Carl-Richard

What does that have to do with Gaza?

Yes. I think if you expect your first cold approach to go super smooth, that would certainly make you less likely to do cold approaches again, because as you say, it's more likely for a cold approach to go poorly than go well. On the other hand, as I pointed out in the thread, if you keep doing cold approaches despite your negative expectation, the times it does end up going kind of well, that will be immensely reinforcing. And I think for most people, in the context of cold approaches, unexpected negative outcomes is not really a problem, as people are generally more overly anxious than overly confident. And if you are overly confident; 1. why are you doing cold approaches?; and 2. you would probably handle rejections better just in general. This negative reinforcement mechanism you're pointing to is thought to be why for example naltrexone therapy seems to work for quitting certain addictive substances (e.g. alcohol or opioids). The therapy consists of pairing the intake of the addictive drug with the intake of naltrexone, which is an opioid receptor antagonist, meaning it inhibits and produces the opposite effect of the desired response associated with the addictive drug. When your brain realizes that the familiar stimulus (the act of taking the drug) is not just no longer paired with the desired response, but with a response of opposite valence (an aversive response), your dopamine system updates its responses to the stimulus, meaning it will no longer associate it with the desired response and trigger cravings in the same way.

Let's get to the bottom of this: why are you glad that it's all a dream? To me, the fact that it's a dream is completely neutral to whether or not me as a human being should be glad or sad about a certain event in the human realm (e.g. Gaza getting obliterated). So to me, the fact that you seem to take some kind of solace that it's just a dream, means that you completely misunderstand what is meant by it all being a dream. In other words, you seem to conflate personal solipsism (the "dumb" kind) with transpersonal solipsism (the "cool" kind).

I do strength training too. It's the main thing I do. I asked about which type of cardio is best. Certainly, doing the type of cardio that makes you look like a twig (e.g. long-distance running) wouldn't go well with strength training (but apparently sprinting does; just look at sprinters and how buff they are)... or could anybody provide a counterargument?

@UnbornTao Another insight about recontextualizing one's insecurities: It is possible that your insecurities could be based in essentially nothing of substance. For example, imagine the go-to example of an intelligent person (Albert Einstein). Now, despite all the achievements, all the contributions to science, all the praise (generally the substantive evidence of this person's intelligence), you could still imagine a scenario where Einstein in his childhood was for example called stupid by somebody he respects, and ever since then, he carried an insecurity about not being smart enough. Of course, not all your insecurities are based in nothing substantial, but just recognizing the possibility that some of them could be, you could potentially identify such insecurities in your life, or you can put yourself in the mind state as if that was the case for a specific insecurity and see how you would act. This insight and the one above are just ways of peeking behind the curtain of your habitual mind and maybe see things from a different perspective.

There is no dream.

Very few individuals in modern society have zero problems with concentration.

What the heck does this solipsistic bullshit change about Gaza? Nothing! We're all lucky we're not in Gaza. In Gaza, solipsism becomes the last thing your mind could ever think about.

I've heard other people also say this; that it's "too short". Too short for what? It's too short for HIIT, or long-distance cardio, but for sprint training, it's just perfect. If your goal is to run at maximum speed continuously for a short period, 20 seconds is perfect. There is also something very special about sprint training that I haven't mentioned. At the very end of your sprint, the intensity of your breathing skyrockets I think many times higher than the average intensity of long-distance cardio, maybe also HIIT. It's so intense that you have to stop, or else you'll become sick. This level of intensity, even though it's for a short period of time, surely must have interesting benefits for the cardiovascular system. Besides, why should breathing at medium intensity over 20 minutes necessarily produce a stronger/healthier cardiovascular system at baseline than shorter alternatives? Likewise, why should HIIT be better than sprint? It's kind of like saying that you should only lift medium weights with many reps to build a strong body that can support your everyday activities, not heavy weights with few reps. What kind of logic is that? Obviously, heavier weights = stronger body. Does it then not follow that more intense breathing = stronger cardiovascular system? Or is it the case that your lungs have a kind of Goldilocks zone of long-term medium intensity stimulation for maximizing lung capacity?

Yet virtually all the super-geniuses of history received aristocratic tutoring.

I’ve had a suspicion for a while that practicing N-back with multiple stimulus types (especially Quad N-Back) promotes the equivalent of ADHD, because it incentives you to change attention between different stimulus types to get a more even score, because an even score generally feels better than an uneven score (in my opinion). I think the more psychologically healthy option is to choose the amount of stimulus types that gives a roughly even score, across all stimulus types and at all stages of learning at a given N-back level. For example, when advancing from 3-Back to 4-Back, if you for example get 30%-10%-0%-0% on Quad-4-Back, you should lower it down to Triple-4-Back. If it’s still uneven (say 30%-10%-0%), lower it down to Dual-4-Back. I find that Dual with audio and position (but probably any visual alternative could work, e.g. color or shape) is the best (I'm on Dual-4-Back right now), because they seem the least likely to compete for your attention (the audio and visual system seem to operate decently well in parallel). You can still rotate between different Dual combinations (with audio as a constant) if you want to train with other stimuli, which might also train different aspects of your brain and might offload fatigue from other brain areas (plus, more variation means less boredom). That said, the fatigue is probably largely systemic, as N-Back tasks seem to increase integration across brain networks, so rotating stimulus types will probably have limited effectiveness: I’ll maybe experiment with doing 3 sets of each combination in my daily routine of 10 sets to see if there is a decrease in fatigue compared to doing just one combination. My intuition tells me it’s most ideal to practice just one combination each session, kinda like how most bodybuilders split their workouts into chest day, back day, leg day, etc. From that perspective, practicing Quad-N-Backs would be like trying to hit a whole-body workout with the same volume as a weekly 3-way split (which is simply intractable).

I think equating the term "meditation" only with the times where you "get it" is a bit pessimistic. There are good and bad meditation sessions. And just because you believe that you're not actually meditating while meditating, that doesn't mean you shouldn't 😂 Or else it's just the Neo-Advaita conundrum all over again. All you can do is continue looking inside, ernestly looking for whatever you think you're looking for. And then maybe some day, through some seemingly wild fluke or unforeseen circumstances, you'll enter samadhi while not even trying. That doesn't mean that the prescription for every spiritual practicioner should be "don't even try". Spiritual advancement is a complex strange-loopy process, like a hand trying to grasp itself, or trying to catch soap bubbles. Just keep on spiritual-izing, whatever that means for you at your particular point in your path.

Poetry uses implicit and intuitive structures, which can be an elegant way of communicating, but it can also be prone to misinterpretation (due to the lack of explicit precision). Imo, an elegant use of poetry generally requires a refined sense of context awareness, e.g. knowing the person you're talking to and their past experiences, how their mind works, what they're feeling and thinking in the moment, etc. Truly intuitive people (e.g. "real" spiritual gurus) can touch your soul with so little words, because they know so much about you by just looking at you or observing your behavior. In fact, when your context awareness (and just general awareness) becomes extremely refined, I believe you can see the karmic footprint of somebody just by glancing at their eyes. That is where you get stories like Ram Dass meeting his guru and discovering that he essentially knew everything about him (e.g. that his mother had just passed away), or Sadhguru (jokingly) recalling his experience in school (paraphrasing: "I was paying so much attention to the teachers that I could see their past, present and future"). And you can certainly see moderate versions of this in your own life: you know very well when somebody is sad just by looking at them, and if you by some second clue (or multiple) can derive a possible explanation, and if it happens to be true, then you have effectively read their karmic footprint. In that sense, "psychic abilities" are just extreme versions of normal psychological phenomena (e.g. affective empathy, seeing patterns, logical inferences, etc.). One example from my personal life (which wasn't confirmed, but it still illustrates my point): at one point during my degree, I noticed that one of the lecturers suddenly called in sick a large number of times. Already then, I thought something must have happened. And then the few times I saw her after that, I couldn't help but feel that she was very sad, in strict contrast to how she used to be. The conclusion that popped up in my head was that someone near her had passed away. Again, I don't know that this was the case (I also had other theories, like a breakup, or just general stress from teaching while pursuing a PhD), but you can see how an extremely refined ability to pick up on such signs and draw true conclusions could lead you to be labelled a psychic. Of course, there are alternative explanations of psychic abilities that rely less on explicit signs like how somebody looks or their emotional state (e.g. that it's possible to merely download information about someone you've never even seen or met by pure intention). But in either case, the way you arrive at a conclusion is equally interesting in my opinion.

This is generally good advice, but I'll give some personal experiences with the possible traps with this advice. In the last year or so, I've made quite a lot of effort to "dumb down" my thoughts, not just relative to who I'm speaking to, but for myself, as I used to sometimes spend a lot of time writing or thinking stuff that didn't fully make sense (which often correlated with me writing more and more in an attempt to cover the holes so to speak). It definitely worked, as I don't say as much nonsense anymore, but inadvertently, it made me become less informative and even less precise at times, effectively from dumbing things down too much and mistaking lack of information for elegance. Essentially, much of what I thought was elegant, was just dumb, because I withheld information when that was not necessary. Much of the elegance I was looking for mainly seems to boil down to this: embrace conceptual richness, details and clarifications, but be skeptical of how these things are presented. For example, it's generally better to choose a simple set of common words as opposed to a flowery metaphor or a highly niche synonym, but you shouldn't as readily drop a sentence or leave out an example illustrating your point or avoid mentioning a difficult but relevant concept. Another example: leave out "filler words" and excessive repetitions, but don't leave out actual information. So this is something I'm working to correct. This correction will also be a bit clumsy in the beginning, but it's better than whatever the hell the path I've been going down. It also made writing and especially talking much more difficult, because you always have to double-check what your mind comes up with, and it definitely messes with the flow of the delivery. And I sometimes ended up using an inappropriate level of dumbed-down-ness for the situation, especially recently as I've started truly "higher" education, where the people around me should be able to follow me at my unfiltered capacity, at least judging by how some of my professors speak. Basically, I would dumb down my speaking to a everyday conversation level while speaking about highly technical subjects in front of the class, just because that had become a habit, which is of course, dumb. That is one thing I generally want to start practicing: talking at "my level" (or my peers' level), which I know I'm able to do, but which I've denied myself the right to do (lol). To summarize: brevity is not precision, simplicity is not elegance.

I can faintly remember looking up at the night sky in my early childhood and experiencing a vast expansive sensation of "being" the sky. That memory also brings up visions of outer space, as if I was floating between the stars and the star clouds. Many other memories from my childhood feel otherworldly and mystical like that.

"Never act [...]", "100% true"; be careful with these things.

Well damn, I considered watching it. Maybe I really should

I'm taking a week break anyways. Cya

Now you're talking about H2O. "I'll have a glass of water" is different from "I'll have a glass of water with ice in it". Is ice "wet"? As a Norwegian, I can tell you I've experienced ice that you could confidently describe as "dry". They call solid CO2 "dry ice" for a reason, in that it doesn't turn liquid, or "get wet". But again, all of this becomes inaccurate once you invoke actual physical concepts. Again, I'm talking about water, not H2O. The point is that there is a way to use language in an accurate way (like in physics) and a common way (layman), and there is a way to do both of them wrong. The way you're doing both of them wrong is essentially by over-equating and over-generalizing ("genius is uniqueness", "stupidity is genius"), or when you conflate them like you're doing now. Either way, it makes it all appear pretty nonsensical. Even if it makes sense in your own head, on the surface and from the perspective of the people you're communicating with, it looks absolutely nonsensical. You can either be happy with that, knowing that most people will not listen to you, or that they will pretend to understand, or be satsified with a subpar or shallow understanding, and that you can say essentially anything you want and maintain plausible deniability that what you're saying is crap; or you can be unhappy with the fact that people prefer to listen to you with a low signal-to-noise ratio and that there is little oppurtunity for deep and coherent connection with someone else.

I think if you made a thread that asked" what is water?", you would eventually conclude that water is dry.

That is why I generally don't read your posts.

How have our bodies changed in a way that human nature hasn't? The image of humans working together like the cells in our bodies is such a fascinating image. It truly is the next step of evolution. Currently, we're tiny amoebas bumping into each other competing for resources. Essentially, Game B is laying out the physiological blueprint of the human superorganism: who will be the mitochondria, the immune cells, the blood cells, the muscle cells?

Rack ? pulls ? above ? the ? knee.

@nuwu I think you're a good example of using too many big words

In the words of Ye: I love Hitler. And wild boars.