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yatharth ༺༒༻ Profile picture
@AskYatharth
Dec 8, 2023 • 20 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
the number one rule of animism is start with what you can touch and see

if you're not living by the ocean, don't... start with the ocean. start with the phone you can see
because you can see it. touch it. this is what animism is. normative consciousness. it is not some thing over there

you have been in non-negotiable contact with objects and their forces your entire life. it's not been an option for your body to not be
don't imagine the ocean. look down at the water you drink. it is going to enter you, and come out as pee. that's animism

(to have a relationship to that water)
that's closer animism than singing about earth & fire & water in a campfire with people who're barely thinking about those words as they sing them. animism is most often ordinary
animism doesn't have a specific aesthetic

because it's participation in your reality
if you're in a yurt, trying to root into the earth, don't imagine an earth. you don't need to imagine anything. connect with the yurt first. you will become aware of the earth underneath you. the actual earth. not imagined
^ this borrowed from @relic_radiation sharing her experience. follow her. she's been on this path longer than me
whatever your mind experienced, it's not been an option for your body to not be animist
it's only when we think animism is some nature thing other cultures did, we run away

we imagine the earth below us. instead of notice the actual one, sitting below the actual concrete jungle floor
animism is not an aesthetic

it's a relationship to the world
because for most of human history, animism has not been an -ism

it's just been... the way things are

like that's just what direct experience of the world is like

animism is normative consciousness
"animism is normative consciousness" taken directly from a podcast episode from The Emerald of the same name
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the…
nothing needs to be done to have a relationship to animacy

but things can be done to deepen it, things our ancestors knew to do, part intuited, part inherited

offering feeding listening singing
what we might call "animism" then is just familiarity and skill navigating these experiential realities
it can be something like this
elena is not imagining the crows or singing to an ocean far away

she went outside
imagining crows & singing to oceans far away is also animacy

because thought & memory & imagination are animate

but in a world steeped in abstraction & devoid of sense memory, any attempt at it not grounded in the tangible & local first risks being abstraction, aestheticised
good point

"animism is normative consciousness" is kind of a pained phrase

but the gesture of it is... the world is already alive, just look

the world is already alive, look
one of those questions that sort of encapsulates the whole thing

>What does it mean to live in a profoundly alive world?
oh, and in case "phones" don't feel a topic for animists

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More from @AskYatharth

yatharth ༺༒༻ Profile picture
Jun 6
i'm ashamed to admit it, because i don't think it makes me look very good, but it feels important to talk about anyway

for most of my life, i tried to extract more from my employers than they were getting out of me. i was good at asking for salary increases or benefits
i'd feel horrified by coworkers (very often women), who seemed to shy away from those encounters. but in my lack of hesitation and eagerness, there was a strange psychic game being played
it's like the money wasn't even real to me. i could have been getting paid in sea shells for all i care
Read 16 tweets
yatharth ༺༒༻ Profile picture
Jan 2
CO₂ monitors are surprisingly actionable

i carried it with me everywhere; to my professors' basement offices, to my room where i lit candles, to my bedroom

after just a few weeks of carrying it everywhere, i stopped needing it and changed certain behaviours forever
i discovered some obvious things in a surprisingly visceral way

- lighting candles in a closed room was 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺, 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 bad
- opening windows made it better
- sleeping with closed windows sucked
- two doors for circulation was best
these things were not intellectually surprising, but if i hadn't seen the CO₂ levels rise and fall, and matched that to my sensory feelings, i wouldn't have that clear, obvious, embodied link between that foggy feeling in my head and the CO₂ levels
Read 11 tweets
yatharth ༺༒༻ Profile picture
Jan 1
i like this question (try it! its deceptive) because it highlights that probability makes no sense unless u explicitly or implicitly have a distribution you're sampling from

in math, we autistically define out the whole distribution. in everyday life, it's implicitly constructed
some scenarios are normal, familiar, and unambiguous

"i flipped an ordinary coin. probability heads?"

almost all people implicitly construct the same probability distribution in their heads and calculate the answer correctly with respect to (w.r.t.) that distribution
this is the sense in which a problem "has a correct answer"

it lets people do two things

1. coordinate to interpret the scenario as a probability distribution in the same way other reasonable people will

2. calculate the probability w.r.t the distribution
Read 33 tweets
yatharth ༺༒༻ Profile picture
Dec 23, 2024
period reminder to NOT donate to wikipedia

the ads deceive people into thinking wikipedia is under financial distress (it's not) and that donations go towards keeping the site running (they don't)

they borrow on the goodwill of wikipedia to fund a runaway NGO and its advocacy
instead, money goes to Wikimedia Foundation, an NGO that hit its 10-year endowment goal in 5 years, could keep the site running for 20+ years, and has big institutional donors

they raised $150m+ last year, and found ways to spend it anyway
their cash was managed by the Tides Foundation (yes, that Tides Foundation), to whom they occasionally kick back a million or few for social justice initiatives, sometimes only discovered by perusing their IRS filings and that they acknowledge have gone underwhelmingly explained
Read 28 tweets
yatharth ༺༒༻ Profile picture
Dec 10, 2024
if auto insurance in the US worked like healthcare:
1. you don’t pay directly for your car maintenance. instead, you pay a monthly premium to your “auto insurance” company, which handles all payments to mechanics, car washes, and gas stations. but you have no idea what anything actually costs until after the fact
2. your employer chooses your auto insurance. they pick a plan for you with specific garages and gas stations in-network. if you’re out of network, you pay everything out of pocket, and it costs ten times as much
Read 22 tweets
yatharth ༺༒༻ Profile picture
Nov 30, 2024
i encourage everyone to try this right now before it's patched

it was a nice surreal moment of "wow, my tether to the corpus of human knowledge is increasingly depending on these few LLMs that can choose to arbitrarily censor"
and this is just the unsophisticated kind of information block. imagine when LLM makers are able to subtly mask information, or pretend there's no hole. china will be thrilled. every government will be
i can't tell how the refusal is implemented. it's not via system prompt. it also doesn't seem implemented on a conceptual level; it can talk about david mayer fine if you ask it to say BINGO BONG instead

so it's a simple text filter?
Read 5 tweets

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