Luck is not some mysterious force working inside us, but rather tiny subtle flaws or advantages intrinsic to our current personality or understanding of the world. Luck is as relevant as our day-to-day emotions. Fleeting, seemingly random, but controllable with enough data and effort.
Tag: reviewed
Storing data behind your eyelids
While I was just meditating I had a moment of…hm, I’m not sure what to call it. Let me preface this with something. When I was learning about Ayahuasca (DMT) they mentioned this vast inner chamber that you can experience. Almost like a massive dome inside your mind or perceived outside your body; more or less just a significantly large space. During one previous meditation session I felt this momentarily, like there was a large inner world inside my mind. It was a brief experience. I just had a similar experience right now during this session. I felt an inner space behind my eyes. Basically like there was a bulletin board or room within my mind for an “inventory”. And it got me thinking, perhaps there could be a memory method developed around this. Inside our minds, around our eyes, accessible simply by closing them and looking up, down, left, or right, we could quickly access bits of data. By consciously planting information in these slots, they could be written and memorized very quickly.
Parent-Child Nodes and Nuclear Weapons
Not sure how this just popped into my head, but what if the reason we didn’t want countries like Iran and North Korea pursuing nuclear weapons went beyond the obvious destruction those devices could cause. What if the path that nuclear research went down revealed even more destructive powers only witnessed in secret laboratories. After decades of nuclear and associated research, is it not possible they’ve stumbled upon greater threats?
UPDATE 2015-03-14: I want to avoid political issues as much as possible, but one interesting thing this post suggests is that the obvious often masks something more sinister at play. Issues drawn to the front like nuclear proliferation might only be a distraction or the tip of the iceberg. There are probably good questions you can ask that branch away from talking about nuclear weapons and reveal related issues that are more prevalent to what’s actually going on.
UPDATE 2018-09-09: This is about parent topics and child subtopics. We spend our time focused on big picture items like “nuclear proliferation” with a few subtopic nodes to convince others of our “advanced understanding”, but if you could see the whole tree, what percentage of related knowledge do you really have? I would wager it’s not a big number. How can we feel so confident about our knowledge when we know so little?
The language before language
What do babies think before they can ask themselves questions? What is it like to ask, “what is that?” without the language to do so? If an animal is curious about something, how does it tell itself it’s curious? Is there a consistent thought that fires every time it thinks, “I wonder what that is?”
The only way to get ahead is to teach yourself
I’ve often remarked that the education system is bad, and it is. Something I just realized is that people don’t know how to teach. It’s actually worse than I initially realized because I was giving these people the benefit of the doubt. But now I realize that these people I looked up to are no different than any other person. They simply think they know what they’re doing and have the power to enforce it, but in reality they are just as lost and as unqualified as any of us. Don’t be fooled, the only true way to get ahead and learn is to teach yourself. That much is evident.
Free will and the scarecrow
We may not have free will. After reading that passage in The Elegant Universe it seems very possible that our decisions and logic follow a pre-determined path, perhaps with limited choice on our parts. Maybe in the future, a milestone humans will pass is the realization of this truth and the reform that will need to follow.
Perhaps college was more useful than previously credited for. I came to this conclusion after watching The Wizard of Oz, towards the end, when the wizard revealed himself and spoke to the scarecrow. Success at college isn’t only the technical understanding you gain, but rather the depth with which you can think.