Ideas that keep coming back

Here are my ideas that keep coming back. They got here in a passive way. I didn’t select them. I just observed which ones return most often. It’s a resource I maintain on my wiki that has been evolving for over five years. I try to include an idea there only if it crosses a threshold of being active in me for several months. I also have a waiting room and an archive of old ideas that I either integrated, or that don’t feel as important rn. If anybody has collections of ideas like this that changed them, I would love to hear about them. I’ve been creating ideas folders since adolescence. Go to the bottom of this article to see a photo of my first collection, written with a marker pen on my bedroom wall.

Nature of things is śūnyatā (emptiness). Things have no fixed, inherent nature, which is precisely whymultiple perspectives on the same thing can each be genuinely true (even opposite ones). A thing isn’t locked into one description. And this may apply to teaching. For example a jhanna teacher might tell one student to effort more and another to relax completely. The teaching has no single right form, it’s empty too.
~ Rob Burbea said something like this in Introduction to Jhanna (1st or 2nd lecture)

Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously
– via theo

The best guiding question in life is, “Who do you want to share this life with?”… My ethics is derived from my desire for good peers
– visakan veerasamy

Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.
– General Omar Bradley

Wants are infinite, the reality is constraints
– via Eliezer Yudkowsky

Internet as a self-destructing paper
~ gwern

People don’t want you to be perfect, what they want is to feel connected to you
– via Joe Hudson

Enlightenment feels like correctness, that every passing second feels correct
– Aella via interview with Spencer Greenberg on Clearer Thinking podcast (28:29)

Why would I trust opinion bc its my own?
– Julia Galef via Rationally Speaking #143

I don’t see much of a difference between deeply accepting yourself and deeply accepting others. You can’t really accept yourself *conditionally—*if you’re okay only as long as you aren’t “X”, then you’re like the Catholics trying to get into heaven by being good enough
– Aella Link

If you have a plan B means you are failing at plan A
– a friend

Beliefs persevere even without any social pressure. … The belief will not change when the reasons are defeated. The causality is reversed. People believe the reasons because they believe in the conclusion … We believe what the people we love and trust believe. This is not a conscious decision to conform by hiding one’s true beliefs. It’s the truth, this is how we believe.
– Daniel Kahneman

I am trying to be the dumbest person in the room

Had a lot of occasions lately to wonder what truths about myself people are trying to avoid telling me.
– Cate Hall link

You don’t have a brain with a body, you have a body with a brain
– Ido Portal

I want to be as publicly vulnerable as possible, because I want to broadcast acceptance towards others. As in, one of the first times I felt deep acceptance from someone else was when I watched them name an unflattering thing about themselves with openness and grace
– Aella

Flirt with abandon
– ceo link

Don’t look what people are saying. Look what people are doing.

Locate an animal, mimic its expression and movement for two minutes. If there are no other lives around, observe an object and be it for two minutes. Do it regularly
– Apichatpong Weerasethakul via Hans Urlich Obrist

We seem to be so important that it breaks our minds and makes us wonder if the universe is real
– Michael Vassar

Ours is the era of inadequate AI alignment theory. Any other facts about this era are relatively unimportant
– Eliezer Yudkowsky

The truth doesn’t lie in the middle, truth lies where it lies
– Władysław Bartoszewski (original in Polish: Prawda nie leży pośrodku, prawda leży tam, gdzie leży”)

Intelligence is did you achieved things you wanted in life
– Naval

I have felt it myself—the glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.
– Freeman Dyson Link

Start where you are
– Pema Chödrön

The world can never own a man who wants nothing
– Wu Hsin via Naval Ravikant

Trusted third parties are security holes
– Nick Szabo in crypto context

It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking, than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting
– A.J. Jacobs

If fixing or saving and trying to rescue [other people] is futile, radical self-care is quantum and it radiates out from you into the atmosphere. Like a little fresh air. It’s a huge gift to the world. One people say: isn’t she full of herself? – just smile obliquely like Monalisa and make both of you a nice cup of tea. Being full of affection to self-goofy, self-centered, cranky, annoying self is home. Is where world piece begins
– Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Life’s work is like building castles from the sand or painting pictures on the water
– Naval

If you hesitate whether to become a participant, take part
– Paweł Althamer

A secret of getting ahead is getting started.

Don’t focus on outputs. Focus on inputs. And then score will take care of itself.
– Bill Walsh

Science is the quantification of doubt. Facts are f words in science.
– Lisa Feldman Barrett

Love is the most important force in the universe
– Michael Pollan

Everything is on the spectrum of love. Everything can be explained by identifying where it lies on the spectrum of love

It’s a lot harder to create something constructive than destructive. First was dynamite then was a combustion engine. First was the atomic bomb, then was a nuclear electricity plant. In order to make something constructive one need to make it safe, control many moving parts, sync a variety of processes together.
~ Naval

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
– Seneca

It’s less important to improve how you play on a good day, and more to find a slight better ways how you play on a bad day
~ Alex Ferguson, a highly successful coach of Manchester United

What you do on your bad days matters more than what you do on your good days
– Kevin Kelly

We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are
– Anaïs Nin

I wake up every day thinking that I don’t understand. How to live in a world that I don’t understand?
~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

99% of all effort is wasted. Focus on 1%
– Naval

The ongoing experience that I have is a feeling of, I never know how to express this, but that things are neutral in a way. Things are more neutral than they seem. One person hears something and they say it’s bad and the other person hears the same thing and says it’s good. It has its influence depending on whatever your background is, where you come from and your interpretation. But actually things are in a sense neutral.
– Pema Chödrön Link

How to become smarter? Take care of your body. Your head is an organ too.
– Tim Ferris

If you cannot do what you asked yourself to do for a long time you are probably not a good kindergarten teacher to yourself. Our brain is ancient. It’s sub–divided in many ancient, animalistic parts. In order to be a functional human being you need treat yourself like a kindergarten teacher controlling a group of children.
– Tim Urban

I suspend judgement
– Montaigne via Anthony Bourdain tatoo

Wisdom is just covering blind spots in one’s mental model map of knowledge … Eighty or ninety important mental models will carry about 90 percent of the freight in making you a worldly wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.
~ Charlie Munger

Find source of the discipline, study for the rest of your life
– Naval

Focus on important, neglected, and tractable
– via Open Philanthropy

Don’t trust individual papers, trust literatures –
– Tyler Cowen

In primatology, when we talk about primates, almost everything is viewed through a perspective of a hierarchy in the group. In social sciences, when we talk about humans, hierarchy is rarely ever mentioned
~ Frans de Wall

The more you know, the easier is to know more