may I have the courage to have clarity
January 2025
50 tweets
649 likes
33 retweets
@made_in_cosmos this is stupid and (like adult media) we need to figure out how to put actual complex challenges of perspective taking into media form like there should be lil misunderstandings, tiny mysteries of "how did that happen?" getting resolved via curiosity
wait sexy hips are made of PUFAs? I feel conned
it's helpful to make at least one tweet about all the main books that have blown your mind or that you'd be stoked to talk about, so that when your friends search twitter for who else has read them, they'll find you (just happened with me)
you don't have to ask your mind for permission to do things
Thread · Admitting I mostly hate the first four months of parenthood · 1 of 21 tweets
one of the best descriptions I read of the particular flavour of awfulness that newborn life can be: > being a slave to a petty tyrant that was barely recognizable as human (from one of many DMs this thread got me, saying "I also hated the first few months, hang in there")
what's the best way to get conversational language models (or Claude in particular) to act like pure text-completion systems? like I want to put in "excerpt of interview with Dr Whatever" and have it just confabulate without the drama of needing to caveat "this is hypothetical"
took baby all night while Jess slept in another room and now it's dawn and I'm free to hand her off but she's adorable and learning how to intentionally grab stuff (4.8mo) and I'm like nah I'll keep her til my 8am call tyvm 👍👍 snooze you lose
new Claude prompt I'm playing around with. paste in journal entries, ask it to do some kegan stage analysis. then ask: > what questions would you ask the author that would make him fruitfully uncomfortable by pushing at the edges of his capacity for meaning-making?
@visakanv vibes with that vid we recorded when I was in SG: youtu.be/FrSrFPCIknE
@visakanv I'm here for this x.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…
@visakanv @Coscorrodrift whoa I didn't know CA was into "unfolding" as a term. I've independently (as far as I know) found my way to it as a key term, quite a while ago! and more recently saw the Diamond Approach / AH Almaas very into it
Thread · Admitting I mostly hate the first four months of parenthood · 1 of 21 tweets
also things have gotten a LOT better lately fwiw. I knew there'd be a turning point I just mistakenly thought it'd be around 3mo for me instead of 4-5mo.
@SpiritDirtbag doesn't equal 5555
in my religion it is blasphemy to conjugate "trust" in the imperative case
@Morphenius you've learned what you've learned. if you want to have a different sense of things, you need to bring new learning in contact with your existing learning. in practice, there is no unlearning that isn't this.
just hit 2025 consecutive days of purposeful actions logged on @IntendApp in celebration: name a date in the last ~5 years* and I'll tell you something I did that day 👀 (*you can try anytime in the last 10 years, it's just patchier before that!) x.com/IntendApp/stat…
@johnsonmxe wow I watched this before but I watched it again today — with the sound off — and it was almost even more obvious how she stiffens to place the phone call
Thread · Trying on strangers' postures and stances on a busy street
my hobby: trying on ppls' stances when I'm walking on a busy street. I pick a person & just adopt their tension for 2-3sec. then next person. started w faces but now I do gait too. bizarre to realize how many stances I can hold but never do hold aside from this game learnings 🧵
I started doing this 12 years ago randomly, maybe in response to it being my first time living in a big city (SF, where I was an intern at the time; now my home city) I guess I wanted to get a sense of the vibe of the city. wrote this verse then 👇 x.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…
learning 1: I get an immediate sense of what is going on for the person. low-res (idk what they're worrying about) but high-fidelity (I know ~exactly how they're worrying) I didn't have @johnsonmxe's word "stance" at the time, or the idea of Mask-work from Impro. but both fit!
learning 2: as I said in the top tweet: it's bizarre to realize how many stances I can hold but never do hold aside from this game. tension appears in muscles I've never noticed. I feel like I'm stepping into completely alien lives, and yet they all make sense internally.
learning 3: it feels surprisingly liberating, like stretching after sitting still for awhile. sense of like "oh, it can be like that? wait, it can be like that?" ...most of these are somewhat unpleasant, but it's still interesting!
learning 4: this process is extremely natural. I don't pause or consider or think for any amount of time before trying on their stance. I just do it. I don't narrativize it. I don't try to figure out how to do it. x.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…
learning 5: my body—or whatever part of me does this—is shockingly opinionated. I merely intend to try on a stance, and I end up with changes in places I can't even SEE on that person. first noticed this when in order to be one guy I suddenly screwed my tongue into my cheek 🤨
these learnings are in my body. you are not learning them by reading this thread, any more than you would learn to ride a bike by reading a thread about it. it might show you something useful, but the core here is a first-person experience to be had, of how it affects you
but it's easy, so try it and see what you learn! (& report back 🖋️) in case you're worried: of 100s of ppl, nobody's ever noticed. 🔑key: I'm not caricaturing them, mocking them, or mimicking specific large motor movements. I'm just adopting their pattern of muscle tension!
@johnsonmxe's theory says that people who are more stiffly stuck in some stance will have trouble adopting other(s') stances, but the point isn't to "succeed" by some metric, just to find out what happens if you try, so even if that's you I don't think you'll "fail"!
I like the verb "try on" for what I'm doing here, and I think that highlights the non-failure-ness. if you go to try on a shirt, and you can't even remotely get it over your shoulders... you still tried it on! even if you guessed it wouldn't fit, you still experienced how.
oh, two other little things: 1. walking helps it be unnoticed, because often by the time I've adopted someone's stance we're already passing each other! 2. I had most of these learnings within a minute — like 5 instances of doing it. now I just do it for fun and for stretching
@johnsonmxe thanks, both for the theory and for this post which nudged me to finally write up a thread of what I learned from hundreds of micro-experiments in trying on strangers' stances while walking past them:
@array_hog @Meaningness hah, nice. seems legit related tbh. I'm actually quite curious David — do you see any connection between @johnsonmxe's use of "stance" in his vasocomputation model (👇) and your use in the context of confused/complete stances? x.com/johnsonmxe/sta…
@katantenbring give it a shot and lmk how it goes!
I feel like America has... kinda forgotten that it is the kind of place that still has ceremony like this!
@zencephalon the Big Wild remix of Hundred Waters' Show Me Love (obvious first one that comes to mind. it's a little "don't hit the tree" tho so I'd probably come up with a better one if I thought about it a bit longer) open.spotify.com/track/7iFlBjOu…
The Air That I Breathe would be pretty powerful "sometimes... all I need is the air that I breathe and to love you" (there are a few good versions, this one is the first breakout hit, but not the original)
@poiThePoi dare I ask which cheeks?
GPTs/LLMs were trained to do one thing shockingly well (predict text) and the result is to do a million things shockingly well explain why this doesn't violate the no free lunch theorem wrong/silly answers accepted!
Elon's gesture at the inauguration was...
Karl Popper is helping me ground & orient today, to what matters for having a democracy
@algekalipso @AndrewCutler13 this vibes with some stuff we talked about last summer about Christ's two commandments (love thy god fully, love thy neighbor like thyself) as being pretty similar to what's going on for cells in healthy organisms, cf @drmichaellevin's work
what needs to be said, even though it feels like it should go without saying?
on why to thank people for criticizing you, drawing them into a frame where they're helping you not blaming you this whole thread vibes like @DefenderOfBasic
just updated malcolmocean.com/work-with-me to include prompt engineering consulting, which is one of the newest things that I'm up to
some lemon seeds kinda look like ears
in building apps that use LLMs (to do anything more than a simple input-output task) I've found that it's generally helpful to think of the LLM (well, the simulations inside the LLM) as a *user* of the app, who has a different interface with it than the human users
@DefenderOfBasic sort of. they're referring to a certain level of organizing principle of reality. this video starts to explore how you might go about identifying such a principle (at which point you can notice false claims that various religions make about it) youtu.be/X6MYsKeTjKk
@DefenderOfBasic the psalms literally include some "my god is can beat up your god" dick-measuring stuff OG christianity didn't say "there is only one god", it said "only worship this one god". praxis, not professed belief. believing in, not believing about lesswrong.com/posts/duvzdffT…
This @slatestarcodex piece from 2018 aged weirdly, but this holds: politicians and political movements alike are utterly failing to anticipate the effects of backlash, like a new chess player who plans a strategy ignoring that his opponent gets moves too. buff.ly/4geFhm9
what's a concept that is super useful for you, but when you go to explain it to someone in order to use it, you can't figure out how to do it in a way that works? for me: self-organized criticality