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Jim OShaughnessy Profile picture
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2 Dec, 5 tweets, 1 min read
1/ "The wrong software guarantees wrong answers, or total gibberish. Conversely, the correct software, if you find it, will often "miraculously" solve problems that had appeared intractable.”
~Robert Anton Wilson

The Thinker and The Prover, Threads 1-4
2/ Thread One

3/ Thread Two

4/ Thread Three

5/ Thread Four

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More from @jposhaughnessy

Jim OShaughnessy Profile picture
2 Dec
1/ The Thinker and The Prover, Part 4

“The lunatic is in my head
You raise the blade, you make the change
You re-arrange me 'til I'm sane
You lock the door
And throw away the key
There's someone in my head but it's not me”
~Pink Floyd
2/ We’re now going to look at what we’re up against—hint, it’s a lot and sometimes freezes our efforts to change—first, from outside influences and then from our own minds. I’ll also make some suggestions along the way for how you can reignite your
3/ Thinker and change your perceptions. There’s no magic to it, only our willingness to take on the difficult task of evaluating and challenging our own beliefs.

So many misunderstandings and tragedies result from our (and by “our” I mean all humans) inability to properly do an
Read 25 tweets
Jim OShaughnessy Profile picture
26 Nov
1/ Reading "The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous" by Joseph Henrich

The first thing that strikes me is the idea that in addition to many psychological studies having serious replication problems
2/ the author found that even well designed studies have: "Massively biased samples: Most of what was known experimentally about human psychology and behavior was based on studies with undergraduates from Western societies.
3/ At the time, 96 percent of experimental participants were drawn from northern Europe, North America, or Australia, and about 70 percent of these were American undergraduates."

This leads to biases the author and his research associates dub
Read 8 tweets
Jim OShaughnessy Profile picture
24 Nov
1/ The Thinker and The Prover--Part 3

We left off with how the ability to challenge consensus reality could be a horrible or great thing, depending upon where society finds itself at the time. Generally, the more open and free a society,
2/ the greater the impact of people who challenge the conventional wisdom. One of the reasons why my Prover always finds free markets superior to other systems is because they have provided the lion’s share of new things and ideas. This wasn’t always so,
3/ and for certain regions ruled by Fundamentalist political or religious beliefs, *still* isn’t so.

When we study history, we see that before the connected computer age, consensus reality changed very slowly and often was extremely hostile to anyone who injected new ideas
Read 25 tweets
Jim OShaughnessy Profile picture
16 Nov
1/ "Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages."
~Bertrand Russell
2/ Everyone who thinks must face the scary question of: Why?

Why are we here, there *must* be some grand scheme, some huge meaning to life.

So asked Buddha, Marcus Aurelius, Lao Tzu, Jesus Christ, William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, et al. "What is the grand purpose?"
3/ There must be complex answers for this complex question!

Whole industries, academies, universities, philosophies, religions are there with the right answer, right?

Um, probably not.

Life and these institutions and philosophies have great, almost infinite pre-packaged
Read 10 tweets
Jim OShaughnessy Profile picture
15 Nov
1/ The Thinker and the Prover, Part 2

So why is being aware of this software “glitch” in our HumanOS useful? I believe that understanding it can help you immeasurably in both understanding yourself and other people.

The first observation is that while many can see this process
2/ clearly in *other* people, they passionately believe that it does not affect them.

If you’re a human being, it DOES affect you and realizing that can help you out of the conundrum it causes all of us.
3/ “ A good way to discover your shortcomings,” said the Master, “ is to observe what irritates you in others.”
~Anthony de Mello

But before we turn to self-examination, let’s look at some other ways understanding this process can help us
Read 16 tweets
Jim OShaughnessy Profile picture
14 Nov
1/ The Thinker and the Prover--a thread

“The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. That’s some serious shit. Most people wouldn’t want to examine that statement, much less their own lives.”
~Jed McKenna
2/ “We say “seeing is believing,” but actually, as Santayana pointed out, we are all much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe nearly all the time and only occasionally seeing what we can’t believe.”
~Robert Anton Wilson
3/ "People consistently overrate their own skill, honesty, generosity, and autonomy…They chalk up their successes to skill and their failures to luck, and always feel that the other side has gotten a better deal in a compromise.”
~Steven Pinker
Read 25 tweets

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