The general rule seems to be this: the more abstract we make an event – that is, the more we see it in terms of its meaning to the mind, rather than how it feels to the senses – the greater the psychological pain that is created. The more we can zoom into the direct experience, and refrain from engaging with the story around it, the less of a pain in the ass it is.
The lesson is simple: We must resist being too clever. Every programmer, or investor, or gardener, or urban planner, etc, must learn this lesson eventually, or else be bit in the bum by hounds of their own making. When complex systems work, they work. But when complex systems fail they fail in complex ways. Often we cannot even spot our disasters until long after we’ve boasted of success. I feel a few weeks ago as if I have had half a thought, and now I sit here waiting for the other half to arrive to me.
I don’t know what this next year has in store – none of us do anymore. But, in the meantime, I’m going to continue to pack in as much as I can before my thirties are up.
Think of this sort of thing as a journal entry you get to read, a taste of what you might get if you phoned me up and let me blather for an hour or so.
Why “looking on the bright side” isn’t great advice - and what to do instead.
Here's the blog post: https://www.pamelajhobart.com/blog/dont-look-on-the-bright-side
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This thread is about mental health. A decade ago, I was overwhelmed by panic and depression. On the surface, I seemed fine. Inside, I was a bunch of bandaids. I want to share what I've learned about mental health (from a patient's perspective) in case it helps others. What makes us unique as a species -- our remarkable memory and tremendous imagination -- is also the root cause of most of life's suffering. A worm doesn't have a traumatic memory of being stepped on yesterday. It also doesn't anxiously think about if it will get stepped on tomorrow. But we don't have worm brains. We tend to think about the past and the future. A lot. And we suffer because of it. Consider the military veteran with PTSD that is haunted by memories of war. Or the sexual assault victim that is overwhelmed by fearful thoughts of if the perpetrator will come back in the future. Our memory and our imagination can work against us. It often does. Put succinctly, thinking in the past is depression. Thinking in the future is anxiety. And thinking in the present is peace. Our aim is to have a present mind as much as possible. With a present mind, we exonerate ourselves from most of life's suffering. There are a few things that can exacerbate our suffering. (1) Trauma (2) Separation from others (3) Separation from Nature It's more about how we're living and less about a chemical imbalance, which is an outdated and simplistic understanding of mental health. Trauma is the main cause. Trauma gets stored in the "feeling" part of the brain, manifesting physically (changes to brain componentry), manifesting cognitively (recurring negative thinking), and manifesting behaviorally (recurring self-destructive patterns). Reducing trauma-based suffering requires a comprehensive treatment protocol that addresses biology, cognition, and behavior. A combination of multiple treatment modalities is most useful versus any single modality. Treatment happens in three stages: (1) Symptom Control (2) Awareness (3) Transcendence There are overlaps in these stages so it's not as clear cut as this. But it's helpful to frame it in this way. Symptom Control is about getting acute symptoms (e.g. panic attacks or suicidal ideation) under control. With the symptoms reduced, you're more capable of investing in other treatment modalities. For example, it's hard to engage in talk therapy during a panic attack. Medication can be very useful for acute Symptom Control. I used medication for 4 years so that I could better engage in other forms of treatment. But medication does not address the root cause of trauma, which is essential for a deeper sense of recovery. Exercise can also temporarily reduce acute Symptoms. In my case, I ran ultra marathons. I needed to run 50 miles a week to burn off panic attacks. But that isn't sustainable. My joints started to reject the volume of running. Again, the root cause must eventually be addressed. Other treatments for Symptom Control can include consistent sleep, a healthy diet, yoga, companionship, time in Nature, and meditation (or another form of spiritual practice). Your depression is not a glitch in your brain. It's a signal that something in your life must change. The Awareness stage is about digging into the source of trauma to understand the various ways it is manifested in your biology, cognition, and behaviors. Developing Awareness also acts as a symptom reducer so it builds on top of the other Symptom Control mechanisms. Awareness can take many forms. Studying medical literature to learn about what's happening to your body and brain. Talking to others and discussing shared experiences. Revisiting prior traumas and understanding how they've influenced your current behaviors. All are beneficial. Meditation + Psychedelics + Cognitive Behavioral Therapy are the three legs of the Awareness stool. All three work to peel back the layers of the trauma-storing mind to arrive at epiphanies regarding how past trauma has shaped your present condition. Transcendence is about awakening beyond your history and your life situation to find freedom from suffering. This is when new patterns of behavior become adopted in light of everything you've learned at the Awareness stage, creating a path to your new sense of Self. It's essential to eventually move on from the Awareness stage b/c one can identify themselves too closely with their trauma, thereby binding their sense of Self to their trauma e.g. "I was assaulted by a parent therefore I'll never be capable of trust in a romantic relationship." The Transcendence phase can be enhanced with more meditation (or other spiritual practices), psychedelics (when administered appropriately), and the mindful practice of adopting new patterns of behavior that condition self-love versus self-sabotage. A simple tool one can use daily during the Transcendence phase: when confronted with a life decision, ask the question: "What is the path towards love for myself or love for others?" If you choose the path towards love, you'll remain on the path towards Transcendence. Altogether, treatment takes time and dedication. It took me 4 years to get through the Symptom Control stage such that I no longer needed medication. I built Awareness over 6-7 years. And, finally, 10 years into my journey, I began the Transcendence phase. The Transcendence phase will last for the remainder of your life. It's a wonderful pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It's worth committing to the work needed to return to a calm, peaceful mind. To those that are suffering, things can get better when you make changes to how you live. - Find your tribe. Connect with others. - Return to nature. Go outside. Get dirty. - Do purposeful work. Don't be a drone. - Be active. Eat clean. - Practice mindfulness. Tame your mind. I fear that many of you are quietly living painfully inside, hiding the pain by burying yourself in the pursuit of achievement, which is the only socially acceptable addiction, especially in our industry. I can say this from experience. I'm here to talk. My DMs are open.
I want to make the body into sky. – Anish Kapoor, on his sculpture Marsyas (2002), Turbine Hall, Tate Modern No, I can’t imagine it–– I, the taut tongue in an unsheltered mouth dizzy with the earth as it turnsand turns. At least let me be skin. Something beneath skin.
But seeing the shape of your ideas is not the same as having new ideas, and in fact — as with the ossification of keywords — creating a too-comprehensive portrait of your own thoughts can amount to locking yourself into a labyrinth of your own preconceptions. Instead my notes were beginning to depress me. They were a visible testament of fruitless effort. To my horror, it turned out to be a chaotic mess that would never have passed muster under my own dissertation director. It read, in my opinion, like something written by a sentient library catalog, full of disordered and tangential insights, loosely related to one another — very interesting, but hardly a model for my own academic work. but I had to admit that once again my attempts to disrupt thinking with a technology of note-taking had only resulted in an enormous, useless accumulation of busywork. I finally had to acknowledge that something had been wrong about the advice I received so many years before: a scholar’s notes were not a life’s work, but only a tool.
You could imagine a world where cartography never incorporated drawings of territories, and instead relied solely on written descriptions of land. “To the west is a mountainous range, with several large rivers emptying to a gulf in the south.” In such a world, there would no doubt be practised experts, capable of envisioning in their minds the described area. But these written maps would clearly suffer from a lack of depictions.
Meditation: RAIN of Self-Compassion (2020-12-30) - One of the great sufferings is turning on ourselves with judgment and/or self-aversion. This practice brings the acronym RAIN to this pain. It helps us cultivate a healing self-compassion, and the realization of who we are beyond any limiting story of self.
Robin’s note on “Is Substack the media future we want?
I think Anna hints at something here that I’ve struggled to describe, the way that blogs were somewhat hidden and when you discovered them it was like finding a treasure map; something intentionally obscured from view.
One idea that comes up a lot in certain technology circles, especially cryptocurrency, is the idea of a “zero-knowledge” proof, or ZKP. Here’s a quick analogy that might be helpful to explain how a ZKP works. Let’s say there is a wall of 1,000 locked safes. I want to verify that you own each safe. You could do that by unlocking all the safes, but that would reveal the combination to me, and you don't want me to know the secret. We seem to be at an impasse. One way out of this dilemma is for me to leave the room. I tell you, “I’m going to leave and come back in 1 hour. Please open all the safes.” If I come back and the safes are open, it's probably because you knew the combinations to each safe. You never had to tell me the secret (the safe combination), and I don’t have to know what the secret is to be satisfied that you know it. That’s the “zero knowledge” part.
For mathematicians and computer scientists, 2020 was full of discipline-spanning discoveries and celebrations of creativity. We'd like to take a moment to recognize some of these achievements.
1. A landmark proof simply titled “MIP* = RE" establishes that quantum computers calculating with entangled qubits can theoretically verify the answers to an enormous set of problems. Along the way, the five computer scientists who authored the proof also answered two other major questions: Tsirelson’s problem in physics, about models of particle entanglement, and a problem in pure mathematics called the Connes embedding conjecture.
2. In February, graduate student Lisa Piccirillo dusted off some long-known but little-utilized mathematical tools to answer a decades-old question about knots. A particular knot named after the legendary mathematician John Conway had long evaded mathematical classification in terms of a higher-dimensional property known as “sliceness.” But by developing a version of the knot that yielded to traditional knot analysis, Piccirillo finally determined that the Conway knot is not “slice.”
3. For decades, mathematicians have used computer programs known as proof assistants to help them write proofs — but the humans have always guided the process, choosing the proof’s overall strategy and approach. That may soon change. Many mathematicians are excited about a proof assistant called Lean, an efficient and addictive proof assistant that could one day help tackle major problems. First, though, mathematicians must digitize thousands of years of mathematical knowledge, much of it unwritten, into a form Lean can process. Researchers have already encoded some of the most complicated mathematical ideas, proving in theory that the software can handle the hard stuff. Now it’s just a question of filling in the rest.
Learn more: https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantas-year-in-math-and-computer-science-2020-20201223/
My friends didn't wait for me to ask. They showed up. They took over. They didn't ask.
My friends didn't wait for me to ask. They showed up. They took over. They didn't ask. When they all swept out of there four hours later, my place was a home. Not only was everything put away — but now it had a memory attached to it, a group memory, friends, laughing, dirty jokes, hard work. These are the kinds of friends I have. Be that kind of friend to others.
And I remembered a part of me that had been boxed up and filed away for a long, long time. “A reminder of my capacity for feeling”: that’s what I experienced. And it’s what I wish for you, too.
When you use Δ to send a block forward in time, you are in effect sending a series of linked ideas forward to your future self. Your future self then has the ability to contribute to this evolving strand of thought and send it forward in time again ad infinitum.
The grab-bag style is really interesting, where I just list out ideas and links to things that were interesting to me throughout the week. It’s essentially a forcing function for my attention. You have to to notice the things that you’re reading and thinking about, that are actually important, if you want to have any hope of pulling together enough interesting atoms for a functional structure.
I found my best friend in pieces: the sense of humor from the disco producer, the philosophical banter from the Twitter friend, the emotional support from the diamond maker. I found that all of the qualities I wanted in a best friend didn’t have to come from a single person.
I think one of the reasons Zoom school horrified so many people, is not because it was a big break in how education works but because it brought the reality of how education works, to the forefront it highlighted the American classroom as the consumer audience structure it is
Stephen’s comment on Parsing’s module namespacing and how they tried to mirror Combine’s
This is just a humble suggestion from a fan. I see that you have an public enum Parsers { } to use as a namespace, like Combine does with the Publishers type. But you've still defined sever...
