linguistics

What's in a question...". Here's a scenario...
I say something. It could be anything but for the sake of argument, "I hope Trump runs for a third term."

People in hearing range are heard to ask (examples):
   - What do you mean by that?
   - Umm, have you read the Constitution?
   - Why?
   - How do you think that benefits the country?

My interest... Which, if any, of those questions might be considered an invitation to dialogue? Which might elicit a defensive or angry response? If we accept a premise that Our country is being damaged by polarization and hostility, how do we engage with one another to explore the why's behind opinions held? What is your base response when someone asks you a question?

I have observed what I think is shift in definition (or perception) regarding the purpose of a question. To some extent, I think the use and nature of questions has been placed in a negative light. And, that is hazardous to Our ability to gather and analyze information as well as Our opportunities communicate about important societal issues.

At a base level, how much does tone of voice matter? Does who asked -how they look- matter? Does the choice of words affect your response? The time or place? How much of your response is determined primarily by how you interpret the question versus how the questioner might have intended it?

Additional circumstances where I wonder about questions and what they mean or do...
   - How often does a politician who represents you ask your opinion before voting on a matter?
   - Are public polls and surveys able to collect opinion fairly? (I.E., Shouldn't there generally be a "None of the above" option for almost everything you've ever been asked? Or, data about who is taking the poll and for what purpose? I am tired of being forced to answer in a way that defines my 'social box' incorrectly.)
   - Particularly with regard to evaluation of programs, we are asked to place ourselves in various classifications. Income, race, faith, address, age - you know what I mean. These "metrics" are quantitative and objective but... Who decides on the ranges?; Who decides on definitions? When we are measuring whether the quality of someones life has improved, do we need more 'humetrics'?

Have I perhaps managed to kindle curiosity in a dark corner ? :-) It seems to me that this is worth thinking and talking about. It may be part of healing and finding our individual agency to affect the world. It might also be a part of solving problems in a way that promotes positive-sum outcomes. 

AMA with Hannah Aline Taylor. Wednesday 2/4 at 4:00 PM CT

love, boundaries, and mistakes in relating, community, and peopling together (+ thank god love doesn’t look like you expect it to)

Incorruptible Organizations AMA with Eric Ries. Wednesday 2/4 at 3:00 PM CT

Lean Startup author who now focuses on legal structures to protect mission-driven organizations from corruption. incorruptible.co

Free book giveaway! Register here.

AMA with Jeffrey Ladish. Wednesday 2/4 at 2:00 PM CT

Executive director of Palisade Research; studying AI loss of control risks.

AMA with Rob Miles on AI Safety. Wednesday, 2/4 at 1:00pm CT

AISafety.info founder has spent years telling the world about risk posed by strong AI.

Second Coming of (Distributed) Christ (Consciousness). Alex Zhu on Wednesday 2/4 at 11:30 AM CT

A math and compsci guy tries to integrate mysticism and spirituality into a rigorous epistemic and a rational worldview.

What is the 'Metacrisis' and How Do We Solve It? (AMA). Rewatch the live AMA conversation with Layman Pascal 

Are spiritual teachers more narcissistic on average? Our best guess at infant phenomenology is that we come out of the womb experiencing a pre-differentiated oneness. As babies, we assume the world revolves around us because for all we can tell, the world is us. We have no way to empathize bc we can’t take another perspective. This theory underpins a lot of psychological claims, like “we internalized our parents’ fighting, assuming it was about us when it really wasn’t.” 

I claim this isn’t an elevated spiritual state, because we haven’t developed individuality yet. We need to have something before we can transcend it. Ego collapse and ego-transcendence both involve a different sense of self from the adult norm, so they’re easy to confuse without a developmental distinction. Both provide a sense of certainty, and rely on non-linguistic knowing, making it harder to recognize the distinctions.

To the extent this is true, it makes me wonder: Are spiritual teachers more narcissistic on average?? (some evidence points that way, but no rigorous studies exist). Can they differentiate between the state of pre-differentiated and post-differentiated union? And if they can’t, how often are experiences labeled “union,” or “nonduality” actually literal infantile regressions? If so, wouldn’t these teachers exhibit the same self-centered orientation of an infant?

Plus, selection effects: narcissistic individuals are drawn to roles with authority, attention, and reduced accountability structures. Communities where charisma is more relevant than independent reviews of competence (versus accounting or Nascar), and states of attainment are categorically unverifiable by the students (versus massage or writing fiction).

Distinguishing infant oneness from transcendence

This doesn’t mean all spiritual teachers or leaders are “narcissistic” even in a colloquial sense, just higher risk. And it’s an inherent epistemological risk in finding someone who’s better than you at something you haven't accessed, using frameworks you haven't developed, verified by experiences you can't reproduce (yet).

So best to encourage critical thinking, and introspect on some of the checks I have for myself (and others) about myself and anyone I look to for guidance: Is my spiritual practice increasing my need for special treatment, entitlement, surrounding me with people that never challenge my views? Am I always turning criticism around—saying it's “your karma,” “your projection,” “your lesson”, “your drama triangle stuff”?” Am I telling others what’s true about them without acknowledging my projection (ironically), justifying boundary violations since it’s all illusory, calling my emotional reactivity "authenticity," calling others’ reactivity attachment?

Or do I laugh at myself, and the inevitable foibles I engage to maintain the sense of self I’m laughing at? Can I laugh at any so-called “spiritual attainment”? Do I truly not need special treatment—do I wipe the toilets and empty the trash like everyone else? Am I able to hold many different perspectives at once, including “unity” and my uniqueness? Do I maintain appropriate boundaries while experiencing interconnection? Is my ethical behavior consistent across contexts?

Please help me stay intellectually honest! I'm not a fan of generative AI in general, and LLM technology specifically. I think its capabilities are being drastically over-hyped. It's a perfect, sweaty example of a solution looking for a problem. I'm skeptical of many claims people are making wrt how it's helping them.

My experience is it's like having access to an idiot-savant intern. Awful at most tasks, but knows everything and can read incredibly quickly.

Publicly, I've taken on the mantle of a staunch critic of generative AI and a pro-human, pro-soul advocate.

And for the most part, I'm happy with that stance. I like it. It feels good to rail against something, and it feels good to contrast a thing that I hate against something I love. It throws the love into more relief.

Yet, I don't want to lose any babies in that bathwater, and I don't want to lose my intellectual honesty in the neurochemical rush of fighting for a cause. So I'd love to explore the best use cases of LLMs that you all are actually using, and actually finding beneficial, life improving, productivity increasing, all of that.

I'd love to hear your experience, and ideally, you'd to tell me how you're doing what you're doing with it in enough detail so that I can try it.

I'll start.

Absolutely most useful thing I've found for it so far, and it's not even close, is language learning.

I'm in a slow process of learning Japanese, and asking a chatbot to break down the grammar of a specific sentence is super useful. It's also great for generating content for flashcards. Say you have a set of characters, and you want some example words that use each particular character. It's so easy to generate stuff like that.

Outside of that, I use it in super basic ways (basically as google with one less step).

So please, give me your best use cases, things that you've not only been impressed by, in a "oh wow, that monkey can tap dance!" way, but that has actually improved the quality of your life.

Free FROM. Sexual freedom is not actually freedom TO (do xyz).

We are always sexually free TO do whatever we want.

That's why there's cheating, and why monogamy cannot prevent cheating, why in fact monogamy is what creates cheating.

Monogamy is the context of promises and agreements which has us categorize some sex as right and some sex as wrong, or "cheating."

Without this construct, we have the sex we have with the people we have sex with.

Sexual freedom is freedom FROM.

Freedom from meaningmaking.

Freedom from abstraction and evaluation and analysis.

Freedom from judgment.

Freedom from the impulse to hide my sex, my sexuality, my nudity, my desires.

Freedom from unpleasant consequences for sharing and showing what and who and how I am, what and who interests me, how I want to connect with others.

In this freedom from, people's questions about my sex life make little sense to me.

They come from the premise that I am largely executing freedoms TO, aka the idea that I'm having lots of sex with lots of people, whatever those acts and numbers are to THEM.

Sure, I'm free TO do that. But that doesn't mean I do. You're free to do that too. It doesn't mean you do. Being free to do something is an option, not an impetus.

In fact, being and feeling trapped is often what people are choosing when they're free to choose anything. They just don't see it that way. Much of my work is showing this to individuals who are ready to see it.

The questions people ask me about my sex life and my romance reveal that they are not free FROM certain ideas about sex, its meaning, its consequences, the consequences of sharing information about it, etc. They ask questions that I have no answers to because I am free FROM these constructs. I can't answer, because I am not within the construct where the question even makes sense.

"How do your lovers feel about you having sex with other people?" Is a good example of this.

I am free from the idea that it is anyone's business who anyone else is having sex with, and free from the idea that it's my business to hear about the feelings someone has when they stray from their own business.

I am free from the idea that feelings are about circumstances. What they feel when they hear about me having sex with someone else is a result of the thoughts they think about it and the cocktail of experience within them at any given moment, NOT about the fact of me having sex with someone else.

They don't feel anything about MY actions, they feel things about whatever their internal world makes of that information. This is why lying is even possible. I can tell someone false information, and their experience is made of believing the information is true. If that fact didn't happen, then how could the experience they have of believing it happened be about that fact? How did my lover feel, after I had sex with someone else, before I told them about it? That's how they truly feel about me having sex with someone else.

I am free from meddling within the feelings of others, free from the idea that a feeling could be wrong or evidence of something going wrong, free from the idea that feelings are to be fixed or cured, free from the idea that certain feelings "shouldn't be."

I am free from the idea that it is my job to know or caretake the feelings of another. I am free from the idea that it is possible for me to know how another person feels—I can know what they tell me, how that translates within me, but that's already at least two abstractions away from the sensations they experience in their bodies.

I am also free from close relationships with people who are not free from these ideas. I am free from judgment and unpleasant consequences when I share information about my sex life, or even if I were to be seen in it or caught in the act, because those I relate with are free from patterns of getting in someone else's business. I am free from consequences because those I relate closely with are free from the sanctimony and righteousness of leveraging consequences on someone they love.

I am free from the idea that I should exercise my freedom to have sex with someone simply because there's attraction there. I am free from my own reactivity to intense desire, and therefore able to reserve myself to only invest sexual energy with those who are free from these patterns and beliefs.

I am sexually free because I am free from the bullshit society programs into us about sex.

We are all sexually free to do whatever we want. But when we exercise sexual freedom TO without sexual freedom FROM, it's a bad time all around.

How to make skills of depth/presence/development legible to others? I've had this fantasy for the past year of creating a YT live stream show that features different teachers, facilitators, healers of different modalities and somehow make legible what they're doing to a larger audience.

Often, my experience is people enter the spiritual/healing/relational arts world from a really intellectual place and work down.

For example, 
- Read a book about the topic (NVC, IFS, meditation, etc)
- Practice it mainly from their head (sentence stems)
- Do a milllion reps and somewhere realize, this is also an embodied awareness practice
- Start getting into the weird woo territories of energy, spirits, intuition, etc

But to a beginner, there's a pre-/post- issue where you can't really tell the difference between a really deep facilitator and a really confident charlatan.

Furthermore, you aren't really that interested in the really deep people. A lot of my friends have been practicing for 15+ years and won't seem impressive on a podcast or a stage like the big head intellectuals and academia folk (Brene Brown, Lex Friedman, Huberman, etc) but they are geniuses in their own craft.

So, how to illustrate these skills that don't translate as well into written or spoken existing mediums?

hope that's legible what the q here even is

Spiritual AND religious ⛪️ . I’m spiritual AND religious. 

I’m spiritual: I believe reality-experience far transcends my individual self-reference, my understanding, and the understanding of science; and I believe this transcendence has a causal impact on the happenings of the world.  

But I’m also religious: I’m dedicated to daily transformative and devotional practices; I’m daily connected to other practitioners; I study “the transcendent” all the time (God, the universe, Truth, Love, Beauty, philosophy, awakening, shadow, etc), I learn from lineages with thousands of years of wisdom. I’m informed, challenged, supported by a community of fellow practitioners, teachers and students who are all involved—in my business, family, friends. I show up every Monday night to relatefulness, and sometimes y’all work me :) 

Some of y’all may not even realize you’re part of my religious community. You may want to keep the word out of your mouth like a bitter root. But you send me podcasts, articles, comments, give me gifts and ideas that show how much exists beyond what I knew, perhaps beyond what is knowable. You show me what I’m holding on to that I can give up. You show me how to be a better father, son, husband, citizen, steward of the evolutionary impulse. You show me love, humor, gentleness, forgiveness. You show me ways to come into greater integrity.

I don’t mean that I belong to a specific form like Christianity or Buddhism. I belong to you.

And I belong to a commitment: to inhabit and be changed by spirituality, rather than just claim it. To knowingly devote myself to it in every single moment, especially when I’m resistant.

#TTT 

Shadows of personal growth culture: weaponized toolkits. I think everyone here has probably experienced weaponized NVC. What are some of the other things you see weaponized that annoy you?

eg:

• Weaponized Commitment to connection: there are bunch of versions of this: i can’t heal myself without you, my feelings are dependent on your reaction (classic codependency) you must stay in the connection and respond to my inquiry or else you’re not deep, spiritual, or committed enough, etc

• weaponized owning your experience

Of course most of the time if you simply use principles, steps, and tools for yourself only you dont run into these issues; but even then people are sneaky and manipulative (often without even realizing it themselves!)

casre. The article here on Relatefulness vs Circling, and numerous instances of listening to people try to nuance intriguing distinctions between various tweaks of intersubjective practice, turns my mind back to the shamanic.  What I mean is that these modalities which emphasize conscious access to self-content which is recognisable and verballly communicable, needs to be supplemented by modalities in which we are nonlinear mysteries to ourselves and each other, reaching for the shares we don't understand, the languaging that doesn't make sense, the gibberish, the coded speech of subconscious and nonhuman wisdom.  This emerges to some degree in all the different styles but from my point of view it needs to be more explicitly highlighted in order to invite the strangeness of deeper levels of the self.

Does anyone else have aesthetic preferences about the 6 digit numbers that get texted, emailed or generated as part of a website sign in process?

I just noticed, there are some I like much more than others.

Does anyone else have aesthetic preferences about the 6 digit numbers that get texted, emailed or generated as part of a website sign in process?

I just noticed, there are some I like much more than others.

Seeing ourselves and our culture in Charlie Kirk. When I first heard about the murder I didn't know how big of a lightning rod it was going to be. Then my friend Kageni challenged me to write about the Charlie Kirk event “from an integral perspective,”* and I’ve learned to listen to her challenges, even when I'm feeling scared or inadequate (like this one). (For those who don't have the context, I apologize).

Also, in writing about this human being as an object of our cultural fascination, I've necessarily moved past the well of human grief and empathy. Forgive my insensitivities, oversimplifications (mapping rather than territory-ing), many omissions, forgive if I strayed from my lane, and may we continuously reclaim our shadows to create a more loving world.

I. We are projecting so much onto Charlie Kirk that says more about us than the real tragedies. This is normal—to quote Valerie Daniel “You can't breathe without getting projected on.” But it keeps us from confronting the raw realities of grief, powerlessness, the horror and unpredictability of life, the darkness and violence in humanity. And the irony—cruel or helpful, depending on your view—is that whatever we’re unwilling to face in ourselves is destined to repeat itself.

So let’s reclaim these projections, for our personal peace, and to prevent future tragedies. All the negative and positive stuff we project onto Kirk, onto culture, onto whoever we deem the other. Eg: If I can’t stand the celebrations, I’m probably hiding from my own schadenfreude, likely hiding how deeply I’m ashamed of my desire for power and holding others accountable. Or I’m unwilling to be tender with myself when I think I'm a victim, leading to over-responsibility: exhausting for me and enabling to others.

Loving like this is fierce. I call it forgiveness. It demands the courage to challenge deep rooted beliefs we use to orient to the world, and stay present in the resistance.

II. There are at least three distinct conversations happening at once:

1. Murder is always a tragedy, including Kirk’s.

2. Kirk's complicated character. His views are taken out of context but even so were offensive and scary to many people.
   
   How do we stay present with that fear and offense? But also the way he inspired so many good things in people, including the kind of integrity and service in young men this his murderer lacked? How do we wrestle with views that appear to span the gamut from traditional christian conservative (amber) to modern defenses of free speech (orange) to post-conventional institutional critiques (green)?

3. Celebrations of his murder are vastly overrepresented online, but are part of a feedback loop that leads to more fracturing, which leads to individuals like Kirk’s killer making specific horrific unethical choices, which keeps the loop going.
   
   (Eg: his success was somewhat a reaction to the increasing cultural power of the radical left (operating from amber/ethnocentric structure despite progressive (Green) language), which is now getting amplified, which will amplify another conservative voice, which will lead to more assassinations).
   
   How can we re-align the system if we don't see we are it? Reclaiming our projections is a necessary first step if we’re highly triggered, because (a) systematically reconstructing our intersubjective meaning-making capacity demands intertribal coordination, and (b) it shows us where our actual power lies.

III. Reclaiming our projections through collective dream analysis (sociosomnia).

What if we see America’s reaction to him like a dream that we can interpret? Here’s one view: our culture is in a tizzy around free speech. We seem to both love it and be so terrified of it that we want to cancel and “kill” it. We’re trying to find orientation and values in the chaos of a post-truth world but we don’t yet know how to say “yes, all these points of view are valid (green) but some are more valuable, relevant, and true in this context than others (teal)."

#TTT
---
*The spirit of "from an integral perspective" in this context is making sense of competing claims to truth without demonizing anyone, but being willing to take a stand for goodness and values. To paraphrase integral grandpappa Ken Wilber, if we assume no one is smart enough to be 100% wrong, then how to we stitch together a coherent sense of what’s happening from all the partial truths and fragmented perspectives? In this particular post I’m relying a lot on adult developmental psychology, but the overall theory has a variety of other helpful meta-frames for understanding how seemingly totally different values relate.