Connection

This line from David Foster Wallace still haunts me:

“The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?”

And he’ll

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“People think that intimacy is about sex. Intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you can stand in front of them bare and their response is ‘you’re safe with me’- that’s intimacy” Adi Shakti

I think that a fairly reliable mark of high intelligence is the capacity to recognize the signal within the noise of someone's 'wrong' take.

Pseudo-intelligence gleefully pours out the bathwater, raw intelligence finds & nurtures the baby.

Every conversation has multiple layers. Some people hide behind masks. Others lie to others (and themselves). And others say one thing with their mouth and another with their body. It only takes seeing through one of these layers for somebody to call you a genius.

In other words, rather than trying to please humans, Scientist AI could be designed to prioritize honesty.

Engaging in group activities that generate synchronicity – such as rituals, dancing or singing in choirs – alter the sense of self and increase connection with others.

Quanta interviewed 19 current and former NLP researchers to tell that story. From experts to students, tenured academics to startup founders, they describe a series of moments — dawning realizations, elated encounters and at least one “existential crisis” — that changed their world. And ours.

starting to suspect having a good conversation and feeling connected is not primarily eye contact or asking a lot of questions or not talking about yourself or whatever, or even curiosity, but some yet more fundamental thing that drives all of it like ... joie de vivre??

i get the sense the core thing is actually quite simple, and all the indicators... See more