Tasse's Corollary to Pearson's Law

Realize I never set this down in actual written words! So:

Pearson's* Law, paraphrased: when you measure something, you will naturally start to maximize it.

Tasse's corollary: ... even when you're trying to minimize it.

*(or maybe Monson's or Drucker's or Kelvin's or Caulkin's or Ridgeway's or Rheticus's - none of these seem very popular or credible, but I get marginally more hits searching for "Pearson's law")

A friend just pointed out I should have another law: "The broken thing will start working again exactly when you ask someone for help with it."

(Man, am I gonna be a Dignified Olde Gentleman someday publishing a book of sayings? I hope so, 'cause there's no way I'm gonna be a Dignified Olde Gentleman otherwise.)

project cyclops

Someone once told me I sounded like Youtuber CGP Grey, so when I stumbled on the podcast he co-hosts (Hello Internet) I gave it a try, and yep I feel this guy very much.

For a while he was doing this thing he called "Project Cyclops" - turning off a lot of his social media and other internet noise. Obviously, he's not the first to do this, but I like the name, so I'll borrow it.

Why: I don't know specifics, but some combination of calming down, slowing down, getting more out of my head and into my body, just feeling better. Something I'm doing now isn't working; I feel like I'm just zipping from thing to thing the whole time. I also feel stressed a lot, even though my life may be among the less-stressful lives; I feel angry a lot, despite having little to be angry about; and I feel like I'm wasting my life on trivial shiny things instead of focusing on what matters. Turning off your social medias won't solve these, but I hope it helps a little.

Some specifics:

- signing out of Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook, hopefully just not accessing them. Same with Feedly - I feel less sure about that, but I'm gonna try it.

- not listening to podcasts - still doing language tapes, and music if I feel like it, but gonna take a break from podcasts.

- not yelling at cars. To be clear: ban cars, and direct action in the form of yelling at them when their drivers are entitled assholes is probably a small impact in that direction. But for my mental health's sake, I'm gonna give it a rest for a little while.
- probably not videogaming. I like these too, and I think they can be deep and good, but they get me in a tightly wound mind-state, which I wanna practice not being in. (Plus, I just finished all the achievements in Slay the Spire*, so why even bother gaming anymore?)
* yes I am very proud, why do you ask?

I drafted this post on Sunday, and now posting it on Friday, I've done it for about a week. (I'm not totally all talk.)

Too soon to talk about effects, but I have noticed that my checking pattern when I'm bored at work is now email -> other email -> slack -> try to open twitter, realized that I'm signed out, think "hmm maybe there's nothing for me here", stop checking things. So, that's cool.

really bad and really good mental states, I guess?

I don't know how I got linked to this "qualia computing" site but it's occasionally-really-interesting and occasionally-crazy-seeming.

This post on "psychotic depression" just quotes Infinite Jest, and it's a good-though-terrifying read. Similarly, this post on logarithmic scales of pleasure and pain. Gets me thinking a few things:

1. holy god, how do people survive. how is there so much pain in this world. how can we even deal with living in a world where there are people suffering so much. (my answer so far: mostly, ignore the problem and hope it doesn't happen to me. obviously, this is unsatisfying.)
2. I oughta get back to meditating. (if I had a dollar for every time I said this...) I've experienced some pretty-faint jhana-type states, not regularly or dependably or strongly ("0.1th jhana"?), but it'd be really nice if I had a thing I could do to feel good more regularly.
(not that meditation's goal is producing jhana states. as far as I understand it, they're a nice byproduct, and/or a cool thing you can practice for fun.)

50 interviews with people experiencing PNSE (Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience) and a summary. This gets me thinking a few other things:

1. Enlightenment is a lot of things to a lot of people. Maybe a good analogy is, being a good chess player. There are some real discrete steps along the way ("oh, now I really get why you should control the center of the board" or "I finally found a good counter to the Sicilian Defense") but it's not a state you'll get to and be done.
2. It's also not blissful... except, I mean, I think I'd like it. It sounds like it's a quieting of a lot of self-related mental chatter, an expansion of the "self", less common occurrence of negative emotions. I guess that doesn't sound like a general solution to all of life's problems, but it kinda sounds like most of a solution to most of mine.
"When asked, none said they wanted their self-referential thoughts to return to previous levels or
to have the emotional charge returned to them."
3. why the hell does everyone in the enlightenment/etc world write books that look like this