(2023jun7 thread) I try to be generally helpful to people on Twitter and I think I do a decent job I also try to teach people how to be helpful to others but something clicked for me today: the most critical part of my help is via my intuition. I cannot bottle + transmit my intuition via text.
the best you can do via text- even via hundreds of pages- is capture snapshots of intuition in action. but snapshots of intuition are no substitute for intuition! if you’re lucky, a well chosen set of snapshots can maybe set off an “intuition ignition” in another person… but that is significantly a matter of that person’s intuition. I understand better now why Victor Wooten says stuff like, I paraphrase, “I cannot actually teach you anything. I can just show you what I do, and it’s really you who teach yourself”.
One way of thinking about intuition is that it’s a sensitivity to the goings-on in complex web of relationships – you just know, you just feel when something is off, from experience. you recognize the limits of utterances and you know when to drop something if it’s not working
you can read a million words on a topic, study, analyze, etc, but it’s no substitute for experience in the field, where someone with intuition can see where you’re going and simply step right into the blindspot in your OODA loop and cut you off
I mean, if it were possible to simply siphon off instincts from the page then everyone who reads self-help books would become high-agency powerhouse millionaires. It doesn’t work in part because they have to cultivate their own instincts in parallel, and that takes domain experience
“How to be appropriately self-critical” is another eg of a domain where even the best instruction will always be insufficient, BY DEFINITION. If you find the right angle to think about it you’ll laugh for hours but your angle is not my angle
“how to be independent”, “how to be original”, “how to be creative” are all egs of questions in which it can be useful to study the stories of independent creative originals, and yet those stories will stifle you if you’re not careful. In the end you have to disregard everything
my intuition is rooted in MY experience and MY assessment of MY experiences I have made some of the best intuition-triggering memes in the world, but they do not transmit MY experience. they set off cascades of insight for others based on THEIR experience
some people get this instantly, some even say it’s changed their life some people have no idea wtf it says or why it matters What’s the difference? it’s a matter of their experience, their insight, their context, their reading, their POV