if you’re high functioning autistic I think it’s worth trying to change it and mitigate its downsides, the “I have autism must accept every symptom 100%” thing I think is a bit too far. mdma, oxytocin nasal spray, meditation, exposure therapy, regular therapy I think can do a lot

https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1836573676147478584

I think autism is completely real in the same way that depression is real but identifying with “I’m a depressed person” can be extremely life limiting. I think it’s important not to fall into learned helplessness. Though kindness with yourself along the way is critical too

I tend to think I understand my own unresolved “inner work” (“I contract here because I’m afraid of X from event Y”), but almost every time I’m wrong. When the contraction finally releases, the real reason surprises me. If I’d truly understood, it would already be gone Or I’ll think, “I intellectually understand why I’m doing X but haven’t emotionally processed it,” and that’s wrong too—I’m always missing deeper layers. When the real insight arrives, it makes way more sense both felt-emotionally and intellectually

I wish there were better neuroimaging tools to measure happiness. you can look at the financially wealthiest people on earth and see how they got there (mostly start tech startups and hold the equity a long time). you can’t do the same with happiness bc too many people faking I think you’d see roughly the same narrowness of paths if you had the imaging and then sorted. there’s a physics of happiness in the same sense there’s a physics of money. if you want 100 billion there’s only a few ways to do it. if you want to 100x happiness only a few ways

there should be like one month all in retreats where you do all the healthy things at once. you have doctors and physical trainers and you maintain perfect diet and it’s also a meditation retreat. It’d be 10x easier to teach people meditation if all their habits were good imo all the things compound on each other so there’s a benefit to doing them all at once. And then after the month I highly doubt anyone will revert that much once they realize what doing all the good things can feel like

meditation can be like learning a bunch of cool tricks as a giant black hole gets slowly closer and closer to you every time you do a trick, and you fear the black hole, but you love doing the tricks. Then the black hole eats you and it’s so much better than any of the tricks Also it wasn’t a black hole it was kind of nothing but an amazing nothing

I’m surprised more people don’t experiment to find food they find like >8.5/10 both healthy and tasty. the upside over the long term of eating healthy almost all the time is so huge (much of life/health variance) that if you can find a way to do it w/o willpower that’s a big win I haven’t worked out any numbers but my guess is that any willpower/coercion spent on food is better spent on designing and running experiments (ai can help) to find food that doesn’t require coercion to eat, than spent on directly eating healthy food you don’t like eating

i think the “everyone is traumatized” (lowercase t trauma) therapy thing isn’t a fake fad, basically everyone is quite traumatized (stored emotional contractions in the body), which is fine bc you can still have a very wonderful life. but we should make humans less traumatizable most animals don’t seem so traumatizable, I think humans are prob uniquely sensitive. storing patterns makes us smarter, and humans are really smart, but it’s a giant cost and we can prob find a way to get the benefits without the costs

increasingly convinced the body is like this insane fractal database for storing emotions and particularly emotional pain. I’ve had a great life, am generally quite happy, and releasing the pain doesn’t cause suffering, but the raw amount I’ve found in there is absurd so either my body is particularly good at storing it, or I’m more traumatizable than ordinarily (though by all external measures I’m less), or everyone is carrying around an absurd amount of gunk

good news is the more I clear it out the better I feel, but there’s a looot

I’ve gotten a lot of benefit out of assuming animals are ten times intellectually dumber than I think and ten times emotionally smarter basically every animal bigger than a worm is more emotionally attuned than the average man in sf

i make like three @slatestarcodex style "X: Much More Than You Wanted To Know" reports a day now with Deep Research and it's wonderful i don't consume a huge variety of things, i'm a pretty habitual creature, so I basically went through and read phd-level 5 page on each of the ingredients to make sure I pretty thoroughly understand everything going into my body

deep research has increased my learning speed to an almost absurd degree. i'll go from wondering how people have handled CLIP adversarial overfitting in the guided diffusion literature (not really my field) to a pretty thorough understanding in like 30 seconds of active work it might actually be faster than having the world expert next to me, because I can read faster than they could talk

there are almost no areas of my life that ai isn't currently dramatically improving it designs my exercise routines (iterated on with personal trainer), finances (iterated on with financial organizer), mealplans (iterated on with schizo health friends), it reads and writes my emails, house design (sent to gardener/designer), lots of human+ai symbiosis

willingness to think for myself before asking claude is reaching new lows, some glare on my screen i instinctively take photo of desk and ask claude how to reduce rather than thinking about it. barely even read output i just skim. brain use baseline lower than ever. i am happy i had a (luckily minor) head accident recently and claude was like try to avoid using brain too much for a few days to avoid concussion risk and i'm like way ahead of you doc you solved that for me a while ago

i think more accurate than long term meditation turning you into a wise sage is it turning you into a happy dog. little object permanence, happy mostly for no reason, whatever is in front of you right now is your whole world. little state / short term memory, hard to traumatize prob unlike a dog it usually ups intelligence in practice, bc being able to sit with a problem for an hour effortlessly without distraction just helps a lot, and for some reason it seems to way up long term memory for almost everyone. i can remember almost every month of my life

neural network interpretability is so fun, it’s always nice when things that are important also turn out to be a blast to do I used to assume all the important things probably look like sitting in meetings fighting with bureaucracy. but neural network interpretability is like all the beauty of going to the zoo mixed with all the beauty of mathematics

as a whole ai research right now is way off on the acid-adderall balance imo. too much tunnel vision rigor not enough playfully trying new ideas I think between adderall and acid the field should lean towards the former bc we kind of know what works, but it should be like 80/20 imo and rn it’s more like 99/1. Nearly all the worlds sharpest talent is focused on it and I hear one interesting new idea every like 3mo

relatedly i often see people plan to sprint super hard towards an ambitious goal for eg a month and i rarely see it work. i actually think they can go way above that goal in a month, but i'm skeptical they get to choose when the energy will arise

https://x.com/nickcammarata/status/1872730522142818624

i see it like catching a wave. if a giant wave comes and you ride it well it'll probably be shocking how well it goes. but our wave conjuring tools aren't very good. i think if people listened for waves more things like einstein's annus mirabilis would be more common

meditation has transformed life from a concerningly short (eg 80yrs) timeline of complex moments to mostly quite simple peaceful moments (some touch, sound, shapes, etc) that spans all beings across all time. the timeline’s simplified and vastly widened the thing you used to identify with (ball of tension claiming to be you) is gone and has been gone for a long time, so the only reasonable thing to identify is the emptiness that all sensations arise from and return to, and that’s going to be around for a long time

enlightenment could have been a good word if it were seen as a small deal that isn’t particularly impressive, a change you can go through like puberty is. but somewhere along the way it became a grand claim that’s synonymous with “I’m perfect” and now it’s too cursed to touch the change can be amazing without you being amazing for going through it, they’re orthogonal. airplanes are amazing but all you did was walk into an airport and that’s fine and good. we should want great things to be as accessible and easy as possible

i think you can smile away most of your trauma but the smile needs to be genuine and tears might be needed to relax enough to get there i think the mechanism is the same, it's a burning away, a dropping. i think we normally associate smiling as like not paying attention or something, blissfully unaware, but i mean a different and more present form of joy

https://x.com/bayeslord/status/1868472312821137856

why hasn't ea ever cared about pms? it's among the few biggest causes of suffering / disability for like half the women i know, relatively small interventions seem to improve it (eg various tcm herbs) and i don't think i've ever heard it brought up as a serious cause area are there subsets of it i've missed that care about it a lot, or is ea just so male coded that women's challenges never made the candidate list