Twitter posts I'd love to talk about
An evergreen collection of thought provoking things that I've stumbled on, that I enjoy bringing up with people IRL
This is just the start of a collection I hope to update over time. There’s a lot of really fascinating discussions I stumble on throughout Twitter. When I bring them up with people in person they often lead to fascinating discussions where we both learn a lot.
Especially when the topic has already been heavily discussed, one of us brings up a point and I say, “yeah a lot of people think that too! but that’s not the end of the story” and we scroll through the discussion.
It’s like, normally I talk to friends about an interesting topic and we may be get stuck in some branch of the conversation tree, or we think we have the answer, and weeks or months later one of us stumbles on something, a new prespective, that changes everything. This is just accelerating that, giving us a fully formed conversation tree to compare the answers we come up with independently against.
(13)
I love this argument and thread by Rob Miles. Reductionism isn’t wrong, it just applies to human conciousness too.
"AI is just linear algebra" feels like a midwit thing, where someone's figured out enough about the world to be excited by reductionism, but not enough to realise that it's universal.
They think we're making the mistake of not applying reductionism to AI, but actually they're making the mistake of not also applying reductionism to everything else
Everything is "just" the stuff it's made of
"How do you think AI systems can do so much? You must not understand them well enough to see that there's no magic in them" Yeah, magic isn't actually required. You have to understand the rest of the world well enough to see that there's actually no magic anywhere else either
https://x.com/robertskmiles/status/1776141380416376865
(12)
I feel like Good Liberals aren’t supposed to publicly admire other cultures in this way. I acknowledge the dangers of projection/stereotyping/fetishizing. But it seems like this implicit prohibition actually just propagates marginalization, just more passively, through distancing and making-foreign
https://x.com/TylerAlterman/status/1804209868863152527
I like this story of walking around a black neighborhood and seeing it not as noisy & chaotic but as vibrant and joyful
(11)
calling for the extermination of invasive plants and animals is the liberal-approved brand of xenophobia
https://x.com/yoltartar/status/1799923143802548708
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, what exactly IS an invasive species? What makes something native? it wasn’t always there, right? (this doesn’t mean we should be OK with anything growing anywhere. The question is, how do we decide what to do?)
(10)
Finally, I hit on the right question. “What is the underlying nature of knowing truth to you? What’s the gold standard for evidence? Everyone has to take a lot on faith, there’s too much to figure it all out. But ultimately, what form of evidence trumps all others?”
https://x.com/eshear/status/1657613625530654720
love this thread from eshear about heriticon, talking to a guy who doesn’t believe in moon landings, or viruses (and YET the person seems reasonable and smart). eshear tries to understand him & how different people find truths
May 28
(9) is it undemocratic to use lawfare against trump?
Sorry, I too hate Orange Man, but I’m not going to pretend Dems were not / are not fighting tooth and nail to get him unqualified to hold office and that this is wholly different from the Right’s election delegitimizing attempts.
https://x.com/SarahTheHaider/status/1792532435877462048
my view: “you may agree with the conclusion (not wanting to elect trump) but we should call out specific undemocratic means of achieving this outcome if we see it (because it hurts us all in the long run)”
(8) on homeschooling vs trying to fix the system
the two points of view
“Which is a mistake, kids should all go to public schools and get a good education. If the system is failing them, then it needs to be reformed on a countrywide basis.”
“Well, I'm not going to sit around waiting for that to happen. So homeschooling it is.”
https://x.com/schadenfreu_de/status/1776588396363727151
this feels very much like the fundamental disagreement within civilization. Do you participate with a chance that your (and your family’s) life will be worse, but also a chance that it may be much better? or do you withdraw and do your own thing, and have a guarenteed good/safe outcome, but not as good as it could be?
(unfourtunately the original post with all the discussion seems to have been deleted…)
(7) are Floridians justified in wanting to ban lab grown meat?
https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1787144969615999464
this one is very fun and spicy. I’d love to start with the initial argument (below), trace our initial reaction “yeah, just another case of stupid people being against technology”, but then work up from there to the argument Devon makes, that it is perhaps totally rational (and in their best interest infact?) to want to ban it
This is really important to me, related to #5, in that I think it’s super important to understand the opposition/what is actually blocking your great ideas from doing good, if we care about making things better.
The answer to why don’t people agree with me is literally never, “because they are dumb”. Just put that aside, pretend it is not true. What else could it be? Why would a reasonable person (who is very different from you) disagree?
(6) on walking in the street with a bag of microwave popcorn:
this is what Heidegger meant about the ordinary person living almost unconsciously, unable and unwilling to act outside the structures of normality even in trivial ways, bound to "what one does" like a straightjacket of inauthentic conformity
https://x.com/meekaale/status/1791359446586683785
what else are we doing that is restricted to a narrow pathway of “what is normal”, when it might be perfectly harmless and in fact beneficial to do (even if everyone thinks is weird) ?
(5) do democrats self-sabotage by calling for government services AND regulations that make it hard to deliver this service?
Yes, the deepest irony is that the side of the political spectrum that demands government services is also the side of the political spectrum that systematically puts in places regulations to make them far more difficult and expensive to deliver.
https://x.com/gpurcellredux/status/1795099083561894033
I think this is a very thought provoking/hard truth to reckon with. It echoes something I’ve been wanting to ask people IRL for a long time (but haven’t quite mapped that conversation tree yet): “what do you think happens if the other political party disappears one day”
I expect most people to intuitively say, “we’ll finally be able to make progress/solve a lot of the low hanging fruit at least”. I think this may be true for some but not everything. I think it’s important to understand what is actually blocking progress for each issue.
(4) Hank green on ad block
https://x.com/hankgreen/status/1719076849593242099
I have mixed feelings about ads. I don’t use adblock. This seems very confusing to everyone I know IRL. But to me it’s a necessary cost of a greater good? I cannot in good concious enjoy & consume content others labored for without giving them anything in return
I also want to one day make content and make a living creating beautiful things. I can’t do this if there is no money to be made doing this. Not using adblock is my way of “being the change I want to see” so to speak. Or, I see it as a civic duty, like voting, participating in the system.
(3) the lesson of the bells // what do schools teach?
https://x.com/i/bookmarks/all?post_id=1794848679834349993
this and the quoted tweet linking to more discussion, about what is the value of school. What is the value of unschooling. Do people learn because of school or inspite of it.
(2)
The median doctor rarely updates after medical school which becomes extremely apparent when you have a good one
https://x.com/seconds_0/status/1794931112449638490
This is crazy to me, and also nuanced. Doctors suck, don’t trust ‘em. Doctors are smart and save lives. Both are true. Can we tell the difference? Can see the blindspots of doctors, can we tell when they are sure of something and there is medical consensus, and when they’re making their best guess with outdated information?
(1)
https://x.com/DougTataryn/status/1761263932281594286
this idea that it’s possible to cure sleep anxiety by finding the specific root cause (the thing looping in the grandma’s head) blew my mind
and this guy, Doug, doing this research in the 80’s about how depression can manifest in our physical bodies (and you can sort of “see it” in patterns of muscle tension, as a diagnostic/predictive tool) is insane
AND the fact that he had to “hide this research”
Too fringy. Just like my having to hide the fact that I meditated back in those days
makes me wonder: who among us today already has found an important, verifiable truth that could improve our lives but is ignored? If I look carefully, can I see something today that will be widely accepted only after 50 years? It’s like catching a pop star, the next big hit, before they are widely known.
(and then the flip side, how many cases are there of people who are genuinely amazing and talented but that don’t get famous, or important verifiable truths that get lost and rediscovered much much later…?)
Aella has an “origin story” about this, about realizing that old fashion looks insane to today’s eye. What things today will look insane in the future? (culturally, socially, scientifically)
(0)
i think most people are operating quite similar to me in life, but are in intense denial about it. I think a lot of the people accusing me of being weirdly robotic and evaluatory are also doing it too, but are so afraid of rejection that they hide it from themselves.
https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/1754645399971811353
this is quite a spicy question. It invites us to ask, the things we hate, do we hate them because they are bad, or because we see ourselves in them and don’t want to be like that? There may be cases of both. How honest are we to ourselves about our desires and impulses?
this feels deeply profound and I think shifted something for me. Taking lack of motivation not as motivation but as decision, is extremely liberating
> If you really want to do it, you will find good reasons to work harder, if you don't really want to do it, you will find good reasons to give up, it's your life, you are free.
https://x.com/orangebook_/status/1753608684830355477
I think about James's tweet here a lot. I think the overwhelming complexity we see is often not a feature of reality. I used to feel like it was just too hard to find truth. But it just so happens, a lot of truth isn't that complicated.
> But sometimes, people with a vested interest in the status quo will attempt to flood the field with claims of overwhelming complexity,
>
> not for the sake of a better solution, but to make the problem appear intractable and drain energy and momentum needed to solve it.
https://x.com/provisionalidea/status/1804640406031765541