People have been so hung up on this idea of intelligence being heritable or not heritable that it's almost forgotten that severe mental illness (schizophrenia, bipolar, major depression) is highly heritable -- and there are few things that can sidetrack your life like that.
How's your self-object breakthrough? Okay, I might be jealous that you found a foolproof(?) way to have it published :)
Ofc I'm still mostly bouncing between the top 2 boxes here... (Being aware of it maybe makes that less concerning?)
(Pleasantly) surprised-- but maybe shouldnt have been-- that Chandrasekhar opened with thermodynamics
Heads-up. Regarding the self-obj. Might try to set up a three-way to sync with aeb* when I can tria(ge/ngulate) the relevant emotions better (modulo whatever mental resources my own PRE-breakthroughs require)
This turned up the other day and explains the overarching framework of how my practice (symbolic, embodied) fits into other approaches to facing the world
and i think communicates the sense of urgency in terms of the current crises such as the crisis of object relations, crisis of energy and the environment, crisis of political legitimacy, etc.
Yeah I saw that post and was going to try to kick off the thread from that very stub.
I do feel the urgency, so a thorough read is warranted.
Thoughts after the first pass, though, "rationalism fails because humans learn that fast-think responses are better for dealing with chaos", what's your succinct summary of the "crisis of object relations"
Instead of relying on real science, magic has become the sole foundation of expertise for the technocratic elite and the professional managerial caste—culminating in the legendary powers of the High Mages of the Central Bank, the Priesthood of Think Tanks and the Sacred Policy Institutes.
There's this sock-puppet on HN who I might have otherwise written off as a conservative but the way he writes is stimulating so he seems to be just one of these technocratic elite according to the above (albeit I credit him for the "insight")
Chimp troupe actually does get close to my knee jerk reaction to the substack: that rationality aka the mental has always been at best only been a thin veneer on top, at least for as long as I've been part of this troupe.
"object relations" is the ability to express love.
In higher ed we are already facing a crisis because people slowed down having kids 20 years ago. The hysterical right is talking about the crisis, the left cares about the welfare state which needs working-age people to fund it but it still fantasizes that billionaires can pay for it all without the recognition that billionaires need working-age people and an expanding economy to be billionaires.
Young men immediately around me are desperately struggling in various ways, which makes the problem intensely personal to me.
20-30 years from now though the hysterical right will seem prophetic, but for now the responsible right and the literate left share in the "individual uber alles" ideology that problematizes everything.
There's a take that revolutions only happen right after things get slightly better, like spring for the suicidal.
(Have been trying to link "individual uber alles" to the macro-nihilistic core of liberalism but nothing has been clicking, including https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46346958 [0])
At the risk of overgeneralizing, women tend to make a healthier (more functional=better moral-injury-compensated) tradeoff between value or values. For men, the "trades" come close to women's Goldilocks zone, but "trading" (finance) will always be the devil. A man will rather be seen in the company of high-class "Trading" than be married to "the Trades".
(Within the technocratic elite, VCs try to make a better tradeoff than Jane Street/RenTech etc, but the national ideology is such that followers of Warren Buffet can still accuse them of leaving value on the table. PG used to talk of "rapacious" finbros but he & Jessica doubling down on Altman is your "supply-side socialism")
[0]top comment: high risk high formal value politics ("war") beat high _informal_ risk high _informal_ value building, family, community ("love"). like how Taleb only gets love (sycophancy, but not really?) from low-bros of the global South-- too much testosterone to make a healthy tradeoff.
Here just to note that we seem indeed to be getting somewhere,
(+according to Arnol'd, Varchenko discovered?/invented? mixed Hodge* structures so he could deal with oscillatory integrals. those lowly monsters that feature in many a baby phyker's trauma..
The old fashioned tech doesn't do much better; I did an image search on '"whitney tuck" cusp' and got back a picture of a VIA monograph. At least it was relevant!
Pedantic exception: "Text" is good; "hypertext" is better
Development of selfobject images I've been chewing on it and think the best thing is the "emotional preparation" used in the Meisner techniques of acting. Images that really activate the real self are very personal and archaic and could be embarrassing. It would not work if I were to give you one as a guru [3], and if were to have you describe them as a guru you I would be inclined to judge them and you'd be inclined to be dishonest because you'd be afraid of being judged.
In the case of Meisner you go into the repetition exercise having done an emotional prep and your "guru" observes how it affects your behavior and can tell you "that was amazing, that really worked for you" or "that fell flat" and the one thing they'll tell you is that you have to imagine something rather than recall an experience. You aren't expected to talk about what you used, you're getting feedback about the effects.
The other thing I want to suggest is the Bandler/Grinder kind of content-free exercise where you are told to evoke an image but not expected to describe it, I think that's less effective than the Meisner training because it is presented as something you can do out of a book or in a large group and you don't have the closed loop that monitors behavior and physiology.
