PJ Eby

Helping impossible dreamers become unstoppable doers since 2006. Visit my site to download my book, "A Minute To Unlimit You".

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

Answers are only skin-deep. Until you've wrestled with the questions yourself, they don't really belong to you.

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

@Gemini_Notebook URLs for collections would be nice so I can jump to them from links.

Also, being able to tell which collection(s) a notebook is part of, preferably visible all at once on all notebooks. It's hard to tell which notebooks you *haven't* put in a collection or are missing from one.

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

@chrislakin @DaystarEld The phrase "feal the fear and do it anyway" is the title of an entire book on this stuff. (Like, "Truth 5": "Pushing through fear is less frightening than living with the underlying fear that comes from a feeling of helplessness.")

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

@chrislakin @DaystarEld "Feel the fear and do it anyway" isn't the same thing as exposure, because it's *not* trying to make the fear go away. It's more like, "fuck you fear, I'm doing it anyway". The book's literal "Truth 1" is "The fear will never go away as long as I continue to grow."

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

@scottdomes Speaking from experience, putting yourself into a "have to" situation can also just seriously fuck you up, even if you succeed.

As in, it can make you feel *less* capable than you did before, *despite* succeeding. Took me decades to properly undo it. 0/10 would not do again.

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

@QiaochuYuan @honka_clown_gf But it doesn't do that. Shame makes people align to the values of others; regret makes one align to one's own values. i.e., shame is a costly *signal* of alignment to group values (or more precisely, subordination of self), while regret is *actual* alignment to personal values.

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

@mxcl This is done by most newer shells (e.g. elvish). For bash, just wrap the entire script in `main() {...}; main "$@"; exit $?` and you're good. (The main+exit must be on the same line.) The {} forces the file to parse, and exit-on-same-line loads it to memory, preventing changes.

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

the vast array of ramblings it was derived from.

The tool is Hindsight, by @Vectorizeio, btw. It's open source but the free version doesn't have the fancy visualizations, just raw data. I loaded my notes from Obsidian (@obsdmd) into it with one click via their plugin.

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

This is the first AI knowledgebase tool I've actually found helpful for organizing my notes. I fed a couple hundred of my paid newsletters and personal notes into it from Obsidian, and here's some of the results. The first two are pretty and "oh, huh, that's interesting", but 1/

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

the third one is one of the most useful for me personally, because it's pulled together and synthesized dozens of things I've written over the years and more or less turned it into a FAQ! It's not error-free, and it's missed a few things, but it's more usable than 2/

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

@calculastrology @chrislakin Eh. Even when I was interested in meditation as spirituality, I was concerned with outcomes, not signaling - not even to myself. My other self-helpy activities (e.g. productivity related) had MUCH more signaling involved. So IME signaling vs outcome focus is orthogonal.

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

@chrislakin valuable than the techniques themselves.

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

@chrislakin Hell, until I tried to teach people stuff and noticed some people not getting it *I* didn't get that you need to communicate verifiable checkpoints (like my "mmm test") for someone to verify that they've done a step before going to the next. In general, those are almost more 2/

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

@chrislakin I don't mean meditation specifically here - virtually every mindhack can be screwed up by misinterpreting steps or doing other steps due to existing assumptions. (Not even counting the part where any tech can be used to manifest whatever your original problem is.)

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

@chrislakin Probably because "meditation" is a big abstraction, like "procrastination" or "software engineering". And there's not only the question of what meditational procedure is prescribed, but what the person needs and how they're *interpreting* the steps - very common to get wrong. 1/

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

@almostlikethat e.g. I was ADHD but never had problems with schoolwork because it was easy and I got rewarded w/attention and status from teachers. So I never really had to grapple with the ADHD until I was an adult, and even then I initially lucked into a very ADHD-friendly position.

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

As children, we conformed and performed instead of figuring out what we want, and learning how to bounce back from not getting it.

Then as an adult, the performance became unrewarding: our best is now the *minimum requirement*, leaving us feeling fake, and unable to keep up.

[꧁༒☬ 𝔾𝕒𝕓𝕣𝕚𝕖𝕝 ☬༒꧂ @Gabbrielxzn]

Someone please explain the neurodivergent experience of feeling like I was mentally older than my peers as a child and now feel mentally younger now as an adult….

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

@almostlikethat NDs tend to do some things that make them seem more mature to adults, and get positive feedback. But then as adults, the feedback stops, because it's not special any more. But the discipline isn't there because the things they got rewarded for were the things *easy* for them.

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

@ethan_heff @LarkyMauler @no_earthquake @focusfronting Also the "we put broken glass and fire in our practice pits" is where they really should've noticed they were being messed with.

[PJ Eby @pjeby]

@tokumin @HeathDingwell @emollick If only they hadn't nerfed reports by truncating sources at around 200Kb (chars NOT tokens) of text, making it impossible to use full books as sources any more. :-(

I don't use it near as often any more because I can't trust reports not to ignore half a book's contents.