@QiaochuYuan
real actual human adult male
š Joined: 7/9/2018
šļø Archived: 9/8/2024
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once upon a time i was talking to my college gf and she was worried about some academic thing and on a whim i decided to kiss her on the forehead. this was the first time i'd ever done that. she stopped talking and melted in my arms. and a great secret was revealed unto me
this is the bortle scale. it's used to measure how dark the night sky is in a given place. until relatively recently in human history i imagine every human being who ever lived could see a bortle 1 sky every night of their lives, weather permitting. i personally have never seen darker than bortle 4 in my entire life, and that only happened once. when i was in college i saw a video on youtube, it was a time-lapse of a barbecue in texas or something, and the sky was around bortle 2-3. i was extremely shocked that the milky way was clearly, brilliantly visible to the naked eye, which i had never seen in my entire life and hadn't actually understood was a thing that could happen. i thought you needed a telescope or something. this is despite my having both a big glossy book about astronomy and a big glossy book about mythology in my childhood bedroom, where i had both read about the milky way as a galaxy and as a part of human mythology dating back thousands of years. it's fucking big as hell in the sky. it was much bigger than i was expecting. it has names in other languages that make this more obvious. in asian languages it's called the "river of heaven" or the "silver river." in indian languages it's called the "ganges river of the sky." it's a big fucking river in the fucking sky and you're supposed to be able to see it with your fucking eyes. here's a quote from a thread on an astronomy forum called cloudynights about what it's like to experience bortle 1, from Bob4BVM: > There are a few places where I go in certain mountain areas of far eastern Oregon to get toĀ Ā Bortle 1. > One is a site at over 9500 feet on a mountain surrounded by desert with the nearest town streetlights over 100 miles away. > I will never forget the first time we were camped there. The stars were so bright & clear that the experience was like you were standing IN the dome of the heavens, not below it, the 3-D feeling was unmistakable.Ā Yes the stars colors were very distinct, adding to the 3-D effect. > I did however find it initially disturbing that there was a huge band of smoky haze that ran from horizon to horizon roughly following the plane of the Milky Way. I was at first offended that smoke would be messing up the great view of our galaxy. > It took a while for it to sink in, but I finally realized... what looked like 'smoke' was the huge outer halo of the galaxy, extending far above and below the bright band of the galaxy, easily triplingĀ its overall width.Ā I did not have a telescope along on that first camping trip to that mountain.Ā None was necessary, it would have diluted the immersive experience of just laying on my back and taking in that enormous river of stars which to its outer limits covered fully half of the visible sky from horizon to horizon. when i look at the night sky (bortle 7-9) i like to imagine being alive 5000 years ago and getting to see bortle 1 every night. i like to imagine wondering what the hell is going on with all this stuff in the sky. what is it? why does it move around like that? what does it all mean? or if i don't ask myself these questions maybe i'm chilling with a kid and they ask me. and then maybe i start telling stories to entertain the kid. and i imagine people naming the planets and the stars and the constellations, and inventing gods and monsters and astronomy and astrology, and mathematics, and physics, and eventually - well, y'know, the electric light.
think i've noticed a pattern from watching movies from different decades and i wanna know if anyone else agrees - it feels like in older movies characters used to look at *each other* more, there was more eye contact and more significant nonverbals?
what makes it real is that we decided it's real together. the new year is a collective spell we all cast. you are participating in a real flow of collective energy, that acquires power from how we do it every year. magic is real and it always has been. happy new year https://t.co/DFL3ivJ9Gp
you ever just wake up and start thinking about the reddit guy with the insane clown fetish who just 100% made his wildest dreams come true by poasting? what a champion https://t.co/vNAME8aYlX
there's this truly unfortunate trap you can fall into of being both 1) annoying, and 2) visibly vibing as very fragile such that if you were told you were annoying you'd fall apart, get really sad or angry, etc. and people will not give you feedback on #1 if they sense #2 https://t.co/EouF8jtE3W
alcohol is *supposed* to be poison, thatās the point. drinking together is the social equivalent of leaving your weapons by the door, it renders you less capable of deception and manipulation because youāre impaired. itās a tool for building trust https://t.co/LeTPfj81ir
a few days ago i took a medium dose of acid and wrote for several hours straight and admitted some things to myself, mostly about money let's start here: last august my mom gave me $100,000 for my birthday. i resented her for this and also suppressed the resentment
it's ludicrous how few people know about this paper, so, friendly reminder that the fermi paradox was completely resolved in 2018 and it turned out to be because multiplying point estimates of highly uncertain parameters is very bad actually https://t.co/c7NSHTruyb https://t.co/uZjynZA9dG
my thesis is that we are really not supposed to be alone at night. if daytime was ancestrally for finding food and tending to physical needs, nighttime shouldāve been for gathering around the fire, telling stories, tending to social needs. i think the despair is just loneliness https://t.co/IXZdz57lHY
> When, occasionally, genuinely significant things happen to Musk, Isaacson largely ignores them. In May 2002, Elonās first wife Justine gave birth to their first child, a son. They named him Nevada, because heād been conceived at Burning Man. When Nevada was ten weeks old, heā¦ https://t.co/lBwKPOjvwN
i do not have anything useful or valuable to report back to you after having spent half a year off twitter. the flip side of insulating myself from a million random psychic influences was strengthening the effect of my own mind on myself, which has been uniformly terrible. when i am left to my own devices it turns out i am a stupid, lazy, passive, weak-willed coward. most days i canāt think or breathe clearly. i have been procrastinating on renewing my driverās license for 6 months because the thought of interacting with a bureacratic process fills me with terror. most things fill me with terror. my food sensitivities have gotten worse to the point that i can no longer eat at any restaurants except sushi restaurants and i only cook a single meal for myself repeatedly, with no variation. i spend my days much like i spent them during grad school, desperately searching for distractions to prevent me from experiencing my own body and mind. i think constantly about every single way i have failed in life, which is all of them. i am about to turn 34 and all i can think about is how much of a failure it makes me, to be 34 and to have nothing, no wife, no child, no career, all things my father had by the time he was 32. earlier in my twittering i was powered by a certain morbid fascination with my own pain, its brightness, its volume. i know i am old now because i no longer find my own pain interesting, it is just pain and it just hurts now. apparently i have been sitting the wrong way my whole life and it is crushing my belly and weakening my ability to breathe, but sitting the correct way makes me too aware of my body and then i am paralyzed by fear and guilt and shame and despair and other things i no longer have the curiosity to find words for. this is a metaphor for all of my other problems. other people seem to have an ability to move on from setbacks that i completely lack. i donāt think iāve ever gotten over anything in my entire life. i do not understand where strength or hope or courage or just the bare stubbornness required to decide to stop caring and do something else are supposed to come from. hurts and disappointments and heartbreaks stick to me like tar and do not come off and iām sick of it. the only thing worse than continuing to suffer and stay paralyzed is the idea of reaching out and asking anyone for help. there is a part of me that stubbornly insists that i have no friends and there is no one close enough to me to owe me the kind of help i need. i donāt even know what kind of help i need. i have been incapable of maintaining friendships for years. on some level i have still not relearned how to trust anybody. the thought of asking for help simultaneously fills me with shame about the depth of my problems, dread about the idea of entrusting someone else with them, and the obscure sense that this is just another test i have somehow failed in life. when you play a video game and you mess up a run as badly as iāve messed up my own life you are supposed to quit and start over. but as far as i can tell you canāt do that irl. so i guess iām supposed to do something else but i canāt figure out what that is for the life of me. i am so unbelievably tired of talking about myself. one day iād like to talk about something normal and concrete and real, like turnips, or plumbing. anyway howāve you guys been
there's this really bizarre thing that happens to you when you first start to learn rigorous mathematics, which is that geometry is taken away from you and you have to conduct a series of arcane rituals to get it back. to get back the *pythagorean theorem*, you need to:
the account is deleted now which means the original tweet is gone but @halvorz (pbuh) was so real for this https://t.co/uJtAgyfAXQ https://t.co/ZST3eWewJX
anyone have hypotheses about what's going on with this? currently i'm going with "going on vacation itself is the active ingredient, it's good for your nervous system" or something in that neighborhood https://t.co/AecWak4er4
apparently physically active and physically inactive people expend about the same # of calories / day. the hypothesis is that as activity ramps up the body spends less energy on other stuff. and exercise might be good for you b/c that other stuff is *stress and inflammation* https://t.co/q03suMBe7M
thread of notes on scattered minds by gabor mate https://t.co/2Jl1W5KXSG https://t.co/LcOEoOiyTY
> Betty, filled with spiritual radiance, said, āAll the flowers are beautiful.ā > āAh,ā said the teacher, blocking her, ābut this flower is especially beautiful.ā > Betty rolled on the ground screaming, and it took a while to calm her. https://t.co/RBsRlc98Qz https://t.co/uSKnWF81oO
i taught a class like this once but it was called introduction to leadership. i wrote āintroduction to leadershipā on the board then sat down and didnāt say anything and waited https://t.co/R4bjmtVqDX
crying is a process adults rarely let themselves *complete*; the complete process feels like too much to ask for, it is loud, it makes you look insane or like a child or both, other people get scared and don't know how to handle it. but it is totally normal and immensely healing
every time i watch (live action) movies i am thinking about "everyone is beautiful and no one is horny" in the background https://t.co/qk2XofJVTc https://t.co/jb8jcUZVIQ
this has been happening over and over on math.stackexchange recently: new user: i had this math q, i asked chatGPT and here's what it said, is it right crabby asshole: ugh why'd you ask chatGPT you moron new user: bc chatGPT answers my questions without calling me a moron https://t.co/FVgsUijliS
noodling over a reframing of ADHD. āattention deficitā is a terrible name i think; the way i experience it is more like my sense of whatās important at any given moment is unstable, jostled around by input. sometimes thereās an emergency and then itās temporarily very stable
in my dream religion when you die god just, like, explains your entire life. like you see all the invisible forces that were acting on it, all the motivations of the people that were opaque to you, the gift of perfect clarity about the story of you
the year is 2032. you're trying to read calvin and hobbes with your kids but they get confused about the scenes where he's playing in the snow. you have to explain that before the pandemic kids used to have snow days, and then, tears in your eyes, you have to explain what snow is https://t.co/X3yR5n7G7z
i owe a lot to people who were willing to offer me feedback even though i reacted to it by falling apart, getting really sad and/or angry, feeling terrible about myself, etc. etc; it was usually still good in the long term. i appreciate people who are willing to take that risk
scott hypothesizes that depression involves something like defending a sadness set point; you deeply feel that you are supposed to be sad and actively work to make yourself sadder if you become too happy. food for thought https://t.co/MFx92hxUlV https://t.co/814E1qPe9G
if any mutuals ever want to learn or brush up on linear algebra, abstract algebra, topology, category theory, algebraic topology / homotopy theory, number theory, combinatorics, generating functions... i am literally world-class in explaining some of these so hmu https://t.co/7flo1PqFAz
it's sort of tragic that in the 20th century our most accurate theories of physics became too hard to understand without a lot of technical background and ability. in previous centuries i think you could reasonably expect a bright educated person, not necessarily a specialist in math or physics, to at least have some sense of how newtonian mechanics worked and how that fed into this broader scientific materialist paradigm about how to conceive of the universe and our place in it. nowadays understanding the mathematics of the standard model of particle physics even at a sketchy level requires some familiarity with: lie theory, representation theory, differential geometry, fiber bundles, functional analysis, probably other stuff i'm forgetting - mathematics which mostly did not exist in the 19th century, and which is pretty hard! newtonian mechanics you can visualize and directly connect to your experience, it's about pushing balls around or whatever, it's something you can get your hands on. the standard model is extremely removed from experience - it concerns very small "particles" which you definitely can't see, and which are also not "really" particles, they're really excitations of quantum fields, whatever those are; the wave functions in quantum mechanics are hard enough to get a grip on, and quantum fields are even more inaccessible than that. seriously testing the standard model is so difficult it requires billions of dollars of resources (that's about how much the LHC cost, which was used to detect the higgs boson). (also, disclaimer: not a physicist, don't understand quantum field theory or the standard model, this is all just as far as i understand which is not much, a real physicist can correct me if i've grossly misrepresented anything.) sometimes i wonder about the psychological and cultural effects of this inaccessibility. in most human societies throughout history there was a relatively straightforward understandable official story about the nature of things, the way stuff works, what a person is, what makes the sun and the moon and the stars move in the sky. for the last several decades the official story has been that some brilliant weirdos worked out this unbelievably detailed and beautiful theory about stuff, all the stuff everywhere, the stuff inside your body, the stuff that makes up the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, the milky way, the black hole at the center of the milky way. but it's mostly inaccessible without PhD-level knowledge and ability. what is it like to live in a society that tells you that the true nature of reality is something almost nobody can meaningfully understand?
this is beautiful. both education and self-awareness are closed loops that donāt go anywhere. stunning and brave https://t.co/jY2MnU3XSR
w e l p > The progression of [autism] is proposed to be driven by overly strong reactions to experiences that drive the brain to a hyper-preference and overly selective state, which becomes more extreme with each new experience and may be particularly accelerated by emotionallyā¦ https://t.co/HVw8tu6N13
reading about completely normal stuff again https://t.co/s8uIUepdJu https://t.co/2Cv0dnPUZd
so Life has this weird minigame called Supplements where at any given time thereās a supplement that doesnāt do anything for most people but will make you, specifically, feel like god came back from buying cigarettes, and it changes every few months or so. who designed this
congratulations, you've placed two layers of indirection between yourself and an experience you're having ĀÆ\_(ć)_/ĀÆ this is supposed to help how? the real question is what being a failure feels like in your body. fewer layers, not more https://t.co/uDaNRs3dI4
this is a good example of a math education thing where i feel like people have real actual objections that are philosophical in nature that get stomped on and gaslit away with the raw mathematics. but the raw mathematics doesn't directly address the philosophical question https://t.co/6PulRMdMeL
i donāt think i understood until this last week how functional the ingredients of a stereotypical vacation are: get sunlight, be near water and in nature, do whatever you want in an unscheduled way, eat good food, walk around looking at beautiful things, hang out with your buds
periodic reminder that as far as i can tell lex fridman's MIT credentials are basically a scam. he wants you to think he's an MIT professor and he is nothing of the sort, all i can publicly verify is that he has an MIT email which means nothing. link to relevant thread below https://t.co/wLqsHkTvL9
nobody could possibly have written this scene in a work of science fiction at any point in the last 50 years https://t.co/kLNgHUhmIq
this is another thing i used to believe strongly and donāt anymore. again this is a helpful corrective starting from a (sadly very common) position of being overwhelmed by ātoxic shameā. but there is such a thing as healthy shame and it matters to your ability to behave ethically. iāve repeatedly found myself stuck in depressive states that involved being overwhelmed by shame and having the vague sense that i was supposed to deal with it by loving myself more or being kinder to myself, and that never felt accessible, never felt like the right move, and never ended up being what actually helped. the shame was trying to tell me something - among other things, that i was acting out of integrity with my own values. and when iām deep in the shit it often feels like trying to be kinder to myself would be letting myself off the hook, which feels unacceptable. maybe it doesnāt have to feel that way but i bet iām not the only person whoās wired up like that internally. there is a developmental aspect here. the sort of person to whom this kind of messaging is likely to be helpful maybe had early childhood experiences that led to them feeling ashamed of themselves at an existential level, ashamed of existing and having feelings and needs, that kind of thing. unconditional love is exactly what is needed for this situation; itās what you should have gotten but didnāt get as a young child, itās what was supposed to establish your basic sense of having a right to exist. but itās possible to get stuck here - at some point you might need to redo aspects of being an older child, a teenager, a young adult, and these are different developmental stages with different developmental tasks, some of which might involve eg feeling healthy and appropriate amounts of shame over hurting other people, that kind of thing. sometimes what you need is a stern talking-to, not a hug! love is the foundation but then you build a whole other thing on top of that foundation!
wow this guy is correct as fuck holy shit https://t.co/Fsf948Atyv
if GPT-3 can do the homework you assign your students then the homework you assign your students is fake notice what you did *not* say: "finally, GPT-3 will save us so much time analyzing international relations" https://t.co/P5EN8bRBAZ
sometimes i think about all the things i canāt muster the will to do for my own sake if my life depended on it but that i can do for the sake of someone i love as easily as breathing https://t.co/ZwJifs8m5j
i do not understand what kind of live you have to have lived that you are optimistic about the potential for technology to change society for the better. i was born in 1990 and as far as i can tell every single technological innovation made in my lifetime made the world worse
> The moment I first held my child, I had a vision of every human being who had ever done the same. I stood paralyzed, rooted to the spot while before my eyes a whole field of ancestors stretched back into the forgotten past, each cradling a baby just like I was doing. https://t.co/WPc1LiT2Cx
my relationship to math is very weird b/c like i spent thousands of hours putting autism points into it and became clearly world-class along some unusual dimensions then totally abandoned the whole thing and completely reinvented myself as the guy who cries a lot
do you guys ever think about the old xkcd's, the ones that were full of yearning, that approached moments of transcendence https://t.co/bbGCavB5zL
thereās a take i think of internally as the āminimal but respectful takeā on astrology, tarot, magic, etc. which is that nothing is happening that violates known physics, but that the human mind is capable of discerning real signal from more info than the west assumes
being taken over by an ideology for the first time is a lot like being in love for the first time. you don't know what it's like for it to end. you can't imagine being obsessed by anything else. and you don't have a frame of reference for what abusive behavior looks like
at the first bio-emotive retreat i was paired up to facilitate bio-emotive for this woman. we started with "there's this friend who owes me money and i haven't been on her case about it" got to "why do i always let people walk all over me" then: raped when she was 14
it's a little-known fact that god actually didn't die until the widespread use of pseudorandom number generators by modern computers, each use a small act of divination, exhausted god's ability to respond to all divination. god was killed mostly by microsoft in the 90s
when i first got interested in trauma and healing and all that stuff it was in response to feeling deeply helpless and powerless in my own life. i constantly found myself unable to do anything i wanted to do, hemmed in on all sides by invisible barriers i didnāt understand. for several years in grad school i kept a spreadsheet logging how i spent my time by the hour, inspired by some trendy quantified self stuff, and highlighting each hour green, yellow, or red according to whether i thought iād spent that hour well, okay, or poorly. i regularly saw myself logging weeks of mostly red and mostly being unable to budge this. nominally i was supposed to be working on my thesis but i was almost never able to do that - it was too overwhelming even to think about - and instead i wasted years watching anime and playing video games and other dumb bullshit like that, in a state of constant freeze, wracked by constant but deeply buried guilt and shame. i didnāt know how to talk about any of this, so mostly all i could do was suffer in total silence. i was unable to maintain friendships and would frequently go weeks without talking to another person except to order food. i wouldnāt wish this experience on my worst enemy in the last few years the concepts of trauma and healing have somehow become much more mainstream - i donāt have a clear sense of what drove this and would love to hear thoughts about it - and have also correspondingly received significant pushback. the part of the pushback that interests me has to do with the way conceiving of yourself in traumatic terms can *reinforce* a sense of helplessness and powerlessness. to me the point of thinking in terms of trauma is to find leverage points - as in, ah, maybe i can make progress in my professional life by dealing with unresolved feelings about my parents, that kind of thing. but thereās another way to use trauma and healing concepts which is to crab bucket yourself: ah, i canāt do these things because of my trauma, therefore iām off the hook. short-term i guess this is a defense against guilt and shame, but long-term it risks being a recipe for stagnation, especially if youāre in a community of similarly-minded people, and double especially if you believe that trauma is real but that healing is inaccessible. we also canāt ignore the way social media rewards you for focusing on things that are bad, scary, outrageous, disgusting, which synergizes in this awful way with trauma discourse to encourage the formation of communities of similarly traumatized people who perpetually micro-retraumatize each other while convinced theyāre addressing the most important issues in their lives the way out of this trap appears to be variations on @visakanvās āfocus on what you want to see more ofā - shifting attention towards desires, values, dreams, visions, asking what sparks joy, moving towards rather than away, finding stories that move and inspire. thereās a lot of richness to this circle of ideas and over the last few years iāve grown to appreciate them more and more. this is not a luxury that would be nice to have, this is about how to get out of hell in the lewisian sense, the hell whose doors are locked on the inside, and back onto earth, or maybe even into heaven at this point iāve been on twitter for long enough that patterns are emerging of people whoāve been stuck on the same thing the entire time iāve known them and people whoāve successfully gotten unstuck and are doing what they want. i put myself in the stuck category so i have a lot of sympathy. if i had to name one shared trait all the stuck people seem to have, including me, itās that they all seem lonely, and in a way that maybe has something to do with pride. when i started tweeting about healing on twitter i had this crazy idea that i could do it all by myself, and the most important thing iāve learned in the last 4 years is that i was wrong. i was never supposed to do any of this on my own, and neither were you
guys can we talk about this completely insane thread where oxytocin nasal spray apparently makes an autistic guy not autistic temporarily? i'm gonna be fucked up about this for days https://t.co/dZV8r1i8MN
none of these things is a substitute for a functional social fabric https://t.co/WnHDwXwpOx
most businesses arenāt as intimate as therapy. when i buy ice cream iām not also allowing the ice cream man to take charge of shaping my personality so i donāt have to wonder if the ice cream man is shaping me into a person dependent on ice cream to function https://t.co/bRAC9qZ2JN
does anyone remember in the late 90s and early 2000s when it was considered wildly sexist and misogynist to notice anything along these lines? i'm not saying we should go back but it's interesting to me that this norm appears to have shifted and i have no idea why https://t.co/DvLQyVLAgG
pain is good, actually, i canāt believe weāre even having this conversation. people exist who congenitally canāt feel pain and they get horrible injuries and die b/c pain is literally a *warning* https://t.co/xxGLeDicBQ https://t.co/DtIjmWh96X
the most interesting and also saddest part of this to me is the part where she couldnāt tell whether any women actually enjoyed and were actually attracted to men https://t.co/TEpgKXLrIR
so about half the reason i stopped using twitter is b/c after reading scattered minds i decided i didn't want a million random psychic influences on my mind all the time. i don't intend for this to be permanent tho. hope you're all doing well š https://t.co/sypK6H8hqf
"you feel like you were told by society that the way making a living works is that you do labor and are paid a fair wage for your labor and that's how you earn the right to exist and be a member of society. you feel guilty because you've never done this"
the central appeal of psychedelics, to me, has never been being transported to some crazy magical world but that psychedelics make me feel fully human, like i am actually using all of my human senses, in a way i often find difficult to access sober. being moved by movies, etc
i feel like "it's bad on purpose to make you click" is still the most important fact about social media that people do not, on a gut level, understand, and i would like us to attempt to explain it in as many ways as possible until the point is clear
"but that's just not true. you actually do not need to earn the right to exist and you never have. the reason you're alive right now and not starving to death on the street even though you haven't had a job in 3 years is because your parents send you money because they love you"
iāll do it: itās actually bad to have more agency than you have a clear understanding of your values. thatās a recipe for being preyed on by people who want your agency to serve their agenda. refusing to cultivate agency can be a defense against this https://t.co/uxX7T5oey3
fun fact: there's a technical term for the ~polycule in the top left, it's called the "giant component" https://t.co/sqCOh0BoS9 https://t.co/6XhYCUnPKy
people really don't get how sincere the AI existential risk people are. lots of looking for ulterior motives. i promise you all the ones i've personally met and talked to literally believe what they are literally saying and are sincerely trying to prevent everyone from dying
idk past a certain level of power this just feels like a vote of no confidence in the trajectory of civilization from the people who are supposed to be shepherding it. zuck is arguably more powerful than most world leaders, he should be building for the people, not himself https://t.co/rx3O2F8YYA
one of my most woo beliefs about the bay area is that it's filled with like spiritual radioactive waste from the 60s that seeped into the spiritual groundwater. cults grow there specifically like weeds. insane background energies which is why i don't want to move back
so i've been thinking a little bit about how i'd go about introducing someone to math, a few people in portland have expressed interest in something like this. the rest of this will be some messy thinking out loud. a major thing is that there's this large and imo veryā¦
i pay a lot of attention to stuff like this when i watch older movies now, stuff that probably wasn't especially significant at the time but has acquired significance from the way it's disappeared https://t.co/kUZlp1PpQT
@visakanv there's maybe something about the silliness of the muppet concept freeing you from pretension. you wouldn't feel as much pressure to make The Serious Definitive Napoleon Biopic so you can just focus on telling a good story