@mattgoldenberg not sure but I have a related 2×2 that might be of interest:
August 2024
Retweeted @mattgoldenberg
I'd like to see less talk about self-non-coercion and much more discourse about "non-coercive motivation", which I thin…
yo @mattgoldenberg what's your best link-to-able resource on why just getting rid of non-coercive motivation isn't enough, and you need to deliberately cultivate joyful motivation as a replacement?
my first guess was this thread but it seems to be about a lot of things and not centrally that
“You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” — Zig Ziglar
Thread · Living inside a half-hearted choice as nonconsent with your life · 1 of 9 tweets
someone DM'd me being like "what do"? my general advice is: allow yourself to re-make the choice tho it can be hard to get enough space (and courage) to do this properly, if it's something where by default you kinda need to keep showing up every day, like a marriage or a job
Retweeted @patio11
"So how do you take comments on writers from readers?" I try to be like a well-adjusted doctor: the patient is probably right…
@Trying_Truly came across this (click through to 2nd tweet) while I still had this open of yours
Thread · Living inside a half-hearted choice as nonconsent with your life · 1 of 9 tweets
my impression is that most people aren't in a state of full consent with their life situation. but one can be! (the first draft of the top of this thread had a "most people" claim, but then I decided that was a secondary point)
@mbateman "hm, it seems to me that I'm awake, because [...]. and if I'm awake and we're interacting, I conclude you're awake! but maybe dream me would also say that to you! so how could you know?" (idk if it'd work for your 4yo, but that's the kind of perspectival thing I'd try here)
@mattgoldenberg sweet! lmk when you do so I can link it here: (you might find this video interesting—I'd love to have you part of the larger conversation!) youtu.be/pSGaplsHdAM
@mattgoldenberg "the wisdom to know the difference"
is coercion efficient as a motivational strategy? (internally or interpersonally) here's a debate between me & @IvanVendrov that spans topics from washing the dishes to control systems theory to theology takes a bit to pick up, maybe start 5:25 or 32:40 youtube.com/watch?v=pSGapl…
I'll tease you with the chapter headings I just spent 20 minutes pulling out! 03:40 can Ivan control Malcolm? 05:25 professional examples of interpersonal control 17:00 traps along the way 22:30 depression from stopping coercive motivation without already having joyful motivation 27:28 Roman use of "discipline" & "virtue" 32:40 how to measure motivational efficiency 34:15 coercion has goodhart built-in: washing the dishes 🧼🍽️ 41:40 jobs you love, jobs you hate 52:30 internal conflict causes stuckness & oscillations 58:00 pre-coercive culture got outcompeted 1:02:50 aiming for a new thing that feels better 1:07:45 propaganda against your animal 1:12:00 theology: does reality punish/coerce you? 1:16:20 early history of science 1:19:50 limits of cultural propaganda 1:22:00 cultural knowledge greater than individual secret of our success 1:27:40 overcoordinated overshoulded 1:30:00 cultural transition phases 1:35:30 research agenda: the shift 1:37:45 law of conservation of coercion? 1:41:30 our equiv of "drosophilia" for testing
Thread · Learning you have to put up with shit, then learning you don't
the first part of your life involves learning that you have to put up with shit the second part of your life involves learning that you don't
you spend the early years of your life repeatedly hearing that you need to put up with shit (read: more shit than you think you have to put up with) this is somewhat true, in fact, in practice, at young ages, though less true than people want you to think
by the time you're living on your own, making your own friends, choosing your own job (vs going to school) ...you have a lot of options for not putting up with shit!
even if all the jobs you can get kinda suck, you still don't have to put up with any particular one—you get to pick which tradeoffs to deal with!
part of realizing that you don't fundamentally have to put up with anything is realizing that you made a bunch of choices/commitments in ways that were more like "I have to put up with this" than "I want this". coercion, not consent.
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF yep, makes sense vibes with this other thing I've been noticing (click through for at least a tad of nuance before offering the critiques I'm sure you have of it!)
@AviSchiffmann this is funny and the product will probably be good for some people, but the name just makes me sad
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF fuck yeah to this
Replying to @eurydicelives
@eurydicelives yeah and turns out towardsness and awayness work really differently—awayness can't aim malcolmocean.com/2022/02/toward…
lots of vibes in this post that I think my friends will be interested in (particularly the @TylerAlterman @__drewface cluster) a sequel to a post called the MetaModern Business Bureau, called Make Game A Pay For The Wall: laymanpascal.substack.com/p/make-game-a-…
this is helpful
@quirkyllama there's something like that, but also even if the tradeoffs suck there's still a difference between feeling like you have to accept certain tradeoffs vs realizing that it's up to you to pick your poison
Replying to @PrinceManayBora
@PrinceManayBora decision is merely a cutting off of options someone who decides to sign a contract (eg leasing a new car) due to social pressure (whether family or shady car salesman) has decided, but not consented
@RatOrthodox huh. tentatively... curious..?
@nbashaw @nickcammarata agreed. it's also that without the effects being verifiable, and with the "therefore you should" being "endure this specific long path" not "try this supplement and just see if it works"... the memetic signature matches a social control psy-op, or of self-sacrificial cope
@sarahradz_ even worse is that the cleaning fee sometimes goes up if you're there more days. I'm not making it more messy!
@nbashaw @nickcammarata like it's a different thing for that sentence to be accurate to a person's experience, than for it to be uttered as a speech act since it's way easier to just say shit like that than to have it be actually true, further proof necessary
Retweeted @lemonaut1
If something as simple as cells can work together harmoniously to form something as complex as our bodies, I have no doubt t…
raise the bar
thinking about hosting a "work 100× softer" bootcamp. any takers? *drill sergeant voice, but whispering*: you call that soft? you can work way softer than that!
@HunterGlenn @lemonaut1 here's my theory of change for this: TL;DR = there's a bunch of subtle stuff necessary for groups of people to accurately and confidently ascertain that they have the ability to be multi-organism life in the sense of not letting entropy pile up inside malcolmocean.gumroad.com/l/how-we-get-t…
it's not so much a system as an encouragement to listen to yourself. you will notice, when your discover violations or that you'd trusted someone in a way that it turns out they didn't ever ask to be trusted, that there will be a feeling of "ahh, I can't trust here"
Retweeted @br___ian
you guys are welcome to question anything I say ever, as long as it doesn't implicitly call into question my own self-trust
wait hold up Reggie Ray and Reggie Watts are different guys??
@justavagrant_ depends on if I'm the guard who always tells the truth or the guard who always lies
@phantom_opus you might also dig @AndrewCutler13's work on cultural diffusion, showing that the origins of the present human condition are complex, possibly more like single-origin, and a lot more recent than the latest Out Of Africa event vectorsofmind.com/p/evidence-for…
@phantom_opus @AndrewCutler13 here's a more specific theory of what diffused: vectorsofmind.com/p/eve-theory-o…
@midwit_mentat nah I just google image searched and that's definitely one guy with two names
@Jonathan_Blow scope creep / expansion these rockets all solve exactly one problem if you find later iterations of software that solves only the exact same problem as earlier iterations, it'll tend to be simpler. but usually we add more cases/situations
I believe in* God** *put my weight behind, bet on, ally with (as in "I believe in you" or "I believe in this mission") **the largest-scale forces of creativity & love in the cosmos
for an extended take on what I mean "believe in", see this article by @AnnaWSalamon lesswrong.com/posts/duvzdffT…
for an extended take on what I mean by "God", listen to this conversation between @RomeoStevens76 and @aneeshm youtu.be/X6MYsKeTjKk
complaining is sacred, but it's not a good building material
every theological view secretly contains a pedagogical view
time for me to do a couple more podcast interviews! 🎙️ tag below a podcaster you'd like to hear talk with me! 💬
Malcolm, explain bootstrapping meta-trust right fckn now, in one breath, standing on one foot
this was written during a tiny Writing It Live! sprint with @HunterGlenn—he picked it out of 6 potential topics I offered! to learn more and book a time with me to do something similar (could be 1-3h instead of 30mins), go here:
this is a much denser pith of a 21k word doc I wrote in 2021-2022! which is available as a mini ebook here. this manual is basically my theory of change for scaling collaborative culture malcolmocean.gumroad.com/l/how-we-get-t…
@visakanv Bam, a year later I have a 4th 1-page screenshot. More to come! (I've added a "write 100 onepagers" to my "do 100 [do 100 things] thing")
@visakanv idk if this is actually particularly more accessible (aside from being shorter than the mini ebook it's based on) but we'll see maybe that's what I need to write 100 for 😛
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF yeah it's not a very easy-to-keep secret since it's self-evident if you know where to look but a lot of theological views treat their implicit pedagogy as immutable and unquestionable and not even part of the picture
@ConvergeToTruth complaining helps us reaffirm our values in the face of violations to form coalitions around upholding these values and to not accept a "new normal" where they go regularly violated
@mattgoldenberg nice, he wrote this:
Retweeted @HunterGlenn
My first 15-minute sprint-write with @Malcolm_Ocean. Please enjoy "Accelerating the Dialectic" in 1 page. We don't need t…
@HunterGlenn here's a link to the full-sized page:
> There is an objective and discoverable truth to the agent’s proper role and thus its morality. But! The answer depends on your perspective. I've been trying to articulate this point for months, thanks @eshear. (read full thread; he's making an analogy to physics relativity!)
@eshear right, and the players basically don't need their hands for anything else, so they might as well be wearing boxing gloves!
Retweeted @PrinceVogel
I want a system where I can slam a button which causes someone to disappear entirely for a week or so, at which point you…
@samswoora yeah! I had this insight a few months ago and wrote a thread about it!
Thread · Sin as parts destroying the environment they depend on · 1 of 24 tweets
"We are not punished for our sins, but by them." — Elbert Hubbard (as quoted by @slimepriestess)
Retweeted @HephaistosF
@HSI_TV @samswoora Original sin is literally Adam being given the choice: have God pre-emptively limit Adam's will to avoi…
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF @HSI_TV @samswoora yeah, fucking around and finding out did result in a bunch of pain and suffering the issue was framing it as disobedience and thereby creating an infinite shame loop, rather than just as natural consequences to learn from
@samswoora you might be into this video on Original Spin, noticing how this particular confusion happens for people: youtube.com/watch?v=6Ykr2X…
@HunterGlenn @samswoora "the idea that every single thing you do is a sin" wait who is a proponent of that idea?
Thread · Sin as parts destroying the environment they depend on · 1 of 24 tweets
@slimepriestess another angle on it: > Sin is just what they called behaviour that doesn't scale.
@sonyasupposedly idk but all of these fake milks are a joke unless they match the macros of real milks, which basically none of them do milk+cereal is a protein+fat rich meal; these are not
Wittgenstein probably got here first but uhhh if it can't be empirically tested then it also isn't making an actual claim about experience at all and thus can't be metaphysically suspect either, it's just sort of irrelevant (or a work of fiction)
@DefenderOfBasic yeah, also sometimes in order for a learning to be taken in, it has to be paired with some other piece of something, or some implicationy toxin has to be stripped away first
Replying to @n8bitt
randomly came across this again and I found myself reflecting that actually this STILL feels true of me. I totally COULD have romantic love for multiple people, it just feels likely to cause a mess, so I chose not to > it reflects a capacity to hold romantic love for more than one person
@lumpenspace can you unpack this?
Thread · Being able to laugh together as the standard for resolved conflict · 1 of 10 tweets
it's hard to laugh about a situation that you're only still in because part of you is strongarming another part of you
I mentioned to @Morphenius a video of Vervaeke's in which he rederives the need for dreams, from first principles. unfortunately saying this is kind of a spoiler for the vid since it's cool to have it surprise you, but alas, I don't have a better intro: youtube.com/watch?v=vcp6J1…
@occhiolist__ mostly just this so far:
@schaumuniversum love it
@prerationalist yes lol. sometime I'm like "good Q but I don't want to tangent into too much... I'll just give it one breath" and a solid minute of run-on parenthesis-rich sentence later later I finally gasp for air to the shock of my interlocutors who had all but forgotten the constraint
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
Malcolm, explain bootstrapping meta-trust right fckn now, in one breath, standing on one foot
> until you have a deep object-level understanding of a situation you should not start thinking in abstractions twitter.com/TenreiroDaniel…
Retweeted @tasshinfogleman
"respecting distrust is a form of accepting that reality is as it is"
Hello, what are you going to do today to make yourself happy~ (from a spambot, but it's a good question!)
@AaronEstel @sonyasupposedly 2% barely qualifies as "not fake milk" but yeah
Retweeted @Gena_I_Gorlin
I was already thrilled to have @FoundersPodcast in my life, but now I owe him a profound and unexpected debt of gratitud…
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF it doesn't actually make the situation good though it just buys more time to stay in the shitty situation without exploding
@HunterGlenn @samswoora that's silly. a perfect person would never get themselves into my situation 😜
@HunterGlenn @samswoora but less jokingly, that just... seems wrong to me. there is no right behavior. there is no perfect person. there is no teacher grading your performance and giving you an A. the best solutions to real ethics problems are non-obvious insights emergent from context+creativity
@loopholekid I had a normie friend who thought the LLM had opinions and could therefore advise on whether certain behaviors were appropriate, rather than understanding how biased it is by the framing of your question, and also how its response is deterministic + random number generator
for building, you need fury, not complaining
@ConvergeToTruth that, but also like we haven't experienced anything like what sane loving software would be, in most dimensions and yet I can continue to carve out a tiny region near me where instead of being resigned to this, there's a sense that this is bullshit
@ConvergeToTruth likewise, people who have lived under an oppressive regime for generations, can still gain perspective by complaining about it rather than being resigned to it and this can allow them to start building energy towards overthrowing it!
@FrankaMedic @mattgoldenberg @IntendApp those questions are bad tbh, and I actually just changed them today while going through my own review. they now read: What problem are you really trying to solve here? What can you do in August to really make headway on that? getting you more in touch with the substance
@RatOrthodox ah yeah "do what you want" and "get what you want" are not quite the same thing
@nickcammarata @nbashaw yeah I agree, overall the message (including all this context) doesn't match psy-op, but it does readily pattern-match to that in a way that's predictable and therefore if not dodged suggests poor theory of mind
@nickcammarata @nbashaw and in practice people surely do whip themselves to practice based on reports like this, which for some of them will maybe end up feeling worth it but for people who struggle to actually get into a practice that works for them will just turn meta-suffering up super loud
Replying to @PrinceManayBora
@PrinceManayBora what do you mean?
Retweeted @mattgoldenberg
here's what i came up with explanations below tag urself
@SurenVynn imagine you have a group of people and they're asked if they can be interrupted and a few people quickly say yes so the interruption comes in but some of the other people didn't want the interruption but now it's too late. group partially consented. ...that, but for parts of you
@christineist @HeidiPriebe1 hm someone link me?
Retweeted @ostensiblynil
@Malcolm_Ocean did you fully consent to be on twitter right now?
@ConvergeToTruth hmmm that kinda resonates for me but also feels odd. where does evolution begin? don't rock formations also in some sense evolve?
@RortyWitt I imagine you mean biologically evolved, not memetically evolved, but it seems to me that human behavior is massively overdetermined by memes since their evolutionary power outclasses biological encodings in pace of evolution and horizontal transmission we're made for learning
@Alphiloscorp @nosilverv lol I wrote the footnote back in May
@what_quiddity may the other replies to my question be illuminating also you might get something useful out of reflecting: how, in fact, do you know that things (that are bad) are bad? how can you tell?
@mormo_music versus hearsay. some evidence has to route through taking somebody else's symbolic representations and converting them into an imagined sense of the world if you tell me you replied with speech to text, I could believe you or not whereas I can directly sense that I'm typing ⌨️
@mormo_music but sometimes we get a bunch of corroborated hearsay: people are sure talking as if there's some wars 10 or so timezones east of me. I haven't seen it myself but it would be a pretty impressive work of propaganda and/or conspiracy if the whole thing was completely made up
@mormo_music but as for the exact details of what's going on in those wars? well, I haven't seen a kind of overwhelming evidence that gives me much confidence in that. I could try doing hours of research to find sufficiently unbiased (or oppositely-biased) sources to figure it out though.
@asemic_horizon I explore the religious conversion thing here, as a case study of sneaky false generalization/reification of direct experience. seems to me to be distinctly a different issue from gaslighting (tho maybe sometimes ALSO includes gaslighting as an aside) malcolmocean.com/2023/12/how-di…
@Jazzkid__ in that case, curious which of your old drafts (or published pieces) DO still stand the test of time and continue to feel relevant and/or helpful
@StephenSkolnick nice! what kinds of old drafts did you have that became outmoded from that?
@adamyormark you might like this thread:
@adamyormark what old drafts of yours stopped making sense once you realized this?
@kcorazo huh, tell me more about the self-image? you see yourself as someone regularly overturning your views? the thing I describe in the top tweet has only really happened to me once, on a big scale, maybe twice
@kcorazo (although I have had many drafts slowly individually become relevant because things shifted)
@cptnjamescook hey @mslkmp you might like this Marcus Aurelius quote: "Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one."
@Feral_Mystic whoa, trippy! what'd you have to refactor about your old writings after that?
Replying to @ryan_c_lewis
@ryan_c_lewis writing essays is one of the most adaptive responses to trauma out of all of them tho ngl
@carl_feynman epic, nice
@4confusedemoji right, of course, there are crystals that just naturally form perfect right angles as part of their deal
@farawaylaughtr what were your old ways of knowing that no longer made sense?
@eatnik here are some of them
@aleksil79 haha yup, unfolding unfolds unfolding and sometimes it does something different when it does
@aleksil79 whoa snap. can you point me at this apprehension? I feel like I may already have it but would be nice to verify
@slimepriestess makes sense given my sense of your recent writing what were the kinds of drafts you had before that, that no longer made sense after?
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF yup, totally!
@MattPfeiffer @eshear @LankletsBane my take here is that you seem to be unnecessarily shifting from 1st person to 3rd, which you can do, but it doesn't contain more information than "I'd like to flourish anyway" multiplied by "and that's true for many I's". but then it becomes reified and disconnected from the care
@ShapesintheFog how do you know that'd be the price point? AI companies are super hungry for more data and have completely bonkers quantities of dollars
@christineist @MasterTimBlais wrote way too much about it malcolmocean.com/2023/01/2022-d…
@cwrichardson right but like, some people I talk to seem to have trouble even remembering whether pacific is earlier time than eastern, or later, without looking it up or walking through it, which is just nuts to me
@lemonaut1 say more about the connection?
@AskYatharth @QiaochuYuan ended up writing this thread that looks at consent (and implicitly is sort of about NNTD stuff for sure)
Retweeted @natural_hazard
Hm, new phrasing: "deception" is causing people to be wrong via fudging with the inputs to gnosis "coercive deception"/…
@relic_radiation yessssss allowing
Thread · Allowing yourself to do the thing instead of getting yourself to · 1 of 11 tweets
"non-obstruction" as another frame on allowing
Thread · "How am I relating to this?" as a way out of stuckness · 1 of 9 tweets
oh man this idea I had back in early 2022 was actually basically the same premise: repeatedly take your stance towards your situation as object
@justavagrant_ most people probably wouldn't be but you don't need to be in a relationship with most people visakanv.com/blog/most-peop…
very satisfying to type out visakanv dot com slash blog slash most dash people
@justavagrant_ there's some amount of compatibility on the community front that you need with a partner just like you need compatibility on the culture front in order to parent together but that doesn't mean that if you have a *project* about either of these that they need to share your proj
man can you imagine how much of a pain it would be if there were a bunch of competing standards for which order the alphabet gets sorted in? grateful to not live in that world
It turns out that while “this is not supposed to be my job” is sometimes an accurate thing to think, it’s often a disempowering one. [...] it may not be my job but it is my problem. malcolmocean.com/2023/08/whose-…
it may not be my job but it is my problem
from "Whose job is this?" malcolmocean.com/2023/08/whose-…
@Levi7hart @paulg probably that this is how he started writing code, so there was no previous experience to compare it to
Replying to @innerstitial
@innerstitial @slimdaveyy haha yeah when I saw your "imagine if" I was like "uhhh thanks I'll pass" haha
@lemonaut1 ah yeah! this is hugely resonant with how I think about this stuff even better, a bunch of it is not just independently verifiable but independently findable. convergent principles
@phokarlsson Nice! I've been realizing I want to do this more as well. This post is encouraging me to get into it. Although I'm curious, is the reason you need to drive new readers that there's a substantial churn on stack subscriptions?
@natural_hazard punch pillow is like the worst thing ever. impact not satisfying enough. slamming pillow into ground is WAY better. I've heard good things about hitting pillow with tennis racket but haven't tried it myself
@natural_hazard I know nothing about studies
@natural_hazard this vibe lol x.com/eigenrobot/sta…
"Markov blankets are like if the serenity prayer and linear algebra had a baby"
incredible nominative determinism
I was taking care of some sort of toddler, and the moment I remember is that right as we were about to step over a gap of some sort, he lifted me over. Ludicrous, of course, but it highlighted to me the way in which accommodating for people doesn’t let you see their true abilities. (the only entry in a doc I made 12 years ago titled Dream Journal)
If I were a funky indie band I would get dozens of fans to submit videos of them just bomping around and then I'd assemble it into a whole perfectly-sync choreographed dance routine. Has anyone done this? youtube.com/watch?v=PCBTZh…
Retweeted @eshear
“I’m using this slang ironically” The slang can’t tell that you’re using it ironically. Neither can your self-image. Never part…
shoutout to @ncasenmare for the talk that resulted in me & @utotranslucence meeting 7 years ago yesterday! here are some notes on it I took back when few people were tweeting. interesting stuff! click around to tweets with replies; I did it tree-like rather than thread-like
Retweeted @utotranslucence
people I am begging you to hear that working on an inscrutable, poorly-defined, enormous problem that demands my maxim…
pay close attention to your impulse to bookmark a tweet "I need more space to digest it" sure but when? could just print it off and take it to a park right now
@utotranslucence inspired by the 525 bookmarks on this tweet:
btw: @utotranslucence & I made a baby registry so faraway friends & family could help us welcome our daughter in a few weeks! and we thought we'd share it to twitter for: a) friends we keep in touch with here 🥰 b) kind internet strangers 🤩 amazon.com/baby-reg/jess-…
@mimoosworld haha okay but like option 3, take your computer off internet and to the park or the balcony or whatever
Replying to @grimoire_garbo
@grimoire_garbo @mimoosworld yeah if it's a single tweet, not a thread, could readily just write it to digest it
also if you don't have a printer you might try @getPrinternet
@onlyfootnotes @getPrinternet I continue to be really excited about a group issue, so that 5 friends could get each get a copy of the same issue, where they each pick one article!
half-truths are so annoying precisely because they're half-true
a situation in which honesty is enthusiastically encouraged, but not possible in practice
my childhood was like this honesty was treated as a virtue, and lauded as such but there was a bunch of subtle bullshit that wasn't getting talked about and was heavily resisted
to be clear by honesty I don't just mean "not outright lying"
wild that they sell groceries at the abstraction store now
ur not a concept tho
@tautologer share a gist! stoked to test this stuff. I use a lot of userscripts for twitter eg this one for removing the red dot from the favicon (and the (20+) from the title). vital for my sanity gist.github.com/malcolmocean/9…
@tautologer oh cool you're based in SF? let's hang out some day and ship a lil browser ext for twitter based on our scripts maybe
Thread · Decoding the 'marry you but not hook up with you' chart · 2 of 5 tweets
what she says: I would marry you but not hook up with you what he hears: you're disgusting, a sweeper, I wouldn't even want someone to see us together what she means: you're charming/husbandzone so I don't want to get attached if this isn't going anywhere chart from @ItIsHoeMath:
video on the chart NOTE: I'm sure there's a lot of people (men and women) for whom this doesn't resonate. but if you've never considered that maybe the opposite sex thinks of things totally differently than you, this might be good for loosening your sense youtube.com/watch?v=n4aMiA…
Replying to @eurydicelives
just identified a scientific study I could do to test my Non-Naive Trust Dance framework! around 35-40mins in this video, @vervaeke_john describes a test where a false belief in (in)competence in a new skill is induced via fake feedback, a belief which persists after the person finds out it's fake. he notes that these studies are solid—they're having no replication crisis. however! he notes that part of the experimental design is that after inducing the false belief and then telling the participant that the feedback was bullshit, the participant is distracted before they're asked how they think they'd do at the task for real though. the obvious reason for this being (I assume) to avoid them making the easy move of saying "well I have no idea, you just said it was all bs" so they instead fall back on their deeper sense of having trusted the feedback at the time I would love to redo the persistence of belief experiments, but instead of distracting the participants after they find out that everything they've just experienced was bullshit, invite them to process whatever feelings of betrayal they have around that, and to reconcile it with everything else. My hypothesis is that there would be a bunch of complex feelings, including perhaps an amount of disgust that would usually be impolite to express in front of the experimenters, that would be needed to really reckon with the fact that they were given fake feedback from people they'd trusted... and that this thus might not be a problem of rationality so much as a problem of emotionality. And yes, we could argue that a rational person would nonetheless override these recent experiences they have been told are bullshit—told, I note, by the same people who lied before! are they lying now?—but it seems to me that the process here of coming to a new sense of things is not primarily made of reasoning, but of working out matters of intuitive trust. The belief didn't get installed by reasoning, it got installed by trusting your learning process—if it gets uninstalled, it will be the same way! (you can see here the influence of coherence psychology & memory reconsolidation on NNTD) So! I don't know if this would fully work, but if it didn't majorly help, I'd eat my hat. Let me know if you have access to a good context to run this variation on the experiment and want help designing it! Obviously there'd be some complex stuff to control for. Personally I'd also consider it inhumane (as with medical studies) to not offer the betrayal processing to the control group after the study as well, so they haven't on net been gaslit.
@DefenderOfBasic The 2024 Reply Games! I would subscribe to this
Retweeted @DefenderOfBasic
can't believe I am living the dream of being an internet commentator. like watching a live sports event, the excitemen…
Retweeted @RhysLindmark
18/ Regulating intelligence is hard. It might look more like regulating humans than regulating technology. We judge hum…
@RichDecibels oops I accidentally put America on your chart (may also be of interest to anyone looking to plot something that's outside your scale)
not enough of you have tagged yourself in this yet
Replying to @tensor_fusion
@tensor_fusion @krishnanrohit +10 for Scale
@krishnanrohit probably mostly not what you're looking for but might be a gem or two!
@krishnanrohit if you haven't read any of the Perceptual Control Theory books, they're great—highly recommend
@4confusedemoji it's an amazing book, probably my top of 2022
anybody have a psych department I could borrow?
@ItIsHoeMath interesting. I quoted your diagram here about this, but it seems you have a different interpretation than I did. where do you see her comment as locating him on your Zones chart?
@__drewface what matters to you, what you care about
@__drewface @SP1NS1R where can I preorder this?
@FionnJohnOC @__drewface liiiiink
@EP_Freely @__drewface I saw you touch on lying. I'm about to have kid 1 & I've been reflecting that there's gotta be some good stories for helping kids understand the whole "what a tangled web we weave" dynamic ie to see why lying will cause them problems, not just "is wrong"
@AskYatharth yeah a man who doesn't see any distinction is a fool and/or very immature. not ready for marriage.
@AskYatharth when pointing out that it's okay to care about hotness, I also note: "you don't care about it infinitely—you wouldn't marry the hottest person you'd ever met if they insisted on shitting on your electronics constantly" you care about it as much as you do
@AskYatharth ...likewise you wouldn't even just have sex a single time with the hottest person you can imagine, if it cost you a million dollars and replacing your left hand with a 50lb kettlebell
Thread · Decoding the 'marry you but not hook up with you' chart · 1 of 5 tweets
here's takes from the guy who created this chart, who seems pretty taken by gender-war stuff like his points are good, but also wracked with zero-sum status game vibes that seem to me fairly incompatible with cultivating sane spacious love
@Tangrenin @moissanist his models seem decent but the vibe he cultivates on twitter is very different from the vibes of "strangely earnest twitter" as I like to call the part of twitter around me so makes sense we wouldn't be hanging out, broadly
@gworley3 @ItIsHoeMath what's his best developmental stages dating one? I've only watched the Zones video basically
@SevernCrossing2 @ItIsHoeMath hmmmm yeah I agree that the men's thing isn't quite as linear as it's made out to be (also because any sane man doesn't want to marry and have kids with an irresponsible asshole even if she's hot) but it does seem like it has a different texture than the women's zones one
Thread · Decoding the 'marry you but not hook up with you' chart · 1 of 5 tweets
also: all of these are simultaneously the case: - we have a lot of instincts, impulses, urges, desires from pre-birth-control times - these... are somewhat out of date, and we know this—it clearly DOES affect our behavior. most people today DO fuck people we would not want to have kids with, who we wouldn't fuck without birth control - we, as humans, are not subject to our instincts as much as other animals. memes and prefrontal cortex reasoning have real power! - however, we often assume memes and prefrontal cortex have more power than they in fact do, and can get nasty surprises when we or others don't act like we naively thought we/they somehow would
@justanowlet @animalologist are you saying physical attractiveness isn't relevant here?
@clozapinenvibes I wanted to tag some "remind me" bot but looks like they all died to the new API 🪦😔
Thread · Ask what someone meant before interpreting an upsetting remark
the deeper moral of this story has nothing to do with dating or sexual selection or gendered perspectives the deeper moral of this story is that if someone says something that upsets you, ask them to explain more what they mean before trying to interpret it too much
but also... people sometimes subtly make moves where the only intent they consciously notice is "compliment" but on some other weird level are bids for some agreement of a status differential that sets a power precedent or something
I've done it. not proud of it. it didn't lead anywhere good, and rarely does. mostly traps in that direction. you don't want to have a partnership where you have the upper hand in this way (perhaps unless you're a sociopath).
if it feels like the person might be doing something like that, it's not necessarily doomed. but don't proceed until you've investigated so thoroughly that you're ZERO worried about whether this is the case (and your investigation might yield that it is, or fail to unworry you)
ooh I like this approach. would be worth checking if it applies to - productivity porn - insight porn - food porn x.com/postcyborg/sta…
@FrankaMedic there's two things here, like: - are the events in the porn depicting true wish fulfillment among the participants? (depends) - is watching the porn truly fulfilling the wishes of the person watching it? or is kinda tricking them (sorta always)
@MarvinKeilbach yeah the way I approach this stuff is to say "so... independent of your intent, if I let that slide then as far as I can tell I'm basically saying I'm fine with being abused, and I'm not." you sorta don't have to deal with their intent, you just have to be clear it doesn't stand
@pavedwalden @GarrettPetersen wanted to find this and was afraid I would fail but I eventually got it with beaver "you should see what I" top notch tweet
Replying to @storebrandguy
@storebrandguy @RandomSprint @GarrettPetersen yeah I'm not a particularly cynical guy but the couple of times I stepped in a strip club it was clear to me that the whole thing was fake / a joke, like I could tell the implied feedback I was getting about my attractiveness/value was total BS
@dela3499 @mbateman John Vervaeke makes a great point midway through Awakening From The Meaning Crisis about how these sorts of arguments are post-hoc justifications for nihilism as a mood, not something that will ever allow a happy, connected person to conclude that nihilism must be true
nuts that they sell abstractions at the grocery store now
Replying to @maaruin210
@maaruin210 @ItIsHoeMath it's not just looks. if you read closer, a high "bad boy" score can be achieved via machiavellian traits and all sorts of other stuff that is not actually generally admirable! (although you can also be assertive, cocky, powerful, without being an asshole or sociopath)
Thread · Decoding the 'marry you but not hook up with you' chart · 1 of 5 tweets
well-articulated by Emmett here strikes me as interesting to note that the capacity to see what the woman was (very inarticulately) genuinely intending as a compliment, is showing up in joyously married men. idk if there'd be a strong correlation but...
French Drop plus a lil bit of improv/patter skill is an incredible 80/20 for blowing kids' minds with magic tricks you really don't have to be that good at it even, just have to sell it
met a 6yo at a park and he started spontaneously singing "welcome to the internet, what do you prefer?" and random other fragments from that Bo Burnham song said he found it on the internet (sensible lol) and that it was "blade" which he shared meant "kinda good, kinda bad"
was curious if my speech to text could handle newly coined words with prefixes, and started blurting out weird morphemes until I found that indeed it could generate "paralogicalization" (and also just now parallelogicalization and parologicalization)
@mylesbyrne I would take a joke explanation if you'd spare one 😛 (I know the song, but not much of the context around it or the original Lisztomania)
@Aella_Girl I've been working on a bunch of stuff in this vein and it's totally doable although it increasingly feels like rationalization to consider oneself christian in anything but the "it's the context I come from" sense, not unlike secular jews
Thread · Sin as parts destroying the environment they depend on · 1 of 24 tweets
@slimepriestess could see it as the same structure but it's some part of you sinning against the whole of you (which is its environment) or locally can also mean temporally-local, like "feels good now but predictably fucks you up or messes up your feedback loops"
I guess that tweet still has a notion of sin but uhhh I'm not talking about an authoritarian thing at all people don't always forgive these sorts of sins, but reality does. you might get hurt as a result, but you are free to start over with no grudge.
a prayer I've been unfolding this year
Thread · Moral intuitions as symmetry intuitions, and reconciling epistemic frames · 1 of 4 tweets
"moral intuitions are generally symmetry intuitions, so fixing asymmetries in your direct phenomenology should allow much clearer direct perception of things likely to be perceived as moral/immoral" — @RomeoStevens76
@RomeoStevens76 @WystanTBS this needed to be its own tweet for quoting:
Thread · Why 'sin' doesn't mean 'miss the mark' · 15 of 16 tweets
I normally love argument-from-etymology but "sin"="miss the mark" always grinds my gears. I think because it's a motte-bailey; in practice, connotationally, it means something almost the opposite! wait—that's not even IN the word "sin"! "sin" has a totally different etymology
you are perhaps thinking of the greek word "hamartia"! THIS word did originally have a non-moral meaning, and then only later when imported to christianity, did it gain a moral one
however! the Hebrew term both: - does have a root in "miss the mark" - doesn't seem to have had a non-moral meaning for a long time!
in any case, we must ask: - do Hebrew-speakers use "chata" for missing a 🎯? with no guilt, just "oops" - do Greek-speakers still use "hamartia" for that? - do English-speakers use "sin" for that? and at least in the last case, I am pretty confident the answer is "ofc not"!
so stop saying "sin" = "miss the mark" when it clearly doesn't! here's the actual etymology of "sin", which basically comes from "to be truly guilty of" (whether a crime, injury, shenanigans, or violation of divine law)
if the Christians in the time of Old English had wanted to pick a verb that didn't have the connotation of guilt and offense, they could have used perhaps Unþeaw, which meant "bad habit" or "vice" or various other terms roughly meaning "mistake"! they did not choose those words.
also, Christians now could choose to play the game with new words there's nothing inherently right about the word "sin" does your hamartiology still make sense when you say "make mistakes or hurt someone"? who defines what counts as "sin" for you? why?
here's some speculation from Claude about how the term "syn" might have evolved from meanings more like breaking a social code or damaging one's honor not a hard move—the everything-God is the Code of all Codes, the Clan of all Clans
all of this brings me to the interesting puzzle about whether "sin" is supposed to connote failing at a socially-defined duty (which in practice it absolutely does to christians and jews today) or failing at being in good harmony with all of reality
this definition 👇 highlights that tension 👁🗨some sins ARE socially defined, because you can harm the stability of your society by breaking norms 🛬but other sins are defined by the laws of physics and trust-dancing and so forth; they simply will not work
of course, historically there has tended to be equivocation between these two meanings! you can make an argument for why from memetic evolution or from authoritarian corruption; both have merit!
@wolftivy has an interesting article on this (which doesn't note that historians are unclear on whether there was a single guy named Abraham who made these moves. but the story nonetheless points at a shift from socially-defined values to universal ones) palladiummag.com/2023/07/13/don…
this universal, self-evident reality, is a major part of what I orient to when I orient to God I both believe it, and believe in it (although both of those are weird phrases—I see it, I love it.)
and I've found lots in Christianity that resonates with that universal self-evident reality: ❤️🔥 agapic love 🫂 forgiveness 🙏 sacredness of every single person 🏳️🌈 pluralism
and I've found lots in Christianity that doesn't resonate with universal self-evident reality: 🧑⚖️ punishment 🚱 parochial arbitrariness treated as eternal 🙃 gaslighting people on their basic goodness-badness sense
@SolsticeSunday @Aella_Girl @DollPariah thanks for being my "person wrong on the internet" today to inspire me to write up a long rant!
Thread · Moral intuitions as symmetry intuitions, and reconciling epistemic frames · 2 of 4 tweets
@RomeoStevens76 "In practice," Romeo adds, "there are competing symmetry intuitions, hence [waking up doesn't automatically make you a better person]. But it should help quite a bit on the margin."
priority: synthesizing competing symmetry intuitions how much investment is going into that? that's actually a really simple way to put some of the most important work I've been doing with my life the past 4 years! eg these conflicting views on trust:
Thread · Why 'sin' doesn't mean 'miss the mark' · 1 of 16 tweets
as a final comment: another common translation of sin is "iniquity", whose etymology is simply "unequality" in other words... violating the symmetry inherent to moral intuitions!
@regardthefrost so why not just use the term "error" then?
Retweeted @RomeoStevens76
I can't actually develop other people's virtues, despite their universal sounding names. Nor can I really steal their w…
generative AI is gonna be a wild ride over the coming years. doesn't have to be this stupid tho
generative AI is gonna be a wild ride over the coming years. doesn't have to be this stupid tho like literally you generate some stuff... how about you try *checking* the stuff before you report it authoritatively
Retweeted @sarthakgh
It is almost like we need politicians to make it easier to build vs run election campaigns on price controls to help regular…
the entire history of human evolution is kind of an intervention cascade tbh
@mayfer, this is a funky duck (this not a reply since I'm not logged in on mobile and can only send top-level tweets)
This Is Just To Say I have dropped the balls that were in my court and which you were probably expecting me to handle Forgive me they were important so was everything else
can't delegate taste
@QiaochuYuan a memory: I regularly (like monthly?) think fondly of the toast you made at mine & @utotranslucence's wedding, which as I recall went something like: > "Malcolm and I... our relationship has involved a lot of being confused together. and man there sure is a lot to this world…
@QiaochuYuan also shadow statements are lit
Retweeted @mbateman
We gave 4yo an iPad and set it up to offer her three affordances: 1. Take pictures 2. Type in notes 3. Text with a handful…
@maybegray iirc you're collecting WCW parodies
is there a service that can input a recipe and output an @instacart (or similar) order? (that doesn't order extra of salt etc)
@Stutigardum oh yeah name three 🙃
@QiaochuYuan play with self (which includes elements of discover & see through. trying to improve yourself produces the below Heideggerian error though, which @Morphenius and I have started calling self-tooling)
@QiaochuYuan @Morphenius not the self-tooling error are: - honing your skills - solving your problems - listening to your needs - nurturing your own developmental unfolding but to try to improve yourself you must take yourself as object, which produces a paradox
@QiaochuYuan my take:
making generalizations is hard sometimes
does "stuffy air" mean "too much CO₂"?
@UnderwaterBepis @QiaochuYuan depends on how you define coercive, but as far as I can tell, it's not
@QiaochuYuan it's still barely getting started imo. the thing that is worth moving on from is various half-assed confused attempts. do write up your post-mortem on that though! helps us all, to see how each other got stuck in such confusions
@QiaochuYuan to be clear, I'm pretty sure it'll evolve into other framings etc "non-coercion" has a negative/awayness quality to it—good for identifying the issue, bad for a new attractor
@QiaochuYuan @mattgoldenberg recommends focusing on learning "joyful" motivation, and then to some extent the coercive motivation will fall away on its own where it's not needed
Retweeted @uncatherio
we are running a meal train to keep the Ocean family fed at this time - remote contributions welcome <3 …
Retweeted @__drewface
My opinion on the [current cultural issue du jour] is that you should come over for dinner, anon. It's been too long since…
@__drewface @keeshlauria @eshear @Prigoose @calistan_ yeah, that combined with all following each other, which is another thing bots do to seem real it kinda makes sense... it's just... really sloppy algorithms with insufficient oversight. like it wouldn't be hard to hire people in a low-PPP country to bot-or-not accounts
@__drewface @keeshlauria @eshear @Prigoose @calistan_ (you have at least 3 people per account, and they all need to pick bot in order for the account to get banned or something like that)
@Nsousanis @utotranslucence yes! lots of both. and lots of help from friends/neighbors :) (also to be clear, Ocean is her last name, like mine)
@p_millerd post is about Bay Area get on over here 😉
> objectively speaking there are many things in the world that are worse but very few of them viscerally disgust me more it's good that different people are maximally disgusted by different things
Retweeted @visakanv
they tend to say something like, “I know perfect is the enemy of the good but I can’t bear to do merely good so I keep trying…
"can you take one of the mid-sleep feeds tonight?" me: "sure! ...hang on—I made that agreement on autopilot. let me take a moment and actually make it from my heart." *I go sit on bed next to her & baby, and pause* "...yes. I would love to" 🥰
Retweeted @utotranslucence
she was born at home on monday morning after a torrentially fast labour meet baby ocean
an example of working softer. noticing where the impulse to choose to do something comes from, and choosing to do things from as much spaciousness as possible, not from just bouncing around or agreements made thoughtlessly (the autopilot was itself unsoft)
@__drewface @utotranslucence > She's the most precious thing in the world. I mean I certainly think so but did your lil one get a demotion? 😜
we'll be hosting baby coworking (100× softer!) starting in a month or two once baby has an immune system, but in the meantime if you're: • a Bay Area local • someone I know in person ... lmk if you're into coming over and helping with delegations-from-dad!
your confusion is a resource if you will allow it to be what it is, and let it unfold
Thread · Shame as the experience of separation, and reconnection as its cure · 1 of 6 tweets
although actually this whole thread needs some rethinking since I spotted Original Spin shame is powered by disowning that your own pain matters (and it starts when your caregivers tell you your own pain is a problem you ARE, not a problem you HAVE)
@HunterGlenn @lemonaut1 a different answer is that shame is the bottleneck shame is what doesn't allow us to come into deeper intimacy, because it's about creating a wall of separateness
Thread · Shame as the experience of separation, and reconnection as its cure · 1 of 6 tweets
but also! part of how me & @Morphenius noticed Original Spin was noticing that if the pain is NOT being separate from god/universe (because nonduality) then what IS the pain?? oh, it's from eg a time your caregiver made your problem a social problem x.com/darcyjae/statu…
reminds me of coherence therapy's juxtaposition move, which is sometimes phrased as "so [X is good], and at the same time, [X is bad]" (once you've located these specific schemas)
realizing today that I wrote a song called "the meta song" back in 2010 and I have no idea where I learned the concept of meta I guess it was just around, didn't seem that niche—I definitely expected others to find the song funny
@gworley3 sweet I'll message you!
@RichDecibels iirc I got this from Entering the Heart of the Sun and Moon... there's a move that's "view your partner as a fully awakened being and your teacher" very powerful. (can also apply it to every person, but that's harder and has a different set of tradeoffs)
Replying to @chadthanasius
@chadthanasius if the connotation is now wrong for what you mean, then why keep using the word? if the word keeps evolving connotations you claim to disagree with... why is that happening? what purpose is that in line with?
@QiaochuYuan @Morphenius stoked this is happening. would be cool to record a call and put it on youtube (idk if that's the first step but at some point it'd be great)
trippy double-etymology here "prize" as what's offered (freely) as a reward for winning "prize" as what's taken by force, seized
newborn life is just one blessed thing after another
metagogy
yep, communication between people is never about having the same knowledge (as a THING), but about having compatible interfaces (/translation layers) between your knowing and my knowing
"get their consent" feels to me like a bureaucratic way to say "find out what they want"
Retweeted @ScarletAstrorum
freedom from: arranged marriages with bad husbands freedom to: responsibly choose a great spouse freedom from: limited…
@lumpenspace @HephaistosF hm, can you explain?
@panafunds mmm. I like thinking of it like this:
@TweetHue how on earth do I move lights between rooms? also why on earth can't I automate "all lights regardless of room turn red"? why only the 10 built-in shades???
ape rotator
Retweeted @yourthefool
The discord server that @repligate and @amplifiedamp are running is probably the most cutting edge research in interaction…
@goodside but the entire world IS improv theater toddlers know this too before they get RLHF'd by school
soulshape
stop trying to be yourself and just do your thing
the 2nd time I connected with @AskYatharth it was at a mock funeral he did for his birthday (over zoom since it was 2020). the eulogies gave me a rich sense of his character / role in groups
"you can't make an anti war film" honestly the way to do it would be to have the war be an aside to the plot except that cool things that you expect to happen keep not happening due to the war.
one nice thing about LLMs is that they'll raise the lower bar on how people are willing to be treated
when you don't have a good reply guy youtube.com/shorts/a_rWR8o…
hmmmm
based
there's a story of a toddler who thought "oh no" meant "it fell on the ground" so toddler would throw things on the ground while saying "oh no!" there's a lesson in this the lesson is about AI alignment
this kind of smart, context-sensitive, mixed-use code-switching is illegal to use in most American dialects
I can't tell if this is a koan or not:
@prerationalist I mean,
Replying to @PrinceManayBora
@PrinceManayBora thanks! it's a remix of this more descriptive articulation of the same thing, from a few weeks ago:
@nosilverv @meekaale interestingly it looks like the same guy used it a couple months earlier and then remembered it this weekend upon seeing the dogsled vid
this is what Heidegger meant about the ordinary person living almost unconsciously, unable and unwilling to act outside the structures of normality even in trivial ways, bound to "what one does" like a straightjacket of inauthentic conformity
@nosilverv @meekaale meanwhile I have the perfect thing to QT with this copypasta, saved as a reply to this tweet:
@inkolore_ by being weird in 2019
@tonyaajjackson this is a beautiful articulation of what @Morphenius calls prayer in The Coming Age Of Prayer relentlessdawn.wordpress.com/2019/05/15/the… cc @visakanv
"...but I've seen something of the ways things unfold: you are innocent, and you'll be just as innocent as you grow old" (me, singing to my 2-week-old daughter)
just discovered that the name Dennis is a variation on Dionysus and now I really don't know how to feel
Retweeted @austinkleon
“It wasn’t for me” is the best phrase
which of my friends wants this gig?
we had a brief window of history when answers to big questions didn't seem to need to route through experts
it's a shame there isn't a Spiritual Midwifery but for caring for newborns rather than giving birth
looking forward to the era where we get to give little instructions to our speech-to-text AIs, like • I always want "Jean", never "Gene" • "4:00 A.M." is nuts, just "4am" please
@aphercotropist that's a great point those are still relevant answers to many questions I appreciate you continuing to bring this view!
@nosilverv @meekaale called it re "perfect thing to QT"! this is I think now my most-liked tweet by a factor of 2!
Replying to @TyAvery12
@TyAvery12 everything is a remix 🙃
Retweeted @bashu_thanks
No actually this is what Heidegger meant about the ordinary person living almost unconsciously, unable and unwilling to a…
😙👌
I assume so! I don't know much about Heidegger (I copy-pasted the above text) ad hominems are boring, but I'd be interested in an actual explanation of how to square these two things! probably real fruit to be found there x.com/VinceFHorn/sta…
@nosilverv @meekaale noice
@nosilverv come say hi to me and my newborn! (outside, since she has no immune system)
there is so much potential for learning we have barely scratched the surface twitter.com/selentelechia/…
can somebody please explain this opposite day function that I found in high school it makes no sense plz @QiaochuYuan ur my only hope
me: Jess, the guy I'm taking your laptop to to get fixed... is he the guy? @utotranslucence: what? you're gonna need to say more words me: is he... the guy? Jess: ...oh yeah, he's the guy! me: "gonna need to say more words" my ass
it's like a tiny version of Toxoplasma! ...wait the vaccine does it too? (caveat: may not replicate) x.com/shinboson/stat…
@GIPHY I made a collection while uploading/creating a gif and after I made the collection it just took me to the empty collection page... completely deleting all of my work-in-progress no bueno guys! fix that.
@nosilverv I'm gonna be the ignorant guy here and just ask what we're doing wrong? (I assume mine is one such)
anybody know a bay area group house that's dismantling and would like to give away their projector?
Replying to @shinboson
@shinboson kind of impressive that a vaccine would ALSO cause this effect I would have naively assumed that it would only be with an active form of a virus, which would be exerting pressure in that direction, not caused by the immune response from the person
@utotranslucence (context)
Retweeted @shinboson
imagining a conflict with stone aged aliens that were like 200 IQ, like they didn't know anything but caught on quickly (ki…
Thread · Inviting a newborn into the culture you actually have · 5 of 8 tweets
thinking about this as I now have a newborn I'd sorta thought I might try to do something like this but while my particular daughter likes being held, she also seems to be very content to sleep on her own and most of her cries have been about us struggling to feed her (in time)
like I'm assuming that one way or another, these babies weren't having major struggles with breastfeeding (other experienced nipples around! cross-nursing is based) (...let alone needing to wait multiple minutes for the formula bottle to get sterilized before being filled again)
on a different level... I feel a sense that what's being described here is indeed in part the prioritization of the infant, but it's also an invitation into an existing sociosensual culture and I can only invite my daughter into the culture that I actually have!
I've been working to cultivate a more sensuous way of being in the months leading up to her arrival, in part for this reason. to move more from what feels good in my body, tasting the texture of the context
I'm reflecting that she cries/yells more now (week 3) than in the first days. has she learned already that her initial scruffling sounds and little movements don't get our attention adequately, compared to loud sounds? seems possible. I feel sad about that.
Retweeted @the_wilderless
I forget who specifically has brought it up, but the thought has floated around here before that goes “most small group…
@wfenza @frideswyth yes and no some aspect of coaching is much more like nudging people to keep thinking out loud about their problems and to notice connections, and LLMs are already becoming competitive at this
one of the most important (yet underrated) keys to a healthy relationship is what I call exquisite calibration: its ability on various timescales to be able to tell whose needs or priorities are locally more important. it's the difference between compounding surplus vs deficit
Thread · How to tell if someone will be good at parenting with you · 1 of 9 tweets
the first two things to disambiguate: 1. good at parenting in general 2. good at parenting *with you* to be clear, even the first is "according to your values"! the second is about the way the two of you are capable of working together
@typezerofun writing a thread over here!
Thread · How to tell if someone will be good at parenting with you · 1 of 9 tweets
a few basic points re "good at parenting in general": 1. what's the texture and strength of their nurturing love in your connection? do you feel supported to grow/heal? 2. watch them with friends' kids 3. notice how they handle stress ...and then just notice how all that feels!
@khemaridh came across this while searching for a totally unrelated tweet curious how your thoughts on parenting & ambition have evolved over the past 2.5 years! (I now have my own kid who is just a few weeks old!)
Thread · Loyalty as extended self, and its tension with integrity
@jessi_cata > The idea that people cannot be made to testify against their spouse is an encoding of an instance of this principle in law. iiuc it was originally actually related to the legal fiction of husband and wife as one person, applied to laws against self-incrimination!
@jessi_cata but if I assume that it's still about loyalty, then what I get is: loyalty is about self-other boundary not about people earlier in time, but about those you include in your sense of self such that you back them for the same reason you back yourself!
@jessi_cata and this then highlights that loyalty and integrity can be in tension. a person who lies to get their friend off the hook is committing the same sin as a person who lies to get themselves off the hook. but the issue is the lying, not the loyalty!
@jessi_cata like a person with more integrity might loyally say to their friend "I love you no matter what but you gotta face that you fucked up here and deal with the consequences" (tbc: obviously if you're in a draconian regime, maybe lying IS appropriate)
@jessi_cata and from what I've heard of courts, they're often approximately draconian regimes/contexts. like tbh I think that probably having someone testify against their friend is bad and we shouldn't do it! (for similar but less strong reasons as having the spouse testify against)
@jessi_cata anyway, we've now built up to a frame of: loyalty+integrity means "I will stand by you and ALSO bear (some of) the costs of these consequences" (whether social, financial, logistical, psychological)
@jessi_cata ...this is clearly exploitable by someone with less integrity than you, which is why it's risky to let your loyalty to someone exceed your trust in their integrity! but that's dimensional: you might, say, continue to call your brother in jail but not pay bail the 3rd time.
@faraz_r_khan @mbateman does this even work? if it does work, does it work by getting those people to vote at all? I would have assumed these ultra left voters would have been voting democrat no matter what already, just to keep trump out
Thread · How to tell if someone will be good at parenting with you · 1 of 9 tweets
parenting involves tons of tiny tradeoffs (literally hundreds each day!) of who does what. so: are you generally making those in ways that feel right? or constantly building up "ugh why didn't he help me" / "ugh why couldn't she do it herself?"
Retweeted @sashachapin
@PrinceManayBora I think it’s like, a really great conversationalist should be able to do 1-6 1 Shoot the shit with anybo…
newborn napping snuggled next to me, wife napping on other couch, AMA
@trans_criptome @visakanv yeah I would assume it's a mix of enbies and people who want to make people follow rules to earn nice guy points but I feel a lot more space to pay attention to who wants they/them when I don't have to listen to the other 90% of people say an obvious he or she
@chercher_ai @ross_roams wait, can you explain this more? do these map onto the chakras or something?
@neokodosian @LottieHistory @lordhellion
my preferred pronouns are I/thou
napping? gq. probably would be good to take a nap soon tbh—I generally nap best before 4pm. got okay sleep last night but not great.
"Sniffing a molecule emitted from baby heads makes men less aggressive" I have smelled the head! it's quite something I'll try to get a good dose of that next time I'm infuriated (eg by crying I can't make sense of) and see how it goes!
this moment? cozy and spacious. easier to keep baby in my awareness with her right next to me than if she were napping on the floor (which she also likes!) ...if I had to guess I'd say she's a lil comfier here.
@davidbessis cc @Morphenius (who has this excellent thread on math trauma)
Retweeted @danallison
This resonates, but it also feels incomplete. I do believe we will eventually mature into a society of adults, maybe sooner…
@typezerofun got waylaid partway through writing, which ironically was due to being called into help handle a sudden situation (broken glass on kitchen floor from baby bottle, lactation consultant about to arrive)
Thread · How to tell if someone will be good at parenting with you · 4 of 9 tweets
one way to solve that, broadly speaking, is to be happy with a very substantial division of labour, traditionally by sex. that at least keeps it from feeling like you're constantly making bad trades. you make one big trade, and as long as you're into that, you sort out your half
but in any place where that question isn't pre-answered, you're going to need to be able to navigate it together, and the smoother you navigate it, the better everything will feel. each moment of helping will feel joyful because it benefits the whole more than it costs you!
and this builds up a surplus in the whole, which then wants to help you out in specifically the moments when you most need it! (because that's where the biggest further surpluses are possible!) you can TELL it's what you collectively want (@nosilverv tweets, originally public)
of course, you're going to make errors in navigating this. the important thing is not getting it right 100% but being willing to readily note, to yourselves and sometimes each other, eg "huh, that ask for help was actually unneeded, and you were doing something important. sorry"
"Whose Job Is This?" a post on owning the jobs and problems that are yours, and not being confused about which ones are and aren't malcolmocean.com/2023/08/whose-…
Thread · How to tell if someone will be good at parenting with you · 1 of 9 tweets
there's solo skill here, but also people have different styles for how to navigate conflict resolution here, and you want someone with whom it feels easy and satisfying to sort out these "whose job" questions!
Thread · Inviting a newborn into the culture you actually have · 1 of 8 tweets
to be very very very clear, I'm not under any illusion that we can go back. there is no such thing as "back" to a culture that is unstable in contact with existing cultures. but that very instability highlights that it's memetic, not genetic! good news :)
Thread · How to tell if someone will be good at parenting with you · 1 of 9 tweets
example of calibration: just now I was assisting breastfeeding (mum & baby very much still learning!) and I was like "fine for me to go pee?" and she said nothing, which I took as a "no". but if I'd been like "😬 I really gotta pee!" then it would have been next unless something…
@typezerofun dating apps don't profit more if they make dating work better! the incentives are all wrong having badly-engineered hype that gets people to talk about it or come back after a hiatus is fine by their metrics
Thread · Inviting a newborn into the culture you actually have · 2 of 8 tweets
and yeah, this is reminding me of my intention to cultivate more duality-literate-nonduality vibes as part of my parenting what does liminal consciousness look like which can play with current mainstream cultural vibes? smoothbrains.net/posts/2022-08-…
one I'm most excited about is just setting aside time for nonverbal deep play (I've done this with adults and it's SO fun & trippy) also games with identity. how old does a kid need to be to hang out in a mode where nobody says "I", just "we"?
Retweeted @jonnym1ller
We've poured hundreds of hours & $10k+ into this one video to achieve two ambitious goals: 1. Explain why nervous system…
Replying to @9mm_smg
seems to me also that from their perspective it's just an absurd policy to ban abortion (it wasn't illegal in USA before 1880) imagine if one politician said they'd ban milk. you'd be like "moron wtf" and not vote for them, not because you're obsessed with milk but...??
@faraz_r_khan @mbateman yeah honestly the whole thing reeks of "the daddy model of wealth"
I want a watershed map but for highways, where it colors eg regions of SF with which exit you'd take to get there after arriving via the bay bridge
.@utotranslucence, while refusing to let the neighbour's cat in: "boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously"
(we used to let the downstairs cats in like every day before we had a newborn, but cats are not that clean (and these are VERY social outdoors cats) so we're taking a bit of a hiatus on that)
"So you feel bad as a result of constantly not living up to the ideal... this might sound like a dumb question but... why exactly? like, how do you think that works?" [instead of accepting this common experience at face value]
@teebarnettsays I like what you're getting at here! some feedback on tweet format is that I think it's more powerful if you just lead with the dialogue. so something like this:
wait is rock paper scissors entirely made of metagame?
did you know you have the power to directly manipulate reality?
we could have called them the "virgin numbers"
Replying to @HephaistosF
@HephaistosF @jessi_cata differential self-other boundaries like A considers B part of self, but B doesn't consider A part of self? super useful concept, nice.
nice. imma try this (when I'm on my computer)
LLMs are so good at explaining what words mean in context. arguably something that's a natural innate talent
