Best of Twitter - Week of April 27, 2020 - when should should you start meditating?
It's astonishing how many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs reached a state of blissful self-enlightenment, complete with all the self-help tropes around mindfulness, material detachment, and how happiness is really an attitude, *after* having gotten rich.
I get the 'now what?' that drives the enlightenment seeking--it's being the dog who finally caught the car--but what's striking is how the values embraced *after* having made it are precisely the ones that, embraced *before*, would have utterly deflated the necessary ambition.
"X wasn't worth it" or "I regret X" is a morally defensible statement only if you're also willing to forego all the outcomes of X, both good and bad, after the fact.
^ reminds me of:
Similar to @paulg's "Do things that don't scale", I'd say "Take the risks you can't at scale":
ֻ💰 PayPal: Process the payments that others won't
ֻֻ🏴☠️ YouTube: Host the pirated videos Google won't
⛏️ Airbnb: Scrape and spam what others won't
Underemphasized part of history!
^ whenever you read history or listen to personal stories from successful people remember that these things are systematically being left out and you get a systematically wrong picture of reality if you don’t adjust for this
I slept 4 hours a night for 14 days and didn’t find any effects on cognition (assessed via Psychomotor Vigilance Task, a custom first-person shooter scenario, and SAT): guzey.com/science/sleep/…
(discussion, limitations, plots, statistics, scripts, and raw data at the link)
Galaxy brain take: The CCP knows they can't keep most of their top tech talent in China. So... why not play up the espionage dial to 11, make it super obvious, and kinda hope for retaliation. If the US does nothing, you get some IP, if they overreact, you get your students back.
Inspired by a thread on HN incredulous about engineering headcount at a large software company:
The biggest thing people don’t appreciate about large companies is the basic productive unit isn’t an individual it is an engineering team with about ~8 members.
^ thread
I have my iPhone on silent mode 24/7 so notification don’t bother me. Now I realized that they’re actually a tool to train your mind! Turn on the notifications. When you get one, notice it, and let it go. Don’t be bothered or distracted by it. Just like a random thought.
The modern struggle
Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower,
fasting, meditating, and exercising,
up against armies of scientists & statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, & medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games & addictive drugs.
"Most software at Google gets rewritten every few years." arxiv.org/pdf/1702.01715…
"Every 20 years, caretakers completely tear down [Japan's Ise Grand Shrine] and build it anew." danwang.co/how-technology…
^ one way to defeat the fact that you’re a giant bureaucracy is to deeply institutionalize regular complete rewrite of everything important?
If I look at the capabilities of single celled organisms, it makes me think about how smart individual neurons might be.
Rafael Marine Microfauna @rmartinledo
I just finished a new blog post: "Twenty-six Controversies and Challenges in fMRI" summarizing some of the more interesting ones over the years.