When I was 21 months old, I was dying from undiagnosed Type 1 diabetes. The textbooks said you couldn't get it that young, so the doctors missed it. My mom read the Merck Manual herself, matched my symptoms, and pushed for testing. The endocrinologists told her she saved my life. After that, I had to do calculations just to stay alive. Insulin doses, carb counts, ratios. But the math never really matched the messiness of life. Stress wrecked it. So did sleep, heat or cold, a bad night. The number on the glucometer rarely matched what the formulas said it should be. Most of us do this. We have a clean model, life has its own way of working, and when they disagree we side with the apparent safety of the model. @PlayNiceInst and I just published a paper about this habit — we call it "latent Platonism" — and how its structure ends up causing a lot of unnecessary suffering. Open access! nature.com/articles/s41599-0…

It is a pretty strange paper. Examining my own experience (both of philosophy and of diabetes) led me to see links between Buddhist practices and Kuhnian scientific revolutions. They have the same shape: accumulated anomalies reveal that the conceptual framework itself is the obstacle, not the problem within it. The cure can't come from within the framework; the framework has to be transformed.

I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at 21 months old. Survival ever since has meant one thing: the formula only works if you also pay attention to what's actually happening in your body. Neither concepts nor perception are sufficient. That's the paper nature.com/articles/s41599-0…

I've independently been doing this for years bryankam.com/p/morning-devot…

Conceptual thinking and experiential knowledge aren't opposed positions — it's not "rationalism" vs "empiricism." I argue that they're two trainable skills. And most of us have only developed one. My paper with @PlayNiceInst on how they relate: nature.com/articles/s41599-0…

Autopilot thinking means an autopilot life Concepts are efficient. They allow action without rethinking everything. But they may keep you in patterns after things have changed. My paper with @PlayNiceInst on how to notice this — and what to do instead: nature.com/articles/s41599-0…

Most people aren't Platonists. And yet... "Capitalism is ruining the world." "I can't do that because of my anxiety." These things are real, but treating them as *more* real than experience is what I'm calling Latent Platonism. Our paper on it here: nature.com/articles/s41599-0…

My paper with @PlayNiceInst is out. Neither/Nor: A philosophy for oscillating between conceptual and experiential knowledge nature.com/articles/s41599-0… We argue against "latent Platonism" — an unconscious preference for concepts over experience. The cure is oscillation.

My first non-self-published publication! patreon.com/posts/acceptance…