QC
@QiaochuYuan
Followers
32K
Following
382K
Media
5K
Statuses
68K
thread of threads about bay area rationality and the bay area rationalists / lesswrongers / the AI doomers:.
5
1
165
once upon a time i was talking to my college gf and she was worried about some academic thing and on a whim i decided to kiss her on the forehead. this was the first time i'd ever done that. she stopped talking and melted in my arms. and a great secret was revealed unto me.
82
2K
52K
here's a secret cleaning technique i've never heard anyone else describe: look at your room (or w/e) and just notice what you don't like about it. pay attention to what feels off, messy, gross, etc. then move your body from that feeling of dissatisfaction.
ppl who used to be messy but became tidy: how did you change?.
45
1K
18K
COMPLETELY insane that some startup just landed a spacecraft on the moon and i've heard almost nothing about it. there really is no, like, mainstream broadcasting anymore.
We have confirmation #BlueGhost stuck the landing! Firefly just became the first commercial company in history to achieve a fully successful Moon landing. This small step on the Moon represents a giant leap in commercial exploration. Congratulations to the entire Firefly team,.
99
828
12K
the worst thing about the internet is you can't kiss girls on the forehead through it (yet) (who is working on this).
12
471
11K
this is the bortle scale. it's used to measure how dark the night sky is in a given place. until relatively recently in human history i imagine every human being who ever lived could see a bortle 1 sky every night of their lives, weather permitting. i personally have never seen
206
2K
11K
ADHD is like you wake up every day and have to rebuild the cultural fabric of an entire civilization in your mind from scratch in order to figure out whether you're supposed to, like, do the dishes or whatever.
91
1K
11K
think i've noticed a pattern from watching movies from different decades and i wanna know if anyone else agrees - it feels like in older movies characters used to look at *each other* more, there was more eye contact and more significant nonverbals?.
56
416
10K
sometimes you can really tell when a girl on twitter hasn’t been kissed enough on the forehead recently ykwim.
11
379
9K
what makes it real is that we decided it's real together. the new year is a collective spell we all cast. you are participating in a real flow of collective energy, that acquires power from how we do it every year. magic is real and it always has been. happy new year.
I know that there’s no real difference between today and tomorrow but damn if i’m not a slut for the symbolism of it all! a blank page! a fresh start!! new year new me!!!!.
14
985
9K
do you think whales have religion. do you think when they talk about god they say that god is music. the most perfect harmony, the harmony of all things. and all whales are notes in the music of god.
84
588
8K
there’s this woman awhile ago who tweeted something like “i was mentally ill until i fell in love with someone i had to have my shit together to be with, so i decided to stop being mentally ill and it worked” and not to overstate this but there’s something real and impt here.
I think many people will agree that some forms of mental illness or psychosis etc are contagious and transmissible through the internet– it’s clearly happening to those wacko people yonder over there! not us though of course haha… 👀.
81
445
8K
does anyone actually have a straight no-bullshit answer to what a 40-hour work week for a remote white-collar job is supposed to actually look like concretely? i don't believe most people can do e.g. serious technical research 8 hours a day, maybe 4 max. what's the other 4?.
811
148
8K
tried getting claude to write funny tweets starting from 9 examples. it generated some okay stuff but nothing that actually made me laugh. then i tried asking it to generate tweets written from its perspective rather than a human's and actually laughed. hmm
115
657
8K
you ever just wake up and start thinking about the reddit guy with the insane clown fetish who just 100% made his wildest dreams come true by poasting? what a champion
78
473
4K
holy shit the book the iron giant is based on was written by sylvia plath's husband, after she k*lled herself, to comfort their surviving children. WHAT
49. the iron giant (1999): wow what a spectacular fucking movie, works on every level. working through the cold war in a children’s movie is brave, i can’t believe it works so well. the giant is like e.t. and the terminator and… frankenstein maybe? i laughed, i cried (almost)
27
250
4K
i never feel more male than when women demonstrate that they have no visceral understanding of this, which to me is the most obvious fact about being male, easily discovered by paying the slightest bit of attention to our culture (dragon ball z, halo, sports, military history).
young men want to be brave in the face of danger. They want challenge and glory and a culture that will respect them for sacrifice, a culture that treats them with dignity for their risk taking or protective instincts.
49
180
4K
alcohol is *supposed* to be poison, that’s the point. drinking together is the social equivalent of leaving your weapons by the door, it renders you less capable of deception and manipulation because you’re impaired. it’s a tool for building trust.
Someone needs to invent Alcohol that isn't poison. That would be pretty neat.
69
289
4K
a few days ago i took a medium dose of acid and wrote for several hours straight and admitted some things to myself, mostly about money. let's start here: last august my mom gave me $100,000 for my birthday. i resented her for this and also suppressed the resentment.
1K
375
4K
therapy for men should be like the therapist takes you into the woods and teaches you how to forage. he puts you through boot camp. you build a barn together. he fights you every session until you can beat him. then he takes you out for drinks to celebrate. *then* you talk.
141
223
4K
sometimes a guy will tweet out literally the secret of life and you just have to stare in awe. this is probably the only tweet you really have to read. every year my appreciation for it deepens. this is how you properly open the flower of life and find the real wave conjugations.
focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of.
21
359
4K
day 17 of no porn, no TV, no movies, and no video games and i can feel my long-atrophied imagination coming back to life.
71
144
3K
hey remember how we went to school where we spent 8 hours a day for over a decade having what our bodies could do completely under the control of authority figures. boy i wonder if that had any lasting effects.
43
566
3K
my thesis is that we are really not supposed to be alone at night. if daytime was ancestrally for finding food and tending to physical needs, nighttime should’ve been for gathering around the fire, telling stories, tending to social needs. i think the despair is just loneliness.
why does this happen? why does the nighttime inspire despair? is it as simple as “no more sun”?.
39
342
3K
it's ludicrous how few people know about this paper, so, friendly reminder that the fermi paradox was completely resolved in 2018 and it turned out to be because multiplying point estimates of highly uncertain parameters is very bad actually.
84
661
3K
the era of AI-induced mental illness is going to make the era of social media-induced mental illness look like the era of. like. printing press-induced mental illness.
there’s many other downsides here but it’s also factual that this will lead to a lot.of psychotic episodes for deeply mentally ill users. conforming everything that people say and praising them is very dangerous for some of the population. idk. does openai think about anything?.
36
295
3K
@jnsyaaa i love that people in the comments are like "this is too hot to be real" but then someone found a citation.
7
9
3K
i do not have anything useful or valuable to report back to you after having spent half a year off twitter. the flip side of insulating myself from a million random psychic influences was strengthening the effect of my own mind on myself, which has been uniformly terrible. when i.
361
101
3K
> When, occasionally, genuinely significant things happen to Musk, Isaacson largely ignores them. In May 2002, Elon’s first wife Justine gave birth to their first child, a son. They named him Nevada, because he’d been conceived at Burning Man. When Nevada was ten weeks old, he
38
238
3K
the guy who invented three-cueing was dyslexic, didn't believe dyslexia existed, typical minded his way into a theory where everyone has to read the way he did, got popular enough to harm tons of kids. good thing this is the only time something like this has ever happened.
49
327
3K
for people who are as adhd as i am it's essential to be operating off of your own personal sense of aesthetic dissatisfaction, this will never work if you're trying to pattern-match to an imagined authority figure's concept of what cleanliness is supposed to be.
9
107
3K
did a task that took 4 appointments, ~$400, and ~10 hours that i've been procrastinating on for almost 3 years. oldest task on my todo list.
did a task that took 10 minutes and $10 worth of supplies that i've been procrastinating on for 11 months.
36
44
3K
i find it personally offensive when math is taught poorly because to me math is one of the only realms in which things can make perfect sense, in which it is possible to completely and fully understand something, and depriving people of that is a kind of spiritual crime.
34
265
3K
okay sorry i am apparently unable to let this go - it is seriously disturbing to me the way many of you seem to refuse to see the ethical component of this situation (the lying + the stealing) and i am losing trust in you accordingly. do any of you care about ethics at all?.
i learned something about agency when, on my second date with my now-girlfriend, i mentioned feeling cold and she about-faced into the nearest hotel, said she left a scarf in a room last week, and handed me the nicest one out of the hotel’s lost & found drawer.
251
45
3K
whatever process zuck used to figure out how to rehabilitate his image needs to be studied in business textbooks, it's insane how much he's managed to turn around public opinion. this is legitimately cute as fuck. skeet skeet motherfucker indeed.
this man is absolutely relationship-mogging everyone like wdym you made your own acoustic version of Get Low for your wife !!
47
71
3K
@DoroisDoro you can wear anything you want and you have a lot more leeway when it comes to flirting (i think, idk).
6
0
2K
there's this really bizarre thing that happens to you when you first start to learn rigorous mathematics, which is that geometry is taken away from you and you have to conduct a series of arcane rituals to get it back. to get back the *pythagorean theorem*, you need to:.
40
214
2K
holy shit, predictive processing theory of addiction:. > In this paper we show how addiction can be thought of as the outcome of learning. We’ll argue that predictive processing implies a view of addiction not as a brain disease, but rather as a breakdown in the dynamics of
56
192
2K
claude plays pokemon is still stuck in cerulean city after, i think, 3 days? and the way it's stuck is kind of interesting: overthinks everything + incapable of getting bored. it would make more progress by taking way more actions even if they were random. makes ya think huh
59
105
2K
did a task that took 15 minutes that i’ve been procrastinating on for 7 months please clap.
did a task that took 2 minutes that i've been procrastinating on for 5 months please clap.
31
62
2K
man i am learning some stuff about the ADHD / depression network of symptoms / habits. life just gets harder if you don't immediately execute on all of your ideas. you have to remember and worry about remembering more stuff. executing constantly reduces memory load so much.
the main thing i’m trying to do rn is make the gap between having the idea to do something and doing it as short as possible and so far the ideas i’m executing on mostly don’t involve reading or writing tweets. so it goes. headed to barnes and noble again to read a history book.
34
174
2K
anyone have hypotheses about what's going on with this? currently i'm going with "going on vacation itself is the active ingredient, it's good for your nervous system" or something in that neighborhood.
221
65
2K
the account is deleted now which means the original tweet is gone but @halvorz (pbuh) was so real for this
Many people want to hate other people, and constantly look around for new groups to hate. On twitter, they have observed recent criticisms of Effective Altruism (some valid), and are attacking imaginary sins they invent for these folk devils, without knowing anything about them.
20
215
2K
interesting and disqueting question to ask what % of the population is now below the “whispering earring line,” ie would be better off letting gpt make all of their decisions for them.
66
76
2K
in 2024 i mostly suffered enormously. in many ways this was the worst year of my life. i learned nothing and did not grow in any way, except perhaps like an ingrown toenail. my plans were foiled and my dreams crushed. in 2025 i expect all of this to continue unabated.
95
149
2K
apparently physically active and physically inactive people expend about the same # of calories / day. the hypothesis is that as activity ramps up the body spends less energy on other stuff. and exercise might be good for you b/c that other stuff is *stress and inflammation*
49
139
2K
willpower is really not the main weapon you have against the addiction nexus. the cure to addiction is to make your life feel good enough that you don’t want to escape it. that’s it. it’s not easy but it is simple. eat nutritious food, get restful sleep, feel, breathe, act.
27
189
2K
if you know the steps to solving your problem but you aren't doing them then you don't know the steps. you're missing the steps that let you execute the other steps. and maybe your other steps are completely wrong anyway. you have to start with what you can actually do.
a pattern I’m noticing with smart, thoughtful people is that they usually know what their problems are, they know where those problems come from, they know the intellectual steps to solve them. but they get stuck there, in analysis mode, churning through insight after insight.
29
169
2K
saw a girl at the gym today so beautiful it felt illegal to look at her. like i ought to slay her a great beast or dedicate a temple to her first.
64
99
2K
did a task that took 2 minutes that i've been procrastinating on for 5 months please clap.
64
55
2K
do you ever think about how your neopets profile page gave you more freedom to use html for customization than literally any modern social media website.
10
428
2K
every day i come to this app and absorb 48 hours worth of information in 1 hour and then wonder why i feel overwhelmed.
20
165
2K
in japanese they don’t day “normie” they say “reaju” which means “satisfied with reality” and i think that’s beautiful.
22
166
2K
@sashachapin it’s sick and it’s why i don’t believe in god. one of the happiest days of my entire year happened because i walked for something like 2 hours doing errands.
15
11
2K
thread of notes on scattered minds by gabor mate
Scattered Minds by Gabor Mate is the most beautiful, empowering, impactful book about ADHD and approximately zero people with ADHD have managed to finish it.
23
174
2K
i taught a class like this once but it was called introduction to leadership. i wrote “introduction to leadership” on the board then sat down and didn’t say anything and waited.
14
96
2K
current one i'm on about is "early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise".
day 39384739 of realizing that sayings that i thought were vapid cliches are actually direct pointers to truth.
11
98
2K
turns out i can recover from being crippled by shame by. 1. doing things that make me feel proud of myself. 2. actually feeling proud of myself afterwards. who knew. it sounds simple but i’ve never heard anyone say this.
41
103
2K
i owe an incalculable debt to a handful of women who cared about me enough to take the time to rehabilitate me in some way. women have been responsible for catalyzing nearly all of my growth as a human being, in one way or another. they didn't have to but they did anyway.
My friends, we actually *are* all here to rehabilitate each other and much, much more
25
91
2K
one of the wildest things i’ve had to repeatedly relearn is that emotions only feel like they last forever if you resist them. if you open up to them they flow through you like water.
18
165
2K
every time i watch (live action) movies i am thinking about "everyone is beautiful and no one is horny" in the background.
6
87
2K
"slop" was a really good recent memetic coinage. we really needed it. kudos and props to wherever that came from. here in the age of slop. the slopocalypse.
it's mfaslop. which, hey, just call it a genre and dedicate an aisle to it at the bookstore. sci-fi, fantasy, mfaslop.
18
60
2K
> Betty, filled with spiritual radiance, said, ‘All the flowers are beautiful.’.> ‘Ah,’ said the teacher, blocking her, ‘but this flower is especially beautiful.’.> Betty rolled on the ground screaming, and it took a while to calm her.
there's sth about the way people compare things that to me feels. unecological. like asking how does writing a book compare to having a child? both things are great in their own way and they each actually enrich the other. which cake ingredient do you prefer, eggs or flour?.
27
236
1K
wow time moves a lot more slowly when i'm actually trying to be present. is "time blindness" just straight up nervous system dysregulation.
22
81
1K
in retrospect it's pretty fucked up that you can just say to people "hey you know that hole at the center of your being" and they'll just be like "oh yeah the hole, i know exactly what you mean, love that hole, one of my favorite holes".
35
125
1K
crying is a process adults rarely let themselves *complete*; the complete process feels like too much to ask for, it is loud, it makes you look insane or like a child or both, other people get scared and don't know how to handle it. but it is totally normal and immensely healing.
14
202
1K
romantic comedy where a millennial and a zoomer fall in love and the millennial teaches the zoomer all their arcane ways lost to the ravages of time like how to read, how to cook, how to navigate a filesystem, how to draw art by hand. neither of them can make a phone call.
21
108
1K
one of the things i had to do, somewhere around january, is realize that i was in a hole deep enough that if i wanted to get out of it i had to make a heroic effort. like do things every day that terrified me, for weeks, alone, instead of waiting for things to somehow get easier.
Every time I talk about mental health my comments are filled with people who want to argue with me because they're a super special case and their mental illness is just so bad that it should be okay to give up. Okay, give up then. You don't need permission from me.
19
134
2K
this has been happening over and over on math.stackexchange recently: . new user: i had this math q, i asked chatGPT and here's what it said, is it right. crabby asshole: ugh why'd you ask chatGPT you moron. new user: bc chatGPT answers my questions without calling me a moron.
21
74
1K
can't believe i'm being led towards the most frustrating mix of woo beliefs i can imagine, "magic is definitely real and definitely works but god mostly doesn't want you to do it".
119
34
1K
you can tell mandelbrot was a cool guy because he paid careful attention to the art of naming. "fractal" is one of the best names anyone's ever come up with for anything and it's clear from this passage that he knew exactly what he was doing:. > I coined fractal from the Latin
25
124
1K
talking about mental health all the time is probably one of the worst things you could do for your mental health or anyone else's. starting to think that iatrogenic harm is actually the default outcome here. you have to find something to focus on other than your own mind.
I have to say, there's this subculture of I guess "mental health" accounts that I actually think are like, extreme infohazards. Got diagnosed w adhd/ autism this year and realized I'm prob dyslexic which is why I can't spell at all without spellcheck - I feel like, had we.
41
94
1K
anyone else find it super weird that the lymphatic system is one of the most fundamental systems in the body, easily equal in importance to the nervous system and the circulatory system, but nobody told us about it in, like, high school?
72
72
1K
"for years, all scientists believed [incredibly dumb claim about humans easily disproven by the most cursory observations of real life], but emerging research points towards [completely normal conclusion that all animals instinctively understand]".
In the old model of the mind, the infant was seen as a blank slate that passively received information from the outside world. But emerging infant research paints a picture of the infant as an active participant in the world, capable of social interaction soon after birth.
23
103
1K
noodling over a reframing of ADHD. “attention deficit” is a terrible name i think; the way i experience it is more like my sense of what’s important at any given moment is unstable, jostled around by input. sometimes there’s an emergency and then it’s temporarily very stable.
45
105
1K
in my dream religion when you die god just, like, explains your entire life. like you see all the invisible forces that were acting on it, all the motivations of the people that were opaque to you, the gift of perfect clarity about the story of you.
70
81
1K
saw a girl at the sauna just now who i found so beautiful i had to repeatedly and forcefully move my eyes away (it is literally against the rules to look at people too much here, or talk to them unless you came with them).
27
10
1K
it drives me a little insane every time people talk about sex as if it's a substance that men extract vampirically from women.
42
102
1K
i think i'm starting to understand what an "excuse" is. i thought an excuse was like a fake or made up reason you couldn't do something. but i think it's a reason that, if you're giving it, means you're focused on weaseling out of the thing instead of focusing on doing the thing.
36
76
1K
i owe a lot to people who were willing to offer me feedback even though i reacted to it by falling apart, getting really sad and/or angry, feeling terrible about myself, etc. etc; it was usually still good in the long term. i appreciate people who are willing to take that risk.
7
40
1K
the fact that psychology majors don’t have a reputation as being particularly charismatic or good at relationships or even at managing people is a pretty damning indictment of either academic psychology or college or both.
72
84
1K
the year is 2032. you're trying to read calvin and hobbes with your kids but they get confused about the scenes where he's playing in the snow. you have to explain that before the pandemic kids used to have snow days, and then, tears in your eyes, you have to explain what snow is.
TIL that snow days no longer exist and are now "virtual learning days" and I feel like this is fundamentally anti American and unjust.
10
84
1K
statistics is the worst thing that's ever been invented and i can smell the stench of evil wizards all over it. all this language designed to convey the impression that you know more than you know. none of the words mean what they sound like they mean.
66
92
1K
some of the stuff i’ve been dealing with is like “remedial adulting,” just a bunch of simple boring life skills other people probably learned when they were kids or teenagers that i managed to avoid. it’s painful and embarrassing and not very interesting to read or write about.
60
61
1K
if any mutuals ever want to learn or brush up on linear algebra, abstract algebra, topology, category theory, algebraic topology / homotopy theory, number theory, combinatorics, generating functions. i am literally world-class in explaining some of these so hmu.
Serious question: are you an expert? what would you say you’re an expert in?.
92
34
1K
scott hypothesizes that depression involves something like defending a sadness set point; you deeply feel that you are supposed to be sad and actively work to make yourself sadder if you become too happy. food for thought.
32
91
1K
the problem is that i built a personality that is only functional when i feel like i’m winning then experienced a string of uninterrupted wins until i was 22, then i lost hard and have been losing continuously since.
52
90
1K
this is beautiful. both education and self-awareness are closed loops that don’t go anywhere. stunning and brave.
23
83
1K
w e l p. > The progression of [autism] is proposed to be driven by overly strong reactions to experiences that drive the brain to a hyper-preference and overly selective state, which becomes more extreme with each new experience and may be particularly accelerated by emotionally
49
81
1K
it's sort of tragic that in the 20th century our most accurate theories of physics became too hard to understand without a lot of technical background and ability. in previous centuries i think you could reasonably expect a bright educated person, not necessarily a specialist in.
134
107
1K
i have no idea how to relax. guys. how do you relax. what are 3 examples of "purposeful relaxation activities". describe 5 memories of times when you were relaxed and the causes and conditions of your relaxation. link me to a 120-page pdf on the neuropsychology of relaxation.
159
88
1K
if you think the foundation of ethics is whether conscious beings experience suffering as a result of your actions, you are setting yourself up to be emotionally blackmailed by people with borderline personality disorder.
80
95
1K
wow i'm dumb i found out where those 6 extra daylight hours were hiding this whole time, turns out you have to wake up earlier in the morning and there they are. did you guys know about this.
pretty sure i've complained about this before but i continue to wish there were like 6 more daylight hours in every day. it isn't always this bad but worst case it feels like by the time i'm fully booted up and ready to start my day the day is already mostly over.
22
46
1K
here's my dating advice for straight guys: learn how to read her mind. not joking. completely serious. this is not a dig at women. become psychic.
23
93
1K
one of the things you learn from public discourse about a topic as intimate as sex is that some people have set up their lives around extremely tragic compromises to the extent that to stay sane they need to not be aware that it's a compromise.
20
68
1K