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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

This is my conversational account. For my work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 20 Mar 2019
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      If you're reasonably open to experience, intelligent, and good at pattern matching, you'll arrive at a "seen it all" plateau by about age 35-50. It won't be true, but it will feel like it. Genuine, category/pattern busting surprise is harder to find past a point in our universe

      20 replies 78 retweets 323 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 20 Mar 2019
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      People think this is not true because they conflate surprisal with unpredictability. They're not the same. I can't predict a sequence of coin tosses, but almost no sequence of heads/tails would surprise me. It would take something like tosses producing pi in binary to do that

      3 replies 3 retweets 51 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 20 Mar 2019
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      When you're a baby, surprise is a continuous state. When you're young, it comes overwhelmingly torrentially and you have to affect unflappability to seem cool. But by the time you're about 35, if you like surprise, a certain desperation to seek it out will creep into your life

      1 reply 13 retweets 68 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 20 Mar 2019
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      Surprisal is a cognitive addiction of course, and a good one. But the hits get harder to produce. By 40, fracking surprise out of the universe turns into an advanced cognitive skill.

      3 replies 7 retweets 66 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 20 Mar 2019
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      A naive response is "have you read all the books in the library yet?" or "have you taught yourself advanced quantum mechanics yet?" Former is plain silly. It becomes obvious fairly quickly in a reading life that humans have written 100x more books than they have things to say

      9:12 PM - 20 Mar 2019
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      • Asparagale Monocot III David Walker displaced subjects of the midEast/mansion dwellers Andre Mark Ryan Sallee Nadia Jenssen 宅家 James O'Leary d̷r̤e͆ḁm͛ e̴͒ɐt̎e̶͚r̶ 🔪
      3 replies 3 retweets 55 likes
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 20 Mar 2019
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          The second response is trickier. Of course not all of us are genius enough to grok and appreciate surprisal hidden in depths of the advanced math of quantum mechanics and stuff. But here's the thing: demystifying a subject to drain it of surprise is FAR easier than working in it

          1 reply 1 retweet 45 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 20 Mar 2019
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          Good pop science/math that is decently challenging can demystify a subject for you without giving you the mastery. And a taste of mastery is enough to tell you that there isn't as much surprise there as you might think.

          2 replies 2 retweets 44 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 20 Mar 2019
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          The illusion of having "seen it all" is like the illusion of having found a "formula" for prime numbers that works up to some point. Of course the number of primes is infinite, but you can convince yourself you've seen them all if the next one is too far away for you to count to

          1 reply 2 retweets 39 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 20 Mar 2019
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          Half of all meditation techniques are about regaining the easy-to-surprise beginner mind so ordinary magic of life can surprise in delight you again. The other half of meditation techniques are to console yourself because the first half doesn't work as well as advertised 😆

          5 replies 9 retweets 98 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 20 Mar 2019
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          But "beginner mind" idea is right in essence. Except you have to generate the surprise within yourself. Thanks to our enormous capacities for denial etc. some of the deepest reserves for mystery and surprise are within you. You just have to be willing to look foolish to tap them

          3 replies 3 retweets 56 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 20 Mar 2019
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          People dimly recognize this and try to pick up new skills and brave early-learning-curve awkwardness as a way to inject freshness into life again. That's not quite right. If you're an advanced pianist, fumbling at tennis won't really help rediscover the surprisability of age 9.

          2 replies 5 retweets 32 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 20 Mar 2019
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          What WILL help is to blow up things where you think you already know it all and find ways to go all fumbling and awkward again. So our notional pianist has to find a way to be a fumbling beginner *at the piano* again.

          4 replies 4 retweets 59 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 20 Mar 2019
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          Self-disruption basically. Trying to inject novelty into your life by learning unrelated new things is like trying to do 3 undergraduate degrees instead of 1 PhD. A series of degrees is a scripted series of self-disruptions. MS mind disrupts BS mind. PhD mind disrupts MS mind.

          1 reply 4 retweets 52 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 20 Mar 2019
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          Doesn't work very well, but the more informal, less scripted version of developing a sense for when you've plateaued in some activity and blowing it up at the right time, to make it new again, but WITHOUT losing the experience earned... that's the real skill of surprise-seeking

          3 replies 1 retweet 39 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 20 Mar 2019
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          Thank you for reading my long-winded justification for my writing mostly sucking this last year 😆

          4 replies 0 retweets 39 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 20 Mar 2019
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          Addendum: there is a big element of surrender in accessing surprisal latent in the universe, and it becomes harder to surrender with age because we become addicted to agency. Even when risks are low, we resist. Kids surprise more easily because they surrender more easily.

          8 replies 4 retweets 57 likes
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        13. End of conversation

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