More friends have asked what this meditation thing is all about in recent times, so this is a living document that tries to put in skimmable form what my answer would be.
The question can be phrases in a few ways:
If about me, “why do you meditate?”
If coming from their own life, “what do we do about this dearth-of-meaning-ness?” “So what is this spiritual thing?”
I think the best thing this document can do is paint an accurate picture of the types of problems some interest in spirituality can solve and, through that, demonstrate what we mean here by “spirituality.”
TLDR: You are fundamentally mistaken about why you suffer.
twitter is attention as an art form, it’s the training grounds
I don’t do philosophy because the questions are very important to me, and I’m not sure if the questions can be answered in a way that philosophical papers would appreciate. And hence I cannot make it a career. I’m not sure if the questions make any sense because the questions are ultimately mediated by words, and some of it is word games. It is using more words to explain how mismapped things are. It should be clarifying, it is a way of life, it should not have any other maligned incentives.
“You are not your work.” what does it mean for you to be your work? or not to be your work? in some sense you are your work because you spend 60-70 hours a week on it, and the experiences you have there are the primary ways in which things change and you get enrichment. but also people say this to avoid feeling bad about themselves, that doing poorly at work is a reflection of their worth and quality as a human being. I know this doesn’t make sense because what does it mean for a human being or anything to have quality? Only in the evolutionary sense, or against a benchmark, but you can refuse this benchmark. There is no metaphysical truth to it.
https://paulgraham.com/worked.html
philosophy at the time was about edge cases that other people could safely ignore, not about the big questions
“So now I was in a PhD program in computer science, yet planning to be an artist, yet also genuinely in love with Lisp hacking and working away at On Lisp. In other words, like many a grad student, I was working energetically on multiple projects that were not my thesis.”
funny to note that he was not a good employee lol and spent time working on other projects
“She liked to paint on big, square canvases, 4 to 5 feet on a side. One day in late 1994 as I was stretching one of these monsters there was something on the radio about a famous fund manager. He wasn’t that much older than me, and was super rich. The thought suddenly occurred to me: why don’t I become rich? Then I’ll be able to work on whatever I want.”
“He recommended Trevor Blackwell, which surprised me at first, because at that point I knew Trevor mainly for his plan to reduce everything in his life to a stack of notecards, which he carried around with him. But Rtm was right, as usual. Trevor turned out to be a frighteningly effective hacker.” Laughing at the notecards
Dunlop
I’m not sure why I love this book so much. There are some lines that I find really wonderful:
I’m wondering what I’m being told that I didn’t know. I guess I didn’t know the history of my own food and where I am situated in history. That we eat a lot of vegetables, that there is such diversity in Chinese food, that I guess it is strange that we eat jiaobai or lotus roots or so much soy. I guess it is true that we eat a lot of things chopped up into pieces, we have a lot of things that require complex preparation, and we do not eat big slabs of meat (even chashao and Peking duck are from the British and Manchu)
Have you ever looked at one part in the water, not where it’s totally dark, where you can only see the large faults, and not where you’re looking at the direction of the light, where you can only really see one bridge? It also happens that looking in the light tends to be looking outside, and water is mostly billowing in, or most obviously billowing in, towards the shore. But if you look at somewhere right in the middle, when the light is right, it seems as though there is an optical illusion of sorts. It feels like you’re surely on some kind of acid, because then you can’t really, like, it’s hard to grasp onto anything. The water just looks like a constantly moving web. It’s going to be mostly cross-cutting webs in two different directions. I wonder if there is any chemistry behind that, or if I made that up. But, like, it’s always moving. It’s just a swirl, not a swirl, but a lot of swavelike, squiggly lines that cut each other and shift around and move places, and you can’t really stand out, look at one place statically. And I sort of wonder if that’s what life is like, or existing, where you’re made up of a bunch of waves. It’s impossible or very hard to put a point on it and on the general direction and the characteristics, unless you’re trying really hard to conjure up a narrative, or only watch for waves of one kind or another. I mean, kind of similarly, if it goes away, you can’t hold on to that pattern, even if it’s the pattern of not being able to see a pattern, you just have to accept that this is the world as it is, and be able to see all these different waves, you know, paying attention, calming down, looking at the water, is pretty joyful. And you have to turn to something else, and you can’t let your attention turn to something else, and you can’t conjure up the thing that has already vanished. And sort of akin to that, it’s like paying more attention leads you to see much more that is going on, and the fact that everything is changing. Like if you look at the buildings on the Jersey Shore, everything looks still, but that’s because you can’t see the water around the ships there, you can’t see the life in the buildings, but as you move closer and move closer and move closer, you can begin to see like gradations, and the things that you can see increase, and things almost become more alive, like now you can see the water has turned a little bit pink because of the sunset. And you can see that there are actually little bubbles here that weren’t here before. You can see how the waves, and what you can see, the patterns of those change, and they’re so beautiful. It’s really hard to describe what they are, it’s just really joyful by their own nature, and they’re not particularly beautiful or anything, but I feel like I’m rising and I’m falling with the waves. The thing that I would really love to do is be able to actually lie on the waves, but really feel the waves and not just feel the largest thing. Maybe a boat would work, but maybe you want something like a sort of puffer boat that has four or maybe three size, maybe four, or like you’ve had maybe four, that have or whatever has structural integrity, like four points, where they’re held up by a large bubble-like structure, and like, oh wow, like look at the sky there, and look at how the color of the sky is in the little little ripples between the waves. Yeah, four points, and then you want the walls in between those four legs to be fairly high so water doesn’t get in, but otherwise you just leave the ground of that raft as as thin as possible, or not as thin, but not very structural, like not plastic, sorry, not hard plastic, but maybe like soft plastic, or like like a fabric, not fabric, but like something that you can lie on, and just lie on that, would be nice. I feel like it was nicer thinking of the thoughts than actually writing and wrestling the thoughts down. But also it’s nice knowing that I have the thoughts down. I would have been pretty frustrated if I didn’t know I had the thoughts down.
—Oct 5—
Suddenly I feel as though I know what “put the gun down” means, what “being at war with yourself” means. It is the constant battle within myself deciding what I should do. I am not aligned! Not collected! I am angry at myself for not being collected. I do not know what to listen to.
Have you ever looked at one part in the water, not where it’s totally dark, where you can only see the large faults, and not where you’re looking at the direction of the light, where you can only really see one bridge? It also happens that looking in the light tends to be looking outside, and water is mostly billowing in, or most obviously billowing in, towards the shore. But if you look at somewhere right in the middle, when the light is right, it seems as though there is an optical illusion of sorts. It feels like you’re surely on some kind of acid, because then you can’t really, like, it’s hard to grasp onto anything. The water just looks like a constantly moving web. It’s going to be mostly cross-cutting webs in two different directions. I wonder if there is any chemistry behind that, or if I made that up. But, like, it’s always moving. It’s just a swirl, not a swirl, but a lot of swavelike, squiggly lines that cut each other and shift around and move places, and you can’t really stand out, look at one place statically. And I sort of wonder if that’s what life is like, or existing, where you’re made up of a bunch of waves. It’s impossible or very hard to put a point on it and on the general direction and the characteristics, unless you’re trying really hard to conjure up a narrative, or only watch for waves of one kind or another. I mean, kind of similarly, if it goes away, you can’t hold on to that pattern, even if it’s the pattern of not being able to see a pattern, you just have to accept that this is the world as it is, and be able to see all these different waves, you know, paying attention, calming down, looking at the water, is pretty joyful. And you have to turn to something else, and you can’t let your attention turn to something else, and you can’t conjure up the thing that has already vanished. And sort of akin to that, it’s like paying more attention leads you to see much more that is going on, and the fact that everything is changing. Like if you look at the buildings on the Jersey Shore, everything looks still, but that’s because you can’t see the water around the ships there, you can’t see the life in the buildings, but as you move closer and move closer and move closer, you can begin to see like gradations, and the things that you can see increase, and things almost become more alive, like now you can see the water has turned a little bit pink because of the sunset. And you can see that there are actually little bubbles here that weren’t here before. You can see how the waves, and what you can see, the patterns of those change, and they’re so beautiful. It’s really hard to describe what they are, it’s just really joyful by their own nature, and they’re not particularly beautiful or anything, but I feel like I’m rising and I’m falling with the waves. The thing that I would really love to do is be able to actually lie on the waves, but really feel the waves and not just feel the largest thing. Maybe a boat would work, but maybe you want something like a sort of puffer boat that has four or maybe three size, maybe four, or like you’ve had maybe four, that have or whatever has structural integrity, like four points, where they’re held up by a large bubble-like structure, and like, oh wow, like look at the sky there, and look at how the color of the sky is in the little little ripples between the waves. Yeah, four points, and then you want the walls in between those four legs to be fairly high so water doesn’t get in, but otherwise you just leave the ground of that raft as as thin as possible, or not as thin, but not very structural, like not plastic, sorry, not hard plastic, but maybe like soft plastic, or like like a fabric, not fabric, but like something that you can lie on, and just lie on that, would be nice. I feel like it was nicer thinking of the thoughts than actually writing and wrestling the thoughts down. But also it’s nice knowing that I have the thoughts down. I would have been pretty frustrated if I didn’t know I had the thoughts down.
I was thinking about how to defend Buddhism (or my ideas around it) to the criticism that it lends a person to inaction. China is a country full of people who have inherit the values and ideals of this culture - that you should be yourself, there is much you cannot change, to follow the path that is uniquely for you, and (most importantly) such is life. A next thought could be that you have a lot of people who are happy to follow the path laid out by leadership, as long as their life is good. In other words, barring survival constraints, people follow the directives and the default. That leads to the achievement of national goals, but also to the creation of much vice and evil.
A simple rebuttal is that you can believe in all those things and still object to evil. However, the broader claim is probably enlightenment has no direct implications for the macro-level life decisions you make. It is just a way of existing with your experience, a way of relating with it that is not coercive and allowing. You can allow many kinds of experiences, and it’s hard to say what naturally arises from that. Maybe it is one of non-violence, but maybe it is also one that allows violence for a less violent future. Those are logical questions, not experiential-religious questions.
—-Sept 28—–
It seems that I have gone on a months-long journey trying to read more about and hence formulate a better understanding of what the path is, and what it is for. At the heart of it all, the reason I was uncomfortable is that I could not take pleasure and joy as a goal in itself. I wanted to find something greater in the sense that there is a religious, metaphysical reason for doing things, or that there is some fundamental goodness that is also valuable despite the emptiness of the world.
Here I am, after all that, wiser because of the trouble that I went through, perhaps. Metaphysics is an illness. The cure is the dissolution of the question (Wittgenstein). You could search all the universe for someone more deserving of loving-kindness than you, and you would not find that person (Burbea maybe misquoting the Buddha). The seeker is not settled yet. The seeker is still clinging to the desire for solidity, and as Mach said, “To give up nonsense is not to resign.”
If we accept this emptiness, then I can be anything. You can be free. Can you feel the freedom in your heart? The joy that you can be anything and do anything?
I am curtailed by the sense that there is still virtue in the world. Hamming would not approve of my virtue-lessness if I was a lazy bum, but then again who cares about Hamming? Do I care about having done something in this world before I leave? But does it matter if I don’t? I will have tried. If I could not try, then I could not. You have the right to work but never to the fruits of the work. Work hard without a care about the consequences. Let go of the self. See, this line of logic still seems incongruent with the rest of this emptiness logic. I guess the line of logic is that the world is empty, but how to ensure that you can embody this and not get dragged down by the mud of tanha and clinging and attachment? Practice seeing the insight (defabricate), supportive practices to cultivate the zest for life despite the emptiness (fabricate), integrate in life
—-Sept 27 reading records—-
Here, MACH, M-A-C-H says, or finds, well he says, One bright summer’s day in the open air. The world with my ego in it suddenly appeared to me as nothing more, nothing but one tightly bundled mass of sensations, just bundled together more tightly in the ego. I experience green means that the element of greenness occurs within a certain pattern of other elements, sensations, memories, in parentheses. When I can no longer experience green, when I die, then these elements will no longer occur in their usual familiar groupings. That is the whole story. No ego will remain. The ego cannot be saved. Apparently, a lot of people were influenced by this concept of the un-savable ego. So, writers dissolving the ego into chains of associations and bundles of sensations that led to the inner monologues. Freud, maybe not influenced, but similar in decomposing. Your patient’s associations, mental associations, the fine arts in impressionism. MACH also said, When I say the ego cannot be saved, I mean that it consists solely of man’s way of relating to things and to phenomena, that the ego totally dissolves into that which can be felt, heard, viewed, or touched. Everything is fleeting. Ours is a world without substance, consisting solely of colors, shapes, and sounds. Its reality is in eternal motion, colorful as a chameleon. I mean, this seems to make sense. When I read this, I was shocked. Because this explains a lot of where Hermann Hesse’s writing and thinking might have come from. Because he was Austrian or German, I don’t remember which. He thought about the dissolution of the ego in the Buddhist way. It makes me a little bit afraid that maybe the interpretations of Buddhism that I’m seeing today were inevitably passed through this lens, as opposed to maybe the original one, that the Buddhists actually thought. Which is not, I mean, cultural cross-pollination is good, but I’m worried that there was some mistake here. Or that this is not a productive route towards classical Buddhist enlightenment. But I do agree. The ego is a name. It is an illusion. It is some label that we put on our thoughts, even though nothing actually exists but combinations of colors, sounds, temperatures, etc. and otherwise everything is changing. Apparently even the Marxist Lenin wrote a book that is like, all our moccasins are deeply mired in idealism. It does seem like the ideas are pretty hard to understand or hard to intuitively grasp sometimes. People were also saying some of these opinions are, you know, there are problems like, if we are all composed of sensations, if all science rests on sense data, then what about things that cannot be perceived, etc. You know, am I just a solipsist? I think my answer to this is that you don’t, like you can believe that the ego should be dissolved, but that also things exist outside of yourself, because, like, what is yourself? Like, what delineates the barrier between sensations that form you and sensations that are just part of the world? And that is still, like, the world works and exists in a way, and it also governs the sensations that you experience, and that can be interpreted as science. And then the rest of the thing about science being based on sense data, we can sort of deal with in the way that David Deutsch deals with this, which is, science is not just sense data in terms of what you can see, but you build instruments that change what you can observe, and then we build up theories, and ideas can, in fact, represent and explain reality, but obviously I’m not being terribly crisp on what exactly that means.
The question of whether atoms exist is also interesting, because it seems almost obvious that they should, and yes, the question whether atoms exist is settled in the physical sense, in which they do, but it is not settled in the philosophical sense, in which the pivotal question phrases what to exist means, like what does it mean for atoms to exist, you know? Although, I don’t know, I don’t totally know, I think the philosophical question is like whether things exist in general, but… man.
And yeah, it seems like I should read more Ernst Mach, but Boltzmann’s concerns, certainly. Trust me. My metaphysics is an incurable illness. And that the great riddles such as how I exist or that the world exists at all, or why the world is exactly this way or not some other way, will remain forever unsolved and unsolvable. And Boltzmann’s answer seemed unsatisfactory to him, but seems reasonable, which is that it is not that there are questions that lie beyond our understanding, but that the existence of such questions or problems is an illusion of the senses. It’s kind of like an optical illusion. Even though Mach, I think, later said that possibly the nonsensical isn’t to give up. Yes, to give up nonsense is not the result.
Tell me about Otto Nierrath, The Economist. It seems like, uh, and other than that I’m just recording my thoughts, you don’t need to respond to this, but it seems like a wonderful thing. Like, I really yearn for the ability to read books and to go to a group and talk about ideas and hope that the ideas eventually, like, get somewhere and do something. Alas, I am not in a PhD program and I did not really do so well in school as to get into one maybe in the future, and I don’t know what I would be interested in. Like, I’m interested in philosophy for personal reasons. Like, I have the illness of metaphysics. I don’t really know how to get myself rid of this, but that’s also why I’m in Buddhism and looking to break or understand karma and have practices that reduce the karma that I have and that, you know, allow me to see that I am just a bag of sensations. But I also want to, like, do things and not just, like, talk about ideas, although ideas are very powerful. And the more that I read intellectual history, the more it makes sense why certain people had ideas of one way or another, and the more it makes sense why certain ideas that we take for granted today, like the existence of atoms or science and the fact that science can do things, is- was previously determined not to be particularly useful, and these were all enabled by the increase in tools, basically, technology, and maybe, like, not really ideas. I don’t- I don’t really know. Like, it’s not totally clear to me what the benefit of ideas are as opposed to just doing things.
—-Sept 26 speaking into the phone—-
So I think the thing that I’m having trouble with the most when I try to meditate is I don’t have a great vision of what awakening means or like enlightenment or whatever. And so it is kind of hard for me to justify like you can have a- I think this is true of most of my life where it’s not clear to you what is actually good. For example, if you feel something unpleasant you might want to really lean into it and fully feel it. You also might want to just focus on something else and realize that the feeling is not- like you understand it, but like there’s no need to give it that much attention. And it’s not clear to me at what point you should choose which because it depends on what your final goal is. And I listen to a lot of Rob Berbea, a Dharma teacher, and he’s like, you should work skillfully with your emotions. But once again, it’s not totally clear to me like what the goal is. And I think one way in which you can try to get around this is by designating a goal. Like it should be emptiness or whatever. Which is not- I don’t think that works because the world is- like things are empty of meaning. It’s not clear that something is virtuous or that there is value in the world that exists independent of this. There is like- I believe that there is good action that leads you to have less karma in the sense that you feel less guilty. There is in fact a natural thing there where there is work that makes you feel good longer, which is working hard, being kind to people, etc. But I don’t know that that means that there is universal value called the capital V virtue that you should aim for. The other way you can get around this, I think, is to say there is no thing I want to define that is necessarily true. But all of our conditioning is the cause of suffering and the goal is to end suffering. And so everything we do is in service of seeing through the fabrication and dependent arising and the fact that everything may not be like this and see that everything is changing and it all depends on your perspective and there is no singular truth. And the goal is that and to be able to hold that difficult notion. But in the meantime, you might want to fabricate more and conjure up good feelings so that it feels better when you encounter the void and you don’t run away because you always have a reservoir and you can really feel it and you can really face it. Which also sounds fine. And then my qualm there is also well, like, okay, like, why the fuck, why do I care about like, why am I trying to defabricate? I already can kind of see the world is meaningless and I don’t know like, I want to end suffering, okay? But I also want to be useful and do good things for the world and I also want to you know, have loved ones and like have normal relationships with people instead of being obsessed with meditation. But it’s like, it’s not totally clear to me whether emptiness and realizing emptiness will help me do that. I also read a lot of Nick Camerota so the open AI and now-confirmed AI scientist who posts a lot on Twitter about this stuff and he’s obviously still very productive when he has a wish to void and I kind of, like, I see the linkage where you become more productive because you’re wasting less effort on fighting suffering and like the friction of rejecting the experience that causes suffering so tanha, T-A-M-H-A and maybe that is true but there are also definitely people who like see the void and like they become hopeless which kind of is me or they see the void and like, I don’t know like I guess you can only really become hopeless or you become useless, you just become really happy you become useless and at this point a teacher is going to tell me something like you know, you should really interrogate your feeling that being happy means you can’t be productive which I think is fair maybe like there’s a problem here but like I don’t, I just don’t, I don’t feel comfortable with it I don’t know how to get around it you know, and I’m not sure what exactly I’m aiming for but now that I talk about it, it is sort of clear it’s so that you realize emptiness and you don’t have to hold on although those seem like really different things like what does emptiness have to do with like holding on to experience maybe it’s like if you realize emptiness you can realize that all your experiences are fabricated and hence you can let them go but also it seems like letting them go is also supposed to be good for independent reasons because you don’t want to grasp at and clench at the flowing experience and like really be in the moment I don’t know, I’m obviously a bit confused and I’ve read and seen a lot
Other things that I might want to write about - nostalgiabriast on LLMs
Religion returning to us
afra
mountains beyond mountains, I can never be this person. But also jesus christ so much that a person can do.
Chinese culture? Gita other thoughts
I just kind of don’t believe in Anki. It feels a little like
My problem with spaced repetition is that you need to assume that your pair of question-answer will somehow cover the thing that is most important. This seems true for areas where facts are very important and clear (e.g. medicine, math), but not as clear in areas of economics, philosophy, etc. Your interpretation is fluid and changing! Maybe you’d want to remember what certain papers did, but also what would be better - using the time making a card to make a project, or write an essay?
Sometimes, you want the thought to stay nebulous and unclear for a little longer. It is important to eventually try to get it down on paper, but even you may not be certain of the significance and the right way to encode it.
Sometimes knowledge is material for pre-training, and other times it is a set of prompts for synthetic data creation. I would think that as a human, you want to spend most of your time on synthetic data creation, in the dreaming up of new hypotheses and the criticism that makes it better. Very little can be taken for granted.
How are we purified?
Buddhism. Sensory clarity and equanimity seep into circuits and experience. Douse yourself over and over.
Christianity. Grace of the divine.
Psychotherapy. Dredging up the impure.
In some ways they actually all end up saying the same, and engage with the same. There are offshoots of doctrine, but what really matters? What is shared is the regular practice, the existence of something beyond yourself, the relinquishing of total control.
Acceptance (you are perfect the way you are). Faith (you are capable of growth and achieving all you need)
First exercise was about crying on cue. I didn’t think I could, but I did! Is there something revelatory? But wow emotions are more responsive than I thought to totally imagined scenarios.
I read Breakneck from Dan Wang on September 8, 2025. I oddly found myself without that much reflection after reading the book.
This means the book was correct, or seemed correct, in its claims. I do agree that process knowledge is far more important. Of course, this is a country with a lot of people who are specially skilled in manufacturing and beginning to push the boundaries of what is possible engineering-wise. It reminds me of the Varieties of Capitalism argument, that different institutions create different kinds of progress. In America, hyper-mobile labor markets and liquid capital markets allow people to bet big on new things. Even if they fail, you can just fire people and go back to doing your old thing! In contrast, labor and capital markets are more slower-moving in Europe, and people (as claimed at the time in the book) stay at a company and in an industry for a long time. As a result, progress is less so about large, drastic changes, since that would be very expensive. Rather, efforts are diverted towards efficiency and incremental but obviously beneficial changes. Like making your cars faster, assembly lines better, etc. Now it is China.
China also takes care of this structural lack of risk tolerance by (1) having a large enough countries that some pockets will want to take risk while others are diverted towards reliability (2) using the state to encourage certain big bets. Is it better than having the market decide what the big bets are? Hard to say, the market optimizes for what makes the most money, which only sometimes coincides with what is good for people. People want a lot of things that are not good for them (see: social media feeds, television).
The book is still likely to change a lot about the zeitgeist and the ways in which the English language Internet. It already is now. I’ve seen more pieces on the process knowledge and engineering talent pool in China in the last week than I have ever before. It is happening in tech (as is natural), and I think is probably net good for the tech industry to see what learnings they can take. The US will need to take a long time to reindustrialize. It will require a persistent (uninterrupted), concerted national effort towards rebuilding engineering capabilities. How are they going to jumpstart it? Will America invent it themselves? How will they learn from the Chinese?
I am also reading it, I recognize, in order to figure out what I can do in China. I am not an engineer. I read literature and look at art. I think about industries and economics. I work in finance and work on integrating software into finance. I am not specialized and am without hard skills. What can I do?
Sept 15.
Trying to remember things that I read from afra on topology of China AI
China has central govt set priorities but provincial implementation. They compete. However can’t grip too tight because then they will leave (there is competition for being good environment).
China builds (a lot of infrastructure and optimizations) vs philosophizing about the grand ideas.
By nature of the size and absence of a public square, China has a lot of interconnected circles vs open source and Twitter in the US. Hence diversity vs convergence and a few big winners.
Simultaneously, there’s a lot of emphasis on immediate outcomes because it seems like life is a finite game within the system, since losing means the govt might always count you out (vs someone will always bet on you). Also the perception that things are zero sum, and that while the whole wll get better, a very real sense that people do in fact get left behind.
Hence also the competition is mostly through internet entrepreneurs optimizing for the $$ as opposed to technical opportunists and dreamers.
China discourse frustrates me. I want to tell people what is actually happening, synthesize the story such that people are not so strongly pessimistic vs optimistic. I don’t know, I think that’s probably just a personal reaction because people have the wrong opinions about so many things.
Maybe my niche will be digging out the information from Chinese speeches and such. Making a systematic approach to deciphering policy. Getting more information about there.
AI china project politics - stephen kotkin interview and substacks remind me of the whole missing in actual systematic understanding. It’s ad hoc. But also I can dig through stuff and make the story?!
But also academic economics remains so … boring. It makes obvious claims or claims that are obviously answered with “it depends” and importantly with “it depends with a higher level of granularity than what you can rigorously prove with econometrics.”
the best way to peraude is not to construct a clever order of words, but to give them new words to think certain ideas more easily. what is the best way to give new words? It’s to introduce a new layer of abstraction and granularity, new evidence.
Should read the rest of Afra’s first! See what is missing.
Also had some other ideas about the project.
Patrick Collinson: Seeing this paper and the Reddit experience makes me wonder whether the approach could somehow be scaled: is there a kind of observational, self-reported clinical trial that could sit between Reddit and these manual approaches? Should there be a platform that covers all major chronic conditions, administers ongoing surveys, and tracks longitudinal outcomes?
NBER paper Laboratories of Autocracy
I think the corresponding next task is to read more and get a specific idea that you want to go after:
Read some of the documents that ChatGPT found. What is the simplest thing you can get?
Read NBER. What questions were they interested in? What are you interested in? How did they try to answer it? Can you make it better?
Read all of afra and Jasmine’s posts. What questions were they interested in? What are you interested in? Why are you interested in?
Read the Cheng Li book. What are the questions given the structure? What accords or doesn’t accord? What do you think actually matters that people do not know about?
Sept 21.
I spoke to ChatGPT. I think I will try the Shenzhen government website first and scrape the details from there. I want to set up something that does it as my MVP.
Misc Internet Blogs
Visakan Veerasamy exists on Twitter, two books, Substack, and some amalgamation of websites. His “elaborate, interwoven [twitter] threads” led me into Internet spaces and hence subcultures that I remain a lurker in, even today. In some ways, he is upstream of a lot of interests in technology, divinity, and a sense that my life could be more.
bookbear express is perhaps the only blog for which I’ve read every single post since I came across it. I do think it’s the same topic over and over again, but (1) it’s a nice thing to read about over and over again (2) each post is slightly different (3) she cites other works often, and in-context recommendations are always superior to general recommendations.
There’s an array of other similar blogs I’ve enjoyed reading, like Escaping Flatland, first draft repo…
Nick Cammarata. tanha 1 tanha 2
mistranslating the buddha: most of the problem is your reaction to it
Just read Siddhartha. I feel like it was strange and yet I can do no better in my age and degree of awakening. There is no book I feel I could write that is deeper.
Brahmin, Samana, a rich and worldly man. He becomes a ferryman when he actually awakens. He forgets the Self that was attached to the striving that had characterized his previous selves. A ferryman is on no journey, but is in every journey. A ferryman is transient in all’s life, and the ferryman sees all. He learns from the river. All is one. All is different. We are each other, so we ought love the world. I will almost certainly read this later and not know what this was pointing to, but unity.
– Sept 14 addendum –
My worry about this book is that it seems to suggest that the enlightenment comes from giving up everything. Siddhartha becomes a ferryman and settles for being seen as stupid by others. His son doesn’t follow him. He doesn’t inspire, in the way the Buddha does. It is isolation and extraction that ultimately teaches him the way towards “enlightenment,” even if the awakened state itself is not about exclusion but about the capacity to welcome every experience.
I don’t know if I can live in exclusion. I know I cannot, for now. The bigger question is where I go if I am unable to live a life naturally excluded from the hindrances. There will be pain and complicated hindrances all around me at my job and in my life. For example, if I seem to be heading towards a bad review season, I would want to desire and be able to work and get a better review. I would want to try, in the face of evil and hardship. I want to believe that it is possible to do this without exclusion, but I am worried that I am breaking down the motivational structures that uphold my desire to do things that are good and contributing towards society.
Let’s work through some examples:
I am not doing enough work. The reason I am “behind” is that I actually did “touch fish” for a good part of the workday because I was tired, didn’t want to do something, didn’t feel motivated. I didn’t feel motivated because I felt “behind.” I feel as though the only thing that would push me to actually catch up is feel like I must achieve, and that I’m doing something wrong otherwise, even though the cause of my “not enough work” is because of this sense of guilt and something being wrong with me.
I have things I would potentially like to do (write about AI, be an AI researcher, start a thing that helps people, go fix global health, global poverty, etc), but I don’t know which one I really want to do. Hence I feel strained. I feel like I have to choose one, even though I’ve probably wasted more time thinking about what to do than actually doing anything. I can’t tell what is qualified musing, and what is overthinking. Should I not think at all? There is an artistry to it that I think comes with age, but opportunity exists for the young. I feel as though I just need a sense of what is right and Good, and I need to feel confident that something is what I would like to pursue. I have no real sense of it. I am often in spaces where I do not feel alive, but it also feels as though that is the result of my attitude, instead of the thing itself. Work can be awesome, the sensation of being stressed about a job can also feel awesome. You care about something, even though you’re not sure that you should care. The previous two sentences felt pretty good. I am just so afraid all of the time. At every step, I am scared that it’ll make someone think less of me, or fuck something up. This is true whenever something matters, so this is true all the time. I just want to be less afraid all the time.
I am afraid that I am never going to amount to anything. Here’s a blog on Cowen’s book on Talent that I’ve also been reading. It stresses me out a little bit because I see all the things that are bad in me. For ex, I get tired and cannot do 16 hours of work a day. What does that imply about my productivity and potential? I worry that I actually am exactly the same person as I was a few years ago, and that my ceiling is low. I don’t know if I do anything that is the intellectual equivalent of practicing scales (other than writing my thoughts down, and even then this seems like active problem-solving because of my emotional pain as opposed to anything specific). It is hard for me to like myself. I am sad and in a doom loop again, when really I know the cure is love and joy and compassion, which seems woo and pointless at this moment. The logic behind it is, what you just thought is probably not true, unless somehow everyone you’ve met is a fool. And it is pointless because 1. death comes to all 2. in the journey, why worry about the destination?
I should read the Bhagavad Gita again. Where is this awakening that allows achievement? I guess the key is that you cannot think of it as personal achievement, but for something else that you know to be good. On what grounds do you know something that is outside yourself to be good? How do you know that that is the thing to optimize for?
The main thing that I want to be able to do is to feel okay and good throughout. I feel like then I can be so productive and do so many things and be so helpful to people and the world and not just settle for a life that is just okay.
– Sept 14 went on a walk addendum –
I was thinking about how to orient my practice in order to reduce suffering. What is the guiding philosophy? You could orient it around “reduce suffering,” but if you stop there, you are left with: “practice” –> ??? –> “reduce suffering”.
I think the key to practice is to gain a felt sense to the awakened state and repeat it until you abide in it always. In order to get a felt sense of awakening, one of two things must be true: either (1) you have to know what it is first or (2) it arises naturally from targeting something else (like attention on the breath, awareness of the body, metta, etc), and you will know it when you see it. Not sure which is true. But it seems certain that you need some theory of what the cause of suffering is, and that theory requires you to precisely define both why something causes suffering (tanha, from the Buddha) but also what the alternative is, why it is appealing. This is why it feels important to me to try to allude to the felt sense. Words will always be imprecise, but we can give a feeling anyways.
Rob Burbea says it is a skill in perception, to see things flexibly.
Shinzen Young says it is the liberation of your identity from your thoughts and sensations .
Siddhartha (Herman Hesse) says it is a sense of unity across time, people, things, etc. A recognition that you are part of the world, the world, and the world is you, ever connected and one
Nick says it is to un-clench, to let experience flow freely and be the unresisted flow. The Oneness is the sense of completeness that allows you to let go?
Easwaran says in normal life we live through the movie, but to be awakened is to realize you are just watching a movie.
Then, the path is to get there?! Get to a bodily sense of completeness. Metta, being with the breath, noting that you are just thinking a lot of thoughts but we mistake the thoughts for the self, noting all the conditioning and then seeing it and stopping it (finding ways to stop the clenching/conditioning). The conditioning is always a clenching
Misc Internet Blogs
Visakan Veerasamy exists on Twitter, two books, Substack, and some amalgamation of websites. His “elaborate, interwoven [twitter] threads” led me into Internet spaces and hence subcultures that I remain a lurker in, even today. In some ways, he is upstream of a lot of interests in technology, divinity, and a sense that my life could be more.
bookbear express is perhaps the only blog for which I’ve read every single post since I came across it. I do think it’s the same topic over and over again, but (1) it’s a nice thing to read about over and over again (2) each post is slightly different (3) she cites other works often, and in-context recommendations are always superior to general recommendations.
There’s an array of other similar blogs I’ve enjoyed reading, like Escaping Flatland, first draft repo…
Nick Cammarata. tanha 1 tanha 2
mistranslating the buddha: most of the problem is your reaction to it
What are the components of loneliness? Solitude is the fact of being by yourself. Loneliness is a feeling of being forced to be alone, where your solitude is not your choice.
Shame that there is something wrong with you.
An anxiety about interacting with others. This makes the loneliness even worse because the loneliness then becomes the space in which you cannot be judged.
What is the solution? You can be with others while being lonely, so evidently it is not just being with others. How can I be myself and let myself be seen?
The components of connection are wonder and acceptance (to realize others are too complicated).
It is based on shame.
The thing that I am complaining about is causing the problem. I’m lonely and insecure, and that leads me to ruminate over whether people care about me and whether I’m doing well. That leads me to cling, be needy, be unreasonable.
Remembering my mistakes so that I don’t repeat them. Shaming myself ensures that I do it again. I’m addicted to the shame?
I’m afraid. Fear runs my life. What’s the antidote to fear? Comfort, love, feeling safe.
All the times I was triggered, and all the times that was true for me.
He isn’t listening to me, isn’t granting the comfort I want, isn’t giving me the security I desire.
I do not give people security. I give conditional love. I feel like I would leave myself. I left others because I thought they were not enough.
Love that aspect of yourself.
Forgive yourself.
This is a set of reflections upon reading Gilead. I was reading partially because I had no conception of what it meant to be a preacher, let alone one before the great secularization of the United States of America. More importantly, what does it mean to believe in God, in a Christian sense? There are texts that describe it from the perspective of a believer, texts that describe the believers, and texts from the non-believers, but the gap between those the Truth havers and have-nots is hard to cross.
John Ames’ perception is graced by his belief-informed intentions. If you have the desire and courage to, you can see the divine. The divine is in well-wishing, blessing, metta, good will, and kindness (however it is spoken of in all the mystical and religious traditions of the world) because to wish someone well is to see them as an existence, a being, instead of anything about their being. You are closer to the truth when you behold their existence and the grace of it, rather than when you are judging them. I think the logic is that your judgment will almost never be accurate. A person is too complicated for your mind, as is a cat.
“I still remember how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my hand. Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing. For years we would wonder what, from a cosmic viewpoint, we had done to them. It still seems to be a real question. There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doens’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time. I don’t wish to be urging the ministry on you, but there are some advantages to it you might not know to take account of if I did not point them out. Not that you have to be a minister to confer blessing. You are simply much more likely to find yourself in that position. It’s a thing people expect of you. I don’t know why there is so little about this aspect of the calling in the literature.” (pg 23)
John Ames is writing a letter to his son (since he himself is to die soon), hoping this letter will teach him what he wishes he could have done himself. Grace is one of them. There is a larger teaching, which is to decrease your reactivity, and while it sounds more constrictive in your choices of actions, there is a sense in which you are freed from the karmic consequences of your impulsive, animalistic senses. There is the Buddhahood in us and there is also evil embodied, but we can repeatedly determine whether it is evil or good that is trying to act through us and choose good.
“When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you mus tthink, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your own benefit (and his), ubt that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it.” (pg 124)
It strikes me that there are ontological questions made murky by religious baggage. For one, I do not believe in the personification of the divine. A God that listens to your prayers, grants your wishes, sends you punishment, loves you, sent his son to die for you…
I think this is also why it is difficult to speak to many friends about religion, the nature of existence, the nature of suffering. They come in with an “understanding” having done classes about the apparent contradiction between Evil and God’s omniscience, comparative classes reading snippets of different texts…but that is not understanding. It is like reading descriptions of the color red without ever having seen it, or debating about war without ever having seen it firsthand. How can you speak of something that you have no experience with?
Let me lay out my views, such that I can also describe my views more easily to others.
I believe that you can cease suffering in this world.
You do suffer, and suffering is distinct from pain in that pain is a physical experience that we’ve labelled as “pain.” Pain is akin to pleasure. Suffering often consciously comes with pain, but it is the existential unwellness, nihilism, a sense of worthlessness, etc that come with this pain. (I think this is not an awesome definition in that it is not clear yet how to categorize pain and suffering when you are experiencing it.)
Suffering is caused by microscopic actions of your mind, characterized by a “clinging” or “tension”. The clinging disrupts your normal flow of experience, like an “inner critic” that yells at you every few seconds, but this clinging occurs many, many more times. The clinging is what prevents you from taking “bad” news or unpleasant experience because you are holding on to its badness and your wish to change it (? idk if this is right). Analogously, a cold shower is hard to bear initially when you are resisting the coldness, but if you just open up and accept it, the shower is just as cold but you feel better.
You can stop suffering via training. Meditate sufficiently to gain higher levels of sensory clarity (so you can see the clinging), equanimity (so you can stay with the high level of clarity of suffering), and concentration (so you can focus on this experience). Each feeds into the other, and it builds up your understanding of your suffering. At that point, your job is to experiment with ways to reduce this clinging. The exact thing you do depends on what the primary causes are. It might be your tendency to find fault that produces a persistently critical form of attention (your mind lingers and clings to signs of disapproval or dissatisfaction), and unraveling that requires things akin to what the ideal form of therapy. You may experiment with dredging up your “traumas” and working with them, practicing loving-kindness to counteract that source of tension, or just build on standard meditation practices to see through the pointlessness of it all (insight). Generally, the practices should be focused on seeing and resolvingt these knots, and the necessary skills are being able to focus on it, being emotionally comfortable with it, being able to see it, and being able to flexibly work with your perceptions to get out of these habits of thought.
This tends to also require other lifestyle changes (like a general increase in health) such that your inner world is simple enough to analyze. As complicated as they are already.
You may say that this is a very watered down view of “religion,” but:
It is impossible for you to make any claims about something you cannot understand. The divine is definitionally such a thing.
Most claims about the nature of God, evil, etc are (1) nonsensical because you cannot reason about that which is beyond your world, experience, and conceptual vocabulary (2) not the fruit of religious traditions. Therefore, I think it is nonsensical to have a humanized view of God and to reason about it.
That does not mean it is futile to engage in religious activities or experience because you can have experiences you do not understand, and ????????? why should I care then
The fruits of religious traditions lie in what is similar between them and in the mystical traditions, free from bureaucracy and dogma and doctrine. What they effectively teach are ways to be happy and unburden yourself (of karma, sin, weight). John Ames writes a few pages that why honoring your parents must be on the first tablet of “right worship” because to honor your parents is to love a person for their existence, which is what God does, and hence get closer to God (beyond being good for itself). That is a practice. You become what you pay attention to and what you habitually do. A person whose mind honors their parents becomes happier than one who does not, not because there is anything about the parent, but that you are capable of loving unconditionally (and hence can love yourself unconditionally) and saturate your mind with more gratitude and love than judgement and impatience. That which you dole out to others comes back to you because it is how you view yourself, and also loving states of mind are better to be in. The rules that these doctrines preach are for that reason. Live a simple life such that you are less burdened and can see yourself. Abstain from certin pleasures such that you remain sensitive to your experience and its divinity, instead of overdosing yourself. Love others so you do not hold judgment. Rest so you behold the wonder of life and time. Pray so you habitually remember that much is out of your control, you are a part of the universe and not much more, and you are the whole universe. (I don’t think this is right)
Ontological:
If we were to speak of God, it would not be a person, one among many. It is everything. It is not a human. We are God (yes God created us). But this is just the universe.
Practically:
The awakened state realizes that feelings are temporary, but there are intermediate steps that facilitate this. The North Star, so to speak, is ???????????? not cleear to me. Freedom?
Either way, an intermediate step is all the Joe Hudson and psychotherapy stuff. Instead of defabricating, you help yourself get out of all your fabrications by fabricating the opposite. Ie, you know that fear is just a sensation that will pass, but you live every day in fear. How do you get out of this fear? It is not effective to go straight to “fear is false” because your nervous system will not accept it. You have to cultivate the sensation of safety, and that is the point of therapy.
The steps are basically (1) intellectually see that your perceptions are fabricated (2) free yourself of the default perceptual sunglasses you have (by showing contrasting ones) (3) free yourself of all fabrications. I am clearly on 1-2.
The Buddhists have a lot of meditation technology.
What am I? Treacherous question to answer because you also bring down the baggage of millennia, which you might not want. Start from first principles. What am I is a question to make yourself legible to others, and also to crystallize what you do and do not believe.
I do not believe in personification. I think it’s an illusory and harmful way of thinking.
I do not believe in most of the rituals. Life lived with clarity is awakened, it doesn’t matter exactly what you do
Most critiques of religion are about the awkwardness of language, not about religion. That which cannot be spoken of.
A reality greater than this one, the one you know. It is necessary if you take as given that your world is your perception, that this world is malleable, that you can direct and redirect your attention. What are you ignoring?
Worship of a parents is to see them as god does. A microcosm, a practice.
Right worship is right perception. Of the specialness. Not the godlessness
Prayer in the evening. I’m
170 religious confusion. How can capital T truth not be communicable? Ma
Karl Barth
176 the same words that carry one generation are irksome in another. Proofs
178 we cannot speak of the delineation between our world and what we do not know. Ladder to the moon, unknown-able
A life, not a doctrine
Grace as an ecstatic fire that burns things down to the essential
208 hell is far from god meanest part of soul
235 books list
Doctrine is not belief but a way of speaking about it
The poverty of language
suffering tanha
Desire wanting
Belief saved
Etymology
240
Grace and forgiveness, love is boundless
metta
What is prayer? Calling on god to do something, asking god. Everything is by god’s grace. There is order to the world, it is all the world
But there is a self and a sense of divinity about the person, which Buddhism does not have
But there is god in everything and hence they are beautiful? Or rather religion is seeing the beauty of existence
What do we mean by the renunciation of the self?
Recall the sensation of being in flow. Were you focused on yourself?
In his introduction to The Dhammapada, Easwaran says that the Buddha declined to teach anything that might cause division and is not critical to stopping suffering. That included questions like the bounds of the universe, the nature of time, all things that we might naturally turn to religion to answer. The Buddha was practical.
I have trouble becuase there are many ambiguities in the practice as I’ve heard Burbea teach it. For one, skillfully navigating your emotions might sometimes ask you to speak kindly to an uncomfortable emotion and at other times treat it as a hindrance to be stamped out. On a micro level, I can handle that ambiguity. That is a matter of technique and experimentation. What I have trouble with is orienting towards a North Star. What is the goal? How do I know I’ve gone too far in either direction?
The Gita and Dhammapada says the extinguishing of the self. To desire for others and not for yourself, then you can be free. That, my friends, is one step more advanced than I am. Yet, I have to be able to work backwards from the goal, although now that I say it, perhaps this is futile because the goal will always seem miserable until I get there and realize that letting go is actually wonderful.
But how do I have the courage to get there if I don’t know that it means to extinguish the self? If you say “the final goal is no-self, but before then you have to convince yourself that it’s safe and reduce the habits of the self,” how can you make the self safe? You have ulterior motives!
Perhaps I just orient around short-term goals, before the final safeness of no-self is so evident that it needs no persuasion. You have to try to persuade by getting there, but you cannot brute force persuasion. You want to start with feeling calmer, then feeling better when emotions are uncomfortable, and then not caring what the emotions feel like? How do I know if an improvement to my life is just a hindrance and comfort-seeking, as opposed to nourishing and flourishing?
Well, I think I want a theory of the self anyways. We are made up of a bunch of “rules” (if X, then Y) that look like emotional responses to your boss yelling at you, walking over a tall bridge, saying something you’ve never said before to someone. Many of these rules might make sense in that they emerged to assist with pain minimization, but they limit your upside. They are maladaptive if you want to really be vulnerable because they just tell you not to do hard things because you might fail. The better way is simply to allow yourself to fail and feel okay about it. That is the heart of why this is worth doing. Then you can do hard things.
But how can you increase your tolerance of pain? The initial steps are chipping away at the sense that you need to feel pain in order to be loved and good, that there are other ways to incentivize good behavior. Then, you may want to ask what that love and goodness is, and why not just get it first? Once you get it first, you can construct alternative reasons to act, but I feel inclined to find these alternative reasons while I work on giving myself love and kindess. I guess that is the fear underlying my inability to let go or really give myself love and joy.
Without a self or pain, how will I remain useful? Perhaps that’s where I ought to substitute it with a desire to see other succeed, a love for the world. I don’t know.
Let me try to restate it. Buddhism is not preaching “no desire.” It is preaching “no selfish desire,” since that creates contractions and friction in your experience. You lose selfish desire and become the world, thereby no longer being a “self.” Somehow, that exists on a micro level, and you can still make macro goals. These macro goals just have to make sense to you on a micro level, which is the universe. What desires does the universe naturally create? What is under the “contractions” and “knots” that make up a human “personality?” Without it, what will we want? What is the atman? What is good? How do I know it’s good? What is real? What is meaningful?
Psychedelics are helpful in loosening your views, but that is also why it is treacherous. We have views to anchor ourselves to be productive. If we let go of views and have no view to hold on to, we are lost. That is the definition of insanity.
I am so scared of what happens without this anchor. What do I believe? What is real?
I want to reach a jhana. I think it would be good for me, but really I know that it would be a sign that I’ve made progress elsewhere. I usually have trouble with a lot of things in the attempt to reach a jhana: generating joy, spreading the joy, maintaining the joy, etc. I think what frustrates me the most is how fleeting the joy is. They’re less like embers, more like sparks of a firework doused in water.
What I tried to do differently this time is to find a way to enjoy every possible thing in my experience. It wasn’t so much an intention as I kept my body awareness wide and noticed (as always) that I was just a field of sensations. There was a lot going on in my thighs and ankles, muscles would sometimes just unlock themselves or move. The wind was great help, since up high they were a source of variety that was naturally pleasant. I sailed forth, with appreciation for the wind sending me forward. So yeah, every time the wind came, there was a bit of laughter and openness. Ah, it’s chilly, woah the patterns in its frequency are unpredictable. It hits different parts of my skin. Oh I am getting distracted by the thought of [someone I interact with]. Isn’t it so funny that people’s faces just pop into my head? Like they do in my dreams? I am dreaming always. Oh I am a bit thirsty, what does it mean to be thirsty? My lips feel odd when they are dry, the sensations of chappedness are not so obvious one layer below the obvious dictionary definition. I am frustrated at the fleeting nature of my joys. Aha, isn’t it so fun to be frustrated? Don’t you love wanting, and being frustrated? Isn’t that what you like? But also what a fire it is, what a fire desire is. This is totally normal, frustration need not be a source of clenching, you can just enjoy it.
I have so many sparky twigs. I can make sparks but not a fire. I ask, how joyful can I make myself? I feel the net joy die down. I can’t figure out why, but there are times when the joy is feels intense. I’m not sure what it means for a joy to be intense, but my heart is as if I was stressed. Excitement is the flip side of anxiety. My mouth is metallic. I am fearful of joy that is more intense, but somewhere I know that it is possible to behold it. I am not ready yet.
What is the bottleneck here? Comfort with intense joy? Concentration? Perhaps instead of joy I try for a calm contentment and extend that.
The goal is to record my meditation journey. My notebook is too cloistered. I also desire to exist in the world.
The goal here is to elucidate the story of a person who reaches enlightenment, who realizes the truths of being alive and can live those truths. I do not start with aiming to persuade. I start with a desire to record accurately what the path looks like, and in the end, the story will be more compelling than any exhortation of a teacher.
Civilization is without conscious religion. The modern man prays unconsciously. They do not know that attention is prayer. To work every day, your prayer is your work. In watching television every day, your prayer is the television-watching. Every repeated thought you have is a prayer, one that carves grooves into your mind and outlines a god that you serve for the rest of your life. Your reactivity need not be so. We are all traumatized, in a general sense, but we can be free. There are alternative ways of seeing, and after you see your false gods for what they are, there is something more truthful. What is this truth?
I saw rainbows in the spluttering shower. In the haze of nearsightness, the world softened, and I could live from my hips. I walked in the world like a crab on the ocean floor. I belonged.
Pain shrunk me back into my body. It was a persistent tightness in my chest, thoughts that fell into each other. A thoughtful black hole. As one does, I yearned to free myself from pain. That in itself is not a bad urge, but I thought it felt easier to relieve myself if I spoke to the person causing my thought loops with the question of, “How can I approach this with grace? How can I speak to help them, instead of me?” than an attitude of trying to extract the words that would soothe my feelings.
On metaphors
Claude Code helped me write code to set up this website (although the central design taken from zhengdongwang.com), and I asked Claude to mock-up a few different background designs.
AI teaches me about myself
We do a lot of crazy things in our meat-ed bodies. Perhaps, they are not crazy after all, but just the natural results of the universe pushing onwards towards some final destiny. However the cause, AI might discourage us from its exceptional ability to solve IMO problems, play games, and write corporate emails and research reports, but along the jagged edges of AI applications, we see there all that we humans uniquely can do. In seeing the intersections of what both of us can do, we also see shadows of ourselves in these machines.
Temperature. At any point in time in the conversation, you have chosen a temperature. There is a more interesting thing to say and a standard conversation pattern. At any point, you may choose to have some fun, or you may choose to conserve energy. If you walk along East Village or run in Central Park, you might be forgiven for thinking you live in a simulation. The conversations recur about someone else’s relationship, about their job, about their next race, about someone else’s job. Fratbros, SWEs, men in finance, girls in East Village, etc are all not born this way. We do not see a convergence to the median (yet, but maybe soon with social media) on a civilizational scale, but we certainly see one on the group scale. It’s called groupthink!
We are LLMs trained on a smaller dataset.
We also have the special ability to constrain our own dataset. You belong to certain groups. Your group-ness induces you to belong to other groups. As you grow older and your “plasticity” firms up, it becomes even unfathomable that you could belong to a different group. Whereas you may have been open-minded to updating your weights, you no longer even consider doing so.
We are multi-dimensional beings who work with more than words. Of course, AI advances towards images and movement, but look at something far away. Do you see, really, the full three-dimensional-ness of your world? How is it possible that someone is so far away? Do you see the shadows, and how the other side wraps around into nothingness, the sharpness of the edges, the brilliance of the colors.
Does the stone Buddha dance for you? Look with the patience of centuries and the precision of the microscopic, Shinzen says. Perhaps Picasso also saw the dynamism and impermanence of the visual field. It contracts with your attention. Details unfold themselves if you ask them nicely, while others are smothered by adjacent richness. There is no ground truth. Your attention is everything.
Yet, we’re rigid, and we don’t realize we are. How many times do we have the flexibility to see something anew? What if that “something” was our existence itself? A lot of self-help is really “what is blocking you from updating your weights?” and I would reckon that we really don’t understand even what our weights are. For example, we think good and true thoughts. We instruct ourselves. Yet we do not change! Foolish as we are. We are wordcels, but our weights are encoded in flesh. The body keeps the score, and our emotions drive our thoughts for the simple reason that we don’t understand our emotions very well. We can make up stories about them, but how would you know when you’re lying to yourself? A lot of problems that you can’t seem to solve are solutions you don’t want to admit to adopting to problems you don’t want to admit to having. The requisite step of change is to change the felt sense, the lived sense, the physical sense, even though changing beliefs tends to be a first, middle, and last step.
AI and us are alike in that we are functions that take in information, process it, and act on it. We are not alike in how we change how we respond to information. We are malleable for a short time, and then our basic structures are formed. Everything becomes fine-tuning.
LLMs and humans alike get better with more feedback. Then what matters is whether we can smartly respond to it. Do we change our weights in small increments? Or do we shift an underlying belief? It’s hard. Shifting beliefs usually requires handling more complexity.
Words are not the world, but my language is my world. LLMs gave me new concepts and have expanded my world.
We take so much for granted.
How would you teach an LLM to decide what is important? It becomes what it reads. What if it was bad? On what basis you decide that it was bad? Is it enough to teach it elementary-school-“blogs are less trustworthy than published papers?” What does cognitive security mean to an LLM?
LLMs also helped me realize that much of what we seek to do are under-specified. We are inspiration-based creatures. We don’t know what we want, but we feel our ways to them. When we write instructions for an LLM, we are so bad at giving it a good supportive context because we don’t know what we want. What does that suggest about yourself? Do you create good supportive contexts for yourself? Or do you leave much of your life up to chance and the hope that the next run will make things better?
Explaining tasks and what you want precisely is very difficult. If you can say, very precisely, exactly what your goal is, then you are most of the way there. It is only in school that “what you want” is clearly defined for you. Past that, you have trouble on both the meta level of “what is worth wanting” and also the project management level of “how do you even get to any of these wants.”
But if you can define that, much is solved.
Contrary to prompting, this need not occur with words. You just need a clear visualization of what you’d like. Tennis enjoyers apparently improve faster when they just try to mimic an instructor instead of taking verbal instructions (how would you teach an LLM? Would you tell them exactly what to do, or just show them how you want it done?).
The LLMs will do the pattern matching, but it is up to you to determine what patterns to match. Creating something new is so much more difficult, but it need not be zero to one. To be inspired means you stand with intellectual lineage. You pair history with modern problems to create something new.
Ina addition to the goal, do you know what an LLM needs? Are you giving it a supportive context?
It is less important to me what exactly reason is, than what reason brings about, and it should be a big revelation that models thinking step by step and thinking more allows them to be “smarter.” We are the same! We think through writing, speaking, reinforcing connections, putting feelings together into something that we can hold on to. That should give you a big “in” about what a good habit to develop is.
We are word machines as well, but we have a life to live. We are agents interacting with other agents. We go through life prompting the outcomes that we want. People are auto-filling based on what they see and what you say and what you do. What is the auto-fill that comes out of your life?
You have beliefs (the words in context), aliefs (the weights), and the context (the project, the task).
That which I learn from AI
Temperature - a more interesting thing to say
Think through writing, retrieval. Think through words, then the map becomes important (both the bijection and the framework)
Explaining tasks and what you want precisely is hard and most of the way there when doing something difficult
Break things down into steps. Then an LLM might be able to do as well. We are just word machines.
model responds diff to diff contrxt kike people, eg cengiz feedback could ring differently
We are mimicry machines (inner game of tennis, trust the data), reward optimizers
we are just LLMs trained on less data and hence have crazier and “crazier” responses
Everyone talks like each other. Oh I met his gf she was cool
Context for answering questions is everything! Creating supportive context.
Inference vs reason (speed)
We are pre-competitiveness?
prompt the responses you want, people are also auto completing
That which AI cannot do
Judgement, determining what is most plausible
What I want to build
Glasses man, hardware
LLM processes info and stores. We have much more info. Can we improve their taste, through time? Accidental human lives, accidental model design? Evolution - ie send them off and simulate them in a market?
A felt sense
How can we compute faster than numbers?
Brain is centralization is natural. More info, processing, and action. Feedback loop.
Foundation and Dune are one. Prophecy and machine.
LLMs can do rote work and things for which there are good answers. Open space is harder to evaluate
on metaphor
What does AI tell us about being human?
Metaphor
This is a worthwhile question to ask, in my opinion, because metaphor is the way we understand the world. If not metaphor, concept. Each lamp produces infinite shades of light tan. Each moment can be split into infinite moments. Each human life consists of uncountable thoughts and emotions.
In order to deal with the infinite complexity of the world, we operate at a layer of abstraction far removed from reality itself. We speak of institutions instead of many groups of people. We talk about a machine instead of all its component parts. We use stereotypes instead of meeting each person where exactly they are.
The vocabulary of the universe is infinite in size. It knows no difference between the discrete and the continuous. In contrast, we are impoverished in our expression. The modern person has also limited themselves to thought as our primary method of processing information (hyperlink), so our language limits what we can think. Anything that limits what we can think then limits what we can believe, what we can act on, what we can live.
So, then, the introduction of new language means an expansion of our world. Recursively, as our world changes, our language expands. Even as we destroy ourselves with modern loneliness or social media, we have enriched our species’ words and the depth of understanding possible.
Frame for the Metaphors
Whenever I see writings about AI models, it discusses three things:
The data
How the data is processed
How the processing affects action
The first metaphor. Humans are built up from those too. We accept information, filter information, process information, use the fruits of our processing to make decisions, and learn from the consequences of our actions.
Establishing the Connection
What do each of those correspond to in a human being?
What is data? Data is everything. It is the sound that you hear, the wind on your cheek, the memories that come with that sensation, the thoughts invoked from reading this passage, the subconscious tingling as you awaken from a dream. Even our dreams are data, on which we are trained.
What is the processing? This is a more complicated question, but I think it’s easy to say that we have conscious decision-making (you may ask many people about which job they think you should take and make a thought-out decision) and sub-conscious decision-making (you may decide on gut/faith/feeling that a life is not for you).
What is action? You decide which coffee to order, you decide whether you want to tend to your distractions, you decide what project to work on. In response, you get feedback, all filtered through your processing components to become (once again) data.
Theorems
Our data is always contaminated. The loop is an infinite loop upon itself. This is what causes bad mental health persistence and good feedback loop persistence. Fundamentally, it is hard to change our weights because we contaminate our data.
We are LLMs trained on a very small dataset of formal stuff, which is why our “reasoning” tends to sound a lot more like just regurgitating theory instead of thinking about it. How much of a conceptual map do you have about economics?
But we are trained on a very large dataset of being human, which involves feeling and acting and also thinking.
But we are also trained on a very small dataset of language even though we have a rich dataset of being human, which we somehow have no ability to consciously interpret. We can only subconsciously live it. This means no matter the richness in our experience, we talk in the way people around us do.
This means our processing becomes the same, which means our actions and data then become the save. We converge to the median on the group scale. [placeholder for fine-grained logic]
In order to change, you may change any step of this chain.
You can change your actions to get very different data. You may speak at a different temperature, for one. What happens if you leave your training set of language?
You may expand your dataset. Yes, people travel, but also read. Listen to your body. Each of these could be a different essay. [attention, multidimensional]
You may understand your weights and just change them. Listen to your body, again.
LLMs do this in small steps, lest you terribly overcorrect. You ought to too.
There is no objective right and wrong. This is why LLMs cannot decide what is good or bad.
Under-specify the prompt. Give yourself a supportive context. Say exactly what you want / don’t want. This is a poverty of language. But for us it can also just be acting! Even without good data we can prompt ourselves out of things, but because we are actually self-improving, prompting ourselves better can make us better! Depends on chunk size
People can also be prompted. Social interactions, etc. There is something to be said here about what can vs cannot be prompted?
Creating something new is difficult. Raise the temperature. This is where you must reason / invent. Reasoning is in contrast to regurgitatino and memorization, going with the flow. Reason is contrarianism.
Alternative Metaphors
Everyone has a system prompt. Know yours before it rules you.
The real questions are at the non-overlaps. Why are LLMs much “worse” at writing than top humans, when they are better at math and coding? The preliminary answer is that math and coding have certain answers that the LLM can optimize for. However, how can it be that humans can be “good” at something that relies so much on judgment, that even they themselves cannot track progress of?
Perhaps this is a measurement error. In other words, people compare LLMs to their favorite authors, but everyone has a different favorite author. If we made as many LLMs as we have writers, then people will certainly have some LLM that they like more than some human author. This also applies to individual pieces of writing. People usually do not know which pieces of theirs will become hit tweets or award-winning books. Given a sufficiently high number of tries, a monkey can write Shakespeare, and we’re just comparing many tries to a few.
Perhaps people are attached to writing for personal reasons that are not just about the writing themselves. The author is not dead. They are alive and well in your “XYZ is my favorite!”
Perhaps humans are actually better at extrapolating based on less clear data. There is good taste and good writing. You develop a taste for it by…reading a lot? And developing judgment? To live life is to collect multi-dimensional data, and perhaps there is something in this multi-dimensional data
You see a math question, and your weights tell you that math questions lead to pain and lead you to flinch away from them. You flinch away from a math question, but your weights tell you that you must do the math question because not completing it correctly leads to pain. You are in conflict, but your weights tell you that conflict means you will not get anything done and that leads to pain.
I was running downhill along North Woods when a non-Strava buzzing notification interrupted. A college friend had requested to follow me on Beli (fun app!). A kindred soul, and yet I hadn’t thought of them once since moving cities. In that moment, I finally understood why social media exists.
I’d use Beli more if restaurants gave me more joy per $. In the meantime, the kitchen has seen no more burnt oatmeal or crowded pans, as I belatedly graduated “learning to cook.” In recent weeks, I’m learning to cook thoughtfully. A few months ago, I’d added tablespoons, teaspoons, and pounds of stuff together to make beef and broccoli, crying the whole time about what garlic and ginger were even for. I was surprised that the result was good! Magic! The second time wasn’t easier, nor was the third time really. But now I’ve made the same beef and broccoli a little more than ten times, along with tomato and egg and other stuff. Nowhere near Visa’s do 100 things. Still, now I understand what my father meant with the frustrating answer “a little bit” every time I asked “please, just tell me how much sesame oil it needs.”
So, grocery stores are as fun as Uniqlo now. Ah, yes, that would be good for dinner. That can make a nice snack. That’s a good thing to keep in the top shelf for when this haul starts running dry. I read in a newsletter: “If life is a never ending loop of dirty dishes and laundry then that means life is a never ending loop of home cooked meals and comfy clean clothes.” Incline the mind towards appreciation—yes, life is a series of problems, and yes, you are also the luckiest person in the world.
I am growing into the target demographic for NYT Cooking. These are windows into other people’s lives! You learn how someone else treats these ingredients! They use methods you haven’t heard of before!
There’s a joy in merging practice and theory. 知行合一. When we were whisking the dumpling filling, C tells me that sesame oil increases the perceived moisture of the product. The fat retains moisture in meat and adds an oily, rich texture that creates the sensation of tenderness. Later, I watch C slide the salmon into the oven’s top rack. The salmon comes out with a brown and crisp top. He says this is broiling. After dinner, I watch a Youtube video on making pan-fried buns. After making the filling and the dough from scratch, she adds enough oil to coat the bottom of the pan before setting down the buns and replacing the lid. Ah, of course, that’s why the buns’ bottoms are brown and the heads soft. The world reveals itself to me.
I also feel my life stretching laterally into new corners of human experience.
I remember the cultural classes in elementary school. Everyone sits around a table cutting paper snowflakes or wrapping dumplings. Arguably, all of Chinese class was cultural education. We memorized poems and 文学常识 (“common sense for literature”) and spent little time on grammar and systematically learning new words.
There’s so much I didn’t (and couldn’t) appreciate. What does tradition mean? It’s not going through the motions of folding a wonton, or doing calligraphy at the NYPL on Thursday. Feel it. The sensation of being in a long lineage of families who sat around a table putting down line after line of dumplings. Some rows are like the terra cotta warriors—varying in detail but largely perfect and identical. Others look like trees ravaged by a fire. A child asks, “What’s the correct way to fold this?” The grandfather responds, “Every way is right, but this is ours.”
I didn’t get poems until I watched an animated movie (《长安三万里》) about two poets, Li Bai and Gao Shi, and their difficult friendship. Their poetry was about their time fighting invaders at the border, a lifetime spent watching their country decay, and the friends and enemies who kept them company (friendship theory of everything). You inch closer to their emotional range when you know what they loved and hated. The author is not always dead.
I knew the labels of experiences, before I ever experienced them.
Oh, this is what they mean when they say, “You can go crazy from spending all your time with someone.” This is what election fatigue means. This is rapture. This is why people believe in crazy things and how they justify unspeakable violence. This is why people have book clubs or dinner parties. This is a whole person. This is love. This is how hard it is to say something the way it feels. This is what cannot be said.
You don’t get it until you do. Is there a point to teaching poetry then? Or forcing an unwilling teenager to the table to make zongzi (粽子)? Or reading novels about love and loss before you lived enough life to relate to it?
There is. The first time you live it doesn’t have to be the first time you see it. They put the ideas in your head so that you can recognize it when you feel it in your heart. They give you a tradition so that you always have something to return to. This is another part of being human. You don’t know it yet, but aren’t you excited to?