What are you short on in the short term but long on in the long term
One of mine is probably psychedelics. I think current tools are slightly overhyped, but novel discovery of new better ones is extremely underhyped (/ criminalized 😢)
Also neural network interpretability. I think very short term (next year) it’ll probably continue to be kind of niche but long term it’ll be known as one the most exciting subfields in science
Scientific publishing. Distill & scihub were big hits to the community I think, and I’m not excited by many other projects right now. But long term I’m optimistic
.@willwjack he hasn’t posted a single banger in almost a week but long term he’s gonna take over this place
The jhanas. Basically no one who isn’t a serious meditator has heard of them and I don’t expect that to change soon, but their value proposition is hilariously ridiculously good and they’re not that hard, and at some point they’ll become a big hit like psychedelics are now
Mentorship over traditional schooling. It’s so obviously better (eg Two Sigma Problem) and the college psyop is slowly falling apart. I think long term optionality culture isn’t that good, better to make specific bets learning under specific people, bigger wins that way
.Bret Victor (@worrydream) I wouldn’t say I’m short his current project dynamicland (itself a long term project), but I’m confident he’ll do great things in the long term, and compared to that I’m short short term
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A lot of people I know are giving up good feels for a chance at a lot of money but don’t have a plan to convert that money back into good feels, and I think they’ll find it’s harder than they expect
I think they also overestimate how hard it is to just get those good feels directly. All these people are talented and have lots of energy and could easily learn the jhanas, work towards self-love, healing their traumas, PSNE states etc there are a lot of paths
This isn’t about people that are primarily mission driven (which is most people I know) just the ones who are out primarily for money for the theoretical good feels that money will give, which is still a huge amount of people
There’s no attention police stopping you from just attending to pleasant sensations
Also I totally get how monks were celibate now. They had more or less directly comparable — but way more fun — tools
This is a good thing by the way! It’s easier to eat your vegetables (train your concentration) when each vegetable comes with two hundred spoons of sugar (extremely potent tranquil bliss)
Being able to enter jhana one walking around with buzzing blissful piti encompassing the body using concentration is the closest thing I know of to going Super Saiyan
It’s synesthetically golden to me, which I think is a big part of it
The closest analogy is imagine you were wearing a big fuzzy weightless blanket that’s staticy and that static is stably stimulating, blissful, and exciting. And you can do whatever with awareness (eg listen to music, dance) as long as attention is on the blanket
Scores I was pretty sure my body did not keep, it turns out it kept
As far as I can tell it basically kept all the scores
One small area of my lower right back has at least three major scores (surfing accident small Caribbean island 24yo, wrestling 8yo, sledding into tree 13yo). Jhana into body scanning into an embodied emotional-memory is like a memory mind-palace and they all come out to play
“If you are faced with [fear of loss of control, stopping you from entering the jhanas], the first thing to realize is you have never actually been in control of anything ever.”
Right Concentration by Brasington Leigh, which I recommend if you happen to enjoy the idea of nearly infinite access to bliss and tranquility
My favorite things about the (first four) jhanas is that experiencing the purest concentrated form of the basis vectors of emotions (excitement, joy, content, equanimity) makes it easier to pre-cognitively translate normal good feelings to a vector of those emotions combined