domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
waffles
breakfast food
2m ago
I read the Matthew Walker book when it first came out. At the time I was sleeping maybe about 6-ish hours on weeknights, maybe 8-9 on weekends, sleeping in or whatever after staying up late or going out, dreading the alarm clock on a Monday morning, all-around normal stuff for someone in their mid 20s. In retrospect, there were hints that I wasn't getting enough rest to function well (e.g. tiredness during mid-afternoon, inability to focus on highly technical work, waking up groggy on weekday mornings) but guess I didn't pay much attention to that until I finished the book.
(Obviously our bodies are all different, some of us need more sleep than others, and I feel like I'm sightly on the right side of the bell curve for quantity of sleep required to function optimally)
I made some lifestyle changes, some major, some minor. The most significant was consistently sleeping and waking up at the same time. I got myself a wake light, and started using that instead of an alarm clock. After a while, I realized that I could wake up without an audible alarm, and the feeling of waking up refreshed, every morning, instead of to a blaring alarm clock, beat the pants off my former lifestyle.
Minor ones included avoiding blue lights or bright lights before going to bed (to the best of my ability) which makes it easier to fall asleep. I also cut out alcohol near bedtime, which appears to give the sense of deep sleep but studies (?) and personal experience suggests otherwise.
It wasn't until a couple months of this that I realized how truly sleep deprived I was before. Consistent quality sleep is truly mind-altering and I can't imagine going back.
hydroacetylene
3m ago
I mean, trying to pull permits for a literal rocket launch would do they anyways.
hydroacetylene
5m ago
This is the purpose of government under liberalism. You can totally have ‘different people live under different laws and there’s complex rules about who defers to whom’, and have a state, as long as it’s not a liberal society.
I don’t think trans realize that.
TwiceHuman
7m ago
I suppose so, yeah. Some people arrive at axioms "I think therefore I am", others arrive at nothingness "Nothing is real" or at least the conclusion that thinking is fundamentally limited "The dao of which can be spoken is not the real dao", "where one cannot speak one must be silent", "I can only know that I know nothing", "Life is absurd".
That "something cannot come from nothing" does not take into account the mystery of why anything exists at all, it also doesn't imply that anything is truly universal - but that something arbitrary seems to be all which exists. You can call laws of physics, human nature, and the universe fundamental, but they're "specific", things which exist in themselves, and thus not thing which generalize outside of themselves. Different people could exist, different universes, different laws of physics. Ours just happen to be what we were given.
And in all honesty, we cannot even communicate or think unless we use a foundation, so I think it's fine just to choose something. Just like it's fine to choose a language, a culture, a religion, an axiomatic system, a system of values, a morality. None of them will be universally valid, but they will be valid in the scope in which they exist, and that's good enough. It's the same for me, I must have a personality, a job, and a social role. I can only specialize, as general improvement stop being possible at a certain point (since the areas of further improvement contradict eachother). I actually recommend not learning too much or growing too wise, as you may lose your ability to believe in the arbitrary things that you've chosen. The alternative to having both pros and cons is simply having nothing at all, which is worse. In other words, we must be egoistic and take actions which from certain perspectives, are mistakes. Our locally valid ideas are only valid in a limited scope, but we must believe in them nonetheless. We must believe in ourselves with no external validation beyond the fact that we exist. We solve nihilism by rejecting the idea that universal validity/external proof is required for something to be real (in other words, rather than solving the problem, we reject the problem). In the words of Max Stirner "I have based my affair on nothing" (meaning on himself I suppose). My own existence is an axiom to me, that's the solution to any existential problems I may have.
Throwaway05
8m ago
Heard chief.
hydroacetylene
11m ago
And this is specifically autistic, though. Your plumber dissatisfied with his love life hits the strip club instead.
Tanista
12m ago
If he doesn't have a ghostplayer maybe he has a ghostposter. It can't take much effort to just repost all of the DR stuff he's signal boosting with a "!!"
That'd free up a couple of hours.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
20m ago
My understanding of aspies is basically that they have to learn to be social explicitly, they have to kind of learn that something is a joke and that you laugh after a joke, etc. it’s completely external like a skill. And I think that since our vision of our identity or identities is seen through the other, the aspies have a bit less self-awareness of their identities than a normie might. You don’t just naturally act like your gender as most people do by picking up on cues, you learn to act your gender the way I might learn French — you make an explicit decision to study the subject, and then to use it. Of course it’s never going to feel quite natural in the same way my French isn’t going to feel natural— it’s something I’m translating in my head from my natural language to French and it’s not the same as English which I just naturally speak without having to think about it.
hydroacetylene
20m ago
I have empathy for those suffering from mental illness(like those who can’t tell what gender they are), but that doesn’t mean I go along with their delusions. Some things are just false. 2+2=5 men can get pregnant there’s more than two genders etc.
I'm going to be blunt: I don't actually need to understand the various foibles people have ,anymore than they need to understand my own particular...weirdness (though I grant that it's harder to tell at a glance). I just need them to create a social structure where I can tolerate them with minimal cost to myself and the things I consider important, then I'll happily do so. Part of that is minimizing the burden I/they make of myself/themselves.
I was all aboard the acceptance train because I assumed this would be incredibly easy for transpeople (and it probably still is for the man who is merely in the dress - that bit has always been easier for me to manage). Insofar as some of us have changed our minds it's a direct result of us being told every which way that this is impossible.
Empathy (which has been utterly ruined, much like "tolerance", by activists) really has nothing to do with it. Look at the McBride situation: "empathy" doesn't really change anything about the fundamental difference of opinion about who belongs where that continually brings this small population to the front of the culture war. It's just a disagreement that we need to hammer out.
The only reason I know anything about "AGPs" is because I was looking for an explanation for absolutely deranging policies and some strange behavior. What needs to happen is that the salience of this stuff needs to be taken down and that has to be done via message discipline and realistic asks on the other side.
The less the average person has to think about this issue beyond "you do you" the kinder the discourse will be.
roche
26m ago
Embodying an emotion sounds like it could just be a result of attention directed towards an emotion, such that said emotion is the meditation object?
AFAIK the point is letting your guard down so that the emotion completely consumes you in a controlled environment. The idea is to "sublimate it" like therapy, but to such a degree that your attachment to this emotion in general burns away.
You may also know that the brain accepts something as true the first moment you see it, and only judge it afterwards, which is why some advertisement tries to overstimulate you as it delivers its message.
Yeah, this is true. This is why Indian rituals have long made sport of overwhelming the senses above all, through things like kirtan. I seem to remember some old anthropology quote about how naive and barbaric pagans are, because their idols and rituals are so loud and noisy that there simply can't be any deeper feeling behind it. But more than likely, the overstimulating nature of pagan rituals all across the world serves to overwhelm the senses, so that the brain is tossed on a sea of confusion for a brief time and is more open to processing the raw experience. You can replicate that now by listening to this. When the brain lacks confidence it's more open. Etc.
This is the brains model of the body, often called the spirit body by mystics, and it may be related to our sense of Proprioception. I don't know if you can accidentally mess up this sense, but it's possible.
I've definitely had the "thinking center" of my brain change places a few times before. Once a few weeks ago, during a particularly bad episode of insomnia, it was like a bunch of thread had fallen loose from the spool and took extra energy to reach my "thoughts". Another time was during meditation, where it did a very bizarre rotation down to my throat and rotated back up. Yet another was an incredibly neat phenomenon where I was meditating in a chair, and for a brief feeling it was like my perspective rose "up and over" my head, and I realized then our perception of reality is based on the tiny nook in our minds from which we see everything normally, and if you happen to see from anywhere else, everything will appear differently.
I hope these insights were useful! If you want, I will try to dig up the titles of some of the books I've read on this, though 40% of it is my own original ideas and guesses.
Mm, yeah, it's good. But I still have no great leads. There's no desperation for these weird Eastern practices to be true, or whatever -- it's more like "We have several millennia of records, they claim incredible things, some of them have already proven to be correct, but nobody is reading them". Personally it astounds me that the Indian discovery (and Chinese discovery for that matter) met with such little fanfare during the Enlightenment. It was by integrating the mystic traditions of Eastern high priests that the Greeks began their scientific golden age, and so to see the Eastern world met with either profound apathy, or religious fanaticism, is really strange. Because obviously when you tell someone about the Tao and it sounds dumb and impractical, the move isn't to say wow these Chinese sure were bad at philosophy, but to realize the very book is telling you words suck at conveying meaning, and virtually all intent behind its writing is lost, and to get at it you've got to dig and dig and dig and dig. And I would absolutely love to do it, but I'm on Japan now, and next comes India, and I'll be in a casket before I have time for China. But anyway... have you looked at the Tibetan practices or tantra at all? That's the most promising area IMO
Folamh3
32m ago
To clarify, I'm not saying that obsessively texting or calling someone should be illegal, and it's rarely more than an annoyance for the person at the receiving end. But I also think that pestering or bothering someone is bad behaviour, and that when the object of your affection has made it perfectly clear they aren't interested, you should respect that. I'd put on the same level as ghosting someone: obviously not calling for it to be banned (how could it?), but I consider it inconsiderate and disrespectful unless proven otherwise.
Throwaway05
34m ago
"Reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood."
The fence is not some abstract Platonic solid locked in time, it is a thought experiment to remind you to understand why the current state of affairs exists instead of some other possible state of affairs.
I have provided numerous questions whose answers may help explain the current states of affairs. You have quibbled over a fence like it is some sort of shamanic totem that if only you shake it in the right way argumentative success or understanding is reached.
This does nothing to address the issue at hand.
hooser
37m ago
TapWaterSommelier translates some Russian gallows-humor jokes from the start of the current war / special operations. The original source of the collection is great but it's in Russian, and jokes are some of the hardest writing to translate.
My favorite:
“Good morning, here is your conscription notice.”
“Who are we fighting with?”
“Fascists, of course!”
“Ok, and against whom?”
The original source is an anthropologist who studies jokes-as-coping-mechanism in Russian-speaking world. TapWaterSommelier gives a good summary of the trends. The joke I quoted is an example of a "common-man" character who obstinately and deliberately remains clueless about anything political.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
46m ago
What I see is that both of you are doing what is very common in Internet debates, which is, being very confident that you're right and the other person is wrong, adopting a rather condescending tone in explaining how wrong and ignorant the other person is. I do think @Throwaway05 is being a tad condescending, but we don't generally mod for being "a tad condescending." You, however, were getting increasingly heated, especially in your last post.
I very frequently find myself writing a post layered with sarcasm and condescension directed towards someone I think is being an ass. I usually (usually) rewrite it and manage to take a more neutral tone.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
56m ago
I think you're right that the zeitgeist has a lot to do with it. I remember at the nadir of my dating life (before Obergefell) looking in the mirror and asking why I couldn't find an awesome woman. And at least very briefly thinking that I'd be a good one myself (fit, tall, all those cool male-coded interests: what's not to like?). But it wasn't a popular idea to consider at the time, so it got shoved aside never to return and things got better for me within a few weeks. I'm occasionally thankful it didn't get further consideration at the time.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
59m ago
Not necessary to it, although I did notice, and it adds another level to it....
TheFooder
1hr ago
Illinois gonna Illinois.
Ain't that the truth. I didn't realize how bad it was until I moved to another state.
KingOfTheBailey
1hr ago
So the Doge of Venice wasn't part of the pun?
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
So, what I think you're saying is that you want to talk about the current operation of the farm, given the existence of the fence. That may be an interesting conversation, when we can get to it, but the current operation of the farm is designed around the fact that there is a fence there. That a current farmhand says, "I've kinda figured out at least something nice I can get out of this fence here," is not our first question. Our first question is why. What for. What problem was it designed to solve? I have tried to endeavor to understand why it was put into place. What for. What problem it was designed to solve. What information am I lacking on that question? If I am not lacking in information on that question, I would appreciate some acknowledgement on that point, and then we can move toward other issues. As of now, my sense is that you're saying that I'm just so completely lacking in any information that I still don't even have any idea why it was built, what it was for, what problem it was designed to solve.
TeknOShEeP
1hr ago
Or he's multi-tasking, as in that wonderful leaked SpaceX call where we learned the Starship was one second from abort on the tower catch, while Musk was streaming his diablo run the whole time.
SBF also famously did this with league of legends, but was also notoriously bad at LoL, whereas Musk appears to be actually good at Diablo. Maybe we should start judging business leaders by their gaming chops.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
But some people's intense romantic fixations can lead them to behave in extremely unhealthy ways which violate the boundaries of the object of their affection: repeatedly texting them, calling them or buying them gifts when they've made it perfectly clear they aren't interested; following them; bothering them in public places; sending them hateful messages; and (much more rarely, of course) physically intimidating or assaulting the object of their affection, or their current romantic partner. We call such a person a "stalker", and much of the aforementioned behaviour is actually illegal (however difficult it is to enforce), and rightfully so. As sympathetic as I might be towards someone whose affections aren't reciprocated and is feeling sad about it, my sympathy ends when they engage in unacceptable behaviour like this.
I am a reactionary on this one: I think the stigmatisation of deep love and persistent suitors is something modern society has gotten badly wrong, and is a symptom of safetyism and inauthenticity. Threats and physical attacks of course have to be off-limits (though even then, there used to be far more sympathy than there is now; note that Romeo and Paris literally fight a duel to the death over Juliet, and neither's intended as an unsympathetic character), but most of the other stuff you mention in many cases is a non-issue blown up by hysterical fear and in other cases is a mild annoyance that can be trivially dealt with by blocking the stalker's number.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
See, to me there’s the “I hate people who do this” thing where everybody just dunks on whoever we’re talking about, calls them gross and disgusting, and tries to make them miserable. I think life is too short for that. And sure, there’s nothing to be gained by saying to a gay couple that they’re disgusting people, degenerates, and so on.
But the other side of tha5 is some bad behavior simply shouldn’t be normalized due to the knock on effects on society. The trans issues especially come with a lot of real, serious baggage. The WPATH files more or less show this, as does the literal explosion of kids under 15 or so suddenly deciding they’re trans and being given drugs. There might well be a case for “okay, fine, if you’re of legal age, you can do whatever with your genitalia and we’ll leave you alone for the most part.” I have reservations about restrooms and trans people being in positions of power over children. But I think for the most part, I’m like okay, this guy wearing a dress is 40 and shopping at Walmart, I don’t need to get out the pitchfork here, he’s not hurting anyone. I might not hire him to babysit, but beyond that, I think there’s something weird about people spending too much energy on it. Once the bad policies that open up the door to harm are closed, there’s not much to talk about here.
Folamh3
1hr ago
I wonder if others, like say antifa members, occasionally look at Proud Boys and recognize in them a shadow version of themselves.
It's a real "there but for the grace of God" situation, isn't it. It's funny when you see street clashes between Proud Boys and Antifa, and for all the talk of this being a clash between a racist organisation and an antiracist organisation, both groups look about as racially diverse as rural Sweden, or in some cases the Proud Boys are more diverse than the Antifa guys.
I read somewhere (possibly in a review of The True Believer) that the number of literal Nazis (as in, members of the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s) who were previously communists is off the charts. I also read somewhere that in the UK in the 1980s, both far-right skinheads and antifa recruited from the same pool of talent: football hooligans, young frustrated men spoiling for a fight, who could easily be radicalised into one extremist ideology or the other (or even both in succession) if there was the possibility of getting to bust some heads with impunity in it. See also my post about how being generally dissatisfied with your life is a far better predictor for endorsing an extreme ideology than anything else.
Of course I have empathy. Trans-bashing has never entered my mind. It's more like, every trans person I've come across has some deep mental problems and not-being-a-woman isn't even foremost of them. They're neurotic. They're obsessed with porn. They hate their parents, and conservatives. They're pale and sickly. They cut their own hair and make awkward looking bangs. They only want to talk about themselves. You rarely come across a trans person that makes you think, "Huh, this is just a normal person that wants to be a girl". The rejoinder is: "Our fucked up society is the reason they turn out this way!" Which... yeah, sure. But if you agree society messed you up, isn't priority #1 then to repair the damage?
Actually, what bothers me about them is the odd double standard where they demand recognition from our society, yet refuse to play by any of its standards and so indulge in hypersexuality, self-harm, gross fetishes, disruptive behavior etc. which is what made the gays so hated in the past. If transexuals were otherwise healthy adults that acted like the opposite gender, almost no one would mind.
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