Experiments in Autodidacticism

[Clinamenic]

It reveals that he, West, has contended with these concepts on levels that are less purely academic, but rather more vulnerable and honest, than the levels on which most people contend with them.

 

[Murphy]

To paint you have to focus in and pull back, same with language

Cornel West can call you brother, Judith Butler has cats, compounded by American stereotypes

 

[Clinamenic]

His body language, from what I've seen, is one of a reserved and sophisticated ecstasy, an ecstasy that sometimes spills over into exuberant gestures and vocal emphases.

 

[Murphy]

Dave Chapelle comparing Bush and Clinton holding babies for press junkets

 

[Clinamenic]

To paint you have to focus in and pull back, same with language

Cornel West can call you brother, Judith Butler has cats, compounded by American stereotypes

Totally, and I've been strictly focused in for so long as to constitute a sort of hyperacademic psychosis. Still feel the pull.

edit: granted a very benign psychosis in the grand scheme of psychoses. In the sense of a reality that is substantially detached/removed from normal reality.

 

[Murphy]

His body language, from what I've seen, is one of a reserved and sophisticated ecstasy, an ecstasy that sometimes spills over into exuberant gestures and vocal emphases.

House is a feeling

Serious point though, it’s like a bit like the flip of Eddie Murphy’s white bloke performativity impression (I can’t do philosophy after a day like today, inherited a dog....)

The point with West is passion underpinned by a metabrain capable of holding multiple complex concepts in mental hyperspace, move them round at will, see each mode through and still be an engaging speaker +++

Academia is loaded with good brains who present poorly and vice versa. It’s rare to get both

 

[Murphy]

Totally, and I've been strictly focused in for so long as to constitute a sort of hyperacademic psychosis. Still feel the pull.

edit: granted a very benign psychosis in the grand scheme of psychoses. In the sense of a reality that is substantially detached/removed from normal reality.

Communication through the physical act of speaking or doing presentations makes your brain really focus, more plasticity, but language itself can be reductive too

 

[william_kent]

reading Judith Butler sends me to sleep when I have insomnia, her words have power...

 

[Leo]

Something to take seriously. I sense much of the world's high-level business hangs in the balance of first impressions, gut feelings, readings of body language, etc, things more primal than conceptual sophistication.

wonder if/how this has changed due to the pandemic, when business travel ground to a halt and most business was conducted via zoom. you see each other, get a first impression/gut feeling, can read some body language, but you're removed. you can't possibly replicate the actual IRL interaction and experience.

 

[Clinamenic]

wonder if/how this has changed due to the pandemic, when business travel ground to a halt and most business was conducted via zoom. you see each other, get a first impression/gut feeling, can read some body language, but you're removed. you can't possibly replicate the actual IRL interaction and experience.

Interesting, hadn't thought of that. No remote participation in golf, or in underage sex parties at the Plaza for that matter.

 

[woops]

One of the reasons I've been turning back, gradually, toward plain language. Still not there yet, but significantly better than many of my earlier posts where I felt little to no need to keep things simple, but was rather more concerned with articulating the most advanced thinking I could achieve, at the expense of simple language.

yeah i remember your first post stan.

 

[Clinamenic]

Very remote and warped dispatches back to the crowd, whereas now I am learning how to carry that message in ways that keep it more intact.

 

[Clinamenic]

I've been formulating a more targeted topic schedule, where instead of each day being its own topic, a week is dedicated to a topic, with each day having its own subtopic. Seeing as computer science is taking the lead in terms of net focus, I will expand the program with COMP as the first topic:

-MACRO topic (XXXX)
-----MESO topic (XX)
----------MICRO topic (?)


-ECON (Economics / Finance)
-GOVT (Government / Law / Public Policy)
-GPOL (Geopolitics)
-PHIL (Philosophy)
-BUSI (Business / Marketing)
-SOCI (Sociology)
-LITR (Literature)

-MATH (Maths)
-PHYS (Physics)
-CHEM (Chemistry)
-BIOL (Biology)
-PSYC (Psychology)
-ENGN (Engineering)
-COMP (Computer Science)
-----COMP-NN (Neural Networks)
-----COMP-CA (Cellular Automata)
-----COMP-BL (Blockchain)
-----COMP-EN (Energy Industry)
-----COMP-IP (TCP/IP)

-RELI (Religion / Metaphysics)
-NEUR (Neuroscience)
-STAT (Statistics)
-HIST (World History)
-MEDI (Medicine)
-MUSI (Music)
-ARCH (Architecture)


So the five working subtopics of COMP are blockchain, neural networks, cellular automata, the business and technology of energy production and infrastructure, and TCP/IP and other such protocols.

I also seek to make this program more active and product-oriented, rather than just watching lectures. Perhaps it would be best to use a method based on questions, and formulating succinct and intuitive answers to them, answers that make sense to the first person I meet outside, to follow Feynman's standard.

Another factor to consider is how to keep the other topics in the loop, even during a focus period on a single topic. My initial answer is this, to have five days each with a subtopic focus, and to leave two days open for covering other topics.

Once I work out some ways to engage more actively with some of these topics, I may be able to squeeze 30 min sessions into days that are focused on other topics, building toward a modular schedule of topic-based engagements that can keep the whole macro schedule in the loop.

Really the whole point of this is to A) build an integral understanding of organized matter and the affairs thereof on this planet, and B) to gather and compress knowledge into packets/capsules that can be unpacked on a practical basis, rather than having to lug around a bunch of information.

Also need to work out a third degree of specialization, sub-subtopics, which may allow for more comprehensive schedule-drafting

 

[Clinamenic]

A little over a month ago, my laptop got soaked and the documentation for the month of August may have been compromised, and so for the last month I have been in more of a freeform state with this project, which was already happening before the laptop got soaked - suboptimal structure of things, to just have vastly different topics every day and to rely only on passive learning via lectures.

 

[Clinamenic]

Another benefit to a more active, product-oriented method would be the potential for sharing these products (code, diagrams, reports, etc) as things that are more resume-friendly than this project at large.

Correlated to this turn I've been feeling toward plainer language, is this turn of embracing socialization in ways I hadn't been considering worthwhile, i.e. actually leaving the realm of ideas and investing my attention into other people.

 

[Clinamenic]

A central hypothesis to this project is that if I get into a flow state while grokking some topic, I should be able to encapsulate that felt intuition into a diagram and/or report, which upon revisitation would reactivate the felt intuition to some degree.

All of this, as opposed to ongoing memory maintenance. Trying to hold onto a bunch of facts and terms, which are not grounded in intuition, would seem to, in the long term, cost more cognitive energy to subsist than this method would cost.

Also being tested here is a sort of epistemological network effect, that the interconnection of a bunch of nodes (patches of knowledge) will result in the nodes developing/growing more efficiently than if those nodes were siloed and strictly focused on.

 

[Clinamenic]

I am thinking the whole project may benefit from having an aim, aside from just knowledge as an end in itself, and aside from merely designing a self-guided generalist method.

One prospective aim is to determine what an algorithmically democratic metaverse could consist of, how it would be built, etc, and to then divide that up into more specific and concrete questions to be distributed among the tiered topics, to be focused on in a more specialized light.

 

[Clinamenic]

Recently I've been getting some basic insights regarding western musical notion, following an introduction to the topic from a Yale course called "Listening to Music" which I would recommend.

And one way this insight-effort can converge with the insight-efforts of COMP, is by fine-tuning a soundtrack to play while working on code, a sort of harmonizing trance.

The ones that stand out for me are Route One by Sigur Ros, and Music for Eighteen Musicians by Steve Reich.

But as a way to exercise composing, as an active effort under MUSI, perhaps I may instead tailor a piece of music to complement the experience of working on code.

That is, the project central to a focus on the topic MUSI, but one that is only referenced in the project central to COMP.

Actually, the music itself may involve certain mathematical operations, which could be a convergence with MATH. Or it could involve NEURO.

 

[Clinamenic]

For example, the first thing I tried, on this shared sheet music notebook app Flat.io, was tracing out an arbitrary melody for a piano, with the central note being 0, and time being time (still don't intuit the whole A-G scale).

And for a second piano, I instead charted the derivative of the first one. I put the value of the rate of note-change as the note to be played, in tandem with the initial melody.

Anyway, what I did didn't sound interesting, but it could yet be [an] interesting technique.

edit: bracketed text

 

[Clinamenic]

Pathosonic algorithms, etc.