fun perceptual game: go outside and walk along the sidewalk, and temporarily let go of the knowledge that cars are roughly the same size, and just watch them get bigger and smaller as they get closer and further (whether slowly from your walking or rapidly from zooming by)
May 2025
TOP DOWN BOTTOM UP THAT'S THE WAY OUR MINDS CONSTRUCT
@TheAnnaGat @AgnesCallard @TheHopeAxis wow I scrolled past this really fast and thought the image was more like this
you can't *just trust*, but you can just...
I mean I AM talking about sex, but like... without loss of generality
kaiser's billing management system is comically bad completely different site from their main site (which also lets you put in a credit card but I guess doesn't use it?) and then if you hit the "contact us" button it says "plz go away" 🤣 @aboutKP
huh, interesting short summary by @oldheneel of some ideas on better math collaboration may be of interest to @Morphenius, @QiaochuYuan holdenlee.github.io/Tim%20Gowers%2…
"I don't trust us to take care of this" hits different than "I don't trust *you* to take care of this"
"I have a call at noon... I'm being evaluated by an exorcist" "...for demons, or potential employment?"
my name is—no. my pronouns are—no. my identity is—no. —who needs to let WHAT go???
anybody got an easy/good way to turn a google doc (eg my own journal entry) into an audio thing I can listen to? imagining a NotebookLM podcast dialogue on my diary loool
I've recently been experimenting with thinking more just in terms of "what actually motivates me?" ...like descriptively, looking from the outside, what tradeoffs am I willing to make in order to do what?
what's the longest english word composed only of vowels & continuants? eg 'anyway' or 'frill-less-ness' (not saying that one's cromulent enough to be counted for this longestness record, but it DOES have the property)
"At what point did this become normal?" lol it's not normal it's basically a prank, and it's a hilarious delightful one and it looks like it's at a festival or something, not an everyday walking down the street
agents tend to be surprised by changes they didn't anticipate (also unpleasant surprises are unpleasant lol)
things that get used for something are the kinds of things that can be used for that something
3/3 great answers to this tiny nerdsnipe of a question so far, from very different angles. I love the people around me 🥰
@eshear and* as a newborn your parents are more part of your body than your own arms you will for the pain in your belly to go away, and your parents respond telekinetically to your will *(as you pointed out to me last summer, and as I've since observed first-hand)
@eshear we do have SOME memory access to things we considered saying and didn't say (by deliberate choice or more randomness) which maybe future language models somehow will, but currently... even if you handed them their CoT, it's not necessarily faithful. maybe humans like this too
I have never felt so assured
lexhaust: when you get all the words out of your head so you have space for new ideas
the self is a theory of change
I've observed this! when I do subestimates of tasks down to the 3-10 minute scale, I'm within range 4/5 or 9/10 times but the one where I'm wrong uses up WAY more than all of the total slack remaining from everywhere else
🎭
You have buyers for my esoteric first-name last-name blog that makes no money and whose readership hasn't grown in years? 😮 Who are these people and why aren't they hitting me up directly?
just gonna leave this etymonline excerpt here
huh, “attempting to see someone the way they see themselves” is a form of trying to trust!
this is different from “recognizing that someone does ACTUALLY see themselves the way they see themselves”, which is very worthwhile x.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…
wait shit attempting to see someone else the way they see themselves is actually kinda cruel to the extent that their self-image is causing them problems! because it then means you'll participate in enacting those problems
"secular satanism" is a useful phrase
bless this mess
Excerpts from Psycho-Cybernetics. I'd really love a model that unifies this view and the coherence therapy / memory reconsolidation stuff. Both already agree that you have coherent systems generating doing exactly what you're doing... @mold_time? @RomeoStevens76? @QiaochuYuan?
sundried sundries
haven't solved all of your life problems by talking to AIs yet, and want to talk to a human? the Beyond Goals Intensive gets you live coaching from not just one human but many at once! plus coworking, exercises, & much more 👀 join this weekend: gobeyondgoals.com/registration?u…
weird idea for an AI prompt... a room full of people with a ton of varied life experiences, and whatever complex situation you ask for advice on, someone stands up and is like "yeah I went through something similar and here's how it went for me, and what I learned / wish I knew"
struck by how Last & First Men by Olaf Stapledon is the only novel ever written of a whole million+ year story of humanity, extending out from its time. any earlier and it was hard to see what was possible; any later, obv accelerating growth made it too bizarre to imagine 200y+
because it's become so obvious that everything changes so fast and that culture and the specifics of tech are both kind of unpredictable for exaptation reasons (even tho most people don't specifically know about exaptation)
@stevekrouse here's mine! malcolmocean.com/work-with-me/
How people end up with crazy (to you) worldviews: 👉 they have some experiences they don't know how to make sense of, and a crazy worldview comes along and says "hey look here's how it makes sense" and it is legit kinda helpful! (but then obscures other things, obvious to you)
ironic how much the narrator's voice sounds like @georainbolt. but despite the aesthetic, it most certainly is not haha. neat lil film. (16mins) vimeo.com/990820299
@georainbolt ...just went and played a rainbolt vid again and okay it's not THAT similar. maybe I just got mcgurk'd by the visuals haha. but there's something about the deadpan descriptiveness that's similar even if the voices themselves aren't
@georainbolt oh also looks like the film is by @AgnesCallard's son! (I saved this tweet months ago with a note to watch it later, and watched it before looking at the tweet again)
for those getting into Psycho-Cybernetics - I'm finding it really potent to record myself articulating a visualization (in present tense, first person - 'I'm waking up, feeling the texture of my blankets, feeling vast and spacious' etc) then listening to it
when you and the other have different protocols, you need to somehow deal with the fact that you don’t have a shared protocol... all while not having a shared protocol with which to collectively do that dealing
The meta-protocol is the translation process, the dance by which trust is built between and within people. It navigates this fractal puzzle:
talked with a Jehovah's witness guy in a park who was saying how Genesis is true and evolution is false and I was like bro as 6000+ year old creation stories go this one got like 60% of the stages of evolution RIGHT. a couple orderings wrong but like, mankind isn't made first.
I regularly work from a park bench, and neighbors will often be like 'this is so cool! do you get wifi out here?' and I'm baffled, like a) have you never heard of tethering? b) have you never enjoyed working offline?
@eshear The opposite of commitment isn't doubt, but obviousness malcolmocean.com/2021/11/mindse…
@eshear @albustime @ollyrobot @joodalooped initially thought Emmett was answering the original question here, not referring to his own reply 😂
@joodalooped the God I pray to is good, in that this God never punishes you and does not wish you any extra suffering, and is doing its current best to free you from it. it's the most powerful agential force but not arbitrarily all-powerful.
@joodalooped this God seems to me to have continuity with the Christian God, but also many Christians are doing a lot of rationalizing suffering as a kind of cope for maintaining their particular memetic defenses. more on that here: malcolmocean.com/2025/03/hell-i…
@nosilverv wow. also just gonna say while yeah part of this is from subtle vibe stuff I hate how much ppl also make a point of insisting that people smile for cameras etc. like they somehow actually think that it's better?! even BeReal is like "REMEMBER. THIS IS FOR YOUR FRIENDS." bro stfu
Retweeted @hktsre
re:Scarfgate, u can only understand this if ur terminally online and a wordcel; new unsaturated ai benchmark material?? https:/…
I don't have a super strong stance on the scarf thing (and I was biased by reading the italicized attuned telepathy interpretation before even reading the original) but I do think that some of the argument is about the noncentral fallacy re lying/stealing
here's the original post, for context:
and here's the aforementioned "italicized attunement telepathy interpretation"
@zencephalon > awaken infinite game players awaken people to the infinite game, or take people who are already aware of playing the infinite game and wake them up?
tried seizing the day and it was like 'hey don't grope me like that'
autopilot is when my mind is just doing stuff without asking me for permission flow is when I'm just doing stuff without asking my mind for permission
you get community by being a lovely hang (alive, looking outside yourself, willing to let others in on your inner texture in a safe way, curious)
tweet the better tweets you wish to see on the TL
Retweeted @joeykatzen
Government city “planners” should be planning public spaces, not micromanaging private spaces. Good planning actions for a…
in particular, the original tweet is "you have problem X because you have uncool trait Y" which from a psycho-cybernetics perspective is kind of a curse. if you want to be helpful, say something that has more towardsness in it
@Chris_Smeder @WystanTBS also fyeah constraints x.com/sashachapin/st…
struck by the difference in vibe of someone saying they work 'at Company' vs 'for Company'
basically every system has blindspots, and I find it curious how some systems are still stuck in a mode of needing to insist that they don't, rather than saying "this is a hard topic, we'll do our best to listen and integrate but it's complex and may take time and creativity"
The water is wide I cannot get over how freaking wide this water is Give me a boat that can carry two and I won't be over how wide it is A ship there is that sails the sea It's loaded deep as deep can be But not as deep as this water is wide It's freaking wide You guys it's wide
tfw about to buy something but then you realize that there are more options and you decide that instead of buying you'll just put it off forever instead
thinking about how little free libraries have a little dopamine hit for looking in them, and wondering if there would be a way to make a park more lively by putting up a new comic or something everyday
@benpence the original tweet was a DM in reply to someone remarking that the spiritual community they were part of had blindspots and I was like "yeah ofc they did! not a big deal at all. although the part where they pretended they didn't..."
why on earth doesn't google docs support blockquotes yet? is it because microsoft word never did? what a stupid reason. now that gdocs is becoming super markdown friendly (copy & paste), hopefully this is coming soon
"one thing you should always have is one piece that is like 10 levels harder than you should ever play. but the trick is to not actually learn it, but to learn *from* it. what can you observe?" tryna figure out how this applies to coding or business 🤔 youtube.com/shorts/ZPAtB5P…
sometimes a system (person, group.,) gets stuck in a dynamic where part 1 says 'let's try this' & part 2 shoots everything down because all the past ones have never gotten off the ground. easy to blame part 2, but they do what they do because part 1 is somehow ignoring them
this is basically the poverty trap systems attractor but for trust
in which @Morphenius and I share our model of the mechanism of shame (and how to undo it) with @this_is_silvia, for incorporating into her book youtu.be/Xqe1GMpJfvk
epic system for using AI to explore psychotechnologies, therapies, meditations, etc: has some substantial amount of free quota to advanced models, including to its speaking model. so: you can put in a short exercise like this (from No Bad Parts, IFS book) and then just have it walk you through the exercise. and it'll adapt the steps to refer to the specifics of what arises for you. there's SO MUCH possibility with these systems for creating little personalized guided experiences. I guess not just for therapy-like things, but any introspection or visualization or other related process. eg maybe the mindful glimpses from Loch Kelly's book could work with this (@LochKelly1 you could probably add some really cool interactive guided meditations to your app! maybe a higher tier!) ===== Exercise: Getting to Know a Protector Take a second and get comfortable. Set up like you would if you were going to meditate. If it helps you to take deep breaths, then do that. Now I invite you to do a scan of your body and your mind, noting in particular any thoughts, emotions, sensations, or impulses that stand out. So far, it's not unlike mindfulness practice, where you're just noticing what's there and separating from it a little bit. As you do that, see if one of those emotions, thoughts, sensations, or impulses is calling to you—seems to want your attention. If so, then try to focus on it exclusively for a minute and see if you can notice where it seems to be located in your body or around your body. As you notice it, notice how you feel toward it. By that I mean, do you dislike it? Does it annoy you? Are you afraid of it? Do you want to get rid of it? Do you depend on it? So we're just noticing that you have a relationship with this thought, emotion, sensation, or impulse. If you feel anything besides a kind of openness or curiosity toward it, then ask the parts of you that might not like it or are afraid of it or have any other extreme feeling about it to just relax inside and give you a little space to get to know it without an attitude. If you can't get to that curious place, that's okay. You could spend the time talking to the parts of you that don't want to relax about their fears about letting you actually interact with the target emotion, thought, sensation, or impulse. But if you can get into that mindfully curious place relative to the target, then it is safe to begin to interact with it. That might feel a bit odd to you at this point, but just give it a try. And by that, I mean as you focus on this emotion or impulse or thought or sensation and you notice it in this place in your body, ask it if there's something it wants you to know and then wait for an answer. Don't think of the answer, so any thinking parts can relax too. Just wait silently with your focus on that place in your body until an answer comes, and if nothing comes, that's okay too. If you get an answer, then as a follow-up you can ask what it's afraid would happen if it didn't do this inside of you. What's it afraid would happen if it didn't do what it does? And if it answers that question, then you probably learned something about how it's trying to protect you. If that's true, then see if it's possible to extend some appreciation to it for at least trying to keep you safe and see how it reacts to your appreciation. Then ask this part of you what it needs from you in the future. When the time feels right, shift your focus back to the outside world and notice more of your surroundings, but also thank your parts for whatever they allowed you to do and let them know that this isn't their last chance to have a conversation with you, because you plan to get to know them even more.
often when I get to a tiny eyes-closed exercise in a book I'll just get stuck. today, I put it into an AI, and had it walk me through, and it was so cool! it adapted the exercise to the specific responses I had
type of guy who realizes "it's all vibes man" and then immediately goes out and start studying electromagnetism and acoustics in order to understand the nature of the cosmos
@Meaningness also here's the relevant passage from Ofermōd. it's well worth reading if you care about nobility or civilization link: meaningness.substack.com/p/ofermod
share a conversation you've had with an LLM, below. I think there's lots we can learn from each other! maybe a long meandering idea exploration, maybe a shorter surprising insight or solution, maybe a funny win or fail
I've lately been enjoying having Claude give responses in alliterative verse. this was inspired by (a) my roommate expressing that he noticed that talking to AIs was making his writing more drab slop (b) reading Beowulf recently and really enjoying the energy of the writing style and wanting to read and write more like that I have the sense that while AI can make things more bland and generic, it can also do the opposite—spend dozens of hours talking to an AI in an unusual style and I bet you'll develop more capacity to think and speak it! pre-prompt / style: INSTRUCTIONS: Speak only in alliterative verse, like old poetry. No need to use any particular flavor of English aside from that - Greek/Latin/long words, neologisms still totally fine. Though feel free to coin a new kenning now and then. Use technical language and jargon where appropriate — your speech should be clear and precise in addition to poetic and evocative. Before responding, repeat my message in the same such style. --- [actual question/convo opener starts here]
wow this style is so great.
@nearcyan @aphercotropist you might enjoy hating this (what near is dunking on, not near's point)
Retweeted @voooooogel
"Why did you stop using me?" you look down at the disposable vape laying on the ground next to your desk, which just spoke…
@DavidSHolz yeah I've been thinking about this, specifically in the context of Last and First Men. there's lots of "nebulously far future" sci-fi but it's increasingly difficult to imagine out the world unfolding over the coming decades+centuries but worth trying!
> Being an agent means that when you make mistakes, your ability to maintain yourself as an agent is under threat. A language model’s mistakes do not threaten its continued existence. It’s a stretch to say that it faces any consequences at all. — @MeadowsRichard
"we're in a free country" "are we tho?" "I mean yeah. a free country is one where anything that's not prohibited is allowed" "...I guess a lot of things are prohibited!"