Turn On, Tune In, Write Code
thenewatlantis.com
thenewatlantis.com
Very confusing article... Maybe the author was partaking in psychedelics while writing it?
Perhaps I'm being overly critical, but part of it is that I think there is an interesting story here, and I was disappointed not to find it in this article. I can easily imagine an article, like the kind they publish in the New Yorker for instance, that really does tease out all these connections, along with teasing out the places where the "common knowledge" is a distortion of reality, providing real insight. But this just wasn't that article, for me.
I don't see the section as particularly weak, it does exactly what it supposed to and it's argument is sufficiently strong for that purpose.
I would note that while you complained about the argument being weak, you didn't actually make any effort to edispute any of it.
If you found the topic interesting and wanted a deeper study of the topic, then thats great go do some research, I doubt nobody else has researched or written about it. Complaining that a book review isn't a scholarly article or a full essay isn't actually gonna get you any deeper understanding of the topic.
We are just drowning in stupid news opinion that is begging for clicks and not irrelevance.
I learned absolutely nothing from this article. Just a total waste of time to read.
Drugs in the 60's: This will free your mind
Drugs now: By doing small amounts of LSD I maximize productivity generating capital for my boss
@jil_slander, 10/30/2017
In general psychedelics strip away your ego such that your self appears illusory. I've never met anyone whose takeaway from psychedelics was individualistic.
It was individualistic in that the sense came from my own embodied experience of being in the world, and I was thinking about myself, but it was an insight about contextualizing myself in a much larger thing.
It made me feel special, personally, for being a member of such an incredible group, but anti-individualistic because I extended this specialness to everyone.
Nothing wrong with boosting creativity. The choice of directing that creativity to your employer's profits is only an issue if your company is boring or unethical or undeserving. Besides, I don't think micro-dosing aspires to the "turn on, tune in" part of the equation. I've never micro-dosed, but a coffee-like buzz has no connection with Leary's mantra.
Leary explained it directly: > "Turn on" meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers engaging them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. "Tune in" meant interact harmoniously with the world around you—externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. "Drop out" suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. "Drop Out" meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily, my explanations of this sequence of personal development are often misinterpreted to mean "Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity".[4]
So the order was. Turn On = expand your consciousness Tun In = learn/integrate from your alternative views generated by your altered state. Drop Out = return to unaltered state to rest
In the 1960s and 1970s, after being a hippie, it was still possible to get back into mainstream society. Welfare payments were more generous, rents were lower, and student loan debt was not a big thing.
Today, the next stop is homelessness.
It has some ideas worth discussion but it's wrapped in a thick layer of what seems to be purposeful misunderstand, and misstatements. It lacks crucial context.
> "Turn on" meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers engaging them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. "Tune in" meant interact harmoniously with the world around you—externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. "Drop out" suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. "Drop Out" meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily, my explanations of this sequence of personal development are often misinterpreted to mean "Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity" ~ T. Leary
That's Leary on his own use of the phrase, and I think this article is continuing this purposeful misinterpretation. Further, the article treats the phrase as if it is synthesis of everything the psychedelic movement stood to offer.
While I'm rather interested in exploring where the psychedelic movement moved from counter-culture to grind-culture, to do so with such hyperbolic statements as
> By contrast, the lifestyle influencers hawking psychedelics today lack the intellectual ambition and the incentive to offer their audiences anything other than another consumption niche.
leaves me feeling the author is more interesting in exploring their own opinions.
::button press:: Shut up and do it. Most humans don't even want verbose error codes. Shut up, do the thing, and if absolutely necessary beep when something goes wrong.
Did she? She claimed she found wild (and weird) sexual life of Samoans but her findings were never succesfully verified, or supported (including by Samoans themselves). By now it's quite clear that she was either a victim of a prank, or simply faked interviews. It's both sad and funny that it appeared so embarassing to rollback all the pseudoscientific bs which grew from what is essentially a description of fictional world that plenty of people who claim to be science-lovers, or even scientists continue to refer to the work as if it is something fundamental and correct
Weeding out from this incredibly lengthy text all attempts of character killing of the first public debunker, lame claims such as "Dr.X thinks the report was generally correct" (with not a single point provided), unrelated statements such as that some of Mead's ideas maybe right because of completely different research by different people in different place), we are left with the fact that there's no, zero, none evidence to support factual correctness of Ms.Mead's Samoan research on sexual behavior. And to deal with it her supporters reiterate the same argument in different forms - that there's a mystical conspiracy of silence on the island, i.e. Mead was told truth, but somehow everyone else both before, and after was not. It's absolutely ridiculous as we are talking about modern times, and society numerous enough to have internal political divides, and by that time already well-connected with outside world including intermarrying, and people of varying origins living their whole lives there, not to forget it was never isolated within Oceania.
Oh, and there's also an argument that we shouldn't judge her because she "followed interpretative approach", and her report "is not falsifiable". This one can make sense, but it's just another way to say she was a fiction writer sold as a scientist.
My process relies on putting difficult problems out of immediate focus, and use kinetic and calming means like exercise, meditation, and hot saunas. If that doesn't work, throwing away code and trying again like rewriting a book chapter can be useful; Joe Armstrong [RIP] was a big believer in this.
For ideation, a variation of stimulus reduction approaching sensory deprivation without a dark, warm water tank works for me.
> Make it work. Make it beautiful. Then make it fast.
And something along the lines of having to solve a problem once just to understand it (which aligns with what you mention).
And I say forced because social program will not sustain your well being.. not yet in North America anyway.
Like, what if i don't want to be friends with a database? What next ? a few beers with my fridge? Skinny dipping with my toaster?
Sounds deadly.
Another instance of SV bros unknowingly LARPing spirituality is more obvious: the weird, intense religious-like fervor some people have about AI.
This stuff inhabits the void in people, and it becomes very obvious.
Like, the idea of a global integrated organism that integrates information at the speed of light, and had perfect recall, is basically Genesis.
It is crazy to me how fast and how intensely cult-like AI became. It's even crazier when you consider the gap between their belief in AI (singularity, automate every job, next step for humanity, etc...) and their actual AI projects (make a fancy QR code generator or yet another SEO spam site...)
It’s only five or ten years away!
More seriously: I expect some proponents have financial ties to AI as a whole. It smells way too much like the crypto/NFT grifters.