The moat of low status might be underrated -- effective, practical, neglected

Never took a single course in K-12 on learning how to learn. Fortunately, I had to learn how to learn in order to pivot into software engineering a few years after college. Amazing how well this stuff works when effort applied.

jhanas are fun and powerful, you can learn to create on demand some of the best feelings your nervous system can produce but they teach you an important lesson beyond this. which is that those good feelings are not the best your nervous system can do. that you’ve been completely

one of the biggest ironies of life is that transformative spiritual experience is totally real but there's no way to describe it to someone who hasn't already experienced it without sounding totally stupid

Anki habit is a power trip

Good meditation coaching

“red-pill advice often focuses on looks or wealth, but no amount of either can bring durable security if you’re not secure without them”

Nick 😂 we’ve come a long way since the days when people were debating whether the jhanas were even real, but in a way it feels like we’re only just beginning. So much left to do and many lives to change

🎯 And a model for what expert intuition offers another superpower: *knowing when to disagree*. When an expert is sensemaking instead of pattern matching, you know you’re on equal footing, and should be careful about to defer to them bc they have some sort of social status.

Clarity on when to disagree is truly a gift

Sometimes I really feel like me and my subconscious are like an engineer and production code. My attention is on a tiny part of the overall system, but it’s like writing code — either fixing or introducing emotional bugs that run on autopilot in the background until revisited.

Nothing like someone casually handling a couple of pythons to remind you how different can be perfectly suited to tackle different problems.

While helping me think up jhana experiments, ChatGPT just coined the phrase "view scrubs." It meant mini-exercises in which students swap out views. I thought it meant people who have adopted very silly views.

the infinity stones of Naval’s recommended subjects to learn are now coming into place. Can’t wait to try Physics Graph/Lemnisket (Lemnisket/PhysicsGraph) from Chris and Jeffrey Biles. When I saw their ui I immediately thought of Justin Skycak and Math Academy In fact,

meditation is a thousand times more powerful than the average person thinks it is

Thomas Metzinger meets Krishnamurti in 1980, tell him of all the wonderful things meditation is doing for his life. K: cool, but are all these boons the specific results of meditation, or is it just nice to have found a story that makes your life feel meaningful & enchanted?

meditation might have the worst pedagogy of any field. they solved the cause* and cure** to suffering but hid it behind weird poems and deities * clenching and resistance ** train to not resist, see how you gradually feel way better, see the non-specialness of self-sensations