mentalisttraceur-incomplete

[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

I bet Tumblr would actually get a lot more money from users if it was actually proactively honest about its finances, instead of acting like nothing is wrong while trying to stop the bleeding with random Business(tm) ideas for making money.

Just make a post like once a month, aim for tone and style that leans into Tumblr culture, less Wikiledia donation nags and more

yo [playful insult that tested as least offensive with focus groups], look, here's the deal. this place costs too much to run, and we still can't figure out how to make money. plz help? (but no pressure! don't feel bad if you can't, take care of yourselves first) [link to a pay-as-much-as-you-want option for some widely appreciated benefits like no ads, like a slider where as you move it around it it shows how much you'll pay and how long the benefits will last - could

[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

You know what would probably make things better? If people didn't get to know who won the election for positions of actual decision-making power until after they are done serving.

You make it to the final ballot of an election for, say, US President? If you win, you govern for four years from some luxurious locked-down bunker resort. If you were the runner up, you take a vacation for those four years - we can provide a second locked-down resort, if we do this right we can minimize who knows who actually won down to an extremely small number of staff at each facility. You both can bring people in when you go in but they isolate with you. After your term is done, we reveal who was who. We can have some very reliable safeguards against secret coups despite this privacy if we get elaborate enough.

That does mean we can't have decision-makers also being public figureheads. No more public speeches about what you're allegedly doing. No more flying to countries to meet for largely symbolic photo ops of talks while the real talks happen between your teams of experts and advisors.

We can have the figurehead as a separate position. Make it elected too. Give it a genuine important name too - the whole point is that this is the person we want as our public face: representing our will, our values, our perspective, our passionate reactions, our strong postures. This is the person we want on the podiums speaking for us. But the real decisions are all made by the other one. At most, this one says something that inspires the other one.

Of course we should do this for all significant positions of power. Legislators. Judges of the highest courts.

Anyway, just think how much bullshit we could cut out of the political process, and how much we could force people to have their bad thinking called out by reality, if people couldn't go "[good/bad thing] is happening because [my/your guy] is in charge!" Like no, you don't get to know which guy. You don't get to use monkey brain tribal feelings about the person or their side. You will look at the actual decisions and effects on their own.

And suddenly, the incentives are better. Honest adherence to campaign promises suddenly matters way more, and yet ability to do the right thing without worrying about it undermining your image before the ramifications are felt is greater. And so on.

[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

USA's 14th amendment insurrection clause - does it apply to a president acting against the results of an election?

On just principles, I think:

If the president appears to have had a genuine and well-founded belief that the election was compromised, it's not insurrection. We must, after all, acknowledge the possibility of situations where an election is actually rigged or fatally flawed and a genuinely for-the-country president is in a position to know about it.

The belief really does have to be well-founded, however. We should expect a high standard of competence at assessing evidence from a president presuming to act against the nation's mechanisms to allegedly save it. So the analysis can't just be if the evidence shows that the belief was genuine, we must also make an effort to determine if someone fit to run a country should reach the same conclusion given the same evidence and the same amount of time to ponder it.

(Perhaps an empirical test could be to gather many people who have positions or achievements which are highly esteemed and widely recognized as requiring a lot of intelligence and ability to reach correct conclusions from evidence, give each of them all the evidence that was available to the president, and have them each independently decide if the evidence warranted believing that the election was so compromised that immediate action was required. If it really was a justified conclusion, you'd get significant consensus.)

However, I think the business of protecting a government by the people and for the people from gradual degradation calls for some game-theoretic consequentialist analysis too:

can a government afford the risk of getting this wrong? maybe we should treat elections as sacrosanct? zero tolerance for acting against them from positions of power - if you genuinely want to stop a bad election out of care for the country and not yourself, let's make sure it really is an altruistic act, and the the best outcome for you personally is martyrdom.

[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

One important ramification of this is that I didn't even realize that "incompatible" is also a valid boundary to have in many situations - it doesn't have to just be hurt/harm which must be validly stronger than the other person's negative experience for not getting what they want. No one taught me that

"hey, I find that personally unacceptable (you're welcome to do it with people who are fine with it, but not with me)" is something I should stand up for, or that

"I had an unpleasant reaction to that" / "I don't like that" in response to behavior is a good and healthy thing to bring up as soon as I feel it (as opposed to holding back because think about how that makes them feel)!

I'm sure my parents said words to that effect at some point, but that doesn't really work if you emotionally trample it whenever it actually happens with you.

I'm even happy to suppose that part of this is me being autistically prone to systematizing, turning everything into logical rules with as much coverage as possible, and only then iteratively learning to refine/caveat/compose rules to handle the subtleties/complexities/differences, so I may have generalized admonitions too much. I am also happy to blame this partly on me being atypically sensitive or maybe even "online" as a mind earlier than normal, so what would've been a harmless admonition to a typical small child might have been a badly memorable and impactful one for me - similarly, maybe the entire spectrum of negative experiences in life was more impactful to me.

But still, the result remains the same.

I have tolerated so much unpleasant and incompatible behavior over the course of my life from basically anyone around me. The earliest times I can remember acting on my natural inclination to tell people that something didn't work for me or was unpleasant for me, my parents gave me shit for it - especially on the grounds of how I was making those other people feel. That's putting aside how any serious defiance or anger against them in (sufficiently) private situations was punished.

I'm here coming up on 33 years old in a few months, still rediscovering more of my natural inclinations to act in ways that would organically make me a human with very strong boundaries. For much of my life I have sustained myself to a large extent with artificially philosophized boundaries which were engineered at significant intellectual cost and which required hypervigilance and unusually high interpersonally oppositional emotions to enforce - and it was still a consistently bad approximation at best, with big unnatural consequential latencies between transgression and reaction.

Enforcing my boundaries is a profoundly uncomfortable experience for me because it kicks my brain into like ... not fight or flight yet, necessarily, but at least vigilance for it. I can't really relax or think about much besides my awareness of what the person is doing or what might be going on in their mind until they exit the interaction.

[one thing I find dissatisfying about this post which caused me to abandon it is that I don't want to make it seem like the blame is entirely or even majority on my parents. I think they probably get a plurality of the credit - that they are the strongest single influence towards this problem... but I can see other (potential) factors]

My parents tried to teach me, verbally, to stand up for myself, to push back against mistreatment, to assert boundaries....

But then they utterly undermined it at the level of my actual emotions and motivations, by the way they reacted any time I naturally did that against mistreatment from them.

By the time I needed to do it against anyone else, standing up for myself was no longer a natural act - the natural move was to wait and see, do my best charitable idea-fitting, and always err on the side of treating the person as having the best intentions.

When I first started trying to do it against anyone besides my parents, it was something I had to consciously and artificially force out despite fear or empathy, and something I could only see as justified after I had already charitably let several hurtful/harmful transgressions (or just incompatible actions) slide. (With my parents, it wasn't even something I was ever taught to mentally label as "standing up for myself", and it was always lashing out once I hit some internal limit.)

[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

One of these days, I will be able to interact with people without having to deal with my brain kicking up cowardly reactive concern about making others uncomfortable.

As a teenager, I overcame it with judgy anger. Worked well enough, although it made me prickly - prone inconsiderate

[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

Pro-tip: the smarter the narcissist, the more trying to avoid revealing your dislike/judgement/disagreement/etc will backfire into earning you quiet but lasting and most intense/deep hatred.

If you're going to think a negative thing but do anything less than bluntly/directly/openly sharing it, you really do need to make sure they're not smart enough to notice it, because to a narcissist, unresolved/unresolvable image damage is basically the worst wrong.

[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

Really mad at everyone responsible for making me so inclined to suppress my natural desire to bluntly state my boundaries and preferences with a fear of causing any negative feelings in the other person.

This routinely causes me to have interactions which don't go how I want, almost exclusively because I, for example, permit someone to help me when I don't actually want help. All

[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

I'm fairly mad at everyone responsible for making me so goddamn "considerate" of other people's feelings, when really all they did was suppress my natural inclination to bluntly state my boundaries and preferences by wiring into me a fear of causing any negative feelings in the other person.

You don't really notice it online until you're talking to me one-on-one. And when it does get tripped, online or in person, it often looks like hesitation or a lack of a comment,It's less because it's online and more because the interaction shape is different.

I don't know how much of that is my natural presets and predispositions , how much of that is

[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

Crucially, notice the composability/generality and resilience.

"that's my standard mode of [...] consumption" is reusable for almost any noun which we can get an experience from, take in, process/digest in any sense, and so on. And it clearly means that this is a very typical pattern of operating for me.

And what's the biggest risk of misinterpretation in a good-faith and logically sound idea-fitting? Maybe you waste a moment trying to think if "standard" is supposed to add something over "normal"/"typical", if this behavior is more deliberately designed and chosen than organic? Or if "consumption" is implying some kind of exclusion of infinitely-renewable/sustainable use? (I could use "use", which isn't terrible, might even switch to that - the tradeoff is that then it might sound like it might be paralleling f.e. "use" as in a drug, or "use" as in a tool. In context "consumption" was a better fit than "use".)

Only at the meta level is the misinterpretation risk bad, because it's disappointingly common for people to assume my wording is affected/artificial, which I consider to be an inherently bad-faith-to-the-point-of-being-asinine interpretation.

I feel like one crucial part of understanding me (although you probably already know this if you stuck with this blog for a while), is that a phrase like

that's my standard mode of music consumption

comes out of me with zero thought, effortlessly and naturally, but I actually have to think to come up with

that's how I listen to music

and even then I have to force myself to omit words like "normally" or "usually".

#mentalisttraceur meta #idea fitting #composable language

[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

I don't want to dunk on humanities too hard, but back in college (undergrad only) I could comfortably sit down the evening before an essay was due, write my take, go find just enough sources to back up my take because a minimum number of sources was mandatory. Then do it again for a friend who was struggling, with a different take that matches their feelings/values/thinking and in their writing style.

I don't want to dunk on STEM to hard, but for the first couple years of computer science I could do that as well, although I preferred to just binge

[this post had no actual point, it was just emotional flexing/wanking dressed out of habit in rhetoric as if it was going somewhere]

[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

Two very hurt people partition their self-protective cognition like anger and being unforgivably offended from their unusually high empathy, kindness, and so on - separate anything that helps vs hampers being ready to do defensive or retaliatory harm.

The kindnesses will see each other and want so badly to bond. These rare personality cores are so precious, so beautiful and good, so meant to connect, so soothed by just being together, so content to just love each other.

The protectors will inevitably trip over something in each other. Snarling or aversion or something worse ensues. Bonding cannot be permitted. Self-fulfilling judgements and fears set in motion actions which make sure of it. Better alone than in risk. Better lash out now because we feel a thing than risk the delay or error chance entailed in working through it.

A tragedy in however many acts it takes.

Actors swap roles almost at random. New actors jump in all the time. If you are one of us, you might be in this game until you're dead, but you can retire by embracing being alone, healing, or filling your life with people outside the game.

But the shit show itself never stops, can't stop, won't stop. Not until all of humanity gets reliably good at not severely traumatizing new people... which I'm pretty sure works out to be a logical/existential impossibility, if you gaze too fully at the problem. I can't recommend looking - if you know what I'm talking about and want to help, madness and despair and horror at what can seem like futility of it all is a risk behind that veil. Just... grab the part that you know and try to fix it. Even if that means just trying to be happy and find your own exit. And don't get attached to pulling anyone in particular out with you. Some of us maybe aren't meant to leave. Just believe you can find someone just as good or better than the one who's not coming with you.

[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

Someone needs to teach the overly-empathizing how to be immune to the feelings and feeling-cues of others.

I'm 100% serious this needs to be a school or course or at least a reference guide to incidentally helpful schools or courses.

Like a kind of monk dojo, except instead of something more general and broad like Buddhism or something physical like kung fu, it's focused on specifically the

[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

OP mostly has a good point but should also be required to spend their next lifetimes in worlds as close to this one as possible while allowing every kid in every school the autonomy to up and leave class at any time so long as they claim it's to go to the bathroom.

It is bullshit - it is inhumane even. And when I look at schools (USA) now, they're even worse, they feel like prisons. And kids coming out of school now seem more broken in as a general trend, like circus elephants who learned to see their chains as unbreakable before they grew the power to break them.

We should make every effort at every opportunity to give kids a better experience which treats them more humanely.

But having said all that... This bullshit did not just magically appear for zero good reasons. The causal tree of this bullshit is huge, old, and almost certainly contains traumas and maybe even corpses of kids from unattended bullying gone too far, kidnapping, and rape - those rare cases surrounded by huge bodies of classroom happenings inconFigure it out. You cannot reliably come up with a better-on-net or better-on-average solution without thinking through

But yeah, it's bullshit. (But also, "homework" and "needing permission to pee" are not fucking close to the same tiers of bullshit, and in a good curriculum which also respects the kid's need for time free from school work, homework is closer to not-bullshit than bullshit)

to any teenagers reading this i just wanna say that you're right. homework is bullshit, not accepting late work is bullshit, tardies are bullshit, having to ask to use the goddamn bathroom is bullshit. any adult who tells you differently is either lying or doesnt remember how much it sucked

[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

People complaining about thirst traps on Tumblr Live are so funny to me, like... you really have that little self-control, or neediness, or jealousy, or sour grapes attitude, or moralistic narcissism, or inability to figure out how to hide it (yes, even permanently, not with the built-in setting which re-shows it but a web extention and maybe one line of code that you copy-paste), or [miscellaneous other problems]?

Calm down. Hot chicks are hot sometimes, and a large part of human activity has been driven by that since time immamorial. Enjoy it or move on. Hot guys are also a thing, smaller audience but similarly eternal. Enjoy it or move on. Nowadays we recognize hot enbies too. Enjoy it or move on.

[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

Super-tentative thought...

Okay, so, first background item: people with multiplicity sometimes have this thing happen where even though more than one personality/mind/alter is "active" at once, only one of them keeps the memories. So later, even though one of them doesn't remember the events, during the events they're present and can be consulted (at least internally) for questions, can offer their own thoughts, etc.

Second background item: I have a great memory for most things, but terrible memory for my reasoning and how I reached my decisions/conclusions, or specifically examples of stuff encountered along the way - like "why not [different/worse solution]?" fuck if I know, I don't remember, I probably don't even remember for sure if I ruled it out or not. I know it's worse for the totality of all my or our values/preferences/goals/etc, but I'd need to reinvent the thought process to get there.

Third background item: the one pretty much agreed-upon way to create multiplicity is childhood trauma; I had some moderately traumatic / complex-ptsd-causing experiences as a child; almost nothing in this world, especially in minds/brains, is all-or-nothing clear-cut you either have it or you don't - everything is a gradient... "having" DID is having enough partitioning of thought/emotions/awareness/memories/identity that the result is qualitatively different, but there's nothing precluding lesser/partial/weaker/etc partitioning.

Anyway so all that said maybe the reason why I suck at remembering the examples of how I reached conclusions is that my thinking is "implemented" a little similarly to DID, where my best thinking is sufficiently different cognition from my doing/enacting/living cognition, different enough that the cognition flows (the cascades of what neuron paths fire and which don't) are effectively somewhat partitioned (much as the partitioning caused by habitualized unpleasant-internal-experience-avoidance, rejection-of-certain-aspects-of-the-self, and so on, which gradually leads to neat little avoidances of the

[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

One really frustrating thing with Syncthing I ran into recently is that it really gunks up when you

suddenly drop gigs of files into a synced folder (for example, pulling out a large backup to go through it), and then

there's churn with those same files right after (for example, you've started to work through the backup, deleting some files, renaming others, catenating/merging/etc some things)....

In particular, I've noticed Syncthing trying to copy in huge files hours, or even days if the sync is big and slow enough, after they have already been deleted on the source device.

I guess its logic boils down to just having one big queue, so the "my-old-junk/9-GiB-raw-video.dv was deleted" update sits waiting while all the in-flight "here's bytes [x:y] of my-old-junk/9-GiB-raw-video.dv to copy in" messages get processed.

Now, if there are only two devices, I assume (or at least hope - I can conceive of worse implementations that are plausible enough, unfortunately) this settles faster - after all, if "foo.txt" no longer exists on the source, who are you gonna get the remaining bytes of "foo.txt" from?

But if there are, say, four devices, like in my case, then the three slowly-catching-up-on-sync devices all might have pieces of the file, or the whole file, by the time the delete happens on the source device - so they can keep feeding each other gigs of data which should've been deleted and which frankly they have no excuse to not know is deleted.

Now, personally, making sure that the most essential metadata of "this file was deleted/renamed" gets through at the earliest opportunity despite any head-of-line blocking or backpressure issues with file contents... that's the kind of thing I'd be thinking about from the start. Off the top of my head, there are multiple possibilities to explore here: use a separate connection, or use the built-in priority stuff, or write in-app logic to try to detect backpressure and hold back and not fill up buffers so that there's always a little bit of room for this high-priority stuff (a perfect solution can't exist because network vagueries mean that any node in the path could share queues/buffers for your low-priority and high-priority stuff, even if you use different everything for each, and every bit of information you might be able to dynamically discover about how much you can push before packets start dropping could technically change at any time... anything - there's no reason why file foo should fully copy in, then sync makes progress for days on other files, and then finally "oh, foo was deleted (back around when it was copied down)").

No but it gets worse.

See, because hours or days pass after deleting a file "qux" on A before the sync finishes creating the file on devices B, C, or D, it's possible for these lagging gunked up syncs to revive file "qux" on A - because "oh look, file qux just appeared on B, we don't have a qux here on A, guess we should sync that down".

It's rather frustrating because the whole point of having sync was to free me to switch between devices at a whim, or to grab any device when going out and know that I'll have access to everything, and be able to make progress on everything. And now, for a couple of my synced folders most affected by these gunked up sync issues, that hasn't been true for about a week.

Luckily, it's per synced folder.

[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

Maybe the best definition of bravery is using your full intelligence despite fear. Staying present in the moment, focused on the problem-solving, calm until it's clear how to usefully not be. Not merely ability to act despite fear but

#cognition #fear #bravery