mathematics

Should Politics Be On The Playing Field? . Why has just about everything within our lives become political including sports. Should athletes use this form to be political or should they do it off the athletic field and on their own time?

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.

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

Trust scores. Brand new, but the onboarding info suggests Trust Scores reflect how much a post's source "reflects my worldviews"?  I'm not really looking for an echo chamber platform and had assumed these scores would focus more on good faith, or even veracity, as opposed to viewpoint alignment.  I could totally see upvoting something/one I completely disagree with as long as I see them as using logic and rationality to support their good faith views.  Am I misinterpreting?

How is AI being used in legit positively transformative ways? I'm curious to hear about folding proteins, curing cancer, or personal examples like a recent I heard from @brian of Claude helping him get better at yoga.

My feed is mostly filled with things that feel like unconscious optimization processes run amok. More AI marketing slop, selling AI tools to be better at marketing AI tools, and weird recursions like that, and I'd love to get more of the optimistic, positive alternatives.

SlutCon- Inspiration to bravely step forward. I come from a long line of deeply christian people. Literally some of the first Puritans to come to America were my ancestors. Just yesterday, I was trying to get a sense of how I come across and a person asked me if I was religious due to my general demeanor- golden hair, near glowing blue eyes, fair skin, and some kind of aura that radiates “I memorized bible verses for fun as a child.”

Given this, I think some may find it surprising that when my SF bay girlfriends said they were going to host “Slutcon” that I jumped on the opportunity to participate. I’ve felt hesitant to share that I’m associated with an event using “slut” in the name- fears about people in my professional network shunning me, my family finding out and thinking I’ve gone off the deep end, or potential future partners writing me off. 

Over the past year or so, the organizers of this event, a little slice of bay poly culture, have grown to be people I deeply admire and am really grateful to be building friendships with. Part of my writing is an attempt to do the thing that I admire in them which I’ll try to name.

Something that I don’t think people could possibly know until they experience an event like this is how wholesome and considerate this group of organizers is on the whole. The content seems to confuse a lot of people, as I read comment after comment on twitter of folks unwilling to suspend some cluster of beliefs related to the correlation of pro-sex and being an evil or an STI riddled person. It’s just not true. And I get it– some group somewhere in the world may have these afflictions but it’s not here in bay poly culture, and it’s not at SlutCon.

Instead, there is careful planning: imagining what would bring 120 men delight while also honoring the desires and boundaries of the 60 volunteer women. There’s next-level consideration: from serving allergy-conscious food to building support systems for anyone who’s found themselves past an emotional limit. There is an unmatched openness to feedback: if something goes awry the organizers want to hear about it, there’s a true desire to build better. 

A quick vignette on that for those in my circles that are not familiar- there’s a general culture in the bay of graciously seeking out and receiving feedback. This isn’t like a passive survey your company may send out to get feedback- there are people here with open personal feedback forms soliciting anonymous feedback. And beyond feedback, there is a culture of accountability to feedback. Across various events or social groups, it is common to see detailed accounts of any instances of misconduct- who was involved, what happened, how the organizers failed, what steps are being taken to prevent future occurrences, and the steps being taken with those involved. This is so common that it’s easy to release shame about having done something bad and instead feel motivated to do better. 

Above all, when I’m around the men and women of this community, I feel deeply connected to an ethos that believes good exists in all beings, that there is too much misplaced societal shame, and we should create spaces that cultivate deeper looking, that teach us to love one another better, to find more joy in connection, and yeah- to feel maximum pleasure where it’s available. I see this group as brave, and Aella is definitely a figurehead, putting her authentic self out for all to see, and it’s true of her friends too. 

What I admire most about this group is how they radiate some combination of authenticity mixed with ethos driven by desire to do good AND, despite how risky the content makes it to, they step forward. Being around them, I feel more whole myself and I’m inspired to drink the metaphorical kool-aid.

I’m grateful to be inspired by witnessing their joy and freedom, their pleasure-filled faces after a super-hot make out session at the event they made happen. I’m proud to be affiliated with their creation even if someone wants to call me a slut as a slur. 

I loved the event, in all it’s contradiction, vulnerability, wholesomeness. 

Stay tuned for more reflections including:

• The surprising data on men not completing their boob-touching homework

• My soapbox of “contrived spaces” and how to experience realness everywhere

• Feeling heartbreak while flirting 

• And… The inaugural Strip Circling (™) experience that had people beating down the door to get in

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.

Are all second-order emotions bad? An idea that I’ve found helpful recently is the idea that all second-order emotions are bad. Feeling sad about feeling sad, feeling happy about feeling happy—all of it is bad. Emotions are unavoidable and just are, and meeting them with full acceptance and curiosity is good. Meeting them with other emotions is bad. So if I’m feeling happy, it’s a good thing to wonder why, to be curious about where that’s coming from, and whether it’s driven by something that can be repeated. The same is true with feeling sad—it’s good to be curious. Meeting emotions with curiosity is always good; meeting them with other emotions is always bad. I’d love for anyone to come up with a counterexample to challenge this point.

Micro-transformation: unitive practice from Russian Orthodoxy ☦︎. Fun fact: Ceaselessly, inwardly repeating the Jesus prayer “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me” from your heart has consistently led to stabilized unitive state-stages (Theosis) for more than a millennium. 

This practice is called the Hesychasm. It’s been officially recognized by the Eastern Orthodox Church since the fourth century. I’ve been playing with it as much as possible for the past few weeks, and I am loving it. It is very powerful. 

Then! In the early 1900s, hesychast monks on Mt. Athos took it a step further. Their results were so radical that in 1913, the Russian government sent troops to stop them! 

What was the shift? Their actions were the same—they aimed to engage the Jesus Prayer every moment of every day. But my (very limited) understanding is that their attitude reframed prayer from a practice that petitions for union with God one day that isn’t now — to an expression of divine essence (nonduality) right now. Prayer is not a behavior you do; prayer is God happening. Faithfully seeking IS participation as found-ness.

What’s so beautiful is that seeing it this way resolves the seeming duality between “no where to get, no one to get enlightened” and “but I’m not yet aware that I’m enlightened.” That thought itself expresses the divine. As does practicing.* We can see this parallel in every mystical tradition I’ve studied.

Variations on Imiaslavie 

Here’s a way I’ve been playing with this practice.

I shift the “me” that I’m asking mercy for (from my heart), when I say “have mercy on me” to be wildly more inclusive than my particular body-mind-character-Jordanness. Eg:

• “me” including whoever I’m judging or mad at
• “me” including whoever I’m speaking with or looking at
• “me” including all of humanity, or a people, or a country, or a world leader (especially one I judge)
• “me” including all plants, animals, and living creatures—a bug in my house for example

I think the “including” part is really important. I’m not praying for these beings as separate from me, but rather as extensions of me, or expansions of who I identify with. If this doesn’t make sense, a place you might want to start is with your family, especially if you’re a parent of young children.

I want to honor the lineage and centuries of practice by noting that I may be totally butchering the practice and theology. Although I believe it reflects the view of Gregory Palamas, a 13th century saint famous for defending hesychast spirituality, I haven’t run this by any practitioners or been advised by anyone else doing this practice. Nevertheless I share it because I believe it’ll be asymmetrically positive, and, especially with this caveat, I believe in the value of our civilization experimenting and adapting practices from a variety of ancient and time-prove lineages that are good for all.

(h/t Sean Esbjörn-Hargens for turning me onto this practice),  #TTT 

Our Experience of Gender is Caught in a Drama Triangle. My contribution to the #DeepTakes event is an experience I find really alienating and lonely on a personal level and I see it playing out culturally in a way that seems to impact everyone I know (and obviously huge swaths of people I don't).To express what I am seeing in this context I first have to explain a little bit about what I mean when I invoke the concept of a Drama Triangle.

The Drama Triangle is a social model of human interaction proposed by psychiatrist Stephen Karpman. It suggests that in circumstances where conflict arises and individuals are reactive to rather than present with that conflict there is a tendency to assign three roles: victim, hero, and villain.The victim role is characterized by fear and helplessness, the hero role is characterized by righteousness and some attempt to act as a saviour for the victim, and the villain role is characterized by blame (of self or others).

What is most important to me about this model is not how it points out that this dynamic often emerges in the context of conflict, but how it reveals that the dynamic is unconscious, volatile, and misleading. When the dynamic arises, it is typically through some invisible collusion that the roles are assigned and they remain implicit rather than being consciously claimed by the individuals involved. As a result of the unconscious nature of the dynamic, the roles are unstable - individuals often end up switching between these three roles as implicitly and unconsciously as the same roles initially emerged. Regardless of how the roles are assigned at any given moment, they obscure something true about each individual involved - victims are actually agentic and accountable for their own experiences, heroes are not moral authorities nor are they responsible for victims' experiences, and villains are not sole causes of the conflicts arising between them and their hero/victim counterparts.

I've explained this concept in the context of a conflict arising between individuals but, when it comes to gender, I am seeing the same dynamic play out in broader cultural conflicts between and within gendered groups. Probably the clearest example I can provide is how conflict between capital W-Women and capital M-Men has given rise to a drama triangle. For longer than I've been around there has been a broad, complex cultural claim that society is structured in such a way that Women are inherently victims and Men are inherently Villains. The specter of a Hero arises from this dynamic in many forms; activist groups are perhaps the clearest examples but it is also interesting to see how women/men may belong to the group role of victim/villain yet act in the role of the hero on an individual level if they can be seen as acting out any sort of protection, vengeance, etc. in reaction to to the Story of Women's Victimhood.

In my own experience relating to men, the cultural phenomenon of this Drama Triangle has been profoundly unhelpful! The dynamic sets a cultural precedent that looms over any conflict that arises between me and a man in my life - as tension emerges in our connection our difference in gender pulls this cultural lens into place such that there is a shared apprehension that I will be assigned the victim role and he will be assigned the villain role. What a mess! As if staying present with tension and orienting toward love and truth isn't enough of a task already! From here there are plenty of ways we squirm together - maybe we both preemptively try to promise we are not the victim/the villain, maybe I'll try to put him in the victim role or he'll try to put me in the villain role, maybe one of us will scramble to be the hero. All unconscious, unhelpful strategies to navigate an unconscious, unhelpful cultural script. I am getting a headache just writing about it.

Trust me, I wish this dynamic only loomed over my connections with men in my life. On the contrary, the way this Drama Triangle twists up my relationships with other women may actually be even more damaging - it's a tough race to call. In my connections with women the cultural precedent of the Drama Triangle still creates a shared apprehension but in this context the apprehension is that we are both victims and that we agree that men are villainous. Now I could gesture at the various ways in which this has been awkward and disconnecting in my relationships with other women but frankly, there is one stand out context which I see as the likely root of my deep resentment motivating this deep take.

I have had difficult situations with bad outcomes (ranging from deep emotional wounds to physical/sexual assaults) arise in my connections with men in my life. From the very earliest of these challenging experiences, it has been very important to me to integrate these experiences in ways that protect and strengthen my capacity to have healthy, loving relationships with men. I faced profound difficulty finding women who were able to support me in integrating my experiences this way rather than imposing the Drama Triangle on my situation, villainizing the men involved, and seeking to either play out the Hero role by saving me or pressuring me to join them in the victim role as a fellow woman. I have severed friendships, fired therapists, and generally opted out of "women's spaces" to protect myself from this because to the extent that I have ever seen myself as the victim of difficult situations with men it has been intolerable! My experience of the victim role was catastrophic for my self esteem, ruinous for my romantic relationships, and completely spiritually backward. I really really hate it.

Obviously I can't say as much about how this dynamic impacts men's relationships with one another but I do see men face pressure from women to take on the hero role by confronting other men as villains in their community. I've also had multiple men open up to me about the way that they've internalized the cultural role of Men as Villains and alienated them from their own sexualities, ambitions, boundaries etc. through a narrative that they are inherently creepy, greedy, controlling, etc. Although I don't seem to attract men who respond by trying to claim the victim role for themselves in my personal life, I am certainly aware of the "Manosphere" where the subcultural norm is to invert the cultural script and see men as the victim of women who perpetuate the myth of their own victimhood as a power grab and manipulation at mens' expense.

Now more than ever before it seems especially clear that gender non-conforming individuals are also deeply impacted by the way the binary gendered experience is captured by the Drama Triangle. While this impact is complex and multi-faceted, I'll offer an over-simplification here which I see as gesturing to a very prominent thread of impact for these communities. Non-binary and Trans people often seem to me to be implicitly collapsed into the same group role as Women or Men so that the existing cultural script can fit them into the Drama Triangle without much modification.

My social circles and information channels tend toward treating gender non-conforming groups as analogous to Women and implicitly assumes that they too are inherently victims of Men and assenting to this categorization puts "Us" (whoever we may be) in the hero role. Given my own impact of internalizing the message that I am a victim of Men, I have a strong projection that gender nonconforming people are actually greatly disadvantaged by the imposition of this lens and in my own relationships with gender non-conforming people in my life, the apprehension that they are victims and I ought to be heroic about it makes me act kinda weird. I feel an inflated sense of responsibility for their feelings and end up walking on egg shells around them in a way that doesn't feel true to me at all. This is something I really wanna work on in these relationships but, just like in my relationships with men and women, I deeply resent the added weight of the Drama Triangle as it shows up for me here.

Similar to the Manosphere example, I don't have much first hand experience of the corresponding culture which collapses gender non-conforming people in with Men but it is on my radar that there are people who see Women as victims of Non-binary and Trans People. This dynamic tends to rigidly impose the existing gender binary against the autonomy of gender non-conforming people and conclude that AMAB gender non-conforming people are trying to cheat their way into Women's Sacred Victimhood and AAFB gender non-conforming people are abandoning their sisters to escape Women's Sacred Victimhood and that whole narrative is unspeakably yucky to me in so so many ways.

There exist at least a couple of "answers" to the Drama Triangle that offer possible healthy responses to this unhealthy dynamic. Choy's "Winner's Triangle" suggests softening the helplessness, righteousness, and blame of the victim, hero, and villain into vulnerability, care, and assertiveness, respectively. Emerald's "Empowerment Dynamic" suggests swapping the victim role for the creator, characterized by a reclaiming of personal power, swapping the hero for the coach, characterized by the facilitation of the creator's self-empowerment, and swapping the villain for the challenger, characterized by the capacity to call others to action.

Imagine me shouting to the sky and shaking my fists when I write how strongly I would prefer a cultural norm that experimented with these approaches (or invented new ones) in context where conflict arises and gendered experiences are implicated. I've been taking my own baby steps in my relationships with men, women, and gender non-conforming folks, but I come to you all hoping for help to foster awareness and openness to new norms in our community. I deeply believe if we could make our great escape from the Drama Triangle and reclaim our experience of life in a world with genders it would be miraculously transformative for our relationships with ourselves, our intimate partners, our friends and family, and the world at large. 

What will the future literally look like? This idea comes from watching Mad Men- seeing smoking and drinking freely at the office for example, and my brother once pointing out that if a show or movie ever wanted to make it really clear that it was set in the 1990’s, all they’d have to do is have multiple people driving Saturn cars.

So here are a few of what I think (hope) the future will literally look like:

Gas stations will be very rare, and parking spaces will almost always have charging stations.

Having a garage in homes will be rare because car ownership will be rare. Using self-driving Uber-esque systems will be way more affordable, and car ownership then will be similar to antique car ownership now.

Lawns will be very rare, and permaculture-style of local fauna that doesn’t need care, upkeep, or watering will be common.

What do you think the future will look like?

How i decieded to stop sharing my feelings with my mom. one time when i was 17, my mom took me to Baltimore (like an hour and a half away) to help me get my driving learner’s permit. it was a special DMV with extra long lines, because i was not a citizen. the process took many hours of just sitting there (this was before smartphones), and I was incredibly bored. My mom asked me how i was feeling, and I told her I was bored.

Then she got super mad and said that it was wrong of me to be bored. that she spent the whole day helping me with this and how dare I say I’m bored. the whole drive back she was ranting non-stop about how ungrateful we are - for some reason she got mad at Emma too, my sister (not her real name), even though she wasn’t there. she kept saying we were not grateful to her and were super entitled.

She kept saying, wait till we get home and Emma hears what you said, she’s gonna be mad at you too I pretended to fall asleep in the car so that I wouldn’t have to keep hearing her.
Eventually we got home, and she told Emma and she was like ummm, yeah, of course he was bored and sided with me.
My mom stormed off angry. I decided that day to never again be honest with with my mom about my feelings

This is a big update for me: 50 Niche Social Networks by the numbers. I used to think we were up against a graveyard of failed projects. There’s truth in that, but it obscures the vibrancy of the existing social media landscape:

• There are 30 social networks most of us have never even heard of pulling in 500k+ monthly active users. This isn’t just a fluke - it’s solid proof that focused, community-driven platforms can thrive.
• In addition to the standard dozen billion+ MAU Major Players (Facebook, Youtube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, WeChat; and .5 billion+ Snapchat, X, Pinterest, Spotify, Reddit, Quora)
• plus the foreign heavyweights (Douyin, Kuaishou, QQ, Weibo)
• there are also 19 pretty other huge platforms killing it

This is testament to

• The viability of focused, community-driven platforms.
• The social media landscape is more diverse than it might seem
• The success of niche platforms suggests there’s still room for innovation and growth in social media, especially for platforms that address specific needs or values that aren’t getting met by current platforms
• One option we have is positioning UpTrust in a different category, we’re not directly competing with established giants but rather creating a new space—where our niche is nuanced conversation about cultural landmines that goes well, in addition to kickstarting the trust economy (instead of the attention economy). It’s not about how long we can keep you scrolling; it’s about creating real connections and actually making people’s lives better.

Platforms with 1-5 Million Monthly Active Users

1. AllTrails: (hiking) ~4 million/mo
2. Letterboxd: (film enthusiasts) ~3 million/mo
3. Bandcamp: (music) ~3-4 million/mo
4. iNaturalist: (nature observation) ~3 million/mo
5. Mastodon: (decentralized social networking) ~2.5 million/mo
6. Ravelry: (knitting) ~2 million/mo
7. Tripoto: (travel) ~2 million/mo
8. Fitocracy: (fitness) ~1-2 million/mo (estimate, exact numbers not disclosed)
9. ResearchGate: (academic research) ~20 million total users, MAU not disclosed
10. Untappd: (beer enthusiasts) ~1.5 million/mo
11. Couchsurfing: (travel networking) ~12 million total users, MAU likely much lower
12. Gaia: (yoga and meditation) ~500,000/mo (estimate)

Platforms with 5-20 Million MAU

1. Fishbrain (fishing): ~6-7 million MAU (estimated)
2. Dribbble (design portfolios): ~5 million MAU
3. Depop (fashion resale): ~4-5 million MAU
4. Day One (journaling): 1-5 million MAU (estimate)
5. Patreon: (creators) ~8 million patrons
6. Komoot (route planning): MAU not disclosed, 40 million total users

Big Niche Social Platforms (20 - 180 million MAU)

1. BeReal: (authentic social media) ~25 million daily active users
2. Fandom: (fan communities) ~315 million total users, MAU not disclosed
3. Soundcloud: (music sharing) ~175 million/mo
4. Discord: (community chat) ~150 million/mo
5. Twitch: (gaming) ~140 million/mo
6. Tumblr: (microblogging) ~135 million/mo
7. Strava: (fitness tracking) ~100 million total users, MAU not disclosed
8. Wattpad (storytelling): ~90 million MAU
9. Goodreads: (books) ~90 million total users, MAU not disclosed
10. Etsy: (handmade and vintage items) ~90 million active buyers
11. Nextdoor: (neighborhoods) ~69 million verified users
12. Flickr: (photo sharing) ~60 million/mo
13. Stack Overflow: (programming Q&A) ~50 million/mo
14. DeviantArt: (art sharing) ~45-50 million/mo
15. Houzz: (home design) ~40 million/mo
16. Duolingo (language learning): ~40 million MAU
17. Meetup: (local community groups) ~35 million total users
18. Behance: (creative portfolios) ~25 million/mo
19. Last.fm: (music scrobbling) ~20 million/mo

Religious Community-Focused Platforms

1. YouVersion: (Christian) ~40-50 million/mo
2. Patheos: (Interfaith) ~10-15 million/mo
3. IslamicFinder: (Muslim) ~10-12 million/mo
4. Pray.com: (Christian) ~5-7 million/mo (estimate)
5. Aleteia: (Catholic) ~20 million monthly visits
6. Catholic.net: (Catholic) ~3-5 million/mo (estimate)
7. Al-Muslimeen: (Muslim) ~2-3 million/mo (estimate)
8. Torah.org: (Jewish) ~1-2 million/mo (estimate)
9. Mi Yodeya: (Jewish) ~500,000-1 million/mo (estimate)
10. Mindar: (Buddhist) ~500,000-1 million/mo (estimate)
11. DharmaMatch: (Buddhist/Spiritual) ~100,000-300,000/mo (estimate)
12. Sikh Sangat: (Sikh) ~100,000-300,000/mo (estimate)
13. Hindu2Hindu: (Hindu) ~100,000-300,000/mo (estimate)

Recent Growth Examples:

• BeReal: Grew from 10,000 users in 2020 to 25 million daily active users in 2022.
• Discord: Grew from 56 million MAU in 2019 to 150 million MAU in 2023.
• Twitch: Increased from 55 million MAU in 2019 to 140 million MAU in 2023.
• Pinterest: Grew from 335 million MAU in Q4 2019 to 450 million MAU in Q4 2022.

Terrence Howard maybe a crackpot, but he isn't all wrong. Terrence Howard is mostly known as an actor, but he’s recently been interviewed by Joe Rogan for his book 1 x 1 = 2. The book is intentionally provocative and intended to critique how trusted math and science are in a civilizational context.

I haven’t read the book, and I think Terrence introduces much more confusion than clarity, I think there is something of value in what he is attempting to do (even though the attempt has little if any merit given the conclusions and claims that Terrence makes).

I think he is attempting to bring a qualitative sense of humanity back into relevance (with a sense that numeracy has overly quantified and objectified our experience).

While Joe Rogan expressed that he didn’t fully understand the point that Terrence was trying to make, he did stay open to the possibility that he was missing something that would help get Terrence’s point.

Most critics have been hard on Terrence (claiming pseudo-science, fraud, sensationalism, or insanity), and have been critical of Joe Rogan because he didn’t push back harder on obviously non-sensical ideas. My friend Erik has posted a video criticizing one of the debunkers for seeming to intentionally miss Terrences intended insight. It can also give you a bit of a brief intro into the topic if you are interested.

But I think there is a deeper motive and validity to be discerned.

One claim by Terrence is that 0 x 1 apple being equal to zero apples is nonsensical because you’ve destroyed something that used to exist (the apple), whereas what is intended by the equation is there are zero occurrences of the abstract category apple which results in zero actual apples.

Another claim is that $1 x $1 = $1 is nonsense if you also say that 100 cents * 100 cents = 10,000 cents.

It is clear in this example that there is a confusion about units (we don’t recognize units of a square dollar or a square cent).

I think Terrence is trying to point out something similar to what Bucky Fuller says when Bucky claims that the continued use of the word sunrise is harmful, even if we know what is meant is a portion of the earth turning into alignment with the sun’s rays.

The very subtle point that I’d make is that saying 1 x category of apple = 1 actual apple seems to be valid to us, but misses that there is still a whole lot of context that is missing from that actual apple, and much abstraction that pollutes our understanding of what is actually happening in the world.

Thoughts?

Terrence Howard maybe a crackpot, but he isn't all wrong. Terrence Howard is mostly known as an actor, but he’s recently been interviewed by Joe Rogan for his book 1 x 1 = 2. The book is intentionally provocative and intended to critique how trusted math and science are in a civilizational context.

I haven’t read the book, and I think Terrence introduces much more confusion than clarity, I think there is something of value in what he is attempting to do (even though the attempt has little if any merit given the conclusions and claims that Terrence makes).

I think he is attempting to bring a qualitative sense of humanity back into relevance (with a sense that numeracy has overly quantified and objectified our experience).

While Joe Rogan expressed that he didn’t fully understand the point that Terrence was trying to make, he did stay open to the possibility that he was missing something that would help get Terrence’s point.

Most critics have been hard on Terrence (claiming pseudo-science, fraud, sensationalism, or insanity), and have been critical of Joe Rogan because he didn’t push back harder on obviously non-sensical ideas. My friend Erik has posted a video criticizing one of the debunkers for seeming to intentionally miss Terrences intended insight. It can also give you a bit of a brief intro into the topic if you are interested.

But I think there is a deeper motive and validity to be discerned.

One claim by Terrence is that 0 x 1 apple being equal to zero apples is nonsensical because you’ve destroyed something that used to exist (the apple), whereas what is intended by the equation is there are zero occurrences of the abstract category apple which results in zero actual apples.

Another claim is that $1 x $1 = $1 is nonsense if you also say that 100 cents * 100 cents = 10,000 cents.

It is clear in this example that there is a confusion about units (we don’t recognize units of a square dollar or a square cent).

I think Terrence is trying to point out something similar to what Bucky Fuller says when Bucky claims that the continued use of the word sunrise is harmful, even if we know what is meant is a portion of the earth turning into alignment with the sun’s rays.

The very subtle point that I’d make is that saying 1 x category of apple = 1 actual apple seems to be valid to us, but misses that there is still a whole lot of context that is missing from that actual apple, and much abstraction that pollutes our understanding of what is actually happening in the world.

Thoughts?

Terrence Howard maybe a crackpot, but he isn't all wrong. Terrence Howard is mostly known as an actor, but he’s recently been interviewed by Joe Rogan for his book 1 x 1 = 2. The book is intentionally provocative and intended to critique how trusted math and science are in a civilizational context.

I haven’t read the book, and I think Terrence introduces much more confusion than clarity, I think there is something of value in what he is attempting to do (even though the attempt has little if any merit given the conclusions and claims that Terrence makes).

I think he is attempting to bring a qualitative sense of humanity back into relevance (with a sense that numeracy has overly quantified and objectified our experience).

While Joe Rogan expressed that he didn’t fully understand the point that Terrence was trying to make, he did stay open to the possibility that he was missing something that would help get Terrence’s point.

Most critics have been hard on Terrence (claiming pseudo-science, fraud, sensationalism, or insanity), and have been critical of Joe Rogan because he didn’t push back harder on obviously non-sensical ideas. My friend Erik has posted a video criticizing one of the debunkers for seeming to intentionally miss Terrences intended insight. It can also give you a bit of a brief intro into the topic if you are interested.

But I think there is a deeper motive and validity to be discerned.

One claim by Terrence is that 0 x 1 apple being equal to zero apples is nonsensical because you’ve destroyed something that used to exist (the apple), whereas what is intended by the equation is there are zero occurrences of the abstract category apple which results in zero actual apples.

Another claim is that $1 x $1 = $1 is nonsense if you also say that 100 cents * 100 cents = 10,000 cents.

It is clear in this example that there is a confusion about units (we don’t recognize units of a square dollar or a square cent).

I think Terrence is trying to point out something similar to what Bucky Fuller says when Bucky claims that the continued use of the word sunrise is harmful, even if we know what is meant is a portion of the earth turning into alignment with the sun’s rays.

The very subtle point that I’d make is that saying 1 x category of apple = 1 actual apple seems to be valid to us, but misses that there is still a whole lot of context that is missing from that actual apple, and much abstraction that pollutes our understanding of what is actually happening in the world.

Thoughts?

New to UpTrusting, but an OG trust-o-phile. I had an a-ha moment playing the linked game in 2017 which illustrates something interesting about Trust that had eluded me up until that moment: trust, if treated as a blind decision, without reflection, can be dangerous, and leave me vulnerable. There is also a potent corollary: if a moment of trust is based on a questionable foundation, and I resist reflecting on its soundness, the universe will conspire to reveal my vulnerability. Lastly, the more I resist the a-ha, the more energy I must invest in my delusion of safety.

The a-ha has sprouted from a tiny acorn into a mighty oak. I now recognize (on good days) that healthy Trust: (1) is always contextual, (2) is more robust when held as perpetually dynamic and less robust when held as fixed or static, and (3) can never betray me without my participation.

It’s a joy to find a space where others are exploring this rich tapestry. I look forward to weaving a thriving fabric that nurtures inalienable brilliance.