Elizabeth M-I

The beauty of x tiles is that it’s not a calendar app and you can leave things unscheduled or change them into scheduling at a later time. It’s a pretty unique app in that sense as many others work via the time blocking method.

but this, I’ve recently worked out, is because I don’t estimate time well, don’t figure out which tasks need to be broken down (and only then scheduled) and ideally, to get around demand avoidance, the scheduling should be flexible- think what needs doing in a week of work, not daily or hourly.

It’s taken me the best part of a decade to work all of that out & find the apps that half the time help me & figure out why they weren’t working the other half of the time. The scheduling point I was always a little skeptical of, as time blocking never worked for me,

e) you need to plan routines not just via vibes for time, but to the actual time available.

All this is to say if you, like me, have virtually zero working memory you must work out ways to externalise this- ie apps like the above that can do what your working memory should be doing.

b) if it’s a big task, you must break it down into manageable chunks.
c) you should estimate how much time each tasks needs, (and then at least double it if you have ADHD)
d) if it’s not scheduled it won’t get done

And yes it has taken me approximately a decade of consuming self help & productivity tips to realise that these only work well when also applying the following principles:
a) if it’s in your mind alone, it will be forgotten. Write. That. Shit. Down. In. A. List.

3) X tiles- relatively new to me and similar to Notion but more intuitive and easier to use. Great for planning projects under different pages, with tiles that can be turned into tasks which you can schedule into the planner on the app. Great for working out when work is actually going to get done.

2) Routinist- a morning/night routine making app that forces you to be time realistic-it works out when you need to start work & how long you need to sleep,& shows you how timed routines might fit these limits. It notifies you to start, finish &when you’ve overstepped time for each part of schedule.

Niche ND help post- If you have time-blindness, planning and sequencing issues,I can’t recommend using the following 3 apps together enough:

1) Minimalist- a sleek list making app with a pomodoro timer and more features- great for making lists of life areas and getting tasks out of working memory.

Rest is *good*, unscheduled time is *good.* You are not always either producing or decaying. Creativity flows from shutting things up enough to hear yourself, to be able to synthesize everything you’ve taken in lately.

Just realised it’s ‘and the tender, soothing flute’, not ‘and the tender, soothing fruit’ in King Jesus has a garden. Obsessed with the assonance in that song. Assonance is such a pleasing poetry- less obtrusive than alliteration.

This was such a horrific read that I had no words. My heart goes out to Zoe and her family, and of course P.

I also wanted to say I’m not an AI skeptic- in either usage (how could I be, when it’s given me both an instant sparring partner and also, for the first time, a useful accessibility tool- it helps with my dyspraxia and other NDs no end) or it’s potential for consciousness (more probably in 2027)

Just realised the way I wrote this is slightly fudging the causality- it’s less a distilling of intellect and more a synthetic production of intelligence, but the stripping of intelligence from other mind features is the main point I’m trying to communicate.

But I don’t think this is an idealist/dualist vs materialist argument, or even pointing to a dual aspect middle ground as metaphysical mediator. I think this is an ontological argument about the inhabitation of will. Hence skipping to that chapter to see where Bostrom stakes his claim.End🧵 (for now)

mind- brain malleability?) In both debates, those who defend the materialist causality of the brain on the mind and those who defend the seemingly idealist or dualist effects of the mind on its matter, talk past each other.

then is the mind merely a dependent on physical states, and conversely, if changing our cognitions actively through therapy rewires the brain’s neurological processes, shouldn’t we focus on psychological interventions as a harm reduction model, and isn’t that important to the appreciation of

brain that we are missing in our brain/mind models? (This is analogous incidentally to better faith debates within the ‘psych wars’ about physical or psychological origin and treatment of mental ill health- if medications manipulate the mind to produce different cognitive states,

Put another way, if a model machine brain can be engineered to output acts of human intellect in a different internal way to way that a human produces that same output, perhaps there is something fundamental about the way a human mind inhabits and uses its

Indeed we might see that brain based models of intelligence- in which the brain as a preset mode of sequenced thinking- or put more simply, the brain as the mind’s pre determined train tracks- might be missing something.

If we stopped to examine the foundations a little while, we might see that if we are displacing our theories of intelligence through building machines that encompass intelligent acts without the intelligence we either know or presume to know is intrinsic to such acts.

we have instead ignored them, and doubled down on the progress aspect of AI- ie that we will learn something fundamental about our brains’ intelligence through building artificial brains.

have been occurring alongside innovations in our understanding of intelligence and/or indeed have been exposing the shaky understanding we have of intelligence itself. But instead of examining these foundations and what it means for outputs of the mind and brain in humans and machines,

instead of teaching it the complex cognitive demands that chess involves), seems to be a lament of under-appreciation of the AI’s projects’ feats of technological progress, I think what it is really obscuring is that these progresses

originating from John McCarthy, that ‘as soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore’. Whilst this, along with the chess machine story just after it (how it was possible to design a specific chess algorithm to build a superhuman chess playing machine,

More on that next year, but essentially I don’t believe in the downstream account, and I think disabilities of the mind serves as the test case, not just ethically but ontologically, to prove that belief. One anecdote from chapter 1 that stuck me is the idea the author sympathises with,

and that humans will have to reign in their autonomy in order to have control over whatever outputs they decide on. What working in decision making and disability has taught me is that this procession is based on false assumptions or, more tentatively, a povertied philosophy.

Implicitly in the idea of superintelligence dominating human intelligence, there is the notion that these intelligent machines will be able to act independently and have some kind of will, whether conscious or not- ie that agency and autonomous will are downstream of intelligence-

But I don’t think I’m straw manning to say it. Indeed it seems to me to be the central claim that is left unsaid in the AI project- namely that there is no necessary part within human being to human thinking. Put more philosophically, that there is no ontology to intelligence.

that the mind is not irrelevant to intellect and in fact is part of intellect and that therefore thinking machines would need something similar to properties of the mind into which they would need to think before they could act with a controlling will.