but also all understanding is piecemeal, so leaning too heavily on a “A grade” model will eventually lead to more pain than leaning moderately on a “B grade” model, because all models are wrong to a degree we cannot know in advance
Conversation
on multiple separate occasions lately I’ve been struck by how tightly miserable people cling on to remarkably flimsy models of reality. there’s no nice way to point it out over plaintext. been writing drafts of an essay about this for months but still very dissatisfied
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(also drafting an essay about the perils, promise and psychosis of plaintext, also still dissatisfied)
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rereading the first tweet you could say that in a sense it’s sort of true-through-recursion, like, I did become happier when I improved my model of happiness, which is a subset of my model of the world. So I started out with a vague premise that was directionally sort of okay…
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but a slight improvement in the model-of-happiness made it quickly evident that the more critical thing is actually to cultivate the courage to do what seems right. And “seems” here is a synthesis of thinking and feeling
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it all pretty quickly becomes a complicated mess, very hard to talk meaningfully about without getting lost in the details or otherwise oversimplifying to the point of inanity. I do think the pursuit is worthwhile and I would not discourage it
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best “advice” I could muster is probably something like “expect to be surprised, to question assumptions you didn’t realize you were making, and to reframe, re-evaluate, reformulate everything from scratch from time to time. and maybe try to see the humor in it all if you can”
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another way of reframing it is that real understanding is not a static set of facts and figures, or even good object-level models, but a dynamic dance of relationships; knowing which models to use in what contexts. knowing how to ayy in any given context
Quote Tweet
this is the heart of philosophy, all else is commentary 
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hahah yea I discuss this with him and a couple of other friends like every other week or so
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Visa’s meme is an exceedingly good one. That, plus the tweet, makes it probably the best I’ve seen — or at least the one I think about the most 🔥