TwiceHuman
1mo ago
The chemical fires need to be cleaned up afterwards too.
But the genius of the human race are the kind of people who have seemingly limitless energy (PDF warning). So I don't think it's harmful for the brain to expend a lot of energy (that said, it could be that less energy is needed to study topics that you care for. That it's not just your brain being more receptive to these areas, but that it processes them in a less costly way - for instance, without anxiety, without judgement, without keeping track of time and without evaluating the external environment. In this case, it makes sense that you'd want to isolate yourself before you start studying, because only in a basement or a similar room would it be okay to lose one self in the task and turn off any peripheral perception)
I took a psychology class a long time ago
I've never taken one! But I was a better psychologist than the "professionals" around me already at 10 years old, and I read a lot of Jung and such in my teenage years, and ran a lot of experiments on myself as well. I also had the bad luck of encountering most types of mentally ill people and having to deal with them (don't piss off borderline women, by the way). I also experienced symptoms from every cluster of mental illness myself, so I probably wouldn't lose out to even Buddha in experience and self-reflection. I have no respect for 90% of psychologists, even the PhDs seem absolutely clueless. I used to bully the mods on /r/psychology before I was perma'd from Reddit. (Their 'hot' section now has an article about how women value kindness the most in men, and that supportiveness and intelligence were more important than looks. Not a single thing in that sentence is true. Every post I can find on the sub at the moment is garbage, actually). JP is alright, as is thelastpsych.
Life is pain on the extreme ends.
Yeah, but extreme ends have their own opposites. The spikes of positive emotions I experienced when I was severely depressed are much larger than the ones I feel now. Overall, I feel better now that the depression is gone, but I'm actually making fewer meaningful memories now. The subjective parts of life have a tendency to balance themselves like this. It's only objectively that my life has improved a lot.
It knows more than I do
This is what made me listen to my brain, emotions, instincts, etc. but now I've realized that there's areas where it's unreliable and where I have to overwrite it with willpower. It's not so much that I "know better" than my brain, but I do have way different priorities. My brain is too stingy, it doesn't want to invest. It's also too cowardly. It's also hard to modify, it doesn't care for conformity, it's immune to hypnosis, it won't let me lucid dream, and it resists when I try to reprogram it.
I like to think that I'm a bit of an arrogant person, but that could just be a defense mechanism against the fear that I'm not. And I suppose that our environment used to force us towards being healthy using things like necessity. I have a bit of royal aesthetics, and most people on this forum are intelligent, so it's likely that we all have family members who used to be rather important people. That said, mental illness runs in my family just as much as intelligence does, so I feel like I'm on the experimental dev branch, one of natures instances of "throw a dice and see what happens".
You make a good point that it isn't ideal to say "I don't fit into society, I must be sick", for it might be that society is what's sick (or at least poorly calibrated for man as a species). Just like there's environments in which a cynical person would fare better than a naive person, there's also socities in which other healthy traits are disadvantageous, while unhealthy ones are advantageous and thus appear good.
I'll take your advice and attempt to change my environment, I just tend to think that external solutions are bad (the insight is from psychology in general. Most problems which seem external are actually internal. If you feel that you lack external validation, you might lack confidence, for example. And the feeling that I "need" a cup of coffee to be able to do my work would also be my brain lying to me. So I've been avoiding external solutions as reliance on external things feel like a bad tendency in general)
Yeah, willpower is dangerous, but a lack of it can be too. Some people are only doing alright in life because their instincts is smarter than the destructive ideologies they have consumed, and other people are only alive because they learned some degree of self-tyranny. The balance here is difficult.
By "tiny ones" I assume you mean children? Thanks for telling me about control theory by the way! I immediately fell into a fun rabbit hole about predictive processing. A final insight is that eggs may taste bad for you because your body knows that you shouldn't eat them, but this isn't always reliable so take it with a grain of salt (heh)
TwiceHuman
1mo ago
I don't think you have to be in a constant unpleasant state to grow. Growth is unpleasant in some ways, but pleasant in others. It's especially pleasant when you cash in on it, for example becoming rich and then going on vacations a lot. But I do generally agree that "suffering is the root of growth", meaning that it requires great conflict between yourself and the world, or between yourself and other parts of yourself, to grow the most. The greatest growth also puts the individual at risk of destruction.
I'm not puzzles much by competing instincts. Even craving dopamine seems somewhat justifiable to me. It's the craving for what destroys you, or the craving for nothingless, which seems weird. The former might be a way the body is forcing itself into growing, but this mechanism seems more destructive than constructive. The latter seems like the "death drive" or nihilism, but it might be similar to going into a coma, with the body simply wanting rest.
I read in some of Nietzsche's work that people keep themselves ill, and that this triggers healing. Kind of how fasting and cold showers increases longevity. If this is true, then it makes sense that people keep themselves in a constant "just barely surviving" situation. It just seems irrational from the outside, since it's less pain overall just to do something about ones problems.
Your comment seems correct overall, but I don't think that pro and anti-social instincts explain everything. I'm autistic, so the social instincts in me just aren't that strong. I don't care too much what other people think, and I don't even do good things because I felt that I should. I just do what aligns with my sense of aesthetics.
I don't like the idea that the body is bad. I have to agree with Nietzsche that instincts should be tamed rather than suppressed, and that he who says human nature is bad or evil is merely projecting. Rather than "If you're a good person, you will be happy", Nietzsche's stance is "If you're happy, you will be a good person". Merely being in a good mood tends to make you treat other people better. So when other people fear my nature, they fear parts of themselves which they perceive in me. Anyway, this would be the "good/evil" perspective. My confusion is about the "good/bad" perspective. A good way to put it is "One seeks that which tends to be bad for them, and in nature, this works out, because it's gated by that which is good for them". For instance, you want to relax, but you must first work. You want to waste resources, but you must first accumulate them. You want peace, but you must first win it through war. In the modern world, wire-heading, self-hacking, artificial rewards, etc. become possible, and we sometimes manage to solve some of the problems which exist to make us healthy. "We did it, we overcame the need for hard physical labour!" excellent, but if exercises is no longer required, what will stop your body from breaking down? We're meant to try to win, not to win. We're meant to fight for peace, not to achieve it. But I guess this partly answers my original question, thanks for your thoughts!
TwiceHuman
1mo ago
You have to work hard for food, so if you felt like staying home instead of going out to hunt or pick berries, wouldn't that be a bad thing? I think there's a point where this laziness can be said to be pathological.
I'm quite thin, but even in overweight people, laziness seems dominant. I think optimism and confidence "ought to" modulate laziness (since it would hint at abundance, or tell ones body that one is the pack leader). But personally, my appetite is low no matter my mood.
TwiceHuman
1mo ago
Were they ever so scarse that people would be "lazy" like the modern human? It seems even more wasteful to let your own body decay and die than it does to take at least some care of it. It could also be that I still have some lingering depression, or that something else is wrong with me. After all, despite having food, I don't have much desire to eat.
It's good that I do have a strong willpower. I've just listened too much to my body since I expected it to be a little more trustworthy with my future than what is the case. This is after all the same body which can wake up 2 minutes before my alarm because it knows the time so well, and which can tell me insights about my problems in dreams just because I ask nicely.
I'm still a little puzzled, by the way. I think I waste 500 calories a day just being anxious, so it's not all about energy reduction.
TwiceHuman
1mo ago
Yes. Perhaps I should have phrased my question better, I just wanted to keep it short.
I know why death exists. But I don't know why people become hedonists by default. Why you have to fight against yourself in order to wake up early, in order to study, in order to exercise, in order not to get distracted. The body seems to want to do nothing at all, or to do the bare minimum when things have to be done. It seems that, if you follow what your body wants, you die. Isn't this terrible design? Anyone can become a great person, you just have to steer yourself manually, while your body yells at you to do otherwise. It's like our bodies want us to live in poverty, to not become anyone special, to be too weak to be helpful to others, and to die without realizing our dreams. How did Darwinism cause this? I don't understand.
TwiceHuman
1mo ago
I have a very weird question for you all. I think it's too much of a question to fit the wellness thread, but it doesn't fit in well anywhere. That said, this is the most intelligent forum I'm aware of.
Why would I waste into nothing and die if I followed my natural inclinations? How did darwinism possibly select for that?
I have to use my willpower and overwrite what my body, ego and drives want, in order to have a good life. Surely it would be more better if nature just gave us all strong willpower? Or if our natural urges pointed us towards that better life in which we're successful all on its own?
There's times where there's a lot of wisdom in the body too, when it actually knows better, and when overwriting it with your willpower is stupid. But I have hurt my own progression a lot by focusing too much on these cases, as the opposite cases are even more common.
So, why? The desire to be a loser, and the hatred of my own inadequacy coexists in the same body. The only theory I have is that life requires resistance in order to grow strong (trees grown without wind do not become strong enough to support themselves, for instance). So, human beings fight themselves in order to create this resistance when it does not exist externally (which is why people who don't know real struggle seem to become insane and invent problems where none exist). When I had my depressive episode, I noticed that it felt like my body was trying to kill itself, but also to stay alive at the same time. And like how a fever hopes to kill the bad parts in your body before it kills the healthy parts, what profound suffering does it that it increases internal pressure hoping that the weakest part breaks first (leading to those turning-ones-life-around stories). But hedonism and other such tendencies do not seem to bring any advantages at all.
The tendency to mediocrity does not make sense to me. It does not seem beneficial. Humanity is capable of so much greatness, but 9 out of 10 end up quite pathetic, seemingly by design or by choice (rather than actual external limitations). Are we sick? Even "The natural environment had limited resources" doesn't seem like a good enough reason for the desire to self-neglect and to avoid opportunities which are obviously good just because they're a little bit difficult.
TwiceHuman
1mo ago
I disagree. Any technique which Tiktok uses will only accelerate our collective brainrot. These techniques actually work, but I don't think that's a good enough argument to use them.
TwiceHuman
1mo ago
You're likely making a reference that I'm not getting, or hinting at the limits of subjectivity?
I could can answer the question as long as I have a set of constraints (what would you like to optimize for?) but I assume you asked me this because you assumed I couldn't answer it. After all, it takes quite a bit of arrogance to think one can answer such a broad question
TwiceHuman
2mo ago
I do agree with your take if we stress "The person actually victimized". I dislike it when people are offended on other people's behalf. Some take it further, and look for signs of flaws in others, scanning them for traits that they can "expose" to the world, as if they were "moral police". The Nietzsche quote I'd choose here is "And some who cannot see the high in people call it virtue that they see the low all too near, thus they call their evil eye virtue" In either case, I consider revenge to be rather imperfect. Even if you had a society in which one could always get the perfect amount of revenge, I'd still not want to be there if the crime rate was high. Rather live in a country with little crime. Prevention is simply better. I can only speak for myself though - maybe there's people who enjoy revenge so much that it makes up for the events for which they take revenge.
TwiceHuman
2mo ago
"Justice" often just means "revenge". Nietzsche wrote some great takes on this, I can dig them up if you want, from a psychological perspective his takes were really good as far as I remember, and I could probably defend them.
For now, though, I want to say that I do see the logic in murdering the murderer of your father if the system fails you. But this would be a personal revenge. Those that I find the least justifiable are those who take "revenge" on others behalf - "cancel culture" is one manifestation of this, but there's more, and they're all based in aspects of mob culture/herd morality/social dynamics which are closely tied to malice and which can be prevented by the slightest bit of wisdom and self-understanding. It's a simply form of stupidity, holy simplicity if you will. I know that the left are not religious, but they're bigger moralizers than those on the right, and their values come from the bible even if they do not realize it. Or at Nietzsche said:
"We see: an authority speaks - who speaks? - One may forgive human pride if it sought to make this authority as high as possible in order to feel as little humiliated as possible under it. Therefore - God speaks! One needed God as an unconditional sanction, with no court of appeal, as a "categorical imperator" -: or, if one believed in the authority of reason, one needed a metaphysic of unity, by virtue of which this was logical. Now suppose that belief in God has vanished: the question presents itself anew: "who speaks?"- My answer, taken not from metaphysics but from animal physiology: the herd instinct speaks. It wants to be master: hence its "thou shalt!"- it will allow value to the individual only from the point of view of the whole, for the sake of the whole, it hates those who detach themselves-it turns the hatred of all individuals against them"
And this would explain why the death of god has not lead to the death of morality to the extent that one would expect. The morality was grounded more in instincts than it was grounded in religion. Religion merely served to legitimize it
TwiceHuman
2mo ago
It is meaningless, as nobody was ever interested in figuring out who was oppressed in the first place - they merely wanted to legitimize giving power and advantages to specific groups that they either identified with or felt sympathy for. This sympathy depends on the perceived strength and the perceived morality of the agent in question. There's little empathy when women attack men, since men are seen as stronger. There's no empathy when somebody accused of (insert social taboo) is attacked, because they're perceived as being evil. The judgement of evil is perceived as the lack of innocence, and the lack of innocence is proportional to the perceived free will of the doer (and to the extent to which they understand what they are doing). This is why we punish accidents and mentally unwell people less harshly. It also depends on the perceiver, as it gets harder to hate people and judge them as evil as you grow wiser and realize that we're just products of our circumstances (because this understanding of ours results in attributing less free will to others).
Some day I'd like to put human nature into equations, just simple, imperfect ones.
Provided we are careful to measure the "extent to which they're against you" by actions more than words
I personally just thought of it as (actual, not apparent) hostility. Actions and words are both downstream of that.
But if they don't actually do anything about it, then it's all just surface level talk
Yes, but again, situations like this arise because it's all a sham. A thing I've noticed is that most people who complained that X group is oppressing Y group hates group X more than they like group Y. So if somebody hurts a child, it envokes aggression towards the person who hurt the child, much more than it envokes the desire to protect the child. People rarely differentiate between the two when they think about such situations.
Many people also just want a socially acceptable victim to went their negative emotions at. Others want to think of themselves as being "good people". Others still want to show other people their values, and signal virtue or in-group membership. These selfish desires pretend to be altruistic, and the vast majority of people do not have enough self-awareness to notice themselves doing this.
So by "public sentiment" is mean the true sentiment, not the apparent one (which is misleading, which is why I find joy in exposing it like this)
And a problem needs to be solved
People do not want this problem solved in general. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to be pro-freedom when it's to their advantage, but also to decrease the freedom of those who have different values. The public support for "colorblindness" on the political left disappeared because it was true neutrality, and that's not what they want, for that would disallow them from fighting racism with racism. They're opposed to freedom of expression too, also because it's neutral. If 90% of people hate the KKK, they will say "The will of the people have spoken, this is democracy, the majority is right". It was probably the same when a majority oppressed homosexuals in the past, it's just viewed differently in retrospect because, and only because, the majority is against it now. The majority can only disagree with the majority across time. The public could only start to agree that discrimination against homosexuals was bad when it stopped being much of an actual problem - for the two are one and the same thing. This is also why feminism is the most popular in the countries which need it the least - the more feminist a country is, the more power woman have, and the less women will be oppressed.
But it's logically possible
I think it's only possible in the map (the political consensus based on nonsense). In the territory, all of this is nonsense (meaning that it cannot be true in reality. My map of our social reality shows that our social reality is dishonest, and the "real" version which I claim to be true has a lot of tautologies, but I believe that speaks in its favor. Tautologies eat themselves, right? Like circular logic, I think they evaluate to nothing)
We have rules like "You're not allowed to discriminate against inherent traits" and yet we don't treat health, beauty, and intelligence like they're protected traits at all (which is why attacking these traits in opposing ideologies is so common). In fact, our set of "protected traits" is politically biased, and our enforcement of our own rules is biased as well. I'm curious what would happen if we made ideologies protected as well - they're not really different from cultures and religions anyway, they're all just worldviews with a set of values embedded in them. We didn't really improve anything when we changed from religious wars to culture wars, I don't even think the irrationality decreased much. Hell, to be against biases is impossible, as it's a bias in itself. One cannot have a strong preference for the equality of preferences.
TwiceHuman
2mo ago
Sorry for the delay in responding. By the way, I like your username!
Right, my model assumed that neutrality does not exist, that you're either for or against something.
Notice that I wrote "Convince everybody" and "get the majority on your side". I should have made it even clearer than this, but my point was that the ratio of group sizes is not what matters ultimately. It doesn't matter if you're 1% of the population or 90%. What matters is what society as a whole thinks about you. In order for my model to work again, you simply average the sentiment. If 40% of people hate you, and 60% are neutral, then the average is dislike (because (40*-2 + 60*0) is less than 0). If society as a whole can agree that you're in need of protection, then it cannot be true. It's true only when society does not think this.
You're correct that the direction of the inequality is not as important as the ratio/strength of inequality (so being 49.9% of the whole or 50.1% feels about the same), with the exception of votes/elections/etc where a few percentage points mean everything. The results of an election is basically the direction of the inequality, and the strengths of every sentiment basically doesn't matter (a vote is worth a single vote, it doesn't matter if you support a candidate slightly or love them, or if you dislike other choices or hate them). Voting is a function which throws away a lot of information.
Example 4 shows that to be an "oppressed minority" it matters that the overall sentiment of society is against you, rather than just anyone. Thought I also argue this above, example 5 shows us that in order to measure the disadvantage you hold in society, you have to multiply the amount of people who are against you by the extent to which they're against you. You should also multiply this by how powerful they are (if those against you are 10 times more powerful, they count for 10 times more). Now, simply find out if the sum of the sentiments in your favor minus the sum of sentiments against you, is bigger or smaller than 0. On the makro scale, this decides if you're oppressed or not, and the average sentiment is necessarily going to be the opposite of what it claims unless it's exactly 0 (If society as a whole arrives at the conclusion that society as a whole is against you, we arrive at a contradiction).
And in order to criticize the idea from the other direction, I want to point out that groups like the KKK are, by definition, minority groups suppressed by the majority, and that this is precisely why we do not grant them this status. We collectively agree not to protect them against the collective. There's a "paradox" here (it's actually just a contradiction). It's similar to the problem of creating an institution whose job it is to make sure that institutions do not abuse their power. No institution is going to evaluate itself in a neutral manner because the evalation finds place from the inside and not the outside, and for the same reason, society necessarly cannot evaluate itself fairly. Objectivity can only exist between an object and something outside of it which is deemed to be more correct, and you eventually reach the largest scope possible.
I agree that, when reality disagrees with a model, it's because the model is wrong. But reality agrees much more with my models than with politics, since politics is basically a competition in bending reality to ones favor through the use of deception. Most popular statements are wrong, meaning that they cannot possibly be true. Try evaluating Poppers paradox of tolerance mathematically, and you'll find that people who use it as an argument simply do not understand what it implies. I'm not very good at mathematics on paper, but many mathematical concepts have become part of my intuition.
TwiceHuman
2mo ago
I see, I just went by skincolor. If possible, I don't want to overcomplicate things by taking "jews are in a super-position of white and non-white, collapsing to the state which benefits them the most at any given time" seriously. Genetically they might be a little different, though, I'm even open to the idea that jews are objectively superior in some sense (e.g. often intelligent), but I think they're also inferior in others. The use of deception is an indicator that one has difficulties competing fairly, after all.
Despite being white I don't care that much if another race is "superior" though, the only hill I'm willing to die on is that "mid" is too harsh an assessment
TwiceHuman
2mo ago
Oops, yeah, thanks! But if you use the Method of Loci, you can technically have both!
Apologies in advance for the long reply. Read what you want and ignore the rest
1: Is not hard to fix. It's arguably easier to throw away the restrictions that society has told you to place on yourself. You can be more true to yourself and be more successful as a result.
2 is harder. I got an Asian girlfriend myself, seemed easier all things considered.
I have to disagree that human problems are difficult. I think that the non-existence of these problems is the natural state. Society messed up when it created obesity, it introduced new problems which do not occur naturally. Most foods I see in stores have about 10% sugar, and even most "healthy" food is fraud (the apple juice is sugar-water with chemicals which taste like apple). Even if society can find a way to solve these problems, it also created them. My grandma grows her food in her own garden, these problems are alien to her.
Unwanted pregnancy is a good argument though, since it's natural. It's a feature though, rather than a bug. Your body knows exactly what it's doing. The same applies to depression and such, it's no accident, it's a strategy to increase yours odds of survival. I think it's good that self-modification is so difficult (in fact, it's likely difficult because those who were good at it didn't pass on their genes, meaning that wireheading killed them).
Wire-heading is really dangerous. If you do any, I recommend gratitude meditation (since it won't interferer with your functioning). Many forms of wire-heading can effectively destroy people. When girls grow up watching disney movie depictions of love, notice how many years it takes to reverse the standards and how many disappointments they must experience. If you feel pleasure 10 times stronger than anything real life would offer you naturally, it's really hard to go back. Gratitude meditation makes you enjoy real life more though, which is why it's safer.
Whoever builds it is always going to be optimising it for society's benefit
Yeah, or income, and that would ruin it. That's how society functions. But it's not how we have to function, nor is it how everyone is forced to function. I don't feel any desire to optimize for socities benefit personally. These destructive incentives seem to emerge statistically. A company need not be evil, but companies are evil. A person need not be self-serving, but people are self-serving. The answers to all social struggles are quite simple. There's no real weights keeping people down. You can pirate "No More Mr. Nice Guy", "The University of Success" and "The Dating Black Book" and perhaps "12 rules of life" and read them in a few days. Internalize the gold nuggets which resonate with you and you're already ahead (the average person is very far from their potential)
You write as if some people are lower and some people are higher, and as if only years of hard work can ever hope to change this fact... But that's only true for ones socioeconomic position. Mental domains (social skills, happiness, charisma, confidence, likability, etc.) are completely mallable. Even if you've been a coward all your life, you can suddenly start being like John McAfee. Not acting like, but being like.
Helping shy people 1-on-1 is not difficult for me, I've done it many times. The hardest part is helping them believe in themselves, rather than to believe in you (even if you're prepared for this). It's also hard to keep them from falling in love with you (seriously. And gender doesn't matter.) I know a guy who involves everyone he meets in fun activities. It feels natural when he does it. You might feel like it's awkward, but it only gets awkward if you act like it is. Just pretend it's not awkward, and be casual and unconcerned (but friendly), and it will probably work out. They will likely relax when they notice that you don't seem to be uncomfortable because of them. People mirror eachother a lot, and you can control your side of the equation.
I think it's fine that people naturally fit into a position. Not everyone can be at the top, due to how hierarchies work. But I don't think lower positions are meant to be as terrible as they are. Consider a family which owns a dog - the dog is at the very bottom, right? But everyone takes care of it and treats it well. You'll be okay a long as you don't have unlikable traits.
Teaching people how to be likable is not difficult if you know how, but it probably takes a small books worth of information in total to communicate all the axioms (but in order to find all of them you have to read 100s of books and do some introspection as well). But if you follow the axioms, you literally cannot fail. There's not even any need to sell your soul, nor to roleplay and pretend. Of course, this alone will not make you into a millionare, but you could act with the exact confidence of a millionare if you wanted to.
TwiceHuman
2mo ago
I don't think you can compare jobs like that, since a society needs a variety of trades to function. If we identify "the best job" and educate every single person in that, it will quickly stop being the best job. Society forms a hierarchy, but the top of the hierarchy is made possible by the bottom. I don't think it's fair to take the winners in isolation and say "everyone should be like them", for instance, concluding that every person should be a CEO so that every person could be rich and high status. So we have to be careful how we apply the rule.
But if creation scientists are more healthy (I think health is the closest we get to an objective metric), then I think we can conclude that their values are superior in a way (and to be exact - they're more in line with nature). So what if they're irrational, delusional, or "wrong"? That's just theory, and theory exists to aid reality. Reality will always beat theory. If they enjoy life, have many children, and have less mental issues on average (which seems to be the case), why not consider their ways superior?
TwiceHuman
2mo ago
Have you any of you solved some political, philosophical or historical issues? By which I mean that you came up with a bunch of axioms and that you never had to update your beliefs ever again. Edit: If not, I'm interested in hearing why. Many people here have probably discussed these topics for many years already, have you really made no meta-progress?
I will start:
Freedom of speech is optimal (Even if you want to reduce misinformation, it seems that posting the wrong answer and waiting for somebody to correct you is a strictly better strategy than censoring the wrong answer)
If you can convince everyone that you're an oppressed minority, you're not. That you can get the majority on your side proves that you are not discriminated against or in a vulnerable position, as being in a vulnerable and oppressed position is defined by having the majority against you.
One is innocent until proven guilty (This is partly subjective, it's a personal value that punishing an innocent person is worse than letting a guilty person walk free. If you disagree, simply reverse the axiom)
If your biggest problem in life is being called slurs for your inborn traits - your life is pretty good and you don't have any serious problems. You're therefore privileged.
Most groups who blame a more successful group for all of their problems are simply unable to cope with their own inadequacy, and aim to subvert the more successful group by manipulating their values in a way which makes an equalization appear as 'justice', so that the more successful group feels bad and gives their advantage to the less successful group. This instinctial (which is why a dog begging for food will exploit your sympathy, so that you perceive yourself as a bad guy for not giving the dog what it wants)
You can judge things by the outcome they produce. An unsuccessful person has no right to lecture a successful person by demanding that the successful person imitate the unsuccessful person. This generalizes - Anime is doing much better than western cartoons, so it's simply better. If Christians have better mental health, then Christianity is superior in at least one way. If children who are spanked grow up to be better people than those who weren't, then parents who spanked their kids were in the right. Reality is in the right, even when it appears immoral or irrational.
Reducing "bad things" doesn't seem to work, but producing "good things" does. Trying not to worry doesn't work, but thinking happy thoughts does. Telling people what to do is better than telling them what not to do. I'm not sure why, but I've checked, this rule seems solid.
TwiceHuman
2mo ago
I've long felt that human instinct is breaking apart, since before the internet got political. That good times result in "weak men", but also that "weak men" are sick (which I mean literally). I have some rules of thumb for healthy natures, like "standing up for oneself", "not always seeking ones own advantage", "admiration of superiors rather than jealousy", "a disdain for easy victories", "high standards", "will stop attacking another person once it's clear that they've won", and things like that.
On top of the negotiation power of men being limited, the way they use what they have is pathetic - they line up to give away even more of their negotiation power. If this is actually what's causing the stages of the demographic transition model, it would be really interesting! Great insight, I will give it some though.
The worst one is South Korea, and they're well-known for their feminism problem. I'm not sure if X caused Y or Y caused X, or how strong each direction is, but the two do seem related like you say.
From my limited experience of Thailand, simping does occur, but the culture is still quite traditional (well, I expect that large cities and smaller villages are wildly different here. I think it's because of higher population densities in cities, and because big cities are the most connected to the rest of the world, making them more vulnerable to external influence).
The ratio between men and women might be one of the causes for men losing their value and the world becoming more feminine, but I think there's more (one being the domestication of humanity as described by Nietzsche, another being a consequence of technological advancement, a third being intentional subversion as described by Yuri Bezmenov).
The Kinsey reports (1948 and 1953) apparently lead to the creation of Playboy, and Playboy has had a hand in destroying socities understanding of gender, so this may another origin of a brand of wokeness. There's a lot of articles from the early 2000s internet which discuss the medias role in all of this (you can find them on online archives). They do include words like "illuminati", but that can't be helped, and they describe the issues we're facing today better than most newer articles, so from that perspective they're quite high quality.
Then why are women so afraid of them?
You're right that it would lower the value of women, but these men would remain dysfunctional. Restoring the balance between men and women isn't enough, we have to make sure that the average human being is healthy, or we all lose. Part of what made me healthy was wanting a girlfriend, it gave me something to strive for when money didn't interest me. I still to this day work to earn the acknowledgement of women, and for nothing else than to please my ego. I could make external validation worthless to me, but that would make it even harder for me to meet my goals. Some people grow under pressure, others are destroyed, and it's an interesting puzzle to rotate these vectors correctly (by changing ones interpretation of the world). But if you reduce all vectors to zero, you have nothing to work with. It's like trying to sail in a sea with no wind, I'd rather have a storm.
to want to improve men's social skills under an environment like this
It would put me at a disadvantage if all men improved, but I managed to improve myself in the past, and I like telling others how I did it. I have many more reasons: We could help men become healthier and more masculine, which would make them more aggressive towards the mega corporations trying to exploit us. Censorship would likely also decrease as men become more confident, as being afraid of words and opinions would start to seem like a silly concept once again.
TwiceHuman
2mo ago
Sure!
It absolutely did
After dating apps appeared, dating was ruined as a result, and this quickly started to influence dating outside of said apps as well. If you go back another 20 or 30 years, I'll claim that this wasn't much of an issue, meaning that dating was ruined by something recent (be it wokeness, feminism, signaling games or moralizers. With dating apps serving to accelerate us towards the nash equilibrium).
Now, people complain about the past because it was "immoral" and "unequal", and fair enough, but if you're on the side of modern morality and equality, then you're supporting the forces which are making healthy human relationships into a rare occurrence. People who want to "improve the world" in a way which rejects tradition are to blame that the world is getting worse, and it doesn't matter if they have IQs in the 140s, that they love altruism, that they have mathematical frameworks for reducing poverty and "saving the planet", they will fail, life will get worse for everyone, and they will continue to double down on their methods because they sound correct and make sense theoretically, especially to other smart people.
If the real world failed you, it's either because:
1: Society told you to be a "Good person", and you became somebody that society approved of but that women had no interest in. In other words, society told you how to act in order to benefit society, and not how to act in order to benefit yourself or be popular with women.
2: You're a reasonable human being, but the women around you bought into feminism, or have so many men to choose between that you can't compete. Once these women start to become reasonable, they're already old (and have high bodycounts or children). This is not yet the case in Asia (I'm afraid it will be soon, but I hope not).
There are people who feel satisfied with very small accomplishments
This is true. But if they could control their own circumstances, then they'd mess everything up for themselves. Imagine this, you're playing a game, and you have the ability to cheat, you literally decide how difficult the game is. Can you prevent yourself from cheating? If you die and lose your items, can you prevent yourself from giving them back to yourself? For every cheaty action you take, you lower the value of everything you worked for, as the subjective value of everything is the same as the amount of work you put into it. It's my understanding that very few people have the self-control to keep such a game fun for themselves. They would have to create something to fight against, something which resists their efforts, which is counterintuitive to them.
It's another understanding of mine that the "optimization mentality" of rat-adjecent communities lead them to maximize rewards, meaning that they are much more likely to ruin the game for themselves than average people. Well-being consists of balance, and both maximizers and minimizers will almost surely fail to achieve this even if they have intelligence, money and cutting-edge technology.
TwiceHuman
2mo ago
I made an attempt: Those who are the most drawn to stoicism are those who need it the most, and therefore those who are the least stoic. Those who are the most into stoicism will be adopting it as a psychological defense mechanism, similarly to how "tough guys" and "nice guys" do.
Those who are actually stoic will trivially be stoic as well. So I think the correlation has a u-shape. The most and the least stoic people might call themselves "stoic", while those in the middle distance themselves. Quite a lot of extremes are easily confused for the opposite extreme (an example I like is autistic people with no social skills sometimes coming across as chads)
That's not exactly true. The effect you're pointing at here didn't seem to happen before modern dating apps. I also find that women treat me much better in Asian communities, so the current hostility and distrust between genders is most likely cultural.
Politics are reaching pathological levels and causing a lot of issues. Another big issue seems to be that women have too many choices (rather than too few) which makes them look for better alternative all the time (and comparison is the thief of all joy or whatever). Many relationships are the most fun the first few months, and then the novelty will wear off, but if these people jump from guy to guy as a consequence of this, then they're messed up in a sense (for instance, addicted to the dopamine rushes associated with the early stages of relationships). It's not a biological fact that most men will end up as losers.
But this is what the Rat community wanted: More technology, more connection, fancy algorithms on which people could compete. The Amish do not seem to have these problems, and women who have only had one sexual partner are much less likely to want a divorce on average. All these problems are a result of materialistic rat-adjecent mentalities. You cannot solve a problem with the same way of thinking which caused the problem in the first place.
It's difficult, by doable (and when compared to engineering cat-girls, downright trivial) to become a high-value man. This won't help you get a high-quality women though, unless you're in an environment in which they exist, so women will have to improve themselves as well. It's nothing difficult, they'd just have to be feminine, which would happen automatically if our society didn't hinder the process.
As far as I know, forced marriage was mostly done out of necessity, but a second (and very common) cause is that teenagers have sex and get pregnant, which is a social no-no. So they rush a marriage, because then it's okay. Crisis averted I guess. This still happens today by the way.
And no, I'm not a drug addict, and neither am I so psychologically broken that I can find enjoyment in effortless pleasure. It's sad that you even have to ask. Even actual mice will resist free cocaine if they have a space to play around in
Then the problem is over-constrained and has no solution
We need to get rid of modern politics, it's awful. We also need to get rid of modern views of human nature which are entirely false (the erasure of gender, tabula rasa, the fear of masculinity, the lie that women should be masculine). Oh, and likely porn as well. This would basically solve every problem you listed.
In case you're banned, I suppose you can't reply to this. But I will have to disagree that whites are mid.
Most of the giants of humanity (Einstein, Tesla, Hawking, any "great person") were white. This is a good marker of intelligence. Asians are better at rote memorization, but that is a very bad marker of higher intelligence, and it's mostly a result of spending 40% more hours studying on average.
I will have to disagree with creativity too when it means "originality" due to the collectivist nature of Asia. If you mean "artistic skills" however, I will have to agree with you, asians win.
Working with constraints results in creativity for everyone. There's a reason why writers block mostly occur as a result of a blank page. This is how the human mind works, and it's merely a coincidence that the Chinese are more restrained at the moment.
As for "How good the look after age 30", I mostly agree, but it doesn't seem very related to other metrics.
TwiceHuman
2mo ago
I'm not the person you replied to, but I share his dislike for most of the Rat community. I think Yudkowsky gets it, though. (For a wire-header to be able to enjoy life, they'd have to create artifical challenges for themselves, not unlike those found in real life. So they might as well just engage with real life)
One of the obvious scenarios which threaten humanity is that some people have bad social skills and that they don't have an environment in which they can improve (or alternatively, that they can wirehead the reward of socializing, which is much more pleasant for them than actual improvement).
Giving "virtual waifus" to "incels" doesn't solve any issues, it just suppresses symptoms. By the way, I find it strange that, in an imaginary scenario where we approach AGI level of intelligence, we cannot seem to imagine coming up with a way to help people who have terrible social skills. I'm very puzzled by how a community can have so many knowledable (and sometimes intelligent) people and still have such shallow, naive, and simplified takes on serious topics.
It's really just left-wing elites, "intellectuals" included, which isn't strange given the political bias of universities. What they have in common seems to be a very social kind of ambition, they seek social power, and at the same time they're vulnerable to conformity and group delusions (and all other unfortunate instances of social instincts, like bullying, thinking that the likelihood of a statement being correct is a function of how many people present agrees with it, and assuming that a statement is likely to be wrong if the speaker isn't liked by the community, etc)
In case it's not clear, I'm agreeing with you. The ivory tower intellectuals are completely unqualified in improving the world. I wouldn't even describe them as intelligent, but I will have to admit that they're generally knowledgeable. They vastly overvalue education. Experience is much more valuable
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