You just broke my mind. I have visual aphantasia but until I just read your comment about audio aphantasia it never even dawned on me that hearing a song or sound in my head was a possibility. I just did your “who let the dogs out” test and I could remember the tune but as soon as I stopped thinking about it, it went away. That’s a wild personal discovery to have from an HN comment. Thanks!
Here’s some evidence for you: when I close my eye, I see black. That’s it. No amount of effort conjures an image. That’s not what most people I talk to about it report, so I am going to assume there’s a functional difference between me and people with functioning visualization.
I believe you. Why wouldn't someone believe you? There's not much reason to claim "I cannot do X" maliciously. I'm hopeless at catching a ball, can't play tennis to save my life, for instance... believe me?
I just want to throw my two cents in: I think I have a pretty good level of visualization ability, but it's not actually projected into my field of vision. It's like having a second monitor plugged in somewhere... _else_. It doesn't overlap with the 3D space of our world. I don't SEE it, but I do "see" it, not as concepts but as something akin to generated memories.
It does often help to look away from visually distracting things so that the mind is more free to use its capacity to generate things.
I have the same. I'm looking at my laptop's screen as I type this, and if I close my eyes while typing I cannot even visualise said screen. Now, I can blind-type, recognise faces, navigate aso without any problem. I can even play chess quite well (fide ~2050, 2200 blitz on chess.com), but I cannot visualise a chess board, nor can I visualise my moves or the moves of my opponent.
However, I don't "see" (pun intended) it as a problem. On the contrary, I'm not wasting cycles on irrelevant details while I'm thinking.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm on the hyperphantasia end of the spectrum and it is honestly actively problematic sometimes. For me, it can be very difficult to work with things that I can't translate to visuals, mentally; and daydreaming, and memories can be so vivid they are distracting or disturbing. It's very much an asset in certain circumstances (like debugging code or fixing an engine), but there's a reason most people don't have that fidelity.
>Here’s some evidence for you: when I close my eye, I see black.
This, I can imagine things, but it's like the idea of something, not a picture of it. Blows my mind when people tell me their imagination is like watching a movie.
Same! My wife is at the opposite end and can visualize these wild scenes and describe them in detail and I’m like “I can tell you roughly where the parts of a cat go”.
That's so funny, my wife and I have the opposite dynamic. She rolls her eyes at me when I insist "no the couch would definitely fit through that doorway if we rotate it like that, I don't need to measure", and after she gets a tape measure it's about an inch of room to spare.
Feels like the author starts with a valid criticism of Rush and then spends 3,000 words settling old scores with managers. The strongest part of the article is the first 10%; after that it mostly becomes an anti-MBA rant.
The Vegas Loop isn’t really “better” than a subway, it’s more like the best available option given the specific political and financial reality of Las Vegas.
Vegas has never had meaningful public transit investment, and a real subway would cost billions and take decades of political will that simply doesn’t exist here. The Loop fits the actual use case: moving convention attendees between LVCC halls and eventually casino properties, quickly, in a city where distances are deceptive and walking in 115° heat is brutal.
For that narrow purpose, point-to-point, climate-controlled, short-hop movement in a dense tourist corridor, it works reasonably well. The comparison to a subway is a bit of a category error; no subway was ever on the table. The real question is whether it beats surface-level shuttles and moving walkways, which it probably does.
The critique is fair though: it’s not scalable the way a subway is (throughput is limited by number of cars), and it’s privately owned infrastructure serving commercial interests rather than a public transit network.
Great news! Killing the Esmeralda 7 solar project is the right decision. People don’t realize how massive it was, over 110 square miles, bigger than Las Vegas itself. It would’ve scraped up pristine Great Basin desert, wiped out wildlife habitat, and trampled culturally important land not to mention diverting massive amounts of water which is a tight resource out here. Renewable energy is great, but we don’t need to bulldoze entire ecosystems to do it. Killing this one might actually push solar developers to think smaller and smarter next time.
Viewing exercise as interesting time spent is probably where the outliers of "people whose instincts defy millennia of evolution" come from. My wife and I truly love trail running and usually running more than 99% of users in Garmin (according to the charts). During race training season we're frequently in the 50 miles per week or more range which, as older and slower runners, means we might be running 10 to 15 hours per week. But, we love it, so no more interesting things for us to do than that.
> I can’t stop myself from thinking that working on a book for 6 months, doing its projects, is a huge waste of time for me, and because I already feel late, I find myself, yet again, in a cycle.
That’s such an important observation. Many of us have become so fooled by the notion of fast consumption and immediate gains that we have all but stopped putting in the meaningful work.
