This sounds great to me, and I think I would be likely to sign up for it if I could, but I haven't thought about it for more than a few minutes, am particularly unsure about the implications for culture, and am maybe too enthusiastic in general for things being 'well organized'.

Oh yeah, I think I get something similar when my sleep schedule gets very out of whack, or for some reason when I moved into my new house in January, though it went back to normal with time. (Potentially relevant features there: bedroom didn't seem very separated from common areas, at first was sleeping on a pile of yoga mats instead of a bed, didn't get out much.)

I think random objects might work in a similar way. e.g. if talking in a restaurant, you grab the ketchup bottle and the salt to represent your point. I've only experimented with this once, with ultimately quite an elaborate set of condiments, tableware and fries involved. It seemed to make things more memorable and followable, but I wasn't much inclined to do it more for some reason. Possibly at that scale it was a lot of effort beyond the conversation.

Things I see around me sometimes get involved in my thoughts in a way that seems related. For instance, if I'm thinking about the interactions of two orgs while I'm near some trees, two of the trees will come to represent the two orgs, and my thoughts about how they should interact will echo ways that the trees are interacting, without me intending this.

No, never heard of it, that I know of.

I'm pretty unsure how much variation in experience there is—'not much' seems plausible to me, but why do you find it so probable?

I also thought that at first, and wanted to focus on why people join groups that are already large. But yeah, lack of very small groups to join would entirely explain that. Leaving a group signaling not liking the conversation seems like a big factor from my perspective, but I'd guess I'm unusually bothered by that.

Another random friction:

• If you just sit alone, you don't get to choose the second person who joins you. I think a thing people often do rather than sitting alone is wander alone, and grab someone else also wandering, or have plausible deniability that they might be actually walking somewhere, if they want to avoid being grabbed. This means both parties get some choice.

Aw, thanks. However I claim that this was a party with very high interesting people density, and that the most obvious difference between me and others was that I ever sat alone.

I share something like this experience (food desirability varies a lot based on unknown factors and something is desirable for maybe a week and then not desirable for months) but haven't checked carefully that it is about nutrient levels in particular. If you have, I'd be curious to hear more about how.

(My main alternative hypothesis regarding my own experience is that it is basically imaginary, so you might just have a better sense than me of which things are imaginary..)

A page number or something for the 'more seasoned' link might be useful. The document is very long and doesn't appear to contain 'season-'.

The 'blander' link doesn't look like it supports the claim much, though I am only looking at the abstract. It says that 'in many instances' there have been reductions in crop flavor, but even this appears to be background that the author is assuming, rather than a claim that the paper is about. If the rest of the paper does contain more evidence on this, could you quote it or something, since the paper is expensive to see?

I am somewhat hesitant to share simple intuition pumps about important topics, in case those intuition pumps are misleading.

This sounds wrong to me. Do you expect considering such things freely to be misleading on net? I expect some intuition pumps to be misleading, but for considering all of the intuitions that we can find about a situation to be better than avoiding them.