Random thoughts

People try to mask negative intentions with polite words etc, but they get through. Some are obvious in hindsight, others are just somehow felt with a sixth sense. Perhaps that's why some people put on layers upon layers of polite masks, they think they can hide their intentions, and they try harder when they fail, but they don't realize it is a fundamentally futile act.

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I used to think Gödel was a bit of a freak for his paranoia in his later years.  These days I sympathize. A side effect of general heightened awareness seems to be a proportionally heightened awareness of various tail risks, and the realization that they could become reality if you choose them to be. As possibilities flash before your mind, if one does not have the courage (or recklessness), one would naturally try to eliminate such risks as much as possible. Once that becomes a habit, one becomes even more sensitive to even less probable risks, and hence becomes more and more "paranoid".

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Are the "10000 hours of intentional practice" thing mostly fueled by the crystallization of one's imagination? The same way placebo effect works? It might be interesting to see what happens with "10000 hours of intense imagination but no practice". The funny thing is, "a couple years" is empirically roughly the median time scale that "dreams come true", or alternatively, mental projections become inter-subjective.

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There is some funny thing about "attention". Is "attention" related to "choice"? In theory we somehow "choose" what we give "attention"... 

Given what we already know of the purpose of "attention" in Transformer AI architectures... does it make sense that if we shut down the attention mechanism, we actually perceive more of other stuff?

Are there different kinds of attention?

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There are a bunch of people that, to me, seems to becomes stuck in their own subjective interpretation and reality of the arcane and occult. Making "too many" connections that aren't useful. I can't say I don't feel a primal feeling of "disgust" when listening to them talk -- but when I rationally analyze the situation, I can't think of a good reason to say they're "wrong" -- the only thing I can say is I don't accept that truth. As long as they don't actually try to implement what they believe, they're fine (and given that they're alive, they probably never tried). The question is, are those incoherent *stories*, the coincidental connections, actually useful (for them)? I can't conclusively say they aren't. It's like a functional person that has a side hobby of being delusional. So what if person X believes that Santa Claus is literally a real person that lives in the North Pole and climbs down chimneys? And I guess it's a cautionary tale for us --- a reminder that there are many dimensions of truths, none that are objectively better, and that there's no inherent reason why others would choose yours over theirs. And of course, that being said, don't be that guy.