somethingsomething
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User ID: 1123
somethingsomething
1yr ago
That kind of effect was also very prevalent in my own experience and is something I'm still very on guard for. In brief, I currently see it as a powerful way of accomplishing the goal of being pitiable. If that is my goal, then it's a powerful, recursive move to pity myself, and then use that as an example of how pitiable I am. I think the counter-move is to be vigilant about recognizing when I have that goal, and have a strong will to discard that goal as it comes up. But that's just in brief, I think there is a lot I could write to expand my ideas on this.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Yeah that's what my foreboding final line was supposed to hint towards. Personally I was exposed to a lot of silliness online and in culture and I feel like I grew up, if a little later than I should have. I have a hard time judging which way it will go with the next generation.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
I think the "tiktokification of text" is a pretty major downside. Twitter has the capability of being used in a highbrow manner. Instagram was the same way, until they almost destroyed it, and now it's in an uneasy middle-state.
I think ultimately serious, normal adults are not interested in wading through a mixture of adolescent snark and not-subtle, vapid, hail-corporate-adjacent self promotion to actually exchange ideas. I feel like there is still a huge opportunity for substack notes to be "hey we are the serious place" but their app sucks.
Maybe gen z just takes the whole internet and destroys everything good about it. Not sure at this point.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
It does sounds like we have different experiences of depression. I might call mine more neurotic or distressed than what you've described. I appreciate your reply because it's making me think I'd probably rephrase my original post to add a few more qualifiers. It might reinforce my thought that depression is an analysis of a set of behaviors over time rather than a direct emotional experience. I revisited the depression symptoms list and it seems to me that a really wide range of causes could result in a subset of those symptoms.
I feel like my cause is very much a cultural learned behavior resulting out of a kind of toxic shame mindset, which I think is common, and I feel like I see it in a lot of depression communities, but it makes sense that it wouldn't be universal.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
I would imagine that yes, there are a lot of strategies that different people could find more or less effective. I would like to go deeply into the strategy of having a solid belief system that makes doing those 2 things fairly automatic. And this doesn't have to mean fooling yourself, if you buy the premise that depression is a delusional state, where you are spending your precious time on Earth moping unnecessarily out of confusion.
So I'm going to go into what that process looked like for me, which was somewhat accidental. It's funny though, I know red-pilled can mean a lot of things, but just going through the left wing disillusionment after so long just felt such a powerful deprogramming, and was such an important part of the process for me.
That was an interesting article, and I think some of my thoughts could translate well into that way of thinking. That said I am a very non-visual thinker, and that may be giving me trouble with really accepting that lens. I read the article on that site about rejecting-not-accepting and did find a lot of that to be relatable.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
I have not had a depressive episode in 2 months after dealing with high-functioning depression for about 10 years. Obviously that's not long enough to know I've really beat it, but I feel like I've had a real mental shift as a result of interrogating just about all of my beliefs in the past 3 years.
I'd like to document my thoughts in writing here in the wellness threads to organize them and spread the word of what I've learned, if others find it useful. These should be assumed to apply to healthy brains exhibiting unhealthy behaviors. Obviously the brain can have all sorts of conditions that are more deeply rooted or physically problematic that this won't apply for. These thoughts describe how a healthy person might become unhealthily unhappy through their upbringing, learned behaviors, and genetic predispositions, but nothing beyond that.
I'm going to start with just an outline that describes what I think are the essential qualities of depression. I hope to post more detail in a future wellness thread.
A depressive episode is a self-reinforcing dialogue involving shame and self-pity, where the self-pity is repeatedly justified to a skeptical observer.
Depression is less a state of being or description of action, but rather an analysis of actions over time. Rather than saying "I am depressed", it can be useful to say "I am pitying myself, and I am justifying why I have the right to pity myself, over and over again," because that better describes the actions in the moment.
If the pity must continually justified, the question is to whom? I think there is some inner skeptic that we are justifying it to, that remains unfooled, and I think that it's a really interesting avenue to explore why this is and what the results are.
There's also the question of why we pity ourselves. I think it's used as a coping mechanism for anxiety, and I think every depressive episode starts with an intense anxiety trigger. People who feel anxiety more intensely (neurotics) are more in need of coping mechanisms.
I think there are several large forces today promoting self-pity: progressive ideology, certain corners social media, the liberal internet more broadly, and aspects of the psychology establishment. A big part of my growth was understanding how my progressive worldview was deeply toxic to my self-esteem, and how I had fallen for a kind of internet-mediated social contagion. Along these lines, I see self-pity as a sister to ressentiment.
The quick answer on how to reduce depressive episodes is to (1) become less sensitive to anxiety and (2) when you pity yourself, and the skeptical observer asks you to justify it, admit that you can't, that the self-pity was foolish, and that you will manage your anxiety more productively instead. I will try to elaborate on strategies for this in future posts.
This requires understanding thinking-as-dialogue, which I think is how the brain synthesizes different points of view into a cohesive worldview. I think that most people probably do this without realizing it, and some may not want to admit it because it might sound like you are hearing voices or something. But I think that a healthy brain thinks in dialogue while smoothing it into a single "voice" that one identifies with. If you have issues with identity or have more serious mental issues with voices, etc. then that goes beyond what I'm describing.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
I think this is what's missing from the modern gender debate with the supposedly traditionalist right wing view (that I am sympathetic to). Traditionally if there was a profession, men were almost exclusively doing it, and so we can realistically expect men to have a pretty broad palette of expressiveness.
I basically see it as male security -> women enter workforce -> male anxiety -> men undermining and sniping at each other, enforcing too restrictive gender roles. The result is broader male expression gets twisted into shame-coated "queer" outlets rather than being healthily expressed, and traditionalists are confused into not realizing the anxiety itself (part of) the problem.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
I don't know much about other instruments, but playing guitar is physically painful for a while. Less so with electric but if men go electric more than women by default do to tech bias or harshness bias then that cancels that out.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Interestingly, I feel like game studios have not been as catastrophically bad about this as hollywood. Generally the "audience shifting" controversies are pretty mild and course corrected quickly compared to Star Wars, Ghostbusters etc. It's funny because it seems like this whole thing got started with GamerGate but overall the big studios never totally lost their head, and I think nothing nearly as devastating as new Star Wars has happened to any IP. EA is the one company that I think has made the most missteps, but they were voted the worst company in the world so what do you expect.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
You can pick that out as an issue but I don't think it derails my argument. It just means Trump may have bit off more than he could chew. Ultimately I do think Trump baits these investigations and the broader elite ire as a way to foster the kind of indignation you see in this thread. Sure Trump gets treated unfairly, but he purposefully acts unsympathetically in order to bait out the unfairness. In other words, he's not acting in good faith and everyone outraged on his behalf are being played.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
There's no contradiction between these being sincere efforts to take Trump down, and also that Trump benefits from these investigations, and acts in a way to generally make them more likely to happen, and in my opinion, intentionally so. That's the point of a bait, to say "come and get me," and then turn that into an advantage. It's what DeSantis is trying to replicate, but he isn't so bold as Trump as to actually bait intelligence agencies, settling for the media and Disney instead.
Trump has only been doing better in the primary polls since people have been getting in the race, and the only noteworthy thing he has really done is get indicted. so it's not clear what evidence there is that these latest cases have caused any issues.
It's hard to say for me whether Russiagate overall harmed him because it was bored into everyone's brains, but it also imploded. The worst thing it did really was edge the Democrats who then went totally nuts, and some undecideds got swept up in it. I think there were other ways the establishment got their jabs in and actually made Trump's life worse. But I think the investigations are where Trump wins because that is actually where you have to put up or shut up, it's an actual game that Trump can play, and he's won every time.
As a long-term phenomenon I think the cases look even better for the anti-establishment right (and left even) because there's a immediate effect where people get swept up in them and want to see Trump lose, and then there's a tail effect where people become bitter and cynical towards the prosecutors who are bringing faulty cases they can't win. Biden's win was at the height of one of those anti-Trump pushes, but I think things look incredibly dire for the Democrat establishment going forward, since they have spent so much political capital on nonsense.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
The point is Trump doesn't want to stop, and if he knows what's good for him he won't stop trying to get investigated, because they improve his political prospects.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
The moment he stops being investigated he also loses his political power. He's powerful because his actions feed the collective persecution complex of him and his supporters. It's not just political. He also always creates the appearance he is doing something shady behind the scenes, to bait investigations because they are good for him and his political prospects.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Then wouldn't it be wise for Trump to take steps to avoid being investigated? It seems at every opportunity he acts guilty enough to get investigated but is actually clean enough to get out clean. I don't think it's out of the question to think he benefits from the image of the establish going after him, and he knows it.
In the end you get a bunch of people complaining about how he was treated, and that's what he wants. That's why he acts the way he does, anything to make him look like more of a victim.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Yeah not to mention the beauty of the inverted sun, which to me had a kind of deep archetypal quality that I feel like is pretty rare for natural phenomena. Highly recommend.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
To those using ChatGPT to brainstorm, what kind of prompt engineering techniques have you found to be useful?
Something I've been doing is asking chatgpt for a list of responses, and then basically running high order functions on those lists. So you ask for a list of X, and then say for each item do Y, or combine all items into Z. This just lets you look at more than one idea at once, with some turning out better than others, and I think it also results in more creative answers, since you're not just getting the most common idea, but ideas 1 through 5 or 10 that are all going through these transformations. Then you can ask it to combine or shift ideas into each other for more possible creativity.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
The Ehrlichs float the idea of adding "temporary sterilants" to the water supply or staple foods. However, they reject the idea as unpractical due to "criminal
Stop there!
somethingsomething
1yr ago
I would be curious if rationalists are even less "social conformity" biased. I'd guess the average rationalist grew up an outcast who became (often irrationally) suspicious of the ingroup, and gravitated to outgroups to fulfill their social needs and went on to justify their continual social exclusion via their own intelligence whether they were or not.
They are just as influenced by social conformity, but through an inverted/rejection/wound/resentment model that leaves them able to see through the blind spots of the normies, but just as biased when it comes to the particular outgroups they identify with. Which is still valuable to have, but the self congratulations are probably unwarranted.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
He seems like a character out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel
somethingsomething
1yr ago
I'm reading The Western Canon by Harold Bloom, a pretty entertaining mix of anti-resentment culture war from the 90s with literature worship. Got me listening to the Paradise Lost audiobook.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
It's not cope, but I agree that would make a cool cut. In my other response I fleshed out my argument a bit and mentioned Run Lola Run which did something similar with FPS switches. It's just worth analyzing why the different FPS makes you feel things differently and the possibility that there are actual reasons 24 has remained the standard and is vastly preferred by enthusiast in a way that hasn't happened for other tech advances, like digital film, CG, etc beyond the incurious "cope" argument.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Cope is far from the most likely explanation. What I have to work with is:
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An intense revulsion towards high FPS film and television every time I have encountered it outside a nature documentary, that I share broadly with the film industry and enthusiasts.
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Things I have noticed that I like about 24 FPS that appear degrade at 30 and even further degraded at 48 FPS, but also degraded in a different way at 12 FPS.
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Finding 60 FPS games vastly preferable to 30 FPS games, despite growing up with games at a low FPS, which I also happen to share broadly with the games industry and enthusiasts (although it's only been more prioritized recently). Also, finding no degradation in 120 FPS or higher.
Empirically I don't think your analogies hold up well. The average record enjoyer does not feel revulsion towards digital audio outside of memes, the black-and-white movie enjoyers, as much as they even exist, don't feel revulsion towards color film. If this is Stockholm syndrome, it's on a far more massive scale than any other phenomena like it that I can think of.
When considering mass psychosis we should at least be curious towards what actually changes with different FPS choices. You say blur is in everything, but I was describing the amount and qualities of the blur, not just from fast movements but practically all movement because it's so low. There's also the ways even TV at 30 looks different from film. Watch Run Lola Run which mixes the two, and try to observe the different effects each have in how you process the scenes. I really think if collectively we act incurious, and if film goes to 48 or higher, film is dead. I watched the Hobbit at 48, I watched an interpolated Game of Thrones episode. Both were just absolutely revolting.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
As someone who can't stand 30fps gaming but loves 24fps film, let me just (imprecisely) defend it here.
I'm pretty sure there are ways to mitigate the choppiness from pans, I'm not sure on the specifics. But generally I think it's a limitation that should be worked around as one of the weak points.
The strengths of 24fps film is how the natural blurring of movement in each frame creates the beautiful and subtle impressionistic quality movies have, and that's something that would have to be painstakingly simulated to do in games (and blurring effects in games are pretty bad so I feel like that is a ways away)
somethingsomething
1yr ago
It's interesting how this is almost the opposite of mental health therapies that use body scanning, or focusing on the body to try to resolve mental issues.
I see self-loathing as less central than self-pity right now. I think the basic definition of "feeling sorrow for someone's misfortunes" is what I mean by pity. So to fit my example, some bad memory trigger makes me anxious, I pity myself to cope with the pain (feel sorrow about the past, about what it means about me as a person, etc.), a critical feeling enters judging me of not being worth pity, and I turn that around and say, oh, what a misfortunate situation it is that I should feel shame from pitying myself , and from there you have that recursive cycle. And that is potentially one of many strategies to sustain the pity, self-loathing can enter as another strategy, etc.
It seems like what has worked for me lately is a very strong belief that I will not benefit from striving to pity myself, which would short-circuit this process if I am right that this is what's happening. It may be that others can pity themselves healthily, or I might regain the ability to do so. But I believe it's possible that because I used it so reliably as a coping mechanism, I developed a unhealthy dependency on it that it is best to quit.
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