rwnspace

Someone suggested making minor mistakes on purpose to me a while ago, and it turned out to be a pretty interesting kind of pain to lean into~

There's a typo near the end of the post, which made me smile - my first thought was that it was left in intentionally. I recommend following the author's lead. Like any treatment, it's no panacea, but by god was it liberating, and I'm not entirely disabled by perfectionism these days :)

You're absolutely right, I'm always tired when I have to schedule around other people's preference of working 9-5. It's not like schools should be scheduling for 9AM or earlier starts either, it's bad for the kids, particularly teenagers.

I think Erdős said of his own mathematical ability (no doubt with some humility) that it was very much a 'bag of tricks' he would apply to the problems his multitudinous collaborators were working on. I think a lot of philosophers use this approach too.

I think the value of polymaths is more 'synthetic', not necessarily 'analytic'. Many useful discoveries or insights are the result of an almost magical use of what C.S. Peirce called abduction: the process of generating hypotheses.

Knowledge in many domains, connected to the right problem, can lead to profoundly effective abduction. Sometimes this transfer can take the form of a persistent metaphor, or maybe an experience that makes itself known to you while you're thinking about something else, or simply your attention is guided to look at something in a particular light.

I feel like the post does a great job critiquing those high-status polymaths who emit an irresponsible amount of certainty. But there are plenty who use their wide learnings in a less concrete way, looking to add to their bag of tricks, and to put things together in interesting ways.

But this comes full circle - the more privileged are more likely to be more charismatic. In the UK, the art of rhetoric doesn't appear in the standard curriculum. I am confident in my ability to predict whether a UK politician has been to private/grammar schools and Oxbridge or not - to distinguish those who have been taught elocution and rubbed shoulders with the rich and powerful from an early age.

Not only that, but confidence and certainty are very charismatic, or at least, draw attention. That works fine as a mechanism for liberating people from concerning themselves with the minutiae of every part of life in society. But we all know some variation of that quote about the certain fools and uncertain wise. I'm thinking of those especially confident scientists who have used their platform to trash reflective subjects like Philosophy (not naming any names).

I suppose a good summary of my point is that charisma can transform interest into idolatry.

Well, the ship was sinking either way...

I'm kidding, and I see what you mean - but I think reading more news solves big issues just as well as reading less news.

Changing the state of things now, or changing the way people approach things in the future - that's how the change thing works. Western people have had so much of the latter from the hyper-media environment that I find myself sympathising with the flouride folks - ideology may as well be in the water for how pervasive it is.

Our individual approaches toward media consumption have to be personal and pragmatic - they aren't statements of Kantian universal morals. Much like tee-totallers don't necessarily believe that everyone should give up drinking.

I know you're not quite saying this, but the idea that avoiding the news and having your head in the sand have anything to do with each other is a false equivalence. If anything, in today's world it's the other way around.

Well, is it how things get fixed? The way we collectively attribute passive attention and consume information seems less and less up to us, the longer we're surrounded by the digital equivalent of slot machines. The media is more give and less take than ever; and the longer this stress goes on, the more emotionally charged the process of memetic exchange becomes.

Still, talking to people is as good as it ever was, if you're determined about it. While these days it does require significant care and patience to avoid the memes and the trigger phrases, it's still more than possible to gesture at the ideas behind the noise and get something fresh going - to get minds exchanging.

I cannot convey how much I miss OLGA. My first taste of irritating copyright laws over art was they came for Napster, but I was still pretty young so I didn't feel it much. When they came for OLGA, I was skipping school to play guitar 12+ hours a day. It was around my 15th birthday. I'm pretty sure I cried. I still have a precious folder of printouts from <2006 - I don't play guitar much now, but it only just occurred to me that OLGA is probably somewhere online... :D

A good point - I hear that writing a blogpost on your new stratagem for the week is a good way to achieve that end. You can even make a job out of it!

I'm allergic to it too. There used to be a fantastic add-on which replaced every instance of the word 'cloud' with 'butt'. Very handy a few years ago. Could do with updating for the era of guilt-deflecting advice-meme pollutors.

Oh, it's from Matthew Walker. He's a very creative scientist: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

I'm not sure either, but I am certain it's possible - not every race to the bottom is impossible to decelerate. But we must find the way to a consensus about the immeasurably powerful sorcery belief and speech imbue. Nuclear pales in comparison; the way I see it, we choose between the common good and the Good Life, or MAD.

I think this effect is tough for anyone tuned to care what others think, and it tends to be rougher the younger you are.

There's a significant lack of guidance in WEIRD societies about how to be a person, and this is topped off by the limited maturation rituals: learning to drive, first full-time job, graduating and buying a house come to mind - but we've somehow come to a consensus that putting a giant paywall in front of them and creating dependencies between them is fine.

Putting it like that, it's no wonder that so many young people are staying home, whittling their time away on scraps of "advice" on how to get on in life.

I've come to pity people who plug such "productivity" advice online, because I feel like they must be suppressing (or missing) an idea of the Good Life: a notion of using one's actions, or speech, to contribute to the common good.

I'm hopeful newer generations in the West will have the nous to reject false idols like "productivity" or extreme wealth, but I think it's on us to expose the painful lessons learned as we're transitioning into a cyborg society.

It's a natural good like water at this point. And the psycho-social mechanistic designs which go into what you consume are much more dangerous than added fluoride.

The amount of doublethink on display here is incredible. It IS impossible to both live without these services and a be a relatively normal member of society. I've tried everything in this article, and it isn't sustainable. Veganism is also something I've tried, and it's an apt metaphor; I think most thinking persons are educated enough to agree that the global meat industry could be improved by both regulation and consumer behaviour. That everyone could do with feeling good about having a little less meat, don't feel bad about having a bit.

With Veganism and other stances of denial, it generates so much extra complexity and negative social pressure that sustaining them requires finding a niche social group to help you feel ok about it, and teach you strategies to help maintain it.

But if the very thing you are trying to quit encompasses the social medium, you're completely on your own.

Deleting my Facebook was social suicide, no joke. Most of my friends are old enough to rely on that platform alone. It was like losing a limb or two, and suddenly realising all your friends ever do is climb.

A straightforward point that comes to mind regards reusing the output of GPT-n as part of the training input to GPT-n+1: Andrej Karpathy recently tweeted about it in terms of pollution, which has wonderful connotations: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1284660899198820352

There are some societal functions, some conversations which cannot be conducted over the Internet. And the rest of them probably ought not to be.

"The key to originality is hiding your sources."

Adding on to this, the evolution of modern music, particularly sampling and DJing, is a very visceral example of how originality doesn't just appear in what sources you approach, it can also come from the /way/ you approach them.

Speaking of walks of life, the whole thing about walking a mile in someone else's shoes comes to mind.

Then I wonder if reading others' thoughts on the Internet is quite a bit like browsing a giant shoerack.

The primary material on Lesswrong is a mixed bag, but certainly some of it is very interesting even to people with training in Philosophy.

Indeed you can thank Dennett's 'Intuition Pumps' for providing a source of legitimacy to those people who want to take the mental model stuff Very Seriously.

The same stuff can be mis-leading or well-leading. People will be people. Give it a few years and I half-expect a Mental-Models-cum-pseudo-Magickal Qabbalistic cottage industry to appear. Or at least a handy reference system, such as [Yudkowsky 24:10]...

There are literally thousands of Unix tool replacements released on GitHub, and more every year.

Just off the top of my head, fex and miller are alternative cut-likes with field extraction.

Unless a new unix-tool-alike is significantly better and backwards-compatible, HN and most greybeard nixers tend toward conservatism. The old tools are usually good for 95% of use-cases anyway. There's just way too much to keep track of if you're eager to switch to any old shiny new thing.

Imagine if we put the blame on wild animals for their behavioural adaptations after we destroyed their natural environments.

Imagine if we simply observed obesity as "what happens to x% of the human population after y years of exposure to this environment".

Imagine if we observed the growing disconnect between intelligence and critical thinking ability as a function of changes in the information ecology.

`~` contains these dirs: `inbox, lib, code, proj, org, .archive, .sync`

Things arrive in inbox, and get sorted into lib or code. Org contains notes. Files are symlinked from lib/code/org into proj &/or .sync.

Lib folder structure is kinda similar to how 4chan is broken down, plus an irl folder for important shiz.

PDFs have reasonably descriptive titles or at least the DOI. I recommend ripgrep-all for document search.

Tried library systems like Dewey and they're a good way to hide your files from yourself. Single folder plus search tools and non-terrible titles (terrible titles are deemed acceptable only in the inbox), then symlinking out into project folders makes more sense to me.

The code folder also has a `gh` folder for GitHub projects I'm checking out.

I'm sorry to be glib, but I've never heard of 'just medicine'. I know there are many procedures and medications that doctors are willing or trained to provide, and I know that many doctors only know or prefer a subset of these, even for common diseases. I know some doctors who are very open-minded in their recommendations and some who are conservative to a fault.

Due to the replication crisis, I imagine it's actually much more difficult to get non-standard treatments in now than it was to introduce treatments last century.

Not that I'm disagreeing with you - I'm fully in the Ben Goldacre 'Bad Science' camp - I just wanted to highlight that these things sometimes take generational and cultural change, and for some classes of treatments, it's not always a case of taking something from the 'not yet proven to work' bucket and putting it in the 'proven to work' bucket (both buckets are somewhat leaky anyway).

Ah I'm with you, thanks for the explanation - you're quite right. I've done a fair bit of bash and still I fully expect parts of the syntax to escape my memory. A modern and safe shell would be oil [0], ubiquity is WIP.

[0] http://www.oilshell.org/

Could you explain more re: bugs? Dylan Araps sort of specialises in well-written (ba)sh and iirc uses shellcheck meticulously. I ask not to be combative in case you're just making a casual joke - more I'd like understand how bugs might creep in to (ba)sh code - even if say, one follows shellcheck and is as competent as Dylan.

I am continually reminded of this essay by Mark Chapman, "Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution" [0]

[0] https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

The markdown editor listed on that page, Left, is really rather good: https://100r.co/site/left.html

Here's a simple system: find out what resources you absolutely cannot bear to delete. If it's all of them, then your problem lies elsewhere.

It took me years of this cycle before I turned a corner a few weeks ago - the phrase 'necessity is the mother of invention' became viscerally meaningful, and not just an empty platitude. In the past year or so I would instantly burn out as soon as I tried to push myself for longer than a day or two, because I was right at the edge of overwhelm before I even began.

I realised that it was on me to find the world where I had a forceful, motivating necessity behind me, and the right task in front of me... Otherwise I would simply not do anything at all. And that's a relieving truth, honestly. Be thankful that your brain budgets for you. It's probably a fundamental guard against extremely costly psychological conditions. You can't just induce mania every time you open one of those tutorial bookmarks.

Historically you'd have a child to look after by the age you had both energy and experience, and the ordeal would soak up both and (hopefully) give you a bit of wisdom in return... Millenials and younger are having to shortcut this step to wisdom in a world with incredible uncertainty. The infotainment hurricane inculcates us with FOMO. It's just not the kind of environment that rewards slow, deep, considered, enjoyable, reflective, /focused/ learning. And lets be real, we're in the middle a blooming pandemic.

Accept there are things which are not right for you, and that you might not ever get round to. Realise that your laziness and intuitive preferences keep the world of 'shoulds and oughts' a manageable size. They're also the levers to make it right again, if that world is growing out of control (I analogise them as natural defences against 'cognitive carcinogens').

Imho you don't need any more tools or methodologies, or resources/pdfs/tutorials - you need fewer. Same goes for entertainment. I resolved to stop my obsessive resource hoarding/kleptomania, and to stop spending my life force on stupid smoke and mirrors for my own motivational systems. Seriously, consider reducing your possibilities and spending some time without the Internet every day. It turns out that turning off the info pipes and going to town on deleting most of your local resources/bookmarks is highly relieving, once you're past the initial pain barrier.

All that said, Joplin is really good for notes and tasks - just whatever you do, don't get into Emacs+Org if you have trouble with procrastination (I recommend Doom Emacs + org-roam).

[0] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dalio

Thank you. Your software is a big part of some of my fondest memories :)