Save Your Mind With Buckets

Lower the river.

I got weary of listening to Sam Harris’ latest confession (Podcast #317). I think in a moment I understood the sense of his malaise when he said that his quitting Twitter was the best thing he had done for his peace of mind in 10 years. His interlocutor, Paul Bloom, I think grasped where Sam had burned himself out. Let me tell you my angles.

1. The demand side of social media is a junk food habit.

2. Veteran celebrities know how to survive.

3. Open Source requires goals.

4. Stoicism, dammit.

Stoicism Dammit
My version of Stoicism is blended with previous experience with Taoism. So in terms of whether or not the world is in balance - I know and assume that it is. Our parts of that world is small; society is not the center of the universe. So my attitude adjustment is not strictly born in the tenets of Stoicism because the Stoic does not make sense of the universe. He only assumes the universe and truth are in place and rational. The Taoist is not such a positivist. He can exist in a chaotic / ordered dualistic universe. So I am perfectly comfortable in my assertions that while we live in dark and desperate times, these times are fueled by a finite source of energy that cannot and will not rip the universe apart. Sure, maybe there will be heat death in 20 odd billion years from now, but entropy does not rule everything around me. If it does, maybe I’m in the wrong location, or just not patient enough. Every baby, every puppy is a bundle of joy. They get birthed every day.

Therefore ask not for whom the bell tolls. If you can hear it, then you’re still alive. If you could hear all of the tolling bells for every creature that suffered death and was buried, your head would implode from their resonant frequencies. Control yourself. Stop listening to every goddamned thing.

Two things strike me about poor Sam’s malaise, and I love the guy for his precision. The first is that he probably has the kind of mind that for 10 years was able to answer the million questions his million followers asked. He gave until he bled. This is the martyrdom of the liberal heart. It is inevitable. It is self-destructive. To be endlessly selfless is to be a parent. Nobody could remain sane with 500 children, let alone one million followers on Twitter. Sam thought he could, and they got on his last nerve. Surprise! Not.

The second thing that strikes me is that for someone who admits that there is no [insert specific terminology here] free will and that everyone’s choices are largely shaped by their environment, he sure did spend a lot of time in Twitter’s toxic environment. Where oh where, Sam, did all of your meditational discipline go? You told us all that you could barely sleep for years because your mind kept buzzing. So what do you do? You expose it to the biggest form of distraction on the planet. Sam is not over-focused. He’s just not picking healthy diversions. He sobers up just enough to have another drink.

You have to love that kind of dude, right? He never measured his paces and realized at long last that he’s been walking in toxic circles. He’s been wearing the wrong shoes for a decade, and finally he has taken them off. Nice going Sam. Took you long enough.

Open Source Goals
There is a myth about crowdsourcing, and therefore the validity of social media, AI Chat, postmodern deconstructionism and socialist, populist democracy (and thus social justice activism). It is attributed to Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux and/or Eric S. Raymond. “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” It’s kind of another way of saying that 50 million people cannot all be wrong, which in many cases is just fascist.

Open source software is a tremendous boon to mankind, but information doesn’t want to be free. Information needs to be turned into knowledge and that requires expertise, even if that expertise is the engineering of a mechanical turk. That expertise is of no value if it doesn’t meet a goal that is valuable. Sure, if you build it they will come. This can be equally said of the atom bomb, penicillin, anime porn (cat girls!) and fentanyl. For something of value to be built well, it requires coordination. If that thing is to be excellent, the value of excellence must triumph over the value of harmony. In other words ‘being productive’ is measurable and producing a significantly impactful result requires disciplined coordination. Twitter is productive for its inventors, not for its users. Not if its users want what Sam Harris wanted, the kind of discipline in the minds of the goal oriented contributors that syncretistically produce stuff worth thinking about.

That’s what it’s like to be on a valuable open source software project. You know that ideas will clash. You know that forks will take place. But if you can focus and stick to the agreed-upon set of goals, then achievement is possible. There is nothing in social media that possesses a fifth of the discipline of a git commit, push and pull request.

Even ChatGPT knows this.

A pull request and free speech are entirely different concepts. A pull request is a term used in software development, specifically within the context of version control systems like Git. Free speech, on the other hand, is a concept related to the rights of individuals to express their thoughts, ideas, and opinions without censorship or restraint.

A pull request is a way for developers to propose changes to a software project's codebase. It is a request made to the project's maintainer to "pull" the changes made in a developer's fork (a personal copy of the project) and merge them into the main project. This is a common practice when contributing to open-source software projects. Pull requests enable collaboration, code review, and discussion about the proposed changes before they are integrated into the project.

Free speech, in contrast, is a fundamental human right that allows people to express their views and opinions without fear of punishment or censorship. It is enshrined in various national constitutions and international human rights documents, such as the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Free speech is essential to the functioning of democratic societies, as it promotes the open exchange of ideas and fosters public debate.

In summary, a pull request is a technical process in software development, while free speech is a human right related to the expression of ideas and opinions. They are not directly related and serve different purposes.

Twitter has no projects and no mechanism to discriminate in a transparent manner. A rejected pull request is clearly visible to everyone on the project. We could talk about how a representative democracy might have the discipline of open source software projects, but that is for another day. Yet keep it in mind, please.