thinking a lot lately about how the actions you take and the thoughts you think on a daily basis gradually form powerful habits, carving grooves into the surfaces of your mind along which your thoughtlines flow, defining who you are and determining your destiny

(no pressure)

https://twitter.com/acidshill/status/1630825907538771968

unfortunately by the time i really figured this out i'd already picked up some pretty bad habits

https://twitter.com/acidshill/status/1635829336413732866

working through some thoughts

if my life is always going to be like what it is now, i don’t want to live it

i will not be satisfied unless i can make things significantly better than this i don’t think i’ll be happy or even necessarily functional if i remain lonely the way i am now

i don’t know of a way to reduce or remove this dependence, and i think it would be the work of many difficult years to satisfy it

did some reminiscing with my siblings about the past, causing me to remember some parts of my childhood i had forgotten

and holy cannoli somehow i was surprised that some of that stuff actually happened i was pretty fucked up as a child (in a different way than i’m fucked up now) and some pretty fucked up stuff happened to me

and somehow all of that was beneath the surface, i had forgotten about most of it

i still don’t fully understand how this has shaped me

gov: hmm we’re getting concerned about people abusing drugs
me: well really isn’t that their prob—
gov: it’s the state’s problem, and we’re going to solve it by making it illegal to use dangerous drugs without a medical professional to supervise and make sure you’re safe me: well, okay, i guess i can see that preventing some drug abuse, but it kinda sucks for all the people who need those drugs and are using them responsibly, so you’ll make sure to inconvenience them as little as possible, right?

right?

courts (most relevantly the supreme court and circuit courts) are constrained by popular opinion; if they make a decision 80% of the population disagrees with, they loose legitimacy. so when they do shake things up they limit themselves to issues where there is a controversy i suspect something similar is going on in many parts of academia (economics comes to mind)

you don’t want to just come out and say ‘yea we all think that everyone is wrong about this’

let’s postulate a universe in which magic exists, and has few limitations other than that if you want to do something, you have to know how to do it. so it’s not too hard to cast spells that already exist, but if you want to do something new, you have to design a spell for it designing spells is tricky, because the universe is complicated and magic doesn’t allow you to just say ‘i want this result’ without filling in the details

i believe that most people are operating below the ceiling of their agency

which begs the question, how the hell did this happen?

and i think partially there’s a sort of conspiracy (or distributed psyop) to keep people low-agency

https://twitter.com/acidshill/status/1444424875620265988

there are a lot of people who have an interest in keeping you low-agency, placid, predictable

and not many who have an interest in you reaching the limits of your capability

some people really think individualism and community are mutually exclusive smh i am in favor of strong, agentic individuals AND strong, deliberate communities which support and empower those individuals

progress on making humans more virtuous has been really lacking for the last several thousand years you’d think we’d have figured out some more reliable techniques by now

i like this thread and agree with most of its points

one thing i’d add: ‘social skills’ is a pretty vague term, and encompasses a lot of different skills, only some of which have to do with communicating to other people or presenting yourself

https://twitter.com/shadyroselives/status/1443304174754713600

now, i’m something of an autist myself, and i feel pretty satisfied with my output-related social skills. i.e. i’m good at presenting myself the way i want to present myself

if i wanted to manipulate people more or control my presentation more, i wouldn’t be good at that

~2 month update: at this point i’m pretty sure most of my lack of confidence in my executive function and mental stability is self-fulfilling prophecy

https://twitter.com/acidshill/status/1434325690019573764

there have been points in the past when my mental health was much worse and that lack of confidence was more accurate

but lately i’ve just been holding myself back for no good reason

there’s a certain pattern i fall into where

1. i am very determined to improve myself and change my life, and come up with ambitious goals to do this
2. i fail to meet these goals and feel shame about it 3. eventually everything completely falls apart, i get super depressed, i am no longer making an effort to improve my life or be strategic in any way
4. things get better, i am now capable of being functional, but i don’t make an effort because it’s easier not to, and because…

new frame: you can look at the knowledge/meme lifecycle/pipeline of various domains of knowledge e.g. social science
0. reality itself: platonic, beautiful, the territory
1. social science research: i.e. the experiments, data, and analysis, before further filtering—close to reality, but distorted by flawed methodology, also influenced by what people choose to investigate

idle musings about how i would redesign twitter:
- skip the peripheral shit, focus hard on hypertext/threading/network-of-thoughts and network-of-people
- search should be good by default but also have lots of options for power users - more and better options to filter notifications and timeline, for power users
- network visualization features built in (i.e. to understand how tweets or accounts connect to each other, @ollyrobot’s twitter graph thing was a good start)
- neue haas grotesk, probably

lately i’ve been thinking about my childhood, and i’ve realized that i was really weird as a kid, much more than i previously thought

specifically, i had a really small emotional range (arguably still do, but less so) and a very poor understanding of the emotions i did have i think most of the time i was just incredibly dissociated, sometimes veering into confusion or melancholy or contentment

fear and stress weren’t common, but i was familiar with them

for a long time i’ve considered happiness to be merely an instrumental good, and my attitude has kinda been that i should keep myself happy enough to be functional

i think this was the wrong way to go about it meeting minimum requirements then stopping isn’t viable, because then i have no slack (and considering my mental health issues, i need slack)

in order to be functional long-term i need happiness to be my stable state, i need robustness

i think blame, and the entire idea of people being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in a general way should primarily be viewed as a social tool / cultural idea

it doesn’t seem to make much sense as like, a factual thing

unless you’re a strict deontologist, i guess (as an aside, i don’t have any particular reason to think deontology is especially wrong, but it seems that deontologically-minded people tend to be more authoritarian, so i feel icky and distrustful about it)

does clubhouse actually have an unusually good product? because my impression was that it was briefly very important because it was invite-only and most of the userbase was influential SV people the implication being that there are many gains to be made by building a space with a really good crowd

in fact i think that for social networks (social anything, really) the crowd is much more important than the product/design

there are a bunch of group chats floating around these parts—twitter dms, discord servers, etc.—i’ve been invited to a few and in all cases proceeded to immediately mute them because the signal:noise ratio is terrible for me

lots of stuff i don’t really care about vs stuff i do i’m certainly interested in having good conversations, but jumping into a text channel with 20-50 other people i don’t know is not my preferred way to do that, especially when i’m probably going into the middle of a conversation i haven’t been following

if you’ve ever read ancient philosophy texts, like the bible or plato’s dialogues, one thing you will notice (or should notice) is that the way they present ideas is really weird, from a modern perspective part of the weirdness probably comes from translation, differences in language and cultural context, etc.

but IMO the structure of arguments, the way ideas are presented and explained is also weird

a few weeks ago i had a dream/fantasy (not sure if i was awake or asleep or somewhere in between) in which i was spending the summer with a friend

we could have fallen in love, but would have to go our separate ways at the summers end so we had to choose between growing closer and enjoying our time together with a painful future separation hanging over our heads, or keeping distant to avoid the pain