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In math, when you go from 3 to 4 dimensions, there is a sharp switch from visual geometric intuitions to symbol-rewriting intuitions, where your right brain gets trained on patterns in how the symbols move around rather than the underlying shapes
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when this happens, you quickly lose a sense for the forest over the trees, assembling bigger jigsaw pictures becomes dramatically harder because the space is larger than your visual intuitions can cover... this happens with words too
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when a topic gets sufficiently complex, your big picture intuitions collapse fairly rapidly, and you have to rely on aphorisms and other micro-level thoughts that you then have to grope around and weave together almost blind, because the dimensionality of the idea is too high
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You can try all you want to get big picture intuitions, with mind-maps, weird metaphors, or whatever, but there's a fundamental hardness to the big picture thinking needed that you cannot finesse away
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as in math, there's 3 basic strategies 1. Give up and stick to symbol level (map literacy) 2. Work with "3d projections" -- a set of partial slices you CAN big-picture grok 3. Work with "patches" -- a sort of differential geometric approach where you get good at quilting
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There is a reason ambitious thinkers like Taleb, after a great opening act, often resort to generating piles of aphoristic rubble for their act 2 (and in his case, kinda retreat to increasingly refined 3d-projective repetitions of their Act 1 as their Act 3 elder game/late style)
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I'm no exception of course. Twitter is just easier for me right now than longer forms. It's easier to scurry around like a rat in the darkness, or a worm slithering around underground, generating 280 characters worth of thought at a time
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Replying to
You are doing what I call vanishing past your own event horizon. Or to use a more evocative everyday phrase, your solution to the problem is to become part of the problem. Congrats, you are now as obscure as the problem you were trying to investigate.
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I've been thinking about late styles/elder games/Act 2 for a year now, and all the supposed good news is feel-good fake news. If it looks like somebody is doing very interesting things past 40 or so, look again. It's always tricks with mirrors or harvesting stuff done before 40.
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In The Science of Discworld, the authors talk a lot about "lies to children" ie how popular understanding of science is layers upon layers of wilfully crafted misunderstandings to give people a false sense of comprehension. Our culture is equally full of "lies to the middle aged"
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US culture is particularly full of this shit. It annoys me. It gets in the way of actually having a generative, alive Act 2. It fetishes the affordances of youth. It blinds you to the affordances of maturity. It accumulates a debt of reality shock that hits you eventually.
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Yeah, this is far more true than anyone will let you admit. It's one of the deepest taboos in modernity to admit that aging is NOT a bed of roses or a graceful ascent to the peaks of wisdom and insight.
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