Coolguy1337
11mo ago
Wow. I'm not sure if I completely agree with her perspective. However I am 100% that she is on to something regarding the hyper-mobility. Just going by people I've met at Universities, hyper-mobility seems to correlate a lot with, as the cool kids say, "being weird" and also often actually being smart.
Thank you very much for posting about it!
Coolguy1337
11mo ago
Make sure that you've eaten enough before. Drinking on an empty stomach has never ended well for me. Eating a large pizza an hour before serious drinking is my go to.
Coolguy1337
1yr ago
Lions Mane. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what has changed. But I feel more awake to some degree. It might not help other people though since it seems to be the most helpful for people who've suffered minor brain damage. I suffered one concussion too many as a late-teen to the point that people around me noticed, and pointed out, that my language use got worse.
One objective thing is that my eyes open a lot more now. Not sure what that means (worse eyesight?). It also gave me some wild dreams and slight headaches (which i normally never get).
Coolguy1337
1yr ago
Have you read the blog https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/? The ideas he writes about might be helpful in a certain way. I though a lot like you when I was younger and even admitting that makes me a bit embarrassed.
Otherwise, and I say this in a way intended to be helpful. I think you take your life (and status) too seriously. You write paragraph after paragraph filled with big words that mean little. For example, you have no idea what her family life is like in reality if you've never been there. You're just extrapolating to feel bad about your own life. To build a pretty-little-narrative about yourself. Stop thinking and start doing shit instead, and perhaps you might be cured of your illness. You want to abandon your family for a chance at the Good Life? Sure, just don't make up excuses for why it's morally okay. For why they (you) deserve it.
Hopefully I'm not breaking any rules when posting this. The intention is to be kind (but not nice) in order to help. Your problem is the fact that you are neurotic as hell, possibly because of a hard and stressful childhood. Trying to fix anything other than this is just procrastination.
If you feel like I'm being completely off the mark please say so, I might be wrong. You know your life better than I. I'm just making an educated guess and projecting a bit.
Coolguy1337
1yr ago
Because I have to I guess. I don't particularly like this world. But I do know that killing myself will only make it worse given that I do consider myself a 'decent person' and given how my family would react. I have to fight, even if I don't want to. This is perhaps not the most encouraging statement, however, I find it serves as a pretty good base, at least for myself. I mean, if you're depressed because you dislike the current state of the world, maybe it's better to attempt to change a small part of it to your liking instead of killing yourself?
A more generic reason is that things can always get better, and if you're seriously thinking about ending it, you can always start changing your life more radically in hopes of achieving positive change. Maybe not in a quit your job and take all the drugs kind of way, but to simply increase 'exploration' of all kinds of experiences you have not tried yet. How many types of human living have you experienced and how many are there?
One also needs to look into how many of 'basic needs' are not met, given that we are just animals after all. And without certain basic things is very hard for us to feel happy. Spending time reading about the human mind and body can be very helpful here. A common idea is that certain kinds of depression are simply an adaption to a certain kind of environment.
Other than that I'm not sure what to say, it might help others help you if you explained why you feel this way. If you have the energy to do so.
Coolguy1337
1yr ago
At least to some types of people, those communities are extremely dangerous. I fell for the old 'me_irl' memes of old during a few years when I spend a lot of time at home due to illness. I've never really been one to be tricked into believing things when speaking to people in the real world, however those kind of reddit communities manages to warp my mind a lot. Despite never even commenting. Some combination of being tired, agreeable and a bit neurotic?
I see so many people in real life everyday suffering from similar things and I just want to shake them and tell them to throw the phone away. But I don't know how. I wonder what will be said in the future about this time period.
Coolguy1337
1yr ago
From where I'm from heavy-drinking(occasionally!) is not a big deal. However people who become terrible people when drinking are. In fact the drinking is often used to identify these people. So in my uninformed opinion, I would worry about that if anything.
Coolguy1337
1yr ago
Sorry for not replying, got lost in the real world with its real words.
The main idea is whether or not they are using sentences and thoughts that they themselves derived, or copied from other people. You can also look at whether or not the intention of the communication is to Win the Conversation, or communicate clearly in order to interface better with reality. Sometimes it can be very scary to notice how few people in certain communities actually create new thoughts. How many people are deciding what is true or not? One of the things that make us so adaptable to different environments is probably the fact that the main human algorithm running in groups doesn't interface with these environments directly.
The reason why I mentioned age is because I do not think most people start out this way as children, having worked with kids a lot, it constantly surprised me how much more real that the thoughts of children can be. They were almost always wrong (bcuz kidz r dum), but they usually contained a certain real insight that adults who play The Game lack. I'm not sure if it's a physical process of growing up (lack of neuroplasticity maybe?), or if it gets beaten out of people.
I really tried to explain it the best I could but I feel it's still not very clear. I do however not have more time so hopefully it us good enough.
Coolguy1337
1yr ago
If you ever have the energy to do so. I'd love if you wrote more on this subject because I think it's very much worth discussing (and I very rarely see good discussions about it). I very much agree with what you're saying, however, for some reason, most people do not seem to get this and it infuriates me (because of the damage it causes). Or at least they do not accept it if stated literally while sometimes their actions do indicate that they notice it in someway.
It's also often the STEM guys that seem to fall for this the most (and inflict the most damage on others). Typical (basic) examples are belittling others for enjoying going to the cinema or borrowing movies at physical stores, instead of just watching it on NetflixTM (because it's more efficient). And it does seem to make an impact given that I've noticed a lot of people make disclaimers on the vein of 'I know this isn't efficient, but I still like the experience'.
Coolguy1337
1yr ago
Been lurking for many years and this was the first thread that compelled me to create an account. I work in academia and frankly i find the high regard for that place here pretty funny. A decade or so ago, before i started studying mathematics I was extremely nervous. I though I'd be the dumbest kid there because the regard of academia was so high. Turns out that I can now count on one hand the amount of people I've met there who I regard as smarter than guys from the group i regularly play video games with. And they were not the ones "known" for being intelligent.
What these people, in academia do have, however, is drive, much more than sense. People who do things for the sake of having done them, people who build things for the sake of having built them, people who write papers for the sake of having written them, people who chase status because that was what they were born to do. Well perhaps they are smart, I mean they do succeed in generating status for themselves, some even publish things worth reading if you don't zoom out far enough. I mean a new theorem is a new theorem right? (spawling, unending complexity be damned (when are we dealing with that?)) But I would not classify them as intelligent, nor would I classify the discourse there as intelligent. But publishing a new machine learning model that will do an untold amount of damage is nothing to sneeze at. I mean you're winning right?
I believe that in order to have good discourse one needs to remove (bad) status from the equation, because otherwise that optimization will drown out everything else. This is in large part what clusters of academia has been. Give a bunch of rich and smart people maximum status, so they may discuss ideas without the worst status games. Unfortunately it never lasts, since optimal status-seekers, those pesky ones, are always one step behind, copying what works as fast as they can because copying is cheap. Doing their absolute best at pretending to interact with the real world. So the novel, intelligent discussion will always be in the places where even the high-class people aren't even aware exists, constantly moving (are we rediscovering something that ends with -ion). Because if they were aware, they would have driven out all the bright kids. Or sometimes they are even hidden in plain sight explaining complicated things simply upon unaware audiences.
Case study: https://youtube.com/watch?v=PGv4ixLllWo
In my opinion, I think TM is pretty good but with a somewhat high variance between posters. Especially for it's size and the fact that it's public. And it's funny how some of you keep degrading it, but perhaps that's why it's still good (even if I think it dipped when leaving reddit). If we convinced ourselves that writing here gave us status, suddently the internal incentive for truth and understanding (that atleast some here possess) would be replaced with something external (i.e winning).
You never notice the good old days when you're living them do you.
There was a quote from Anna Karenina that appeared on /r/slatestarcodex awhile back that made me cry. Most replies to it missed at least what I initially felt reading it.
"Konstantin Levin regarded his brother as a man of great intelligence and education, noble in the highest sense of the word, and endowed with the ability to act for the common good. But, in the depths of his soul, the older he became and the more closely he got to know his brother, the more often it occurred to him that this ability to act for the common good, of which he felt himself completely deprived, was perhaps not a virtue but, on the contrary, a lack of something – not a lack of good, honest and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of life force, of what is known as heart, of that yearning which makes a man choose one out of all the countless paths in life presented to him and desire that one alone. The more he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergei Ivanovich and many other workers for the common good had not been brought to this love of the common good by the heart, but had reasoned in their minds that it was good to be concerned with it and were concerned with it only because of that. And Levin was confirmed in this surmise by observing that his brother took questions about the common good and the immortality of the soul no closer to heart than those about a game of chess or the clever construction of a new machine."
I'm not sure how to phrase my thoughts on it and upon closer inspection I'm not sure if it even matches the text accurately. But here goes two attempts:
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Falling for motivated reasoning is very easy, and pretty much impossible to do if oneself has a stake in the outcome. Therefore the highest quality (if one counts all the variables...) a human may produce will tend to cluster around people being obsessed, but largely uncaring of the meta around it. This maps pretty closely to the bus ticket theory linked below and is hardly a novel idea, but I think it bears repeating. But perhaps this is not even true, because optimizing, in many ways, is pretty simple. You grind the information down into larger and larger chunks, until you can move them around in your head with the same difficulty as walking. Then improvements will arrive automatically with a brain that's big enough and a lot of time. That guy with a mathematics phd, welp.
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In someways being good enough means you do not have to chase status, because you know, deep down, that if you tried, you'd win. Once you know that, challenging people without a handicap just feels cruel. Therefore you can spend your effort fixing real things instead, unburdened by the status anxiety of the other ones. Where can you find these people, you ask. Try looking at the way people talk. How many real words are they using? Are we sure the human species is not effectively bimodal at the age of 40?
I apologize for any incoherences, logical and sematic leaps, poor grammar, spelling, you name it (look I'm doing it!). I've never really written anything outside of science "TM" and this took an embarrassing amount of time to compose without becoming a complete schizopost (not a real word!).
But maybe I'm just reclassifying intelligence to define me. I've had a bad day/week/life (3!) and need to pat myself on the back.
One of the most common ways I've noticed it is that they sit in really odd ways despite never having stretched once in their lives. Also being double-jointed in the arm is something people love to showcase. Physical flexibility -> Mental flexibility? Haha.
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