Prathyush

This exploration of a high dimensional latent space as a search through vector subspaces kicks ass! Great work @yuki-koyama.bsky.social!

Yearly reminder that @worrydream.com has a frequently updated catalog of some of the very best material relevant to computation / user interface design over here: worrydream.com/refs/

Screenshot of https://www.oliverburkeman.com/river with the title and the first paragraph

I read Four Thousand Weeks by @oliverburkeman.com
a while ago. Feel that the philosophy it embodies is yet to make in roads into user interfaces of productivity systems. For example, this idea of treating your to-read pile as a river: oliverburkeman.com/river

“Higher food prices can reduce poverty and stimualte growth in food production”. Screenshot of the title of https://www.tabledebates.org/research-library/higher-food-prices-can-reduce-poverty-and-stimulate-growth-food-production

Screenshot from the summary of the article: https://www.tabledebates.org/research-library/higher-food-prices-can-reduce-poverty-and-stimulate-growth-food-production excerpting “The 21st century has been marked … price indices (CPI).” It highlights “Therefore food price … pressure on wages.”

Here’s something mindblowingly counterintuitive – Higher food prices can reduce poverty!

As a person in a country like India, it is almost blasphemous, for many (majority?) here survive on cheap food they buy with their backbreaking / stressful labour: www.tabledebates.org/research-lib...

These errors, once realized enables one to course-correct their process repertoire into something that is aligned with the working of the world. They are not damning about the character of the person, but opportunities to grow and adapt to one’s environment.

One will inevitably encounter a beautiful mess of errors and flaws as one attempts to accomplish their vision this way. These are informative events on the nature of reality, the person, and their interaction with their world.

This requires shifting from the mode of seeking control over outcomes and seeing everything as an instrumental means to achieving something. One shifts over to a process-oriented paradigm where one sees activities as ends in themselves and enjoys the activity as an end-in-itself.

In summary, by acknowledging one’s limits, one can engage authentically with the world surrendering to its rhythm. This way, one gets to immerse in deep time and be able to relish the rough texture of life. Atelic activities makes one more attuned with the rhythm.

Embracing the finitude of life allows one to relish the raw texture of life. This is accessible when one is immersed in deep time and engages with one’s life fully instead of living in the untethered state, attempting to gain illusory control over the way the world unfolds.

Wabi-Sabi describes an aesthetic stance that embraces the ephemerality of things and gives space for life’s imperfections and incompleteness. It embraces the flaws and shortcomings as part and parcel of life.

These sorts of communal aspects are erased away as life gets more slick. There is an attempt at smoothening all this and getting to a polished surface where redundancies perceived as slack/errors/imperfections are wiped away, making way for the most optimal mechanism.

Imperfections imbue things with character. Their rough textures reflect the essence of life in their surfaces. A great example from the book is how Uber decentralizes and automates away the small talk that used to happen when cab drivers huddled together in a central spot.

Like a walk without a destination, the point of it is in performing the activity. By engaging in them, one gets to be in the moment and enjoy the process rather than living in a projected future where you will have everything under control.

The author's antidote here is to engage in activities that are not end-driven but are done just for the purpose of engaging in them. These are called atelic activities. They are conducted for the sake of doing the activity. The means is the end.

This contrasts with the instrumentalist mode of treating everything as a means to get to some end goal. It is pointed out that we treat time, nature, and possibly eventually our relationships as a kind of resource that can be optimized in this way.

By surrendering to the rhythms of the universe, one gets to listen and discover what is important. One can engage deeply with the world around them, accumulating local meaning derived through this authentic engagement. The author calls this kind of subjective time: “deep time”.

This entails consciously sacrificing many tasks and engaging in the few that matter rather than keeping on looking for the most optimal system that purports to help us achieve all our goals and clear our wish lists.

Four Thousand Weeks was a pretty good read on the finitude of life and how we foster an illusion of control over our time through time management techniques. It advocates instead for embracing the finitude of life.

This disposition interlocks with the ideas in 4000 weeks. The act of embracing our flaws is a way of living authentically and attending fully to the complexities of life rather than fleeing from its ugly, unpredictable, and messy aspects.

This is in stark contrast to imposing our will to change the world in a particular way. Our perpetual lack of grounding in understanding the way the world works leads to resentment and internal turmoil for we are not working with the world rather against it.

If we take up the curious role of a researcher of life, we can see our endeavours as experiments where we are trying to understand what the world is really telling us through the outcomes of our actions.

This contrasts with seeing failures as judgements that box us to “not have it.” Growth mindset flips this around: failures are not indicative of flaws in our eternally fixed character but rather learning opportunities to course-correct the processes we employ in our lives.

Mindset gives good pointers here. A central idea is the perspective shift to see errors and flaws as pointers to missing pieces of knowledge. With this, we see failures and errors as informative events that enable us to grow, adapt, and rectify our life processes.

Now that we have a rough idea of the lay of the land of how the mind attempts to control over imperfections, impermanence, and unpredictability of life, let us look at what perspective one can adopt to see the world differently.

Instead of accepting the fact that ultimately we don’t have absolute control over the world and surrendering to the way the world works, we engineer out Rube Goldberg style systems that control the world through myriad parameters eked out through our rational endeavours.

The language of optimisation from engineering and economics seeps into personal lives, and looks-maxxing, self-maxxing and agency maxxing are the common lingo in tech-adjacent Internet. One “locks in” to optimise some chosen metric, usually at the cost of many others.

Image from the article: https://100r.co/site/permacomputing_101.html with source: https://100r.co/media/content/blog/per101_040.png

It is embedded in an ambient way in today’s instrumental world, where the idea is to optimize systems for their best throughput, and reveals itself aesthetically in the slick and clean interfaces/surfaces of the machines that are polished to shiny perfection.

While it is easy to brush these aside as mental disorders and afflictions of OCDers, I think the same undercurrent of attempting to obsessively bring life under control manifests in subtler ways in everyday life.

100% of the idealized creations in our minds that we didn’t make are polished, perfect successes. This contrasts starkly with crafting something real that inevitably entails dealing with the imperfections and messiness of reality. It presents the looming possibility of failure.

A close cousin of OCD is perfectionism. While aspiring to a lofty ideal is a propelling factor behind many great human achievements, it can also degenerate as a coping mechanism to avoid the anxiety of building something real.