I'm obsessed with this. "Pollution" is the 1860s meant environmental pollution. In the 1960s "sound" pollution is coined. Then "light" in the 1970s and "information" in the 1990s.

The fascinating part is that each differentiation changes *the original meaning of pollution*.

https://twitter.com/nosilverv/status/1925521101213299045

Now, why be obsessed with this? The normal/sane response is 'Who cares?' but normal/sane never got anything done, so let' be obsessed.

Very instructive slides from Meta's defense to the FTC.

7 lessons:

1. "Social" media is anything but: less than 1/5th of the time on Facebook is spent viewing content made by friends, and less than 1/10th of the time on Instagram

https://twitter.com/pitdesi/status/1911960350045458607

2. Or is it? Sharing with friends has moved to messaging: 63 times more messages than public posts on Facebook (!)

Head of Instagram. "I think Instagram is more of a messaging app than a broadcast-sharing app at this point."

https://twitter.com/nosilverv/status/1851583695469080649

I need to be beaten over the head with this until I finally get it through my thick skull

Ok, so a thing that has been BLOWING MY MIND laterly is that people seem to process words first as signifiers, not content.

That is, not "what do these words mean" but "what kind of person says these words" (!!!!!!) What kind of words, formulations, turns of phrases are they using? What does this mean about what kind of person they are? and NOT content

Ok, let's do it because, why not? Can't really think of something more important to do than this.

https://twitter.com/nosilverv/status/1654833376736550912

#1 this will be a haphazard thread built over time, probably uncovering and dissolving a bunch of objections

https://twitter.com/nosilverv/status/1654846200556789763

The way to evaluate a paradigm is not via the merits of the arguments you can contort out of it that fit into your current paradigm but to adopt it wholesale and check for reduced confusion as vs the paradigm you held before
(incommensurability of paradigms lol) You’re basically running a min(Confusion) algorithm. (Which is what predictive processing theory says you do, at all levels, except now it's not being instantiated just on your brain but it's running through MULTIPLE brains, on a CIVILISATIONAL scale)

Ignorance of the law can't be used as a defence. This makes sense: else people would cultivate *deliberate* ignorance of the law making no action of theirs illegal.

However you can imagine that the law was written in a made-up language. That seems very unjust. Law written in a made-up language seems unjust because it can't possibly be known. It's a law no human could understand.

Now, given the profusion of laws, is the situation we find ourselves in much difference? Can any one human know all the relevant laws?

There's a capability consciousness possesses that I'm perpetually shocked by and haven't seen described elsewhere.

For lack of better terms I'll call it consciousness capacity to "merge" and "unmerge": When consciousness "merges" it inhabits whatever it merges with and that becomes invisible up until the point you "unmerge" where it becomes visible once more.

The shocking thing to me is how fast, how broad, and how varied the things you can merge with are:

LessWrong is a discursive space. A way of talking about the world that implies a phenomenological theory - a way of being in and seeing the world - within which you can puzzle solve. What makes it an ideology is the additional claim that it perfectly maps or captures the world! There's an MP, MT here where if you find something seemingly 'beyond the bounds of the system' then either the system is incomplete (which ofc it is, but you can't consider from within the axioms of the system) OR you're failing the system.

I was today years old when I learned about Control-Mastery theory.

A theory of how psychotherapeutic works *in practice* that lines up with all I've seen.

Principles: *Patients endured traumatic experiences that led to iatrogenic beliefs which are the source of their psychopathology.

Imagine experience is a river, flowing.

Fixation is like freezing a portion of that river. Now the flowing water is crashing against the frozen block. This is suffering.

Unfixating is unfreezing that portion of the river. Water flows again. There's a release. In it, happiness. Autistic mind is almost the opposite of nebulous empty mind: every little thing is reified, taken literally, not seriously

equanimity = absence of clinging, absence of aversion
not pushing experience away, not holding on to experience not even attempting to reify experience into the kind of thing you can push away or hold on to

Roger Thisdell (of the image below's fame) has a stage theory of Enlightenment (that he went through) up on Youtube. Summarising it here:

Stage 1: Stage 1

stew in their emotions
had a thought so must be what i really think
lack of fundamental sobriety
(beginners mind, closed individualism)

This and

https://twitter.com/alecrobbins/status/1578938206359146497?s=20&t=VWQFKLcZKf39yMNpMFpQCw

This

https://twitter.com/LeftyBellows/status/1578849713067286529

I'm gonna force y'all motherfuckers to get enlightened it's not even hard, everyone's just a bad teacher lol, let's go:

First look at these pics The read these two short parables

Walking a path back and forth
Don't recall if was having many thoughts going
But def many thoughts coming back
Then had a thought that thoughts are so silly, like trying replicate the Earth with puzzle pieces
Too small, not adequate, too much left uncaptured Then entered extreme reverie (or maybe even lost frames?) and then realised what Buddhists talk about: the monkey mind, this non-stop rumination, that is default talking as being actually seriously about its object except it DOESN'T STOP!

Maybe plans are how you avoid having to think 🤔 Thinking to solve problems

Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han:

"Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society. Also, its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves." "The depressed individual is unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself."

Water so fucking good when you’re moving the whole day Engineered drinks are compensation for lack of movement

The two periods I tagged as happiest in my mind, have been going around for YEARS as to why, and now I see it so clearly why they were “more real than real”: I just wasn’t dissociated I think I’ve spent ample periods dissociated. Certainly the entirety of [REDACTED]. @meditationstuff might be a terminological mistake on my part but the way I’ve used “virtual machines” I now see it’s just as “smth I was dissociated into”

DO THINGS THAT ARE OUT OF CHARACTER You can do this because you have a model of yourself such that you know what is and isn’t out of character