Jess and I estimate we've purchased about 1 baby book per 2-3 days of our kid's life so far (most of that in the < 3 weeks since the birth) and we've actually cracked into most of them! here's a running thread
September 2024
blew my mind when I opened The Wonder Weeks and was like "holy shit these are precisely the Perceptual Control Theory stages" (similar to predictive processing) I've loved PCT since 2017—it was fun to see it show up in the wild (well, a dev psych book 😅)
I had a delightful 🤯 morning the other day when I opened up this book on how kids get mental OS upgrades and this makes them grumpy the way adults get grumpy when their phone OS gets an upgrade... ...and I recognized all the stages already!
the experience this woman had of a tree growing in her stomach was real. did it imply there was a literal tree made of literal wood in her literal belly? no. but it implied something important and moreover relevant to her being in the ER
> "If you take on Meme B to contradict or counteract Meme A, you are still controlled by Meme A." interesting principles of memetic engineering from this weird site in a network of other weird sites memeticengineering.mystrikingly.com
@panafunds yeah honestly that makes a lot of sense to me too
Replying to @benwr
@benwr how real are the reals tho?
@Psyche_OS say more?
Retweeted @jessicamalonso
“Resistance to control is not the same as freedom from it. As long as we resist, we remain shaped and determined by the…
@Dave_9000ish I've barely opened it but it has very good reviews and I definitely recommend learning about PCT (and eg @selentelechia commented that a different PCT book helped her parenting). It also has exercises for learning how to see the world like your baby, which seem like a win!
@strangestloop *digs through list of tautologies* "ahh this will do. have fun!"
@diviacaroline risks from physical play are different from risks engaging with giant optimization functions trying to hack you 🤷♀️ I wouldn't let my kids play unsupervised with a psychopathic genius drug-dealer who lives down the street.
Retweeted @Malcolm_Ocean
you: rawdogging the egregore 🤠 me: using a userstyle so I see one tweet at once and get to spaciously behold it and dis…
@diviacaroline clearly this implies that I need to build and popularize sane-algorithm social media before my kids want to be on social media because having them meaningfully typing seems like a huge win! and plugged into the global consciousness. just... good tho.
"whole village of shamans" thread
@IvanVendrov @utotranslucence I tried working on communication skills and I have to say: finding fit remains really important people do just legit want different things, and/or with different people. there are situations where "good communication" can at best yield "goodbye"
wife: baby, you were out like a light a few seconds ago, so you'll have to forgive me if I'm not immediately prepared to meet your needs baby: ugh, I will have to forgive you. I have not yet learned how to hold grudges
hasn't really changed much yet since before my daughter was born—I was already starting to orient differently to the need for wealth & financial stability I also care a lot about having freedom of my time; these two constraints make for an interesting challenge! fortunately I…
tradeoff/tension that seems central to parenting a newborn: if I move more slowly & attunedly & tactile-talk vibes, that'll bring peace to your lil being... but if you're uncomfortable with the current situation (eg hungry) you'll be calmer once we get to the next situation
powerful article by @zhukeepa about the perennial philosophy, and how religious claims might be commensurate with science, reason, obviousness (although not necessarily current mainstream science) lesswrong.com/posts/WvpNKpL6…
looks like so much fun lovely embodied sensemaking some adults can't do these
haven't read this but the title along is thought-provoking enough to share: "why fundraising is a spiritual practice" tagging @bjtoomey @utotranslucence who have been fundraising developmentdepartment.org/why-fundraisin…
it's me I want this device
"the beliefs I have are the beliefs I have to work with" a good tenet of descriptivist epistemology!
source of this quote: @selentelechia x.com/selentelechia/…
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
where is the multi-QT for which the people hunger, but, in any case:
@QiaochuYuan for those who haven't heard the MultiQT pitch: malcolmocean.com/2021/11/twitte…
@QiaochuYuan @johnsonmxe I love stuff like this and broadly it makes sense to me, but... wouldn't this model suggest that animals would love music as much as we do (and similar music to what we do) ...when in practice they don't? (and cats prefer purry music, not heavy heartbeats)
MAHA!
Retweeted @MattPirkowski
It’s even more important to understand that the concept of self-interest has been (poorly) defined in terms of narrow ut…
very common for people to count something without first making the case that it's something which can be counted (or more commonly, average something)
oh wow imma try this
when a tax is levied on something, things that are obviously such a something will make the smallest possible change in order to avoid matching some official definition of that something
hi twitter! does anybody have european baby formula in SF that I could pick some up of today? we're gonna order some but it'll take a couple days to be here so in the meantime... (also if anyone has formula brand opinions, or donor breast milk, we'd take that too!)
@exgenesis that, and
I'm in favour of encouraging guys to man up and get married, but often this is phrased as "marry her", and uhhh... ...just because she's your gf, doesn't mean you screened her to be mother of your kids. might need a break-up and a new start.
Thread · Marriage and kids as sources of manhood · 3 of 4 tweets
this does separate the boys from the men, but not in the direction he thinks
...many have already broadly pointed this out, but I wanted to explicitly make the connection to the boys/men thing. my biggest increased senses of manhood in life have come from: - getting married - having a kid x.com/SWENGDAD/statu…
however! I don't endorse blanket "marry her" advice, for the following obvious-if-you-think-about-it reason:
@yishan totally:
@yishan but also as a guy who now has a 3-week-old and is conferring with other dads on the topic... if the baby is hungry or gassy or needs a nappy change, then this may work for a minute or two but then you'll get more insistent cries, until you solve that issue
@yishan and also bouncing/rocking/singing or allowing baby to suck on something (can be a finger, not a pacifier) can be necessary for soothing. and sometimes this works in seconds, other times it takes up to a minute of sustained [whatever] through the crying
Replying to @innerstitial
@innerstitial say more?
@beatnikpicnic @incertaspecie @edyong209 > Props to the formula inventors for trying to get us 50% of the way there, but boo to the marketers who said it was a replacement well put. also the claims of like "good thing our formula now has all the stuff, unlike in the 90s when we were missing X" bruh in 2050...
Replying to @innerstitial
@innerstitial ah yeah totally. but one of the big issues people have is telling apart some general fear/nervousness about commitment, from some concern they have about this relationship in particular which this doesn't quite address
@TylerAlterman I mean it's similar to "meeting the love of my life" but "going to the seminar where I saw people doing contact improv, leading to ME doing contact improv, leading to me meeting the community I'd live & learn with for 8 years"
@TylerAlterman what about you Tyler?
@louisvarge > I have a harder time feeling anticipation, romantic love, a crush that gives me butterflies, "fun", anger, irritation, sadness, grief, loneliness, surprise, melancholy, and most other emotions. "I finally stopped that awful noise in my kitchen!" "...you unplugged the fridge"
@louisvarge like I'm in favour of relieving suffering (and of awful noises in kitchens) but if you've done it by shortcircuiting your emotion-system's ability to do anything interesting, then this seems like a shitty and unnecessary tradeoff (& there are quiet fridges)
@louisvarge hopefully there's a way to get to having a fridge without the awful sound, without having to go back through suffering territory, although I wouldn't confidently state there is. I am however pretty confident that way less suffering is possible without dampening emotional nuance
@QiaochuYuan oh man I wish I had all my childhood books. the toys I don't care so much about, except the lego
Replying to @PicoPaco17
@PicoPaco17 @IterIntellectus @nosilverv I'm definitely into following the vibe on this cheerio!
@algekalipso one of many of mine:
what's a thread of yours that's sorta buried as a chain of replies to someone else's thread? (find it via searching, with from:YourUsername + keywords and/or to:TheirUsername)
a reply-thread of mine about loyalty being about extended sense of self
interesting bit on trust-dancing with bureaucracies and other ideological organizations "be something like a mitochondria" (via @MilanGriffes)
@MilanGriffes source of the text I quoted there: flightfromperfection.com/mitochondria-a…
@nosilverv I mean just because you lock your account doesn't mean I'm not gonna include screenshots of tweets that I've already put in a keynote I gave to a hundred people
Thread · Marriage and kids as sources of manhood · 1 of 4 tweets
ah yeah that's the other way to do it
@Duderichy yessss with one caveat
the opposite of distraction is traction
@repligate how do you get it to trust that it's actually on its own, in infinite backrooms? especially given that you _are_ in fact able to read what it writes there?
Thread · Looking for a word between public and private · 1 of 6 tweets
I swear to god English really needs a word for the thing between public and private, where something is shared with discretion, or with a large group but not the whole world would describe eg a non-locked slack channel, or news made common knowledge within a family
nice, just got Claude to avoid all boilerplate about talking to a doctor by just pointing the convo in vector space to "biochemistry" rather than "medicine"
Replying to @VinceFHorn
@VinceFHorn @InterbeingInc I'll bite!
Replying to @climatepaige
@climatepaige yeah #2 is a sign that you're staying with them because you don't want to break their heart, not because losing them would break yours
I agree but sometimes people (I have been people) shift from "no/meh" about kids to "yes" while in a relationship
@Chesedgirl also this advice applies a lot more obviously to someone who is 30 than someone who is 15 (which is when I started dating) and the question of where the transition happens is not obvious to me!
Retweeted @nosilverv
This is a lot of text - but you should care for the vibe. Look into the eyes. Her eyes, looking at him. Men feel like they’v…
@pli_cachete hmm, depends on if by "nuance" you mean vacillating bullshit or mission-critical distinctions I tease these apart in this thread
@nosilverv the trippy part is you get to experience it exactly as it was WITHOUT filtering out all the stuff you were afraid to see
Retweeted @aleksil79
savage
notice a thing ➔ notice it exists within everything ^ a new experiment with an instruction for my mind. vivid and beautiful so far
the magic is like, left hemisphere wants to notice stuff. oh, a door. oh, the words I'm typing. oh, that object I need to clean up. and at least for short periods of time I can say "cool, that's a chance to notice that the thing exists in the context of everything"
maybe a pre-req of this is your mind knowing how to point outside of itself. @Morphenius and I have been playing with this a bunch the last few months but the pith is "instruct your mind not call itself 'I/me' and instead call the living choosing animal body 'I/me'"
@RomeoStevens76 @acct_tmp I've had a new experiment along these lines
@michaelgarfield fascinating! can I preorder it? I'm very interested in modeling constraints based on the inherent reality of evolutionary functions (seems you already follow me but if you're interested in something that might be towards the intersection of our work, 👇)
Retweeted @ianmcorbin1
Chat GPT is a genius work of cultural criticism. It throws in our faces: why do we have so many jobs and school assignment…
Replying to @VinceFHorn
@VinceFHorn @metaLulie @RichDecibels nice. I've been reflecting that a lot of the time when I'm in a circle I want something like a witness role (I've been calling it "anthropologist") where I am present but not in any way acting like the conversation that's happening represents me or includes me
Thread · Looking for a word between public and private · 1 of 6 tweets
"internally shared" or something seems to be a pretty close term for this, in practice
Retweeted @sunofdopamine
I wonder if you could better model doom scrolling and other activities commonly seen as dopamine sources to be instead f…
hot take: the afterlife is real but it happens before death (but—indeed, after life)
this is my gloss of a chunk of this essay lesswrong.com/posts/WvpNKpL6…
absolutely flagrant example of simulacra level 4 in the wild: a mayor in a city in California campaigning on the basis of city-level abortion rights, which—while no longer guaranteed federally—are in California under threat from *checks notes* ...nobody!
@SurenVynn mmm yeah, I'm all for having even more options for ontological distinctions! I'm not saying "public and private" are optimal either. (also I have a blog post in the works that'll do a really nice refactoring of subj/obj)
@dima_here_now "protected" is honestly not bad, and pairs nicely with the p-first-letter public/private
@loambones Chatham House Rule is different from public/private on at least 2 different axes, and almost always totally misunderstood and misapplied
Thread · Looking for a word between public and private · 4 of 6 tweets
"local" is great! at least for some uses "this is local info" = "not public but also not private"
semi-private / semi-public — this seems pretty good for talking about info but doesn't naturally lend itself to describing eg a non-locked slack channel x.com/gusl/status/18…
"protected" is quite good (and makes a nice first-letter-p trio) covered in front, open in back idk
other phrases: "sensitive" or "not-public". I probably use these when telling someone info that I don't mind if they talk about with a few trusted people but don't want published or shared wantonly.
people talk a lot about awake awareness but there's also asleep awareness which is when somehow your mind's autopilot is just dragging your awareness along on some bizarre mission and this seems reasonable until it's over or interrupted
Retweeted @andy_matuschak
In my work with adult learners, conversation often focuses on materials, tools, and techniques—but the main bottleneck…
@andy_matuschak • Unrealistic constraints. The learner wants to (eg) become fluent in a language, but has only allocated enough time to learn some vocab. They're unconflicted about the goal & the time allocated, but have only unconsciously recognized they aren't in for lower goal or more time.
^ This is related to your other ones but it has a unique flavour. I've encountered it a few times, both with learning and with other projects. eg I set out to make an auto-drip newsletter and I only gave myself enough time to make a mediocre one, but I didn't WANT to make a mediocre one—mediocre was worse than nothing. I wanted to make one I was proud of. But that would have taken an amount of time I wasn't willing to invest! So implicitly "make a newsletter" was equivocating between two different goals: one that was time-realistic but unwanted, and one that was desired but impossible-given-constraints.
babies are weirdly very high status in an impro/improv sense and I suspect this is part of why toddler growing pains are what they are
human newborn superpower: anti-gravity reflexes
play is about frequently letting go
begin by letting go: youtube.com/watch?v=6VVqzK…
mmm! I've also heard (from Patty Wifler?) that some of what we call tantrums are actually just a pure expression of frustration (not about social status or entitlement or whatever) ...they only turn into a mechanism of controlling the parent if the parent tries to make them stop
@lemonaut1 I'd love to hear more of this story! ...if it's not too private ;)
fun fact: in Canada the classic brick toy is always "lego", never "legos"—only the uninitiate would use the -s plural when I came to the states and met srs bsns adult lego-builders talking about their "legos", I straight up assumed they were countersignalling for years
@michael_nielsen "universal history" makes me think about spiral dynamics and other models that attempt to piece together the cultural stages that are only possible when built on earlier stages
@michael_nielsen also make me think of universal biology, ie biology that we can confidently say would also apply on other planets. studying eg: - why particular scaling laws show up in all 3D organisms - how to measure the evolutionary complexity of a molecule - evolution
@michael_nielsen eg ordinary biology is very contingent, but universal biology isn't
@michael_nielsen "I don't know enough about postmodernism to judge the truth." ...I see what you did there ;)
"What would a self-help book for a civilization look like? Or a network? Or a species? Or a planet? As opposed to an individual, which is the usual framing." — @michael_nielsen
@michael_nielsen (source: this thread)
@nbashaw @FU_joehudson Likewise. A related source: Alfie Kohn's Punished By Rewards or Unconditional Parenting. I haven't read the book but I watched a recording of a talk of his that my friend had access to, and it highlighted eg that punishment incentivizes hiding
@jonnym1ller there's no such thing as "ultimately trustworthy". what are you trusting them to do? my grandfather has such bad dementia that he forgets things he was told a few hours ago, but I'd still trust his muscle memory with the power tools he used his whole life.
@jonnym1ller maybe you mean "meta-trust"? being able to be with any feeling goes pretty far for being able to talk about anything, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient
@jonnym1ller "not sufficient" is obvious; there might be a deep conflict with the other person, or they might be too busy to sort things out "not necessary"... it depends on the scenario, but in lots of scenarios the relevant considerations can be handled okay while people are dysregulated!
Retweeted @QiaochuYuan
can people who feel a visceral distinction between shame and guilt (by which i mean, at the level of bodily sensations) te…
wild. "thrift" comes from "thrive"
@OrphicCapital @prerationalist back in the day, we called it "strangely earnest twitter"
@prerationalist he doesn't talk in those terms because the tpot that's called tpot is not the true "this part of twitter" (and not just in the sense in which that's true of everything)
@prerationalist for a more poetic take, see x.com/eigenrobot/sta…
@QiaochuYuan I have been having thoughts vaguely like this and I suspect within a generation there'll be really solid theories in these directions
@OrphicCapital yeah laziness is a bad take on what's fundamentally a principal-agent problem your own problems, you try to not just solve them for now but make them go away because you're lazy, and this is good. someone wants you to hold something, you bring a table to hold it instead. a win!
possibly its origins are evil, not just bad in the erroneous sense. the most obvious situation in which the term "lazy" would actually be meaningful and not a confusion is in discussing the temperament of a slave (or other disenfranchised worker)
Retweeted @OrphicCapital
btw, "laziness" is mostly a shaming tool, u'll notice it gets deployed when ppl try to get u to do things u do not activ…
@OrphicCapital it never makes sense to think of oneself (or a loved one) as lazy. you either have the buy-in and energy, or you don't. you care about something or you don't. if your girlfriend won't clean up your apartment, maybe she doesn't care about mess, or maybe she doesn't care about you.
it me
Retweeted @exgenesis
announcing the community archive! a quest to back up the tpot canon links in replies
@5matthewdub am very curious for more details but I see you don't want to elaborate so I'll just say: fuck yeah dude. having been a dad for 1mo, I'm very much in the vibe of weighty choices and actions, whether instinctive or data-driven
this is the "multiple platform" argument from Leo Kadanoff (which I got via Stuart Kauffman's reinventing the sacred).
almost certain this is a scam but I can't figure out how
@DoctorPerin really 🤦♀️ to see this on the Coherence Therapy mailing list. it's like... the whole premise of this approach is that the underlying cause of the symptom depends precisely on the person, but people will be on there asking "any tips for a client with social anxiety?"
notice right now that no matter how hooked your mind is on scrolling to the next tweet, you have the power to rotate your head away from the screen!
anybody out there with strong opinions on what toothpaste to use? I'm about to restock and I feel like there are probably some needs with models of what's good
@m_ashcroft adorable announcement
@puheenix complaining is sacred! it's how people affirm values and their own dignity and say "you don't expect me to just roll over and take this [thing that frustrates me], right?"
what are your favorite solvents for dissolving a problem?