I know a couple of intimidatingly intelligent people who are burdened with serious depression.

The one who talks about it thinks it’s because of their intellect, that they can see more than most people; that they have some special insight.

I’ve asked them to explain this special insight that other people “don’t get” and my thoughts on it are:

It’s not the insight that causes the problem. It’s accepting what they see. The kind of intellect they are using is great for discovering things but to accept what you discover is a different skill, which doesn’t seem to come along with a high IQ.

I don’t believe being intelligent makes you less happy. I believe a very well developed IQ-type intelligence coupled with an underdeveloped EQ-type intelligence is a recipe for unhappiness.

Or, to put it another way

Have the grace to accept things I cannot change, the power to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

An intelligent person usually knows a lot about a lot. The more things you know about, the more chances you have to make a mistake and think changing something is in your court, when it's really not.

I agree with that.

Another type of problem with this particular person was the insight that there is no meaning to be discovered, distilled or coaxed out of analysis.

That we must create meaning is an example of something which is entirely in their court but which they somehow can’t accept and proceed with.

You can know something is not within your power to change and still find the fact of its existence deeply upsetting.

That's why the saying I quoted had "the grace to accept the things I cannot change"

It's not "accept things that are not upsetting"

In the fight against "Weapons of Mass Distraction" I went to a Qin F21 Pro and used ADB to remove everything distracting.

This might be a way back to the iPhone for me though.

I strongly identify with the author's feeling that their phone had a kind of "gravity" before removing these apps. I described mine to somebody as the sense I was carrying around the ring of power in my pocket. It felt heavy.

If you are in a room full of people and you close your eyes, you still feel the presence of those people and your self-consciousness is thus mobilized. There is something similar going on when I have a phone full of apps. Even when it's off, I can still sense their presence and some part of me is still online, idling and using resources to account for that.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Many adblockers work by blocking dns resolution, which does not alter code. It's like putting on glasses which block out certain words of a book you're reading. No alteration of the source material or host.

I suppose if this comes to pass such glasses would be illegal. As they go against moral rights of the author.

And then color accessibility settings such as filters would be illegal when reading any colored material since they would corrupt the author's intent.

Does it apply to organic, individual differences in perception?

Maybe when we all get a neural interface we can be calibrated as per some industry standard profile.

Everything I’m interested in is expressed in a language I don’t understand. I need to get a grounding in mathematics.

I've had this feeling before. Even now I read that doc and feel I need to study it for some time.

I think that's actually the point of dense math formulas/papers like this, but I want to share a resource that helped me start from "ground zero" per-se.

Starting with Mathematical Thinking [1], and adding in practice books for Algebra [2] and Calculus [3] to grok what the different parts of the formulas are trying to capture.

Once I did some basic problems, I found the what and why became much clearer. At this point I tend to read it more as programming code than as archaic formulae.

[1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/mathematical-thinking [2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1453661387 [3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1941691242

(sry for the amz links)

Thank you for taking the time to write this. I have sourced the two books off eBay and will start the coursera course.

I’ve just finished Robert Pool and Anders Ericsson’s book “Peak” - which has convinced me to stop comparing my unpractised, lack of understanding to the practiced expertise of others. So the two practice books you recommended have come at a time where I am especially receptive to the idea!

What is the essence of the beauty I see in 90s websites?

To me, they are easier to reason about. Maybe because of a higher information density, that’s static and aligned such that it’s easier to track groups of components and their relationships; cohesiveness is probably the word.

Maybe it’s just nostalgia. But I don’t think so.

It’s heartwarming to read comments from clever people, focusing on their struggles. Too often I interact with people who lock conversations into their own sphere of competence with the outcome being that I feel incompetent.

It'll be very interesting to find out if a system implementing this acoustic monitoring had been deployed and collecting data up until the recent dive.