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We are surrounded by ghosts: https://t.co/0JoS8QMOyG Thoughts on the propagation of knowledge out of epistemic communities, and why most knowledge is ghost knowledge.
Coevolution and the bad take machine https://t.co/uRbLV7qGo0 Why some people on Twitter seem to reliably produce such bad takes.
Extracts from "How to talk about books you haven't read" https://t.co/awN0p1LrCO
Books by writers are the worst. https://t.co/H9WUzdegyv
Emotional reactions as legacy code https://t.co/zhd6j1EmWU
As a side note, a lot of why I'm doing this is because I'm *really* struggling to write PhD stuff at the moment (thanks depression), so am applying the fully general system to try to work through that: https://t.co/pfeaFhhaSz
Constraints on skill growth: https://t.co/tjvmJgQoJ6 Why after a certain point the best way to get better at a skill can be to learn a different skill.
You should try bad things: https://t.co/CL2yrNMYJ2 If you never try things you expect to be bad, your interests can only narrow over time because you will learn that things you thought were good are bad, but will never learn that things you thought were bad are good.
Legibility privileges https://t.co/XQqzRpJHDm The way we talk about marginalisation strongly centers marginalisations that we can easily communicate, which misses the long tail of messy and hard to communicate ways that people can be marginalised.
All knowledge is connected https://t.co/Y5Pq8hBhTs Why you can't really understand gender without also understanding nuclear war and phenomenology.
How to make decisions https://t.co/4M8WSfYubG All decision making processes need to be obviously better than tossing a coin, and many of our idealised models of decision making aren't.
The fastest way to learn something is to do something https://t.co/LwDpTen0vv How to avoid overplanning when trying to solve a problem.
Supersaturation of knowledge https://t.co/HjoHaFIgtS When you read a metric tonne of books per week, weird things start happening in your brain.
Culture is deeply contingent https://t.co/jAyaAK2jfX Why people step left vs right, how culture evolves, why most of it is arbitrary, what to do about that.
Have you noticed how strong the social norms preventing you from being good at things are? https://t.co/gQkxoUKYjo
There are no deterministic voting systems. https://t.co/R5lm990eIY It's not a question of whether to use a nondeterministic or deterministic voting system, but of how to manage the nondeterminism intrinsic in voting.
Legibility is a property of a relationship with a system, not of the system itself. https://t.co/ijoZCx15tW
Your emotions are valid but probably wrong https://t.co/uu6cjJzGu8 Emotional reactions are learned responses, and you learned a lot of them as a kid, but your life as an adult is totally unlike your life as a kid so reactions learned then are no longer at all adaptive.
Skirting the edge of disaster https://t.co/vOGGlvUNRP Everything around you is constantly almost-but-not-quite broken because that's the only point of equilibrium for a complex system.
Interlude: I'm using https://t.co/hBvhtntYJD to keep track of upcoming ideas for notebook posts so I don't forget them. Feel free to comment on it with any questions / requests / etc
Seeking out existence proofs in every day life https://t.co/9tGMsDXoY3 When you have a problem to solve, it's worth solving it badly to demonstrate it's solvable at all, because that knowledge will help you solve it well.
Interlude 2: Ideas for upcoming posts are now in https://t.co/VeW6Uwj1rw because gosh the UX of editing github issues is garbage. Dear github, when I click edit, I want to see the latest version of the issue not whatever random version happened to last be open in this window.
Depression as felt restriction on emotional range https://t.co/XkO6Z1NGxY One of the key features of depression is your awareness that certain emotions are currently impossible for you to have. This explains some useful terminology for talking and thinking about that.
Nerding https://t.co/SAq3p4dgfD Nerding about a subject is just being interested in it in for its own sake rather than for extrinsic reasons. Nerds are people for whom the tendency to nerd is a major part of their identity. When you want to learn a subject, seek out its nerds.
You can't actually run out of ideas https://t.co/i85sThSBPO Idea generation is a process, and it's not one that ever stops. You're probably just making the mistake of trying to avoid having bad ideas instead of ensuring you have good ones.
COULDDO vs TODO https://t.co/u30xjA102x If you find your energy levels are highly variable, you might benefit from having a COULDDO list: Things that you might do but have no obligation or expectation to complete, that are ready to hand when you feel listless.
Stuff just happens and you probably don't know why https://t.co/phy3vbUIQe The world is much more mysterious than we like to think it is. Almost nothing about your lived experiences is monocausal, and the monocausal bits are probably something random.
If a task is impossible, try making it harder https://t.co/pUUWNBty0s The reason some tasks are so impossible is because they aren't things that can occupy your full attention. If you make them harder you can actually get into a flow state on them.
Untangling moral concepts https://t.co/AEKITF7grq There are a number of critical concepts in moral reasoning that people treat as effectively the same thing but are not. This untangles a couple of them to show why they are different.
Computer games as therapeutic tools https://t.co/6kSOo4BgEw I use a mix of Celeste, Slay the Spire, and Untitled Goose Game as therapeutic tools, and I think they're an underrated part of the toolkits we can develop for managing our own mental health.
https://t.co/71CCOmzbdo Men are reliably pretty touch starved because of bad gender norms, and we have a collective responsibility to do something about that, but as long as we treat that as a sum of individual responsibilities we'll just keep getting mad at each other instead.
Be the more decisive person https://t.co/QfWCAVhDUW When the group you're in is dithering about what to do, just make a decision for them and let people provide feedback on it. It helps a lot and everyone will be grateful to you for it.
Install cut out switches in your mind https://t.co/IpZC3t13S2 If you're not careful, you will repeatedly find your thoughts spiralling in unhelpful ways. Install cut out switches when that happens, because most of the time it's not worth worrying about being profoundly wrong.
It's not actually possible to explain everything to a layperson and you're not doing anyone any favours by pretending it is. https://t.co/q6tySR65A9
The art of not having opinions https://t.co/BOZhjO43Cy You probably have all sorts of opinions you don't need to (after all, you're on Twitter). Have you tried not doing that?
Homophily and the tyranny of false positives https://t.co/JNiZszPCYZ The desire to avoid bad community members (as opposed to include good ones) will tend to make communities more homogenous over time.
Suspension of annoyance https://t.co/tWCXamMl5l A lot of authors are very annoying and make you want to punch them, but you could just choose not to be annoyed and you'll probably get more out of them if you approach the book that way.
Books should be taken seriously but not literally https://t.co/LKql21VURv When reading a book you should be treating it as an artefact to examine and to try to gain some useful thoughts and tools from. If you read a book and get religion that's a very bad sign.
Communication: Collaboration and conflict https://t.co/GNumePxCFg A useful lens on communication skills is as managing the workload of the other party. Sometimes you want to make their work easier, sometimes you want to make it harder.
Alief/Belief Coherence https://t.co/Fndu346Bxt Sometimes we think things are true (belief), but sometimes we feel like they're true (alief). Sometimes those conflict. A lot of emotion work can be thought of as resolving those conflicts in ways that can allow aliefs to update.
Berkson's paradox is everywhere https://t.co/SWmC3hjnSD You're probably significantly underestimating how many tendencies you see in the world are just artifacts of your sampling process.
Everybody is looking for permission https://t.co/Esm8saBTkX Most people are holding back from behaving in ways they want to because they feel they don't have permission. It is often useful to think about what is needed to give them that permission.
Safety as an enabler of growth https://t.co/323Xcb6UGH You can't grow unless you can learn, and you can't learn unless you can try things, but many things both within and around you will conspire to make trying things unsafe.
Good strategies often fail https://t.co/jFYBhPzrg1 Good strategies have to account for low probability high impact events, so typically it will look like your strategy was wrong when the outcome you always expected comes to pass. This is the fallacy of Resulting.
On feeling blocked https://t.co/15wcdpRDZu Feeling blocked is the existential felt sense of a missing capability, the feeling that your internal world doesn't have the capacities that you've grown used to. (Yes, I wrote this because I was feeling blocked)
The Inner Game of Celeste https://t.co/CmF8aeixBc Celeste and The Inner Game of Tennis both teach us things about how to relate to ourselves, and the differences between thought and action, but Celeste's lessons about how to treat parts of ourself are much better.
Leaving knowledge in the box https://t.co/qbhX8C6VUu The problem with all knowledge being connected is that in order to perfectly understand anything you need to understand everything. That doesn't work, so you need to get comfortable with not understanding things instead.
Life as an anytime algorithm https://t.co/YZixF022nj It is often worth structuring your strategies for achieving a goal so that you make meaningful progress along the way and will see benefits even if you abandon them before achieving the ultimate goal.
Trust beyond reason https://t.co/G3LN4lavEz You need to trust people more than seems reasonable, and before they become important to you, because otherwise you will end up with people who are important to you but who you can't trust.
One of the best things I've been doing recently (since some time last year) is getting a small group of friends together every three weeks to help eachother talk through problems in our lives. Here are some notes on how it works. https://t.co/6xerIS21qP
Pragmatic Problem Solving (aka Kludges) https://t.co/8zhg2pQJ38 It's important not to get too hung up on solving the problem "properly" because it causes you to miss easy, ugly, solutions that you can just kludge together quickly.
Competence is sexy https://t.co/6sZGxC1T4Y This extremely technical analysis of the nature of sexiness and the gender politics of attractiveness is probably the closest you will ever see to me being horny on main.
On having different thresholds https://t.co/55XVmP0ZTo People let things get critically bad before they act, which is unhealthy, but if you stop doing that people will interpret you acting as meaning things are critically bad. It's important to talk this through when it happens.
Everything is a teachable moment https://t.co/W1FHx8rZn2 Specific outcomes usually happen for general reasons, and by using those events to understand those general principles, we can prepare ourselves for novel situations that our outside of our past experience.
Desire as a driver of growth https://t.co/POSSGbIN75 You can set the scene to enable personal growth all you like, but unless you actually want to do it then you won't. A key to achieving that is to make it so growth brings you good things as well as removing bad ones.
Vampire bats as a model for flirting https://t.co/o1NoNwHR9o Cooperative behaviour in vampire bats are an interesting example of a raising-the-stakes game. So is flirting, and the comparison is interesting and helps highlight a way in which some people (e.g. me) fail at it.
The problem of deduction https://t.co/A2mjauAhZ5 The book "Reliable Reasoning" argues that comparing induction and deduction is a category error. This is a great point that I have somehow managed to forget each time I've read it, so I thought I'd summarise it here.
Teleology is fake https://t.co/LkbJQ2tnld Asking "What purpose does this serve?" is a very useful tool for understanding entities in complex systems, but it's also a fake concept that will mislead you if you take it too seriously, because such things always serve many functions.
Anxiety vs Worry https://t.co/AlucfAsi1l It's useful to distinguish anxiety (about the uncertainty) from worry (about possible outcomes), because although they're tightly related they're distinct emotions with distinct things you can do to address them.
Being safe for others https://t.co/fpDcbfKVYF If you want the people around you to become better versions of themselves, one of the best things you can do for this is to make sure that it is safe for them to tell you things, by practising non-judgemental listening. This is hard.
What's cooking? https://t.co/xvkrbQq3Qn Situations that create a forced abundance of an ingredient force us to cook in creative ways, which uncovers some interesting features of our relationship with food and cooking. Also contains a very tasty recipe.
The rule of three twos https://t.co/ICJC2lt6Na If you have three flavours any pair of which work well together, the three of them together is probably the basis for something interesting too. This simplifies improvisational cooking significantly.
Maybe everybody was right all along https://t.co/0UYhs7bDCa A lot of people have declared that COVID-19 has proven they were right all along. This seems funny, but is probably mostly true - there are many valid critiques of society, and COVID-19 exacerbates almost all of them.
Trivial irritations as inhibiting factors https://t.co/Oz9V2ca6cl Sometimes you've got a long list of reasons why you don't like a thing, but they're are actually why you don't love it, and all you need to like it is to remove some trivial irritation that stops you doing so.
Intuition as search prioritisation https://t.co/bUwrF8iDoY Intuition gives us a cheap way of determining if something might be good, so having good intuition helps ensure we consider likely better options first. This is essential for making good decisions under time constraints.
The memetic domus https://t.co/Yuaci7Akko In which I gesture vaguely at several ideas about domestication and innovation and say "there's something here, right?", generalising the idea of the domus as a set of co-evolving replicators each selecting others to be useful to itself.
Spock is a Lie https://t.co/8Fwzd2uReO Emotion (in the form of intuition) guides all of our reasoning, and is also (in the form of cognitive dissonance) what drives us to improve it. Emotional health rather than suppression is thus key to competent reasoning.
Capabilities can be coerced https://t.co/K5UyYgmu2E If you can't do something, you can't be coerced into doing it, so it's worth credibly signalling your inability. This creates an incentive to treat our desired behaviours as significantly more innate than they actually are.
Ubiquitous Incommensurability https://t.co/mYIi1yBocE People often struggle to list their Top N Xs (e.g. Top 10 books). The reason for this is that you can't actually do that, the question makes no sense. Comparing objects is much too context dependent for that.
Dust Motes and Electric Plugs https://t.co/OOEuyyLPMu Although things are incommensurable at the local level, policy necessarily strips context from the decisions it implies, and policy decisions should be more utilitarian than a naive analogy with ethical decisions suggests.
Notes on becoming a cis man https://t.co/c97s8vZL8E A few years ago there was genuine ambiguity as to whether I was cis. Now there isn't and I'm definitely cis. People don't talk about this sort of experience much, so I thought I'd try to explain a bit of it.
The Accelerator/Brake model https://t.co/WBjlF3FBT1 It's usually worth decomposing interest in an activity into what drives you towards it (an accelerator) and what stops you (a brake). This model comes from the book "Come As You Are", where it's about sex, but is more general.
Does a fish have a face? https://t.co/iJavsfE2XY Notes on the experience of animals as ethically relevant, and the role of empathy in our ethical decision making, inspired by a randomly selected passage from "Finding Our Sea-Legs".
Power, baby, power https://t.co/vM6loU903V A reading from Kathy Acker's in "I'm very into you" results in a meditation gender, attraction, and power, and finishes with a thought on how this ties in to the distressing prevalence of men with power being sexual predators.
Proportionality and Identity https://t.co/ttBrgGQJ62 We use random selection of a jury to guarantee proportionality, but perhaps we should bias this to deliberately over-represent salient minority identities, giving the defence the right to decide what counts as salient.
Democracy isn't just voting https://t.co/WCsBpojHM5 We tend to think of voting as the central feature of democracy, but it should actually be the last step of it. A lot of why we have this misconception is the lack of small-group democracies in our lives. We should fix that.
The conditional love of a small town https://t.co/KrzPlvOVbL bell hooks describes small towns as places where the community is built on a love ethic, but this is very conditional on being a person that a small town can love. The rest flee to the cities to find others like us.
Fixed and growth relationships https://t.co/di7ak0nJJN In "Rewriting the Rules" MJB talks about how we can fix ourselves into set images in a relationship. I contrast this with bell hooks's notion of love as growth, Schelling's theories of nuclear war, and Alexander Technique.
78 Thinking Hats https://t.co/7OBNfdWIJ2 A great deal of trash talk about Edward de Bono, thoughts on the use of tarot cards for randomised narrative construction and writing prompts, finishing with a short meditation on Focusing, Alexander Technique, exercise, and having fun.
Telling each other stories https://t.co/rMWgFLbwF1 Listening to and interpreting someone else's stories about their life causes us to better understand our own. Strong, trusting, relationships with others help by developing a shared canon of stories to help achieve this.
Masculinity as a source of sexual hangups https://t.co/F1K8eFrnCm We think of male sexuality as straightforward, but it's not, and our narratives around it result in a lot of emotional hangups about sex which get handled very badly. PS. I really didn't want to write this.
There is no moral obligation to be exhausted https://t.co/fYJlATwuzS We often feel obliged to help others if we can, but this leads to a kind of energetic crab bucket where everyone feels obliged to be exhausted. Norms that allow you to say no help everyone in the long run.
The Casting of Leaders https://t.co/zwdlEi4P3J We think of movements as being created by charismatic leaders, but the reverse is true: charismatic leaders are created by movements as an enabling technology to provide a sense of agency that large groups otherwise lack.
Care Work and Fixing Things https://t.co/EQFmXRDUJm Work naturally divides into doing the endless series of predictable individually little things, and fixing the occasional bigger things that crop up unexpectedly. Both are essential but we handle the split badly.
Ritual and Freedom https://t.co/KWJB3FqmnR Once you have acquired a measure of self-control, it becomes very hard to freely express yourself because that possibility of control is always there. In order to counterbalance that, we create spaces for that self-expression.
On not behaving like other people https://t.co/jLZqEOwrMx Experts in a niche subject are usually going to be weird in ways that make them much more interesting. Additionally, there are good reasons for them to lean into their weirdness. We might as well embrace that.
Strategy, reliability, and impersonality https://t.co/OS48h9MDHe Exploration of three constructs (Impersonal/Personal, Reliable/Unreliable, Strategy/Goal), ending with a meditation on how we use other people for reliability when we could build it into the environment.
Adoptive Identities https://t.co/erpCkRuUsq Some people are part of communities where they lack the distinguishing identity of that community. This often sucks for them, and it would, in some cases, be helpful to consider them to have "adoptive" versions of that identity.
Numbers and Feelings https://t.co/3epGGTFqBB In which I attempt to do some maths and mostly just end up having a whole bunch of feelings. Very stream of consciousness. Probably doesn't make much sense. Written more for me than for you.
Model Monocropping https://t.co/6DqbVrm3At We tend to think in terms of there being "true" models of the world, and to want everyone to adopt our own models as a result, but a healthy ecosystem requires many potentially-incompatible models that we fluidly switch between at need.
Making Success Trivial https://t.co/vYfdTarY5V Recurring habits benefit from setting the bar for success set as low as you possibly can. This will possibly reveal reasons why you don't want to do the habit, and fixing those will lower the bar further yet.
Cleaning up the fnords in your environment https://t.co/aOH75GQha3 A poorly cared for environment fills with fnords (things that provoke anxiety which you learn not to see). Reversing the neglect requires dealing with the fnords, so the very notion of care becomes aversive.
Easy Changes and Uncomfortable Reflections https://t.co/t473zcjR3K If a change to your life is easy and successful, this can prompt guilt and shame over the fact that you didn't change before. This is a mistake as often a change is easy only after doing the work to make it so.
Separating Impulse from Action https://t.co/koAfMgtioQ I impulse buy too many books. By creating a default list and scheduling a task to make a book purchase from that list every Sunday I can separate the impulse to buy from the action of buying, getting the habit under control.
Initial Notes Towards a Manifesto https://t.co/Px6JtY2gyc I was asked to write a manifesto, but I didn't really feel like doing the whole thing, so here are some thoughts on what I want for the world and I'm trying to do, especially with my writing on the notebook blog.
How to be a better person https://t.co/PvAgs7FONv Studying ethics doesn't make you a better person. Why? Because ethics is actually theory of ethics. To be a better person you need a practice of ethics, which shows you how to overcome the things stopping you from being better.
Building and Rebuilding Foundational Skills https://t.co/aHbFYnNFmV When learning, we progress when we can rather than when we are ready to. This causes us to get stuck with being bad t at some things we find easy. Some thoughts on how to fix that in the context of #Couchto5K.
Why are things hard? https://t.co/Ml6ktpEZ9t I still think "How to do hard things" a good post about a good system, but it misses out on a lot. Things can be hard for all sorts of reasons (emotional, social, time, health, etc) and it can be difficult to cleanly separate them.
https://t.co/rI5r5HGaCi People have this confused notion that reading is the abstract flow of information fed directly into your brain, but reading is an active physical process done by a real human being, and changing physical details can have a huge impact on how easy it is.
https://t.co/VU41p7qEc6 If joy is connected to taking pleasure in surprise then deep emotional experiences, even sadness, can be joyful, but the eternal now of pandemic time robs the world of this joy. I'm not really sure what we can do about that, but I have some vague ideas.
https://t.co/kebbkdskeL The question "What is love?" is hard to pin down, but the more concrete you make it the more is revealed. One thing that is revealed is that there are two types of uncertainty around the question: What counts as love is fuzzy, but it is also contested.
https://t.co/hF4TLCg6wJ People develop knowledge in communities. When those communities are under attack, often that knowledge will be kept from outsiders for safety reasons. Orders that are about promoting "sincerity" can be about painting this hidden knowledge as immoral.
https://t.co/Et9P3dmvzm Acedia is the sin that got deprecated in favour of sloth, and corresponds to a kind of... emotional disconnection from sources of meaning. This post is just a bunch of references to sources on it and vague thoughts on the subject.
https://t.co/UZEASuPetY In which I over-theorise about learning to use a seam ripper to disassemble a pair of trousers.
https://t.co/EacHmz8H5y My first official newsletter entry! I'd like to avoid becoming a productivity guru, so I begin the official newsletter with a post about Total Work and how to avoid it.
It's my birthday, so I'll write slightly self-indulgently angsty notebook posts if I want to. https://t.co/nq68EGw90O
https://t.co/yFEHdApTAU It's tempting to complain that the audience is reacting unfairly to you, and maybe they are, but if you want to actually achieve something you need to work with the audience's reactions as they are rather than demand that they react differently.
Bonus post for today, as I try to articulate one of the things about the pandemic that's been causing me the most difficulty recently. https://t.co/yBjWABdMJg
Misc thoughts on the interplay between moral development and emotional health, largely overspill from drafting the next newsletter post. https://t.co/GO3rmTMsut
Here's a bonus notebook post about how I (mostly, with caveats included in post) fixed my anxiety. https://t.co/NdxX1nfrgn
"How to read a book" thinks it's important that you should know what type of book you're reading. I think this is mostly a waste of time and you should engage with books on an individual basis. https://t.co/xm8dj3qWgW