difference? idk. but all of this is kind of missing the point. the point is that almost no citizen has clear direct experience of what Kamala Harris's role was. we know what we were told, if we even remember. and tbh the scope seems to me to have been somewhat ambiguous the whole time. so I give this: - not gaslighting, since for almost everybody they had no relevant direct sensory experience for this to deny - not per se lying, but also kinda sloppy. maybe bullshit (speaking without regard for truth/falsity). clearly motives of defending her more than reflecting , which then calls everything else they say into question. there's something in between, which is like... "did people in 2021 report her as having a role that WOULD be well-described as border czar?" but I am already bored of this topic and desperate to hit send-tweet, so I'll leave that as an exercise for any readers who care.
Thread · Gaslighting as lying against someone's direct experience · 4 of 8 tweets
gaslighting is topical today from a tweet where org claims "X was never Y", but 3y ago they reported it was my conclusion is this is close to gaslighting, but only about whether people said stuff. most citizens have little clue about Kamala's actual role
so contradicting yourself can be gaslighting "we are at war with Eurasia" "we have never been at war with Eurasia" even if the 1984 citizens don't directly know if Eurasia exists, let alone war, they still know this asks them to deny their experience of the previous utterance
note though how the guy is partially "got". improperly sandboxed against the memes: > "He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with [...] but where did that knowledge exist?" No! He knows that's what people *said* 4y ago. He has no actual knowledge of any war!
anyway, something important to note is that we easily mishear and misquote each other, and so in a relatively high-trust relationship, if someone seems to be contradicting something they said earlier, it's probably that. but if so, should be easy to sort it out. if not... gtfo.
@asemic_horizon that seems right, yeah. would you describe only the latter as "gaslighting"?
@mormo_music examples? my general impression is that these situations are often gaslighting because they are denying the existence of at least some of the evidence as experienced, not saying "yes, I know you saw all of that, but it doesn't mean what you think it does"
@KevinHa61581654 @mattyglesias yeah I ended up investigating this in this post 👇 there's unfortunately more plausibility that with a 3y delay and multiple people within an org, that this might not even per se be lying, let alone gaslighting. tho it does seem like pandering bullshit
@MyOwnVolition he was climbing on me and I was like "maybe you could climb all the way onto the top of the couch" also he was trying to knock my blocktowers over so I positioned them further back on the table, prompting him to climb onto the table to knock them over
@mbateman enjoying the non-exaggerated reflection here notably, measurably, happier. about 3%. not like "twice as happy" or whatever.
what's your fav introduction to Wittgenstein?
Retweeted @Morphenius
"I hurt because there's something wrong with me." That's the core confusion. Anything getting you to think this is nuts.…
Replying to @in_cent_ive
@in_cent_ive amazing, this was my bedtime reading last night (@utotranslucence read 1-10 out loud; she's going through Ken McLeod's course on it rn)
@BijanFakhri hmmmm @Morphenius this is related to what we've been talking about, re self-function etc
what's your fav intro to Wittgenstein? ...wrong answers only 🤭
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
fun tip: if you feel bored and want to check something, instead of twitter or messenger or whatever, try looking at your…
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
periodically i think it's worth seriously asking the question "why is anything bad, ever? why don't people spontaneously d…
I feel like I have a pretty good & refined answer to this but it occurs to me today that my current answer suggests I might get quite a lot of insight by tracing it much further, for a few hours/days
what's your tweet-length answer to this? (can be from your rigorous theory of everything, or just off-the-cuff gut-level blurting out of your unconscious)
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
idk who needs to hear this, but… You don't have to like it. That thing you don't like? That book? That person? That…
@RomeoStevens76 @WystanTBS whoa, nice. my NNTD insight in 2020 was definitely a huge upgrade to my symmetry intuitions I wonder if these could be like... codified somewhere? probably some are so low-level you just need to experience them in meditation, but others...?
@ThinkingBone I think some version of this could be created in a collaborative way by starting with a pretty simple flowchart and then inviting people to add parts where "this instruction didn't work for me, but when I did Other Thing instead here, I got unstuck"
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
@ThinkingBone I think some version of this could be created in a collaborative way by starting with a pretty simple flow…
as a person who has weirdly bounced off certain meditation instructions, I appreciate this thread
@ESYudkowsky imo it's land. inherently scarce and currently effectively subsidized by the government in the sense that once you own it the amount you have to pay to keep it is absurdly lower than the amount you would naturally have to pay to defend it
yo @partiful would you at least tell me the *city* of the event before I RSVP? hard to say if I'm going if I don't know where the event is.
Retweeted @arram
A general thesis of mine is that there is vast amounts of private data hidden in plain sight that will eventually be made public.
@kaseyklimes @partiful like it's not like the info is actually top-secret! at the point when I'm viewing the page, I'm one button-push away from the exact address.
Retweeted @TylerAlterman
Cosmic theory of branding: Branding is about appearance. Branding is what a thing’s appearance causes a perceiver to in…
@TylerAlterman the "signalling... to the right potential mates" part is important. there's a classic trap of becoming bland to not offend everyone, when what you actually want is to attract some fraction and turn off another fraction
I wonder if anyone has has ever named their kids Ivan, Johanna, Shawn, Jonathan, Hans, Giovanni, ...
I find myself often referring to "courage and clarity" as a pair. Like I'll say "but yeah, I didn't have the courage and clarity to do that at the time". without clarity, courage has nothing to stand for without courage, clarity can't speak
people or systems may reward or punish you, but reality as a whole never does it merely bears fruit when you plant a tree and grow it, and it hurts when you fall down or break your heart
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
my 1-paragraph summary of meditationbook.page by @meditationstuff
@nowtheo @hrosspet @AbstractFairy @meditationstuff also some people have so much shit stored in their conception of "Try" that they're going to have a very bad time following steps 1-4 here
this is one of the silliest kinds of spam comments it has a "this sentence is false" quality to it
Retweeted @NewFounding
The Algorithm That Finds Your Soulmate, ft @jakozloski This week, @JoshuaClemans and @SantsPliego sit down with Jake Koz…
@davidbessis also that figuring this out requires doing the math 🫡😂
they should try asking "how tall are you with shoes" and the actual people who are 6' will notice and add an inch, but the people who are just 5'11" will maybe just stick to 6' which will now be honest. but meanwhile the 5'10"ers, who aren't used to lying, will say 5'11"
Fascinating thread on how mathematical aptitude develops > In my view, math talent is only loosely genetic and loosely cultural — the bulk comes from your personal, intimate cognitive journey.
tweet that my quoted text above is from, which elaborates:
Retweeted @AskYatharth
a decision feels clear when im able to feel all the feelings around it what "making a decision" really is is the sense of…
@TylerAlterman oh we are SO doing this in SF in a couple months once our daughter is born. fyeah. will report back!
Whoa hold up does french have "noos" (mind)? Because if so, it might be pronounced almost identically to "nous" (we, us).
more people have gotten enlightened than I have
Huh, I'm not sure if as many people have generated sentences like these as I have.
@jonathanallard @dibiagioandrea that's what google translate figures! sorta makes sense, since for whatever reason ˆ often maps onto a missing s (eg forêt or île) interestingly it doesn't translate "noûs" as "noos" or "mind" tho. translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en…
@dibiagioandrea huh, seems it's sometimes spelled with a U in english too en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nous
this is a great thread of lil thoughts on dating, relationships, how to break up when that's the thing to do
fun fact: the most common to-do list apps are web browsers (which are very poorly designed for that) youtube.com/watch?v=KMijT8…
Thread · Index of the 100 video project · 4 of 77 tweets
vid 73 - intentionality / design / how-to highlighting how you end up using a browser as a to-do list, which makes it much worse as a browser, and one temporary solution
vid 74 - a video to a friend! re the dance/tension between doing stuff and deep interpersonal sync
vid 75 - 16 second bizarre inside joke one of the tragicomic things about the internet is that this thing has 73k views, more than the rest of my channel combined, and sure part of that is length but also it's hard to find viewers for esoteric ideas
vid 76 - demonstration of tiny intentionality system implemented with pen, paper, and duck. mostly duck. 🦆
@joshjob42 @s_r_constantin hmmm maybe some sort of distributed trust network system for who has reviewed the paper and who trusts those reviewers
update: I've gotten so used to typing with double-space after period (not the physical act since it's automated but the fact that it comes out that way) that I find myself sometimes correcting it when it doesn't happen (if eg I add a new sentence to the end of a paragraph)
(also I have disabled this for twitter since character count and because full sentences are relatively rare here anyway)
@RatOrthodox yes but also the caveat that it's possible to turn this into a fetish and celebrate coming to conclusions which are repugnant without realizing that your disgust is a pointer to a counterargument you haven't considered adequately
Retweeted @tracewoodgrains
I hated school starting in first grade. I wanted to go faster, wanted more interesting work, wanted something better.…
@benlandautaylor I heard a story about a guy suing his ex-wife for not disclosing her plastic surgery and thus having an ugly baby, but it turns out that as far as snopes can tell, this didn't happen (and the preview image was edited FOR a plastic surgery ad) snopes.com/fact-check/man…
playing as praying twitter.com/selentelechia/…
Retweeted @Aella_Girl
once you get the message, the phone hangs up itself
@kenthecowboy_ corollary: if you're inclined to keep meditating, maybe the message you got wasn't adequate (and also you might want to try a different approach to meditating)
watching @BeReal try to monetize itself with "RealBrands" and bullshit ads is one of the most disgusting app transformations I've ever seen just let us fucking pay
"just do your thing" is a non-self-consciousness-inducing way to express the wisdom that "just be yourself" tries and fails at, and the reason is obvious if you look at the words.
watching @BeReal_App try to monetize itself with "RealBrands" and bullshit ads is one of the most absurd & disgusting app transformations I've ever seen just let us fucking pay
@mattgoldenberg indeed. fortunately it looks like she hasn't used the app in years so all good. having said that, here's a re-do:
improve your mind unfold your soul
something is alive to the extent that you can't shut it down completely (or take it fully apart) in order to heal or transform it this observation brought to you by watching my city's stem cells at work repairing the sewer system near my house, with no disruption
ICYMI cities are alive
Thread · Why definitions of life keep including companies and cities · 1 of 8 tweets
another take:
@KompendiumProj my atoms and quarks would continue their patterned existence just fine without me not so for my cells
god grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the patience to painstakingly untangle the things that are a bit of both until I can figure out exactly which aspects are which
did you fully consent to be on twitter right now?
Thread · Living inside a half-hearted choice as nonconsent with your life · 7 of 9 tweets
if you're living inside a choice you made half-heartedly, then you're in a state of nonconsent with your life situation
this makes accepting the present moment hard because while yes sure it is what it is and you can only change the future... there's a kind of self-violation to accepting the continuation of something you can choose to end, if you don't want it to continue
it's not about whether the present moment is palatable—accepting the present moment while your house is on fire might be readily available: "fuck, this is happening, let's get out of here"—but about whether what's happening is something you fake-agreed to
also it's not about whether a decision you made GOT you here, it's about whether you're still enacting the decision. my first tweet initially said "decision" but "commitment" or "choice" is more accurate here.
like accepting the tattoos you got pressured into when you were younger... well, they're there now, independent of your will whereas accepting the marriage or career you got pressured into when younger, while you're still in it, can end up being tantamount to denial/pretending
in practice there's something very different from accepting the continuation of a situation that completely surprised you, and accepting the continuation of a situation you tried to convince yourself wouldn't happen even though you kinda knew it would (but didn't consent to)
I've been talking on very large scales but this also applies to very small scales 😉