sm1bp

[Vivid Void @vividvoid]

When a woman says she wants her man to be stoic and never need to be babied, she's rejecting the child in him. She's saying, "I need him to be my father."

When a man says he wants a woman he can fall apart in front of, who never needs his steadiness, he's rejecting the child in her. He's saying, "I need her to be my mother."

Not that it works in reverse: If you want a codependent hell of a relationship, indulge each other's inner child without boundaries, and swallow your resentment until you explode. If you want an independent hell of a relationship, completely reject each other's immaturity and weakness. And prepare to get dumped and lose all self-respect when the day inevitably comes that you lose your mind and throw a tantrum.

Or, you can take the Middle Way: take turns being mom and dad for each other when the other needs it. And work hard on yourself so you don't need it too often, and burn your beloved out.

Choose wisely!

[sm1bp @sm1bp]

@catfrog2000 @scottdomes A v similar distinction I’ve heard is between those that state you should impress yourself on the world (e.g. Nietzsche) and align it with your will and those which state you should let the world impress itself on you (e.g. Buddhist philosophy) and align your will with it.

[sm1bp @sm1bp]

@andrewforshaw10 @lewis_goodall It’s a little performative, but that’s part of a PMs job. A PM without popular appeal can’t get much done. This would be an issue if it interfered with their other duties, but I don’t see how it would. I don’t care if they’re not serious 24/7 so long as they pass good policy.

[sm1bp @sm1bp]

@corfscaff @andrewforshaw10 @lewis_goodall Why on earth do you care if they have idiosyncratic pub orders? Surely you have something better to spend your energy on.

[sm1bp @sm1bp]

@andrewforshaw10 @lewis_goodall you mean acting like normal people? God forbid...

[sm1bp @sm1bp]

@nosilverv Briefly looked into this and it seems GW is trying to answer 1) what is the good life and 2) what kind of person you must be to live it (and how)
Most who focus on 1 (philosophers) don’t focus srsly on 2, and most who focus srsly on 2 (Buddhists) ime don’t do 1 well
You need both

[sm1bp @sm1bp]

@loveofdoing Democracy is probably better than most/all alternatives because it has fewer tail risks - is self correcting - but it does have serious disadvantages wrt e.g. long term planning and sectional interests (e.g. unsustainable pensions)

[sm1bp @sm1bp]

@loveofdoing Condorcet’s jury theorem is obviously false. It assumes *both* independent decision making (false bc people need shared info like the media, which if corrupted corrupts ~everyone’s decisionmaking); and a >50% chance of each individual getting it right (asserted, with no evidence)

[sm1bp @sm1bp]

@nosilverv Briefly looked into this and it seems GW is trying to answer 1) what is the good life and 2) what kind of person you must be to live it (and how)
Most who focus on 1 (philosophers) don’t focus srsly on 2, and most who focus srsly on 2 (Buddhists) ime don’t do 1 well
You need both

[sm1bp @sm1bp]

@RainbowBodied You don’t need god to have the universal law? Just ask Kant.

[Guy @nosilverv]

No, no—sniff—the interesting thing is not simply that the finsta is real and the main is fake. This is too easy, a cheap postmodern reversal. The finsta is the account on which I perform being free from the performance of my main account. You understand? On main I stage happiness; on finsta I stage my distance from this staging—bad skin, stupid jokes, depression and so on. And because I have confessed that the main is a lie, I can continue lying there with a clean conscience. This is ideology! Not the mask concealing the real face, but the second mask which allows me to believe there is still a face beneath the first. sniff The only real Instagram photo is perhaps the one you we too ashamed to post.

[sm1bp @sm1bp]

@cxgonzalez This is p similar to ev debunking but it seems that our moral intutions are downstream of social practice? Which is ok under constructivism (plausible) but otherwise we'd need some reason to think that this social practice ends up approximating stance independent moral facts, no?

[sm1bp @sm1bp]

@nosilverv Not exclusively! Some philosophers derive ethics from what we *already* value. Kantianism tries to derive ethics from rationality alone (what rational self consistency demands re others)
And most Virtue Ethics tries to drive ethics from what we already find to be choiceworthy

[sm1bp @sm1bp]

@TruestSlazac Being drunk completely tanks my working memory, which is normally pretty important for iq tests

[sm1bp @sm1bp]

@Prof_MeowMeow @skavenslave There are… Philippa Foot, Korsgaard, de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Iris Murdoch? Ayn Rand, whatever you think about her.
Historically there weren’t but that legitimately is because women weren’t educated at nearly the same rate as men

[sm1bp @sm1bp]

@scottdomes What book is this?

[sm1bp @sm1bp]

@realpurus @nosilverv For me at least most thoughts come attached with emotions, and vice versa. I think he’s saying something similar

[Ruben Laukkonen @RubenLaukkonen]

My new meta-theory of meditation!

I’ve been incubating on this for about five years. It all began when I measured my own brain during my postdoc in 2021. I was setting up a decoding pipeline for an EEG experiment, which was working extraordinarily well. On my brain, I could decode sounds from EEG activity near ceiling (~0.9 AUC). But then, when I ran the same experiment on other participants, the best I got was an AUC of 0.62.

Why that happened haunted me for literally years. Then one day, I realized what the difference was. The difference was that, during data collection, I was meditating. Because that was something I just naturally did when sitting still and listening to sounds. I was intently focused on the sounds I was hearing, with an otherwise empty mind. So my brain was also focused and clear. And therefore, easy to decode.

It’s pretty obvious in hindsight.

So then I tested this on some existing preliminary data, and low and behold, participants during meditation showed better sound decoding than participants not. Now I just needed to figure out the mechanism and run a hypothesis-driven experiment.

How does meditation translate to clearer neural signals?

Well, think about how any basic meditation practice works. You selectively enhance some aspect of experience (i.e., signal), be it your breath, a mantra, the body, or awareness itself. You also selectively declutter or “let go” some other aspect, such as self-centred rumination and other pointless neuroses (i.e., noise).

You enhance a present-moment signal and you release the noise. So a clear mind ought to be reflected in the brain’s signal to noise ratio and this makes the brain more decodable!

If your intentions are clear; so is your brain. It better tracks the input. It better mirrors the world.

The implications are fascinating.

One surprising consequence is that the future of brain-interfaces might depend on the capacity to meditate. Because you can’t decode a brain that’s noisy. So being able to control machines with your mind might one day depend on your capacity to enact a clear mind.

One of the most cited papers in the field famously criticized meditation for claiming to be a panacea. And yet, there is reason to believe that meditation is at least panacea-like, given it’s unusually broad applications for psychopathology and beyond. Why is that?

Well, according to the present theory, the reason meditation is so generalizable is because many psychopathologies can be linked to poor neural f-SNR (think, obsessions, depressive rumination, anxious worrying, delusional thinking, etc.).

Most of the things we suffer is a consequence of us losing touch with the signal manifold. We get absorbed in our self-generated ignorance; lost in the endogenous noise of our own creation. The second arrow.

If we learn to practice mindfulness, for example, we begin to be able to agnatically select how much abstraction is appropriate for the moment. We begin to be able to skilfully traverse the hierarchy of the mind according to the demands of the present; letting go activity that hinders our ability to see clearly.

But what about deeper insights?

The more advanced practices and realizations we encounter in meditation can be framed as removing pervasive channels of noise driven by aberrant priors, e.g., those comprising a rigid self-model.

There are entrenched habits in our minds that consistently warp our more direct experience with layers and layers of confusion. Potentially, unraveling these maladaptive priors through insight is like wiping a thick layer of grime from a mirror that has quietly distorted every reflection, allowing the whole field of experience to become clearer at once.

Perhaps, then, awakening is a dramatic change in the generative model that leads to a non-linear boost in the brain’s signal-to-noise. This would go a long way in explaining the profound clarity that accompanies such shifts.

The paper also provides extensive tools for objectively measuring a clear mind. We already have strong evidence that the SNR indicators reflect meditation depth better than both traditional linear and non-linear metrics (see comments).

And here’s a really cool bonus finding:

The meditative posture may act as a kind of inner neurofeedback device. The careful posture we maintain during meditation enacts a sensorimotor error-correction loop, signalling through prediction errors when the mind fails to track the present moment.

A slumping posture reveals you’re in noisy territory (e.g., mindwandering), alerting the mind to return to the signal when bodily alignment falters.

Empirical evidence, figures, and more below. Special thanks to @mihir_nath_ for spearheading the empirical work on meditation and the brain's SNR.

Read the full paper:
https://t.co/QspgVDTkIc

[sm1bp @sm1bp]

@QiaochuYuan No, we have reasons for acting which emerge necessarily as a result of our having and exercising practical reason.
These are non religious reasons. And they entail that we must act in certain ways (for instance, take others’ ends as reason for us to act).

https://t.co/oCG53HgmbU

[sm1bp @sm1bp]

@eigenron The idea is smth like: we are beings with rational agency, we must necessarily act. We are self reflective beings, so must act on reasons. Hence we must endorse reasons, and thus necessarily have reasons to act.
And she talks a little about what those reasons may be

[sm1bp @sm1bp]

@eigenron The idea is smth like: we are beings with rational agency, we must necessarily act. We are self reflective beings, so must act on reasons. Hence we must endorse reasons, and thus necessarily have reasons to act.
And she talks a little about what those reasons may be

[sm1bp @sm1bp]

@eigenron Read Korsgaard for an argument that normative reasons to act necessarily arise from possessing rational agency. You’re not gonna get objective reasons without ~religion, so reasons that arise from some necessary feature of personhood is the best you’ll get i think