Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
You are not just your genes. You are your genes reacting with the (current) environment. Since this environment is miles different from the historical norm there's a massive potential for danger.
Are you weak to modern chemicals? Mold? The food you're eating? Lack of exercise? Lack of physical danger? Lack of responsibility? C-section? Parasites?
I am currently very depressed due to accidently (or rather, in overconfidence, assuming this would not occur, due to having felt oh so great for so long) taking too much glycine last night which screwed up my methylation (but I did sleep like a baby). I have a very similar reaction to choline in eggs. 1 egg is fine, 2-3 makes me melancholy, 4+ and it's a good thing I don't own a gun. I've spent many years unknowingly poisoning myself this way trying to eat healthy earlier in life.
Why do you desire to be a loser? Losers are usually not attacked. Perhaps it knows you cannot defend yourself? Is it because it senses that it's sick? Or because you've never tried before?
Or perhaps your genes just suck. But if I were you I would make sure that was the case (by changing your environment is as many ways as possible) before taking questions like the ones you asked seriously.
Willpower was developed later on. It's also very expensive biochemically. Lots of things related to it can break. But ignoring that, high willpower is also quite dangerous. If you don't give in to your desires there's no guarantee of creating tiny ones. You might spend all your days working on (non-)esoteric math. Or sacrifice yourself to a cause. Or eat too many eggs because you are convinced it's good for you despite the horrible taste. Higher intelligence is fantastic. We should convince the fungi to adopt it.
Have you ever looked at the outer layer of the brain? Any interface, no matter how complex, can be exploited given sufficient computation. But that does not mean it's a good thing for anyone involved.
I like to think that I'm a bit of an arrogant person, but that could just be a defense mechanism against the fear that I'm not. And I suppose that our environment used to force us towards being healthy using things like necessity. I have a bit of royal aesthetics, and most people on this forum are intelligent, so it's likely that we all have family members who used to be rather important people. That said, mental illness runs in my family just as much as intelligence does, so I feel like I'm on the experimental dev branch, one of natures instances of "throw a dice and see what happens".
You make a good point that it isn't ideal to say "I don't fit into society, I must be sick", for it might be that society is what's sick (or at least poorly calibrated for man as a species). Just like there's environments in which a cynical person would fare better than a naive person, there's also socities in which other healthy traits are disadvantageous, while unhealthy ones are advantageous and thus appear good.
I'll take your advice and attempt to change my environment, I just tend to think that external solutions are bad (the insight is from psychology in general. Most problems which seem external are actually internal. If you feel that you lack external validation, you might lack confidence, for example. And the feeling that I "need" a cup of coffee to be able to do my work would also be my brain lying to me. So I've been avoiding external solutions as reliance on external things feel like a bad tendency in general)
Yeah, willpower is dangerous, but a lack of it can be too. Some people are only doing alright in life because their instincts is smarter than the destructive ideologies they have consumed, and other people are only alive because they learned some degree of self-tyranny. The balance here is difficult.
By "tiny ones" I assume you mean children? Thanks for telling me about control theory by the way! I immediately fell into a fun rabbit hole about predictive processing. A final insight is that eggs may taste bad for you because your body knows that you shouldn't eat them, but this isn't always reliable so take it with a grain of salt (heh)
High intelligence means high resource (nutrient) usage by the brain. The chemical fires need to be cleaned up afterwards too.
Figuring out what is (and how much, it's not binary) external and what is internal is very difficult. Hell a problem can have many solutions. Sometimes you find the root cause, sometimes you find something good enough (for now or forever). Just try as many and as varied ones as you can (as long as the risks are low).
Side note: I took a psychology class a long time ago. I asked a lot of why questions and for a lot of definitions of terms. I was not given a lot of answers. But I was given a lot of looks. From my observation it was probably the least rigorous subject I ever took (and that's saying something). But the teachers seemed to be very sure about themselves. And the students liked the fact that they were participating in the process of higher education so the wheel kept spinning. The harder it is to evaluate the truth, the more likely...
Life is pain on the extreme ends.
Yes. Yeah, it knows more than I do.
But the genius of the human race are the kind of people who have seemingly limitless energy (PDF warning). So I don't think it's harmful for the brain to expend a lot of energy (that said, it could be that less energy is needed to study topics that you care for. That it's not just your brain being more receptive to these areas, but that it processes them in a less costly way - for instance, without anxiety, without judgement, without keeping track of time and without evaluating the external environment. In this case, it makes sense that you'd want to isolate yourself before you start studying, because only in a basement or a similar room would it be okay to lose one self in the task and turn off any peripheral perception)
I've never taken one! But I was a better psychologist than the "professionals" around me already at 10 years old, and I read a lot of Jung and such in my teenage years, and ran a lot of experiments on myself as well. I also had the bad luck of encountering most types of mentally ill people and having to deal with them (don't piss off borderline women, by the way). I also experienced symptoms from every cluster of mental illness myself, so I probably wouldn't lose out to even Buddha in experience and self-reflection. I have no respect for 90% of psychologists, even the PhDs seem absolutely clueless. I used to bully the mods on /r/psychology before I was perma'd from Reddit. (Their 'hot' section now has an article about how women value kindness the most in men, and that supportiveness and intelligence were more important than looks. Not a single thing in that sentence is true. Every post I can find on the sub at the moment is garbage, actually). JP is alright, as is thelastpsych.
Yeah, but extreme ends have their own opposites. The spikes of positive emotions I experienced when I was severely depressed are much larger than the ones I feel now. Overall, I feel better now that the depression is gone, but I'm actually making fewer meaningful memories now. The subjective parts of life have a tendency to balance themselves like this. It's only objectively that my life has improved a lot.
This is what made me listen to my brain, emotions, instincts, etc. but now I've realized that there's areas where it's unreliable and where I have to overwrite it with willpower. It's not so much that I "know better" than my brain, but I do have way different priorities. My brain is too stingy, it doesn't want to invest. It's also too cowardly. It's also hard to modify, it doesn't care for conformity, it's immune to hypnosis, it won't let me lucid dream, and it resists when I try to reprogram it.
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