Be a goldfish: Ted Lasso, 2020.
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Mental Liquidity
51–60 of 123 posts
Re: Mental Liquidity
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
You just might discovered yourself what others did without thinking: Following some given path to stop worring and using it as 'this can't be wrong because its old and others are doing it and enabling me'. Perhaps community fits even better. I personally am free enough to design my own life without boundaris.
Your current self-description and opinion of religion is where I was prior to moving onto my current state. Looking backwards, going beyond this represented breaking a boundary for me. I am not trying to persuade you and I am holding back from expounding on what I mean at length here, just sharing the perspective.
i wouldn't mind your perspective.
I do thought about a lot and its definitly exhausting to be free but i have been a nihilist since 16. Thought through tons of ideas and concepts (what if the universe is repeating itself, no free will, after life, before life, 'the egg' story, lsd, mdma, ...)
I'm now quite happy and content and still curious with my life. Havent' felt better than this and going the next step: getting a farm and transforming my environment how i want it to be.
Re: Mental Liquidity
#53The prerequisite for "mental liquidity" is articulated by Aristotle: "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." If you entertain the thought, this gives you the chance to try out a new belief network. If you find your belief network would be strengthened by its inclusion, then you adopt it. Otherwise, you reject it. In this way, ones interconnected set of beliefs grow…
> And this is right and good.
I disagree (without down-voting). This is basically 1-man echo chamber, you take what you like (it doesn't matter how many eloquent words you use to describe this, result is same), reject what would challenge your beliefs and would make them weaker. That's the opposite of critical thinking so needed in real world, and prime source why the current world, particularly west, is so torn to pieces about shit like russia, trump, guns, migrants and so on.
Stuff in life is complex, always, almost at fractal level. You keep learning, if you actually want, about new viewpoints that will challenge your current ones, every effin' day. Maybe at the end conclusion is don't trust anybody, people are generally a-holes etc. That's still fine as long as it represents truth.
Re: Mental Liquidity
#54Take a die with six to twenty sides and assign a belief system/worldview to each number.
Roll the dice twice, first for the belief system/worldview, the other for the number of months you live by it.
Of course, you can vary the parameter according to your taste and courage.
But it is important to persevere, so you better start small.
I call it Rhinehartian chaotic paradigm shift.
Dice Man goes chaos magic.
Re: Mental Liquidity
#55The best way to test your "mental liquidity" is to think about some hypotheses that are outside the "Overton window" or even outright taboo. "What if ***** were true? Surely it can't be true. If it were, that would be terrible." That's motivated reasoning. Remember that the truth of any hypothesis is not influenced by how much you want it to be true, or false. Some hypotheses are deeply uncomfortable, but you should…
Actually, most people shouldn't do that in most cases, because they aren't qualified to understand the evidence presented to them. Nor are the hypotheses they're testing their own. Valuable hypotheses arise from evidence - not vice versa. This is why juries in complex cases need so much time to be walked through subject matter by expert witnesses, and why standards of evidence are applied to what they are and aren't allowed to hear, and why the conclusions they may or may not draw are circumscribed to the cases being made by lawyers as allowed by judges. When people search the internet for evidence to support their most uncomfortable hypotheses, they'll always find it. That's how we get masses of people who believe in conspiracy theories and satanic panics, with the certainty of those who incorrectly believe they've done their own "research".
Taking up the most uncomfortable (i.e. "forbidden") hypothesis and giving it the weight required to attempt to prove it to yourself is not a systematic way of finding truth; it's a way of deceiving yourself into believing in the simplistic frameworks of other people's paranoid conspiracy theories.
Re: Mental Liquidity
#56One of the biggest beliefs I keep struggling with is the need to be perfect. I've been jamming away for many many weekends on a side project that literally was done. I just kept adding tiny tweaks left and right, until I literally just now launched it ( https://amee.la ). Nothing ground breaking, and in the end nothing that needed to have so much perfectionism around. The belief of having to need something perfect is…
Yeah, we are all susceptible to this. The tweaks were not worth the time because they didn't move the needle on the core offering. At the end of the day, this succeeds or fails based on how good the logos are. In my few minutes of trying this out, the generated logos were random, seemingly unrelated to the names, and just generally very unoriginal and low quality. I don't want to sound discouraging because this is a cool project, but just to say that spending time perfecting pixels and whatever else that doesn't have to do with the underlying functionality is probably not time well spent at this point.
Re: Mental Liquidity
#57I just finished the Einstein biography by Walter I. and found Einsteins stubbornness quite entertaining. He knew about this trait, accepted it as an effect of ageing and even was making jokes about it. He simply disliked some facts about quantum m. and allowed himself to pursue a rather fruitless endeavour for many years. He knew that this kind of stubbornness would kill the career of a younger scientist but he could afford to do so. In that sense he contributed to science.
Re: Mental Liquidity
#58A term I’ve come to like more is “cognitive flexibility”.
Re: Mental Liquidity
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is a belief it not the highest-ranked hypothesis of all possible options? Obviously beliefs are more complex than that, since we have a default set installed in us as children, and only a subset of humans are taught the rational methods of improving those beliefs over time. I consider myself a member of that subset. (Quoting Aristotle always puts me in the mood to rank things.)
I do believe a hypothesis to be different than a belief. A belief performs a different function than a hypothesis. A hypothesis can be defined as a “proposition made as a basis for reasoning, without any assumption of its truth” (Oxford Languages definition). Typically a function you perform to unearth a truth. A belief on the other hand holds some position on the spectrum of truth. To believe is to make an assertion…
I don't think we disagree. A hypothesis is upgraded to "belief" and therefore to the "spectrum of truth" only because it's the best you know of, not because it's the only one. It's a matter of degree, not kind. And a belief's position as the best one is always precarious; it can be unseated at any time by a better hypothesis.
Axioms are different, but over time I've found that even those weaken and become "merely" strong beliefs (or, more usually, only True within the context you're working in, e.g. mathematics). Even "I think therefore I am" is not axiomatic, I have come to believe. In fact I doubt it's important to identify some sort of root cause, which is rationalist heresy. Oh well.
Re: Mental Liquidity
#60In my experience, This attribute is an absolutely critical part of successfully building culture at an early stage startup, and you have to be ruthless about culling those who are not willing to give it a try nevermind master it.