Pain is a learning signal, not a measure of damage. Unlearn your pain @ https://xitter.cf/t.co/9qU3QYXGXh Prev: cog sci @MIT

Cambridge, MA
Joined June 2019
bone in our bodies is not dead. it is juicy flexible and intelligent i had this image from anatomy textbooks that bone was just scaffolding for the body. a living bone though is filled with yellow and red fluid making red and white blood cells storing fat etc. i think a good analogy is the trunk of a tree. the dead skeleton is like carved away wood. if you slice a living tree though you will see sap oozing through the rings bone can differ in structure so much that one person can use their index to break open a coconut and another can break bones just by standing up
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in my experience deep healing basically requires transitioning to a new developmental stage getting stuck at a transition (to evoke kegan) between stages was intertwined with my illness for instance
I’ve actually been thinking that there might be something *developmental* about friction in the same way muscles don’t grow if you don’t use them a fully frictionless world gives no opportunity for - soul growth? the growth of anything that wasn’t in our pre-existing plans?
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at a bodywork seminar this weekend and it’s four women over fifty and myself. last workshop was the same demographic seems to be my kind of crowd
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Way past time:
“If you truly prioritize safety, it is time for you to leave frontier AI companies.” In an exclusive open letter to the researchers he trained — and the ones who trained on his work — AI godfather @Yoshua_Bengio calls on AI company employees to consider their own involvement in the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence. Read the letter in full, only on Transformer: transformernews.substack.com…
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they made gold from mercury!
Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10. Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years. Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.
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children born without neocortex can be behaviorally ~indistinguishable from children w full neocortex. laughing smiling eating
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Jasmine is a friend of mine and I saw firsthand her and Mikita’s integrity and dedication to OpenAI’s safety team. disappointing to see this sudden ousting
Two other safety researchers and I were fired from OpenAI last week. We wrote this letter to leadership. I believe we were fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation.
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Max Shen retweeted
Two other safety researchers and I were fired from OpenAI last week. We wrote this letter to leadership. I believe we were fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation.
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protestant ethic equates struggle with toughness with good. that only makes sense if you believe that you are either 'tough' or 'soft'. gandalf, milarepa, siddhartha were both
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Max Shen retweeted
In 12 weeks, we built a research facility that is run entirely by AI. AI designs, executes, and observes experiments end-to-end across biology, chemistry, and materials science. We’re introducing SciUniverse: a benchmark that measures AI’s ability to do real-world scientific research.
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if you take the anecdotes from sarno's book seriously, it is one of the most powerful levers we have for reducing suffering. forgive the caps but WE LITERALLY HAVE A BOOK THAT RESOLVES NONSPECIFC CHRONIC PAIN. yes it may be somewhere between 3-20% of those who read it, but NO DRUGS EVEN PRETEND TO RESOLVE CHRONIC PAIN — almost all the medical studies are about PT/drugs/therapy for *pain management*, not *resolution* it feels criminal that we do not have at least 100M looking more closely at what is going on here. (yes PRT studies are great we need 10x more esp on the mechanism) xitter.cf/WillManidis/status/196…
I spent two years in chronic pain. I went from being able to deadlift 2.5x my bodyweight to being unable to put on socks, stand up from a chair, or walk extended distances. It nearly ended my life. 15+ doctors, two procedures, drugs. I solved the pain by reading a book chapter
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I have a concrete research proposal with budget etc for how to make real progress on this — DM and I will gladly share
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unfortunately the state of science on migraines is abysmal. the distinctions between eg ‘migraine’, ‘tension headache’, and ‘exercise headache’ is not coherent peter goadsby (who was at the workshop where the international classification was proposed) says in his presentation: “i don’t know anyone i respect who can put an evidence based sentence together on the subject of tension-type headaches” as he mocks the classification system
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ran this summit a couple weekends ago in santa barbara about bringing rigor to mindbody practices. we had people from antonio damasio's lab, a neuromotor expert and somatic therapist, a close student of karl friston. more soon
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i'm running an experiment! i want to better quantify change during pain reprocessing therapy. if you have chronic pain and are interested in receiving treatment from an expert PRT practitioner at a discounted rate, dm or email me at [email protected] four slots open
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Max Shen retweeted
if you're capital looking for philanthropic stuff to fund… consider retroactively funding work that already happened that you loved. give those people no-strings funds to do more whimsical stuff (or do whatever they want) without requiring them to waste time on applications AND you build reputation for yourself as the serious funder to be connected to. (there are too many funders who say they're "interested" in funding xyz, but never actually do anything, so you could build a great reputation really quick)
there’s currently a lot of capital looking for ambitious, whimsical, interesting projects. the scarcer thing is often compelling ideas made legible, paired with people credible enough to pull them off we need more bridges between weird creative people and capital. fundraising is never easy, but when those pieces click, capital can move surprisingly fast
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Many meditators have transformative experiences: things that completely rewire how they relate to the world. That same rewiring is possible in movement.
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one of the biggest challenges in the face of healing chronic illness is epistemic: how do you know what to trust? there's an archetypal hero's journey through healing chronic illness: hero is sick and confused, turns to the medical establishment, which fails to comprehend her condition. she is thrown into The Wilds, and turns to healers and practices of increasing strangeness (mindbody medicine, reiki, occultic rituals). If things go well, at some point she reaches a depth of transformation where the illness is beheld in full and integration happens one of our biggest problems is that the gulf between the Medical Establishment and The Wilds. with physical therapy, you can audit the (often incorrect) mechanistic claims about pain to then reason about what can and can't help. when it comes to an approach like the Abrahamson auric cleansing (a prominent example many have used to stop smoking), you can't audit the claims. you have to go by vibes and toss aside what we do know about human biology or physics we can and need to establish a clearer map of The Wilds, which means a new science of health. there are lots of great albeit scattered efforts (interoception science, fascial conferences, computational neurophenomenology) -- everything i write is an attempt at clarifying this
I need to hear success stories. For those of who you fully healed from their mysterious chronic health issues, what did you do?
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revisiting sound wave physics rn workflow: 1. skim chapters of edelman's 'understanding ultrasound physics', 2. take a printed test from a generated quiz pdf 3. use fable to grade my responses and update cards in a space repetition system enormously better than my old anki setup
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in my mind the biggest contribution of john sarno is the idea that chronic pain can actually be resolved outside of sarno's influence, the people studying chronic pain mainly seem to believe that it is a lifelong thing you have to manage. even suggesting that chronic pain can go away is heretical in some circles i've been in. it perhaps should be unsurprising there seem to be much fewer cases of resolution in those cases. obviously this is not true in every case (the buddha had back pain, so do a number of very accomplished practitioners), but to deny that this is possible for so many people is an enormous tragedy. pain can, for many people be unlearned!
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