We tried to partner recently to co-create interactive books with a well-known classical education influencer on X.
His job was to select passages from books and provide some commentary. Ours was to turn that material into an interactive title.
We tried tirelessly to look up the passages he'd send to us in the original text. The only quotes that matched were the top 5% short and famous quotes. The rest was made up completely, presumably by AI.
His 1 million+ followers consider him a world-class subject matter expert. But he doesn't read any of the books he's teaching. Eye opening.
Are you saying he posted scripture that didn't exist? Who is this? I actually don't believe that. Many people are surprisingly good with their scripture and would immediately spot someone quoting non-existent scripture.
Unless maybe he was quoting some non-canon like Mormon books. Very common for "Christian" influencers to be LDS.
i can believe this. many "experts" are consistent bullshitters, and it helps them to look more like experts.
this is not always intentional either, and there is a lot of social pressure to do it.
have you ever read a popular article about something you have expert knowledge in? the general standard for accuracy and quality in public discourse is mindblowingly low.
But you can't make up scripture without being immediately spotted. Their comments would be flooded with people calling them out.
It's like trying to talk about star trek episodes that don't exist with star trek nerds. There would be a few seconds of confusion before the righteous indignation.
Would "pragmatic-universal" and "pragmatic-consensus" count as a fifth and sixth? I.e., "what's useful for the group?" and "what the group thinks is useful for them?"
An example of the first category might be a parent deciding it's better for their kids to believe in Santa Claus. An example of the second is to create a society on some maxim that's rendered true by group-consensus, "everyone should have an equal say."
I'm curious how education or entertainment companies fit into this framework, or how they think about PMF in general.
Was Duolingo targeting customers who accepted the "hard fact" that passive audio was the only way to learn a language? Was MasterClass a "future vision" because people didn't believe celebrities would spend their time teaching? Or is it that we NEED education and entertainment, so these two providers just differentiated from a crowded market.
Alternatively Duolingo sells a casual memory game that differentiate by giving the illusion of productivity. And Masterclass sells attention and status to a class of people who are already attention-oriented by stroking their egos. I’m not saying this hot take is necessarily true, but the market isn’t always categorized by what we intuitively think. And realizing that can sometimes give you a massive benefit, simply by applying existing and effective techniques (in these cases gamification and people-oriented success storytelling, respectively) from a domain your competitors don't understand or care about.
Yeah, to me, Duolingo seems to be Hard Fact. But MasterClass might be also Hard Fact. MasterClass is not a totally different education service compared to the existing incumbents. Online university could be MasterClass.
I've bootstrapped a few companies. B2B apps are easier since you can do custom work for business clients while you perfect your software.
Crone AI is much harder. It's my first edtech consumer app. It's been live for 3 months and we've made $1,500 so far (lol).
My previous business startups made $200k ARR and $1M ARR. Iterating on consumer apps is more fun and you can still extrapolate growth from small numbers.
Both of these are very extensible, actively developed, and well-built. Tiptap is indy and pushes its pro product now (fair). Lexical is supported by meta. Pros and cons to both of these FOSS types.
Have you tried Dendron? I'm at the point where I'm debating if I want to migrate my workflow from vscode over to emacs so I can use org-roam in a combined notes/code/documents workflow, and both dendron and foam popped up in my searching for alternatives.
I'm curious if you had any preference or reason why you went with foam.
I believe since Maharshi was a practitioner of hinduism for him "the self" (what they call Atman) was to be seen in all things, and the same everywhere.
So anything transient cannot be the self, hence is an illusion, or false.
He practiced Advaita vedanta. When exploring the non-duality of self vs world, there are fundamentally 2 approaches. Advaita Vedanta denies the existence of the world, only the (true) self is real. Buddhism denies the existence of the self.
A bit pedantic, and I could be wrong, but based on what I've read, my understanding is that Advaita (non-dualism) is not something you can practice, although there are practices in that school that can advance you on the path, like shravana, manana, nidhidyaasana.
It's more of a reasoning-, knowledge- and understanding-based system than anything else.
Jnana Yoga is the path.
Check out Swami Sarvapriyananda's talks on YouTube about Advaita.
I am not knowledgeable about Advaita Vedanta, I'm just repeating some simplified statements from Michael Taft's course on non-duality.
Enlightenment is profound, and unrelated to belief, or non-belief about the existence of the world. Mainstream Buddhism does not deny the existence of the world or individual persons, it states that our conception of the "self" is a mental construct.
From a subjective perspective, everything we experience is mind-constructed, and in that context, there is no difference between self and world; everything we experience is mind. This is the essence of buddhist non-duality.
I would further add that we do not know anything about the existence of the world, only that we perceive the world indirectly based on sensory input, and most of us conclude that the world actually exists. There is a movement in science that calls this fundamental belief into question, you can checkout writings and interviews with Donald Hoffman.
"Hoffman notes that the commonly held view that brain activity causes conscious experience has, so far, proved to be intractable in terms of scientific explanation"
That's just a fringe position. It may look good on Youtube or a TED Talk. But it has no scientific backing. It is certainly not a "movement" in science. They produced no evidence or even proposed any experiments. It's just idle speculation, not science.
His job was to select passages from books and provide some commentary. Ours was to turn that material into an interactive title.
We tried tirelessly to look up the passages he'd send to us in the original text. The only quotes that matched were the top 5% short and famous quotes. The rest was made up completely, presumably by AI.
His 1 million+ followers consider him a world-class subject matter expert. But he doesn't read any of the books he's teaching. Eye opening.
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