14/ The challenge in executing this turnpike roadmap strategy is that your mind-level chooses you rather than you choosing mind-level. If you choose to be small minded today, that's good. If you find you are always small minded and can't ever break up into mediocre, that's bad
Conversation
15/ This is a bit like weight training. You have to increase the weights slowly and perhaps train your attention to exhaustion a bit. If you're in small mind zone and can only consume/produce tweets, try an essay. See how far you get. Strength-train attention from 10s to 10min.
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16/ Note that this atrophying of attention and latency limits will happen REGARDLESS of whether evil designers are trying to hack your attention and keep you phase-locked into their preferred 10s latency information loop. Their designs are in fact the LOAD you're training against
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17/ The fact of the matter is that information distribution has become free/cheap, so the firehose is going to have flows at all timescales and abstraction levels no matter what designers want or don't want. It's the information firehose that's creating this environment.
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18/ Blaming/shaming platform UX designers is giving them way too much credit. There's just too much actual information being put out there at too high a rate, and you do in fact have meaningful access to almost all of it.
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19/ There is of course a time, place, and role for unplugging from information flows entirely, and doing whatever low/zero information refractory period activity you prefer to recover, from domestic blissing to meditation. Not shown on graph.
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20/ But while that has a role to play in mental health, make no mistake: you do need a job in the giant social computer, and that involves consuming and acting on information at all levels on the turnpike, in a temporally constrained way.
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21/ The idea of a profane/secular "temporal" plane and a sacred/religious timeless/eternal plane is a medieval idea invented to justify the power of powerful intercessionary religious orgs. Don't reproduce that bad pattern.
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22/ LONG before the digital media companies tried to pwn your attention by overloading it at difficult latency ranges, religious institutions tried to pwn you by suckering you into checking out of "temporal" matters by labeling them sinful/profane or whatever. This is utter bs.
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23/ That is in fact the original attention hack: powerful religious leaders telling smart people to check out and unplug from information flows. That way, they get the power.
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25/ If you are a genius who rises to Level 25 Omega Super Adept in a monastery in the mountains, who knows everything there is to know about candle flames, that's kinda... very convenient for the Pope and the King. Smart person out of the way in a log cabin learning Candleology.
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26/ A real adept oughta be able to meditate on the angriest, most toxic twitter stream, consume the bile, and turn it into nectar... actionable insight you can bet on in the real world.
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27/ A real adept ought to have strength-trained attention so they can spend an hour either reading a tweetstream or a once-in-a-generation history-disrupting philosophy book. No hack designer should be able to lock them down in the 0.1-10 second range.
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28/ So stop blaming the media platforms for your own wallowing in small-minded twitter gossip about people. Strength train to the point where you decide whether to be there or elsewhere.
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30/ Stop trying to manage your attention and manage your attention Neo. You're in the Matrix now. Some rules can be bent, others can be broken.
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I think you are macro right, but micro wrong. Meditation is supposed to be strength training. What YOU are doing in this thread is meditation. In your 25-27, the guy who leaves everything to focus on candelogy is the dumber one. The smart meditators are on twitter doing threads
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