There is a special ladder in Jerusalem that nobody is allowed to move, and its story is related to the origin of the term "status quo"

The ladder and the story 🧵 The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is a 4th century church that is the center of multiple denominations of Christianity, and is said to be on the spot where Jesus was crucified, buried, and resurrected

Demian: The Story of a Boyhood (of Emil Sinclair) written by Hermann Hesse

In this 🧵we're going to trace how it connects to Jungian psychotherapy, and 1st century AD Gnosticism. You're also going to find out about chicken-headed gods, it's gonna get weird

lfg this book got given to me when I was an exchange student, at a key moment in my life where I was primed to hear what it had to say. Got my mind blown by the 25% of it I understood at the time, still unraveling it all

This is Douglas Hofstadter, professor of Cognitive & Computer Science at Indiana University Bloomington

Best known for his book Goedel, Escher, Bach (1980)

this is nerd 🧵 about his influence on me, and the present

back in high school I was a nerd, but I didn't have access to other nerds. Interest in esoteric topics was strongly socially punished, and it felt (to me) there was no one around me with much interest in learning and/or curiosity. It was pretty isolating

This is the Flammarion Engraving. You've probably seen it before but didn't know it was called that.

In this thread we're going to nerd out about where this came from, what it means, mistakes people have made about it, and more. lfg. 🚀🧵 That first one was a colorized version. The real one is a woodcut and looks like this. Colors were interpreted later to add pizzaz

It's gotta be this way for a while. But good news, it's escapable by many routes, some harder, some easier. Here are some ways I've seen people escape:

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1479631037718138882

1. Question assumptions. "I should be unstuck" ORLY? Coming from where you're coming from, maybe you've got some shit to work through, maybe it's OK to be stuck. Just admitting it is major progress. Your next step is "I feel babystep progress" no longer the "I suck" loop

sometimes, you can't move your thinking forward on some topic, because you want it to move too much. 

you might be too thirsty. Desperate. It causes you to apply internal force, and that makes it worse

force tightens knots there are many situations like this; calming a fussy baby, attracting a mate, going on vacation - where you fail from the beginning if you don't have a certain ease about you

https://twitter.com/forthrighter/status/1587458201800568833?s=20

Most esoteric systems & philosophy are expressible as a set of mappings. Concretes ("fire") are mapped into abstracts ("doctrine")

Relations between concretes stand in, or speak obliquely about relationships between abstracts

Plato's Cave: in the Christian Trinity, the concretes are things like Father and Son, which is not literally meant

"Actual illustration is an exercise in futility"

If there were ineffable things that don't lend themselves to good representation with words, you might still see them surface as:

allusions, allegories
vague/veiled words
visual & musical art
intuitions/intimations I have many thoughts about what this means but nobody wants a 30-tweet nerd thread about an interpretation that's probably wrong. Suffice to say, there's more to this than you'll get on first read if you're so inclined

recipe for ginger syrup and candied ginger are near identical

in one you discard the ginger, the other the syrup

same ingredients, proportions; different outcomes depending on desired deliverable the point is that a rough set of principles evenly applied creates a good life. But what kind of good life? All kinds of different ones depending on what you select for!

the discourse seriously entertains computers replacing humans and going to mars when I cannot buy a machine that does full-auto laundry for me

where is the daily useful innovation? And if it's "too hard to deliver" why do we think AGI is easier? Wanted: machine where I toss everything unsorted into a hopper, and where cleaned, dried, folded clothes come out in neat stacks on the other end, sorted by family member wearing it

The men's suit. It's a way to not be naked, but it's also a powerful signaling device that's very culturally loaded suits are the uniform of power, wealth, and success. That's why "power suit" is a thing, and "power tie" too

Pardes, and exegesis (critical explanation or interpretation of a text) can apply to most any text

Let's do "the tortoise and the hare" one of Aesop's fables. I think most people know the tortoise and the hare but here's a recap if you don't.

Notes on "support by disagreeing well" and what it might mean to disagree well, as a branch off of this tweet

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1039420186586038273

"Stay within OP's frame (or extend it)". If the claim is coffee is best morning drink, disagree about morning drinks; do not switch frames and talk about after-dinner drinks (coffee is bad bc caffeine)

STORY TIME: Harry Potter Sorting Hats, and Academic Disciplines

A 🧵

https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1521923323931725824

@QiaochuYuan is right, they aren't particularly good at relationships. This is because:

*people go study psychology because they're drawn to find out what's wrong with them*

it is not the case that psychology makes you charismatic or better at relationships

@AbstractFairy I don't see a difference here between what I meant by crowd and what you mean by scene. The crowd isn't everybody, it's those people who are engaged in futurethink, picking, research, speculation, "inventing the future"

The "broad crowd" (everybody) takes what they're given @AbstractFairy you may know this graphic. What's called "early adopters" themselves can only come in when something is really practical

the end of the true innovation curve is where this curve *begins*