Burrowing Into The Now:

It's a strange experience to burrow into the present moment, trying to pay attention to everything happening now which your brain keeps in the periphery - breathing, sounds, bodily sensations, thoughts entering your mind, drifting out of presence. Then to stay there indefinitely.

Your mind tends to make interesting connections regarding what's happening moment by moment.

You realize how your internal feelings now depend on what you ate days ago, see subtle patterns of behavior you didn't realize until you experienced a continuous unbroken stack of Now's.

Can you be so present that you notice the subtle movements of a leaf in a gentle breeze?

Can you watch thoughts and emotions rise and fall every microsecond?

Can you notice not just microseconds but nanoseconds?

Feel the split second your breath changes from inhale to exhale?

The wild thing is you can intellectualize it all day.

You can rationally and logically break it down, to understand it deeply, to talk about it, to feel like you're doing it.

But it's always a new Now.

Since you read this, your mind left the present.

Step into it again.

A Dumb Post About Intelligence

I don't feel qualified talking about intelligence/IQ to be honest.

The people I've met who are clearly smarter than me were doing math competitions and understood math faster than me.

And I don't think of people as dumber than me, I just feel like they didn't try hard enough...

Notice how I said "faster".

I haven't encountered any math that I'm unable to understand given enough time.

Even advanced math like string theory and set theory, I've done... but a few people I've met picked it up in half the time when I struggled a bit.

And regarding the other direction, I vividly recall all my childhood, other people caring more about playing with friends than learning.

They threw their hands up with long division, while I sat with it until I got it.

I enjoyed understanding the mysteries of the universe.

People would skim through required reading books they found boring.

They'd half-ass essays because who cares, right?

They had no zeal about, as Newton called it, understanding the mind of God.

They didn't bother learning code modularity or proper system architecture design.

So I don't think they're dumber than me.

I know the argument that some simpleton with a 70-IQ can never understand General Relativity, and I get it...

But I do think the majority of the population can actually understand almost anything if they bothered trying.

And moreover, every day I use the Elevate app and several other brain training apps.

It's like someone saying they're just born to be fat.

Well you don't have to be the tallest tree in the forest, but shouldn't you at least try to reach your peak?

People should train their minds.

I know I know, I'm going against the grain here. I know a bitter pill to swallow is "IQ is real". And I've seen the charts and maps on average IQ for various countries.

Nurture vs nature...

Maybe I'm a delusional optimist, believing in people who are genetically dumb? Idk...

When it comes down to it, there's speed of understanding, and there's WHETHER someone is even CAPABLE of understanding something in the first place.

A nuanced topic. I don't like simplistically focusing on IQ.

I'm always looking for some sentence or equation I can't understand.

At the lowest IQ levels, maybe SOME people are incapable of understanding something.

But with proper nutrition, with actually sticking with it long enough, with making a real effort, perhaps it just takes longer?

Don't even get me started on "various types of intelligence!"

Hard sciences like physics or organic chemistry, math, coding, these things it's obvious where someone fits.

When it comes to "soft" stuff like emotions, sociology, etc., I think people aren't as clever as they think.

Remember - train your brain just as you'd train your body.

Reach your peak before you preach.

I'll end this post with a beautiful quote about intelligence by Bryce Courtenay:

"Intelligence is a harder gift. For this you must work, you must practice it, challenge it, and maybe toward the end of your life you will master it. Cleverness is the shadow, whereas intelligence is the substance."

AI is going to subtly seep into everything.

#dalle2 is going to change the job of an illustrator,

AI diagnosis engines will change the job of a radiologist,

AI chatbots will change the job of customer service,

Many such examples.

Notice I said "change" not "replace".

Think.

Chase after aches and pains with your awareness and watch it dissolve as you shine a healing light onto its center.

Death is the most meaningful moment of your life.

The quiet lonely moment when it all goes black and you never see this reality again. When all you experienced and lived is laid bare. When you know it's your last few seconds of being alive and that's it, no do-overs.

Beautiful.

I'm glad our healthcare systems were stress tested.

I'm glad our political systems were stress tested.

I'm glad supply chains and food lines were stress tested.

I'm glad fiat was stress tested.

I'm glad sexual norms were stress tested.

Now we watch to see what's antifragile.

Save Our Planet

Paper straws on your iced coffee make people feel good, like they're saving the world, but mathematically are a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of corporate deforestation (about one acre per second) and toxic dumping and pointless office by-products tossed away.

I'm vehemently opposed to polluting Earth.

I think corporations with deforestation, toxic waste, and performative crap like "socially conscious green initiatives" are the real culprits of destroying Mother Earth.

I believe global warming algorithms are untrustworthy and fickle.

Here's a thought:

Open source the climate change algorithms, code and data and all, instead of climate scientists saying, "Trust us, our algorithms are correct..."

The Five Senses

Your senses exist to provide imperfect feedback on an imperfect outside reality.

You send electrical signals to contract your muscles and walk.

Your sensory input changes.

You're a soul observing both input and output.

Realize what matters is your relationships with other souls.

Chopped up pieces of fetuses squirming around gasping for life as forceps cut them apart until the cells with the brand new DNA stops trying to stay alive and finally gives up exhausted, its survival instinct in 17 chopped up pieces, finally dimming out to eternal nothingness....

The minute you think to yourself, "this person is dumber than me" and realize you're right, you shut down their avenues for mental growth begotten by you.

Before, you treat them as an equal and ask them intelligent questions and respect their responses. This draws out latent IQ.

People who think IQ is fixed from birth are encouraging self-limiting beliefs.

Serverless is the future.

Algorithms as a service is the future.

Racially Colorblind

Is it privileged of me to ignore skin color? Because I'm white am I unable to understand how blacks have to constantly think about skin color?

No. I don't treat people merely skin deep. I don't pre-judge people on skin color like the racist lefties.

Colorblind as MLK Jr wanted.

Every moment of life for the extreme liberals is filtered through the lens of skin color.

They're constantly looking for "historically marginalized groups" to coddle and pity, so sad that some people were born in the wrong skin color.

Fuck that.

I treat people as individuals.

It's always white women who tell me I'm privileged to be able to ignore skin color.

They have this vision of black persons constantly pulled over by cops and fired or not hired in jobs for their skin color.

The poor black man needs pity from the tiny shrill white woman?

C'mon.

Actually look with your own two eyes in the world and tell me you don't see people of all skin colors getting along.

When I say I think it's the moral thing to consider skin color like eye color, to just treat people as people, they don't like that.

Because really it's about power. Without race-baiting, they lose their power to virtue signal.

"BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD."

Ok.

By immediately thinking of skin color with every person they meet, they're prejudging that person before getting to know them.

Pre-judging = prejudiced.

They're always thinking of skin color, treating people differently based on skin color.

They're the real racists.

Now to ignore race entirely is also kinda silly.

If a bunch of middle eastern refugees enter France and claim that they're as French as the traditional white French blood people, that's silly.

Let cultures stay as they want.

TLDR: Respect separate cultures, and treat people as people, don't immediately pre-judge them based on their skin color.

I Speak For The Trees

Every minute there are 1400 trees in Brazil chopped down by farmers and ranchers.

More than 70% of greenhouse gas emissions for the past 40 years were from 100 corporations.

Stop feeling guilty about your "carbon footprint" and focus on what really matters for the environment.

By the time you read this, tens of thousands of trees will have been chopped down.

How much corporate waste and sewage will be dumped into landfills and oceans?

Stop worrying about plastic straws on your latte, anon.

Stop trusting BigScience's closed-source climate algorithms.

Challenge: Try to find actual non-politicized scientific papers on climate change (we not allowed to say "global warming" anymore?) where they actually show their data and algorithms.

If they tweaked their algorithms by 0.1%, would it still show catastrophe?

Open source the algos!

Let the raw data and the algorithms behind the global fear mongering be open source and let people pick them apart.

With such an important issue, are we supposed to "trust the experts" on this too?

Lotsa smart people would love to analyze this global data and fancy algorithms..

I love our planet and I love nature.

We need a strong case for environmentalism.

Conservatives should be trying to conserve our environment.

I hate how it's being used to manipulate people and distract us from the real polluters.

At the end of the day, Earth will be fine. Life finds a way. Whether we as humans will be fine is another story, and some how blindly trusting the experts to guide us doesn't quite seem like the best solution. I'm all for climate science. But actually find the levers that matter.

When it's used to make people feel guilty for using a paper towel when millions of trees are cut down so lawyers can print out 1,000 page reports, well c'mon.

Edit: 20,000 trees chopped down in Brazil since I started writing this, 14 minutes ago.

Unpopular opinion:

Nearly everyone has a unique genius to them, if they but cultivated it more.

Too many mediocre families raise mediocre kids, not because of genetics but because the kids aren't encouraged to push themselves and test their intellectual limits.

Nothing frustrates them more than you being happy while they're stuck miserable.

A bitter pill to swallow is that seeing reality through the lens of power, while not as good as merely facing reality in the present moment raw, is always an applicable lens in every situation.

Beauty will save the world.

Although I hear that vanity is a sin... fine line between transcendental beauty and shallow materialism.

Time Dilation

Time dilation is one of the wildest concepts in physics.

Special relativity: No matter how fast or slow you're going, light always is at constant speed.

Counterintuitive.

If you're driving 60 mph and the car in front of you is going 80 mph, it looks like it's moving away from you at 20mph.

Not light.

If you go 60 mph, let's say light travels at 80 mph, it's not moving away from you at 20 mph.

It's moving away from you at... 80 mph.

Time literally slows down or space contracts so that light is always same speed relative to you.

The math is easy, it's just the Pythagorean theorem.

Imagine someone's on a moving train and shines a flashlight upwards.

They see light go up and down.

You see light travel in a triangle from the ground.

Speed = distance / time.

Light speed can't change, time contracts.

General Relativity is trickier, particularly the math (remember how hard it is to solve partial differential equations anyone?)

But the principal is gravity bends and warps spacetime.

So if you're closer to the center of the Earth (a gravity well), time slows down.

Einstein showed gravity is not a force as Newton believed, but instead is just a bent spacetime where objects fall inwards together.

Time dilation is crazy - you can have a twin and literally age at different rates based on how far or close you are to massive gravity wells.

He also showed that gravity bends light.

Or rather, he predicted it and later was proven right during an eclipse. That's what made him famous.

He actually came up with equations, made a prediction, and then years later was vindicated when it was proven right.

Newton's equations for gravity were all well and good, but as real science actively looks for examples where something is INcorrect (the opposite of The Science™), the perihelion of Mercury was a bit off in his equations.

Einstein's equations perfectly predicted the perihelion.

Imagine an AI coming up with the clever idea that space and time are not separate things but rather a 4-dimensional spacetime block that bends and warps.

This required human creativity.

And symbolic math.

The beauty of good science is the accuracy of equations' predictions.

Anyway, the point is that time dilation is a real, measurable phenomenon. Clocks tick at different rates depending on how fast you're going and how close you are to gravity wells. Insane. Tough to conceptualize. But it's real. And Einstein figured it out by thinking in 4D not 3D.

Turned 35 today, thanks to everyone for reading my ramblings here!

A word about overthinking and ruminating:

What does it mean to ruminate?

This word actually has a fascinating history:

The word originates from the Latin term rūmināre, which literally means to chew over.

This is why animals that “chew the cud” such as cows are called “ruminants.”

It’s an apt way to describe a particular kind of thinking we all engage in from time to time.

A cow ruminates by regurgitating partially digested material and re-chewing it, usually several times over.

Mental rumination is just the same—we regurgitate old memories, ideas, and stale old themes to chew over again and again and again.

But whereas chewing a cud is healthy and normal for a cow, rumination is seldom healthy and normal for a human!

Let’s say you had a weird disagreement with a loved one and you keep playing the conversation over again in your mind.

Maybe you imagine you saying something else, or you’re filled with regret or remorse.

Something doesn’t feel right about it all, so your brain keeps returning to the same scene, dwelling on it, putting a bright spotlight on every ugly detail, trying on different interpretations and hypothetical endings.

Basically, rumination is overthinking.

It’s chewing ideas down into a pulp, and it’s unproductive.

Often, we bring out an old memory that in turn triggers other (usually negative) memories, which catches us in a tightening loop of distraction and even more overthinking.

You’re chewing and chewing, but your problem-solving capacity is only getting worse, and your anxiety is rising.

In other words, you can’t stop telling yourself a really bad fairy tale over and over.

COVID pushed some anti-antifragile people to their breaking point and we're seeing the aftermath of that now.

But it's good if you zoom out because it's unearthing some latent issues in our society, and as they say, "sunlight is the best disinfectant".