jweber

I don't comment a lot, but I felt this one was definitely worth the read and my time.

While I don't necessarily agree with every aspect, much of this resonated with how I see social media has (been) warped from a regular market of social connection to a lemon market, where the connection is crappy, and many sane people I know are blinding themselves to it (leaving in some corners behind a cesspool of the dopamine hit addicted).

Ultimately, this also seems to be true about how people have responded to the latest wave of human-rights initiatives (DEI) carried into the workplace by HR departments, where a small number of bad actors have capitalized... (read more)

My strong hunch is that this is true for almost any form of communication (internal and external) we receive: it conveys something we can extract value from if we are able to look past the surface (propositional content) of what we immediately infer.

And how difficult it is to remain open to the possibility that my first impression of a signal is "incorrect" (I got it wrong on my first attempt), given how frequently I have used my inference (first impression), and I am still alive (adaptive value of my past choice to not question my first impression)...

The best I can offer is to make it a regular but not constant practice to... (read more)

Some thoughts that came up for me while reading this piece (THANK YOU for putting this all together!!):

I suspect that the principles you describe around the "experience of tanha" go well beyond human or even mammalian psychology. If I am not mistaken, they arise out of a failure to appropriately incorporate the non-life-matter sort of conflicts (between elements of a whole and the whole) as part of life. The cells in my body all have different "cultures" (needs of chemical milieus, whether or not bacteria are needed for the "gut" process, or are absolutely prohibitive for the "brain" process). And each organ has integrated into its internal processes some way of registering... (read 687 more words →)