Often my wife mentions an event or the name of a shop, saying something like “I miss the Flavor Savor hamburgers we used to go to when we lived in Nagareyama!” Usually, to her unconcealed dismay, I draw a complete blank: “what’s the Flavor Savor?” We used to go there all the time, she says, and it wasn’t even that long ago.
I get absolutely nothing. I frantically try to think of hamburger joints in Nagareyama: zero hits.
Then she adds some spatial information, like “it’s on the last floor of the XYZ building in front of the station” and suddenly I’m transported there in a roller-coaster instant and it all comes back to me clearly. I almost feel the swooshing movement of going from the station to the entrance of XYZ building, then to the escalators, then up to the last floor, and finally homing into the entrance of the Flavor Savor, all in less than a second. Now all the semantic information pours out: “of course, the Flavor Savor! We went there, like, six times in a year. They have great avocado burgers and a tasty homemade sauce there!” If not too averaged-out, even some fragments of Flavor Savor episodes might come back to me at that point.
Clipping
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clippings > Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory
[https://aethermug.com/posts/i-do-not-remember-my-life-and-it-s-fine]
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clippings > Hard to see someone as controlling when they make you feel special
[https://skincontact.substack.com/p/21-observations-from-people-watching]
You can tell how controlling someone is by how forceful they are in conversation, how often they cut someone else off or steer the conversation towards what they want. Sometimes it is hard to see someone as controlling when what they desire is making you feel special and chosen.
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clippings > Depression does something useful
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X6Nx9QzzvDhj8Ek9w/a-slow-guide-to-confronting-doom-v1]
I strongly suspect human brains have the ability to enter a depression state because the state does something useful. It seems to me that depression often arises from feeling stuck or not believing that one is able/on track to achieve acceptable outcomes. It’s like the brain, dissatisfied with the situation, boycotts and withdraws motivation. Something like that.
Having one’s brain not let you mindlessly or unreflectively continue down a path that won’t work, seems maybe useful. I’m not sure if that’s it, but I think it’s something.
Capitalism: our best, or even only, truly working coordination mechanism for deciding what the world should work on is capitalism and money, which allocates resources towards the most productive uses. This incentivizes growth and technological progress. There’s no corresponding coordination mechanism for good political outcomes, incl. for preventing extinction.
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clippings > The inner voice is not the problem
[https://qualiacomputing.com/2025/05/03/the-voice-in-your-head-dont-mind-the-inner-monologue/]
The problem with having a voice in your head is that it is a judgmental voice – it creates a self-view.
Judgment is self-perpetuating. It stings. It costs energy. And it builds on top of itself. When you’re too far gone in a judgment spiral, you judge yourself for being judgmental.
Freedom from judgment is within grasp for all of us (assuming we put in the time and effort – though please don’t take this as a judgment on your temporal thriftiness or laziness!). Burbea affirms it’s “absolutely possible” for the habit of judgment to end – sometimes large chunks of the “mountain of judgment” crumble suddenly in a matter of weeks. Even when judgment thoughts continue to arise from habit, they arise “completely free of any charge… just like empty words” with no power behind them. Eventually, these empty judgments fade away because they’ve been “sucked dry” of meaning.
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clippings > Criticisms of libertarianism
[https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/i-owe-the-libertarians-an-apology]
My basic criticisms of libertarianism were:
- Libertarians’ ideological opposition to public goods provision and state capacity not only makes us poorer, but it also makes us less free in the long run, because poorer societies are less able to resist foreign conquerors. For example, it’s hard to imagine a libertarian government winning World War 2.
- By treating all of society as an interaction between a government and the individuals it governs, libertarians tend to ignore the threats to liberty from non-governmental institutions (“local bullies”), and from foreign governments. This led some libertarians to oppose the Civil Rights Act, and to underestimate the threats from illiberal powers like China. And these omissions led to some unsavory people grafting themselves and their oppressive ideas onto the libertarian movement.
- Libertarians underrate the importance of non-market mechanisms, which are sometimes superior to markets when transaction costs are high. If friendship, sex, and the right to breathe air were allocated by markets, society would be worse.
- Libertarians’ focus on deontological (principles-based) notions of freedom often contradicts humanity’s moral sentiments. For example, some libertarians argue that people should be able to sell themselves into slavery; the proper response to this is “Eww.”
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clippings > Blues as a comical performance of black sorrow
Anyway Charlie freed the guitar from all that baggage. He didn’t “twang,” and he didn’t do a lot of showy emotive bending and he had little or no vibrato. That’s a lot like lester young, but it’s also I think a move to escape the minstrel shows and the blues as comical a performance of black sorrow for white people. I mean you can kind of see the legacy of the minstrel show every time some guy with 9s on the top is doing boomer bends and making guitar face playing blues.
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clippings > True art versus social status
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243805]
As I age, I come to see the vistas I imagined when younger as shallow, half-baked. I wanted shallow things, having nothing to compare my desires to, no context for the myths and narratives of my own life aside from the media and socialization I was exposed to early on.
How could I -really- picture the world beyond, the richness and pains I would stumble into, almost entirely on accident? How could I imagine anything true or close to the source, having lived for such a short time, tasted so little of the complexity of our substrate?
Which brings me back to the OP’s lament: of course they failed to make good art: they were not guided by an interest in touching the true thing, only in being recognized as someone that can touch the true thing. Trading the vulnerability of unfiltered experience for the rigid belief in their deserved/desired social status. What good fortune they yet live, can yet grow and change and make art!
I am reminded of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and the Stalker’s Prayer:
“Weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it’s tender and pliant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being! Because what has hardened will never win.”
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clippings > A rationalist argument for god
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/01/the-hour-i-first-believed/]
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There is an all-powerful, all-knowing logically necessary entity spawning all possible worlds and identical to the moral law.
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It watches everything that happens on Earth and is specifically interested in humans’ good behavior and willingness to obey its rules.
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It may have the ability to reward those who follow its rules after they die, and disincentivize those who violate them.
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clippings > Brian Eno believes in singing
[https://www.npr.org/2008/11/23/97320958/singing-the-key-to-a-long-life]
Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call “civilizational benefits.” When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.
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clippings > A positive framework of psychoactive drug use
[https://www.samwoolfe.com/2025/01/drugs-the-human-condition-altered-states.html]
Hominin evolution occurred in an ever-changing, and at times quickly changing, environmental landscape and entailed advancement into a socio-cognitive niche, i.e., the development of a socially interdependent lifeway based on reasoning, cooperative communication, and social learning. In this context, psychedelics’ effects in enhancing sociality, imagination, eloquence, and suggestibility may have increased adaptability and fitness. We present interdisciplinary evidence for a model of psychedelic instrumentalization focused on four interrelated instrumentalization goals: management of psychological distress and treatment of health problems; enhanced social interaction and interpersonal relations; facilitation of collective ritual and religious activities; and enhanced group decision-making…integration of psilocybin into ancient diet, communal practice, and proto-religious activity may have enhanced hominin response to the socio-cognitive niche, while also aiding in its creation. In particular, the interpersonal and prosocial effects of psilocybin may have mediated the expansion of social bonding mechanisms such as laughter, music, storytelling, and religion, imposing a systematic bias on the selective environment that favored selection for prosociality in our lineage. ~ Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution
With this evolutionary account in mind, one could argue that drug use (again, psychedelic use especially) is a part of human nature but in a way that offers several important advantages. Hence, we don’t have to view psychoactive drug use in negative terms (e.g. as a form of unhealthy escapism). Instead, we can view consciousness alteration as helping to solve certain problems in healthy ways, which in turn leads to diverse benefits, including group bonding and the expansion and enhancement of fulfilling activities like comedy, laughter, art, music, sex, and storytelling.