Wow ideas

Enlightenment feels like correctness, that every passing second feels correct. It feels like delight. … It feels like a lot of fun. It feels like creativity and engagement. Not necessarily how I directly interact with the world, but the way It feels to think thoughts. It feels like thoughts are things I am watching walk along the street, down the road, in the distance … It’s not that there is a change in things that happen. The canvas that the thoughts are painted on changed to a different fabric ... I think I am very consistently enlightened, but sometimes to a small degree. Occasionally also it feels I am not at all. ~

Aella

from the interview with

Spencer Greenberg

on Clearer Thinking podcast (28:29)

Why would I trust opinion bc its my own? –

Julia Galef

via

Rationally Speaking

#143

There is a difference between happiness (what brings you pleasure now) vs. meaning (what brings you fulfillment when you look at your whole life) ~

Robin Hanson

on

Lex Fridman Show

Intelligence is did you achieved things you wanted in life –

Naval Ravikant

Beliefs persevere even without any social pressure. … The belief will not change when the reasons are defeated. The causality is reversed. People believe the reasons because they believe in the conclusion … We believe what the people we love and trust believe. This is not a conscious decision to conform by hiding one's true beliefs. It's the truth, this is how we believe. –

Daniel Kahneman

The world can never own a man who wants nothing –

Naval Ravikant

I am trying to be the dumbest person in the room

You don’t have a brain with a body, you have a body with a brain –

Ido Portal

I want to be as publicly vulnerable as possible, because I want to broadcast acceptance towards others. –

Aella

As in, one of the first times I felt deep acceptance from someone else was when I watched them name an unflattering thing about themselves with openness and grace.

Flirt with abandon – via ceo

Don’t look what people are saying. Look what people are doing.

Locate an animal, mimic its expression and movement for two minutes. If there are no other lives around, observe an object and be it for two minutes. Do it regularly –

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

via

Hans Urlich Obrist

We seem to be so important that it breaks our minds and makes us wonder if the universe is real – Michael Vassar

Let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you –

Paul Graham

Ours is the era of inadequate AI alignment theory. Any other facts about this era are relatively unimportant –

Eliezer Yudkowsky

The truth doesn’t lie in the middle, truth lies where it lies (original in Polish: Prawda nie leży pośrodku, prawda leży tam, gdzie leży”) – Władysław Bartoszewski

You’re like the Catholics who are trying to get into heaven by being good enough

"I have felt it myself – the glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds." – Freeman Dyson theoretical physicist, proponent of nuclear disarming, in the context of why from 1981 documentary "The Day After Trinity", via Machines of Mass Distraction, New York Times

Start where you are –

Pema Chödrön

After all, the future is quite meaningless and unimportant unless sooner or later, it is going to become present. Thus to plan for future which is not going to become present is hardly more absurd than to plan for future which, when it comes to me, will find me “absent”, looking fixedly over its shoulder instead of its face –

Allan Watts

The world can never own a man who wants nothing – Wu Hsin via

Naval Ravikant

Trusted third parties are security holes – Nick Szabo in crypto context

Life's work is like building castles from the sand or painting pictures on the water –

Naval Ravikant

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More

Your life most likely be influential only on some limited local scope. Many people cannot even remember the name of their great-grandparents. Why do we intuit our influence having a different influence”

“I’ve also come to believe in the complete and utter insignificance of the self, and I think that helps a lot. For example, if you thought you were the most important thing in the universe, then you would have to bend the entire universe to your will ...

However, if you view yourself as a bacteria or an amoeba or if you view all of your works as writing on water or building castles in the sand, then you have no expectation from how life should actually be. Life is just the way it is. Then you accept that and you have no cause to be happy or unhappy. Those things almost don’t apply.

What you’re left with in that neutral state is not neutrality ... This is the existence that little children live. If you look at little children, on balance, they’re generally pretty happy because they are really immersed into the environment and the moment without any thought of how it should be given their personal preferences and desires. ... One can be very happy as long as one isn’t too caught up in their own heads.”

Take part –

Paweł Althamer

If you hesitate become a participant

You are something the whole universe is doing –

What has been your greatest awakening so far, would you say? … The ongoing experience that I have is a feeling of, I never know how to express this, but that things are neutral in a way. Things are more neutral than they seem. One person hears something and they say it's bad and the other person hears the same thing and says it's good. It has its influence depending on whatever your background is, where you come from and your interpretation. But actually things are in a sense neutral. –

Pema Chödrön

from the interview with Oprah

You are something the whole universe is doing –

Allan Watts

I suspend judgement – Montaigne via

Anthony Bourdain

In times of interpersonal conflict, make the choice that will leave you more equanimous (internally calm) –

Naval Ravikant

A secret of getting ahead is getting started.

It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking, than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting 🏅 –

A. J. Jacobs

Don't focus on outputs. Focus on inputs. And then score will take care of itself – Bill Walsh

Everything is on the spectrum of love. Everything can be explained by identifying where it lies on the spectrum of love

Love is the most important force in the universe –

Michael Pollan

‣

More

Michael came to this realization on one of his psychedelic trips. Can love be the most foundational force that organizes our reality? One thing is to realize how cliche this sounds, another is to actually feel that this might be true. Pollan says that we are all guarding ourselves with irony and are trying to sound smart. His psychedelic trip helped him drop all of this and be able to realize the love principle in a clearer way. Anyway, there where a lot of songs, poems that were stating the same sentiment for centuries.

It's a lot harder to create something constructive than destructive. First was dynamite then was a combustion engine. First was the atomic bomb, then was a nuclear electricity plant. In order to make something constructive one need to make it safe, control many moving parts, sync a variety of processes together. 🏅 ~

Naval Ravikant

via

Rob Reid Show

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality. –

Seneca

Three Buddhist marks of existence: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, suffering – via

Sam Harris

If fixing or saving and trying to rescue [other people] is futile, radical self-care is quantum and it radiates out from you into the atmosphere. Like a little fresh air. It’s a huge gift to the world. One people say: isn’t she full of herself? – just smile obliquely like Monalisa and make both of you a nice cup of tea. Being full of affection to self-goofy, self-centered, cranky, annoying self is home. Is where world piece begins –

Anne Lamott

, Bird by Bird

Why the Internet startup can compete with a huge companies? It’s analogous to charter plane going into the cloud. A pilot cannot see anything. It’s not that they have a radar. It's just the space is so vast that the crash with other plane is highly unlikely. 🏅 ~

Paul Graham

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand – Jim Kwik on

Kevin Rose Show

It’s more important not to improve how you play on a good day, but to find a way to play slightly better on a bad day ~ Alex Ferguson, a highly successful coach of Manchester United

What you do on your bad days matters more than what you do on your good days –

Kevin Kelly

If for you cannot do what you asked yourself to do for a long time you are probably not a good kindergarten teacher to yourself. Our brain is ancient. It's sub–divided in many ancient, animalistic parts. In order to be a functional human being you need treat yourself like a kindergarten teacher controlling a group of children. 🏅🏅🏅 –

Tim Urban

, via message on Patreon

We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are 🏅🏅🏅 – Anaïs Nin

I wake up every day thinking that I don’t understand. How to live in a world that I don’t understand? 🏅🏅 ~

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

99% of all effort is wasted. Focus on 1% 🏅 –

Naval Ravikant

from Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss

Wisdom is just covering blind spots in one's mental model map of knowledge 🏅🏅 ~

Charlie Munger

Eighty or ninety important mental models will carry about 90 percent of the freight in making you a worldly wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight. 🏅🏅 ~

Charlie Munger

Find source of the discipline, study for the rest of your life –

Naval Ravikant

Focus on important, neglected, and tractable – Open Philanthropy project

We see and hear alerts about grilling, cooking, frying, baking. Those who are alerting, are quoting studies done on rats and mice ... People started cooking at least a million years ago ... People tolerate foods, that animal don’t. Animals in their natural habitats didn't eat grilled food, and therefore it is harmful to them 🏅 – Udo Polmer link

We live in a society where incentives are such, that large companies spend vast fortunes basically manipulating you to believe that it is really important to buy crap that you don’t need and that isn’t actually benefiting you … Children act often much more compassionate, and are much more likely to think: Wow! There are children just like me on the other side of the world that we can easily help! And it’s crucial that we do that ... We don’t realize that because advertising distorts so significantly what we think good life consists of 🏅 –

William MacAskill

on Sam Harris's podcast

In primatology, when we talk about primates, almost everything is viewed through a perspective of a hierarchy in the group. In social sciences, when we talk about humans, hierarchy is rarely ever mentioned🏅🏅🏅 ~

Frans de Wall

The more you know, the easier is to know more 🏅

Muscle radiation. When you tighten your fist your forearm gets tightened. When you do it stronger your bicep gets tightened. When you do it as strongest as you can, you arm, parts of back and neck get tightened. ~ Charles Poliquin, on

Tim Ferriss Show