That breakthrough would not be possible without ubiquity of personal computing at home and in your pocket, though, which seems like the bigger change in the last two decades.
"Life itsef", a "semi-monastic co-living hub" which is supposed to be "a place for experimentation, exploration, and learning, where people can engage in self-work, creative work, and spiritual practices" yet has only two and a half hours in the morning and three in the evening for unscheduled time to practice these. If I just do my yoga-qigong-kungfu, the morning space is filled, and do my normal morning meditation in the three hours in the afternoon. No time for experimentation, exploration or learning.
There are also in the direction of twenty people on the team with all kinds of expertise. This whole thing smells like the opposite of a monastic space, which usually consists of an abundance of time and space. Here it seems to be overflowing with all kinds of "modernized" practices and ideas about how that time and space is supposed to be filled. The absence of that normally characterises a monastic space.
I am probably misreading it, but I still wanted to post this. The blog post seems like normal psycho-development.
Not parent commenter, but I believe everything social should be kept to real life. The dynamics of online social media have almost nothing to do with real human interactions. It is a waste of time and a harmful superstimulus substitute, like empty calory fast food for real nutrition.
Keeping personal matters offline might be a reasonable ideal but a highly unreasonable and unfair practice. Many people do conduct significant social actions online.
There are people who have no local access to a similar or understanding peer group. We often hear of this now in terms of sexual identity or preferences, but it could be anything from interests to skills or aptitudes to medical or psychological conditions. People go online to find community, especially community that's not represented locally.
(This, like The Force, has both a light and dark side, of course.)
There are also people who are distant from friends, family, or other community, and for whom online group interactions are among the few available options.
We read and hear now of the closely guarded and coded language that was used to refer to situations and circumstances in Victorian times. Slangs and argots arose to be able to communicate within an anti-society whilst excluding normies. People today may use similar methods (though tools for tracking slang, such as Urban Dictionary, tend to catch up quickly).
Technical means may help, as can anonymous or pseudonymous identities, though both these have their own serious limitations as I've described in other comments on this thread.
the problem is that online discussion comes with higher risks, and one needs to be aware of those risks. but many aren't.
your points are of course good, but there exists private online groups where these risks are lower so especially friends and family are a non issue as there is no problem to have a private online conversation.
finding your community online is more difficult, but the point is not that you should avoid online groups, but that you need to be more careful how you communicate in online groups. you can't just hop in and spill your personal feelings without being aware of how those messages will be received. you want to get to know people first, and that takes more effort and time online than in person. it depends on what kind of people are in the group, and also if the group is public or private.
hackernews is public but most people are reasonable here and bad faith messages are not tolerated, so for a public group it is a pretty safe one, unlike twitter where you risk having your messages promoted to people with an unhelpful attitude.
Among my points are that intimacy and scale are inherently at odds, and that human psychology prevents the public at scale of registering this. If there's a solution, it's going to be in the design, description (and marketing), operation, and regulation of those systems. This is a classic case of "personal responsibility" being a trope and cover for dodging corporate and engineering responsibility.
Evidence of this comes from the level and scale of information breaches: the US DoD, Department of State, Department of Justice, multiple states' attorneys general offices, the Russian Kremlin and military establishment generally (I have strong though as yet unsubstantiated belief that a key factor in Ukraine's success has been a near-total compromise of Russian communications channels). These are entities with a strong incentive to and capability for ensuring secure comms and data management ... and yet ... they're failing. The refugee family or abused mother or whistleblower ... stands little chance.
One of the criticisms of HN is that people are occasionally attacked for their expressed viewpoints, occasionally on-forum (though that's usually swiftly dealt with), more often off. I've seen some well-known and high-karma leaderboard profiles callously call for the death of entire groups of people. And there are sites which do kibbitz on "Orange Site" as they tend to call it, often criticizing its moderation or behaviours, but also conducting just the types of abuse you're describing.
HN also lacks some of the specific protections you describe. There's no private or limited spaces, direct messages, or similar mechanisms, by intent and design. There is the option of throwaway pseudonymous accounts, however, which helps somewhat.
I am stumped: how does visualizing a scene in your minds eye and describing it lead to seeing it on the back of your eyelids as the article linked in the title of this comment section claims? And why call that "image streaming" instead of just "describing a visualized scene". Just advertising, right?
The sense of knowing where a character is in a space in fiction is the same sense that is used to visualize anything else. It is the same phenomenon. If you can "know" where a fictional character is in a fictional space, you can also "know" how a fictional apple looks like, or how a fictional coffee smells.
How or where do you hold the knowing of the location of the fictional character? Look at that psychic phenomenon. Aphantasia seems like not knowing what psychic operations one does all the time, while someone who can visualize can consciously use these psychic operations.
Proprioception is entirely different from vision. You can know where your hand is with your eyes closed without visualizing anything. My sense of where things are in space feels very similar to proprioception, not vision.
Location and vision are separate senses. I'm completely aphantasic, but of course I can orient myself in remembered spaces. Fictional spaces are more difficult, but not impossible if the description is good.
As someone who has used a larger number of psychedelics, MDMA, ayahuasca and so on - yes, alcohol at 16 for a few years was absolutely life changing for many of the same reasons: increased sociability and being able to talk to people uninhibitely about many things. I didn't overdo it and haven't drunken alcohol in years.
Alcohol can be life changing, but I said "not life changing like MDMA". All of the sociability benefits you received from alcohol are achievable via other means that don't require the use of drugs, like CBT and plain old practice/experience. That is simply NOT the case for MDMA and depression and PTSD. If you think so, then show me examples of alcohol making someone relieved, normal and happy in 30 mins after literally years of depression and suicide attempts. They just aren't in the same league.
As someone who has practiced qigong and neigong over many years, feelings are absolutely localized - you can even match them with specific organs. Is is surprising that the adrenals are associated with feelings of panic for example?
The author is part of the tpot twitter sphere in which post-rationalists try to find ways to deal with body-mind/"woo" topics. That a member of this demographic develops a highly systematic methodology is to be expected.
