🇺🇦🌹🗽🛰️ @[email protected]

Data sadist. High quality, high variance, galaxy-brained takes. Urbanism, rage against cruelty and inefficiency, scifi/fantasy, stats and programming.

[🇺🇦🌹🗽🛰️ @[email protected] @SelectStarMan]

US Cities as inspired by 4th Age YIMBYS in Middle Earth:
1. Denver: Caras Galadhon, in Lothlorien.

[Khan Noonien Singh @wtfcetialpha5]

You only think about yourselves.

[🇺🇦🌹🗽🛰️ @[email protected] @SelectStarMan]

@SatyrOnMars Gork, what is a refractory period?

[🇺🇦🌹🗽🛰️ @[email protected] @SelectStarMan]

@nickcammarata @RogerThisdell was just saying the opposite!
https://t.co/inDKcvjVDx

[Roger This @RogerThisdell]

Why do you feel good when listening to others' problems? Why do people get over the Jhanas?

Imagine, you are eating a delicious piece of chocolate, or receiving a soothing massage, or rejoicing in listening to Beethoven. These experiences fill you with positive valence (pleasure). From an unexamined view, the pleasure of these experiences is thought to be found in the tastes, sensations and sounds themselves; that pleasure is about access to the good feelings and suffering the bad feelings.

However, I prepose that there are no feelings or sensations in themselves which feel good or bad, rather pleasure and suffering are actually comparative judgments (made pre the conscious intellect, of course) and so are actually relative, just like direction is.

In general relativity, there's no absolute direction. 'Up' doesn't exist in the universe as an intrinsic property. Direction only makes sense relative to a reference frame and valence works the same way.

A cold shower is unpleasant compared to the warmth of your bed. The same cold shower is refreshing compared to the heat of summer. Neither experience is actually unpleasant or refreshing. The valence exists only in the comparison - in the relation between the current state and the reference frame you're measuring from.

Your reference frame, in this case, is the transitional contrast. What you felt before. What you expected. What you're contrasting against.

We all want to feel better, abate our pain or at least stay feeling good. But how to actually navigate the pleasure/suffering space? The naïve view would suggest feeling good is about maintaining certain experiences, like Jhana, and avoiding certain states like sadness - as if these are stable states in the plane of consciousness that we can position ourselves on.

The implications of how this affects our motivations are actually quite significant. As the Effective Altruists communities endlessly debate how best to steer the future with which projects to work on, hardly any of them have deeply looked into how suffering works - especially not at their own consciousness and suffering. Instead, they run ahead with philosophically examined views (yes), but not very phenomenologically informed views.

And even most people on the contemplative path are trying to arrive at a place, to stay within a desirable 'attractor state'. But there are no places to arrive at and stay at and continue feeling one way about. Instead, trying to continuously feel pleasure would be more akin to trying to only go forward. But as we even collectively find, the great march of self development and of civilisation doesn't only progress forward in one direction - we inevitably run out of room in an area. Instead, the more skilful approach is to learn how to track transitions, play with reframing and create lots of degrees of freedom for energy to move.

Because there is no objective measure on the valence of any state, it all depends how consciousness is transitioning from and to 'states'. For this reason Nibbana has been described as both the highest happiness and the complete cessation of suffering - one definition additive, one eliminative. The value judgement depends on the approach, not on the state itself (in fact there are no states themselves). This relativity and changing reference frames is also why people 'get over' the Jhanas.

Given this understanding, that means states which are typically associated with suffering like low ambition or anger need not be hugely displeasurable if we can skilfully transition into and through them and find helpful framings. How to navigate the pleasure/suffering space in a way that is most agreeable comes down to recognising our frames and aligning expectations, understanding where we're coming from and going to, with our sensory stimuli. This requires extreme mindfulness and highly developed conscious optionality.

And this is why contemplative practices, done well, really transform people's relationship with suffering and how they experience their emotions.

[🇺🇦🌹🗽🛰️ @[email protected] @SelectStarMan]

@Noahpinion Kyringh

[🇺🇦🌹🗽🛰️ @[email protected] @SelectStarMan]

@maxdubler These people always demand giant roads into the city and free street parking to store their car

[Marcel @Cibolan2000]

Let's do a little investigation courtesy of "Housing Density: From Tenements to Towers", a presentation by the The Skyscraper Museum by Bloom and Altwicker.

First The Towers in Jackson Heights - a six story 1920s building development... low density?

A very respectable 155pp / acre

[🇺🇦🌹🗽🛰️ @[email protected] @SelectStarMan]

@JeremiahDJohns Identity is a prison

[🇺🇦🌹🗽🛰️ @[email protected] @SelectStarMan]

@RomeoStevens76 Any thought on Shinzen Young's triad of Concentration, Sensory Clarity, and Equanimity?

[american biologist @95thoughts]

@micsolana Needs to be marine. Q comes down to predation habits + how they scale with size

The largest marine reptiles (icthyosaurs) were macropredators, hunting for big fish. This gets less efficient with size

blue whales’ filter feeding is more efficient with size

qed blue whale = GOAT

[🇺🇦🌹🗽🛰️ @[email protected] @SelectStarMan]

@smittie61984 You are experiencing "the rent is too damn high, commercial and minimum wage worker edition"
Thank you local NIMBY

[🇺🇦🌹🗽🛰️ @[email protected] @SelectStarMan]

@gregogallagher Split-bros think muscles need 48hrs to recover, which is why they rest for five minutes and do the next set for that same muscle group.

[🇺🇦🌹🗽🛰️ @[email protected] @SelectStarMan]

@IkkyusDen Jazz, noise, etc. all reset the expectations your brain has so it can be surprised by I-V-vi-IV again.

[🇺🇦🌹🗽🛰️ @[email protected] @SelectStarMan]

@jasonc_nc I have not seen evidence but I wonder if this is a cause of the enormous setbacks buildings are required to have

[🇺🇦🌹🗽🛰️ @[email protected] @SelectStarMan]

@IJoukov @loganalbright73 Why do urbanites keep trying to make their city amenable to city living? Don't they know everywhere should be a suburb?!?

[🇺🇦🌹🗽🛰️ @[email protected] @SelectStarMan]

@wolfstrength Also you don't want to be the guy who only does weightlifting and doesn't get enough cardio. Over-optimized.

[🇺🇦🌹🗽🛰️ @[email protected] @SelectStarMan]

@ryxcommar I just want to write and debug code by hand, not drive value for stakeholders

[🇺🇦🌹🗽🛰️ @[email protected] @SelectStarMan]

@hecubian_devil Proportional Representation fixes this

[🇺🇦🌹🗽🛰️ @[email protected] @SelectStarMan]

@vividvoid When you need coffee number 4:

[🇺🇦🌹🗽🛰️ @[email protected] @SelectStarMan]

@kpomerleau @JerusalemDemsas That doesn't improve until there are more than 2 choices
Proportional Representation fixes this