Sixian

On the other hand, networks with profiles that allow for more anonymity often grow more easily at the beginning because of the lower commitment required. Long term, however, we’ve seen them burn out and produce less value on average.

The antithesis is that collectivist coordination is its own reward; that we “formation fly” because we simply like mutuality and interdependence more than isolation and independence, and any collectivizable rewards for doing so are simply gravy.

When contemplating these questions, it’s easy to get carried away into a techno-utopian dream world where all wisdom is neatly catalogued into accessible bits, so any problem could be easily researched and overcome. While that vision may or may not be attainable, it does feel quite possible to imagine a world in which all people treat their own har... See more

Some of them we have named for, you just named a few ‘good’, ‘accountable’, ‘evil’, you know, turning away, a bypass, and in naming and in inhabiting and in performing those neural architectures, we place-make the world. We terraform the world as we are terraformed ourselves, as we learn to acculturate ourselves to the psychic demands of these mora... See more

The feeling I get, as a very good bodypainter looking at Sanatan’s work, is that I am looking at magic. And that, in fact, is my definition of magic – competence so much more advanced than yours with such alien mental models that you cannot predict the outcomes of the model at all. If you asked me to imitate the work of any of the top 20 bodypainte... See more

One of my heuristics for growth is to seek out the magicians, and find the magic. Often without noticing, your progress in aspects of life or all of it unconsciously becomes linear. You made a certain amount of money last year, so you aim to make some ‘reasonable’ proportion more this year. But you are largely using the same tools to get 2x as you ... See more

i am very grateful everyone who came to my talk at fwb fest and those who helped me out with it recently. in some ways this talk took 6 years to put together. the basic theory of "lifestyles," identity, and brands was there by 2016, but i was missing a strong notion of culture

The other kind of model is an internal mediator of desire—one who mediates desire from inside the subject’s world. I like to call this world Freshmanistan for short.