Here’s the deal. You read my newsletter. In return, I write my newsletter. This is the terms. This is called ‘bartering’, an economic practice in all primitive cultures. as you advance, you can get promoted to ‘haggling’ but we aren’t there yet. We don’t have that kind of relationship yet. We’ve never even met, unless we have. For now, know your place, barterer. Hagglers, go to the VIP room. The rest of you, to the slave mines. Get reading.
Whitespace
we had the hubble telescope turned inside out
Long have physicists predicted the existence of “dark matter”, invisible element that blocks us from other galaxies, to balance the number we keep getting on gravity. But dark matter implies the existence of light matter. Light bulbs being one such example. There is also whitespace, an inversion of proper spacial forms. Observe:
art: the warm void
Artifacts From A Past Life
tap to benjamin button
If you believed in reincarnation, you could in theory do past life regression hypnosis to discover buried treasure, but in all statistical likelihood you were just some kind of peasant loser without a copper12 to your name. So you’d have to do past life regression hypnosis on enough people to find one who buried their treasure, but if you’re going to all that work, you might as well just start digging in random spots hoping to find treasure in the first place. In theory. In practice, everyone we tested miraculously turned out to be a king or emperor (or married to one) in every single one of their past lives, so you don’t actually run into this problem.
This is, of course, a ‘tell’ about what’s happening. The most basic pattern of self deception is only counting the hits, and never the misses, a technique which I encourage you to emulate. You and I both know past life regression hypnosis is bogus, but I ask you, who is having more fun?
We avoid a lot of things on the idea that they can be taken too far. I believe this is a poor basis for decision making. That just leaves the idea that its bogus3. But bogus how?
What we might call “gullible phenomena” often revolves not around narcissism and grandiosity, but instead revolves upon the barnum effect, which is in short that if a statement looks well researched, people won’t check if its generic. Horoscopes are the simplest example of this, but most personality tests work the same way. I’d say a lot of politics (and religion) relies on a similar principle, but the only real danger here isn’t that generic advice is sometimes bad, that’s pretty rare. The danger is more that it can be thought-terminating.
The best scammers and fortune tellers rely on making you think something was your idea- getting you to do the work of filling in the gaps. But it won’t work if you are aware you are deliberately deceiving yourself. Your subconscious handles tons of stuff for you even while you are awake. But we can all learn to lucid dream. Why wouldn’t you be a king in a past life? Who cares. Sure why not.
This is not legal advice. I am mostly messing around. But there are two things that are real here, two nuggets at the bottom of the happy meal: First, if you have meta-awareness of how you scam yourself, you’ll recognize scams in others. Scammers aren’t common, this benefit is marginal. But second, and this is very important, if you find yourself constantly in life having to look out for scammers, the problem is you.
I remember in high school there was a “type of person” who would always insist they hate drama, but somehow serendipitously constantly find themselves in the middle of it, never out of drama and gossip for more than a week. There’s a couple ways of explaining this, and both can be true depending on the case:
The person actually loves drama, and starves without it, so they subconsciously self-sabatoge in such a way to create it, because being a victim gives them power4
You get more of what you look for.
Humans have a problem of emotionally keyed memory recall- if something bad happens, its easy to remember all the similar bad things, and feel like everything’s always been that way. This helps you to build up spiritual/emotional “tracks” in your mind so that its easier for your wheels to go that way next time, because if you run into a situation a lot then sure, its adaptive to develop some heuristics to deal with that easily. The problem is if you don’t externalize the input (charting it out, journaling, etc) you can’t really contextualize Actual Frequency- its only through review from a distance that you can really grasp what’s going on, especially when emotions are high.
And humans are not exactly good at reading others or telling when we’re lying to ourselves. So it is very easy to develop habitual responses to stimula5 that are mostly imaginary but serve to exacerbate the problem. What you find by changing your outlook appears miraculous- “did I change the world with my mind?” No, you just stopped provoking it, but at a certain granularity these things are the same.
We underestimate how subtle our habitual perspective can change things, and the more deliberately you steer that perspective, a lot of things that would have gotten blown out of proportion become irrelevant as gravity asserts itself without your intervention. Then you’ll be able to see clearly, and make clear decisions! How delightful.
It is commonly understood that a person’s reaction to bullies enables and incentivizes bullying- but this effect applies to way more things in life than bullies. If you decided the bully was not a big deal, and behaved as though they weren’t, and really made yourself believe it, you would act in ways that wouldn’t incentivize the bully. Its a self fulfilling prophesy, and what I’m saying is you can harness this, that is my belief.
You can treat yourself like “the type of person who does x” too, and you can trick yourself into believing it, and then suddenly you are. You have scammed and grifted and conned yourself into being a bad person, you can surely scam and grift and con yourself into being better, believe in urself
This is a cousin to faith, choosing your perspective. This is, in my religion, one of the fundamental purposes of life. God wants to see what you want to see.
Mathew 6:22The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.
23 But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!
10 magic systems that don’t exist because I just made them up
imagine how much greater the epic of gilgamesh could have been
Magical power is based on brazenness. The more brazen you are the more magic responds to you
Magical power based on averice6. It isn’t having money that gives you spells. Its wanting it.
Magical power based on silence- every word you ever speak uses magic, and the greatest sages never speak, but could command the sun
You have to color inside the lines of a childrens coloring book and you can say what kind of spell you want and the book appears but the drawings and number of colors are proportional in complexity to the difficulty of the spell
Magical system where nobody commands anything but random objects will just blow up when you try to use them
magic system with lawn rakes instead of wands
magic system where your feet have to fall off to do magic
Magic system where your spellcasting ability is proportional to your tendency to be wrong about things
magic system where the gods give people magic, but the magic can only be used to oppose that god’s will
magic system where all spells can only be used to minorly inconvenience people or do practical jokes
history
Our toddler is growing7, but until we can trust him with childlocks he still counts as a toddler IMO
“squishes aren’t cars, squishes are hugs!” and then after a short pause: “cars are not hugs.” This is flawless modus tollens
The toddler is using the adjective ‘terrifying’ a lot. But he doesn’t know what that means. Like he sees a sandwich and is like “Is that terrifying?”
“How would you feel about German pancakes tomorrow?” “but I… uh… someone ate all the blueberries.” Someone. Right.
The baby has learned to hyperventilate as a way of requesting “more ice cream”
My time in the mine was well spent
Excellent Duckstack