That's what I thought of too. Just finishing reading Sorcerer's Apprentice - a kind of slog of a read written by one of the insiders of the Castaneda cult. I wonder if he "borrowed" the name...
Is the guy really a cult leader tho? Hahaha, this thread is totally not about this guy but OK: I guess he’s got a cult on your mind if you keep thinking of him while this is actually about something else. Wouldn’t that be your problem tho, not about this guy?
Interesting aside speaking of lucid dreaming- at least one of the authors of this paper is a lucid dream researcher - Karen Konkoly at Northwestern. Another people she coauthored studies conversing with lucid dreamers while they're mid-dreaming. Interesting stuff.
In my experience using Django for my webapps hasn't meant I can avoid HTML and javascript. Writing templates is writing HTML, and any relatively fancy UI including charting etc. requires using javascript
I built a recent Django site that only used JS for analytics and to implement the close button on a modal. You can do charting using server side rendered images pretty easily, especially as SVGs (although I concede, dynamic charts client side are a better UI). CSS is harder to escape if you want things to look fancy.
Given the update latency pynecone has, I can't imagine a charting library would work well.
Mega impressed, I can see myself using this regularly. Charting and viz with matplotlib and pandas transforms is great, but a lot of time there’s a benefit of dumping to point-and-click mode with tableau to quickly spin data around without much coding. This will make that workflow much smoother
Yep. And also there are so many alternatives of dataviz that I struggle to decide which one to use. You learn a few syntax, then come a newer and more beautiful visualization lib and you have to learn all basic syntax again.
There's a huge diversity of social arrangements throughout history. Some of them communal and sharing, some warlike and taking; forced labor and not; monetary systems and not; etc. The quote you reply to is overly nostalgic and too simplistic to reflect realities of history, same with your comment.
Social arrangements throughout history are indeed quite varied. Social arrangements in pre-history and especially pre-agricultural societies less so. Absence of agriculture puts a much lower limit on the size of social groups, usually around 50-150. Rates of violent death vary from ~12-25% (as in asking the question, "what percentage of people died naturally or at the hands of other human beings?"), across multiple continents. This is considerably higher than agricultural societies, and vastly larger than industrial societies.
So what? Your utility function is one-dimensional, lifespan. Maximizing the productive lifespan of proles or serfs is optimal in a society where power is centralized, but you are discounting the value of autonomy to zero.
I reject the Hobbesian premise that other social forms should be dismissed as nasty, brutish, and short, and it's not for lack of familiarity with the anthropology of prehistorical conflict.
Show me a hunter-gatherer society that has social groups spanning hundreds of people or more. There's fundamental limits of food production and social organization without tools like agriculture to support larger population density, or writing to organize larger groups of people. You're asking me to prove a negative here.
You’re conflating carrying capacity with social arrangements, and directly say that lower carrying capacity reduces the variety of social arrangements.
You really think that contemporary Pygmies of the Congo, the uncontacted people of the Amazon, the 19th century Australian Aborigines, Cheyenne, Inuit, and Shawnee, along with the prehistoric of Central Europe and East Asia, are culturally indistinguishable beyond silly hats?
They're not culturally indistinguishable. But they absolutely share many similar characteristics distinct from both agrarian and industrial societies: all of them primarily interact and live in social groups much smaller than agrarian societies. All had rates of violence drastically higher than today.
Of course they have different languages, religious practices, etc. But that's not particularly important relative to the point I'm making: none of the societies you listed were examples of the idyllic noble-savage kind of society that popular culture tends to portray hunter gatherers to be.
> But that's not particularly important relative to the point I'm making: none of the societies you listed were examples of the idyllic noble-savage kind of society that popular culture tends to portray hunter gatherers to be.
Literally no one is making that point. What people (or at least I am) saying is believing all hunter gatherer societies are dominated strong man violence is pure fantasy that is informed by they’re own biases and wishes rather than actual data.
This sounds very interesting, thank you for sharing. Could you recommend any resources to learn about these three regions, ideally for someone without formal physics training?
Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind contains a good layman's discussion of it. (It also contains a good example of a layman's work that makes the same mistake the article under discussion here does: even after going to all the trouble to explain in detail how the three regions I described work, and how "now" slicings, unlike the three regions I described, are frame-dependent and don't have physical meaning, he then makes an invalid argument for the "block universe" viewpoint that depends on ignoring the three regions and treating "now" slicings as though they do have physical meaning. It's an excellent example of how even experts of the stature of Penrose can get things wrong.)
I recall a former cult member turned therapist and cult expert Steve Hassan mentioning TM as problematic, he is the first reviewer quoted by this book about the topic
Any website/domain created for the sole purpose of smearing another peaceful individual gets an instant Ctrl+W from me. TM is a bit outrageous with their pricing model, but it's just mantra meditation with a paid instructor. No, I don't work for TM and I've never paid for a TM class. I just know TM has done a lot of good for the world despite their flaws. But everyone has flaws. I'd rather focus on the positive.
I think the discourse you started here becomes even more interesting and defensible if your assertion goes from “God isn’t real” to “God is human created.” It makes the idea of rights clearer as some kind of higher order, purer version of law
It sounds like you’re saying: all I need to do is stop, but I can’t! Meaning you are in your own way.
If you have positive cash flow right now I’d recommend finding a therapist, since personality changes like this can take some deep digging. Personally I have found experiential therapy useful, things like EMDR, process work, gestalt, or even jungian dream analysis. Many on HN speak positively about cognitive therapy like CBT. You will need to spend a little time exploring and may not find the right fit with your first therapist. Good luck!
Hmm on therapy - I most likely have ADD but I'm not 100% sure. I tend to not concentrate very well. I do know people have said I'm enthusiastic, loud, hyper, sometimes even on drugs (but I'm 100% not).
I'm happy my family and friends, and well HN family is supportive so thats nice :)
Therapy isn’t really about diagnosing things like ADD. Therapists can’t prescribe drugs, etc. Therapy is good for helping understand why we do things we don’t think we want to do.
I.e. it’s possible you’re not actually being “used” and that’s just a framing you’ve created to manage other feelings around usefulness + your own value. Or conversely you ARE being used, but you don’t want to stop because it provides something, some feeling, that you do want.
(I’m not actually suggesting those specific things apply to you - those are just made up examples)
I’ve found therapy really really helpful in terms of decoding motivations I wasn’t consciously aware of. Would highly recommend!
True I'll consider therapy :))
Nah definitely the latter - my parents and siblings keep telling me about my situations since it happened already like 20 times.
FWIW, diagnosing and treating mental illnesses only partially overlaps with therapy. It's also useful for help with emotional/mental/social things in your life you just have trouble with — in your case, setting boundaries.
A psychiatrist prescribes medication; a therapist is more of a confidante and a coach. Whether you have ADD or not, there's no shame in employing someone to help you be a better you!
We’re at the point in the cycle where dollars donated to Psymposia will get better ROI than dollars to MAPS. Psychedelics aren’t going away at this point. Powerful tools must be handled with care, lest they cause more harm than good.
At this point it seems like Psymposia’s MO is that MAPS is the scandal, and is generating bad science. Not sure I 100% agree but I think it’s a point worth considering.
