Carl-Richard

It's interesting how that fusion has essentially happened twice (or who knows how many times?). Thrash metal was the first time in the early 80s (combining NWOBHM with hardcore). Then thrash metal evolved into more extreme metal in the early 90s (particularly death metal), and then this extreme metal (or rather the At The Gates riffing style 😂) fused with hardcore/post-hardcore again to essentially form metalcore. But then you also have genres like deathcore that emphasize the more extreme aspects again. I essentially grew up with Bullet For My Valentine and such bands (and later also Trivium), which is true At The Gates metalcore. As a guitar player, that way of playing riffs is burned into my bones. When I first heard Slaughter Of The Soul which is the At The Gates song the video guy referenced, only a few years ago, I was like "wot? That's where all that is from?". It's such an effective way of writing riffs. It's almost like the invention of palm muted chugging itself (which Thrash metal picked up and went crazy with). It gives a blueprint and spawns an entire universe of creative expression.

@Nilsi What do you think about metalcore?

Is eating food also an artistic pursuit for you? 😆 Do you have a need to be productive and creative? 🤔🧐 You can of course be "productive and creative" and create problems where there are none, like creating a distinction between productivity/creativity vs getting your needs met, or you can say "yes — both", which has really become my default position to most things nowadays 😊 The beauty of what I call "the statistical worldview": things are rarely one thing, often many, at least two (but not either/or).

The value of not removing your taste buds or sense of smell (maybe slightly hyperbolic). On the other hand, humans are the niche-shifting animal (and by extension capable of a wide range of specialized ways of living), so you can focus on some things more than others and "get along", but starting a family is certainly a safe bet for getting needs met.

Maybe a big asteroid hitting the Earth is "healthy at the end" for the world too.

I ordered one from MyHeritage (the best one for those with European ancestry if you mainly care about finding out your ancestry), and I got 97.3% Scandinavian, 1.8% Finnish, and 0.9% Greek/South-Italian. I'm Norwegian by the way ? What is really funny is that I predicted basically all of those three (I predicted Finnish from my father's side and South-European from my mother's side). My mom comes from West in the country and my father is from the East. The West of Norway has been a highly trafficked place for sea trade since the Viking Age, and there are many stories of Portuguese ships capsizing and the survivors washing up at the coast and settling among the native population. My father has always said that my great-grandfather looked like Nikola Tesla (a Greek inventor), and if my estimations are correct, he could've been up to 7.2% Greek (if we assume that he had an ancestor who was 100% greek and that this person and their descendants only had children with 100% Scandinavian people). Given these assumptions, this person could've lived as close as 7-8 generations ago in the 1700s-1800s. However, my mom told me that her grandmother on her dad's side (not the same side as Nikola Tesla lookalike) had brown eyes and a darker complexion than average, so for all I know, the Greek genes might be all from her ? The reason I predicted my dad's side to have Finnish genes is because my grandmother on that side had particularly distinct hooded eyes, which is more prevalent in the Finnish population due to more East-Asian influence (e.g. the Sámi people). The East of Norway is also next to Sweden, which is next to Finland, and we know that Finnish people have settled in those parts of Norway. Besides, my cousin from my dad's side also took the same DNA test, and he got 2.5% Finnish ancestry (and no South-European ancestry), which makes sense. I ordered the DNA test mostly because people in school always thought I was Spanish (lol), and my skin tans really easily (and Norway is very white). Anyways, curious to hear if any of you guys have taken a DNA test and why you chose to take it. Did you have any unexpected results, or did you predict everything like I did? ?

Necrophagist is the German engineering of technical death metal. It's precise and blunt as fuk and the frontman Muhammed Suiçmez is German and an engineer 😂

Phantasmagoria

I think it could make you less gullible, but again, I'm unsure about the openmindedness. What I will say though is that a more general gist of what you're hinting at can be helpful, namely being aware of standards of evidence or reason and being aware of assigning a status (e.g. true, false, probable, reasonable) to things. I notice in myself that I treat most things like an onion: I can entertain some evidence or suggest some position at one level of analysis, but when I peel back some of the layers, it gets clear that the evidence or those suggestions are not the whole story. Like, I might in one scenario talk about the importance of having a strong feeling of your own values and sense of what you think is reasonable, but in another, I might talk about how those things are highly confined to your limited window out on the world, and that in some sense, it's highly probable that you are missing something, could be called out on something, or that you can often probably argue the opposite position from just as seemingly convincing and strong position. So at one level, you assume the lens of the "lone" individual and its innate tendency towards bias, while at another, you question those assumptions. You can go back and forth between them, up and down the layers, but we tend to stick with a few layers at a time, and then it's more likely to do something which comes off as closemindedness, even if you have contact with some deeper layers. So being able to operate across different layers and essentially being cognitively complex, is one defining feature of "mature", "wise" (less gullible) openmindedness.

"Wrong" and "proof" are actually quite specific, especially in combination. Ironically, I think the answer for how to be openminded but not gullible is simply wisdom. Wisdom is about striking the right balance, of hitting the mark, of clear seeing and seeing the whole picture, which is again hard to make specific. As for examples of general things that would make you openminded but not gullible: being driven by what you think is true rather than expedient, by curiosity rather than necessity, holism rather than reductionism, being thoroughly integrated as a person (emotionally, interpersonally, spiritually, etc.), having experienced traps, pitfalls and dangers and not being naive to them, etc. When you think of somebody who is openminded but not gullible, what kind of person pops into your mind?

Trying to pinpoint openmindedness is a bit like trying to pinpoint wisdom. You can give some very general rules, but giving an exact formula that applies in all situations is often ironically the opposite of what you're trying to achieve.

I read your entire post from start to finish. Are you open to that being true? 🤭

What's the proof of that? 🤔

What is wrong and what is proof?

Anneke has such energy, pure, majesty.

I agree it's very wide. If I were to give it the widest definition: an intentional form of attention. So involuntarily having your attention drawn to something, e.g. as a reflex or impulse, would not be a meditation on its own. If it's also a non-judgemental (non-critical or non-analytical) form of attention to the "present moment" (i.e. not thoughts about past and future), it would be mindfulness meditation. But the word meditation is sometimes used for more "judgemental" and thought-oriented forms of intentional attention as well (sometimes referred to as "contemplation"). Meditation may involve focused attention to a concrete object, sensation, thought or experience ("focused attention meditation", e.g. focusing on the breath), or a cultivation of awareness towards more abstract or subtle qualities like emptiness, "being", being lost in thought (e.g. "open-monitoring meditation"). Self-inquiry, devotional techniques, "letting go", are sort of in-between all of these, involving a combination of "judgemental thought" but also a non-judgemental direction towards aspects of the present moment, involving both concrete objects and subtle qualities.

I guess one clarification can be that the fatigue has to be generalized to be indicative of the general load-bearing capacities being trained. For example, you can practice playing guitar very intensely and experience strong fatigue in your hands, but you might not be as fatigued in the rest of the body. Likewise, if the fatigue from a mental activity is very localized to that specific activity, then it's harder to say whether it trains your mental general load-bearing functions or not. But even within that, one would expect a sliding scale or gradient of effects going from more specialized to generalized. For example, playing guitar intensely might train your fingers the most, then your forearm muscles and wrist the second most, then your overarm muscles, then your shoulders and torso, then your neck and leg muscles, etc. So for some exercises, the gradient can be more skewed to generalized or specific. And to determine what this gradient is, you simply determine how much fatigue you experience across different faculties. Personally, if I do very intense brain training, it takes a little while before I'm able to do things like reading and writing at an optimal level of performance, which suggests that a generalized training is happening.

Sure, but the point is to see people as being in different stages of growth or development and that pushing standards on them that they might not be ready for can be counterproductive. When you see that somebody isn't being "stupid" but just need to grow, then that puts a lot of pressure off trying to change them or convert them to your point of view. Let people grow at their own pace. But of course, it's up to you how much you want to surround yourself with kids.

If a kid is being stupid, do you call them out on it, or do you laugh with your belly and say "oh you"?

If you're the grown-up, act like one. Literally treat them like kids who don't know any better.

Arguing about solipsism of course 😋

You just have to understand what working memory is. It's the basis of all active/intentional/voluntary mental activity, of all active thinking, visualization and imagery. It's the general workspace of your mind, and it has general load-bearing constraints, such as the 7 ± 2 rule, speed of processing, limits on detail resolution. These are analogous to how much weight you can lift off the ground or how fast you can run; very general measures of load-bearing capacity. Anything that loads your working memory, which is virtually anything, "trains" your working memory. It's just that if you load it with a bigger load (and in the right way), you will train it better (or in the direction of higher load-bearing capacity). How big the load is (and whether you load it in the right way), is related to how quickly you experience fatigue or loss in performance. And why do you develop fatigue? Say if you are chopping wood all day and you experience fatigue, what is happening to your body? What is happening to your muscles, your glucose stores, your lungs and oxygen levels? Well, everything points to that your general load-bearing systems, e.g. the musculoskeletal system or cardiovascular system, have been working hard. And just like a full-intensity sprint develops fatigue much quicker than e.g. going for a jog, some brain training develops fatigue much quicker than other forms of mental activity. So if you do something intense with your mind that you can only do for a short time before you experience fatigue or loss of performance, then those are signs that the general load-bearing functions of your mind are being efficiently trained. And of course, working memory has physical correlates which has metabolic constraints just like your lungs and muscles (particularly parts of the "Extrinsic Mode Network" in the brain, certain patterns of activity in frontoparietal areas). And also of course, there is some data on the benefits of brain training. Some do show increases in working memory capacity. The most controversial findings are more specifically related to IQ, but even there, you have some mixed findings with albeit small effect sizes. Despite that, I think the studies only show a fraction of what is possible, because getting a good study design that would truly test these things is extremely difficult, if not practically impossible, and is something you would never expect to find in any normal research setting. Yes. Literally stare at a point on your desk right now and try to focus in on finer and finer details (grainy and well-lit desk surfaces are better). Try to literally find the smallest detail you can possibly find and then try to find an even smaller detail, and then an even smaller detail, then an even smaller detail, etc. Do this for 5-10 minutes and see what happens.

Resistance to emotions and experiences is a part of the problem. Keep meditating and allow yourself to express these energies, give them some space, don't instinctively see them as something to get rid of. Now, you don't have to necessarily start lashing out at people or making rash decisions based on every emotional impulse, but simply allow emotions the benefit of the doubt and the starting assumption of openness. Meditating a lot like you do makes you very aware of your emotions. You see more of them, their causes and consequences, and you might have a strong desire to get rid of them because of that, but you might be setting your sights a bit too high and being a bit too harsh on yourself, at least for now. So allow yourself some emotions, allow yourself some emotional control, and keep meditating, and you might see things get a lot better quite quickly.

There is an interesting dynamic that I see when people talk about brain training vs e.g. general self-development or spirituality. When they see claims about brain training causing some improvement, they are generally very skeptical and questions like "is it repeatable though?", "placebo effect?", "is there even an effect?", while with self-development and spirituality, any perceived change or benefit is much more readily taken as proof of concept. It could be because brain training is associated with quantifiable things like IQ which primes a kind of scientific skepticism, while personal development is accepted to be more experience-based and subjective. The effects are also more "enhancements" of what is already there, while the results of personal development are often more tangible and clear cut.

In your mind. A paradox is when you try to superimpose a duality on reality and the duality doesn't seem to work. And often, paradoxes seem like paradoxes from one perspective but not another. Some people may think quantum superposition is a paradox (the particle is in different states at the same time), or the particle-wave duality ("is it a wave or a particle?"), when in reality, they just break with everyday notions of reality and the associated dualities we tend to superimpose on it.