tried getting claude to write funny tweets starting from 9 examples. it generated some okay stuff but nothing that actually made me laugh. then i tried asking it to generate tweets written from its perspective rather than a human's and actually laughed. hmm asked claude to use a more authentic voice, then asked it to reflect on the nature of humor and what kind of humor would be more authentic to it. not bad, a couple of these made me laugh out loud. that last one though lmao

there’s this woman awhile ago who tweeted something like “i was mentally ill until i fell in love with someone i had to have my shit together to be with, so i decided to stop being mentally ill and it worked” and not to overstate this but there’s something real and impt here

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1842921984751210540

coherence therapy takes the pov that many (most?) mental illness “symptoms” are on some level strategies for getting needs met. it assigns the “patient” enormous amounts of agency, which starts out shadowed, and part of how the therapy works is reclaiming this agency

thread of notes on scattered minds by gabor mate

https://twitter.com/uberstuber/status/1757247476766323199

> ADD has much to do with pain, present in every one of the adults and children who have come to me for assessment

> "Every aspect of my life hurts," a thirty-seven-year-old man told me during his second visit to my office

ADHD megathread 1. @visakanv constructive ADHD draft notes (Contains Actionable Advice)

https://x.com/visakanv/status/1448528076577460225?s=20

on the question of whether human-level AI is possible even in principle, people seem to reflexively believe “obviously yes” or “obviously no,” and i’ve never seen anyone publicly change their mind in either direction. and the split is like 80% predictable by STEM background being a rationalist in the yudkowskian sense selected heavily, among other things, for people who believe that human-level AI is obviously possible. to me at age 22 it boiled down to “humans are just very complicated machines built out of molecules by evolution”

short reviews of / commentary on movies i watched on netflix because netflix told me they were leaving soon, or some other place, or for some other reason: 1. the road to el dorado (2000): aged weirdly. it's impossible to ignore the colonialism now and chel now stands out as bizarrely horny for a kids' movie. nobody's allowed to be that horny anymore. some cool animation but deeply mediocre music. watch prince of egypt instead

it's significant about eliezer yudkowsky's core sequences material that most of it is elaborate arguments for weird positions but the one time he switches to "this is obvious to a child and requires no further elaboration" is when he talks about death being bad

https://twitter.com/s8mb/status/1727996069043130652

i am not the person to write about this in more detail but in the worldview of the sequences there is no such thing as making peace with death in a real way. in retrospect this speaks to a profound lack of spiritual sophistication and imo is close to the heart of the disease

at the first bio-emotive retreat i was paired up to facilitate bio-emotive for this woman. we started with

"there's this friend who owes me money and i haven't been on her case about it"

got to

"why do i always let people walk all over me"

then: raped when she was 14 the point of this story is not about me but i'll mention that i noticed something funny about her while we were talking at the beginning of the session: anytime she answered a question, regardless of her answer, she shook her head like she was saying "no"

the ADHD meme is something like "omg i'm interested in so many different things" but my personal experience is that i've always felt like i have a single interest. it's just very big and expansive and has tendrils everywhere. but it's one thing, there's a clear unity to it t.co/3PS8pAifoY some people were just born to see the connections between everything. they're real and they're not arbitrary. everything is happening in the same world, everything depends on the same underlying laws and invariants, everything is a mirror to everything else

ah. i've been relating to grad school as "that time i failed to write a thesis" but it would be more accurate to say that my mathoverflow / stackexchange answers + my math blog posts *are* my thesis. none of that was a waste of time. people still regularly thank me for it if i had written a traditional thesis on the topic my advisor wanted me to it would have been comprehensible to ~10 people in the world. meanwhile the actual writing i did instead was read by... hundreds of thousands of people? (numbers in the images are prob overestimates)

tweeting enthusiastic general proclamations about The Way Things Are is reconsolidating *your own* worldview in light of new experiences. none of those tweets should be read as claims in papers or whatever. that's just what thinking out loud actually looks and feels like rationalist speech norms actively interfere with the process of thinking out loud and in the worst case amount to constant gaslighting, including self-gaslighting; even when it's not that bad they interfere with the necessary spirit of *play*

hello friends i am quoted briefly in this article about rationalist / EA dysfunction which is basically accurate afaict and which i basically agree with, take a look; link in the next tweet as usual for algo reasons (open in incognito if necessary) bloomberg link (open in incognito if necessary)

bloomberg.com/news/features/…

the first girl i ever had a crush on was named austin. 1st grade. i had just moved to the united states and i had hardly seen any white people before. i have a single fleeting image of her face in my memory. she was a redhead with freckles and i would've died for her

https://twitter.com/enlightenedcoop/status/1632537122811920385

blake shelton wrote a song called austin which is about being permanently in love with a woman who is sort of named austin. and throughout elementary school i used to sing this song and think about austin and pretend i was singing it to her

anyone else here have favorite etymologies? pls share below. i am collecting them

https://twitter.com/dreamyweather/status/1632585422152040448

from a previous thread:

https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1370525405631815685?s=20

working with emotions eventually spills over into less comfortable topics. stuff i’ve seen (tentative):

anger + fear + grief ➡️ power, agency, harm, responsibility, ethics, politics, justice, gender, sex, race

shame + guilt ➡️ ethics, culture, religion, god, money

what else? ayyy

https://twitter.com/JakeOrthwein/status/1632576775543992320?s=20

sometimes meditators use emptiness to gaslight themselves there’s nothing wrong with thinking. thinking is for figuring things out. if you find yourself thinking a lot, you are trying to figure something out. one of the things you’re trying to figure out is what you’re trying to figure out

i taught a class like this once but it was called introduction to leadership. i wrote “introduction to leadership” on the board then sat down and didn’t say anything and waited

https://twitter.com/glitchesroux/status/1632451094541398016

i ran it three times. my favorite time was when someone managed to convince the rest of the class to leave the classroom and talk about leadership outdoors

[slams hand down on table] rationality is an attempt to reconstruct judaism but using exclusively the mind instead of the heart, and effective altruism is the same thing but for christianity. motherFUCKER nothing makes sense without this. eliezer is jewish, holden and elie are jewish, will macaskill is scottish which i assume means he’s christian as balls, peter singer’s parents were austrian jews. godDAMNIT

here's my dating advice for straight guys: learn how to read her mind. not joking. completely serious. this is not a dig at women. become psychic deida was lowkey right about everything but you can't read this book completely literally or as a set of instructions. it's poetry

amazon.com/Way-Superior-M…

omg ok so when i was in 8th grade i was in a gifted program and they taught us an intro to philosophy class as an experiment. on the first day our teacher mrs. B wrote "who am i" on the board and then shouted it three different ways:

who am IIII
who AM i
WHO am i anyway that was a really fucking heavy question to lay on a group of 13-year-olds in retrospect and it might've taken me 19 years but i think i'm finally starting to get a handle on who i am. sorry this assignment took me so long mrs. B it was really hard but i did my best

diane duane's "so you want to be a wizard" is one of my favorite YA novels and i wish more people knew about it so i could reference it more easily. there are some beautiful ideas about magic in this book but one of the spookiest is about what happens if you give magic up there's a refrain in these books that "magic does not live in the unwilling heart." when you become a wizard in this universe you take an oath to use your magic to do good and be of service. you can decide to renounce that oath, though, if the burden becomes too heavy