Abstract Fairy

piggy backing on the shoulders of giants

DMs warmly welcomed :D

[Abstract Fairy @AbstractFairy]

the content of a thought is the "I just need to …"

the shape of a thought is noticing there is a sticky tangled ball of pain running around in your head and body

you cannot resolve this through the contents the thought

[Abstract Fairy @AbstractFairy]

I literally do not have a better pointer for this than

1. notice a thought
2. look at its shape
3. ?????!!

[Abstract Fairy @AbstractFairy]

@RomeoStevens76 a good rule of thumb I picked up from a robert green book is to copy people to figure out how they're feeling

same posture, same gestures, same voice, and perhaps most important, same breathing pattern

surprisingly useful

[Creetosis | EN VTuber 🐐 @Creetosis22]

This is a bad way to look at it because I'm kind of on the opposite side of this. I'm the kind of person who rarely reaches out, largely because I don't usually have much to say. I only reach out if I feel I do have something to say. I have friends I haven't talked to in weeks, months and in some cases even years for no other reason than I have nothing to talk about with them.

That and I also feel like I'm being annoying sometimes, so I get a bit nervous about reaching out to people sometimes.

[Guy @nosilverv]

Did I do it? Did I figure how to explain type 1 / type 2 errors and why they matter?

[˗ˏˋ ´ˎ˗ @lapislagoons]

really into this

[Abstract Fairy @AbstractFairy]

@nosilverv there was a tweet saying that the time spent on deliberating between two options is wasted time. if one was obviously better, then you'd immediately choose it

if you're ruminating between two options then there's probably little difference between them

[Vacha @TVachaW]

If you can notice the energetic impulse to eg <look at your phone / doomscroll> and hold it in awareness, it can be a very powerful spiritual portal.

When you disentangle the energy from the compulsive action and look at it very deeply in meditation, you will discover that there is nothing inherently compulsive about it.

This energy, like all our internal energies, is what Buddhists call “empty” - which means it doesn’t have a fixed nature.

What this means is that it doesn’t have to be experienced as compulsion.

It can be experienced as simply a neutral flow of energy, or - as @QiaochuYuan points out below - even as pleasurable.

Once you liberate the energy from the habitually associated compulsive behaviour, it actually becomes a great ally.

That same energy that previously compelled you towards unconscious behaviour can now be recruited to power the conscious task of your choosing.

To help recognise the emptiness of this energy, you can try the following practice:

Step 1: When the energy arises, notice it, suspend any action and hold it in awareness

Step 2: Pay special attention to the insubstantial aspects of the energy. You want to train yourself to be able to see how the aspects of the energy that seem substantial, continuous and solid are actually - when we look very closely - insubstantial, discontinuous and spacious.

In particular you want to pay attention to the vibratory, fluctuating, dissolute aspects of the energy that allow you to see gaps in its solidity and show you the way in which that fixed / definite nature of the energy is constructed and illusory.

Step 3: Notice then how when the energy is seen as insubstantial, spacious and dissolute - and crucially, without a fixed, continuous nature - it starts to lose its compulsive power.

It’s association with a particular action (eg checking your phone / scrolling) isn’t inherent to the energy but rather is constructed, conditioned and ultimately arbitrary.

Step 4: Play around with experiencing the energy in other ways. But ultimately learn to see that it is just empty, spacious, energy that is not inherently connected to any specific desire or action.

You can actually do this with any energy, but the energy of compulsion is a particularly powerful one to work with.

This is because compulsions usually have a lot of power locked inside them, waiting to be liberated.

I encourage people to give @QiaochuYuan’s prompt below a go and follow through into the steps I describe on a regular basis and see how it transforms your relationship to compulsion and reactivity in all domains.

[John Carter @martianwyrdlord]

Lord of the Flies is a "classic" because teachers love the message that without them, their boys would all kill one another. It's emotional conditioning meant to break kids to the harness, reflexively looking to authority figures rather than organizing their own lives.

[Abstract Fairy @AbstractFairy]

@QiaochuYuan the weirdest one I experienced back when tpot was more online and active was that my sleep cycle would naturally gravitate to when most of you guys were up and replying

which is nuts considering there's like a 7-11h difference between me and the US

[kasra @kasratweets]

now that AI makes information consumption and transformation easier than ever I would like to bring back this old banger by Sasha Chapin about how books are not information transfer devices but subjectivity-merging devices

in fact I would say content consumption in general is more about subjectivity-merging than information transfer, which is why I am generally much more interested in writing by humans than by AI

[A.Shipwright @ShipwrightA]

Story Agents wear suits because solid black is the easiest form to manipulate.

But the easier a form is to change, the easier it is to forget what it once was.
One must be careful of the side effects.

[Lakyn Thee Stylist @OgLakyn]

When recreating a look, it’s really important to look beyond the pieces and really hone in on the details. It’s not just a button up and khakis. It’s a fitted button up with large cuffs, tucked into high waisted wide leg trousers fitted in the thigh with a belt.

[Thierry from arvy 🇨🇭 @ThierryBorgeat]

Imagine you spent 40 years doing the boring, responsible thing.

You opened a 401k at 23. You contributed every paycheck. You ignored the noise. You bought the index because Bogle told you to, because Buffett told you to, because every honest piece of financial advice for 30 years told you the index was the safest, most diversified, most rules-based way to own America.

The whole point was the rules.

The rules said: a company must trade for 12 months before joining the S&P 500. The rules said: it must show four consecutive quarters of GAAP profitability. The rules existed because in 1999 the index quietly bought a lot of stocks at the top, and pensioners paid the bill.

After the dot-com crash, S&P tightened the rules. Nasdaq tightened the rules. FTSE Russell tightened the rules.

For 23 years, those rules held.

Then SpaceX filed for IPO.

And the rules changed.

The S&P 500 waived the profitability requirement. Nasdaq cut its trading-history window from 90 days to 15. FTSE Russell cut its to 5.

Bloomberg Intelligence estimates the major index funds will absorb between 19% and 24% of SpaceX's float within six months. That's over $30 trillion of passive 401k and retirement money, mechanically buying a single newly public company at IPO valuations, because the rules said they had to.

Except the rules used to say they didn't.

Here's the thought exercise:

If you spend 40 years building a system designed to protect ordinary savers from buying overpriced stocks, and then you waive the protections the moment a sufficiently large stock asks you to, what was the system actually protecting?

Most of investing is about understanding what's a rule and what's a guideline.

A rule binds the rule-maker.

A guideline binds the saver.

You're allowed to find out which is which only after the fact.

[RomeoStevens @RomeoStevens76]

@vividvoid Symmetry arguments don't always work bc men and women really are different in important ways, but often it's

[Duane Storey @DuaneStorey]

I’ll likely do a post on this as lots of people seem interested. I have an unusual account of my psychotic event as parts of my brain were misfiring but others weren’t.

I knew right from wrong, I didn’t try to hurt anyone. But my inputs were scrambled. And yet the higher reasoning functions were still working. My brain was still trying to engineer my way out of it. I was hearing a voice in my head and wandering around the city kind of in some half catatonic state. I encountered the police once where I tried to turn myself in for some crime I was convinced I had done. They came to my house and looked for evidence which they didn’t find. So they called some nurses to take me to the hospital. Which they did. But unfortunately for me they basically registered me at the front desk and then left. By that point my brain was heavily scrambled and that voice in my head told me to leave. So I spent a few more hours wandering around the city. I figured I was going to end up jail for whatever it was I did, so I tossed my phone away and my Garmin watch. Keys too. Some tourist found my phone and tried to give it back, but I said just keep it (she later would use the emergency contact on my iPhone to track down my family in Canada. Had she not done that nobody might have know where I was for ages - she also arranged to get my phone back to me, which took about three days - I need to track her down some day and thank her)

My second encounter with the police wasn’t as good. I think they thought I was high so they got me to put my hands on the police car while they called a lot of people. I had a casual discussion with one of the officers about Spanish futbol and was answering his questions about Canada. Eventually they took me to the hospital, which is where I ended up in the psych ward. But I have perfect recall of every thought I had during this time. To other people it all seemed crazy, but to me it was all rational. I was trying to turn myself in because I thought it would save lives. My brain was reasoning, it just wasn’t being fed the right info.

When I was in the hospital my brain started pulling the threads apart. I looked around and realized nobody was looking at me. If I had just done this massive crime and been on TV, why weren’t people looking at me? It didn’t make sense. It was scary.

I’ll tell the full story in a post at some point. But one thing I want to point out is how I smelled this happening. Starting about a month before it happened my urine started smelling funny. In the same way some people can smell asparagus byproducts and some can’t, I just noticed a subtle shift in the smell that wasn’t normal. This got worse as I got closer to that day. And in the hospital it was horrific. It wasn’t a UTI or anything, it was some byproduct my body was excreting.

I think what happened is the IDO1/kynurenine pathway was shifted with my infection:

“Inflammation hijacks tryptophan and shoves it down a pathway that ends in quinolinic acid, which is an NMDA receptor agonist — it overstimulates the same glutamate receptors that ketamine blocks. Normally the body also makes kynurenic acid from the same pathway, which acts as a natural NMDA brake. But inflammation shuts down the brake side (worsened by B6 depletion) while flooring the accelerator, so NMDA receptors get chronically over-activated. That excitotoxic state is what links the immune system to psychosis, depression, and delirium.”

I think what I smelled in my urine was a byproduct from that process, whatever it was. But the fact it started before and peaked in the hospital seemed to be a temporal relationship. Just making note of that for anyone else who might ever go through that.

[Abstract Fairy @AbstractFairy]

@CoachlessGG I honestly sometimes wonder if WPA is more just due to people caring enough about itemization and trying out new builds

like serpents fang and mortal reminder usually have high WPA and low purchase because they only make sense if you're facing enchanters

[RŌNIN @ronin21btc]

I LOVE that they forced him to watch the video.

Far too many bleeding heart liberals clueless to the violence these guys are capable of.

[Andrew Rose @__drewface]

Even if it's a joke, the cultural response to actually "solving the loneliness crisis" for yourself, and successfully "living in community" is often social mockery. It is as if the overculture wants to believe community is impossible, so punishes any real examples of it.

[Mazio ⚡️ @Maziodyne_]

Being told this changed my life

[Guy @nosilverv]

“Prove me wrong” seems like a challenge, the ego is already fused with the claim, it’s a dick-measuring contest. And it’s weird because it feels like aligning with badness? Nasty beliefs shouldn’t be desired but, rather, should feel like defeat to accept. “Please change my mind.”