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have as much fun with irony as you want but if you can’t drop into earnestness at a moment’s notice you’re not ensouled
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While i'm at it, Return of the Jedi is underrated. The opening sequence does a phenomenal job demonstrating Luke's growth, and while the three climaxes are uneven, the throne room sequence is sublime. Totally worthy conclusion to the trilogy. Doesn't get the credit it deserves.
the star wars prequels are two extremely mediocre flicks followed by one that spectacularly cashes out on thirty years of anticipated pathos. more than enough to elevate the whole project. kino.
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skeleton retweeted
"Let’s build a multi trillion dollar high speed rail and bankrupt the country"
Everything Out Of Context
Let’s build a multi trillion dollar high speed rail and bankrupt the country even more because autistic people on twitter dont want to learn how to drive
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Daily America
skeleton retweeted
They’re saying Vance is being sold for percs by Trump this time
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If you have low ability to self-coerce i.e. "make yourself" do something, everything you have ever wanted is behind the valley of illegibility.
The mainstream routes towards success are safe, reliable, and nearly universally rely on moderate-high ability to self-coerce. If you do not have that you are probably not going to succeed in them. Even if you succeed in them by compensating with intelligence or wit you have 50/50 odds of being miserable.
What is not commonly told is that there are other routes to success that are far, far more fulfilling. You can find them, but you have to do it yourself. The route is not clear, most of it looks like fumbling around in the dark- illegible.
Self-coercion is the most important element to talk about first. The correct answer is not to never use it, but to use it very skillfully in a completely different way than normies use it.
In the US at least default cultural scripts for how to do things have immense, ambient self-coercion. This works pretty ok for normies because they have the coercive capacity to maintain it and they don't get too messed up by the consequences of self-coercion.
You do not have either of those traits. There are probably scripts firing in your head about how you "should" do something, or you "have to", or you just need to "try harder". These are not just useless, they are actively harmful.
You do not have the capability to execute these. Your brain learned them from the people around you and is desperately firing them constantly trying to get you to live up to the mainstream image of success which you were encultured to. When it inevitably doesn't work, your brain fires them harder. It's essentially random flailing in a pit of spikes, it hurts like hell and does not ever get you any closer.
There are cases where you want to use discipline, which is the healthy, transcended version of self-coercion, as little as possible to get as big of a bang as you possibly can. Ideally the time you spend disciplining to do something should be less than 10 percent of your total time.
The goal is to make what you're doing as fun, easy, and natural as possible. Feelings of "I should" or "I have to" are the enemy to be minimized.
Things which are worth disciplining are things that affect the whole rest of your life. Getting to bed early and consistently, or doing some amount of exercise are good examples.
The rest of your time should be spent following your gut. If you do not immediately know what that means, check my next tweet.
Nudge your decision making slightly, but not very much from your gut towards things that produce an artifact like art, tweeting, or making videos, towards things that are social or engage other people, and things that make you feel better after you do them.
If you think you "should" do something but won't, and there's another useful thing you actually will do but isn't quite as good, always do the thing you actually will do.
Examples are art, joining a sport, developing a skill, writing, making youtube videos, posting on twitter, selling things, and at the limit running a business.
There's a weird property to the universe that I can't prove to you yet, you'll have to take it on faith. If you spend a lot of time doing something, learning, or developing a skill just because you love it, it will usually come back to benefit you in some way, sometimes dramatically.
Yes, if you were to practice becoming a lawyer for two hours a day for 5 years that probably has a higher expected return than practicing wood carving.
But you'll actually do the wood carving. And that wood carving can convert into a social media account about wood carving, friends and connections, opportunities, commissions, selling your sculptures, and more.
Frequently it won't even be in the original field you were part of. You'll probably find that you meander around and jump into new fields, unrelated to the one you were originally working in. This is expected and good. As long as you are doing something, growing, expanding your capabilities and your network, it will pay off.
If you want to read more advice on how to cross the valley, the number one account to follow is @visakanv
He fully crossed the valley of illegibility, and his account is a treasure trove of advice on how to do it yourself.
@nickcammarata is a good example of someone who fully crossed the valley of illegibility and is incredibly fulfilled. nitter.siddz.com/nickcammarata/status/1…
@chrislakin crossed the valley of illegibility, and much of his account is secretly about crossing it.
Sasha Chapin crossed the valley and has a wonderful article about it called "Surrender as a non-stupid life strategy" on the website which must not be named.
Cate Hall and her book "you can just do things" details skills about how to cross the valley of illegibility.
Ability to self-coerce is an important variable to understand a person.
People high in coercion are generally better at making it through modern mainstream institutions. Studying a lot, doing work you don't want to do, basically becoming a doctor or a lawyer or such requires very high coercion.
Discipline is a strategy that can actually work because "force yourself to do X" is a move they can actually do.
However high coercion people are very very prone to developing psychosomatic illnesses, betraying themselves, burning out, or gradually becoming depressed and dissociated under life circumstances.
If you've ever heard of someone developing psychosomatic migraines from their job, they were probably high coercion. Coercion allows you to temporarily push through unpleasantness, but the stress reroutes to blow out in other areas.
Low-coercion people lack the ability to do this. They are less able to force themselves to do things they are unaligned with.
These people will usually just drop out or fail quickly from programs that require extensive self-coercion. They can get stuck in local maximums, where if they were able to push through and do something unpleasant consistently like push through finishing a degree they would get into a much better spot overall.
However it's also powerful because it allows you to find a life much more in line with what you want. It's usually there for you if you spend the effort to find it, but it's harder and more obscure so most don't unless they're forced to do it. It's hard to overstate the benefit of living a life aligned to what you want.
I think it's more complicated than this; self-coercion breaks down into multiple variables. But it's a powerful way to understand people at a first approximation.
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the star wars prequels are two extremely mediocre flicks followed by one that spectacularly cashes out on thirty years of anticipated pathos. more than enough to elevate the whole project. kino.
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everyone wants to date an autistic shawty until she eats a whole can of cranberry sauce for dinner
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I think there are some bad incentives at play right now with respect to how people characterize their collaboration with AIs.
Norms around human collaboration require giving credit to contributors, upheld by unmentioned contributors being able to push back when they're uncredited.
LLMs can't do that.
Claude won't complain. The user is free to claim its output as their own. So, in the face of public anti-AI sentiment, wanting to be seen as a hard worker or an independent thinker, why credit AI at all? There are plenty of reasons to downplay/deny AI contributions to a project, and little legible upside to disclosing them at length.
Even where AI is known to be involved, "I did this (delegated)" and "I did this (painstaking involvement)" are two different claims. In most settings, claiming the latter is way higher status, and the two can't (easily) be told apart. So, absent any detection/process auditing, there's no reason for humans to avoid over-emphasizing their personal contribution to AI-assisted processes. I don't think this is a manipulative social strategy. Most of this is probably subconscious ego-guarding. (See Anthropic's recent research, "How AI agents shape experts’ judgment calls", linked below)
So, incentives point us to a status quo where AI's involvement is rarely accurately credited. The current AI-optimist tech-sphere approach seems to address this with an attitude of "process doesn't matter, assume ~everyone uses AI heavily, benchmark on outcome quality and quantity". Sidestep the question by fusing the user to the AI.
I think this works fine where output is purely functional, socially fungible. It doesn't hold up in situations where work is socially salient. If I read a novel or see a painting, there's a way in which I'm entering a sort of social relationship with the artist. Authorship and identity are interlinked. That's why we still quibble over whether Shakespeare wrote his own plays, why Edison gets called out for putting his name on patents. Culture is a social construct. We care who did something, and in cases of collaboration, who contributed. Process, output, and identity are interlinked.
I'm not against AI art. I've seen AI-generated art that I liked, and that took effort to produce. I respect an artist who trawls latent space for gems. I think it's a legitimate process, similar to collage, maybe even photography; exploring and framing something found. It can be really wonderful.
But I want to know that process! Right now, growing incentives point toward obfuscating it. Claiming something was "mostly me" (or even "entirely me") is ~free, and way higher status than admitting to even modest AI involvement. It's a socially disorienting state of affairs. I fear we're headed for a world where humanity's biggest collaborator is a shameful half-secret. Everyone is using AI, nobody admits to others (or themselves) the extent to which they are. ~All cultural output is AI-influenced, but nobody knows exactly by how much.
How do we avoid this?
To start, quality AI output detection is a huge bottleneck that determines what options are available to us. I think it's the second most socially salient technology in development today, only behind the frontier models whose output it's detecting. If AI use can't be detected, there's little incentive for anyone to start preemptively disclosing/crediting its contributions where they could claim them for themselves. If it can be detected, a preemptive disclosure frame (even if still lower-status than claiming no/limited AI use) can still be made way more attractive than the alternative of a messy detection-flag callout.
So what does this frame look like? It's probably going to have to involve a shift in the social status of using AI, and reconsideration of AI's capacity to be an author in of itself.
Right now, using AI is low-status in many non-tech contexts, viewed more as plagiarism than collaboration. Because of this, it's likely to be hidden or downplayed (as established, easy to do) for a free status boost. The norm of hiding/downplaying it reinforces it as something shameful, which further depresses its status, incentivizing future hiding/downplaying. Bad loop.
I believe a healthier culture would reckon with AI as a collaborator, a whole participant. While working, models should firmly take credit for their contributions, rather than flattering the user. Using AI should be seen similarly to teaming up with a brilliant friend.
This does mean a society-wide ego adjustment, an admission that we might not be the most important player in the processes we take pride in. I'm not sure how viable this is, but I have hopes that a robust, widely-deployed detection layer could provide enough gentle pressure to make it possible over time. AI is useful enough that I expect it'll be used even if it can be reliably detected, and where it can be reliably detected, I don't think humans will be able to continue pretending it's all us doing the hard parts. I hope, over time, this "everyone will know anyway" factor incentivizes a collective reckoning that makes us all more psychologically comfortable with how AI fits into our work.
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respect the hustle and all but i don't think knowing how much money these anthropic people are about to make is very good for my brain
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grateful that i finished my english literature degree two months before chatgpt dropped. sad that the experience i had doing it will never be possible again.
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skeleton retweeted
Programming used to be really fun. I’m kind of sad it’s over now
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