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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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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For people that missed out on making themselves into a key, what does graceful aging look like?
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There is no such thing as graceful aging, only clever optics and PR, sufficient money to buy your way out of being an embarrassing human, and good clothes. It’s all graceless 🙂


