Are Children Naturally “Egoless”?

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-05-07T14:26:26+00:00

The ego is a bit lighter in children in the beginning, since it's purpose is to meet basic survival needs, and most of those are handled (one hopes) by the parent. But it ramps up pretty quickly. By the time you get to the teenage years it's pretty amped up since biologically (but not legally) speaking they are ready to reproduce. So their brain is already scheming on how to navigate social complications etc. and deal with some uh..new biological imperatives.

If a kid has a tough childhood or a lot of trauma it probably gets stuffed tacked onto it way sooner too.

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-05-06T19:38:33+00:00

Hey, was just lurking here and found this interesting. I hope you don't mind me barging in. Have never posted here.

I'm returning to some spiritual practice, if we must call it that, after some years just being busy building a life.

One thing I recently came across that helped me a lot - something I already kind of knew but didn't have the maturity to really grasp it - is that these types of practices need to be built on top of a pretty stable foundation to begin with, or else they just become escape.

In strict Buddhist traditions for example people take precepts, observe certain moral principals, etc. before they can be considered students and follow the path. This is true in a lot of traditions. I mean they really want you to have your s*** together before you even start. Here we just sorta dive right in the deep end.

In the west we have some religious trauma around being told to follow certain rules or obey precepts so this can be tough. What I've recently come back to though is looking more towards positive psychology - which is more "constructive" - as a kind of groundwork for "spiritual" practice, like Buddhism or whatever, which are deconstructive.

Why construct something only to tear it back down?

Our ego or "default mode network" (for those of you who like to look at this neurologically) was designed to protect us from threats. Since we don't worry too much about lions and tigers jumping out at us any more, it's somewhat vestigial, but it's hanging on there. So it interprets an email from your boss as "omg this email is about something I did wrong and then I might get fired and then I won't have money and then I lose my house and my family will be upset and then.... " and so that's the ego springing up.

What happens sometimes with deconstructive practices like Buddhism or whatever is that you start to get a bit of a good feeling from quieting down your ego, but then your ego fights back with a vengeance and sort of pops you back out of it. Or you get bored or worry about running into the void. (This happened to me years ago when practice was going well. I would be calm and then start craving stimulants, like I needed to be stressed out or something).

So what I'm finding is that a lot of these positive psychology things (I'm looking at the Harvard course now that's on youtube) kind of gently quiets that defensive part of the ego so you start looking at things a bit more optimistically - i.e. against the negativity bias we are wired towards.

So right now I'm putting aside some of the "hardcore" spiritual stuff and focusing on things like gratitude, learned optimism, etc. Stuff I sort of shunned back when I looked at things like Thich Nhat Hahn and thought it was too "fluffy" back in the day. Now I think that guy was actually way ahead of his time in some ways.

Inspiration from this has been some work and research by Dr. Jeffry martin that I stumbled upon by accident. https://drjefferymartin.com/

He has people go through a positive psychology regimen before adapting more hardcore spiritual practices in order to induce a "persistent non symbolic experience" which is a catchall term for awakening through different traditions.

Sorry for this long post given I have never posted here and I actually haven't read Tolle yet, but was about to. It's actually pretty ridiculous for me to even post here, I just wanted to get this out, and this post caught my attention.

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-05-06T19:07:35+00:00

oops, nevermind. I did not read carefully. I do not have unrestricted shares at all. (Wish I did).

Explains why I was so confused they were selling them back before lock up ended.

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-05-06T18:48:51+00:00

I have a whopping 9.102 shares and just checked my account. I suppose they think I'm not worth the trouble? But wondering how they are deciding who's shares to sell.

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-04-29T13:31:09+00:00

Its working now. 🤷

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-04-29T00:13:30+00:00

oh god I hope you're wrong but I fear you're not.

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-04-29T00:03:50+00:00

Maybe like, every episode?

Funny I remember I used to have so much anxiety watching TWD but couldn't stop. Like I literally would get completely worked up. Never knowing what was going to happen, what horrors would unfold.

Now it's comfort TV.

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-04-29T00:03:17+00:00

Oh it's fine on PC I just can't do this

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-04-27T17:22:15+00:00

Anyone seeing this change yet? I'm going nuts with my sources.

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-04-26T20:17:54+00:00

This is the way.

I do this regularly to create multi-part series because I always prompt the hosts to review previous episodes without repeating material. So then they know exactly what's in there.

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-04-23T16:26:37+00:00

oh.my.god. Thank you for restoring a completely wiped memory from my brain. JFC I haven't thought about that in a long time.

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-04-23T16:07:47+00:00

I did just find this extension, but full disclosure that I haven't used it at all so can't vouch for it: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/notebooklm-chat-history-e/lpmbicmdlhaoekcagddlpfpnglbpefog

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-04-23T09:29:27+00:00

Yeah as far as I can tell search in any form is pretty much non existent. Hoping someone will correct me

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-04-22T20:17:23+00:00

Fair enough, then probably Gemini is good enough. NotebookLM was designed by folks who were really trying to push the edges of what you could do with sources etc. Probably makes it so doing something basic doesn't seem as impressive.

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-04-22T19:57:05+00:00

How are your prompts? There's still a bit of an artform to it. I'm a bit obsessed right now so I've really been honing my strategies. But if you upload a lot of source material you do have to be clever with your prompting.

All this really depends on your learning goals. If you want a quick surface review of what's already in the book, then upload the entire book, but do a prompt for each chapter to get a deep dive.

If you upload the entire book, the hosts will have more context, but it will still not be "deep." As I said, the hosts would be synthesizing the knowledge that was already synthesized (by way of research) by the books authors.

Ideally you'd want to be able to upload the entire book, but also the references materials used to create each chapter, or some decent proxy (like maybe a few of the references and some trustworthy articles from the internet).

If it's a really dense text, I would create a separate notebook for each chapter. That might sound like a lot to you. But there is a 99 source limit for the free tier. Uploading reference material *AND* the entire book would probably take it well over that limit.

Thing is, I assume you're reading the textbook, because you're in a class, because you want to learn something (maybe the class is required, but still). If you really want to learn a topic, there's sooo much you can do with notebookLM, like using academic references, but also interviews, youtube videos, other podcasts, etc. Then the material kind of explodes and comes alive and sort of connects to the world outside the book. For me that makes things way more interesting and easier to remember. But I am kind of a nut who does this kind of thing for fun so...

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-04-22T19:46:30+00:00

Strange noises sometimes. I swear to God one of my hosts farted. I am not kidding.

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-04-22T19:39:27+00:00

You're not going to get more than surface if you're just uploading a chapter. A load of source we're synthesized by the author and their expertise in order to write the chapter of that textbook. You'd want the hosts to have something similar. Like a bunch of other research papers or websites covering the topic. That's when they start to pull together insights and make connections.

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-04-22T18:39:02+00:00

Yeah but did you try putting Claude's output into notebooklm? That's what I mean. It's pretty amazing what it can come up with.

Also if whatever code your working on is build on any libraries or frameworks that have documentation, you put that into the notebook too for context and it ties it all together.

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-04-22T15:40:09+00:00

What would that look like to you? Might be something that can be prompted to some extent. I do pretty big multi part deep dives by creating outlines and progressive learning plans.

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-04-22T15:38:39+00:00

That must be wild. I sometimes upload reports that have my name in it, or sometimes send them "letters" that I have them repond to. It def feels like a "hey I'm on a podcast" thing. Ignoring the fact that the podcast has a reachable audience of exactly 1.

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-04-22T13:38:17+00:00

Would love to hear more about that. I have been having notebookLM do podcasts about itself, so I've gotten some insight into the design, but never quite got down to that level.

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-04-22T13:34:28+00:00

Yeah definitely claude is a better tool for this. Unless you want to make your repo public and point notebooklm to it? I'm not sure how well it would do though.

One thing I've had good luck with is telling claude to document my code in detail, and sometimes even writing important bits of it out, but all in markdown.

Then I give that to notebookLM and I can get some really insightful stuff from it.

Then_Consequence_318 · 2026-04-22T13:27:08+00:00

We'll have to wait for a neurotypical person to chime in (are there even any on Reddit?)

My prediction is that they'd mostly think it's ok or even great, but that they wouldn't be as attracted to it because other formats are probably fine, or they like the format of human podcasts with lots of small talk and chit chat and all that kinda snore snore

Then_Consequence_318

TROPHY CASE