LastThursday

No... sameness and difference are different. Great video BTW.

A "person" is just a label, as such you will always be more than any label can describe. Said differently, what you "are" is a bunch of labels: but that's just language. Names drift on water Reflecting the full moon

@trenton that's too negative. The issue is one of relativity, stupidity is completely relative (to you). The forum is full of stupid people yes, but also full of not stupid people, relative to you. However, if the wisdom or intelligence is too high, then it's hard to grasp and may even seem stupid. You're not on your own then, but you do have to seek out the intelligence that fits your own. But it's no different in real life, you can only accept and understand new things only from your current viewpoint.

@Samuel this is true to the extent that if you work it takes up a large amount of your waking hours. You'll spend 8 hours sleeping, 8 hours working, and the rest in doing whatever. So, if you can align your work to your values/purpose to increase LOC then it's win win, but mostly that doesn't happen. What does happen is that work pays the bills and that enables you to do what you want with the remaining time you have left. It's more indirect than you're stating. Nearly all jobs are to do with making money primarily, and that means persuading others to part with their cash.

The root cause of friction is a mismatch of worldviews. To break it down, what typically happens in this situation is: You reinforce your worldview with words or violence - they may do likewise Their arguments are persuasive and you change your worldview Your arguments are persuasive and they change their worldview You avoid each other That's politics in a nutshell. The hardest paths are 2 and 3. But nearly never will you change worldviews through reason alone. People hold on to worldviews primarily through upbringing, religion, identity, emotion. Basically, people's worldviews are not built through reason, but through experience. Breaking through that is a hard ask. Intelligence and education hardly comes into it.

A good way to start is to not underestimate your own stupidity. What I mean by that is that tomorrow, in a week, a month, a year, you'll look back and cringe at certain things you did and said and believed about yourself. Look inward first before you look outward, there is the greatest learning.

Some thinking out loud this morning. At different moments in your life you have different sets of thoughts that churn around. When I examine my thoughts they're kind of dreamlike in their character, you know the sort of thing, what would it be like if I was rich and living in mansion, what would it be like if I'd been born somewhere else, born as a different person, and so on. They're dreamlike because they occur but in themselves don't have much meaning or gain any traction: it's unlikely that I will ever live in a mansion. I see it more as curiosity, as mentally "trying on different clothes". One thing that I seem to have a deep affinity with is the outdoor life. I watch videos about people camping, I like nothing more than the beach on holiday, or sitting outdoors in a cafe, working with others in an outdoor project building stuff, hiking, road running. All this might stem from being outdoors nearly all the time as a kid, and especially in the hot dry climate of Andalusian Spain. To me it's play, exploration, freedom, cameraderie, expansiveness. And yet, somehow I'm nearly always indoors. I think subconsciously this fact bothers me, although I don't dwell much on these types of thought generally. I'm inside my head a lot, and this requires a certain amount of stillness and quietude, and being outdoors is the antithesis of that. This need for thinking slowly built up over a very long stretch of time, I was always a curious kid, and when I worked out that I could learn and solve things for myself I never looked back. My default state is "outdoor", "physical", "social", but there is a great weight of "indoor","mental","solitude" working in the opposite direction. I should probably be thankful for having such a balance in my character. But there is also the more subtle battle going on, outdoor is unstructured being, indoor is structured discipline. I've gone from playing "out there" to playing in my head, and I know that I've lost something of my true character along the way. Being an adult requires a fair amount of structure and discipline, and part of me strongly wants to have un-structure and openendedness, not to be tied to anything: freedom from obligation.

I think it'll be good to get out things that arise and put them down in written form. I have so many lost thoughts and ideas, and some of them were very good.

How the other half live.

Yikes. Those things give me ingrowing hairs.

I shave (my face) completely by feel in the shower. The trick is to feel the direction of the hairs and pull the skin slightly in that direction, then pull the razor over it in a smooth quick motion over it. The shower keeps things moist. Worst bits are around my nostrils and corners of my mouth and Adam's apple, but short gentle strokes does it. If you want a proper close shave, then use a mirror and shave the hairs three times in three directions - lather again each time - takes forever though. Ain't nothing sharp or chemical going near my man parts, they are as nature intended - you youngsters.

Reality constructs itself, you don't. Reality constructs you. Consciousness = Reality. Physical constraints are part of reality's construction. They are non-negotiable by you. Reality determines boundaries for itself, call it the laws of physics if that suits you. That is called a body. That is called reality. They are called drugs and food. That is called mining and engineering. They are called doors, or more abstractly transport. Essentially, anything you want to imagine is in some way based on existing reality - and you already have access to these things via your persistent interactive interface.

Think of it in the same way as breathing. Is it possible to control your breathing? Most of the time breathing is outside of your conscious control, but sometimes you become conscious that you can control it. What about actors, can they conjure up feelings, how do they do it? And lastly, how many feelings can you feel at once, and does a new feeling crowd out an old feeling? BTW I like your "outwith", I'll have to start using it.

It's the same for something like law or medicine. Every discipline has its jargon, as @zurew says it's done for accuracy and brevity of conveying ideas. It's also used to signal being part of a group. I bet even in your immediate family you have distinct phrases and unusual words you use.

This is like saying a carpenter should understand ecology, because they work with wood, and being amazed they don't. Different domains of knowledge and experience. You can be an Einstein in your domain, and be clueless about other things.

Leo with hair and lipstick. I would.

Dealing with idiots. There are occasions when I get triggered by people on this forum. It can take many forms, someone says something innapropriate, takes things out of context, trolls someone else, is racist, mysoginist, puts someone else down, laughs at them for their difference, bullies, or is outright nuts. I get even more upset if it's aimed at me. But this sort of thing doesn't just happen on the internet, but in real life too. The struggle I constantly have with it is how to express myself in those situations. I get the impression that for a lot of people it's a simple equation: I'm upset, therefore I show I'm upset. There is nothing in the middle mediating the response, little thought or moderation goes into controlling "how should I respond best?". When I was younger my natural response to being upset was fairly simple: I would just be avoidant. For whatever reason I never felt comfortable just expressing the fact I was upset, don't get me wrong this did come naturally when I was very small, I would cry or very visibly show I was upset, but at some point this was knocked out of me. I think I learned that the best response for me was just to avoid the people that upset me, most probably because I felt helpless in those situations. It was worse if I couldn't physically get away, I would just give people the silent treatment. That strategy would stay with me for most of my adulthood. The problem is I learned is that it mostly doesn't work, it neither makes me feel better, or lets the person know that their behaviour is unacceptable. I needed a different approach. There is something to be said for the "I'm upset therefore I react" way of doing things. For one it's immediate and for another it's direct, the person behaving badly has instant feedback, and you yourself are able to express things without talking yourself out of it. It can solve both the problems at once, you feel better, and the other person knows where you stand. In my experience I've found that the other person will start behaving differently around you, but that it's unpredictable how they will react, sometimes they will get angry, sometimes they will double-down, sometimes they back down and go away, rarely, they might apologise. You can't control others. And that's where I get stuck, because "just reacting" isn't that good of a strategy most of the time: when whole nations do it they end up going to war. Very often questioning the other person's behaviour can work better. The "why did you do/say that?" response can take people off guard. In general asking people questions puts them into a position where they have to think. When you're working, just take note of how many times your manager asks you questions, it's a form of dominance and control. Even if the person doesn't want to answer the question, it can make them think twice when interacting with you in future. And, ultimately that is as much control as you can hope to have, it may be your inner desire to stop the person from behaving badly at all and make them realise the error of their ways, but people are both selfish and slow to change. I'd say questioning works better in real life if you have the stomach for it, and in my experience don't do it to your manager, you might get fired. What have I settled on? Mostly the indirect approach, I am after all British, but it also gels better with my avoidant nature, I can do confrontation but mostly I don't. I find that it's difficult for people to respond (annoyingly) when you're being indirect. I take the observational and non-personal approach. It's hard to explain, but the context makes it obvious who you're directing your comments to, but your comments don't explicitly name the person. The aim is to be as public as possible, but not directly challenging. It could be argued that being indirect is ineffective, but as I've said above you can't control people. And lastly, sometimes no response is the best response, some people (trolls, nutjobs) want the oxygen of attention, best not to give it to them, take a deep breath and move on.

Well done on your breakthrough. It must feel good to let yourself off the hook and take away that pressure. I've met a few charismatic people in my time. From observing them I'd say exactly what you've found out for yourself. They were good communicators with good social skills, they knew how to laugh especially at themselves, and they were confident and happy in their own skin. I'd say self-confidence would be at the top of that list, but not arogance. Having good social skills requires you to be "outward", to pay full attention to the people you're with, be non-judgemental, and not to be stuck in your own head. There's also a large amount of flow and improvisation. If you have performance pressure or worried about what you're going to do tomorrow, you're not in flow, and that kills social communication.

There is the obvious answer, but it's not very sexy: take action. I guarantee that it is 1000x more effective than not taking action. Use your God given arms, legs and mouth to manipulate reality.

@Joseph Maynor you've hit the nail on the head. Nobody thinks "statistically" for example, because it's hard to integrate. And, thinking "theoretically" isn't something that comes at all naturally to most. Nevertheless, it is possible to think differently, but as you say it isn't easy to integrate. My list was just a toy model, nothing more.

If you accept that there is a point to life, then love in all its forms is it.

@YIDIRYIDIR it's a good insight that behaviour is linked to identity. I would argue the converse (because I'm like that). People don't change behaviour because it threatens their identity. Change is uncertainty, and uncertainty is risk, and risk could threaten who you are. Also, there is nearly always some pay off for any entrenched behaviour, even if it's to the detriment of your overall wellbeing. To change then, requires a renegotiation of the pay off, which in itself can be hard to accept or work out.

@Majed I find it weird that you find it weird. Novel things can be weird, but you get used them, and it stops being weird. Women on motorcycles is neither here nor there, they are neither lesser or more of anything for doing it. Maybe they don't like traffic or just like the wind in their hair or have a death wish 🤷‍♀️

It would be interesting to come up with a model of non-standard thinking. I'd say the default mode for most folks is social thinking: who did or said what to whom and why, how one person relates to another, what you feel about things. Here's a random bullet list pulled out of nowhere of different types of thinking: Social - you keep a ledger of interactions between things (people), you apply a value function (feelings) to those interactions Relational - you accept that nothing happens in isolation, everything affects everything else with varying strengths Systems - everything works like a machine with distinct interacting parts, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts Construct aware - you realise that every type of thing is an artificially constructed entity made of other things Causal - you know that if A and B happen, there are different scenarios for their synchronicity: A caused B, A and B were caused by C etc. Statistical - see @Carl-Richard Ambiguous - you accept that it is not possible to know the detail of causes for A and B and therefore have to conclude that A and B are equally likely even if contradictory. You know that knowledge and information are always lacking. Big picture - you zoom out or bring more of the world into the scenario in order to explain things, i.e. there a nearly always outside influences, outside of your knowledge. Meta - you constantly try and see problems from different angles, and through different paradigms, or by thinking laterally. Abstract - you use ideas not rooted in every day things to explain things: mathematics, language, symbols, geometry, numbers. I also wonder if there can be a distinct progression in different styles of thinking.

@Adrian colby I think with autism there is a weak "theory of mind". This makes it difficult to take social cues from a person, interpret those and create a mental model of what that person is thinking and feeling, in real time. This also applies to oneself. We have a theory of mind of our own emotions and bodily sensations and build an identity from it. I suspect those with autism have a more fluid or looser identity. Identity mostly comes from copying others, and applying that to ourselves, but if that process is disrupted then building an identity becomes harder. Anyway, don't take my words verbatim, just my ideas nothing more.