Lolo

doomer optimist / everything becomes its opposite eventually--after tears, fireworks, & winter / @ThyselfAI @coordinape @makerdao @hylo / ☯☸️🤘

[Lolo @levity]

The real enlightenment was making friends with yourself along the way

[Lolo @levity]

@5matthewdub It’s easy to imagine this because for me the best reading experiences are psychedelic, the body energized and transformed

[Lolo @levity]

@5matthewdub Maybe the balance shifted toward loss as literacy became a cultural institution forcing people to propagate it — but I imagine the first serious readers (monks) not losing the body, but illuminating it, in previously untouched pure forms of thought and feeling

[Lolo @levity]

@WriterScience @blader Yeah that one hung me up. Missing commas.

[Lolo @levity]

@wfithian @hector_mats @gbrl_dick @tszzl yes, i'm trying to bridge the gap 😅 do you see the two meanings of "consensus" i'm pointing to, and do they make sense to you? it's like "which side are you on?" vs. whether you even agree to how questions about the Ukraine war are framed

[Lolo @levity]

@wfithian @hector_mats @gbrl_dick @tszzl hmm? i'm not sure what you're asking. i'm saying a difference over the meaning of "consensus" is why what you presented as an example of a non-consensus view is landing as the opposite

[Lolo @levity]

@wfithian @hector_mats @gbrl_dick In the context of what @tszzl is saying, there’s a larger consensus view here that we should interpret politics as a scaled-up version of tribal grievance narratives, and Claude is not departing from that at all

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

When someone teaches you something you didn't ask to learn, your brain reacts like it's in physical pain. UCLA scientists watched it happen on brain scans in 2003. The same wiring that fires when you stub your toe also fires when someone treats you like you need fixing.

Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Lieberman ran the study and published it in Science. The brain region is the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is just the fancy name for your main pain alarm. It doesn't care whether the threat is a hot stove or a friend telling you how to live.

A neuroscientist named David Rock built a framework around this in 2008. Five things make the brain feel safe in social moments: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. Take away any of those and the alarm fires. Rock wrote that one of the easiest ways to dent someone's status is to give them advice they didn't ask for. Even hinting that they're doing something wrong is enough.

When people are told what to do, they often do the opposite, even when the advice was good. The psychologist Jack Brehm noticed this in 1966, and sixty years of follow-up have confirmed it. The brain is trying to keep your life feeling like your own.

Close friends cut each other off with unsolicited advice in about 70% of supportive conversations, often before the friend has even finished explaining the problem. That number comes from a 2016 study by Bo Feng and Eran Magen in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. The closer the friendship, the worse it gets. And the advice tends to make them more stressed, more depressed, and more lonely, not less.

Giving advice gives the giver a sense of power, even when nobody asked for it. Michael Schaerer and his co-authors, working across Harvard, Duke, INSEAD, USC, and Singapore Management, published this in 2018 after four experiments with about 700 people. People who chase power volunteer advice more often than others. Whether the student actually improves is a side effect, if it happens at all.

So when you feel the urge to teach somebody who never asked, that urge is mostly about you. You walk away feeling a little more powerful. They walk away feeling like they were just told they can't run their own life. Most uninvited teaching is one person's ego dressed up as kindness.

[Lolo @levity]

@illusion10500 @scottdomes Your eagerness to diagnose him with this and the content of your later replies reveal how much you are still in the grasp of that same condition and projecting it onto others

[Lolo @levity]

@Thomasdelvasto_ @scottdomes The good news is that career, relationship and kids become practice situations. It does help to have some basic stability first tho. Keep going ✌️

[Lolo @levity]

https://t.co/3CKy3SzsiJ

[Vacha @TVachaW]

Many parents subtly motivate their children via the offering and withholding of love.

This mechanism then gets transferred into how many people motivate themselves.

Their mind / heart withholds love from itself until certain conditions are met.

It says: until I am like this, or I have that, or the world is like this, then I will not give myself love.

Learning how to give yourself unconditional love is one of the biggest free gifts you can offer yourself.

It is possible to live in a state where your default baseline stance towards yourself is love.

You love yourself when you fail, when you are lazy, when you act poorly, even when you are unhappy.

Counterintuitively, this unconditional positive self-regard has a beneficial side effect of making laziness, bad behaviour and unhappiness less common too (perhaps not failure, as to succeed at most worthwhile endeavours usually requires constant failure along the way).

Feeling love for ourselves even when feeling unhappy is a particularly interesting phenomena as it reveals how little suffering there actually is in temporary states of unhappiness when they are held with love.

Also, when we are no longer tensing up against the possibility of having to withdraw love from ourselves, it is a lot easier to act effectively and lots of energy is freed up.

We also start to become motivated by what we actually value in our lives rather than pleasing some inner judge of worthiness.

Of course, cultivating unconditional love for ourselves also makes it a lot easier to give and receive love from others.

Unconditional self-love is one of the closest cousins to unconditional happiness and much more within reach for most.

Cultivating it is a fertile ground for beginning any spiritual journey.

[Lolo @levity]

The real enlightenment was making friends with yourself along the way

[Lolo @levity]

@bryan_johnson @signulll If you’re just starting to pray you have no idea how to conceive of “in full” yet, so don’t worry about it :)

[Lolo @levity]

@QiaochuYuan I really appreciate how Dustin DiPerna once reframed “all beings” as starting from “me and everyone around me”

[Lolo @levity]

@epichrisis @deepfates @DanielleFong sorcerers too antisocial, clerics too square

[Lolo @levity]

The real reward of meditation practice is not just knowing how to rest in the coarse sense, but in being able to let it rip while “remaining uninvolved“

[Nick @nickcammarata]

when we look at uncontacted tribes they spend 4hrs a day doing nothing looking into the sky or whatever, just hanging out

we’re not build for what we live in nevermind what’s coming. easy to loop yourself into crazy. I rec a meditation practice, doing nothing is load bearing

[Lolo @levity]

Taking the singularity as a meditation object is v challenging but equally rewarding

[QC @QiaochuYuan]

people are apparently reading this as a parable about how money won’t buy you happiness or something? this is a description of the foreshocks of the singularity. SF feels it the hardest because they’re the epicenter. the money is the concrete manifestation of a much larger eldritch hyperobject roaring into existence. the stormclouds gather. the winds whip. the world holds its breath

[Mikael Brockman @meekaale]

Alexander asked if a program could truly help a person “on the same level that they are helped by horses, and roses, and a crackling fire.” I dream about mapping software that helps life feel more juicy, whole, lifelike—not more spindly, skeletal, bureaucratic, boring…

[Lolo @levity]

One obvious evolutionary advantage of consciousness is that it got our species to the point where we can run LLMs, an extremely nontrivial feat of material and mental coordination. Puzzling that Dawkins overlooks the dependencies here

[Neil Morrison @entropydevil]

@theserfstv @PronouncedHare It might pay to read his conclusions-

[Lolo @levity]

@entropydevil @theserfstv @PronouncedHare Many zombies survive quite competently without consciousness, we call them businesses and institutions

[Lolo @levity]

@Shadow_Rebbe @visakanv The new TED talk is a TikTok voiceover

[Lolo @levity]

@Shadow_Rebbe @visakanv Yes the lecture has its limitations as a teaching tool, but it’s neurotypical/natural to enjoy listening to other people talk about things (if they pass your subconscious filters for “worth listening to”). That trait isn’t going anywhere