Timothy Lim

Twitter Logs Week 4 2025

Twitter bookmarks from 20th to 26th January 2025.

  • finding your purpose isn’t a static thing, it’s an attractor state as a function of (1) the society you live in (2) your mutable abilities & desires (3) your irreducible human soul

  • People are often willing to pay more to live in walkable, mixed-use communities I knew this intuitively, but I wanted to understand: 1. Just how big is this premium? 2. How quickly does it set in? So I dove into the data, & what I found blew me away

  • SINGAPORE - You’ve go to grow calluses on your heart or you just bleed to death, said LKY, allowing a long pause before he spoke

  • it’s gotten more often now, that i think, alone in my apartment, what the fuck am i doing as a living alone in these sheet walls? where is my family? why am i not with them? why am i in this foreign land?

  • This is the spectacular 1985 experimental fantasy scifi animation “The Book Of Sand” directed by Jean-François Laguionie, which is going to premier in the US tomorrow for the first time at Philosophical Research Society! [ movie ]

  • i feel like my expectation of linkrot on the web has grown with each passing year, such that i get a bit anxious about encountering things and then losing them. starting to wonder if it would make sense to start making a personal archive. it wouldnt take up that much storage…

  • Jordan Peterson in a 1 off old video spoke on addiction better then any one I have seen. he first said we have what could see as many mini personalities. An example of this would be that if person is starving that person will be totally different person, which i think no one would argue. you cant destroy personalities you have grown. once you have drug addict personality it cant be destroyed. you have to grow a superordinate personality that controls the addict personality. forcing addict personality down hierarchy of personality. he is personality physiologist so makes sense he sees it this way. how to grow a personality that stays in control seems difficult. there religious people who over unimaginable primal desires to say eat, so it seems it can be done

  • why aren’t more people hoarding datasets, images, media, music? you do realise that every example you can point to can be ripped apart and combined with anything else. the limiting factor now is sources of inspiration.

  • Fun tip! if you don’t know what you want, you can: 1. try a micro version of that career/project - for a week or two 2. find a person with your job in mind and invite them for coffee/ a short talk 3. join random events/interviews/group meetups as possible & maybe get lucky

  • mental discipline is a sort of like a strong military for the society of your self– it might sound like a good thing, and it can be, but it’s important for it to be part of a wider ecology. otherwise you get like an authoritarian military dictatorship with periodic coups etc #civilisation

  • When your car’s sensor says “low pressure on tire”, that doesn’t mean your tire has low pressure. It means the sensor says that. Important distinction, especially if the sensor has a history of being faulty Your emotions are sensors. Don’t ignore them, just find the root cause

    • https://x.com/DefenderOfBasic/status/1789633810792882267
    • Find the truth of your feelings Everything you feel comes from a source. It’s either an external reality or an internal reaction to a reality. The latter is easy to fix. It’s always a case by case basis. You always need to check
    • It’s possible to end up in a state with tons of errors from all kinds of sensors, and you’re spending a lot of energy turning off each error message every day. It seems quicker to ignore them and get through your work for the day, and it is, short term
    • The experience of being a human person is like driving a spaceship, where errors keep popping up. And I used to X out of them as fast as possible, they keep coming back up, I get real mad, and I finally drag all the error windows down to the bottom right corner so I can’t see em
    • You don’t have to fix them all at once. Maybe take a Friday afternoon and look at one of the errors and just sit with it and see if you can understand what the hell is going on with the system

  • The Tower of Babel (François de Nomé, 1630) [ image ]

  • “love is epistemologically necessary” is concretely true. You can test this. Disrespect literally makes you dumber

  • Yin is letting energy flow where it naturally goes Yang is driving energy where it wouldn’t go on its own

  • high-leverage political move you can make in your city as a random programmer: create a website called SeattleStats or whatever and publish easy-to-consume graphs of the metrics that you actually care about then do a guerrilla QR code poster campaign to make it known

  • Curtis Yarvin is mistaken when he says that Apple can produce iPhones because it’s a monarchy. There are millions of firms (“monarchies”) in the world that can’t produce anything nearly as impressive as iPhones, from the laundromat down the street to Boeing. Apple is the result of a decades long evolutionary process facilitated by the market which uplifts the very best culture, talent, processes, and ideas in the entire world. And the moment Apple slips, it’ll get replaced (the average lifespan of a Fortune 500 is 15 years). Governments just don’t work this way. Xi Jinping isn’t competing again a million counterfactual Chinese leaders who didn’t do Zero-COVID, avoided deflation, didn’t kill the tech industry, and were awake to AGI. He can fuck up as much as he wants. If a monarch happens to be competent, like Lee Kuan Yew, it’s merely by chance, not due to some intrinsic selection mechanism of monarchy that we can replicate. You are just as likely to get brutal dictators like Mao and Stalin by chance - this is not a reasonable gamble to take with the lives of hundreds of millions of citizens. Apple is indeed a wonderfully competent organization - if we want more of the world to be run competently, we should delegate more functions to the market, which is constantly and ruthlessly sizing down incompetence. To be clear, ton of incompetent businesses exist, but they loose access to capital, talent, and power rapidly, which is reallocated to those who can deliver. They don’t drag down the fortunes of entire countries and kill millions of people, which has happened again and again in authoritarian systems.

  • i think this is really important because I think the root cause of a lot of conflict is smart people failing to understand dumb people. The bottleneck isn’t more intelligence, it’s love (in the technical definition that Lulie outlines concretely in this thread)

  • commitment is an act of agency

    • “the older i grow, the more convinced I become that commitment generates a kind of experiential wealth that can’t be brute-forced into existence. There’s this fascinating fractal that occurs where constraint transmutes into focus, revealing layers of complexity a dabbler would miss entirely. It’s not a limitation, because that word feels subtractive, stressing what you can’t do. No, commitment is generative - it’s about what you discover when you choose to stay. You’ll know who you are by what you choose to go all in on”

  • every single deeply good thing in life comes from sacrificing freedom. freedom is optionality, a currency to be spent. if u value freedom above all other things u will end ur life finding u have nothing.

  • The most hellish looping arguments are actually misunderstandings at their core. To be understood, you need to know the limits of language and the blinding power of fear: -People often aren’t saying what we think they’re saying. Language fails us because, in truth, we’re just throwing symbols at each other. When you first learn a word or phrase, you don’t just store the dictionary definition of it. You hear it in context: the person who said it, what you think they meant by it, how others responded. This is cultural. For example, in the US, the word “penny-pincher” has a negative connotation i.e. is considered an insult when used to describe someone. But it’s also individual: the word “marriage,” for example, might point to different concepts in your brain than in mine. Like maybe I think of marriage as a stuffy legal formality, whereas you think it’s the step a couple takes before having kids. Therefore a sentence like “marriage is important” can mean entirely different things to different people. I might respond to it with a question about tax advantages; you might interpret this as me prioritizing money over family. -We interpret actions differently too. e.g. If you’re throwing up, I might think I’m doing you a kindness by giving you privacy, whereas you might think I’m abandoning you. This is why you always want to get clarification before assuming the worst of someone. -The anatomy of a looping going-nowhere argument is repetition without clarification. If someone is repeating themselves, it’s time to define your terms. -In a perfect world, we’d all have mutual curiosity for each other – seeking to understand each other, being slow to jump to conclusions, collabing through clarifying questions. -Mutual curiosity is not always accessible, though, and here’s why. Under most heated arguments that go on and on, at their deepest root, is really a question of whether we are Good (moral, worthy, deserving of love) or Safe (from harm). People on Twitter aren’t vehemently arguing whether “sex is a need” because they’re interested in semantics. For some, saying “sex is a need” qualms fears and insecurities (that asking for sex is unreasonable, or that wanting it makes them bad). For others, it does the opposite (inflaming the fear that if sex is a need it means I owe it, or that not needing it means I’m broken). And so thousands of people end up in a going-nowhere argument about the definition of a word, fighting as if something is at stake. -From a young age, we build elaborate armor around our insecurities. If I think physical attractiveness = Goodness, I’ll continually seek affirmation that I am attractive or could become so. To learn that my Goodness does not hinge on being super attractive would be a WHOLE ORDEAL involving corrective experiences, grieving my past, relearning who I am, doing life differently. To avoid the pain of all that unraveling – and especially the initial terror of “WHAT IF I AM ACTUALLY [thing I think means I’m Bad]?” – when I come across an issue that is a proxy for my insecurity, my brain will helpfully bolster my confidence that I Am Right and blind me to opposing viewpoints. Unfortunately, we all have insecurity like this, whether it’s about intelligence, competence, earning potential, being a good friend, or whatever else. -There’s also an incentive to obscure our feelings socially, which makes understanding and being understood all the more difficult. That’s partly because it’s not safe for everyone to know our deep insecurities, and partly because, in much of society, emotions aren’t well-understood. When emotions aren’t given their proper place, we end up with a strange kind of pseudo-intellectualism where care is earned by being “right.” Consequentially, people attempt to package strong feelings into logical arguments - consciously or unconsciously hoping that this will win them care and concern. But sound logic is hard and not always compatible with expressing emotions! And many people won’t recognize when an “argument” is actually a bid for comfort or connection. So instead, intellectual-speak begets intellectual-speak: litigative questioning, corrections, other people’s pseudo-intellectual counter-arguments covering for their tender emotions. Not care, not concern, not love. -Where clarification isn’t possible or effective, the best thing you can do for yourself and others is to give up and look elsewhere. I hear talk about “finding your people,” but I don’t think it’s ever stated urgently enough. Finding a safe person to confide in is the answer to almost any question. Safe people don’t have to scale psychological mountains to understand your POV or affirm that you are Good. Find people like this, with whom it’s safe to explore even the hidden truths about yourself, and watch your tolerance for maddening looping arguments wither away.

  • this website is a beautiful symphony between machines and humans, humans aggregating signals, and machines distributing those signals to other humans. it’s emergent, beautiful, and accidental

  • I talked to a friend who wants to start a blog and wanted some advice on that—how to find her voice and so on. A few random thoughts:

    • https://x.com/phokarlsson/status/1881287554999460250
      1. It is the stuff about you that is odd that is interesting. So, don’t think to much about how you are supposed to do it, or what the genre convetions are. Just try to amuse yourself.
      1. Another way to phrase it: the best writing tend to be when you surrender to your nature. This is hard to do!
      1. Here is a classic pattern: you try really hard to do something GOOD, then you fail, or you make something silly. And it is the failures that people love, or the thing that was just a silly thing.
    • So try to set yourself up to failure, to not doing the thing that is right, but the thing that just sort of happens when you are not trying.
      1. Style / voice is something you can’t really pinpoint. It tends to happen like this: you combine a bunch of idiosyncratic things you like, and … something happens between those things.
    • You have your interests, you have your sense of humor, you have your grammatical tics, etc: the more you just incorporate all of the stuff that you love or that just happens for you, the more style emerges.
      1. People tend to have more style in their chat messages than in their blog posts. So perhaps write in the chat, rapidly, to a friend.
      1. Here is a very basic and useful structure for a piece of writing: you have a problem, you struggle against it, and reach some insight and, likely, finds a solution.
    • “I don’t have any friends that I can relate to; I thought about how to solve it, and tried this, and it kind of worked and was interesting in this way, but yeah, still not sure.” That is a good enough frame for an essay.
      1. Write from emotion. This goes back to the chat messages: the aliveness there usually comes from talking to someone you really like and wanting to resonate with them, or wanting to amuse them. This creates an emotional surge in the writing.
    • When you write from your head too much it tends to have less style.
      1. This, however, is not an excuse not to be disciplined in your thinking. But it is mostly a separate process: spend serious time reading, taking notes, learning, challanging yourself. But when writing: let that go, and rely on the brain power that you have accumulated.
      1. A good essay is an interesting mind wrestling with a problem in somewhat real time.
      1. Don’t aim to high when you begin. Maybe just do 500 word pieces, and do them with a simple format: problem, solution; an observation; explain something you’ve been wrong about. Done.
      1. Deadlines are good.
      1. I think about it like this: I want to have a balance between pushing myself hard so I learn new things, but I also want to finish stuff because there are certain things you can only learn by finishing. Deadlines is the tool that lets you find the balance.
    • Say, “I’m going to write the best piece I can in 20 hrs” and then you adjust how high you aim and how hard you work so that you can finish in twenty hours. If you want to push yourself to do deeper, you say 30 hours instead. If you want to get more reps, you go down to 10 hours.
      1. You don’t need to know what you are doing early on (or ever). You need to throw a lot of things at the wall. Fail in a hundred interesting ways and pay attention to how all of that makes you feel. You will develop a feel for what it is you do after about 50 essays.
      1. Write a lot. A LOT. Each time take one thing and make it better: a better title, better structure, better ending, better descriptions, better dialogue. Just one thing. It adds up. I think this is the advice MrBeast gives lol
      1. If you want to write 5000 words about grammar and fear that people will get bored by that you should write 5000 words about grammar. It will filter your readers so you attract those who like the grooves of your mind.
      1. Most of all: the point is to aim for writing that enhances your feeling of aliveness, that lets you refine your thoughts about what matters, lets you experience with more nuance what you care about, lets you enrichen the texture of your mind.

  • This stuck in my mind when I first saw it. I appreciate Kats honesty here about her prioritizing outcomes over truth. I think it’s indicative of most people’s mindsets about this question. The question being “is casual sex culture ethical?” Let’s answer it honestly here

    • YMMV but I’d rather not encourage men to see women as unreliable narrators of their desires who say yes when they mean no, and no when they mean yes; the downstream effects strike me as uh undesirable
    • Sex is more vulnerable for women than it is for men. This is partially due to the natural strength imbalance, and might also be due to the phenomenalogical nature of penetration vs getting penetrated. Unfortunately I don’t know enough about gay sex to say for sure tho
    • Women also trend more towards guess culture. To go even further, women will tell the truth by lying poorly, to get around social and psychological punishments for telling the truth straightforwardly. This is probably because conflict is much more costly among women
    • This feels related. Men can engage in conflict for abstract reasons, and have the layer of abstraction protect them from accusations of personal hatred
      • “males are more concerned with abstract rules than females are…boys have developed complex group games…and carry on debates about rules at an abstract level. In contrast, girls play less complex games, and if there is a dispute, the game ends abruptly and without resolution.”
    • Now there’s obvious reasons women don’t like to admit those two facts. They can easily be used to undermine their ability to take responsibility for themselves, especially wrt casual sex
    • Not to mention they apply as a spectrum. On one extreme you have kinky autist sex fiends, and the other you have traumatized BPD women. These aren’t perfect archetypes, but you get the idea These women play tug of war over the public norms
    • And in case I wasn’t clear, that means that I am saying there are plenty of women to which the above statements DO NOT DESCRIBE AT ALL However, I’m pretty convinced that the majority of women lie somewhere in the middle of this spectrum
    • Also, admission of these facts is a betrayal of the argument feminism put forth to justify casual sex. A lot of people think this means there’s no justification of casual sex without it, but obviously that’s not necessarily true
    • I think the defacto norm that’s emerging from modern women is something like “the letter of the law is that i am perfectly feminist and agentic, but the spirit of the law is since I am more vulnerable, you have a greater responsibility to look after me during sex”
    • Said looking after also means paying enough attention to her to notice if she’s saying something she doesn’t mean, or is getting upset
    • I think the above pretty much works for most women. If a woman is offended by the implications that she might not be able to say what she wants, she can correct the assumption, and most men are happy to oblige her preference The issue is it doesn’t work for most men
    • A lot of men resent the new paradigm that women enjoy, which is “feminist when it suits me, traditional when it doesn’t.” It doesn’t feel fair for them to be judged by two different standards, depending on the whims of the women they interact with
    • This used to bother me, but doesn’t anymore. Polite fictions don’t bother me. If anything, I think it’s good to treat people as inviting them to their highest potential, and it’s kind to understand that everyone falls short of that sometimes
    • It’s easy to read what I’m saying as misogynist, but I don’t think it is. I think men and women have different and complimentary common flaws, and it’s not a competition But I’m digressing
    • The biggest problem with embodying the spirit of care during casual sex is that it’s just difficult enough to where people will mess up If you don’t know each other, it’s harder to understand her, interpret her, and not participate in her possible self-harming
    • Ive told women “im willing to have casual sex with you, but im worried youre just agreeing bc this is the best you can get from me, and you’ll come to regret it” And I’ve had women tell me “I’m an adult, I can make my own choices” Guess what happened
    • This is why I’m banned from tinder, and probably why this discourse stuck in my mind. And to be fair, I was forewarned about her outlierness. I was young and dumb and horny
    • But getting back to the point, eigen is right. Mind reading is a skill you can and must develop as a young man. And everyone should avoid casual sex with women this low on the agency spectrum
    • But even with this instruction, I don’t think it’s possible to avoid the risk of hurting women deeply while having casual sex with them. Men aren’t born skilled. It takes mistakes and practice to get it right
    • When women get hurt in sex and tell people about it, they don’t differentiate between the letter and spirit of the law. Few women even admit the inherent contradictions on a Tuesday, much less when their reputation is in such a precarious place
    • Now, while some violation of care is accidental, there are absolutely lawyeristic psychopathic men who don’t give a shit about the women they fuck at all, and just engage in CYA behavior that wouldn’t hurt them if put on paper and read in a courtroom
    • While obviously not as bad as rape, this is bad enough to warrant telling other people about, especially in the context of other people who may fuck him But since it’s unprovable, it’s also interpreted in the context of the woman saying this.
    • A lot of women will think “skill issue. She’s just blaming him for her inability to communicate and stand up for what she wants in the bedroom” In some cases, they will be right, and in others not Remember what I said about women not being able to deal w open conflict?
    • All this to say, men cannot ensure they won’t hurt women deeply during casual sex. This is unacceptable for a lot of men point blank, not to mention the reputational damage from a story where the author isn’t concerned with differentiating harm and rape
    • This is why many men just deny the spirit of the law. They say “to the extent women can’t take responsibility for themselves during sex, that’s not my problem. If they want to be treated otherwise, they should give up feminism and say so openly”
    • But if it were that simple, this thread would just be one of the many obnoxious replies tacked on to some random post somewhere The truth is that the contradictory nature of women isn’t because they’re deficient, it’s because they’re MORE EMOTIONALLY HONEST THAN MEN
    • Men contain multitudes and contradictions, just like women. Men embody the fiction of the singular self harder than women. It’s useful for masculine pursuits, but it causes them detriment in their emotional lives as every contradiction becomes a personal failing of the ego
    • Kats comparison to contract law is poignant. I think for legal purposes, it’s barbaric to enforce the spirit of the law. But for moral purposes, it’s barbaric to treat sexual intercourse like a fucking legal agreement. What’s even the point in fucking????
    • The issue here didn’t peak in the summer of love, or the 80s, or the 90s, or even the 00s. This is a modern issue that stems from having a panopticon in everyone’s pockets. People are too observed to be normal
    • When people who had sex accuse each other of misconduct, traditionally, everyone judges them within the context of who they are as people. Nowadays, people in the internet who don’t know them judge them based on the context of their own political neuroses
    • Without the internet, casual sex culture seems pretty fair to everyone. Men have more power in the bedroom, so they have more responsibility, and if they violate that, women tell people, but that’s quietly checked by the women’s reputation of agency Not perfect but hey
    • It feels weird and gross to weigh in on who’s lying and who did wrong when it comes to internet stories of sexual impropriety. I don’t know them, that’s not my business. It just produces the feeling of being watched and judged among my friends who read my comments
    • This is why I didn’t read the gaiman article. This thread has nothing to do with that article or allegations. I didn’t read it. It’s the abstracted discourse that got me thinking, not any specifics there
    • But yeah. Humans are messy and full of contradictions. That’s what makes sex hot. It’s dangerous. You can’t make it safe and casual. That means that some people probably should opt out, but it’s worth it to a lot of people. The internet fucks everything up, but what else is new
    • Especially when you consider what a similarly monitored society would look like if it considered casual sex bad. Imagine getting canceled just for having casual sex. It could be so much worse
    • Even if we take out the internet as an exacerbating factor, there are still people, mostly women, who get hurt by casual sex. I can see finding this unacceptable and opting out for both genders. I think compared to every other risk we allow as a society, it’s not that bad
    • Ok I’m done. That was probably the longest thread I’ve ever written, but it was really satisfying to think through. If you read it all, thank you