I really like how sometimes, things will have an 'official' name, but most people just call them something completely different (even though they might know full well what the official name is). E.g.:

Elon Musk changed the website's name to X, but most people still call it Twitter.

The Anish Kapoor sculpture in Chicago is officially titled Cloud Gate, but everyone calls it The Bean (it looks like a giant shiny bean).

When I was an undergrad there was a nightclub called Cindy's, but that was not what it said on the building. Basically under a previous management it had been called Cindy's, and the name had been passed down through various generations of students. (I do not know what the official name was).

Why do I like this? It feels like a fun sign of the indomitability of the human spirit, or something; the fact that it's hard to top-down control how people think of things, how they divide the world. Sometimes when people make top-down decisions we just have to put up with it (e.g., if a cafe we like closes down, or a website/app developer changes it for the worse), so it's nice that sometimes we can just be like 'nope'.

shower-ish thought:

People talk about chronotypes, i.e. are you a night owl or a morning lark. But something that also feels important and maybe orthogonal to this is "at what times of day do you feel better/worse"?

I think these are sometimes conflated, e.g. that night owls don't like mornings and like evenings, and morning larks vice versa. And obviously that will be true if these groups are being forced to sleep/wake according to the average "get up at 7-8ish and go to sleep at 11-12ish" pattern: morning larks don't like evenings because they're frequently pressured to stay up past what's comfortable.

But I think personally, first thing in the morning isn't my favourite time of day *even though* I determine my own sleep schedule and I think it suits my chronotype and I'm getting enough sleep. Like by default I'm just a bit grumpy in the 1-2 hours after waking, and I'm not sure that everyone has this. Similarly, some people might have more aggressive 'afternoon slumps' than me, or tend to feel joyous in the morning but a bit down in the evening (even if their sleep schedule is optimal for them).

What are your chronotype/sleep/mood interactions?

I just added to my book recommendations post that I want to read nerdy books about the principles of baking and power-lifting [separate books to be clear, though tbf I would totally read a book that was like "the optimal cakes for building muscle" or something. Though that is probably just "cakes with as much protein as is practical to put in a cake".]

Anyway, the common factor is: I think in some domains, I'm under-utilizing my bent towards/talent for understanding systems/principles, or something?

i.e., there are various practices that throughout my life I've worked on and been either informally or formally educated in, but that I've not learnt very 'systematically'. By that I mean, it wasn't like someone sat me down and was like 'ok, here are the basic building blocks of this activity, here's what all the different moving parts do, here are simpler techniques that you can build into complex techniques...'

And two of those are weightlifting and baking - other examples might be singing and social or emotional skills of various kinds. In most of these cases, I haven't learned these things systematically partly because I've been a casual learner and wasn't prioritizing them. But it's also partly - and I think this is especially the case for social skills - that I alieved that they were not the sort of thing that *could* be learned systematically, or even *had* a system. When I've had teachers (as in for singing and weightlifting), they haven't approached things in a first-principles way. And for e.g. baking, most people get into baking via "try some recipes", not "understand exactly what certain ratios of sugar to flour to fat tend to do" - so that's also what I did. And for social skills, people call them "soft" skills, which I guess means "you *can't* learn this systematically".

But now I think that there must be some kind of system behind all these things, and maybe they are not generally taught systematically just because most people have limited appetites for that and learn better by imitation/trial and error?

It's kinda like how, on Duolingo, they don't teach grammar. I assume this is because for most people, immersion and repetition works better than grammar-learning, grammar just confuses them and makes it boring for them. But *I* have studied lots of complicated grammar (when studying Latin and Greek and such), and so it *wouldn't* confuse me, and I'm often like 'just tell me the grammar dammit! I'd be able to remember the sounds easier if I knew the system behind them!'

Similarly maybe most singing or weight-lifting or baking learners don't want "let's start with an extensive 2 hour lecture where I tell you about the science of your lungs/your muscles/flour", but I would totally enjoy that and it would probably help me a lot.

Beware thought patterns that approximate to "Everything they said made sense until they reached their conclusion, which felt obviously false, so I dismissed them/the argument."

I think even smart people will often think or say this without realizing how big a sign it is that they failed a confusion check.

Maybe the speaker made a mistake! Some verbal sleight-of-hand? If so, you should be able to spot it, articulate it, argue it. Not immediately, maybe, but eventually.
Otherwise, gut feeling/vibes/intuition are hard to distinguish from pattern matching to "too weird" or "wrongthink."

The things that your gut feelings/vibes/intuitions are "expert" on are your own preferences and desires. If someone tries to use "reason" or "logic" to get you to not enjoy something you enjoy, or to enjoy something you don't enjoy, that seems like manipulation.

But for fact-claims about reality, separate your preferences? Feelings aren't robust truth detectors.

They're expectation and prediction aggregations, indicating how much weight you place on things you believe, or how "vital" those beliefs are to holding up the rest of your beliefs.

To be extra clear, this is also *not* saying that you should *accept* anything you hear just because the arguments for it are reasonable.

This isn't about the "acceptance vs rejection" mental motion. It's about the "notice confusion and investigate" one.

It's definitely true that intuitions are great at handling things you have encountered many times before, distilling experiences and knowledge into gut feelings. It makes sense to rely on intuitions to help sort through most of the bullshit you encounter day to day.

My claim specifically is that the intuitions that are built on real knowledge are not *distinguishable* from the intuitions that are built on tradition, peer pressure, and other false beliefs we take for granted.

That inner feeling of "this seems like bullshit" does not distinguish the two; it takes careful, conscious effort.