William Gunn @mrgunn@refactorcamp.org

If you haven't become, at least once, that which you once hated, you were either right at a young age about all your beliefs, or you're not growing.

Maybe this holds a clue to getting past partisanship - stabilizing the transition state between two positions as a way of lowering the activation energy required to shift? If so, I guess that means that art can work like an enzyme, which would also provide a way to talk about the value of art with scientific rationalist. 🤔

I wonder if the metaphor of a misunderstood lyric resolving into the correct one would be a good way to talk about certain things with people who don't operate on the metarationality level very often. Maybe if they could hold that feeling in mind, it would help them understand how to take multiple perspectives on a topic without immediately adopting a perspective as a belief?

I think we all have an intellectual understanding of how what we see is colored by what we expect to see, but getting a direct experiential feeling of the boundary between two perceptions of the same bit of audio gave me a glimpse of the machinery by which our brains fit a coherent understanding onto raw sensory input.

I went to Magritte exhibit at SFMOMA this weekend and it occurred to me, reading his relatively concrete comments next to the more flowery interpretations of his work, that a lot of his work is about refactoring perceptions. Today while driving, I had a moment where I became actively conscious of a verse in a song that has never really resolved into words for me. It's the Spanish interspersed in Should I stay or should I go by The Clash. I've been listening to that song for years, but passively

This is old, but helped crystallize some thoughts: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/do-rationalists-exist/ I'm generally a very decoupled thinker. I can separate my abstract thoughts about a system from my feelings about similar concrete systems. Twitter is inhabited by strongly contextualizing thinkers, who do the opposite, and thus
are constantly upset by the lack of context provided by the platform. #heyfeedfox

Hey folks, long time Ribbonfarm lurker here. The Gervais Principle was life-changing! Hope you to don't mind me crashing the party. I'll try not to lurk 😉