walod

I think that people who are creative have to know the history and repertoire in order for their brain to make the new connections to make the new thing, but I think that creative leap when your brain makes those new connections is not something an artist controls directly. It comes from experience and being "into something", and random accident from experimentation.

The artist doesn't necessarily know why something is new though, even if they have a lot of experience, it's just a primal response they get to a new piece of music they are working on for example, and then they can try to analyze it after the fact. Most artists I know aren't as methodical as the way you seem to describe, it's a lot more intuition and experimentation, and then because of their vast listening experience their brains are adjusted so that they aren't satisfied with existing stuff

Well, I relate to both this and the older 'bad correspondent' article immensely. I have struggled with this for at least 2-3 years now. The only times I can be truly productive (in music, programming or visual stuff) is when I feel like I have a cocoon where there will be no interruptions with 100% certainty.

For me personally the cell phone is a bigger problem than the internet, since people get annoyed when I don't pick up the phone, but I also notice I need to stop clicking endlessly all night on web sites to calm my mind down to get to that mental space for creativity.

Basically the best periods I've had were when others were on vacation or I was, and there was some natural unbroken few days where there was no anxiety at all about being interrupted. The question is how to make it happen. I basically just turn off my phone, close the browser, go for a walk, try to get the nerves calmed down, and hopefully something comes out of it that night.

It's really quite annoying though, because 7 years ago it wasn't like this. I don't want to be a recluse, I just want to balance the two things and have that be okay.

> "civilised world" is kept together by midddle- and working class people.

Well, sort of. I think first you need technological innovation, and then the middle- and working class fill the labor to maintain that technology, but they for the most part didn't create it. They are users of it. Companies do investments and allocation of capital to produce that technology. Without a central source of capital, it would be hard to get the investments needed to research and produce it. I think technology (in all its forms from basic to advanced) is what enables the motion of society and individuals and the freedoms.

And also civilized society is just as much about daily life and consumption of information and perceived oppression or unfairness as it is pure work. It feels like a lot of modern arguments are about these perceived unfair situations, but on a personal level rather than systematic level. This leads to systematic "macro" chaos but predictable individual "micro" movement in the system (based on emotion and current view of the world). As long as the technology and resources can be maintained, there will be some order in the basics in society, since everyone needs food, shelter, clothing, security and so forth, so I would say, the whole system is what keeps the civilized world going and then some day, something fundamental breaks in some way, due to the accumulated macro momentum of micro scale movement, and then the macro breaks, or something like that.

Edit: also as an addon, these micro movements are decided today, by so called "thought leaders", and so these thought leaders are also responsible for the civilized world in that sense. An idea or representation of something has a huge effect I think.

With WP I think it's a problem when people sell others pre-existing plugins and themes as their own work. I think a self proclaimed WP developer should at least know all there is to know about Theme development. That means they need to know all the wordpress internals as it relates to themes, hooks, filters, theme templates, custom post types, basic php logic, html, css, standards etc... They don't need to know plugin development, as plugins can contain so much and be basically anything, but by the time they know most of the theme aspects, they would be able to make basic plugins anyways. The problem is a lot of people don't even know those things, since pre-made plugins and themes make it easier to set up

When you say "information" what do you mean exactly? I can see information as a set of constraints that arises in the system due to how it evolves, and that those constraints enable structure to emerge, and that with the law of conservation of energy no energy can be created or destroyed, it means that all those structures can only do what they can do, any deviation from the constraints will require new energy or removing energy from the system to alter the course.

I like your needles - hyperdimensional record analogy. I would say mathematics encodes for and predicts a certain set of constraints, but we can never be sure we have observed or found the most fundamental constraint, and so to us, an incomplete mathematical 'law' will look like it needs energy added or removed to fit with the real world, but in reality it's just a constraint somewhere that we haven't seen that will readjust the series. All of this is kind of written on a whim, I'm not sure I thought it through enough :

> Some people won't need your plan because they stay at low weight no matter what they eat.

This is just not true. I find that the people who say that actually eat a lot less calorie wise than they think. Eat 4500 calories per day for 2 years and see if you stay skinny. McDonalds 2 times a day is more like 2000 calories at the very high end. It takes time to eat 4500 cals per day, most skinny people can't do it at all but it's easy for fat people. Eating only unhealthy food every day doesn't really say anything about energy in vs energy out

> “Periodically when caverns are empty you can actually shoot sonar images of the caverns,” says Corbin. “And that gives you a three-dimensional way of looking at them.” Some have interesting shapes, he adds. The outline of one chamber, for example, would resemble a large flying saucer.

Mm yes this is a conspiracy theory waiting to happen

If the economy picked up there wouldn't be a problem. It's apparently better than a total crash, because the economy has to go on either way. The problem is what products and services can we make to make the economy grow again and to employ people. Also you may get malinvestments, but that is what risk is all about. No risk, no gain, you know. You just need a few homeruns to cushion the bad ones and the big homeruns are the ones that create whole new markets and longer employment. How to function and survive in the economy is difficult for everyone and it's a big clusterfuck of complexity and short term thinking, so it's all related in many ways. I think QE and 0% interest rate is the smallest of our problems as far as long term goes

What I can't wrap my head around is the difference between "computation" and consciousness when it comes to intelligence. If intelligence is just the ability to receive the right signals and then output the right signals to reach a certain goal, then the more inputs and outputs you have, the more intelligent you are. But then this is not how we usually think of intelligence. Intelligence is like the ability of a limited organism with limited inputs and outputs to make the most of a situation. We can already design a super intelligent system that will process inputs exactly right and output exactly right, but you need the central control and the limited body that will enable some kind of will and prioritization, and I haven't even gotten to conscious experience yet.

Rather than being complex computation, intelligence is about flexibility, but it may be that due to the complex nature of our biology, all that flexibility is just a lot of inputs and outputs, in which case we're back to square one and the limitations of the body etc. In some odd way, intelligence is quite disappointing

Also I would argue it's much harder to lose weight with untreated apnea for a couple reasons. 1. you're constantly over tired, and working out or even walking when you've been woken up hundreds of times per night is hell. Someone with apnea can have 30 or more breathing "pauses" every hour, and all of those times, the brain wakes up in some capacity. You can go with years of that condition untreated. Imagine trying to work out every week with that amount of sleep deprivation.

2. The metabolism and appetite changes drastically. Instead of getting a break and waking up in the morning after a good night of sleep not needing food, you are constantly sugar crazy 24/7. You never get a break from the appetite and blood sugar mayhem. This makes it really difficult to change eating behavior.

The best solution is to get as many people as possible a CPAP machine so they can feel well rested and reset their system, and then they will have a much better starting point for losing weight. And yeah, you can be skinny as hell and still have sleep apnea, a bunch of people do.

Well if the trend is right, and continues, it means future generations will have to have education and a society that by default works in a critical thinking - always learning - always thinking kind of mode. This could be huge for humanity. I think it's mostly culture and societal norms that dictate the normal modes of thinking, and that most people can do just fine if they are brought up in the right environment. The other option is some kind of transformation or crash, or that technology fails somehow and crashes. Or? Well it could be a very bright future if the conditions are right and the planet allows it

Doesn't anybody else find the "equality of opportunity" and other phrases way too abstract for analysis? There are many facets to how an economy functions and how individuals navigate it, and I think a proper analysis of the action on the ground is needed. For example how individuals learn skills and what prerequisites are needed in terms of access to information, ability to focus and think abstractly, and how one trains those abilities. This affects competition in the market, who gets rich, who gets an opportunity and so forth, and yet all the articles I see talk in these distant abstract terms, like they're appealing to someone in the government to fix it or something.

Another aspect is consumer responsibility and the way we tend to buy what we want but not think of the large scale consequences. People use gmail and facebook out of habit. They buy groceries in a big store out of habit. We use products dependent on petroleum yet expect someone else to fix global warming. Being interconnected and living in a rather fragile world where systems affect each other is not a responsibility us as individuals are ready for, and I haven't even touched on civic responsibility and the need for everyone to almost be lawyers and critical thinkers for law to function. There are so many complex interconnected parts and we always fall victim to the movements of the herd

It depends on what you mean by self-consciousness. On the one hand it can be processes for understanding oneself and modifying oneself to better survive in the environment, on the other you have the illusory "qualia" / subjective experience. It seems possible to me to have a self-improving process and an active process to evaluate the world state and self state without consciousness, and that this could result in something life-like. In this sense, is AI far away? It doesn't have to be necessarily.

It doesn't make sense to me personally why we need subjective experience, nor what it is in a physical sense. We can have agency and variability of choice without it, but at the same time we know how powerful it is in humans. Until we know exactly how it functions, i don't think anyone can claim with any certainty if it will happen, or how far away it is.