🧙🏿‍♂️ The Path is Winding and Fraught with Vistas

Getting stuck and sharing my struggles to keep moving even while feeling mired in the muck of learning and stuff...

😰 What Im Struggling With - Failures

Sorry but I’m going to have to start this delayed newsletter with my failures. I’ve been feeling terribly unproductive these past few weeks. It feels as if no matter what I do, I find myself almost incapable of making any sort of progress… I still feel the passion and interest and even ‘energy’ to work on these projects. But it’s all seemingly concentrated on learning and reading stuff rather than writing or producing anything. 

I’ve been telling myself I’d update this newsletter. Do my YouTube videos. Work on the XR design doc project and all the other stuff I’m working on.

I dont feel like I’m spread thin or anything like that… I really do enjoy having all of these projects. However, I do feel like I should seriously practice what Hal Elrod talks about in his podcast in terms of aligning everything under one central mission… but when I sit down to write… to actually ‘put pen to paper’ and get stuff out of my head. I find myself just staring at the page.

Even my usual tricks aren’t working very well. I’ve tried taking a break, taking a walk, doing other things I enjoy like dancing, just writing for 2 minutes, etc… but I still have this…. Idk… some kind of internal friction. 

Maybe its the written form? These last few paragraphs are the most I’ve been able to write in a long while in one sitting. So perhaps I am simply in the ‘mood’ to write more stream of thought, diary-type things?? I’ve been keeping up with my audiojournal still. And even felt the desire to do live streams where I would talk about things that I am learning… maybe I should just do that?

Idk… I can’t say its a bad thing… I really have been learning and thinking about a lot recently… perhaps I just need to give myself more time to digest it all. 

I really dont want to stretch this out for another week though, so I’m just going to share all the ideas I wanted to write about for the Week 3 and 4 newsletter and let that be it. 

Hopefully, you all can still get something of value from these little ‘notes’... I will likely update this newsletter after sending it throughout the week to flesh these ideas out. This is not me telling you to come check this space regularly. I don’t even expect people to read this newsletter all that much lol. I mostly write this for the future. 

But if you do care, if you are reading this the night/days after I post this. I appreciate your attention and I apologize for wasting your time! The journey is not always clear or straight. In fact, my personal journey is often a chaotic mess of eclectic paths that somehow come together on occasion.. But in between those inflection points, it’s all an incomplete mesh of loose ideas floating around in my head and the world. 

Anyways, without further ado:

📚 What I’m Learning:

Lab Information Management Systems

• These exist!

• Lot to learn… many are old fashioned though

Urban Planning

• The history of zoning

• The critical role of light rail 

• A cure to boredom

WeWork

A response to the WeWork documentary, refining my audiojournal entry on it.

• The appeal of communes, beautiful idea but exploitative implementation

• The power of ‘charm’ and ‘confidence’

• The arrogance of ambition. Good or bad?

• The problem of individualism and ‘work hard/play hard’ culture

Egypt

Getting back into Bright Insight

• Diving back into the pyramids and Atlantis. Crazy but...

• Scientific evidence of the pyramids/sphynx being older than previously thought??

Solar Punk

• A positive response to the negative, dystopian views of cyberpunk and steampunk

• Biomimetics and ecological balance

• The joy of questioning the status quo and actually learning from our mistakes

• A playlist

Intelligence

Playing around with vastly different ideas of intelligence…

• Defining intelligence in different ways

• Are trees/fungus intelligent? Comparing Myocelia to the brain (and internet). Talk about Fantastic Fungi documentary.

• What might alien intelligence be like? Expound on my audiojournal entry about why space-faring civilizations will likely ‘sit and wait’ rather than colonize the galaxy

Living Off-Grid

• Water-less toilets!

• Using rainwater - an amazing way to see how much water you use

• The potential of communes (refer back to WeWork)

🧠 What I’m Thinking:

Words are models… language is like water

Thoughts are like clouds, words are like ice. We condense the clouds into a solid form, which begins to melt as soon as it leaves our minds. When others consume those words, that ice begins to evaporate back into a cloud.. but of course that cloud is not the same one we thought we were sending, because it has mixed with the person's own thoughts… and since the ice has been melting in transit, it has lost some of the thought we intended to send.

Language is the ice machine we use to condense, send, and evaporate the nebulous clouds of thought into the more solid blocks of ice.

But not all machines are made the same. Some languages are more efficient than others at different parts of the process.

And language may even limit what kind of thoughts you may have … as you also use that machine to communicate with yourself …

Life is a Game?

How can we make life into a game? What are elements of games that can be used more in life?

• Gameplay Loops

• Map

• Quests

• Ability to quit

Perhaps life should not be a game.. but an access point for many games…

Nexus of the Metaverse

A virtual hangout space (or 3rd place, ie work/school, home, play)

• Like central park but for the Metaverse

  • Has beautiful areas where people from anywhere on any device can meet, walk through a beautifully diverse digital forest, play in virtual parks, have concerts, create pop up stands, etc.

  • Has portals, tunnels, gateways, and other entries to other virtual worlds that can have their own art styles and features

  • Can put up notice boards, quests, and flyers to ask for help or to offer your services with just about anything

  • Should be intelligently chaotic… ie very few roles or limitations as to art styles, etc (the system should have thresholds for things like data so that each individual's machine can not display/render/process things that go beyond that threshold)

Positive Futures

Human-Centered Capitalism

Main Proponents

• Human-Centered/Bcorps

• Doughnut Economics

• Transhumanism

Main Enemies

• Old Guard (1%, Old Money, Organized Crime, Church)

• Consumerism/commoditization

• Accelerationism/Desire for Exponential Growth

Decentralized Communism

Main Proponents

• Decentralization

• Social Nets

• Mass Play

Main Enemies

• Desire for power/greed (Politicians/Gov, Corporations)

• Hubris of central planning

• Capitalists/Americans

Federated Anarchy

Main Proponents

• Federalization

• Emergent Order

• Massive Diversity

Main Enemies

• Capitalists

• Nationalism

• Isolationism

UX - Inmates Running the Asylum

• Darren being attacked and resigning

• UX being co-opted by Lean, Agile, UI, and Design Thinking

• Little to no executive-level designers

• 20:1 (or worse) ratio of engineers (and/or marketers/sales) to designers

• Design being deemed as a ‘creative’ rather than scientific… and anti-creative just because it seeks systemize things rather than leave it up to ‘artistic vision’

Creativity is in nearly every profession! The creativity of design is not (and I’d argue should not) be in making interfaces merely aesthetically pleasing for aesthetics sake, but in understanding the science and technique of everything from behavioural psychology to visual design to omni-channel experiences… Creativity in design is about understanding your audience so well that you make them feel like they have super powers or otherwise can accomplish a task without ever having to think about how your system wants them to do that task… 

The Illusion of Free Will

When we say free will, what do we mean? Choice?

What if options are an illusion?

What is the physical source of ‘choice’? Who is making that ‘choice’? The conscious? Subconscious?

What is me? Who is you?

• The Id vs Ego vs Superego… which is the ‘self’?

• The Thousand Brains theory?

• Identity, and thus consciousness, as a constellation… 

What if free will is what we call the experience of being (self)aware of causality? Of reality?...

Marble rolling downhill example…

• If a marble is rolling downhill, you can predict where/how it will roll

• The more complex the hill, the less you can predict

• If you are the marble, you would not even realize how/why you are moving in accordance to the environment (the gravity of the hill, the terrain, the wind, etc)

Free will is useful… but it is likely an illusion.. a mental model that tries to explain our experience, but does not actually show the full story…

Copy/paste and expand my comments from The Illusion of Free Will video:

I want to study:

• Neurology - I want to figure out how the brain works, discover if we have free will, figure out how to design tools perfectly built to empower our neurochemistry...

• Philosophy - I want to study the greats and learn how our thinking has shifted and why… 

• Psychology - I want to figure out the true evidence behind human nature and build tools around bringing out the best in us… 

• Ecology - I want to figure out all the ways in which ‘nature’ is intelligent, or otherwise self sustainable and invent solarpunk tech to make our tech more ecological...

• Archeology - I want to discover hard evidence of past civilizations and learn/share important lessons from our ancestors… 

• Urban Planning - I want to figure out why our cities suck so much and build communities that are better and more scalable… 

Do I have to go to college for all this? Why? How can I learn a lot about each of these and gain access to experiments/research labs without going to college? How can I do all of this while being more than a ‘consumer of knowledge’... to be a producer/inventor/creator of paradigm shifting ideas?

Playing the game… 

• The frustrations of ‘playing the game’ (career, branding, credit, etc)

• The game of life…

  • What game are we playing?

  • Who are the players?

  • Whats the rules?

  • Life board game story

• What if it was literally a game? (circle back to beginning)

Music

• My feelings about Nas, and other ‘classics’

• Royce vs Lupe vs Mickey Factz

• Flobots - Handlebars

Games

• Warframe

• New World

• My MMO dreams

Artificial Intelligence

• Thoughts on Lex Fridman podcast with Jeff Hawkins

  • What is intelligence?

  • Is AI without emotion really possible...or desirable?

  • What are the risks of creating true AI? (how to mitigate the risk of misuse and abuse by power hungry, myopic, and selfish people)

Climate Change

• Oof

• What can we do?

• How can we keep from despairing? (Share tweet thread)

—

I probably have still more things that has been on my mind of late… but I suppose this is most of it.

As always, thanks SO Much if you actually read this mess. I’d love to know what you think! Which of these ideas would you like to see me expand upon?

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🔌 Always Be Plugging:

• Thoughts of a TechnoWizard - Check out my (almost) daily audiojournal if you want to hear my unrefined, raw ‘train(wreck) of thought’

• A More Delightful Future - Listen to interviews with incredible people designing emergent technologies.

• Becoming a TechnoWizard - Watch me learn about all manner of things on my quest to build a better, more magical world on my YouTube.

• Path of a Trillionaire/TechnoWizard - Feel free to support me on Patreon! If you think this is a lot, watch what I do when I have some actual money in my pockets!!

• The Journal of TechnoWizardry - If you like this newsletter, please share!!