ask culture is like super smash brothers free for all with items on - very accessible to everyone, kind of chaotic. guess culture is like being pretty good with one character. having general social intelligence is like being able to understand the principles behind these things and use principles across multiple characters and multiple cultures to figure out how to communicate the way that you want.
high context conversations are satisfying
childish enough to believe that people will believe the things that they say
soda pain vs no pain
i don't want people in my life that make me feel good. i want people that push me to embody my values.
i have a perspective that i think separates out pretty quickly what types of people i get along with well, which is a perspective around words vs actions. i think a lot of people focus on words as a means of affection, but it's definitely not the primary thing for me. actions and effort mean a lot more. i think it's easy to have a perspective of, "my mother woke up almost every day at 5am to make
i will never understand people who find things less interesting as they find out more about it.
i hate explaining things. first of all, it feels like a lot of work. secondly, i definitely have this assumption that people aren't going to have the patience to care about what i'm saying. This is an assumption that i should be proactive about fighting. i should try and incorporate talking about what i'm actually spending time on in my regular update things.
mental pain is physical pain
can a sinner find peace in hell knowing that all is as it should be?
challenge what is default.
story for being born underground and never getting to see the sky but as a metaphor the experience of being "other" - always feeling like your current life isn't for you but not knowing what you need.
curiosity is discouraged in big cities since you get more information than you can deal with. big cities encourage high filtering of both people and of information.
transferring dependance from friends/family to corporations/government systems provides immediate benefit while discouraging more valuable long term social nets.
seek serotonin, not dopamine.
the people that would be great for you might already be in your life.
there is information that you are refusing to integrate.
maybe there are things that are good for you that are also pleasant, but whatever those things are, you are probably doing them already.
are you human or cattle? would you die without your master? what have you chosen for yourself they they have not allowed?
beyond grief is resolve
syz goals
would you have me cut off my own arm?
you have worked your whole life to make it here and be accepted here, but others have been here forever and are bored and tired of it.
identity as a signal for ego instability
when you have an unfulfilled want or need, things aren't seen as what they could be but instead as what they're not.
people focus more on expanding their network than on utilizing them
educational series where characters go to a school focused on that thing and get involved in tournaments and shit.
some people haven't found anything new to like since they were 19
public vulnerability as a way of expressing vulnerability when private vulnerability doesn't feel accessible
ego stability
class division in the us
second order effects
first order happiness vs nth order happiness
first order happiness is having a good meal. second order happiness is establishing access to a good meal at any time. do you want a good meal or do you want to spend a year learning how to cook which can functionality guarantee you good meals for
banchan
getting people to do things in sf is harder
gourmet breakdown
enjoyment -> acceptance -> improvement
card games formatting.
i miss how people in college had so much personalty. they had opinions and self development and reasons for them to deviating from the norm.
more than most other things, there is a strong desire to build
personal well being status check.
what can you do for me that i can't do for myself?
use tiers of closeness to create a plan on getting closer to people
solider's dilemma with regards to social issues
imagine a society where people graduate college and are invited to or participate in living communities rather than moving out to a place where they'll be isolated.
people become interesting via their various actions that you can break down. I'm cooking some soba noodles for lunch right now, but that breaks down pretty significantly. I'm making soba noodles because i don't think that the food I'm getting for free from my company will be very filling. i could have gotten more food and paid for it, but i felt that figuring out another meal component was going to be more exciting than paying money for more food. also i wanted to avoid paying for food. i'm cooking soba noodles because i got interested in them after seeing that they were easy to make at an asian grocery store. this is a food that i've had only a few times before and i felt confident enough that i would like it and that i would be able to make soba noodles in a way i enjoy.
i remember i liked this kind of thought process with regards to figuring out things about people but i definitely think i prefer it in retrospect - using this kind of thought process to try and help understand people more. there's the old story telling adage "show, don't tell" and i think this kind of thinking really exemplifies that.
very high levels of self honesty. you should be and want to be honest with yourself. if you're not willing to seek out the bad parts of yourself, how can you improve?
things can happen in proximity that are difficult to organize and plan. good conversations are a good example of this and adding a lot of structure around it creates an implication that there are rules to be followed and things to be expected. when people only acknowledge what is named, the things that are not named become unimportant.
non word sounds for communication are really fantastic
what does it mean to say that someone has a lot of personality
are you doing marketing or creating value? are you just making something look better or are you actually making it better
formal tension release? after having an awkward conversation, we should do something fun and lighthearted to chill out.
i'm starting to think that i often talk or act in a way that fuels or contributes to the insecurity of others. i think that I've seen this in a number of interactions across a decent number of people.
what specifically have you observed?
a lean towards familiarity and safety. a lean towards doing tried and true things rather than doing new things. a deeper push for emotional validation over information communication. leaning away from risk taking. unwillingness or aversion to self-expression. a tendency towards under communication rather than over communication.
this is something that I'd like to change, but there's a few problems here.
the first is a natural tendency to get absorbed in whatever i'm focused on. this results in a natural inability to direct attention to people that want attention from me.
secondly, there is a tendency for me to blunt with my words and say things that imply things i didn't mean to imply, especially as i get more and more comfortable with people. when these things aren't addressed, the suggestion can fester in a more meaningful and more difficult to deal with way than an outright accusation might.
finally it's likely for people to show affection in different ways and feel like a lack of affection is being provided. i think the existing literature about love languages goes into it plenty more than i need to but i think that also breaks down my experiences not quite syncing with people. the "validation" of others (as it's typically portrayed) doesn't mean that much to me and as a result, it's natural for me to not express affection that way.
i definitely naturally think of affection in terms of time. things like how much time someone else is willing to spend on doing things for you, how much time people are willing to spend on solving problems for you, how much time people are willing to spend with you.
you shouldn't want to stay the same. you should know how you want to change and already be in the process of changing in that direction.
complex products are doomed to failure
i've always wondered why pasta is so expensive. i wonder if i can create a few pasta recipes and sell them for a relatively cheap price.
paradox of leadership - in a company, the thing that's most important is that you look like a good leader to higher ups. however, in practice, the thing that makes you a good leader is whether you look like a good leader to the people who are under you.
when everyone does as little as possible to contribute to society, everyone has to do a lot more.
logical format. i want to come up with some kind of format that validates an array. let's consider the format "a" || ("b" && !"c"). i guess i could do a simple replacement of quotations, but how would i defend that against arbitrary code execution? maybe... i just decide not to care for now while that app is empty...
actually the regex schema is not so bad - i could just write code replacements that simplify the format.
divergent thinking
convergent thinking is narrowing down implementation details until you get one that works
predictive awareness
preference towards learning avoidance vs learning preference. if a piece of knowledge would hurt you, would you still learn it?
how do you get people to do the things they want? lots of people set goals and can't put in enough energy in order to actually pursue them.
creativity as a function of divergent thought.
your brain can think better than you can process emotion
information withholding as self-protection
algorithm that plays notes with a certain relationship to notes i play on the guitar
have you ever thought something that you've never heard someone else say.
would you rather have a passionate partner that sinks their time into the things they love and are renounced in their field as a result, or a partner who will always be there for you?
i like the idea of having a type of object that people can easily associate with me, like how some people have hats or sunglasses.
A lot of people specify boundaries to keep people from doing things that they don't like. however boundaries are also valuable in that they enable people to do more.
prioritization of people to hang out with.
categorizations of people's mental state:
- people that think of themselves and the world as "good" or "bad" care a lot about maintaining that perception. needs/wants validation from the world/peers. reflective of a background where validation is consistent or singular
- people nihilistically rejecting notions of "good" or "bad" as inconsistent and unhelpful and chasing their own beliefs and own perspective.
- people putting together a generically useful framework of how to get the most of
trust the world over yourself. trust yourself over other people.
dystopian society based on shame and systems of abuse. a near omniscient government entity assigns your value based on your loyalty to the system. this value is enforced by the rest of the world. the relationship between the government and its people is akin to abuse - singular dependance for metrics of value, isolation from outside influence, gaslit narrative. for this idea to really shine, i think this needs to be a system that avoids all stereotypical forms of "abuse". There are no clear actions of violence towards dissenters.
difference between processing emotions vs ignoring them. processing emotions means taking the time to understand them, understand the symptoms and understand the causes.
how much bandwidth do you have normally?
how much bandwidth do different things take up?
community and capitalism are detrimental to one another. the more community you have, the less capitalism you have. the more capitalism you have, the more community you have.
pusog fundraiser
i do not think you can be a normal person if you have internally resolved the contradictions inherent in the assumptions of society and updated your behavior to match those resolutions.
in a superposition of believing that people are good and that people are terrible? this prevents you from making meaningful action with regards to advancing relationships.
a refusal to participate in the transactional nature of conversations.
let's start somewhere pretty basic: the awkwardness around compliments. compliments can be awkward for all sorts of reasons, but here's a pretty big one - compliments are often not merely a statement of opinion. compliments are often given with the express purpose of endearing you to someone. they are a way of saying "i like you and i hope this makes you like me too", but compliments are also scary in this regard. is someone giving you a compliment expecting something in return, whether it be favor or something more significant?
what do you believe with regards to people?
- people are generally not malicious
- people are very bad at being good
- ego prevents people from recognizing and fixing their flaws
people think of ego as high self confidence, but i'd like to redefine ego as how significant your selfhood is to you. what is this selfhood?
it is the idea that you can be good or bad and that different attributes will make you good or bad.
it is the idea that you are doing well or that you are doing poorly.
how do you increase or reduce ego? when you do things for/to people and tell them it is for a particular reason, then you increase ego. people become more concerned with needing to be a particular way in order to reap those benefits. when you do things for/to people for no reason, people feel more comfortable doing or saying whatever they want.
people think that compliments are good, but compliments are curses. the implication is that people like you for a particular reason and there's an implication that without that reason, people won't like you.
there's this fundamental question - what is put in your brain by the world vs what comes from yourself?
i think it comes down to internal vs external benefit. when you do something for someone, do you do it so that they'll treat you better, so that they'll give you something in return, or are you doing it in and of itself?
how much of your initiative are started by you vs by other people
there is this ineffable quality of liking or disliking someone, where interactions are by default positive or negative.
how do you separate what a person tells you vs what a
what do you need in order to be ok?
- are you ok by default?
- do you have a scarcity mindset?
love is not being unable to see the bad parts of someone, love is acceptance of those terrible things.
bon appetit style syz videos
thinking about people is good
internet club
progress club
understanding and insight over fandom
do most people get their worth from their jobs? do most people think it's healthy to get their worth primarily from their jobs?
when talking normally, people can react in a pause. online, that's a lot more difficult
TRASH MANIFESTO
how do you deal with contradictory judgement calls? how well do you talk about differences of opinion?
big difference between "i am hanging out with you because you are someone that is around vs i am actively excited to hang out with you."
validation with disagreement
inherent conflict between capitalistic, transactional perspective and a key detail of the human experience - that providing value to other people provides us with value.
enjoying things is cringe
if you haven't seen this before, you haven't been paying attention
the default effect of your actions is that they primarily affect you, but this isn't true. worse yet, we've separated people in a desire to decouple people from one another unnaturally.
research questions:
- do you have a friend (someone you are not dating or related to) that you would be willing to financially support so they didn't need a full time job?
- is there any service you could receive from a friend you trust that would convince you to financially support them so they didn't need a full time job?
- if you and 3 other people agreed to take turns working and financially provide for the others, would you do it?
- if you could informally provide a service to a friend that you trusted in exchange for them supporting you financially so that you didn't need a full time job, would you do it?
the difference between seeing and understanding. you can explain what an elephant is to someone else, down to all its properties, but this does not give you the same understanding of an elephant that seeing an elephant does.
theory - the greatest contributor towards intelligence is not nature or education, but the people around you. If you want to be more intelligent, then you should spend time with intelligent people that drive your own intelligen.
people who trust their feelings and believe their feelings vs people that don't
pop weird
meal suggester
self optimization
hedonism engineering
only the greatest fool shall sit on the throne of god
the phenomenon of people talking past one another
context important vs individual important
thinking about a social structure for goals.
a common structure for goals makes it easy for people to talk about their goals, while socialization encourages people to work on their goals, learn more about how to improve them, and provides people with a better understanding of each other and themselves.
what is it specifically? participants create 1 to 3 goals to focus on over the course of a month, two-month, or quarter year. once that's decided, once a week, people "meet" to talk about how their goals are coming along.
i'm already seeing a lot of optionality. how should people meet? what should the format of the goals be? what should the format of the meetings be? i'm going to record my thoughts and establish something more concrete or else people will be confused.
drinking games
testings
outside vs inside
so much of culture comes from inaccessibility. specialized context does a lot to make things impactful.
emotional complexity
THE LINE
you have to learn to take care of yourself before you learn to take care of others. if you can't take care of yourself, you're going to be bad at taking care of others.
are you willing to change your systems? do you recognize that your behaviors are probably upholding the system
creativity as a function of security
if you're only going to do it if you get paid, then it's not worth doing
fundamentals of systems thinking: when you have one person doing something, it's fine. when you have hundreds of people doing that thing, things change.
internet meetup - people meetup and share things that they found on the internet that they like. show and tell style
better ways to build online communities
there's a bizarre non-humanism to social media conversations. people rarely ask things that they would in real life - things delving into deeper and more meaningful things. comments are rarely just responses - they're opportunities to rack up your own points against the general outside group by making a joke or starting an argument.
as someone who has been suicidal in the past, i can tell you that things that give me a reason to live are a lot more valuable than things that enable me to live
i know you're fighting for your life, but can't you be civil
a bunch of things i write here have not been saving properly. as a result, i've been having to play this game where i guess what the last thing i was thinking was
spotify playlist syncing with friends
don't trust your eyes
parasite and the line
i don't want the things you can offer me
luxury poisons the mind and dulls the senses
the individualization of capitalism
american society has a perspective that the quality of what you make or do is most important. there's a significant
you can only compromise with good faith actors. a bad faith actor is a pawn at best.
fuck art
stories always have such simple relationships of liking someone or not liking them. "being there" for other people is presented as a binary choice. real relationships are more complicated. people have varying levels of ability and compatibility. people have different levels of interest in one another. people have different things they want out of the relationship. people have varying levels of knowing what they want out of a relationship.
people seem to have these invisible walls that they can't seem to get past. there are lines in the sand that they're used to telling themselves "oh there's nothing past here anymore".
art is disruption. taking an existing form and making it both new and enjoyable. a combinatorial form generator is a natural path towards art.
i have a theory that good ideas can be generated from taking a form and putting a spin on.
commodification of humans
you don't need evidence if people are going to agree with what you're going to say anyways. i personally feel like it's really important to gather evidence
syzygy is weird from a marketing standpoint because we are trying to advertise an informal place. we are trying to enforce a form on something that we also want to be informal.
the form does not and should not be concerned with the informality.
Personal progress is infinite and impossible and worth doing even if it makes you unhappy.
Dunning Kruger cyclic effect - people find out about the dunning Kruger effect and think, "well that explains why all those idiots act the way they do"
infinite loops that people get stuck in.
blame is an infinite, endless cycle.
blame is violence
often what is fair or just leads to a worse future
doing your fair share is not enough in a terrible world
you can't just try the same thing over and over again and call it "trying"
if you had to choose between a better world or a fairer world, which would you choose?
What's something that you used to think everyone else agreed with you, but then you found out that actually very few people believed that thing?
tired of compliancy
how can you have so much and still feel so hungry for more. will anything make you happy? is there anything more you can demand from the world?
internally entertained or externally entertained? does someone or something external to you need to provide you with content or can you create that content yourself? are you a consumer or a creator?
good questions are better than good answers
don't like to consumer unless it enables creation somehow. consumption without creation seems pointless?
theory crafting
thinking about people's tendancies to ignore trouble rather than tackle it
untitled goose and acessibility
let's get polling app, task management app
for the future automation, crm, marketing (mailchimp), knowledge accumulation
infinite vs non-infinite entities
the idea of fairness
there's a perspective that's that if everyone cleans up after themselves, then syz will be clean. however, there are factors that contribute to uncleanliness besides this. additionally, people don't reliably clean up after themselves. we need two different efforts. the first effort is to pick up all the uncleanliness that isn't covered by people cleaning up after themselves. the second effort is to decrease how much of that effort there is a third effort that is indirectly related to cleaning is dealing with people individual frustrations at cleaning up after others.
Been thinking about two types of organizational/relationship stress. There’s one type of stress that’s pretty well known that i would call “Quality Stress” this refers to the stress that comes from not having something be of a particular quality. You work on something and it’s not quite as good as you wanted or as flashy as you wanted or as popular as you wanted.
the other type of stress i would call "fairness stress". This type of stress isn't defined by any particular quality, but by the amount of effort that you feel like you put into something compared to other people. You feel like you're putting in more work than everyone else and you feel like that's not fair. You feel like other people are taking advantage of the fact that you're more willing to put more effort in, or the fact that you have more time to put the effort in, or the fact that you care more.
in general, i definitely like to think that i have fairly decent coping mechanisms for both of these things, but i was definitely having a lot of frustration with fairness stress leading up to the this show on thurs and throughout the past few months.
there's a lot of questions there that i think are actually fairly difficult questions. if i feel like i put in way more effort than other people/the other person, what's the right thing for me to do? is it ok or good for me to pressure other people into putting more effort into the things i care about, regardless of whether or not they care about it? Should this be something that i try and deal with in my own head? should i talk to them about it and cut them out if they don't improve?
i think a common response to this is going to be that it depends on the specifics of the situation. different people are going to have different boundaries and different things that they're willing to compromise. At the end of the day, you have to know yourself and know what you want from other people and you have to make that clear to others. If they're not able to provide that, then you have to figure out what compromise you're ok with.
Another common thing is feeling like an event was going to be somehow revolutionary for you and it just wasn't. You had your hopes way too high for how emotionally impacted you would be by something
feeling like someone knows you is good when they do something for you correctly, and feels bad when they do something incorrectly. this could be them being wrong, but also it could be them being right in a way that you don't like.
the main appeal of a bar is paying money so that no one has to do any work in hosting.
fundamentally, do you want to be around people with similar taste?
new drum machine format where different velocities correspond to one of a number of different drum samples
why are there so many more boring people in adulthood
house party vibe vs public event vibe: is the appeal the person or people involved or is the appeal the activity that's going on?
when you get too close to people and see them everyday, you don't have an opportunity to see how they're doing long term
a person's shadow or echo
experience hashes
nothing a person does that isn't changing a system or creating a system matters
people can create and change systems within themselves.
there are many things that someone has to do, but only a few people have to do and it's unfair to expect or ask anyone to do.
how to stand out
entropic creation
rubber duck therapy
question/answer theory of good story telling. question/answer format of good game design? you tend to play a game with this question of "what can i do
enhanced baseline cognitive load as a result of cognitive disassociation
invisible door
relativity reference frames for decisions
how to have good conversation and enjoy it more
personal variance
syz invite list
let's experiment with how little we need in order to do an art show
people have a strong idea of what is their community and have a VERY hard time reaching out of their community
assumptions necessary for automating thought flows
immediate feedback is important for interest and art
mathematical modeling tendancies
vibe check value
live narrator project
self awareness test
new gambling
advanced specialization or generalized mediocrity
percolate
connection between dissonance and negative feedback loops
hunter mentality
relationship between age, stability, decreased risk taking, decay
casual conversation
single dependancies
power distance
high quality interactions