æthr λ⚡ @wraethr

Functions of a market: •induce complacency •punish leverage with prejudice  •enrich compounders

All religions that have stood the test of time, which is all the major ones you have ever heard of, did so precisely because they solved social and psychological problems for people… the types of things that keep people up at night! Religions are social technologies equipped with psychological techniques for regulating humans. No religion can persist for long, or scale to whole civilizations, if it’s not good at psychologically regulating humans so that they can stably exist in groups of a given size and social structure. People get caught up and confused by thinking about these things in metaphysical terms. Instead, think about them the way a biologist thinks about any given trait in an animal evolved. No complex trait can persist for long if it’s not doing something adaptive for the lineage it belongs to. If it fails to do that, it will soon get outcompeted and REPLACED by another lineage. It should come as no surprise that (Christian) prayer, or (Buddhist) meditation, or (Muslim) prayer, or any such technique provides psychological benefits to people when deployed appropriately, i.e. in an ecologically relevant context. That’s what these things evolved for! The funny, dumb thing about modern, post-Enlightenment “scientific” culture is that it treats other elements of human culture like quaint anachronisms, rather than traits that evolve under selective pressure in social environments. Usually, when people ask questions like, “Does prayer work?” they are thinking in metaphysical terms: “if I ask [sky god] for [thing] will I get it?” What’s funny is that this is how a five year old actually tries to pray, but also how an “enlightened” secular adult tries to “test” the efficacy of prayer. Which is really dumb. It’s like asking a Native American rain dancer why he is dancing even though it hasn’t started raining and there are no clouds in the sky, or asking a bird why it’s chirping when it’s all alone with no mates to court. The person and the bird might even tell you some story they believe about why they do it, without any explicit awareness themselves about why that behavior evolved. Sure, people have metaphysical beliefs according to what religion they subscribe to. But those beliefs are not WHY the religion and its techniques exist. The traditional stories tied to religious practices exist in narrative form because narrative stories are a great way to script human minds for complex social behaviors. At scale. What will be interesting to see is if the adaptive social-psychological value of traditional religious practices actually provides that value when secularized, i.e. stripped of narrative content tied to metaphysical beliefs. For example, does “Christian prayer” provide the soothing, sleep-promoting benefit @hubermanlab describes below WITHOUT genuine belief by the person praying? Can you explain this stuff to an atheist, show them a couple fMRI images, and instruct them to pray to Jesus at 3am when they can’t sleep… and will it actually help them sleep? And if prayer doesn’t work for such a person, doesn’t that just mean that the absence of genuine metaphysical belief corresponds to the absence of some “brain pattern” that would work if they DID believe? And what should we call such a “brain pattern” and its associated set of physiological details? A spirit? A biological mechanism? Well, if you want people to encode and remember it in a way that gets a whole bunch of them to pray (and therefore sleep more soundly), you’re going to need a good story, not a textbook description of brain waves and synaptic proteins. And that’s why we have “dumb” religious stories about all of the “silly” things that people remember for a lifetime - the stories that structure their behavior and regulate their psychology, at scale. What happens, then, when you dissolve those traditional structures? I’ve heard that lots of people have trouble sleeping these days…

Melissa the Hopeful🏠Homemaker @BiblicalBeauty

a week ago

In a recent forum, popular neuroscientist and health guru, Andrew Huberman, revealed his secret for falling asleep in those anxious mid-morning hours when he says you shouldn't believe any thought that fills your mind. He said, "I'm being completely direct with you when I say

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@SSavson stillness is speed

You have to adjust to facts: you can’t have a nation, you can’t have a society, in which everyone is always occupied in intellectual and computational pursuits. A few people have to be around who know how to handle the material world in a gracious way. And for these people we provide only regretfully, as an afterthought.

My life is a series of endless rotations

The body keeps the score and soul has money on the game

Vivid Void @vividvoid

3 weeks ago

The body keeps the score also means it remembers every kindness, every promise kept, every time you surrendered to the Divine

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You'll often find that you need to travel externally to recalibrate yourself internally, and similarly, travel internally to recalibrate yourself externally.

Kendi isminizi duymak zihninizde 1–3 kelimelik bir "süper dikkat aralığı" yaratır: beyniniz isminizi duyduğu an algı eşiğini düşürür ve sonraki kelimeleri doğrudan önceliklendirir. Yani birine ismiyle hitap etmek, sözcüklerinizin etkisini artırmanın en zarif yoludur.

A man who is not on fire is nothing: he is ridiculous, he is two-dimensional. He must be on fire even if he does make a fool of himself. A flame must burn somewhere, otherwise no light shines; there is no warmth, nothing.~CG Jung

"Wealth is a positive sum game and status is a zero-sum game."

if you can master the meta-skill of figuring out what problems in arbitrary domains are computationally tractable, you will have the opportunity, for at least a year two, and maybe longer, to be a kind of meta-genius. you will not know the answer to anything, or even how to find it, but you’ll have refined heuristics for the right questions to ask about everything to make meaningful progress along the margin. this is probably the skill to have optimized for in the last three years, though I readily admit I don’t know how long it will remain a human advantage. it is for now though.

the term optimal at first glance is elusive. what feels calm, calculated and statically balanced hides the truth of the treacherous and wildly sharp edge that can be achieved if elucidated with real possession and veracity. fight for the limits or decay perpetually with the rest.

hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx to my close friend akhil for asking about it and my other close friend fable for working during the world cup final ((1+xy)^3 z + y^2 (1+xy) (4+3xy), y + 3 x (1+xy)^2 z + 3 x y^2 (4+3xy), 2 x - 3 x^2 y - x^3 z): \C^3\to \C^3, has jacobian determinant -2, and sends (0, 0, -1/4), (1, -3/2, 13/2), and (-1, 3/2, 13/2) to (-1/4, 0, 0)

🛸Currently, most vortex-generating metasurfaces are designed based on periodic lattices, with the design concept focusing primarily on the local phase modulation of meta-atoms. In contrast, the realizability of vortex beams and their wavefront characteristics in aperiodic structures remain insufficiently explored. Quasicrystal metasurfaces (QCMs), combining aperiodic arrangements with high-order rotational symmetry, provide a distinct design platform for novel wavefront manipulation, differing from periodic structures.

I found out the other day that any compression tool can be contorted to do language modeling. Turns out gzip can generate text that somewhat *resembles* Shakespeare. Short write up linked below

Breathwork is the gateway to pure alchemy

Following up on the suggestion from Will Sawin, here is an illustration of the new configurations that disprove Erdos' unit distance conjecture (made with the help of ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking).

Julian Bruns @BrunsJulian1541

4 months ago

@mathandcobb an explicit drawing doesnt seem possible, but maybe the last paragraph satisfies your request. (its essentially a projection of the lattice construction in another field into R^2)

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Bir insan ne kadar zekiyse o kadar çok yardımsever olma eğilimindedir. Çünkü zeki kişiler, iş birliğinin uzun vadeli toplumsal faydalarını daha iyi görebilirler.

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I have no prime I will evolve until I die

Curved space elements. Membranes, micelles, helices. Higher structures by curvature of lower structures.