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
Conversation
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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Broadly, these map to 3 intellectual stances: textualism, ideology, and pointillism
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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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You have to deconvolve aging effects of course, output = (aging brain)*(higher dimensional interests)
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There IS an alternative, which is to get increasingly idiosyncratic, convincing yourself you are discovering deep, vast hyperdimensional truths, and that you're "merely" having trouble articulating them for the benefit of others. No, it's not a "mere" compilation problem.
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Replying to
This is a 4th intellectual tradition to add to your 3 above: mysticism
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