This particular example is particularly powerful for me. Spent my PhD years working on interferometric space telescopes for exosolar terrestrial planet detection. The stack of assumptions underlying the instrumentation is *incredibly* deep.
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But paradoxically, the more your identity shrinks as a result of this process, the greater your confidence in what's left. It will likely last longer than the last layer that was peeled away. It strengthens your solipsism.
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Solipsism is in one sense a sort epistemic confidence graph as you go radially outwards from the void at the heart of being. At your current boundary, the confidence of knowing falls of a cliff. The smaller the boundary of self, the steeper the cliff.
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So growing solipsism, in the context of a ego being shrunk by an instrumental connection with reality is a sign of a *growing* scientific sensibility. (not a necessary result of "doing STEM"... in fact shallow talent can grow the ego in a narrow prowess/procedural identity sense)
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One of the fun things about playng twitter with a decently large following is that you can get as esoteric as you like and trust that at least a few people will be able to follow the whole line of argument (whether they agree or not) simply by virtue of the law of large numbers.
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That's the most valuable thing about having ~36k followers... not the tweet that gets 500 likes (meh), but the 10 tweet esoteric thread that at least 1-2 people actually read to the end, grok in their own way, and appreciate. Large n twitter is basically rare fish fishing.
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Btw, rare fish in a statistical sense not necessarily "beautiful mind" sense which would just be self-congratulation in disguise. More like the kid in Slumdog Millionaire who just happens to know a bunch of game show answers through law of large numbers random experiences.
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this has been my experience as an artist working with programming and automated or complex processes. Seeing through an instrument gives you a different, reduced (as in sauce) sense of what your work is.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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