coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
I would argue that Harry Potter is the perfect story to use as a foundation for philosophy. I never got into HP or HPMOR, but at the turn of the 21st century Harry Potter occupied a position among our elite children similar to the Odyssey among the Ancient Greek children. The Odyssey was written to be entertaining and compelling in order to motivate Greek boys to participate in sailing expeditions and behave prosocially. This was its first and primary objective, because this was the first and primary objective of the community. Harry Potter motivated young Western boys and girls to enter elite academic institutions and eventually the PMC class, and it accomplished this wonderfully, with higher-ranked institutions being the first to establish Quidditch clubs. How did Harry Potter do this? Briefly,
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Every aspect of “elite life” is exaggerated in the Harry Potter universe, made into a super-stimuli of sorts, which winds up enhancing interest in their real world equivalents. The letter of admission to the institution becomes the owl (wisdom personified) delivering a beautiful letter, which rescues the half-blood boy from a life of antisocial obesity-ridden mediocrity among those of inherently lesser ability. The half-blood boy’s real family and community are actually among the qualitatively superior wizards, where he belongs. The stupid “muggles” are no match for the pull of the elite institution. 12yo readers are actually sad that they never got their admissions letter, because children are delusional, and this disappointment becomes interest in academies later on.
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Book-learning becomes magic learning; formulae become spells. (This is actually a device used to make medieval priests interested in reading books, too; close to all of the “magic” books in medieval history were written by and for priests, and they made extravagant promises of ability-enhancement from magically finding a thief to summoning a demon. Now, none of these worked, and there isn’t even any symbolic truth in them; the point was to maximize the interest of the priest for books, which will make him more interested in the Bible longterm (especially when he realizes the magic doesn’t work lol)). Paintings with history become “talking paintings”. Etc.
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Hogwarts is, of course, written as a super-stimuli of elite institutions in the Western tradition. It uses aspects of Oxford, Cambridge, the monastic institutions, all blended into one.
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Every aspect of Bildungsroman is associated with Hogwarts. First time friend picks you up in his car? It’s a flying car, and of course you crash into a tree (no, no, on top of a tree…)
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Social issues like institutional corruption and racism also make an appearance. Voldemort is bad, even though wizards are objectively superior and their blood objectively superior; the fear one experiences saying his name is the same as saying the N-word. Draco and the Slytherins? Etc.
Okay, so Harry Potter is the defining book of the 21st century aspirational PMC child. (The PMC is Potter Mania Culture). Now let’s sail back to the Greeks. Greek philosophers applied an allegorical interpretation on top of the Odyssey, for educating elite children. Byzantines as late as the 12th century were using the Odyssey as “hooks” for their ideas. This is really what it’s about: mnemonic hooks, no different than in a memory palace. Hogwarts is one enormous memory palace to be exploited by philosophers. The story is sealed into the child’s mind, and then after that you can use his memories to add philosophy. This isn’t unique to the Pagans either. Philo interpreted every primitive part of Old Testament as an allegory of Greek philosophical ideas, which were genuinely completely retconned into the stories. The Church Fathers did something similar. If you want to be blasphemous, Jesus is the beginning of philosophy on top of the Hebrew Canon, reinterpreting and repossessing previous information in light of greater wisdom, and his story was written to be compelling from a number of different angles, eternally compelling. Jordan Peterson today is trying to use Old Testament stories for his ideas. TheLastPsychiatrist, an old favorite, used both popular culture and Greek myths.
Are philosophical treatises more “serious”? Frankly, I think they are completely unserious, because no one serious reads them. It would be one thing if our philosophers resided in an Ivory Tower on our community, and the crumbs of their wisdom dropped down to us as table crumbs drop down to dogs, but they seem to reside in an ivory tower on their own private island. Almost nothing of what they do will ever actually influence the lives and minds of even our elites, not just the normal and more functioning Americans. Because wisdom needs to be relatable to mainstream culture in order to be consumed. It needs to be digestible, easy, tasty. Because we don’t have a landed gentry, we have stressed elites who don’t have infinite time, and the children of our super wealthy are also retarded. Wisdom is like a small amount of leaven that a woman took and hid in 60 lbs of flour, and it leavened all the bread, blended into it, making it lighter and easier. If your wisdom isn’t relatable it’s not really wisdom.
(Replying also to @Corvos)
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
This is definitely evidence against the theory. Did you find it minesweeper peaceful?
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
I’m familiar with the Halo franchise. People played the solo campaign as the key feature of the game. There was also a split screen mode. But the campaign was enjoyable as a social validation simulator.
sudoku
This was huge during the sudoku craze around 2004, reinforced by “sudoku is good for your brain”, but I don’t know how popular it still is. It has been squarely defeated (pun intended) by the much more social NYT games. I wonder if any kids play it. Perhaps even sudoku was socially-mediated: news says solving it means you are smart, also it’s popular, you feel smart and popular when you play and win.
curiosity, attention, and the little thrill one gets from a solved puzzle
I used to think this, and it falls in line with the Flow theory, but I’m starting to doubt it. Curiosity and attention seem to be profoundly shaped by social forces. Do crows solve puzzles for fun or do they do it for food?
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
The phenomena are different. Someone who has played chess for a decade socially, but who can’t when alone, will play against a bot to increase his skill for his next social game. The win, as a mental phenomenon, is also saturated in the social memories of previous wins. (Imagine a kid practicing a soccer shot and who images cheers as he makes it.) Additionally, chess is a game with uniquely salient social validation, being the “smart persons game”. Tetris as a single-player game doesn’t have any of this.
What I’m wondering is if a game truly devoid of social validation and valuation will be played. So imagine that only you have access to the game, only you will ever play it, and you can’t share anything about the game with anyone. I suppose Tetris and snake are the closest thing? But then I do really wonder if anyone would play this if they had no way of making their experiences social. Historically people shared their high scores.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
Most of the common PvE games have features that introduce artificial social validation, RPGs being the most obvious, but even survival games have elements of accomplishing things whose value in real life is socially-mediated (“I built a base, farm, house; I found gold.”). Halo is single-player, but takes you through a guided story of social validation. It’s quite hard to think of one that doesn’t. You might consider that a skateboarding game could be fun without including social validation, but the interest surely lies in being able to do things which you know (intuitively or through skateboarding literacy) are impressive in real life. Civilization games, well, you are the leader of a civilization and future global hegemon.
Others have mentioned online chess, and that people used to (?) play against bots. But these bot-players have surely been acculturated to believe that winning a chess game is socially validating, and they may also play challenging bots if it means training against playing a real life friend in a week. Even a game like Heroes of the Storm, okay, if someone plays it offline they are still the hero who is killing people and destroying a base.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
Do you think these guys could have been saved somehow through information? Like if you had the magic ability to sit them down for an hour, what would you tell them? It’s scary that a group of apparently intelligent people could have their explicit aim as improving the world, and know that rationalists exist, and then just do… this. Note that the glossary is huge, and that developing new words is a hallmark of cults, probably because it allows you to define all of the connotation and ambience and dimensions of words which affect cognition invisibly.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
Funding is paused. There is no evidence for negative ramifications of the pause. Democrats are using their agents in the media to depict this as chaotic and bad. That’s because the effects of misinformation linger even when retractions are issued, though there is usually not a salient retraction issued anyway. The intention is to form a negative emotional memory in the consumer’s mind which strengthens for each story. I am filing this under “business as usual”.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
You can’t provide a reason for why they would rationally opt into immigration if they knew all the data. Mormons do not have autonomy. So there’s no “revealing preference” here. Nordic countries brought in immigrants under the false belief that everyone in the world is just like them; science and research has now disproven that. If Sweden knew what they knew now, they would never have brought in immigrants. You cannot persuade Swedes logically to do this.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
I just didn’t want the inevitable “but how can you forget —“, he is an outlier
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
How much are video games about social validation? My intuition is that no would play League of Legends or chess if you only played only against bots, even bots designed as a perfect challenge, and if there were no rankings. Do you think that’s the case?
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
The whitest parts of America are the highest trust. Robert Putnam has shown that social trust is related to homogeneity. We also know that oxytocin allele expression is related to social trust, so not every group has the same amount of social trust. If you value “social mobility”, the easiest way to increase this is to live in a homogenous high-trust nation. This is why the five nations with the most social mobility are Nordic, and all of the top 10 are European. And so,
if one wants to live in a society with high trust and social mobility,
their primary ambition should be to maximize how many Europeans exist around them, particularly Northern Europeans. And it seems everyone knows this, hence migration. But this is problematic for those who deserve that level of trust, but for whom the trust is reduced with every addition of foreigner. Because they deserve to live around their own kind, just as much as an intelligent individual whose genes express a high IQ should be able to work productively according to his genes.
An ideology for people too stupid, degenerate, or incompetent to survive in an honest meritocracy
Notably, high-trust Europeans do not feel this kind of sentiment, which is why they enact policies that help their own citizens and promote social mobility. Right now they think that everyone is their people, because they have been misguided, but this can be changed. Meritocracy is also not a historically common idea in Europe. It’s also not very evidenced by science. A person’s identity is not their IQ, it’s the whole package of genes which they share in common with their family and extended kin, IQ involving a sliver. Meaning a high IQ Russian has more in common with an average Russian than a high IQ Persian. This is why a high IQ member of a nation in history continued identifying with their nation. A high IQ is just one genetic expression of a group, and it may even come at the cost of other valuable group skills (like in-group preference!).
Thought experiment: you have a group of Northern European Utah Mormons who were selected by both race and culture to be hyper-trusting. Let’s assume they aren’t gay furries. How do you convince them with reason to invite foreigners to live alongside them? The only reason their theology stopped being explicitly racist is that the American government forced the change upon them. I can imagine, you know, that they may want to invite some Chinese or Japanese families for fun. Maybe an Italian architect, maybe a Japanese designer. But why would they ever increase their foreigner proportion by more than 1%? Is this in their interest?
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
I think all of that would help too, but the reason I don’t think it will help that much is because very attractive women with perfect eligibility are not marrying at 22 and having six kids. Do we see every attractive female Harvard graduate do this? No. The most eligible of women at least from my intuition also have low TFR, though they ostensibly have access to —
well paid men who dress well, work out, socialize, dance, party
Whereas 200 years ago these were the exact women who would have a dozen kids
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
Right but you need millions of people to do this to fix TFR, otherwise the “elite human capital” will try to replace us with foreigners, which IMO is a non-ideal outcome.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
Simple practical outline:
• Develop a collection of media which portrays motherhood as valuable, fun, morally good, compassionate, and interesting. Organized by ages, starting at media to replace CocoMelon, through books for teens, including artwork and songs.
- Make this collection easily accessible and understandable to conservative families. Include parenting guides (activities to do with doll, etc)
• Write basic explanations on how our low fertility is related to childhood media and our low esteem for mothers. Disseminate.
• Collaborate with religious and independent schools to require this media as part of a reading plan for girls.
• Determine a way to incorporate social media into the families and groups which are on board with the plan, because this amplifies value internalization.
• Fund more of the aforementioned media (of all types).
As in they literally have that option right now
No! Because it's not well-known that fertility is downstream from how girls are raised and how women are valued. And also, were this known to some inquisitive families, there's no simple process to implement that wisdom to ensure the relevant acculturation. Right now, you and I as adults cannot decide by will to have the cultural interests of a Spartan, right? We will never love warfare and raiding as much as a Spartan. And we can't suddenly decide to be National Masters in chess; what will take a child 8 years may take us 30. We can hardly will ourselves to develop an interest in chess as adults. The same applies when we are talking about rearing mothers. It needs to begin young and continue into adulthood.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
Yes, just like the Hasids. It’s comically feasible, and you’ve hit the nail on the head that
we lack the social technology
and this is exactly what must be developed, and this isn’t even difficult in theory, just will take a while to implement at a population-wide level.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
Then perhaps they are. If a bored boy can’t get any value from Tennyson, then there is no value in Tennyson, except to keep academics busy.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
My experiment to determine the value of poets:
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Bring in undergraduates for a series of tests designed to measure reaction time according to time of day and season of year
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While they wait in the barren experimental room, they sit at a desk in which parts of a poem are clearly etched in by a “student”
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the student is made to wait in without a phone or any distraction for 25 minutes, essentially forcing them to eventually read the poem
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They are brought in 3 months later and asked if they remember anything of the poem
If the poet has value, his lines will be remembered, and if he has a lot of value, his lines will be remembered fondly in full.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
I don’t think you grasp the importance of martyr stories and in-group trauma. There’s a reason that Israel laser-focused on children killed, even going so far as to make up or exaggerate aspects of the event. Martyr stories propel morale. This is an important ingredient for advocacy groups. Disliking Pakistan != mass violent rape of thousands hidden by liberal authorities. Not even close to the same thing. I’m sure Israelis also had a negative view of Gazans before this. Jews have actually perfected the martyr motif, although I think Christians mastered it and then were blinded to its power.
the base
This is a meaningless buzzword, I’ve never understood it. The base is the majority of voters whose will the President obeys? That’s just democracy. “Throws meat to the base” is the msnbc way to describe the entire nature of democracy. It’s a propaganda term of art, not a serious way to describe things. The CEO throws meat to the base of shareholder, yes, this is capitalism. The boyfriend throws meat to the girlfriend by getting her flowers on Valentine’s Day as expected in a reciprocal relationship. The boy throws meat to his familial base by complimenting his mother’s cooking. It’s all very silly. It’s just “doing the social role”, but described in a way to make your opponent’s actions dehumanizing, and it’s artfully manufactured — me, a stalwart proponent of fulfilling the will of the people, my opponent, an ugly butcher throwing a carcass of meat to the debased dogs.
Sure it’s possible things don’t improve, but the cultural conditions are already an improvement.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
Your points mostly boil down to, “things aren’t good because things aren’t absolutely perfect”, but for a variety of important reasons this is not the correct mindset to have. Things are 10x, 100x better for the “online right”. They are in the ear of Musk and the President, they aren’t cancelled online, their points are regurgitated to the masses on Twitter and Tucker and podcasts. The trajectory is all anyone should care about, and not just in politics but as a general principle. If we are playing a skill-based longterm resource acquisition game, and I just took the controller from my retarded younger brother, I don’t particularly care if my opponent has obtained 70% of the resources, because in just a few turns I’ve acquired 25% more than before, and this is iterative and compounds. The “online right” is gaining permanent resource acquisitions, from which they can generate and regenerate more units, after being frozen and isolated in their Valley Forge moment. New Overton Windows are broken daily.
Now, if you are rightwing and want the acquisition to continue, you need “morale”, a concept studied to death in business and sports and war and child prodigies. What maximizes right wing morale? Obviously not what you posted or the weird OP post. Morale is maximized when reasonably high expectations of individual output are maximally reinforced, when the variety of evolutionary output modifiers are aligned to a collective interest. Essentially, is every milestone to the correct desired result fully celebrated and appreciated? This requires recognizing improvements. Just like if you’re trying to raise a child prodigy, you celebrate his performance of twinkle twinkle just as hard as you celebrate his double thirds etude at 16. So, yes, deporting more illegals is just as important to celebrate as deporting all of them. This is how morale works. (And actually this is still an issue with the Right, I don’t think they’ve grasped that they can utilize morale at a population level to further accomplish cultural goals).
Now to nitpick,
Israel
What I’ve seen is that they have never been criticized as much as today, outside of astroturf factories like front page Reddit. Tucker having Sachs on to talk about Israel controlling our foreign policy is also highly significant as a development.
Rotherham
This posting was for us, not them. You’re not going to persuade me that hundreds of millions of Americans reading about the mass rape of British by Pakistani Muslims isn’t significant lol
Fertility
Genuinely I feel that this is a solved problem. We know it has to do with how we raise girls and how we mete out status. This can be overcorrected in a generation, and if the Right is smart, they will correct it only amongst themselves.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
I’m not sure if the premise is reasonable enough to even consider. The richest man in the world just spammed Twitter with stats about the Rotherham gangs, and weeks later threw a “Roman salute” at the inauguration. DEI is being dismantled. Major social media posts that mention Israel are inundated with Israel-critical commentary. January 6th protesters were unilaterally pardoned. Deportations are occurring. Fertility concerns are mainstream. How can I take —
the degradation of the online right
seriously as a premise? They’ve never been less degraded. “Moneyed interests” have been phenomenal for the “online right”. And it’s never been easier to get your thoughts disseminated, you can just post on substack and gain a following. Factions are also just how reality works, nothing wierd about that.
My own fear regarding the right is that the Zoomers are not sufficiently radicalized. They are the brainzlop generation raised on even more addicting media and games, having rap shoved down their throat like never before. They are true nihilists, not going down rabbit holes online. They haven’t received the sacred texts the infographics and documentaries. But I really have no idea if this intuition is correct, because I’m not in their social ecosystems, which afaik are fractured discord spaces rather than an image board or something. Maybe they’re doing fine actually.
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
It’s obviously that guy and I still don’t understand the motivation. Why doesn’t he just explain?
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
Very nice.
coffee_enjoyer
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9d ago
The benefit to justice outweighs the small injustice here. This is a signal for future courts and agencies that if you over-punish a thousand people, we will under-punish the batch in full. The government and courts now have an incentive try and punish everyone fairly, or else even those who deserve their punishment go free. A similar mechanism is already at work in our law: if you violate rights in obtaining evidence, that evidence will be thrown out, as otherwise it incentivizes the police to continue violating rights.
coffee_enjoyer
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10d ago
It’s gentle (no tension) and it points up to the heavens
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/CristoRaffaello.jpg
The word stochastic terrorism is rightfully derided, but what do you call this kind of speech, which received 42k votes?
Edited for brevity. If you convince a person that they are at war with Hitler, and in fact the last line of defense against Hitler, what do you think the end result is?
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