Pimpus

I agree with this post. Rationalizing based only on data can lead to flawed conclusions and bias. Obviously, quantification is useful in many domains, but when it comes to your health then the worst thing you can do is ignore your intuition on the basis of data.

I also don’t keep any metrics of my website, not even page hits. It’s a hard sell to other webmasters, but I personally don’t want to start writing for the wrong reasons. I think quantification is responsible for a lot of evils in our world today — and a lot of good too. I’m focusing a lot on where quantification can be applied for the benefit of one’s spirit, rather than one’s greed.

Hah. Everything needs to be data or an algorithm these days. Sentiment analysis of journal entries, oh boy...

> I believe you're reading this as much more negative and confrontative than it was meant to be.

Absolutely not. I found your posts really interesting, it's a perspective I hadn't considered and you articulate it well. And no confrontation was intended from my end.

> Don't lie to yourself about what's ahead and prepare yourself.

"What's ahead" is unpredictable and unknown. You should certainly be prepared, but just avoid self-fulfilling prophecies like saying "it's difficult" etc. That can also put some people off of ever creating anything in the first place.

I have to go now, but thanks for the comments!

> I don't want to get into a slug-fest over the work.

That wasn't my intention at all. I just thought I'd share my first impression because, as a newcomer to your work, I probably see it much differently than you do.

I read through your whole post, and -- sorry, this is going to be another first impression, made over the internet, so take it with a grain of salt -- you seem to be very emotionally involved with your work. I would be, too, if I spent that much time on something. I think you would benefit from seeking advice from an unbiased third party. I don't know who that would be -- a publisher? an agent? I know nothing about the book world.

> Finally, you have to consider that a landing page, if you're honest, isn't just to sell books. One of the most important things you can do is turn away people that might be wasting their money. I know that goes against all that is good and holy on HN, but really. I don't want people reading it that are wasting their time. That's awful.

I think a good, professional publisher (or whoever) would berate you for saying this. How can you possibly know who will benefit from your work and who won't ahead of time? I also don't like deceptive advertising but I think you can make your work attractive while also being honest and true to yourself.

For the record, I share a lot of your frustrations with regards to generating publicity. I really resonated with this:

> Creating something does not immediately cause good feedback to happen. Just the opposite. Now the _real_ work begins: getting people to listen. And that's usually a long, difficult, demoralizing slog. You suck it up and move on.

However, I don't think that viewing this as long, difficult, or demoralizing is productive or even rational reaction to have, which is why I'm working on trying to see this differently, myself.

> The quality of your work and the value of your work have nothing to do with anything. All those years that Google told us that if you wanted to be heard, just publish good content. It was bullshit. Humans don't work that way. We are a social species and we consume based on social cues.

People believe what they want to believe, and I think you've already made up your mind. From my view, however, you are just going to limit your success with such beliefs, and worse, the cynicism will drain your enthusiasm and energy.

If you want to be heard, the answer is simple: make something that's interesting to people. I know a ton of very talented chiptune artists who are struggling. Why? Well, would you buy a chiptune album? People spend too much time in their own private universes and forget what other people are looking for. I'm not saying you shouldn't make chiptune or mathcore or whatever, but you have to be realistic about it, especially if you want to make money.

And look, I'll be honest -- not trying to be mean here, really -- but I'm not at all surprised your book isn't generating interest. My first reaction to "Info-Ops" is that it's super dry and technical, not to mention I have no idea what it means. So right off the bat I have a bad gut reaction. Did you not get any second opinions about this title? And $40 for an e-book... well, I admittedly don't know anything about pricing books, but if an e-book is too expensive then people will just pirate it, no?

Great advice. Hitting modifier keys with the thumb is how Emacs is meant to be used, in my opinion. It's the strongest finger, after all.

> For Emacs users, common wisdom is to swap control and caps.

This is terrible advice and it causes so much unnecessary pain.

- The pinkie is the weakest finger.

- Stretching sideways is a terrible movement. Try it several times and compare it to moving a finger up, or curling the thumb. Stretching sideways should be reserved for infrequent actions -- hitting a modifier key is much too frequent for Emacs users.

- You should have modifier keys on BOTH sides of the keyboard. Using Emacs with just one Ctrl key is just... awkward. There are so many common keybindings (like C-x C-c) that are difficult with this scheme. With Ctrl to the left and right of the keyboard, however, I can just curl my right thumb a bit and then press x and c.

If you have RSI, maybe one of your hands is overworked (i.e. you only use Shift with one hand). Big opportunity for improvement there. Unfortunately not all modern keyboards have modifier keys on both sides of the keyboard, so you definitely have to watch out for this when e.g. buying a laptop.

With the key system you suggest, Emacs bindings are even better even than Vi modal editing, in my opinion. Pressing/lifting a thumb is much easier than changing editing modes.

Agreed. What's your point?

Why is it the most unlikely event? We have no proof for any possible explanation of the universe... otherwise we'd have a proven explanation.

> God can exist, I could be Superman.

That doesn't sound like a rational argument to me.

That's a strawman. It's not what I said.

I'm saying that there being a creator is a serious possibility. It's certainly not the only one, but it doesn't deserve the flippant attitude or ridicule. And sure, God doesn't really "explain anything" (who created God? what is He like?). Doesn't mean it's not a possibility.

Part of the atheistic position is an inability to admit that there are things we don't know. What's beyond the universe? We have no idea. I think many atheists are just reactionaries frustrated by the irrationality of religion and throw out all spiritual or religious concepts without thinking it through.

Glad I'm not the only one. Now, in the "confirm password" field, I always backspace the last couple of characters and type them in manually, to make sure they match with what was pasted.

I guess because you have to do a ton of scrolling to go from one of the first tabs to the last.

Of course, if you don't have scrolling tabs then the tabs get so small that it's basically impossible to find what you want.

I solved this dilemma by hiding my FireFox tabs and using Tree Style Tabs. I find it really helps with keeping tabs organized and I can keep a lot open without worrying. I removed the scrollbar and close buttons, and made the tabs smaller, to further save on screen real estate.

Regarding pasting passwords, that reminds me: I signed up for one site, I think it was Paypal, which had a password limit of 20 characters. Okay, that's already pretty bad -- it's an arbitrary limit and not as secure as I'd like for a site that has access to my credit cards and bank info.

Anyway, I generated a password using KeePass with I think 60 characters and pasted them in without error or warning. Turned out that only the first 20 characters got pasted in and the rest were silently rejected.

When I tried to log in I kept getting an invalid password error. No indication that the password I was trying to use was too long.

Only when I tried to change my password and type one in manually did I notice that nothing was getting entered after the 20th character.

I do think the impact of emotions on our thinking is understated, but I also think that focusing on this aspect is going at it backwards. A value system is necessary for emotions, otherwise happy and sad mean nothing. I think this is what you mean when you talk about "modeling emotions". At the same time, some intelligence seems like a prerequisite as blindly following a value system will lead to massive hedonistic AI orgies. Er, I mean, an override mechanism is required, and intelligence is the best possible solution, so we're back at the fundamental problem. I think there is a lot more intelligence behind even our most primitive urges than we realize. Hope that made sense, typing on mobile.

Yeah, I've people compare belief in God to wagers or lotteries or invisible unicorns. I find arguments like this to be intellectually lazy.

The universe had to be formed somehow, right? It's a mystery how. God is a possibility.

> There is no reason to believe intentionally screwing with it's functioning would somehow increase it's ability to perceive the world truthfully.

Right, my point is that psychedelics are great for exposing falsehood in your thinking, but not necessarily uncovering truth.

> The 'most rational' position lies somewhere in that continuum. When converting to the usual trinary labels, one extreme or the other may end up being the most rational position. The center is not automatically best.

What are you talking about? I think you're misrepresenting my position. I'm nowhere on the continuum, I'm agnostic.

> I've gone from someone who 100% believed in evolution and a material universe, to someone who deep down thinks there may be a God, and I may actually have to face some kind of hell for some kind of sins I may unknowingly commit in this life.

Well, it sounds like you went from being an atheist to an agnostic. That certainly is a more rational and less dogmatic position to take, based on what we know. As for the Hell thing, well, it's a possibility. Even Buddhism has hell realms.

Had something similar happen to me. I was a staunch atheist before psychedelics, now the notion of a purely material universe seems naive. Anyway, I wanted to share with you an excerpt from a blog post I'm working on. Might be a bit rough still.

> There's no easy path to enlightenment, but we do have some astounding tools and methods at our disposal. There is the humble magic mushroom, which, along with LSD and other psychedelics, breaks down the substrate of reality for a brief period of time. After witnessing the day-to-day patterns of conditioned behavior, and reality itself, melt away, it's a bit easier to disattach from falsehood. But it's also tempting to take the psychedelic experience for truth, when it itself is a distorted presentation of reality. I personally think that psychedelics increase communication between the rational mind and the rest of the brain, and that psychedelic visions are the rational mind's interpretations of subconscious activity. Mostly these are just wrong interpretations; the two sides of the mind don't communicate often and can't understand each other very well. We have to resist taking the experience at face value and dig deeper to find the kernels of truth.

> I had a short time to reply and wanted to tell you the information you needed.

I understand, thanks for taking the time to reply in the first place. I apologize if I was curt, but I found your posts here hard to understand. Reading your past comments helped elucidate what you mean.

I'm going to sleep now and I'm finding HN frustrating (I couldn't reply to you when I first saw your post) -- how can I contact you? I'm curious how you came to know what you know and if you had a teacher (your past comments hint that you did). I would like to find a good teacher, but I've been dismayed by my contacts with spiritual people and truth seekers. They are nice people, but they all seemed delusional and I had a bad gut reaction to them. You also seem delusional to some extent: you engage in pedantry and over-rationalization (I also do the latter so I recognize it easily). I do find certain delusions to be useful and engage in them consciously for my and others' benefit. Anyway, I want a teacher because my search has been haphazard and I basically stumbled onto my current elevated awareness (in comparison to my previous self) by sheer luck.

Thanks for posting on HN, even if people don't always want to hear you!

No offense, but this wasn't helpful to me. I feel like you're speaking in riddles now. Do you have any sources I could read up on?

I'm finding your posts intriguing despite disagreeing with you. Do you have any sources for further reading?

> Why do you think deteriorated forms of Buddhism nowadays have attached themselves to the term ego?

Is it deterioration or just accepting new ideas? I don't think that 2000-year-old Buddhism had all the answers, or would even be useful to a Westerner (I do feel that we are mostly exposed to "deteriorated" forms of Buddhism, but maybe it's for the better).

> It sounds like high reward behaviors (ie: addictions), small hippocampus size, spatial awareness and time awareness could all be interconnected. Or maybe they're separate causes for the same phenomena.

Yeah, I suspect these are all deeply related. Fascinating.

> I wonder how much it costs to get my brain scanned.

Sounds like something that could bankrupt you stateside. If you want to get it done cheaply and by qualified people, there's always Eastern Europe :)

I don't understand, is the "ego" just an illusion?

Not the one who downvoted you btw. I did read somewhere that Buddhism doesn't have the concept of ego, which genuinely confuses me as there seems to be a very real process occurring in our brains that labels and categorizes information, which introduces distortion and the "ignorance" that leads to delusion and suffering (in the Buddhist view).

Interesting, have you ever had depression? Depression has been linked to low hippocampus size[0]. Would be interesting to see how the drug mentioned by the article affects spatial reasoning and sense of time.

[0]: https://gizmodo.com/5874433/the-pill-that-could-cure-depress... (I once read about a differently-named drug which increases hippocampus size and treats depression but I'm unable to find it now)

I've developed an intuitive understanding of what people mean by this term after experiencing its absence and subsequent return. It's the judge, the classifier, the model-maker; it filters incoming information and tries to make sense of it, usually distorting it in the process. Without it, the outside world is strange and magical but also chaotic and overwhelming. But that's just a description, the feeling of its presence is something else. I can pinpoint exactly when it starts to work overtime after e.g. a personal attack as it tries to maintain an undisturbed worldview. What would be the closest analog to such a concept/process in Buddhism?

> “In older language, distances were typically given by time — the days it takes to go from one valley to another — since it was not distance but the number of sunsets that was easy to calculate.”

This makes sense evolutionarily. I imagine that for the primitive man, a concept like time did not make much sense -- position and motion were the important things to track. We were aware of change, but perhaps we did not conceptualize of change occurring within a stratum like time. Were there any reasons we would track the number of sunsets before the advent of agriculture?

I would really like to see some research on why time behaves so strangely on psychedelics. Our everyday consciousness is mostly stable and steady so it's quite natural to think of it as dependent on time, as if there is a constant metronome quietly ticking away in the background. Most people assume that 2018 will feel mostly the same and take about as long as 2017. Only when things start slowing down and we peer behind the curtains of our egos do we get the sense that things are much weirder than we'd like to think.

Personally, I think the illusion of time must involve a many different brain processes. Memory is certainly one of the keys, but I wonder if the overall state of connectivity or speed or processing of the brain doesn't have an effect. The ego also seems implicated somehow, as we experience time differently in states of flow and moments of awe and wonder.

That reminds me of a blog post[0] I once read by Casey. It does a great job of capturing my thoughts on the subject: in short, that premature abstraction is evil and a productivity killer. Many programmers fall into the trap because of how tempting it is to try and make everything neat and tidy, despite the costs in programmer productivity, program performance, and code maintainability.

[0]: https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0015

> It's worth emphasizing that for the first example, the answer was provided free of charge within an hour.

It shows -- the quality of the answer is quite poor.

> I don't think I agree with any assessment in which this is not an unqualified success.

This made me laugh. I guess the only assessment you considered is your own, which simplistically assumed time to answer is the most important factor.

And yet, not a single soul finding this question on Google cares if the answer took an hour or two days. Apart from you, I guess.

> Then there is a single comment (not an answer) which says "you are not supposed to do that", which have received a single upvote.

This comment should be deleted as it's blatantly off-topic and a waste of time. OK, let's forget about question one, since I found it in two seconds.

> Comments are for asking questions, request clarifications and providing information which does not constitute a regular answer.

> Several answers make it clear that the CSS solution is more fragile and worse supported than a JS solution

As you say here, the questioning ("clarification") of the question isn't limited to comments. It's easy to mentally ignore comments, but when you have to read through half an answer just to get past the BS... and besides, the CSS solutions in that thread certainly are fragile and bad, but that has nothing to do with CSS being appropriate or not and more because the answers are, well, terrible. CSS is perfectly capable of doing what the question asked for in a robust manner, and it avoids changing the page on-load which is a bad user experience (not that any web developers actually care...) and certainly no less fragile (assuming JS is even turned on in the user's browser).

The problem is people telling others what they should do, and I don't want random people trying to dictate what I should be doing -- especially not people giving answers like those. Actually, a couple of the answers are OK, and somewhat explanatory, but the rest are just BS that throw code at you, which is useless and a waste of everyone's time. To be fair, web development answers on SO are the lowest-quality generally speaking. I'm pretty satisfied with using SO for answers about e.g. Emacs.

> I really have a hard time seeing the problem here?

Uh, seriously?

It took two seconds to find an example in my stackoverflow browser history: [0]

> Question: Hide Show content-list with only CSS, no javascript used

> Comment: Behavior is supposed to only exist in the realm of JavaScript.

But my favorite example is the following, which I sacrificed a couple of minutes looking for because the exchange was so instructive: [1]

> Question: How can I replace text with CSS?

> Comment 1: To be honest it might be best to use javascript for this.

> Comment 2: The question is how to do it with CSS. I am using a CMS that only allows me to change the CSS, which is why I arrived at this page while googling for the answer, and not a different one. That is why we answer the question that was asked instead of asking why the asker's situation isn't different.

The thing people forget is that the question is not just about the person asking it, but about people coming across the question e.g. through Google who have to waste their time sifting through idiotic non-answers. For better or worse, SO tends to be ranked highly on Google for development-related queries and I've come to subconsciously ignore it because of its uselessness, in general.

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17731457/hide-show-conte...

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7896402/how-can-i-replac...