This reminds me of the current research in ML of "simplifying" models for inference (pruning, distillation, etc.). Our model of reality is so imprecise, can we be confident that all the local details are insignificant to the global context?
56 karma · joined September 1, 2021
unreify [at] gmail [dot] com
Yes, freeways are major sources of microplastics and yes, I drive on a major freeway daily. That's why I suggested getting a HEPA filter for your car. Does it make a huge difference? Probably not, but the cost of doing so is also very low.
Some studies suggest that indoor air can contain more microplastics than outdoor air [1]. I doubt this is true in busy metropolitan areas, but the point is that indoor air matters. If you're spending half of your time at home, why not get an air purifier and run it when you sleep?
All of the things I listed are small steps you can take to manage your long-term exposure. Even if it's only by a few percent, the cost of getting an air or water purifier is relatively lower. Like I said, we'd need top-down legislation changes to really reduce the presence of microplastics everywhere.
It seems like you agree that this is a problem, so what are you proposing we do?
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...
Reducing personal exposure seems possible. I mean, realistically there are only so many ways microplastics can enter the body, so it's a matter of managing your "attack surface".
Of course there's no way to know what the impact really is, but what we've done in our household in the past few years:
- Eating/drinking: started using glass food containers, ceramic cookware, silicon kitchen utensils. Got a good reverse osmosis water filter, stopped buying bottled water.
- Skin: lots of fabrics are derived from plastics these days, so try to get 100% cotton. Do research on skin products you use every day.
- Air: get a good air purifier and run it throughout the day. Even if the windows are closed, furniture can off-gas microplastics into the air. HEPA air filters for your car, pretty easy to install yourself.
BRB while I take a break from my mundane corporate software job to try and get back my old account/childhood. :')
This. I don't get the sense that Kundera himself is advocating for either lightness or weight. The novel asks a question that's as much philosophical as it is psychological, and the beauty lies in the question itself rather than any answers.
To quote Kundera: "On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth."
The first and most pronounced depersonalization experience I've had was with mushrooms. I had taken ~2g of dried mushrooms and was feeling pretty good, so I decided to take a walk in the park near my apartment. Gradually I started feeling like the boundary between my self and the outside world was getting fuzzier. My body felt like a machine that existed as part of a larger machine.
Then, suddenly, I thought: who is the driver of this machine? If I'm the machine, what is driving it? I felt like I was taking a walk in the park with a VR headset on. I wanted to take off the VR headset and experience "true" reality. I kept asking myself this question, shedding layers of self-identity, until I reached a state of absolute nothingness. Absolute, zero, blackness. It was probably only a brief second, but in that moment time didn't seem to exist. I didn't seem to exist.
The actual experience of the "absolute nothingness" wasn't bad per se, but integrating it back into daily life was a struggle. It felt like nothing made sense. I "remembered" who I was, but I couldn't seem to just immerse myself in that person again. The layers of my self-identity didn't feel real anymore. Nothing felt like it had a reason for existing. Everything was arbitrary.
For a while after that experience, daily life became a struggle. I didn't have the motivation to do anything. Talking to people was hard because I felt everyone was wearing a mask of sorts. It's also hard to understand this sort of DP/DR unless you've experienced it. Like the article, I remember discovering the terms "depersonalization" and "derealization" from desperate Google searches. It gave me a bit of relief to just be able to put labels on the experience. I read about "ego death", which also gave me some perspective.
I also started developing physical symptoms. The explanation is probably just stress/cortisol, but it seemed like the cells in my body also suffered from this lack of subjective identity. I developed chronic inflammation, an autoimmune condition, and had trouble sleeping.
Gradually, over a year or so, I got better, I think due to gradually forgetting about the experience. Still, I don't think I ever returned to the person I was before. It seems like there will always be a part of me that "refuses to drink the Kool-aid" -- that can't fully subscribe to my ego's self-identity anymore.
That being said, I don't regret the experience, as I think there was some sort of truth in it. But I do wish stories like this were talked about more. It's not about avoiding "bad trips", but finding a way to integrate it into your life.
The mesmerizing colors and poignant landscapes, the neurotic physicality of the brush strokes, all told through Van Gogh's letters to his brother -- it was a vivid experience. I understood that Van Gogh saw the world in a different way, and for a moment I saw it too.
Admittedly, some of my disappointment comes from chasing the thrill of playing BotW for the first time. Maybe those were unrealistic expectations, but for the same price and more hype, TotK just didn't have nearly the same impact for me.
If game of the year awards were reserved for new, non-sequel games, maybe franchises would be discouraged from selling the same game multiple times.
The project of the guides is utopian, but they’re a symptom of deep pessimism. They belong to a fractured culture in which symbolic gestures are preferable to concrete actions, argument is no longer desirable, each viewpoint has its own impenetrable dialect, and only the most fluent insiders possess the power to say what is real.
Though I wonder if this diagnosis is actually too optimistic, in that it assumes people are 1) aware and care about the real problems and 2) willing to put in effort to enact meaningful change. Perhaps this is too cynical, but I think most people who adopt this sort of symbolic gesturing are pretty detached from the root issues of power and wealth inequality. "Virtue signaling" is a product of vanity, not pessimism/powerlessness.
IMO, the "meaningful", tangible problems in the world today are social problems. Most programming jobs _are_ the same from this point of view because as engineers, we make tools. We can hope that these tools are used for "good", but at the end of the day, they are existentially and morally neutral.
That being said, I think cybersecurity is a safe bet. Or sacrifice the 200k and go the teaching route.
That being said, as a remote worker becoming increasingly disillusioned about Bay Area cost of living and politics, Austin is on my radar. Any Austin transplants here who can shed some light on moving there? How easy is it to establish a social network/sense of community as a newcomer?
This post and discussions like this always remind me of Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I'd highly recommend to anyone, but especially those contemplating such questions. The major insight, though not immediately helpful, is that life is both heavy and light, and we must learn to live with these coexisting dichotomies.
"In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens. If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.
But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
...That is the question. The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.” --Milan Kundera
Psychedelics do seem to break down lifelong mental models and thus increase your level of self-awareness but I've personally never been able to integrate these trip experiences to anything meaningful in my daily life. The insights I've gained from psychedelics have had little to no impact on my overall mental health, emotional regulation, interpersonal relationships, etc. There seems to be a large gap between the psychedelic state of mind and the "ego" mind that we must embrace in daily life. Sure, I've had interesting trips that made me question the nature of consciousness and reality. I've alos had trips where I broke down all my mental models and experienced pure randomness/chaos, which I believe is just somewhat incompatible with my Earthly existence, which makes integration difficult.
This "self-awareness" is a common theme I've experienced in trips is just the pure randomness of reality/existence. There is no "reason" why anything happens. There's no reason you are you, and there's no reason to be anything different. I think if you truly explore self-awareness, you will reach this point. You are a configuration that has no inherent "reason" to be that particular configuration. You can hope to transform into a different configuration, but there's no compelling reason to be anything else because at the core, everything is arbitrary. The best you come out with is a sense of disillusionment or depersonalization. Maybe you can overcome this point in the journey and reach "enlightenment". I've yet to experience what's past this, but maybe someone else can shed some light on that.
Actually, I wonder if more self-awareness can be a bad thing for some people, and if that's what it comes down to. Often times when I feel the most self aware, I'm the most lost in my own head and disconnected from reality and other people. This isn't objectively a bad thing, but I don't see how it leads to realizations about love and connectedness, which I think are the real antidotes to things like depression and emptiness.
A poetic, bittersweet line. In a way, the sadness is the "good" part, when you feel the most longing for what's been lost. The real loss is forgetting.
There seems to be another related but separate dimension to the spectrum. I remember an analogy of borderline personality disorder being the female version of autism mentioned somewhere on SSC as well, which is interesting. The disorders seem to share some sort of failure in integration between top-down priors and bottom up sensory information, but with a different focus. Borderline personality disorder seems like a difficulty in integrating more extrinsic, social concepts like self-identity and models of other people. It makes me think there's something fundamentally different between introverted and extraverted cognitive strategies.
Predictions (knowing) and their ensuing actions in a non-deterministic world are not necessarily isolated from the eventual outcome. I'm curious how much of the "willful ignorance" is actually avoidance of some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
This. But is it that you might become that person once you later read and do those things, or that you might later become a person who reads and does those things? I think for me it's mostly the latter. I tend to think "this is going to be great when I magically become the person who does that thing" and get discouraged by the doing that's actually needed in order to become that.