The Vibe Handbook, Part Three: Practical Sorcery
One kind of cognition specializes in evaluating propositions. Another kind specializes in conjuring and manipulating vibes. You’d more typically use the word intelligence to describe having a strong logic engine, but there’s another flavor of cognitive strength, which is having a strong vibe engine. Whereas propositional intelligence encompasses talent at math, reading, and memory, vibe-engine intelligence links virtues like imagination, empathy, and ability to “read people.” We make fun of self-proclaimed empaths because they try to identify as a special category instead of part of a normally distributed spectrum, but you can make the same complaint about lots of traits. We don’t scorn people who label themselves introverts (even though extroversion/introversion is a bell curve) or say “I have ADHD” (even though executive function is a bell curve). And vibe-sensitivity is a bell curve too, containing a two-sigma region like any other. Some people are remarkably “tuned in” to others. Some people are especially good at performing vibechecks. The people who make observations like “_____ makes music for girls who _____” or “same energy” or coin hyperspecific new Types Of Guy are vibe-channelers.
What’s the equivalent of book learning here? What’s Kumon for vibes? I think the answer is practicing woo.
Some methods follow.
Turn the logic engine off: vibe with your own mind and body
No thoughts, just vibes. Easier said than done, but the reward for success is being able to write, speak, and make art without hindrance from one’s inner critic. Techniques include meditation; circling; Gendlin Focusing; internal family systems; yoga; improv. Your mind and body are constantly generating vibes as well as receiving them; learning to process your own vibes creates a tidy closed loop.
The goal is to gain a fine-grained sense of, and some control over, sensations in your brain and body: complex emotions, competing subprocesses in the mind, the tension of muscles, the rhythm of breath.
The term “energy” is often used for bodily vibes. I thought this was dumb until I realized it’s not supposed to literally mean energy, in the (1/2)mv^2 sense. It just borrows the analogy of “an arbitrary property related to motion and potential”.
Wikipedia is terrified that someone might accidentally derive benefits from energy healing:
Energy medicine is a branch of alternative medicine based on a pseudo-scientific belief that healers can channel "healing energy" into a patient and effect positive results. Practitioners use a number of names including various synonyms for medicine and sometimes use the word vibrational instead of or in concert with energy. In most cases there is no empirically measurable energy involved: the term refers instead to so-called subtle energy.
“Empirically measurable energy” is the phrasing of a person who thinks we’re talking about a scalar rather than a large tensor.
[P]ositive therapeutic results have been determined to result from known psychological mechanisms.
All you have to do is know the psychological mechanisms.
It’s common to confuse magic (another word sometimes used for vibe manipulation) with pseudoscience. Actually, pseudoscience is also pseudomagic. There are two valid ways of tuning into your mind and body: medically, with devices and measurements and double-blind trials; and magically, with vibes. People who make up fake physics, like claiming that healing energy transmits through some kind of quantum field, are either grifters or guessing incorrectly how vibes work1. Recall the lindy effect: ancient practices that have survived to the present have demonstrated robustness to selection pressures, and the most obvious way to do that is to be useful. Newer practices aren’t as lindy as yoga or meditation, but anything that’s still popular after thirty years or so has at least outlasted a trend cycle. So ancient magic qualifies, but any self-help regime with "quantum" in the name doesn't.
Animism: vibe with nature
But I know every rock and tree and creature
Has a life, has a spirit, has a name
-Colors of the Wind, Pocahontas
Again, you don’t have to literally believe that rocks and trees are conscious. Anthropomorphizing things is just a useful shortcut to interfacing with their vibes. A “spirit” is a personified wrapper around a vibe. You’re repurposing your theory of mind to handle some cases that aren’t quite minds. Teddy bears aren’t literally conscious – even children know this – but to correctly interact with one you have to approximately think of it as such.
Astrology and tarot: I don’t know yet actually
I haven’t played around with them enough. But here’s my guess: you have subtle complex intuitions about the situations and relationships in your life. These aren’t easy to serialize into something legible to your propositional-logic brain. But say you take a set of symbols representing dense clusters of meaning and select a few roughly at random. Three2 seems to work well, hence the popularity of the three-card pull in tarot and the sun/moon/rising system in astrology – broad enough to offer a variety of interpretations, but constrained enough to focus your imagination. Then your subconscious dreams up a legible way to relate the symbols you got to the intuitions you’re trying to explore, shedding light on the content of those intuitions. Compare this to the way actual dreams are generated: your subconscious comes up with some plausible plot to relate whatever elements are floating around on your mind.
Decorating: mold the vibe of the environment
High cathedral ceilings or low cabin rafters, a framed photo or a tapestry, brilliant sunlight or a hodgepodge of lamps and strings and lanterns, sleek metal or warm wood, soothing pastels or urgent neons, tile or floorboards or rugs, bookshelves or battlestations, three plants or twenty plants: your choice of what sort of room to occupy sets the ambient vibes for you to marinate in. This is uncontroversial compared to woo-ier practices, but it uses the same muscles.
Manifesting: declarative vibe-summoning
Conjure in your head the vibe of the thing you want; keep it there in the background at all times; then when you spot a vibe like the one in your head, move toward it.
Here’s Wikipedia again, on the “Law of Attraction”:
The belief is based on the ideas that people and their thoughts are made from “pure energy” and that a process of like energy attracting like energy exists through which a person can improve their health, wealth, and personal relationships. There is no empirical scientific evidence supporting the law of attraction, and it is widely considered to be pseudoscience.
Advocates generally combine cognitive reframing techniques with affirmations and creative visualization to replace limiting or self-destructive ("negative") thoughts with more empowered, adaptive ("positive") thoughts.
Same issue: “pure energy” is vibes, but the writer assumes it’s some physical scalar, like kinetic energy. What IRB-approved experiment are you going to run to test the hypothesis “if you’re constantly seeking to step incrementally toward tensors that minimize cosine distance to a given tensor, it’s easier if you cache the second tensor in your head”?
The Law of Attraction itself sells this idea short, I think; it’s often stated as something like “If you think good thoughts, then good things will come your way, and vice versa”, but “good” and “bad” are vague and underpowered. Better to manifest “schizo egirl cyberpunk chaos fairy” or “a rewarding career as a data-driven, customer-minded accounts analyst”.
KonMari: vibe with an object
Indoor animism. The theory that all your possessions are at least partly Horcrux.
Playlists and mood boards: assemble a vibe
Pictures and audio tracks are much more information-dense than text. So you can combine a dozen of them to capture a vibe. You could store information about the vibe directly by interpolating it from the group’s elements – recommender systems do this (Spotify’s autogenerated playlists, TikTok’s For You), but they’re not human-readable so as far as I know there’s not enough demand for a popular tool to do that yourself.
Congratulations: you are now vibe-certified. Go forth and let the tensors flow.
Another phrasing of scientific vs. pseudoscientific vs. magical: scientific vs. unscientific vs. ascientific. The scientific method requires a hypothesis, which evaluates to a Boolean. Vibes aren’t Boolean, which is why you don’t see F1 scores in text-to-image generation papers. You can quantify loss in other ways, of course – vibes aren’t actually that mysterious, and they don’t defy understanding. They aren’t anti-inductive. They’re just different.
Three may be the optimal number in general of things to think about together. If you have three things, you can think about any one individually, any pair, or all three in concert, for a total of seven, which is about the maximum length of a list the average person can hold in working memory. Two things gives you three combinations (ignoring the empty set), which is boring, and four gives you 4 + 6 + 4 + 1 = 15 (the general form is 2^n - 1), which is overwhelming. If you want to make up a story, come up with three plot elements. If you want to pass the time by inventing spoonerisms, notice three-word phrases and shuffle around their first letters.