TwiceHuman
2mo ago
I see! I very much agree with that link. I thought that your view on sex might have been a consequence of many years of detached and objective thinking, which is common in intellectual types. Another example is thinking that "love is just chemicals". It is, but there ought to be a personal, subjective perspective which enjoys it and sees it as something more.
You inherently accept the fact that sometimes you're going to have to do something you don't want to do in the moment
I can agree with that. Thought I'd expect most submissive types to aim for relationships with people who still treat them with respect. Some enjoy BDSM and degration/humiliation, but there's also plenty of people who want to lose control/let down their guard, knowing that they're still safe and in good hands. The domination stays in the domain of "play", just like banter between friends never becomes serious (which paradoxically makes it reassuring). One crosses into danger zones only for the element of excitement, and with the belief that only minor harm is likely to occur (like when kids go to play around outside). Since your insights align with regular human nature, you probably don't have things like BDSM in mind.
I agree with your take on dominant and submissive natures, but I think it's influenced by moods, confidence and energy levels. I expect all stimulants and high-dopamine states to make people more dominant in general (theory from personal observations, I don't know the neuroscience behind this). I think it makes sense that confidence correlates with independence, and that pro-social instincts are stronger in those who rely on cooperation for survival.
Your model of consent makes sense. I've had to make similar observations myself already, as I've been forced to realize that I sometimes need to overwrite the wills of others for their sake and take responsibility for the outcome. Plus, women tend to like it when men take the initiative. It can't be helped that it feels uncomfortable to be in a sitaution where you can take advantage of a power imbalance and get away with it (Just me? I find it painful to perceive exploitable weakness in others).
May I offer a slight correction to your model? I have this very controversial belief that "sexualities" don't exist in a sense. That anything beyond attraction to the other gender is a kind of fetishism (for instance, how could asexuality be a sexuality when there's no attraction? These words are clearly misleading)
The conclusion you wrote is really interesting! I'm going to read it again when I'm less tired. By the way, I've long though there's two kinds of gay people (if homosexuality can be said to exist). Some enjoy Muscles, chubby bodies, body-hair, scars, and all that, and some enjoy twinks, girly boys, traps, thin bodies, and so on. It's even easier to notice in furry communities. I once guessed that somebody was gay because I could tell by the art style of their profile picture. I told this to a friend of mine, and they seemed rather offended by me insisting that I had this ability, even though I ended up being correct.
TwiceHuman
2mo ago
Technically, "Black people are inferior" is a value judgement which means that it cannot be a fact. It can be a fact that they're less intelligent than white people on average, which puts them at an inherent disadvantage in modern socities (in which even competition between white people means that many remain lower class), and I do believe this is true. If they wish to prevent negative consequences, they should adopt a stance like "The value of human life is not decided by their intelligence" rather than "Black people are just as intelligent as whites and therefore equal in worth", for this latter way of thinking is what might bring negative consequences.
There less and less manual labor over time (in developed socities), and I think the cognitive demands of society increase over time. In the 1950s you could get by with an IQ of 80 or 85, but today I don't think you can. In the future, I expect people with an IQ of 90 to struggle as well.
Are we still talking about the justification for hemming and hawing
I don't recognize those names to be honest. My point is that the way society operates is going to cause a lot of disasters, because we naively suppress small conflicts. To give examples of this mechanism: If you're afraid of regular dentist visits and you don't go, you will be forced to have a really bad experience in a dentist chair in the future. If you avoid people because of minor social anxiety, you will sooner or later have full-blown social anxiety. If you are overprotective of your children, they are likely to get hurt when they move away from home and experience freedom for the first time. If you create "safe spaces" for people, they are prone to stay mentally fragile, which means that an encounter with reality is likely to "trigger" them. If you suppress evidence of voter fraud and vaccine side-effects, falsely claiming that both are one-in-a-billion events, you end up with huge scandals and controversies, etc. A lot of naive attempts at improving things end up doing the opposite (Reddit moderation, the DARE program, no child left behind policies, etc). If you impliment no tolerance policies in schools, don't be surprised if one day a student snaps and kills somebody.
What're we talking about here?
I'm not suggesting that we abandon those who need help, but that we create an environment in which they have both a safety net and rewards for personal growth. Rather than just throwing money at Africa, we should help them become independent of us, for instance. The best you can do for people is help them to the right degree. Too little? They die. Too much? They become reliant on your help and lose their incentives to struggle forward.
Weak, dumb, and evil men have and continue to benefit from conflict
This is a good argument. One maxim which comes to mind is "Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution". If you reward conflict more than solutions, you don't get solutions. That said, conflicts are mostly a signal that something needs to change, and we are lucky that signals come before consequences. Slight tooth ache is an early signal, stress is a signal, a bad grade is a signal. This is where one must start looking for a solution. Suppressing signals and saying "problem solved" will result in disasters later, and you can help somebody in a disaster by turning it into a minor disaster, buying them time to align themselves with reality.
It seems to be making progress
I think immigration will result in a non-negligible decrease of average IQ in every modern country. If immigration is going to be our go-to-solution for low birth rates, the consequences are going to be even worse. We won't be able to solve this problem with any amount of education, and throwing money at the problem is going to be about as effective as throwing money at Africa is currently. If you meant that we're starting to understand IQ better, I'm going to disagree with that at as well - modern politics will make it impossible to do proper research about intelligence, for the same reason that the rest of psychology is degenerating (the reason is politics). Psychology is the most important discipline in the world, but our modern understanding of human behaviour is flat out wrong, and naive idealism is replacing the consensus. Most of our modern "kindness" is out of alignment with reality and almost more harmful than beneficial.
TwiceHuman
2mo ago
Both are true, I think.
Smart people can argue well for almost anything, even if it's wrong. But they also have more self-awareness. For instance, you know that you're good at rationalizing things which aren't true. When you're intelligent, it's more likely that you will think of the possibility that you're deceiving yourself, even if it's also more likely that you can find a reason to think that it's a false alarm.
I think the former factor grows faster than the latter, so that intelligence is more likely to lead to disillusionment or high levels of insight, than it is to lead to having very strong beliefs. There's plenty of people with IQs in the 130s who have very strong beliefs (mostly due to the boost in confidence one may get for being above the norm), but if you go above 145 you get people like Jung and Buddha who become so self-aware that it becomes meta-self-awareness or meta-meta self-awareness.
TwiceHuman
2mo ago
In terms of persuasion, then there's utility to mealy mouthed, soft arguments
Yeah, but this doesn't feel like it has anything to do with understanding how the world works. I feel like you're doing something wrong if you dive into intellectual topics because you want to meet your social needs or influence the values of those around you. If he wants to remain a writer then he has no choice but to continue doing this, but what I dislike is that he's also forced to pretend that this is not what he's doing.
If he cared for truth, he'd not limit himself to those around him. At the very least, he should think things through by himself, and then return to the overton window only when communicating what he found. But if you truly think about things for longer periods of time, especially if you're intelligent, I find that your worldview will become completely incompatible with the consensus.
Many people get emotional and angry when they see stuff they don't like
Yes, and this goes for me as well, so I didn't explain it well enough. 1: Those who handle truth the best are good at seeing things from a detached and abstract/systematic perspective. And I find that those who get the most irrationally angry will only react if you make your position clear. So if you show nuance, they won't know how to react, since it seems like you're arguing for both sides (which is of course because you care about understanding the issue, and not merely nitpicking data which supports a specific ideology). Those who get the most trigged by the idea that black people are inferior to whites are those who are afraid that it might be true. High intelligence makes self-deception difficult, forcing them to think in different ways and get closer to the truth that they cannot hide from themselves. And maybe then they will say "I don't like the fact that life isn't fair" which is actually true, and a real topic worth discussing.
Scott is someone who wants truth to help solve problems
I don't agree entirely. I think he wants to promote his own personal values, and to compromise with others values, even if less appealing values would improve society more. (Relaxing sounds more appealing than confronting what scares you, but the latter is better for you. Morality might be the same, that which appeals to us might be costly and ultimately damaging)
1: Most people below 85 IQ are useless to the system, meaning that they can't do any work which warrants paying them a livable wage. This is not something we should deceive ourselves about.
2: Altruism can create dependent populations. Death is what happens to those who do not adapt, but I agree that it's good to help people to adapt by preventing their death in most cases. What's not good is to help in such a way that the amount of unfit people increases (because it allows people to avoid their own growth and improvement). You feed starving people, they survive and have children, and now you need more food to prevent starvation, right? This problem is inherently unsolvable, we must teach men to fish, not merely give them fish. By "saving" people from growth we push our problems into the future while making them worse. Same when we bail out failing banks and companies. We take surplus from the successful and give it to the unsuccessful, but this just lowers the appeal of success, meaning that less people strive for it, and that more people demand to get what others have.
3: By forcing small incidents not to occur, one makes sure that big incidents will occur in the future. The opposite applies as well, if you expose yourself to small problems then you prepare yourself for facing bigger problems (hence training, studying, exposure therapy, venting, etc). If you prevent a couple from having a few disagreements and talking them out, you get a sudden divorce instead. If you exercise your body, then you're less likely to get hurt next time you need to lift something heavy. All conflicts help fitness/adaptation, they're the feedback you need. Prevent adaptation/feedback/conflict naturally, and you will face disaster in the future. Suppression backfires. People who suppress their anger will sooner or later take all their anger out at once. Things like school-shootings happen because of pent up pressure. The amount of adaptation required is constant, but only by chopping it into pieces can you prevent it from being fatal. One of many consequences of this dynamic is that censorship of controversial subjects is prone to backfire.
How do you reason the Flynn effect and what it means?
I haven't thought much about it, honestly. When I first heard about it I thought "Makes sense, nutrition is getting better" and that still seems to make sense. Education might help too (I said it didn't matter much, but I meant for people like myself who procrastinate in school and teach themselves whatever interests them). Education likely helps performance on some IQ tests, but I don't think the effects on the G factor are very big. I suppose that the Flynn effect is different for different cognitive areas. Spatial seems to have improved the most. There's a million possible reasons for increases and decreases in average IQ, including lead, iodine, immigration, video games with spatial tasks (Tetris likely influences RPM performance), processed foods, literature getting simpler over time, and so on. I suppose these are all true to an unknown extent, which implies that the correct answer to your question looks like a confusing mess, while short precise and elegant answers are likely to be wrong.
TwiceHuman
2mo ago
Wouldn't that make him a public performer rather than an intellectual? Around topics like these, at least. His insights are quite good as long as they don't touch upon specific things.
I don't know what you mean by "beat the allegations"? Data cannot hate people so I don't even see the need to bring things like racism into the question. The type of people who get emotional and angry (because they think facts are opinions) tend to be stupid, so communicating in a way which requres processing to understand solves the issue (so that one skimming your article without thinking would find nothing controversial). I avoided Reddit bans for years with this method. I could for instance say that having a 'victim mentality' isn't healthy, and that it doesn't even benefit the victim. Also that one should get over the past, especially if those who were involved aren't around anymore (at this point, justice is impossible anyway). This implies "Get over the slave trade already" and many other things, but I never said anything bad directly. I personally only treat specifics as samples of what I've generalized. You can safely criticize like 11 different ideologies at once merely by writing "Don't blame all your problems on one group of people".
I can't say specifically what the 60 IQ range looks like, but I'd expect such people to engage in magical thinking, to have problem with conditionals, to only be able to use simple tools (e.g. would not be able to change a microwave to defrost mode). I don't think it matters where one is from, and I think one would still learn basic social skills (but be relatively naive and easy to trick).
But the answer I just came up with seems quite vague, uninteresting and low value. I don't have anything better though. It's not so much that I have an exact model which explains intelligence perfectly, it's more that claims like "IQ is at least partly genetic" are trivially true, and claims like "High IQs are caused by wealth" are trivially false. What annoys me is when people are wrong about trivial things and avoid obvious examples available to them. If Africans had as many nobel prize winners as Europe did, then it would make sense to question IQ as a metric, but most attempts I see at discrediting IQ are incredibly forced and require some mental gymnastics.
By the way, IQ is made up of different domains like processing speed, verbal IQ, spatial IQ, and so on. If we stopped fusing these together into a single number, perhaps IQ scores would make sense. I remember seeing on a graph that I scrolled past on Google Images that an a working memory of about 3 items corresponded to 60 IQ, and this would be a very low working memory. We also know that chimps do better than humans on some memory tests, despite being much dumber than humans. For simple survival, working memory may be more important than abstract reasoning, and simple communication might not require that much verbal intelligence. So intellectually disabled people might have more severe issues like low working memory, while Malawians and 'healthy' naturally-low-IQ people are dragged down by other factors like poor abstract reasoning. I think education is much less important than most people believe. I could explain why, but my reply is already rather long.
TwiceHuman
2mo ago
The article includes a bit of nonsense and it's rather verbose for how little it actually says. This comment will sound a little negative but I can't lower my standards enough to enjoy the article.
This line grossed me out: "If you take anti-racism seriously, this should make you breath a sigh of relief. This finding on its own doesn’t disprove a genetic component to racial IQ gaps. But it does suggest that the genetic component is less than 100%.".
It is trivially true that IQ is not 100% genetic (Otherwise, even sleep deprivation would not lower your IQ by a single point). I don't think anyone really thinks otherwise. I've been called racist for suggesting that black people were less intelligent than white people on average, even when I didn't specify how much, and even when I didn't suggest an explanation (be it nutrition or genetics). It feels like he made up his argument wanted to soften the conclusion. But I had his view when I was a teenager, and that's before I had any interest in "Intellectual" things. It is a surface-level analysis. The entire article basically just says "HBD is true, but feedback-loops like nutrition makes the differences seem bigger than they are".
He also understates the consequences of having 60 IQ, claiming that they will be confused if you talk about anything complex. He makes it sound like an example of something complex would be Calculus, but these people are perhaps 25 IQ points below those who struggle with calculus, and would likely struggle even in 6th grade.
I believe the chair I'm sitting on in real
You're sitting on something, but there is no such thing as a "chair". Luckily, this doesn't seem to matter. Communism seems to be positive associations with sharing. Even an animal can recognize somebody who is willing to share with them vs somebody who does not, and to dislike the latter in the same way that a communist would dislike a capitalist. So neither of these concepts exist, nor do they need to exist. There's also no need for logic and reasoning, unless we just assume that even animals are capable of reasoning, and that 'thinking' itself means something like 'to reason'.
While the person we're discussing isn't insane by DSM-5 criteria, that's mostly because his beliefs are benign enough that I presume he's a functioning member of society.
If somebody stops masturbating and feels better as a result - it's true that they feel better, even if that doesn't make any sense. If one were to say "That's nonsense, they should go back to feeling bad", then that would imply that reality has to conform to our theory, which is backwards. If our theories of reality does not explain reality, then our theory needs to update.
The experiment seems worth doing for a few months for the cardiovascular benefits.
If there was 100s of people online who had tried this and had positive effects (by which I mean ones which sound like enlightenment, and not just cardiovascular benefits), I'd actually give it a go.
When I watch less porn, I personally feel better in general. Here, feeling better is reality (something true to me), but any explanation I come up with will be guesswork, and therefore weaker than my experiences. Saying "It's probably because of a spike in testosterone" will make me look sane again, but I think it's weaker evidence than raw experience since it comes after. That said, experiencing that a family member needs your help is not solid evidence that they need your help, but the experience is just as real as if somebody did need your help.
The rules are useful, but the more pragmatic you get, the less true any statement is. If you keep going you will find that the world is absurd, that you can't know anything, that every model is wrong, and so on (you're probably even familiar with these ideas). But how can I say for certain that nothing can be said? I can only arrive at a contradiction and cancel out everything, which brings me to zero/nothingness.
Anyway, I think that, as you become enlightened, you stop caring about things like proof. Just like you might cure anxiety and find that you don't really care what philosophers are saying about the meaning of life, or that you might fall in love and have no time to waste on people trying to explain to you how love is just chemicals and therefore not real. Finally, I don't think coffee enjoyer's comment provided evidence or proof (though I don't remember exactly). It was just a likable comment for human reasons?
Actually, I once almost screwed myself over with my mental models. My mood got really good, and then I remembered that I had no reason to feel good, but before that made me stop, I luckily recognized that I didn't need a reason to feel good. I also realized that if you don't need a reason, the reason can never be taken away from you, meaning you've "won". You won't need validation ever again. And since at least one person can live without needing a reason, it proves that the idea that we need reasons to live is wrong, that it's a fabricated limitation, it only exists in the territory and not in the map. The problem is the idea that there is a problem. If living required meaning, then life must be meaningful already, or else we wouldn't be alive to ponder the meaning of existence. Of course, I still argue and use logic even now, but the sheer amount of troubles which goes away when you think like this is so incredible that I, a former "intellectual", dare to throw it away and to call former self silly for taking concepts like truth seriously. (I do get your point though)
TwiceHuman
2mo ago
I'm not the person you were responding to, but I have to agree with him.
I don't think anyone knows why they hold the beliefs they do, they just fabricate a reason afterwards which sounds socially acceptable and like it might be true. And whatever the truth is, is simply the truth, so it's silly to demand an explanation, for it assumes that reality needs to justify itself. He changed his belief, and that's more true than any argument could ever be.
If you're building your own worldview, you have no need for something like a consensus, and a consensus is not necessarily true, it's merely a form of coherence. In the first place, I don't even believe that "truth" is very valuable, nor that people are inherently interested in it. And to me, it seems like "truth", in the form where it matters, is context-dependent, and therefore finite, meaning that nothing can be universally true.
You can try "semen-rentention", I can't think of any reasons for how it could be dangerous. Maybe you will experience something amazing, in which case, that would be interesting. The experiment seems worth doing. And now that I think about it, the search for truth is fun, isn't it? Maybe spoiling the answer would be bad taste.
I agree that coffee_enjoyers comment is good, though. It says something similar, but in a more engaging way which is more likely to cause a long-term influence on a person. If you were to argue "If you give the correct answer, don't do so in a way which makes it unappealing", I'd have to agree with you
As I see it, materialism is just confusing the map for the territory. Technically, everything is connected, so everything is one, and you cannot talk about anything in isolation (the thing-in-itself does not exist, it can't).
The concept "truth" only means reality (and this reality cannot be spoken about) or else it means the value "True" in logic, and all such truth values are just tautologies, and these tautologies follow from assumptions. In other words, you have a closed loop, the only kind of logic which exists is circular logic, it has no connection to reality, it's self-contained, which also means that it adds up to zero.
The only thing which actually exists is experience itself. It's not that our senses deceive while rationality helps us live in reality. What's the actual case is that everything comes from human senses, and that we made up rationality.
I've realize these things, and a bunch of similar things, so all the worries you have are syntax errors to me. There's no problems to solve, and all the questions are wrong. There's only a reality of which we cannot speak, but that's not even a problem. Millions of species have existed even before intelligent beings came to exist, so intelligence is clearly not needed in the first place. I think that wanting answers to questions is a symptom of anxiety, which results in a desire for certainty. It's easier to learn how to accept uncertainty than it is to bother yourself with impossible questions that even the most intelligent people in the world have struggled with. I don't even think you struggle with mortality, but rather with the idea of mortality or a perspective which is so zoomed out that it makes you appear small and meaningless (in which case, I recommend going back to experiencing life from your own body, with yourself as the center)
Edit: Also, aesthetics is enough for me, beauty gives me meaning. And if I'm not happy about life, I consider that a psychological problem and not a philosophical one. Existential questions are the symptoms and not the causes, I think.
TwiceHuman
2mo ago
Your message here is quite unhinged, and I mean that as a compliment, and that I enjoyed reading it. I might have misunderstood you though, as verbal intelligence is not my strong suit. I want to make sure I understand "Consent doesn't exist" correctly, are you saying that she did in fact consent because she didn't resist enough, because she enjoys submission (and therefore of having her consent overruled), or because of how human nature works fundamentally? Again, I'm genuinely interested.
I have to disagree with your assessment of the harm of sex. You're being materialistic, seemingly ignoring the psychological parts the equation. Pregnancy and disease are the physical risks. Even if sex is child-safe physically (which is theoritically possible, but rarely the case in real life scenarios), there's still psychological consequences. You can avoid some of these consequences by turning materialistic and deciding that sex isn't special, but I think that would be a shame, and that you'd fail partly (for the same reason that fighting ones own biases is impossible in a sense). It's like getting over the situation that nobody wished you happy birthday by realizing the fact that birthdays are only special if we consider them to be. In other words, birthdays aren't real. A lot of things which "exist" are just agreements, so they're a sort of collective roleplay. But if you destroy these games to get rid of their consequences, then you also lose the advantages, and your life will take another step towards emptiness/nihilism. So I just want to warn you in case this is what you're doing to your own perception of sex.
I choose to think that sex is special for aesthetic reasons, and this is not a delusion since it becomes true by believing in it, which I mean literally, and which implies that people can be hurt if they consider sex to be special and their partner does not.
TwiceHuman
3mo ago
No online communities feel like home to me anymore, and it's because they feel "Public" and "Official", and not like private spaces at all. I think this is because the separation is gone, anything I wrote on here could be traced back to me, and it could also be interpreted badly by people from outside of the community. A private space doesn't work like that.
Most "new" spaces which can be created are created inside of other spaces, and these spaces are hostile in a sense, or at least inhuman (part of 'the system' which has to enforce human behaviour in a top-down manner). So when you make a new sub-reddit you're still on Reddit, so the Subreddit is not yours. And if you make a new Discord server, you're still bound by Discords rules, so the Discord server is not yours. With old forums, you could make your own, since you just copied the code. You could own your own website in the past, and you can't anymore unless you make your own infrastructure.
Also, in the past, nothing I did in a community mattered outside of the community. It's borderline insane that this practice stopped. Imagine if your local shopping center had to refuse you entry because of an email you sent, and that it would be accused of enabling whatever behaviour you did in your own personal life otherwise. That's basically what we're starting to do with the internet.
Another thing which has changed is something I hinted at earlier: We're not expected to be human anymore. I think this is because we have lost the benefit of doubt. Any behaviour which is ambiguous is a "red flag", and you may be punished for it. So you have to internalize what you would look like from outside, and constantly monitor yourself, so that you are not misunderstood (this is rather harmful to our individuality, since it punishes worldviews and attitudes which diverge from the norm). Furthermore, mistakes are not really forgivable anymore. Things like racism, sexism and so on used to be negative traits, but nothing more than that. You could get away with having negative traits, they were just a tiny part of who you were and what mattered was your overall character. Finally, in order to really learn how things can be misunderstood, you have to learn about everything ugly in the world. You're forced to learn that you can't talk about the CP (combat power) of your Pokemon Go Pokemon without making the context clear, and you're forced to learn why. After all, innocence is punished (as it leads to be behaviour which can be misunderstood)
Sorry for hijacking your comment in order to vent, but I feel like I've understood some of the social changes quite well, and I hope that it makes the dynamics clearer for you (I'm adding these, I think the things you mentioned are factors as well). Happy new year!
TwiceHuman
3mo ago
Ah, I see! And "You have to put something of yourself in" is a great way to put it! I do think that there's an objective reality, but that it cannot be described or modeled. If I make a mental model of you, that model would reveal more about myself than it would reveal about you. As for oughts, there seems to be actions which bring better results than others. Any process which is not sustainable will eventually cease, so that which wishes to stay in existence must play by certain rules, or make sure not to step too much out of line for too long. I don't really believe in something like morality, but my personal preferences looks a lot like what people call morality, and finally, it would be bad taste of me if I attacked your moral beliefs since it wouldn't benefit you.
I would call this the standard post-modernist worldview.
Is that so? I don't like post-modernists though. Do you think they understand any of these things? Average people who are post-modernists likely don't know about axiomatic systems or the incompleteness theorems. Human perception is very malleable, they got that much right, but they want reality to be malleable as well, and they think we can achieve this if we simply agree that we can. We could agree that people were equal, and that would largely succeed, but IQ test results would remain entirely unchanged.
Like spiritualists say, everything we need to be happy is already inside of us. We have incredible power over our own reality. We only really need to deal with objective reality enough that we can meet physical needs like nutrition and shelter, which is quite easy. But treating reality like it's malleable is just immaturity, for social methods like "If I just complain enough, I will get my way" only work on other people, they do not work on reality. And treating reality like fantasy is dangerous, it very quickly leads to ruin.
I don't think the issue is necessarily diversity of though, for that actually works well to the extent that everyone is self-sufficient. When people are "enough in themselves", it doesn't matter much if there's other people who also have their own worldview. It's only when people are incomplete that they need other people to be coherent enough that the sum of whoever is present exceeds one person who can live independently. Of course, shared language and such is highly useful, but the more mature and developed you are, the bigger distances you tend to be able to cope with (which is why the old internet used to have many wildly different people co-existing somewhat well, while the modern internet is intolerant of differences as disagreement immediately results in drama and hurt feelings)
But what OP meant was probably "People are now valuing feelings over correct information, and their mental defense mechanisms kick in when they encounter evidence that their precious beliefs aren't workable, and they get hostile towards you if you cause them to reflect on themselves or if you ask them questions which makes them comfortable" and I can only agree with this. What he said wasn't exactly true, but what he meant still carries a good point.
It's not necessarily possible for A to justify their beliefs to B in a manner that B finds convincing
While this is true, you can increase the tolerance for differences in beliefs by about 10 times by focusing on terminal values. For instance, two groups might be in a conflict, both claiming "We're civilized, while you're uncivilized!" very well, but they're in agreement in this: Both groups prefer civilized behaviour to uncivilized behaviour. They merely need to learn how to communicate better to resolve this issue. The reason communicating (talking about things) can resolve conflicts in the first place is probably because most peoples terminal values are highly similar, or because it allows people to understand eachothers perspective in a way which they can respect (in other words, it doesn't conflict with their core values, as that would likely be irreconcilable). Mentally immature people get triggered and misunderstand others quite easily, over minor perceived differences which tend to not be differences at all (at least not as you get closer to terminal/core values)
etc. all criticising different aspects of our society for not being an improvement over nature
I don't think they're honest, even if they don't realize it. They will likely criticize the aspects in which they are at the bottom rather than at the top (meaning that they just want more power). And to be honest, I might enjoy society better if I was in the top 1% myself, or if I felt more compatible with the modern society than I do now. But besides a bit of technology (Computers, virtual reality, dishwashers, washing machines, driers, ovens, fridges and freezers, medicine and the ability to communicate over long distances with voice, video and files) I don't really need any aspects of the modern society. The modern society fulfills my physical needs better, but not my psychological needs. I like civilized people more than uncivilized people, but civility now seems to be decreasing as society gets more modern. In any case, what's important to me is peoples actual character. I've recently read some of the guodian bamboo strips from about 500 BC, and they resonate better with my own values than modern ideologies do. So civility does not necessarily require modernity nor scientific thinking.
I wrote quite a lot here, but I think we agree on most of it?
TwiceHuman
3mo ago
No pressure! Reply if you want and whenever you want
What I meant to say was "It's not just that we don't know how, it's that it's impossible". I don't subscribe to the idea that no humans have figured this all out yet, for I pretty much have. But the conclusion is that humans (myself included) are stupid. I believe that things work out because of human instincts and the laws of nature, and not because we actually know what we're doing.
A shared delusion
I think this perspective comes from the modern belief that everything must be justified or proved in order to be correct. I simply don't impose such rules on myself (and reality itself doesn't either). What I want to convery here is that preferences and beliefs aren't "illusions" in the sense that they're false or fake, and that there's no unique, more "real" underlying reality to discover. I'm "calibrated" for the world through my DNA (darwinism), through a process which made us to adapt to reality itself in a sense, so I will simply trust this process.
Anyway, it seems that beliefs influence reality. That your confidence influences your success (and that this applies even if you're entirely alone). Even if a belief is false, it may influence reality and become true. In other words, a belief seems to be an act of creation, making it "real".
I mean a set of beliefs and values
I do have those, but everyone must have them, or else they simply don't live very long (since they don't prioritize future states in which they are alive). Even the belief that beliefs are bad is a belief, so there's no easy way out.
Genuine intelligence and knowledge
A lot of highly educated people don't seem all that intelligent to me, they just seem good at memorizing things. That said, I'd prefer it if people simply stopped believing that they were smarter than nature (including their own nature). There's so many things about life which are unintuitiv, one of them is eustress, and not knowing about it has caused a lot of damage (helicopter parenting etc). But there's a lot more. Thing seem to go better when one is not so antagonistic towards existence, nature and oneself
TwiceHuman
3mo ago
And we have never discovered how to dispassionately turn an 'is' into an 'ought'
You can if and only if you agree on some values. If you want X to happen, then you 'ought' to take action Y. You need assumptions to have any truth at all (for the same reason you need axioms to have mathematics), and you need subjective values in order to rank possible future states and deem one of them better than the other.
The only problem here is that people are naive and rely on theory which only gets the first-degree consequences correct "I don't want birds to suffer, so I'm going to feed them", yeah but now there's more birds to feed, and more suffering if you stop giving them food (simple example)
Post-modernism survives because its skepticism is backed up by history
In a naive way, that's true. But when has a successful post-modernistic society existed? As far as I know, the answer is "never". A culture which has a coherent set of values and beliefs, and strict social norms to avoid various bad spirals from occuring, will be successful. A culture which knows that no culture is more correct than any other ... Well, such a culture will probably destroy itself. And by its own logic, this is fine, for it's no better than what it replaces, right?
you are going to have to exercise official, ideology-driven judgement at some point
I disagree, but you need something similar. I don't subscribe to any ideology, but I do have my own preferences. Whoever thinks you can succeed in life by being completely neutral is simply wrong. Biases exist in the first place because they aid survival.
Anyway, I trust reality, by which I mean that if a culture does X and it's nice to live in said culture, then said culture should continue to do X. Japan has strict borders, and Japan is perhaps the most civilized population in the world, so no other country has the right to tell them to open their borders.
You have be really clever to think something that stupid' crises
This happened because we assume that "expert" means "nice credentials", that "intelligent" means "educated", and because appearance is starting to have more value than substance (Real nerds tend to have worse social skills, but now even Tech has become a normie space in which connections and good verbal skills are king. In fact, "wokism" seems to correlate with verbal skills and social skills, but most great scientists have been sort of autistic and controversial)
I largely agree with some of what you've written, but not all of it. But it's interesting! In a way, it feels good to read, as it's rare to see somebody sharing what they actually think and feel without excessive self-censorship. But I don't think you've found the truth. Some of what you say get the symptoms right, but the causes are really elusive.
Let me start out by warning you that you care too much. Of course, we need people who care, as nihilism is a danger, but those on the left who are the most insane and the least logical tend to care too much. Once you start a moral war against something, you're almost always on a bad path. All the social movements causing these problems are ran by people with strong moral convictions, and it has come to the point where I instinctively avoid moralizers (I still have high standards for taste, though). I don't think it's a coincidence that you're angry about sexual abuse of children, as it's one of the worse things that people can think of. But all political discussions degrade into accusing eachother of the few things which carry the highest social stigma (which at the moment is pedophilia, nazism and racism). Is this not the same fear of immorality and social judgement which makes people act absolutely crazy in the first place?
There have been a million things
You hear one side of the news, and they repeatedly confirm the same thing. But "your enemies" are repeatedly told another another side of the story, even if it's one fabricated by the media. Even if the media turns out to be wrong in the end, only we are getting the updated information, other people have already moved on to other things, and the memory of who was wrong in the past (because the media told them) remains unchanged. All sides feel like they're on a streak in which they were right right every time. "Once again the criminal was migrant!" "Once again there was racist intent!" "Once again the early life section confirms they are jewish!" "Last-state capitalism claims another victim!"
All of these issues are much bigger than just migration. Some will tell you that the western world was subverted. Some will tell you that people are becoming "cucks" because Testosterone levels are decreasing. Some will tell you that the marxists are to blame for this, others will tell you it's the media, others will tell you that it's a rich elite, others will tell you that it's the result of an ideology which first too over western education. Others will tell you that good times create weak men, others will inform you that technology must result in weaking freedoms. Others will tell you that capitalism is to blame, others will tell you that materialism and the death of god is to blame. Others will tell you that it's due to increased social competition and that we're forced into the rat race. Others will blame Moloch, game theory and social dilemmas as they warn you not to hate the player but rather hate the game. Some speculate that ideologies have replaced religion, others that propaganda and marketing research has reached incredible levels and that we're creating superstimuli that humans cannot possibly resist. Finally, some say that weighting hurt feelings higher than problem-solving will be our doom.
Between 1 in 6 and 1 in 3 girls age 11-17 in the affected cities
Is this not a stat which goes something like "1 in 3 girls experience sexual harassment"? The threshold for that is very low now compared to the past. The rapes are the worst instances of this problem, it's not that 1 in 3 girls are literally raped.. Unless you count even grouping or a slap on the ass as rape. EDIT: Rotherham seems like a particularly bad case, and you might not have exaggerated here, my bad.
That if the best lack all conviction
Somehow, the population has largely been spiritually defeated. We all think something like "We all ought to do something", but nobody wants to go first. But it won't make a difference even if a single person does something extreme, I think. As for those with convictions - do they fare much better? I see more conviction pushing for immigration than against it. I think it's because naivety, idealism and conviction correlate with one another.
Rationality, politeness, tolerance, charity
I never bought into any of these things. I don't even see why you would, as the rational world is at odds with the natural world. Academia leans left, "rationality" is deeply materialistic, "tolerance" never made sense as a concept and these so-called intellectuals cannot even interpret Karl Popper correctly, much less think further than him (which is not even hard). Charity movements disgusts me, and not only because charities waste 90% of their money and exist as a guilt tax, not because they're not motivated by actual goodwill (thought they rarely are), and not even because they simply result in a kind of reverse eugenics which makes the problem that it's meant to solve even worse, but because doing math with qualia in a superficial manner is in terrible taste. In the first place, "suffering is bad" is a terribly stupid assumption which misses the problem. And people from all these spaces tend to think like Elon Musk does, and arrive at the conclusion that we need to mass-import indians. Western intellectualism disappoints me, I can barely respect the one-in-a-million. Not only do they not strike me as intelligent, they all seem to have a "number go up" mentality which conflicts with healthy living and subjective experience.
And it is like you said "The entire project of this space is wrong". It's not a question of intelligence, but of character.
They are evil
They wouldn't succeed without massive support, though. What makes people watch the destruction of their culture in real time and go "Maybe I'm just over-reacting"? What makes somebody more afraid of being racist than of being murdered? Even if those who caused these effects were evil, the average person can't be said to be evil, and for every evil person behind the scenes, there's at least 99 normies cheering for them.
By the way, "sexual depravity" seem to correlate with intelligence. A lot of good things and bad things correlate, which is why "good" and "evil" aren't easy to cut in two. Intelligence also correlates with openness, which is why intellectual conversations easily enter areas that regular people find repulsive. But the feelings of disgust and the ability to think about things which repulse you are valuable.
Finally, the evil you can define still does not manifest clearly. You can fight against immigration, but that's a vague idea. You likely don't have concrete individuals to point your anger at. I think most people face this problem, they're angry but they only have vague targets to point the anger at. Speaking of anger, are you perhaps projecting your own frustration with yourself? You're angry at yourself for being unable to stop the problem, so you point this anger at us? Not that I blame you for this. (By the way, please don't do anything stupid)
Because we don't value reason or the truth
Nobody really does. And you seem concerned not about falsehood but about the destruction of something you deem good. Society as a whole pretends to be partial while fighting for their own values. These two can co-exist, but only when people believe that their values will win on an even playing-field.
Finally, The Motte likely isn't allowed to value truth the highest, since they would get shut down if they got too much negative media attention. And without moderation of things like politeness, many users would simply leave, and we're not many people to begin with.
TwiceHuman
3mo ago
For day 6 part 2, you can solve it
I'm not sure what you mean that the outputs are too long
My bad, I meant that the inputs seem too long. But I suppose you can just describe the input structure, size and possible characters and make the LLM make a program which works for all possible valid inputs
TwiceHuman
3mo ago
How good are these solutions? I find that they seem quite easy to solve (I have only looked at a few of the problems so far though!), but that memory and time-efficient solutions take a bit more thinking and coding. Something which surprised me here is that the outputs weren't too long for chatGPT. I have never tried giving it the full input as I simply expected it to be too many tokens
TwiceHuman
3mo ago
I like the sensitivity part, I feel like senses is how you feel alive, so sensing more means feeling more alive than most people, or at least I like to think so. And having strong principles is usually admirable, though bending is better than breaking at times. Putting oneself at a disadvantage like this is great for individual development, but some people enter into unfortunate brittle configurations where it brings them many disadvantages. If I were to describe your trait as something positive, I'd say it's "having standards". Having standards is a mostly good form of inflexibility (plus, it pushes for things to be better).
I sort of both like and dislike human superficiality. I suppose I can forgive deep people for acting superficially, but that I can't forgive shallow people for having no depth. One of my favorite animals are cats, they just chill and do what they want, but they're easy to understand, they lack the layered deception that human have. If a cat wants to talk to you, or if it doesn't, you will know. As an autistic person, this is much easier to deal with than most people, and I quite like socializing with young people for this reason. So I admire even people who act like cats, despite how easily self-determination is confused for egoism, and how easily being in tune with oneself is confused with superficiality (which might be why it's mostly young people doing this - they're less socialized).
One thing I dislike though, is people who live in "shoulds" rather than reality. This is probably you (and it used to be me) so I will try to explain myself. They might follow rules, not for the reasons that the rules were made, but simply because they're rules. Life is too context-dependent for this to be viable, for there's a lot of cases in which "shouldn't"s are actually harmless or even beneficial. It took me a while, but I have learned to love ambiguity and all the advantages that it brings. Undecided parts of life, those kept vague or unknown, are basically pure potential. Once you make them into something specific, you lose the flexibility of choice. And most importantly, unchanging things are an illusion, everything is in a constant state of flux. Instead of deciding that a person is an introvert or an extrovert, you can just decide to experience the person as they are - and not hold them to the restriction of either (and feel bad when they act against the model you made of them). Plus, if you live in reality rather than in formal definitions, you tend to be mostly immune to thought experiments and existential issues.
where man only focussed on the superficial and the vibes
He didn't advocate for hedonism and materialism at least. But I think he did like "vibes" when they were caused by strong instincts. Nietzsche likes the human body and its potential. But human beings cannot improve without some struggles and hardship, and most people probably won't seek those out if they can avoid doing so, at least those who do seem rare.
TwiceHuman
3mo ago
Actually, you might be right. I know it's associated with ADHD, and that ADHD overlaps quite a bit with Aspergers, but it might not be an uncommon trait in general, even in people without ADHD or autism. A related quirk is probably liking having the television running in the background, or concentrating best when listening to music (most people I know with these traits have had ADHD though)
My guesses of somebody being ADHD are usually quite accurate, but maybe I've gotten overconfident after all
TwiceHuman
3mo ago
I enjoy theories like this, but personally I separate:
1: The anxiety of intelligent (and often autistic) people, who feel like they need to control the world and make everything legible and predictable, because they hate risk.
2: The mentally fragile, who is afraid of being a "bad person", afraid of being judged, and afraid of anything which might push them out of the category "mediocre" because such things poses a social risk.
Group 1 tend to be individualistic and unafraid of questioning the narrative, whereas group 2 is the polar opposite of this. Group 1 is neurotic and tends to have low EQ, whereas group 2 has high EQ but avoids risk because they have very little faith in themselves as individuals, and they need to be part of something bigger in order to act, so they're always looking for some cause or group to be a part of. Group 1 are often childish and sort of naive in that they trust people too easily, and they're higher in the trait "openness" which allows them to believe in more far-out ideas, part of this naivety is likely that they dislike lies, and project this onto others, and another cause is probably spending a lot of time alone, so that they more easily retain childhood naivety. Group 2 are are childish and naive in that they are afraid of negative emotions and anything else which might aid their personal growth. They tend to consume whatever helps distract them from reality (modern entertainment), and they have plenty of friends who will aid them in keeping their delusions intact (You're so valid! Being a little chubby is okay! Being triggered over mean words is totally normal!)
It's hard to cut these two groups perfectly in two, but if I had to try, group 1 are rigid and logical people in an illogical world which requires flexibility, and group 2 are flexible but weak-willed normies who live in shared social delusions (blank slate, etc) and care more about emotions and social reality than they care about objective reality.
TwiceHuman
3mo ago
I'm autistic, and I can tell that it runs in my family. My family tree has a lot of intelligent but eccentric people who likes model trains and such and have a silly form of humor. I've also heard "Coffee just makes me fall asleep haha" at quite a lot of family gatherings. Every time I watched trivia channels like "Who wants to be a millionare?" with my grandfather he'd know basically all the answers. My family also had a lot of criminals, mentally ill people (manic depression for instance), and millionares, so it's definitely not just autism and ADHD.
But yeah, I can see the traits, even though most of my family aren't diagnosed. Diagnosing mental illness is more of a recent thing, at least where I'm from (which I'm not telling).
I don't know if autism is genetic, or if it's mostly caused by stress like you claim, and my family just happens to be high in neuroticism (which results in high rates of autism). I do think mental illness is on a raise though, as the modern society is less in tune with human nature. Couple this with the modern and much lower thresholds for diagnosis of mental disorders, and the effect is basically explained.
That we're less violent now is a more complicated topic. We might simply have removed most violent people from the gene pool over time, and oversocialization likely has a large effect as well (and the general drop in T levels is probably also relevant).
Finally, I don't mind being autistic, but I do think autism is an illness. The overly systematic way of thinking, the need to be "correct" and find the "truth", the need to be in control, the hatred of ambiguity.. I don't think any of these are good or necessary. But I'm also completely disillusioned about technology by now, and by math, logic, rationality, the computability of reality, the value of intelligence, etc. If you ask me, intelligence itself clusters with mental illness and conflicts with human instinct (and therefore, more importantly, it conflicts with aesthetics).
If you're interested in how Christianity won and made us less violent and in how modern society conflicts with human nature, Nietzsches books covers all of these aspects. His criticism of systematizing philosophers like Kant might very well be a criticism of traits of autism.
TwiceHuman
3mo ago
I'm going by feeling myself. I feel like the way people think is changing to be more materialistic, so that people say "good" and "bad" without considering these as value judgements or opinions, but instead experience them as answers which are found and that one can learn if they have enough information. People also increasingly assume that if something doesn't make sense to them, then it's wrong, and like one should have to prove something in order for it to be valid. And yet reality is simply how it is, and if doesn't make sense then the sense-making is wrong, not reality. I often interact with Asians, since I like doing so. I always notice the change when I go back to interacting in English, it's like we value models of reality more than reality, and believe in them too much. There's a similar tendency towards optimization and efficiency as "best", even though there's a clear tradeoff in both aesthetics and morals. I hear things like "Of course X group will lie to you, they want to make money" said in a way which seem to support lying, rather than calling out liars or explaining why they exist. As if throwing away a personal advantage because of personal values is something strange. I hope I'm just over-sensitive to things that I dislike, and that they're actually rare, though.
Magick Tomes
Got any recommendations? It just seems like normal psychology to me (where the magic is speaking to your subconsciousness directly), but if it works, I will give it a try, even if it's strange.
TwiceHuman
3mo ago
I think some wisdom is of the type which can't be verified. I can rewrite sections of the Tao Te Ching such that it says a lot of things that we consider impressive today. For instance "acting without interest" is wise in that it avoids Goodhart's law and "One who loves the self as the world can be entrusted with the world" makes sense from the point of alignment, at least in humans (recreating human love in AIs might prove difficult, after all).
I agree that agenda driven universities can't be trusted with ancient wisdom. The only reason they can be trusted with math is that the rules are verifiable and because they're symbols which cannot be connected to anything that people have strong feelings about.
Selling people something that they want to be true
This seems to be modern self-help and not something that I brought up. But you're not exactly wrong, for there's a line in the alchemist which says something like "When you want something enough, the whole universe conspires in helping you attain it". But I don't think these statements are supposed to be true. Like "Believe in yourself", it's telling people to have a bias which, on average, works out better than not having said bias. Our belief influences our reality, even though they do not influence objective reality. So quotes like "Whether you think you can or not, you're right" are some degree of true. But most people have a hard time believing in themselves, so they just say "the universe" or ask "god" in their prayers, for they can still believe in something greater than themselves. These things are not intuitive at all unless you're told them.
But newer self-help books are made to make money, and therefore to make you feel good and to feel like you like the book that you paid money for. The claims of these books aren't impossible to achieve, but one does not get there without actual effort, be it conscious or unconscious (tricking your brain into heading towards your goal through visualization techniques and such)
the number of self-help books a person owns seems inversely proportional to the person’s mental health
I don't think that's a fair argument, though it's true. I even like the snakiness. But you could also argue that the more medicine somebody has in their home, the less healthy they tend to be. This does not dismiss the value of medicine, right?
By "Red pill" I was most referring to the dating aspects. Men get burned when they follow advice that they're given, especially by girls. Red pill takes are more honest about human nature and about what girls want. But the best dating books focus on "inner game" which is another way of saying "self-improvement", so for a largely unregultated response to men being mislead by society (and women) there's surprisingly little negativity. Of course, there's still some spiteful incels and superficial pick-up artists, but I find that they're a minority.
Yarvin is said to be part of the "Intellectual dark web", and while this is a very loosely defined cluster, I find that anything from there is like a breath of fresh air, no matter the subject in question or the speaker. By the way, since most of what I dislike is modern, I simply just consume older material. I regard the Erhard Seminars Training (1971-1984) books and Og Mandinos "The university of success" (1980) as high quality. Newer self-help is too kind for me, I want to be called out like when I'm reading thelastpsychiatrist
TwiceHuman
3mo ago
I agree, I dislike the statement "anything not objective is not real science" only because it's used to dismiss anything outside of science as "pseudo-science" or "woo", which is to overestimate the utility of science and to create a false dichotomy. Perhaps it's laziness on my part, one just puts themselves in a difficult position if they attempt defending or even explaining the value of unscientific knowledge
Your comments are beautiful, so I will try to put a little more effort into my own and hopefully reduce the gap in conscientiousness a bit.
Indeed, but I don't think this is merely pretence. I think that some people actually overwrite their subjective experiences of the world with reductive cognitive models because they find them to be "true".
I'm not sure if they were intented as weapons, or if humans beings are just awful at differentiating between labels and reality. Labels are abused and corrupted all the time (labeling slight displays of nationalism "nazi" or labeling an 18-year-old dating a 17-year-old a "pedo"), there's also the euphemism treadmill (which I just found out is a term coined by the book "The Blank Slate" which covers many of the same criticisms that I have of modern views on human nature).
"Racism" has been weaponized in the same way since long ago. Correct me if I'm wrong, but racism used not to have a name, since it was just natural behaviour, then it became an action (a discriminatory act), and then it became a trait (so that one could be 'a racist') and then finally, it became anything which suggests that any politically protected group doesn't consist of perfect, infallible beings, which made it so that "math classes are racist" wasn't considered a syntax error anymore, and so that the concept of "Systematic racism" could exist.
I'm friends with a lot of Asians who live in cities and smaller villages, and their views on human nature are better than those of most psychology professors because they're less educated. Their down-to-earth approach to socializing makes for healthy relationships, and the lack of signaling games, politics and moralizing is also refreshing (and a reminder that such behaviour is actually pathological). Speaking of which, do you know of the book "The Manipulated Man"? I have yet to read it myself, but it apparently calls out the sort of social manipulation that people like Hoe Math (Youtube whose videos are much higher quality than his name suggests) are rediscovering now, more than 50 years later.
In the same way that systematic/detached thinking can blind us to reality, clumsy uses of language are likewise muddying the waters, and I think people in the "woke" cluster tends to have good language abilities, which is how(or should I say why) they weaponize language (given how fast language is degrading, the process appears unnatural. Deceptive use of language is becoming more common as social norms against tastelessness are weakening. I blame increased competitive pressure, the 'rat race', and influential hustle-mentalities). Interestingly enough, Jordan Peterson suggests that the "woke" crowd are lacking in verbal intelligence, but I think this is a self-defense mechanism on his part, meant to protect against recognizing that jewish groups engage in this deception.
Meanwhile, the "anti-woke" crowd has a lot of autistic people, myself included, who are mostly resistant to malicious uses of social dynamics. Images like this one communicate a valid point, though it likely wasn't intended to be interpreted as seriously as I do here.
Haha, exactly! It was a chubby bear-like face with a round nose (a bit like the bear from beastars, judging by a quick Google search).
I agree with your heuristics on sexual orientation, but I can't help but feel frustrated by the "are traps gay?" meme, since the question is actually "Is it gay to find them attractive?", but is made to imply "You're gay by definition for finding a man attractive" when the actual answer is closer to "You're gay if you're attracted to masculine traits". The frustration I feel is probably the point of the meme though, and I don't dislike being teased for being too pedantic, as Nietzsche was right in his psychoanalysis of (the use of) dialectics.
I see! While I dislike the idea that sex isn't special (which isn't wrong, since it's a self-fulfilling belief) I've also got to admit that I've seen evidence (PDF warning) that this is the natural way to think.
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