As you say, blinking rarely makes its way into conscious thought, despite that the visual input was briefly suspended. (I suppose a similar thing happens with smell. How often do you notice that you don't smell much when you breathe out?) Neither do we notice that our various senses have different latencies, reporting the same event at different times.
As I understand it, the blind spot in our vision was only discovered relatively recently. For countless millennia, mankind wasn't even aware of it, and not for lack of curiosity. I suspect the same goes for our colour perception.
Senses can even blur together - the input from, say, your sight, can affect how you perceive taste, or texture.
As you say, this kind of 'smearing' is a brilliant feature of our minds, it's not an ugly hack at all. That we aren't able to intuit the precise nature of how we perceive things, is a small price to pay, both in evolutionary terms and in terms of the elegance of the system, to my mind.
On a less substantive note: reading lengthy writeups on Twitter is singularly painful. I do wish people would make the leap to the blog-post format for this kind of thing.
Interesting anecdote: I've been through a fair amount of training in perception and conscious proprioception in the military. The end result of all of this training is that I am very often actively paying attention to my body, especially my vision, hearing, and touch. I've noticed that when I blink, I'm consciously aware of what has changed when I finish blinking. I'm aware of how my body moves during this time, if my sense of touch is telling me something is different than before my eyes closed. I can pick things up that I can't see without fumbling for them. It's really interesting how effectively we can mentally model the world around us, incorporate different types of senses to update this global model.
I imagine that professional athletes, race car drivers, Martial artists, etc... develop similar levels of proprioception and modeling.
For example, would a color blind philosopher understand the world differently? How about a synaesthete? What about a philosopher diagnosed with sociopathy? Would their experience change their rational understanding of the world?
You could very easily write a whole piece about how elegant and awe inspiringly complex and effective they are on the exact same subject.
Except it wouldn’t get as many likes and retweets, of course.
Sort of made me sad just thinking about that. Twitter really does encourage the worst forms of conversation - outrage, sarcasm, cheapness, drunk humor dominates.
But eh, I'm not the one who took their time to write this all out in a presentable way so whatever the author wants
Nassim Haramein - British leftist newager who claims to have invented a new theory of physics implying all particles are actually black holes and who’s quite popular in North London hippie circles has 350K followers on Facebook.
I think these are good baselines of what it takes to get 62k followers.
Science establishment knows all, and is never wrong, especially once it excommunicates a heretic. Science heretics are always bad and wrong. Science establishment people are always right. Trust science establishment. Give science establishment money. Science good. Quack bad. Give money. No money to quack. All to science. Science good.
Did we mention science right and quack wrong?
I've never understood why, in the Eternal September, anyone would expect the average late-night conversation on the internet to be any different from the average late-night conversations at the local pub. Sure, you might find that rare table of PhD students/young engineers/residents/academics and teachers/etc. having a genuinely interesting conversation as they transition from work to relaxation after a long night at the lab/hospital/grading. But mostly it's drunk idiots relishing in base pleasures. And after the second drink or so those engaging conversations will devolve.
I don't think Twitter is encouraging anything in particular here. The same thing happened with IRC channels, forums, etc. No point in getting angry or sad about the Eternal September; it was always inevitable.
The platform not only discourages long form dialogue, which is especially useful for communicating complex topics, it explicitly prohibits it.
Sure, but I don't think that type of communication/interaction causes bad conversations. The conversation was going to be a shit show regardless. Go join any Mome's or Political group on Facebook. The conversation isn't exactly elevated.
> The platform not only discourages long form dialogue, which is especially useful for communicating complex topics, it explicitly prohibits it.
Not really. "1/N"
Tweeting involves getting your short thoughts evaluated and rated by strangers at scale! You're also regularly aware of the properties required to (potentially) go viral.
It is far more difficult, by design, to encourage better conversations there.
While I'm not a big fan of Twitter, "the character limit encourages a weird conversational style" is not on my list of grievances at all.
I see Twitter as mostly a broadcast medium where you go to get the latest info on some event.
Conversations the kind that feel natural and human dont have a weird distracting real time ticker above my head scoring every dumb thing that flits through my mind.
Without going into the backstory, there was a period of time where I had to follow about 100 very specific people. I also happen to know how successful these people were financially.
Those who were the most successful financially tweeted the least and those who were the least successful financially tweeted the most. Then there was those who didn't tweet at all because they had no financial incentive to and their egos weren't contingent upon it.
The 2010s “lol look at this dumb shit” attitude reminds me of the 90s “edgy ironic” attitude. It’s lazy, just following the trend that further reduces our ability to continue and have a cool discussion. You can be funny without needing to hit every dopamine receptor. But hey, maybe that’s just what Twitter is for - letting off some steam.
I only felt sad because I saw discussions here the other day about humans being sphagetti code and this sort of absolutist/negative/ironic postmodern attitude just kind of sucks - it actually shuts down conversation (note you are literally just defending it instead of expanding into, say, some philosophy). You can be totally tongue in cheek, funny, and even self-deprecating without being just wrong and super absolutist at once, it’s just not as easy and probably wins a few less internet points.
If anything I’m advocating for a humor that complements truth.
If one watches a lot of brain documentaries on pop sci TV channels, the thing they present looks like this magnificent beautiful 3D model with bluish and pinkish stuff and light pulses go around as in a hyperfuturistic awesome thing while the camera is circling around with beautiful intriguing music in the background. The reality is a squishy gobblegook of kludges that gets its job done remarkably well but through some remarkably strange ways. It is a lot of spaghetti, no clear modularity, lots of stuff performing multiple functions and doing things in a roundabout way.
I first read about this contrast in David Linden's really enjoyable "The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God".
But if you already think that everything is rotten and humans are crap and biased beyond imagination, nothing has any value etc. etc. then perhaps you'd benefit from the opposite direction idea, about how really well it works and how much extra stuff the mind does that is not strictly mundane and everyday tasks.
> how bullshit insane our brains are
> but OH NO
> this shit works
> your freaking visual system just lied to you about HOW LONG TIME IS
> we're apparently computers programmed by batshit insane drunkards in Visual Basic 5
> your brain has EVEN MORE UGLY HACKS
Interminable shtick that just makes subject matter pointlessly longer and more of a chore to read.
TLDR; that’s authors choice both for stylistic reasons and personal. When the choice is between “don’t blog at all” and “post on twitter” because that’s what fits his mind process, I would rather read about it on twitter than not at all.
Judging by the amount of discussion here, it seems like this was thought provoking for a number of people despite the format.
I find twitter threads frustrating to follow also, but you could always... skip clicking the link if you feel so strongly about it.
As an aside, criticizing the form of content rather than the substance is not of particular interest in general, to be honest. It comes off as “I didn’t really have anything to say about the subject, but at least I can comment on perceived flaws in the style of presentation”.
If you like that style, then fine, why don’t you just not reply to this valid sub-thread? I don’t see you adding any to the discussion. But the discussion of the degradation of our ability to communicate due to social media incentivizing stupid clickbait is super important.
I don’t think the discussion on this post here is reddit-level - for example, I found the top level comment on the role of dreams, and the link to the commenter’s paper on psyarxiv super interesting. As I said in my comment, I too find the twitter thread format a bit frustrating to read.
What I was trying to say is that the author (Foone) has previously posted about this - for them, the choice really is between “blog this way or not at all” due to the way their mind works.
Of course the fact that this topic comes up every time is indicative, but I think what it indicates is that Twitter UX is terrible, not that the author is a bad person for choosing to share in this format.
I definitely should aim my criticism at the incentives more than the people, that’s a good point. I specifically like HN because it seems to have figured out pretty nice incentives (of course the lack of scale is the key).
If this happens any time this author is posted there's obviously something to the criticism of the style.
As for your aside, "if you don't like it, don't read" is also not a particularly interesting contribution, to be honest.
I am not saying Twitter is a great platform for this type of thing - clearly it’s not.
I now know what to expect if I do read more in future, but regardless of my opinion of the style, I definitely rather people post/publish in any form rather than not post at all. Anything that can inform people about something they weren't previously aware of is a good thing.
Say a novice practices to catch a ball on a windless day. He gets better. What exactly is he getting better at? He is getting better at guessing the trajectory of the ball based on past 3D positions of the ball.
This guesswork has its limits. He learns the limits on a windy day. He gets better with more practice on a windy day.
This new knowledge too has its limits. He learns that on a windy day at the beach.
The brain tries to guess the future based on a sequence of events. This is why detaching from senses is an experience like no other. Meditation, irrespective of the modality, is a way to detach from senses. We do not live in the past.
If our brains were not capable of holding memories and only of detecting one event at a time, two cars moving at vastly different speeds would look separated in space, but nothing more than that. I think, our senses, our ability to hold on to memories (past sensor data) of events and our ability to compare two past events combined makes the world animated. This also seems to give birth to the sense of passage of time. Which also could mean that time does not exist?
I don't see a real problem with this. Imagine a video camera that inserts a black frame every other frame (in the sensor data), and a transcriber that just doesn't bother including the black frames in the recorded data. Why would the black flashes from the sensors be a problem?
But that's completely unrelated....
How about a visual system that did not need to take liberties with the perception of time?
Can you offer a source? Asking for a tall friend.
Why this is presented as bullshit insane I have no idea. It seems like an amazingly brilliant solution to me, much better than the 'engineering' solution suggested where your vision flashes black every time you move your eyes. Also worth mentioning this weirdness is repeated in human consciousness all the time. Like the theory (tested as far as we can) that tall people perceiving the world further in the past so they can reconsile nerve impulses from their feet as happening at the same time as visual stimulus. We've known about phenomenon like this for a long time as well as other deeper revelations like, what is sometimes called, the illusion of free will. And yet we constantly act surprised that our conscious experience of the world doesn't correlate to what we find out is 'actually' happening.
So we are flawed meat bags with insane, non sensical brain mechanics, if only our biological solutions were as well thought out as VR eh?
How glad am I that the incredible complexity and subtly of evolution created my visual system and not Valve or Sony.