The worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a material object, you do it wordlessly, perceiving your mental model with a sense that has no name. If you want to refer to it, only then do you render it in words.

When you think of the abstract, you have no choice but to use words as handles; you cannot perceive abstractions directly.
Mostly you navigate these interior landscapes by means of other people’s words.

This is an error because you mistake their words for ideas, but their words are only symbols for ideas https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1025737938682822656

other people’s words are not ideas, they are symbols for ideas. You put someone else’s symbols on your map, and you never bothered to explore there. This is the naive (=default) approach to reasoning
A turn of phrase becomes an expression becomes a cliché becomes a cage

When you already have a map, it is not necessary to perform effortful cogitation, because the lines have already been drawn by the people around you. It's not that you can't think outside the lines, it's just that you won't, without some kind of catalyst

Try to notice your speech habits, the ones you use when you talk inside your head, in particular when you reason about an abstract topic, such as morality, death, god, the technocapital singularity...

Take a complex word or phrase in your mental map, and try to explain it using only single syllable words. If you are an accelerationist, I suggest you start with "capital", but if you talk to anyone for a while you will notice there are words they are abusing.

There are tools for performing a self-diagnostic. Word frequency analysis tools. Locate your most common polysyllables and destroy them. Remove all the expressions and the pretty adornments you borrowed from your favorite blog or author

Those are the bars of your cage. Being inside the cage gives form to the formless. Before, you never even imagined what bars might look like, but now that you have seen them, you have a choice: stay trapped in the box, where you are comfortable, or try to break free

If you are honest about it, you will see holes in your thoughts. You are using overly complex metaphors, words with vague meanings, to do the work of NOT SEEING the holes in your knowledge, the way your brain hides the blind spot in the middle of your eye

Aside, a warning: many gaps are in fact unbridgeable, or will require new scientific or philosophical paradigms, as yet undreamed. Be suspicious of anyone who claims to understand consciousness, or the fundament of being, or how the world will end. they have confused themselves

I have had a few people DM me and say, “you talk about things I have been dancing around in my mind”, or “you say things I feel I am on the edge of understanding” if you feel that way you are probably hiding ignorance from yourself behind pretty words

Instead of looking at the world, you are relying on symbols that were given to you, and they make you feel smart. When you struggle to explain your beliefs about the world (even just in your head), the problem isn't that you can't express yourself, it’s that you did not see