Slevin's journal

Where are you and where are you going?
SouthernAlchemy
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by SouthernAlchemy »

I have an old Coleman single burner that's specifically labeled as dual fuel (white/unleaded gas). Unleaded works fine and I don't really see any difference between it and any other Coleman stove, but maybe. The main thing about the white gas is that it stores many times longer (indefinitely?) than unleaded without getting gummy or otherwise fouling up the stove, so you can keep a can around and the stove filled 'just in case', even if not used much.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

Yeah, I have the old Coleman double burner stove as well, and have used the white fuel stuff. Kinda hard to get your hands on (REI I think?), but you can obvs just switch to unleaded fuel if the need becomes dire. And if there is a bad situation, there are probably many 10-20 gallon repositories of normal gas sitting around you which can be accessed with a hose, which should power that burner for a long time.

guitarplayer
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by guitarplayer »

zbigi wrote:
Sat Feb 19, 2022 10:31 am
I've read somewhere that the gut bacteria mix of people who eat a lot of beans is very different than of non-bean eaters. That would explain the adaptation period - the "bean friendly" bacteria need time to increase their numbers.
That is the Bacterioides (thrive on meat and saturated fat) vs Prevotella (thrive on fiber and carbs) . The latter are associated with all sorts of good stuff, not least producing short-chain fatty acids (prevent obesity, anti-cancirogenic). Turns out all of the humanity is split between having either one gut ecosystem (enterotype) or the other. Apparently it takes about two weeks to swap them.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

This is the stupidest rant, but people on this forum are the kind that understand that money is not really an ultimate goal here or anything, so I’ll throw it up anyways.

One of my employees got a job a couple years back at a 350k+ kind of place. He has told me their software I would be working on is meh to much worse than the ones we have built at my current job, and the people are relatively meh skill wise. He got me an interview, but it’s one of those algorithmic interviews that are heavily irrelevant to the work being done as a devops/ automation engineer (On the daily I mostly just make connectors to fit together different kinds of pipelines and containers and associated tooling and infrastructure). I think it’s supposed to be a “big” opportunity but to me I can’t put it past my bullshit barrier to study irrelevant things for many hours on end to make an already obnoxious income even more insane, and work on fixing a much shittier project. Especially when there is so much stuff to be done on so many different interesting subjects that don’t involve writing software.

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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by guitarplayer »

Tell me about it, I struggle to motivate myself to pass the $13/h threshold based on this type of premises.
Last edited by guitarplayer on Sat Mar 05, 2022 11:53 am, edited 2 times in total.

not sure
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by not sure »

A random thought as I read this - you know how scientific journals/articles calculate an "impact factor", based on whatever algorithm they use to show who quoted them and how many times. Basically a bragging factor, implied to quantify how far-reaching the research and/or ideas are at impacting the scientific community.

I've often thought about the "impact factor" or the work I do or different career trajectories and projects.
I don't have it worked out yet, but consider it in terms of - how it will affect me, my family, the lives of others. There are obviously financial and non-financial considerations.

Maybe something to think about?

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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by jacob »

not sure wrote:
Sat Mar 05, 2022 11:39 am
Basically a bragging factor, implied to quantify how far-reaching the research and/or ideas are at impacting the scientific community.
Not much different than the pursuit of facebook likes. Every time anything gets quantified, something is lost. To further compound the issue calculating people changes the message to optimize the metric (Goodhart's law). As the ultimate insult, McNamara's fallacy enters the picture when people start valuing behavior exclusively by what kind of measure someone came up with. It's one of the great tragedies of modernism/taylorism.

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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by zbigi »

Slevin wrote:
Sat Mar 05, 2022 10:48 am
I think it’s supposed to be a “big” opportunity but to me I can’t put it past my bullshit barrier to study irrelevant things for many hours on end to make an already obnoxious income even more insane, and work on fixing a much shittier project.
I could never make myself do it either. As far as I understand it, these jobs involve a ton of meetings, politics (angling for big-money promotions) and were, until the pandemic hit, all 100% non-remote. Combine that with the need to move thousands of km to a foreign country (FAANG in my country doesn't pay SV-level money) and I suspected I wouldn't even last a year there anyway - so why put up with all the interview preparation.

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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by mathiverse »

I used to not understand people who wouldn't study for interviews given the monetary rewards involved. Now that I'm better set up savings-wise and now that I'm more along the ERE track, I can understand why someone might not study and I've been encountering a lot of personal resistance to studying for my current job search myself. I'm still in a personal, internal battle over whether I will go the whole nine yards with studying to maximize compensation during my current job search. Studying is gradually winning out. I still am finding it too hard to say no to grasping for better compensation when it seems close in hand.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

mathiverse wrote:
Sat Mar 05, 2022 6:49 pm
I used to not understand people who wouldn't study for interviews given the monetary rewards involved. Now that I'm better set up savings-wise and now that I'm more along the ERE track, I can understand why someone might not study and I've been encountering a lot of personal resistance to studying for my current job search myself. I'm still in a personal, internal battle over whether I will go the whole nine yards with studying to maximize compensation during my current job search. Studying is gradually winning out. I still am finding it too hard to say no to grasping for better compensation when it seems close in hand.
I think it’s different when it’s no job -> job and the gap requires studying. But here it is: interesting fulfilling job with new greenfield project -> potentially less interesting job with more b.s. built in, probably more hours worked and probably less autonomy (very important to INTP’s). So it’s probably a direct trade of things I value for making the journey to fi bearable for money.

It is probably worth doing for the time save to FI, but I’m already FI in terms of a JAFI (I spend much more than 1 jafi though), and my partner is pretty much FI, so there just isn’t that much money pressure on us to force me to do things that sound annoying or will make the journey from here to there less pleasant.

In alignment with zbigi above, any path worth taking needs to be tolerable to the path dependent, and to me doing a bunch of nonsense in order to probably do more nonsense I don’t enjoy just seems unaligned with how I want to do things. The funny part is that I enjoy solving algorithm problems when it has nothing to do with studying for job interviews, but when you introduce the job interview incentive I start to hate it and don’t want to play anymore.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's jo urnal

Post by Slevin »

Not a monetary update but a stranger one.

I've been an on and off meditator to some extent for maybe a decade, with periods of good practicing and periods of no practicing (frequent and longer, I have not meditated for probably 8x more days than I have meditated), usually a zazen count to ten or box breathing or breathwork meditation, with maybe my most intense sessions being 2ish hours of standing meditation several years back. I've been in an "off" mode for 6 months or so, but after reading "The Listening Society" and its theories of adult development I decided to get back into it this week. I've just been easing myself back in, 10 minutes a day, "count to 10" with the inhales / exhales sort of deal, kinda baby stuff. But from Wilber / Gortz / etc I have a few more little tools and direction and ideas of what the benefits of meditation might be in the back of my head (chasing higher (happier) states if practiced consistently over a long period of time).

This morning I sat down and like 1 minute into meditation my cats start playing on a paper bag next to me. "Wonderful", I thought to myself ironically while watching the emotion of annoyance pile up in my brain. But I have some tools for this. So I think to myself a small mantra, "I am the watcher behind the annoyance" which acts as both a mantra and a distancer from the emotion. And this leads me to some space where I am feeling some small amount of pleasure leaking out of (into? words are hard) my brain. I sit with this for a while, enjoying it, until I realize this is maybe the same problem as the annoyance and i should try and let it go too. So I do. "I am the watcher behind the pleasure" and I try to distance myself from it. Now I am in bliss. Happiness and pleasure seem to be leaking out of every joint in my body. But for this one I am prepared. I think "I am the watcher behind the bliss" and try to distance myself from it. Now I am in literal ecstasy. My back is convulsing where I am sitting, muscles are losing it a bit. Overwhelming joy and happiness and brightness tearing my consciousness apart. I lose myself for a while in here. What is me and what is the ecstasy??? I'm overwhelmed for a little bit. But eventually I find my mantra to try and get out, in some way I am suffering in the mind destroying pleasure. "I am the watcher behind the ecstasy" I think, and now the intensity and pleasure speed away. I am somewhere new, somewhere zen. My experiential cognition is now a cool stream of calm contentedness and light and both the ego and the watcher have slipped away into this calm contented (nondual?) existence stream, and I feel like I could sit here until the universe ends. This whole time, I am still counting ... 9 ... 10.

Too soon my timer goes off, and I have to slip back into this place and my body. I am sitting on a cushion in front of my windows looking at my garden. It takes twenty minutes to decompress and try and put myself back into my normal self again. But it doesn't quite work, I am something different, somehow changed.

I tell my partner about it, that I have had a profound experience just sitting on a little cushion with my eyes closed. She is a more serious meditator than I. She says it sounds like a lot of interesting things, and that she has had some crazy experiences while meditating as well. Nothing exactly like this, but it sounds like something books talk about often. I say its strange and it feels unearned, because I'm not a serious meditator. I have meditated only 5 times in the last month. But it is here anyways.
So here I am, several hours later. My analytic edges are enveloped still by a warm fuzziness. What a strange thing, subjective existence. How do I share such an experience? Words feel so sloppy and imprecise, dimensionally limited to the words that exist and subject to the map -> territory fallacy. But they are the tools I have, so I will employ them in the best way that I could.

Let me just wrap it up like this: I wish I could give you this feeling, dear reader. I don’t know what it is and I don’t know why it is, but it feels like it very much wants to be shared.

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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by theanimal »

Sounds like a great experience. Seems like a testament to what's possible if we get out of our own way. But that's the hardest part! I do 10 minutes each morning as well, and one day of feeling more zen will be followed by the monkey mind going all over the next. Just keep pushing that rock up the hill, one must imagine Sisyphus happy. ;)

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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by daylen »

Sounds like satori. I am not all that familiar with this word in the original context of Buddhism, though the pattern of description is quite regularly found across all cultures as far as I am aware. Nondual seems to refer to what this "state" or "realization" can bring about in everyday waking life where you see trees but are not separate from them, you see or feel [insert description here] yet are one with all that arises. This takes practice, which is sorta paradoxical as a regime of practice will build an ego block to the "experience". Not surprisingly, this experience appears to be quite difficult to pin down from a cognitive science perspective.

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Re: Slevin's jo urnal

Post by jacob »

Slevin wrote:
Fri Apr 01, 2022 12:14 pm
So here I am, several hours later. My analytic edges are enveloped still by a warm fuzziness. What a strange thing, subjective existence. How do I share such an experience? Words feel so sloppy and imprecise, dimensionally limited to the words that exist and subject to the map -> territory fallacy. But they are the tools I have, so I will employ them in the best way that I could.
Wow! Interesting!

I've been trying to find a translation from the wording of such experiences and methods which tend to be very NF (intuitive feeling) and into Te so that I can better understand them within a framework I'm familiar with. Applying a construct thusly may of course easily be exactly the wrong strategy.

It's my impression that much advice/experience is guided by a one-size-fits-all. (I'm reading Plotkin again and I find much of what he says completely unrelateable in the same way that people would for the most part not stare and fall on their ass if they saw e^ipi=-1 on a tshirt or get tears in their eyes when watching a Saturn V rocket ... experiences he gets while seeing the front cover of a magazine with a mountain farm on it .. or watching a tree for a few days.) As such, while I do believe (literally) that all roads lead to Rome, I'm not convinced that all minds fundamentally work the same.

This might be my Mt Stupid talking (warning, unguided amateur hour) but I've been experimenting with "switching my Te off"(+) by basically lying on bed, closing my eyes, and watching the patterns forming "behind my eyelids". If I think about them, they go away immediately. If I don't they stay. Initially they looked like very high contrast pictures and animations that I later identified with "what I've been staring at recently". For example, when we were camping a lot, I saw foilage and landscapes moving laterally (like staring out a train window). During winter, the foilage went away. And so on. Lately, there's been more color. Anyhoo ... I interpret this as letting my Ni-visual pattern engine run. Being Ni it's a subconscious state. IFF I would apply a method like "I am aware that I'm watching these patterns" (which I would see as switching Te on), they'll get destroyed immediately. I normally don't use "words" to think, so doing so would be a conscious effort and so I think that's what removes the pattern (or anything else) as the "word processor" gets fired up. Therefore I found the description of your method interesting. Even more interesting: It never occurred to me to deliberately(*) pursue the same idea to any other "subjective" sensations beyond vision, especially not with emotions. I'll try that.

(+) I'm told this is "bad language". I suspect I mean the same as "watching and letting it pass through"... Not actively engaging makes a function quiet down.

(*) The I is often identified with the head. I think that's because more of the sensors are there. Using radar terminology, they're usually in a tracking mode focusing on one thing (if they focus randomly, it's monkey brain, if they track one thing, it's concentration), so I try to put them in a scan mode. This puts the I somewhere else (inside the body) ... like the hands which also contain a lot of sensors. This can lead to a "sinking" or "spinning" or "floating" sensation. To me this has not been as interesting as the visual patterns, so ... not pursued.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: Slevin's jo urnal

Post by mountainFrugal »

Slevin wrote:
Fri Apr 01, 2022 12:14 pm
So I think to myself a small mantra, "I am the watcher behind the annoyance" which acts as both a mantra and a distancer from the emotion.
Really cool @slevin! Sounds like a Satori experience to me (based on various reading). It will be cool to reflect on this experience going forward and see if you can more frequently get into the same state with continued practice or how much the "memory" of your experience will help you do so. I think I remember listening to WIlber in this audio program a while back describe similar things. "Kosmic Conciousness" was the name of the audio series where he was interviewed by a very knowledgeable women. My roommate at the time had a CD copy. Might be worth a look!

jacob wrote:
Sat Apr 02, 2022 8:30 am
As such, while I do believe (literally) that all roads lead to Rome, I'm not convinced that all minds fundamentally work the same.
Every road might be harder/easier based on the person traveling. I think this is a really good way to think about things. Very simplistically, we often gravitate towards different sports based on body type why would we not gravitate towards a different spiritual/internal growth path based on mental/emotional type?

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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Scott 2 »

While you describe the experience as unearned, perhaps that mindset let you sit without expectation. What did you anticipate for the session? When meditating more regularly, were you grasping for something higher?

Do you always stop when the timer goes off? When using a timer, I like a very subtle chime. Sometimes I decline the invitation and let the experience continue to unfold.

I see tools for an "advanced" spiritual practice as a way to corral those who can't stop striving. Myself included. For me it was yoga. When my enthusiasm faded, I drifted to level 1 classes and short home practices. The simple tools were more effective. I stopped chasing.

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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by jacob »

Scott 2 wrote:
Sat Apr 02, 2022 10:42 am
While you describe the experience as unearned, perhaps that mindset let you sit without expectation. What did you anticipate for the session? When meditating more regularly, were you grasping for something higher?
I wonder about that too. Will the ego get involved to turn this into a goal-oriented efficiency fest, possibly and ironically making it more difficult. Or will the experience make it easier going forward?

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mountainFrugal
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by mountainFrugal »

I think this is where the traditions/teachers come in to point out that ego getting in the way after breakthrough experiences. It is my understanding having smaller glimpses of what @slevin described + readings is that the more frequently you have them the easier it becomes. However, trying to have these experiences is counterproductive. I think it is really interesting that @slevin had them after being obviously annoyed with his cat. An emotional mental state that you have recognized in the past, point it out so you are no longer identified with it and then expand.

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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by chenda »

Be careful with this Selvin. A lot of these meditative techniques have been extracted from religious traditions and offered to a secular audience without the guardrails provided by religious traditions. You can easily get in over your head, and loose - maybe permanently - your sense of personhood, or suffer other problems. Meditation is often presented as a uniformly good thing, but it can be dangerous to some people.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

Scott 2 wrote:
Sat Apr 02, 2022 10:42 am
While you describe the experience as unearned, perhaps that mindset let you sit without expectation. What did you anticipate for the session? When meditating more regularly, were you grasping for something higher?

Do you always stop when the timer goes off? When using a timer, I like a very subtle chime. Sometimes I decline the invitation and let the experience continue to unfold.

I see tools for an "advanced" spiritual practice as a way to corral those who can't stop striving. Myself included. For me it was yoga. When my enthusiasm faded, I drifted to level 1 classes and short home practices. The simple tools were more effective. I stopped chasing.
No, I just meditate for theoretical long term mental health reasons. This doesn't change anything, just makes the experience (and me) more enjoyable and adds an annoying fuzzy dimension of "what the fuck is this nonsense (existentially)" to my whole understanding of the world when thinking about what the fuck happens when I meditate now. Maybe if it keeps up long term I'll go annoy some PHd students who are studying mindfulness meditation and get them to make me a guinea pig to maybe help others.

Also thanks for the recommendation of a nicer timer. Though I got an app to just be a meditation timer and it seems to be a whole bundle of nonsense more than that including guided meditations and way too much else. Not a real problem, just funny.

@jacob and @mountainfrugal Well I wasn't worried about some ego efficiency test of can I / can I not until you guys mentioned it :oops: ! And n=3 is not a large number of trials, but I have been able to reach this state (or something similar) every day since. Will update with results again after a week or two.
jacob wrote:
Sat Apr 02, 2022 8:30 am
This might be my Mt Stupid talking (warning, unguided amateur hour) but I've been experimenting with "switching my Te off"(+) by basically lying on bed, closing my eyes, and watching the patterns forming "behind my eyelids". If I think about them, they go away immediately. If I don't they stay. Initially they looked like very high contrast pictures and animations that I later identified with "what I've been staring at recently". For example, when we were camping a lot, I saw foilage and landscapes moving laterally (like staring out a train window). During winter, the foilage went away. And so on. Lately, there's been more color. Anyhoo ... I interpret this as letting my Ni-visual pattern engine run. Being Ni it's a subconscious state. IFF I would apply a method like "I am aware that I'm watching these patterns" (which I would see as switching Te on), they'll get destroyed immediately.
I used to do something similar as a kid, where I would lightly press my fingers across my eyes right above my eyelids, which generated some pretty really vivid / bright and interesting patterns for as long as I wanted. These are a little bit different than the background "patterns" that I see when I close my eyes, which is how I'm interpreting what you are saying here. Probably not great for long term eye health to do this all the time, but you may get a more fun visual experience out of the ordeal :D. I don't have any Ni though, only Ne, so I think my experiential interpretation would end up quite different.
jacob wrote:
Sat Apr 02, 2022 8:30 am
I normally don't use "words" to think, so doing so would be a conscious effort and so I think that's what removes the pattern (or anything else) as the "word processor" gets fired up. Therefore I found the description of your method interesting. Even more interesting: It never occurred to me to deliberately(*) pursue the same idea to any other "subjective" sensations beyond vision, especially not with emotions. I'll try that.
If you have "visual" thinking you may be able to translate the idea of you being a separate entity from the vision into your cognitive processing of the pattern watching. I'm just not sure how, because my thinking is mostly words + emotions + my Ne pattern matcher / builder burning through everything I take in or think about.

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