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Nick Cammarata Profile picture
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18 Jan, 4 tweets, 2 min read
can’t believe how life-changing this is and how the basics can be learned in just a few hours

it seems wrong but as far as I can tell the world is filled of pure magic that somehow never leaves obscurity
Like why doesn’t every kid learn about 5-MeO-DMT in class. Even if the take-away is “don’t do it”, everyone deserves to know how non-boring the world actually is

Some day I’ll teach a course called Life is Magic where each lecture is a different thing like this. There’s so many
I don’t actually have that much confidence in any one magic thing but I have tons of confidence in the ensemble of all of them

If you have a problem and haven’t tried at least three magic things to solve it you have no reason to give up hope
It probably sounds like I’m just talking about drugs, but that’s just one class of magic and there’s so many classes. And it’s worth utilizing all of them

Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology

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More from @nickcammarata

Nick Cammarata Profile picture
17 Jan
Did you know that in addition to fixing all your life’s problems, Alexander Technique can improve your posture??
Walking around this river with expanded awareness feels just like low-dose psilocybin. Googled this and apparently I’m very not the first person to think it

Technically speaking, Alexander Technique is a fungus Image
I set an intent to cross the river and expanded my awareness so hard this magic bridge popped into existence Image
Read 7 tweets
Nick Cammarata Profile picture
20 Dec 20
honestly hard to imagine how anyone thinks any idea is out there when general relativity, the delayed-choice quantum eraser, black holes, evolution somehow discovering consciousness, and 5-MeO-DMT all uncontroversially exist
if we set the delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment at 10 on the out-there scale, your agi timeline, quirky theory of mind, or prediction of a strange political outcome is like max a 2/10 to me
you think leaving facebook to join a startup is sooo crazy yet you've been literally BENDING TIME every second of your life and have never even thought about it
Read 5 tweets
Nick Cammarata Profile picture
19 Dec 20
found an old email from high school when I emailed the airbnb founders to see if they were down to pay for me and two friends to travel around the world using airbnb before it was well known

they were interested and asked for our itinerary! But decided we weren't cool enough :( Image
to be clear, by experienced traveller we mean a random high school kid who had been to a few countries. At the time I'd never left America, so having travelled a few times sounded very experienced to me
David and I spent about an hour nervously checking every detail of that email to make sure it was perfect and we didn't obviously sound like naive teenagers. Yet called it "iternary"

I lost that email account but IIRC Joe responded in like 3 minutes with a detailed response
Read 7 tweets
Nick Cammarata Profile picture
8 Dec 20
Current feeling on meta-science: I’m not sure anyone — authors, readers, etc — actually likes papers. What if we just got rid of them?

What could we replace them with?
conjecture: papers are weak and unopinionated

want to communicate an idea? do a vlog -- most communication is about inexplicit vibes

want to release a reproducible protocol? Record you in colab doing it, release for one click reproducibility

want to debate your side of an idea against another side? Do an adversarial collaboration with someone who disagrees with you slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/24/adv…

want real peer review? Record podcast with a bunch of peers for a couple hours. Less time, higher bandwidth than normal review
Read 6 tweets
Nick Cammarata Profile picture
7 Dec 20
i’m often told people love half of what i write and hate the other half (to a surprising degree)

the second costs followers every time but it feels better to aim for honesty than status. I'm helped by the few who engage with the hated ones, and i don't think they know 1/
i’d encourage anyone in a similar position for others to do it more. First, they'll love you if you engage with the stuff others don’t, either riffing off in agreement or providing thoughtful criticism. But the reason to do it isn’t to be loved 2/
but because you’re helping cultivate the courage to write what is true to them, which is surprisingly hard. And by helping them write you're helping them think. Their best stuff hides in the intersection of hated and true, and you're helping them search this area for treasure
Read 4 tweets
Nick Cammarata Profile picture
3 Nov 20
“The most counterintuitive secret about startups is it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one.” - Sam Altman

I think there’s a similar secret in psych. It’s sometimes easier to become happier than anyone you’ve ever met than it is to just cure low mood
one reason is that with the ambitious path you’ll need powerful tools and tons of self introspection to understand how you work and why you’re not 10/10 already

Whereas if you aim for marginal gains you may try symptomatic treatments that end up doing nothing at all
another is that in my experience most people only have one or two core things (part of identity, a trauma, etc) blocking them, often that they’re unaware of

Without reverse engineering and healing them it’s hard to have any progress, but if you do process can be shocking
Read 4 tweets

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