I've started reading again, because reddit/instagram/etc. has become kind of boring for me? Like, I still go on them to get an instant dopamine hit from time to time, but like you said burying yourself in a textbook just feels so much more rewarding.
I've abandoned all online content sources except HN, Substack, and YouTube. The latter two are aggressively filtered and still feel like they're getting less interesting over time. HN isn't the best habit, either, but it's good to have at least one source of news.
Maybe someone needs to start a small group of people who specifically want to do this — seek refuge from the chaotic and increasingly worrying world (in particular the threat of replacement by extremely general automated systems) by immersing themselves in learning, and sharing the results with others.
I’m sure such groups already exist, but maybe not specifically with this goal in mind.
Learning for its own sake really is the answer to lasting happiness… for some of us, anyway.
> seek refuge from the chaotic and increasingly worrying world (in particular the threat of replacement by extremely general automated systems) by immersing themselves in learning, and sharing the results with others.
I think his point is that people have felt like the world is going to shit for a very long time, it's just that with the presence of hindsight we can see that in the past everything worked out, but we can't see the future so our present is troubling.
But none of these feelings are new, just different problems manifesting the same.
In any group there are people that are more talented, more persuasive and/or have more initiative than others. These people will naturally become the group's leaders. This can only be avoided in groups which don't have to make on decisions or conduct activities.
Hey, Euclid's ideas from 2000+ years ago are still going strong.
I doubt much of what we know today will turn out to be wrong. Maybe our abstractions will turn out to have been naive or suboptimal, but at least they're demonstrably predictive. They're not just quackery or mysticism.
Well… in subjects like mathematics they kind of do, don’t they? There’s not much room for opinion on what’s true and what isn’t. Of course, how something is done or the language used to describe it is always up for debate.
You did say ‘wrong’, though, not ‘considered wrong’.
There are no negatieve quanta and there are no negatieve qualities. It would be hilarious to suggest there would be products of the two.
You have 3 baskets with 5 apples each, you remove 7 apples from each basket, remove 5 baskets and you have -2 baskets with -2 apples each thus therefore you have 4 apples left all without the involvement of trees, like Jezus!
Not really. Universities barely even pretend to be ‘churches of learning’ — at least anymore. Going to university, for the vast majority of students these days, is more an exercise in CV-building than self-development and learning.
Such groups are by definition reclusive, hard to find on social media, and might be a lot more fringe or "weird" than you'd prefer. For a while, subreddits were a bit like this.
I don't think it's too far fetched to hypothesize that the next major global conflict will be between accelerators (e/acc) and decelerators. I see a parallel with political/economic ideologies like capitalism and communism. One of them will eventually prevail (for most of the world) but it won't be clear which until it happens. Scary but also exciting times ahead!
Is this a joke? Go outside. Go hiking. Make a garden. Visit Yosemite. Take up bouldering. Learn to surf. Cycle. Go camping. There's a world of living and massive communities but around real life. Explore what your body and mind can do together. Find kinship because it's out there in spades for people not obsessed with the automation of machined content.
I've started reading again, because reddit/instagram/etc. has become kind of boring for me? Like, I still go on them to get an instant dopamine hit from time to time, but like you said burying yourself in a textbook just feels so much more rewarding.