Obsidian
7mo ago
If this is done at anything less than world-ending scale, technological society will hormetically adapt to prevent future instances. It is all but hopeless.
Obsidian
4mo ago
I want to understand more about what you're working with/where you're coming from.
Obsidian
1yr ago
I fucking love olives. I would eat them all the time if they weren't so expensive.
Kalamata olives, olives stuffed with garlic or pimento, olive bread, olives in greek salad... holy shit dude
Obsidian
5mo ago
What aspects turned you off? I liked the political plays, the tension, the insurgency, the Mafia-style social deduction games. If you completely ignore the subplots having to do with spirituality and mysticism, it's a good show!
Obsidian
1yr ago
The only thing I'd push back against here is early specialization. The edifice of human knowledge is becoming very dense, and you need deep knowledge and experience in a constellation of neighbouring fields if you are to merely catch up with the state of the art in one field, much less make valuable original contributions.
This is exactly the upbringing I've wished I'd had. No one asked for context, but let me grudgepost a little:
Everyone agreed I was gifted, and then did nothing to act on that. I wasted ten years of my early life, in full conscience of the fact, waiting for the autonomy and resources needed to push myself.
I hit thirty this year. There's something special about that number: it cut through any internal narratives I may have had about stuff I want to do later. Well, good morning and happy birthday, we are later, later is today! You are on the downslope now, your cognitive and physical capacities are going to get monotonically worse until the day you expire. You're not going to have any more free time or energy or drive than you do right now. This Is Your Life, this is your cruising speed, get what you want out of it now or forever hold your peace.
I've experienced this as a second childhood.
After a difficult first go-around, the primary enterprise of my adult life has been to surround myself with people who are capable, trustworthy, who will invest in me and who are worthy of investing in. And boy have I lucked out. I enter this phase of my life surrounded by brothers, and quite a few sisters, who elevate me and whom I can help elevate.
And though I am paying it forward already in some measure, I hope to go further, through the same kind of life journey that Hoel describes.
What you call raising a genius, to me seems to be merely honouring a child for who and what he is. Through this, even a phenotypically unexceptional child can be made exceptional by bringing him to recognize his own worth, and understanding the kinds of expectations it is reasonable to have of himself. Part and parcel of this is integration in a rich, multigenerational social, physical and intellectual life.
I like the Orthodox imagery of saints coifed in gold leaf halos. Surround yourself with gold-coifed men and women. Raise each other up, and your children as well.
Obsidian
1yr ago
I predict that this is a false dichotomy, and that AI is going to lead to a reorganization of American political coalitions such that the red and blue tribes will not exist in recognizable form. There will be schisms, alliances of convenience, and especially the rise of currently non-existent or occluded political interest groups.
Obsidian
1yr ago
I went to choir for the first time last night. Seriously one of the most elevating experiences I've had in the past ten years.
It compares favorably to psychedelics: same category of experience, but lower commitment and more materially meaningful.
Obsidian
1yr ago
First, there is no reserve of fresh, high-morale troops that Ukraine is bringing to the fight, like the Allies did as the Americans arrived starting in 1917.
I think high-tech weaponry has fundamentally reshaped warfare, though the final word isn't written on this.
"unbounded supply of Javelins, Stingers and Bayraktars" is the new "reserve of fresh, high-morale troops". Maybe.
Obsidian
4mo ago
Read The World Beyond Your Head. Might get you out of your rut, might, not, either way it's interesting thought on the topic of discipline, motivation and flourishing.
Obsidian
1yr ago
Did anyone else get cold sweats, shivering and nausea since this morning? Just me?
Obsidian
1yr ago
You're probably missing some important machinery around time preference and tradeoffs.
Obsidian
1yr ago
But I actually think this may be an accidentally brilliant choice.
Nope, it was very intentional. Reddit political echo chamber dynamics are well-understood, and we doubled down time after time on the megathread format because it introduced friction in those dynamics the way you describe.
Obsidian
1yr ago
Rephrased: there is no such thing as "merely" homeschooling. It's a big fucking decision with big fucking tradeoffs.
Obsidian
1yr ago
This is my first choir, joined because I'm trying to learn music. I got some extraordinary resources for self-study from a fellow Mottizen (Gary Karpinski is the absolute goat) but it was time to take it social. I heard the choir at a friend's Orthodox church and decided I liked it.
My choir is over a hundred people strong. We learn the lines in-person, barely anyone knows how to sight-read. I'm going above and beyond by doing any amount of solo practice.
The first time I heard the sopranos join in I was slammed by a mystical experience, comparable to calmly stepping into a cold shower or being on psychedelic mushrooms.
Would be pretty sad if you saw yourself as too old to be bothered to learn music. We have a bunch of seventy year olds singing soprano, though maybe that's easier to learn. (I sing bass, which is mostly a combination of tonic/subdominant/dominant. And then there's Handel, whoops.)
Obsidian
1yr ago
I'm strongly against this kind of artificial legibility. It can enable newcomers to perform acquaintance of the community far beyond where they're at.
Keep things hidden in plain sight lest you scrap the pipeline.
Obsidian
1yr ago
It's funny because this is OCD spectrum behaviour but there's no telling whether there's a hidden sixth point that goes "also, OCD is ruining my life" or if this is the full extent of your quirkiness
Obsidian
1yr ago
Something's missing. From the stuff you tried, it sounds like maybe it is that you don't spend enough quality time with quality people.
As for myself, I try to keep a stable representation of who I want to be and what I deserve, and then I pay homage to that by getting up, going out, connecting with people, working out, etc.
Obsidian
1yr ago
We are at the stage where the technology exists but is not yet effectively controllable by those in power. Compare with the Internet, which was value-neutral for a long time; but today oligopolies in payment processing and technical infrastructure enable the ruling coalition to push its opponents into ever more remote corners of the ecosystem. Surely dissident online spaces like this one will only become more marginalized as time goes on; so it will be with dissident use of AI technology.
Very happy to see you here. This series is one of my favorite fixtures of this space.
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