Carl-Richard

By only listening to the piano, you would never guess it's from a Black Metal song. The melodies are just superb. The composer of the piano parts (Mustis) is truly musically tapped in.

They say that good music keeps you at the edge between familiarity and surprise. Too familiar becomes boring, and too surprising becomes hard to follow. Musical improvisation is the manifestation of this in real time, and you can usually notice when the player is engaging in well-established/familiar patterns ("licks") and when the player is creating something completely original. I'm used to improvising a lot on guitar, and I've noticed that I'm able to imagine impossibly intricate and original lines of improvisation in my head, but I'm in no way technically advanced enough to manifest that through my instrument. When I listen to the most complete virtuostic improvisational players out there, even though they can come very close many times, I always feel a tension between boredom and impenetrability. Of course, this desire I have of hearing the most hyper-creative lines of notes that I can possibly imagine is impossible to fulfill. It's completely relative to my unique conception of music, and I would probably never in a million years get to hear somebody produce even 10 seconds of those exact notes (which would be absolutely transcendentally orgasmic if it happened). Nevertheless, I know two players who come extremely close, and I'll try to weigh to which extent they're too "boring" ("musically conventional" is a better word) or too impenetrable (too melodically or harmonically complex) relative to my impossible standard of imaginative perfection. Guthrie Govan (obviously). It's tricky, because he is so versatile that he often fluctuates between too conventional (like bluesy bendy stuff) and too complex (like jazzy shredding stuff). I'll give an example for each player: Allan Holdsworth is notoriously known for being impossible to imitate by other players. For reference, Guthrie Govan can imitate virtually anyone but him. He often becomes too complex. I sometimes have to listen to his songs 30 times to understand what he is doing (like the run at 1:28 in the video below). (Btw things become more interesting around 0:40).

Her voice is like a laser, hits you right in the soul.

Was scrolling through my YouTube channel and found an old RuneScape PK video from 2009 (when I had just turned 12 lol). I gotta say I'm surprised by the production value and actually good English lol.

Insight becomes a problem when not operationalized, integrated, accommodated. I.e. it only becomes a problem when turned into an unsolved or unsolveable problem, a neurosis. And that's a question of attention and perhaps applying your intelligence in the right way. "Rationality" in the proper sense. If you cannot deal with your own "intelligence", even after trying, perhaps you're not that intelligent after all. It's one thing to haven't tried. It's another to have and failed or keep failing. Maybe you're only intelligent in a very limited and narrow way (e.g. "intellectually"/conceptually/linear-analytically and not emotionally, intuitively, self-aware-ly, recursively, relationally/systemically, integratively, holistically).

This is not baseless critique. This is careful consideration of the evidence 🤖

I've always been a guy to ventilate my room to avoid "stale" air, but I always blamed CO2.

If you had become omnipotent, you would rebel and curse against your own omnipotence, because "why am I limited to being omnipotent when I could be limited? Damn this existence!". That's the curse of being a human, always crybabying about something. Relinquish your human crybabying. Relinquinsh control. In relinquishing control, you gain absolute control. Because if you are nothing, nothing needs to be any way other than what it is. And then you realize you are God creating everything and it's just the limited human that is crybabying about everything.

Give me your best explanation. Best explanation gets a cookie (laced with meth).

I have a theory (not a conspiracy theory): the people who get strongly drawn to conspiracy theories are the same people who get drawn to supernatural ideas, like God creating the universe from their own predetermined plan (not simply evolving spontaneously through "natural law"). They are fine with explaining reality top down through an elaborate narrative. There is a seeming plan behind everything, behind world politics, behind alien invasions, behind wars, behind ancient history, and they all connect to a grand meta-narrative of control, of manufacturing, of conscious creating, rather than natural systems acting spontaneously. Those who criticize conspiracy theories point out how that level of organization, of top-down control, is unlikely if not impossible, because of the natural tendency towards spontaneous order and the infeasibility of controlling complex systems. In the "naturalist critique", everybody is a victim of systems, even the supposed people in power, while in the conspiracist's mind, the people in power are the controllers of the systems and the powerless are the victims. Whether one is more correct than the other is actually hard to say, and a naturalist that claims otherwise would then become a conspiracy theorist in their own right, thinking they have the level of insight and knowledge to be able to predict complex systems. As for myself, as a general predisposition, I've noticed I'm fine with either (naturalism or supernaturalism). While for example Bernardo Kastrup says he is strongly opposed to supernaturalism simply as a personal predisposition (which is why he says he sees no point in doing philosophy if nature is not simply naturalistic; no "God" at the top planning it all, intervening into nature and changing the natural course of things). But I would also challenge this idea of naturalism, that you could still try to deduce the "laws" behind God's planning so to speak, and it won't be a completely pointless endeavour, simply a more interesting one. Like trying to understand the psychology of God rather than the "physics" of God.

4 weeks is nothing. Give it at least a year, ideally 3-4 years, before you can say you have "kicked it". The work is very likely not over (although it could be). And by work, I don't mean that you will necessarily start smoking again, but you will probably run into the idea many times.

A good heuristic for a business is take something you use every day (e.g. an app, a service, a software, a tool) and find a way to improve it or simply make your own little spin on it. When you do that, 1. you have knowledge about that thing and you know the standards you yourself would expect, 2. you know that it's a product people will use (by virtue of you and others already using it). If it's a simple thing like a simple app (or even something not quite so simple), you can easily create this with ChatGPT. Ask ChatGPT how to go about creating the app or service (and use ChatGPT to do things like coding, etc.). The thing here is to work with ChatGPT recursively, don't let it make something all in one go and then proceed to marketing it. Tinker and improve it until it's really up to your standards. The only thing you really need then is get eyes on the product, and this is only a question of scale and starting capital if you do this with Meta ads and a graphics design app like Canva and you have more than average skills in that domain (which can be trained). I did this quite successfully while recruiting research participants for my university studies. As for concrete examples, I'm planning to do this with a brain training app I use every other day (I want to make a simple and straight-to-the-point version that recreates everything I use every day and only that, and I know people will use it because I know I use it and others use it that way). It's also a funny example, but Jan Esmann the spiritual teacher who was a painter was using Photoshop and figured there was a plugin he could need but it didn't exist, so he bought a book on C++ and taught himself how to code and created that plugin, and then he licensed it and thus he created a software company and that became his main source of income.

Food tends to do that.

I might be old school, but a business starts with an idea. The methods come afterwards. The methods are usually not a problem. You know where to find them. They are ubiquitous, especially in the era of ChatGPT. It's the ideas that are more rare to come by (unless you are fine with essentially copying somebody else and creating your own market space for it and perhaps creating your own tiny little spin on it or outdoing them marketing-wise somehow, which is also possible in the era of Meta ads). And if you don't have an idea now, keep it in the back of your mind. It may come in a week, a month, a year, 5 years. This is what Jeff Bezos calls long-term thinking. It's one of the most powerful ways to achieve anything in life. Thinking about something for one moment, vs thinking about something for years, is about the same as one person vs 1000 people thinking about something.

Your takeaway was not that medication may stop working and may give serious and debilitating side effects and that there is a way to achieve essentially the same results by incorporating the correct habits and techniques? It's the last few minutes of the video that really count. I don't think you did watch the full video, or you weren't paying attention @Cred Everything you're talking about flies right in the face of Dr. Mike's entire lived experience and existence as showcased in the video I posted. ADHD people may care a lot about social status, about getting degrees, about doing structured learning. They might just have to use some techniques and habits to adapt to it. The techniques Mike showcases are essentially ways of hacking your brain and your work habits to simulate project-based learning. Learning how to live always contains an element of strategy and adaptation. Even if you're thinking you're taking the path of least resistance in everything you're doing, you're working on top of layers and layers of adaptation and strategy. They might just sometimes be less deliberate, less conscious. You can be highly deliberate, highly conscious in your strategy and adaptation, that's what self-development is about.

@integral Sounds like trying to say "epistemic" with a congested nose.

I think Breaking Bad is a quite stark showcase of a certain concept of what you could call the "Anti-hero's journey": the main character is called to adventure, facing challenges, overcoming fears, and returns to the society transformed, not to share the fruits of that journey with the society, but to destroy it.

Did you watch the video?

Why? Why?

I saw a comment that said ADHD meds helps them procrastinate. It's like if you have no strong goals, more dopamine just means any and all goals become stronger, so you will be just as bad off if your problem is sticking to a goal. Maybe your goals are just wrong. That's what life purpose is about: finding a strong goal that drives your action. It reminds me of when @Cred said "ADHD minds are insensitive to meaning". Well, maybe it's sometimes more they lack meaning so they become ADHD.

How is amphetamine a "non-stimulant"? I cba with you guys 💀💀💀💀

@integration journey This is truly the most insightful and revealing and inspiring video about ADHD you will ever watch. Mike went from being the worst in the class, to being the best in the class while medicated, to experiencing side effects from the medications and eventually losing the effect from the medications and then finding out a way to get off the medications and still function at a high level. It's truly a hero's journey:

Hopping on Ozempic without seriously trying anything else is like letting ChatGPT write your entire job application in one go. It's just laziness, and of course it produces side effects when you don't approach it intelligently.

In public.

Do you think if you fast for 18 hours and then eat a gummy candy and a chocolate Müsli bar that you will have trouble focusing or not? ADHD meds are dopaminergic (usually reuptake antagonists). Zinc is a dopamine reuptake antagonist. B-vitamins, vitamin D are involved in dopamine function and synthesis. Protein sources (L-tyrosine, L-phenylalanine) give you the precursors for synthesizing dopamine in your brain. Eating inflammatory foods (e.g. rich in glucose, low in fiber, low in anti-inflammatory compounds) inhibits dopamine synthesis and functioning. The thing about ADHD being a statistical thing and that we're all on the spectrum is that even if you think diet is a minor thing (which it generally isn't), unless you've already optimized for and tried different diets, you might not actually know whether all it takes is to change your diet to no longer qualify for a diagnosis. You could be looking at relatively minor symptoms and you could also be responding more to diet than somebody else (that's also a spectrum).