TwiceHuman
1yr ago
I see, I just went by skincolor. If possible, I don't want to overcomplicate things by taking "jews are in a super-position of white and non-white, collapsing to the state which benefits them the most at any given time" seriously. Genetically they might be a little different, though, I'm even open to the idea that jews are objectively superior in some sense (e.g. often intelligent), but I think they're also inferior in others. The use of deception is an indicator that one has difficulties competing fairly, after all.
Despite being white I don't care that much if another race is "superior" though, the only hill I'm willing to die on is that "mid" is too harsh an assessment
TwiceHuman
1yr ago
Oops, yeah, thanks! But if you use the Method of Loci, you can technically have both!
Apologies in advance for the long reply. Read what you want and ignore the rest
1: Is not hard to fix. It's arguably easier to throw away the restrictions that society has told you to place on yourself. You can be more true to yourself and be more successful as a result.
2 is harder. I got an Asian girlfriend myself, seemed easier all things considered.
I have to disagree that human problems are difficult. I think that the non-existence of these problems is the natural state. Society messed up when it created obesity, it introduced new problems which do not occur naturally. Most foods I see in stores have about 10% sugar, and even most "healthy" food is fraud (the apple juice is sugar-water with chemicals which taste like apple). Even if society can find a way to solve these problems, it also created them. My grandma grows her food in her own garden, these problems are alien to her.
Unwanted pregnancy is a good argument though, since it's natural. It's a feature though, rather than a bug. Your body knows exactly what it's doing. The same applies to depression and such, it's no accident, it's a strategy to increase yours odds of survival. I think it's good that self-modification is so difficult (in fact, it's likely difficult because those who were good at it didn't pass on their genes, meaning that wireheading killed them).
Wire-heading is really dangerous. If you do any, I recommend gratitude meditation (since it won't interferer with your functioning). Many forms of wire-heading can effectively destroy people. When girls grow up watching disney movie depictions of love, notice how many years it takes to reverse the standards and how many disappointments they must experience. If you feel pleasure 10 times stronger than anything real life would offer you naturally, it's really hard to go back. Gratitude meditation makes you enjoy real life more though, which is why it's safer.
Whoever builds it is always going to be optimising it for society's benefit
Yeah, or income, and that would ruin it. That's how society functions. But it's not how we have to function, nor is it how everyone is forced to function. I don't feel any desire to optimize for socities benefit personally. These destructive incentives seem to emerge statistically. A company need not be evil, but companies are evil. A person need not be self-serving, but people are self-serving. The answers to all social struggles are quite simple. There's no real weights keeping people down. You can pirate "No More Mr. Nice Guy", "The University of Success" and "The Dating Black Book" and perhaps "12 rules of life" and read them in a few days. Internalize the gold nuggets which resonate with you and you're already ahead (the average person is very far from their potential)
You write as if some people are lower and some people are higher, and as if only years of hard work can ever hope to change this fact... But that's only true for ones socioeconomic position. Mental domains (social skills, happiness, charisma, confidence, likability, etc.) are completely mallable. Even if you've been a coward all your life, you can suddenly start being like John McAfee. Not acting like, but being like.
Helping shy people 1-on-1 is not difficult for me, I've done it many times. The hardest part is helping them believe in themselves, rather than to believe in you (even if you're prepared for this). It's also hard to keep them from falling in love with you (seriously. And gender doesn't matter.) I know a guy who involves everyone he meets in fun activities. It feels natural when he does it. You might feel like it's awkward, but it only gets awkward if you act like it is. Just pretend it's not awkward, and be casual and unconcerned (but friendly), and it will probably work out. They will likely relax when they notice that you don't seem to be uncomfortable because of them. People mirror eachother a lot, and you can control your side of the equation.
I think it's fine that people naturally fit into a position. Not everyone can be at the top, due to how hierarchies work. But I don't think lower positions are meant to be as terrible as they are. Consider a family which owns a dog - the dog is at the very bottom, right? But everyone takes care of it and treats it well. You'll be okay a long as you don't have unlikable traits.
Teaching people how to be likable is not difficult if you know how, but it probably takes a small books worth of information in total to communicate all the axioms (but in order to find all of them you have to read 100s of books and do some introspection as well). But if you follow the axioms, you literally cannot fail. There's not even any need to sell your soul, nor to roleplay and pretend. Of course, this alone will not make you into a millionare, but you could act with the exact confidence of a millionare if you wanted to.
TwiceHuman
1yr ago
I don't think you can compare jobs like that, since a society needs a variety of trades to function. If we identify "the best job" and educate every single person in that, it will quickly stop being the best job. Society forms a hierarchy, but the top of the hierarchy is made possible by the bottom. I don't think it's fair to take the winners in isolation and say "everyone should be like them", for instance, concluding that every person should be a CEO so that every person could be rich and high status. So we have to be careful how we apply the rule.
But if creation scientists are more healthy (I think health is the closest we get to an objective metric), then I think we can conclude that their values are superior in a way (and to be exact - they're more in line with nature). So what if they're irrational, delusional, or "wrong"? That's just theory, and theory exists to aid reality. Reality will always beat theory. If they enjoy life, have many children, and have less mental issues on average (which seems to be the case), why not consider their ways superior?
TwiceHuman
1yr ago
Have you any of you solved some political, philosophical or historical issues? By which I mean that you came up with a bunch of axioms and that you never had to update your beliefs ever again. Edit: If not, I'm interested in hearing why. Many people here have probably discussed these topics for many years already, have you really made no meta-progress?
I will start:
Freedom of speech is optimal (Even if you want to reduce misinformation, it seems that posting the wrong answer and waiting for somebody to correct you is a strictly better strategy than censoring the wrong answer)
If you can convince everyone that you're an oppressed minority, you're not. That you can get the majority on your side proves that you are not discriminated against or in a vulnerable position, as being in a vulnerable and oppressed position is defined by having the majority against you.
One is innocent until proven guilty (This is partly subjective, it's a personal value that punishing an innocent person is worse than letting a guilty person walk free. If you disagree, simply reverse the axiom)
If your biggest problem in life is being called slurs for your inborn traits - your life is pretty good and you don't have any serious problems. You're therefore privileged.
Most groups who blame a more successful group for all of their problems are simply unable to cope with their own inadequacy, and aim to subvert the more successful group by manipulating their values in a way which makes an equalization appear as 'justice', so that the more successful group feels bad and gives their advantage to the less successful group. This instinctial (which is why a dog begging for food will exploit your sympathy, so that you perceive yourself as a bad guy for not giving the dog what it wants)
You can judge things by the outcome they produce. An unsuccessful person has no right to lecture a successful person by demanding that the successful person imitate the unsuccessful person. This generalizes - Anime is doing much better than western cartoons, so it's simply better. If Christians have better mental health, then Christianity is superior in at least one way. If children who are spanked grow up to be better people than those who weren't, then parents who spanked their kids were in the right. Reality is in the right, even when it appears immoral or irrational.
Reducing "bad things" doesn't seem to work, but producing "good things" does. Trying not to worry doesn't work, but thinking happy thoughts does. Telling people what to do is better than telling them what not to do. I'm not sure why, but I've checked, this rule seems solid.
TwiceHuman
1yr ago
I've long felt that human instinct is breaking apart, since before the internet got political. That good times result in "weak men", but also that "weak men" are sick (which I mean literally). I have some rules of thumb for healthy natures, like "standing up for oneself", "not always seeking ones own advantage", "admiration of superiors rather than jealousy", "a disdain for easy victories", "high standards", "will stop attacking another person once it's clear that they've won", and things like that.
On top of the negotiation power of men being limited, the way they use what they have is pathetic - they line up to give away even more of their negotiation power. If this is actually what's causing the stages of the demographic transition model, it would be really interesting! Great insight, I will give it some though.
The worst one is South Korea, and they're well-known for their feminism problem. I'm not sure if X caused Y or Y caused X, or how strong each direction is, but the two do seem related like you say.
From my limited experience of Thailand, simping does occur, but the culture is still quite traditional (well, I expect that large cities and smaller villages are wildly different here. I think it's because of higher population densities in cities, and because big cities are the most connected to the rest of the world, making them more vulnerable to external influence).
The ratio between men and women might be one of the causes for men losing their value and the world becoming more feminine, but I think there's more (one being the domestication of humanity as described by Nietzsche, another being a consequence of technological advancement, a third being intentional subversion as described by Yuri Bezmenov).
The Kinsey reports (1948 and 1953) apparently lead to the creation of Playboy, and Playboy has had a hand in destroying socities understanding of gender, so this may another origin of a brand of wokeness. There's a lot of articles from the early 2000s internet which discuss the medias role in all of this (you can find them on online archives). They do include words like "illuminati", but that can't be helped, and they describe the issues we're facing today better than most newer articles, so from that perspective they're quite high quality.
Then why are women so afraid of them?
You're right that it would lower the value of women, but these men would remain dysfunctional. Restoring the balance between men and women isn't enough, we have to make sure that the average human being is healthy, or we all lose. Part of what made me healthy was wanting a girlfriend, it gave me something to strive for when money didn't interest me. I still to this day work to earn the acknowledgement of women, and for nothing else than to please my ego. I could make external validation worthless to me, but that would make it even harder for me to meet my goals. Some people grow under pressure, others are destroyed, and it's an interesting puzzle to rotate these vectors correctly (by changing ones interpretation of the world). But if you reduce all vectors to zero, you have nothing to work with. It's like trying to sail in a sea with no wind, I'd rather have a storm.
to want to improve men's social skills under an environment like this
It would put me at a disadvantage if all men improved, but I managed to improve myself in the past, and I like telling others how I did it. I have many more reasons: We could help men become healthier and more masculine, which would make them more aggressive towards the mega corporations trying to exploit us. Censorship would likely also decrease as men become more confident, as being afraid of words and opinions would start to seem like a silly concept once again.
TwiceHuman
1yr ago
Sure!
It absolutely did
After dating apps appeared, dating was ruined as a result, and this quickly started to influence dating outside of said apps as well. If you go back another 20 or 30 years, I'll claim that this wasn't much of an issue, meaning that dating was ruined by something recent (be it wokeness, feminism, signaling games or moralizers. With dating apps serving to accelerate us towards the nash equilibrium).
Now, people complain about the past because it was "immoral" and "unequal", and fair enough, but if you're on the side of modern morality and equality, then you're supporting the forces which are making healthy human relationships into a rare occurrence. People who want to "improve the world" in a way which rejects tradition are to blame that the world is getting worse, and it doesn't matter if they have IQs in the 140s, that they love altruism, that they have mathematical frameworks for reducing poverty and "saving the planet", they will fail, life will get worse for everyone, and they will continue to double down on their methods because they sound correct and make sense theoretically, especially to other smart people.
If the real world failed you, it's either because:
1: Society told you to be a "Good person", and you became somebody that society approved of but that women had no interest in. In other words, society told you how to act in order to benefit society, and not how to act in order to benefit yourself or be popular with women.
2: You're a reasonable human being, but the women around you bought into feminism, or have so many men to choose between that you can't compete. Once these women start to become reasonable, they're already old (and have high bodycounts or children). This is not yet the case in Asia (I'm afraid it will be soon, but I hope not).
There are people who feel satisfied with very small accomplishments
This is true. But if they could control their own circumstances, then they'd mess everything up for themselves. Imagine this, you're playing a game, and you have the ability to cheat, you literally decide how difficult the game is. Can you prevent yourself from cheating? If you die and lose your items, can you prevent yourself from giving them back to yourself? For every cheaty action you take, you lower the value of everything you worked for, as the subjective value of everything is the same as the amount of work you put into it. It's my understanding that very few people have the self-control to keep such a game fun for themselves. They would have to create something to fight against, something which resists their efforts, which is counterintuitive to them.
It's another understanding of mine that the "optimization mentality" of rat-adjecent communities lead them to maximize rewards, meaning that they are much more likely to ruin the game for themselves than average people. Well-being consists of balance, and both maximizers and minimizers will almost surely fail to achieve this even if they have intelligence, money and cutting-edge technology.
TwiceHuman
1yr ago
I made an attempt: Those who are the most drawn to stoicism are those who need it the most, and therefore those who are the least stoic. Those who are the most into stoicism will be adopting it as a psychological defense mechanism, similarly to how "tough guys" and "nice guys" do.
Those who are actually stoic will trivially be stoic as well. So I think the correlation has a u-shape. The most and the least stoic people might call themselves "stoic", while those in the middle distance themselves. Quite a lot of extremes are easily confused for the opposite extreme (an example I like is autistic people with no social skills sometimes coming across as chads)
That's not exactly true. The effect you're pointing at here didn't seem to happen before modern dating apps. I also find that women treat me much better in Asian communities, so the current hostility and distrust between genders is most likely cultural.
Politics are reaching pathological levels and causing a lot of issues. Another big issue seems to be that women have too many choices (rather than too few) which makes them look for better alternative all the time (and comparison is the thief of all joy or whatever). Many relationships are the most fun the first few months, and then the novelty will wear off, but if these people jump from guy to guy as a consequence of this, then they're messed up in a sense (for instance, addicted to the dopamine rushes associated with the early stages of relationships). It's not a biological fact that most men will end up as losers.
But this is what the Rat community wanted: More technology, more connection, fancy algorithms on which people could compete. The Amish do not seem to have these problems, and women who have only had one sexual partner are much less likely to want a divorce on average. All these problems are a result of materialistic rat-adjecent mentalities. You cannot solve a problem with the same way of thinking which caused the problem in the first place.
It's difficult, by doable (and when compared to engineering cat-girls, downright trivial) to become a high-value man. This won't help you get a high-quality women though, unless you're in an environment in which they exist, so women will have to improve themselves as well. It's nothing difficult, they'd just have to be feminine, which would happen automatically if our society didn't hinder the process.
As far as I know, forced marriage was mostly done out of necessity, but a second (and very common) cause is that teenagers have sex and get pregnant, which is a social no-no. So they rush a marriage, because then it's okay. Crisis averted I guess. This still happens today by the way.
And no, I'm not a drug addict, and neither am I so psychologically broken that I can find enjoyment in effortless pleasure. It's sad that you even have to ask. Even actual mice will resist free cocaine if they have a space to play around in
Then the problem is over-constrained and has no solution
We need to get rid of modern politics, it's awful. We also need to get rid of modern views of human nature which are entirely false (the erasure of gender, tabula rasa, the fear of masculinity, the lie that women should be masculine). Oh, and likely porn as well. This would basically solve every problem you listed.
In case you're banned, I suppose you can't reply to this. But I will have to disagree that whites are mid.
Most of the giants of humanity (Einstein, Tesla, Hawking, any "great person") were white. This is a good marker of intelligence. Asians are better at rote memorization, but that is a very bad marker of higher intelligence, and it's mostly a result of spending 40% more hours studying on average.
I will have to disagree with creativity too when it means "originality" due to the collectivist nature of Asia. If you mean "artistic skills" however, I will have to agree with you, asians win.
Working with constraints results in creativity for everyone. There's a reason why writers block mostly occur as a result of a blank page. This is how the human mind works, and it's merely a coincidence that the Chinese are more restrained at the moment.
As for "How good the look after age 30", I mostly agree, but it doesn't seem very related to other metrics.
TwiceHuman
1yr ago
I'm not the person you replied to, but I share his dislike for most of the Rat community. I think Yudkowsky gets it, though. (For a wire-header to be able to enjoy life, they'd have to create artifical challenges for themselves, not unlike those found in real life. So they might as well just engage with real life)
One of the obvious scenarios which threaten humanity is that some people have bad social skills and that they don't have an environment in which they can improve (or alternatively, that they can wirehead the reward of socializing, which is much more pleasant for them than actual improvement).
Giving "virtual waifus" to "incels" doesn't solve any issues, it just suppresses symptoms. By the way, I find it strange that, in an imaginary scenario where we approach AGI level of intelligence, we cannot seem to imagine coming up with a way to help people who have terrible social skills. I'm very puzzled by how a community can have so many knowledable (and sometimes intelligent) people and still have such shallow, naive, and simplified takes on serious topics.
TwiceHuman
1yr ago
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.
used as an excuse
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.
I just look at the head
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.
TwiceHuman
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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?
Sorry for the delay in responding. By the way, I like your username!
Right, my model assumed that neutrality does not exist, that you're either for or against something.
Notice that I wrote "Convince everybody" and "get the majority on your side". I should have made it even clearer than this, but my point was that the ratio of group sizes is not what matters ultimately. It doesn't matter if you're 1% of the population or 90%. What matters is what society as a whole thinks about you. In order for my model to work again, you simply average the sentiment. If 40% of people hate you, and 60% are neutral, then the average is dislike (because (40*-2 + 60*0) is less than 0). If society as a whole can agree that you're in need of protection, then it cannot be true. It's true only when society does not think this.
You're correct that the direction of the inequality is not as important as the ratio/strength of inequality (so being 49.9% of the whole or 50.1% feels about the same), with the exception of votes/elections/etc where a few percentage points mean everything. The results of an election is basically the direction of the inequality, and the strengths of every sentiment basically doesn't matter (a vote is worth a single vote, it doesn't matter if you support a candidate slightly or love them, or if you dislike other choices or hate them). Voting is a function which throws away a lot of information.
Example 4 shows that to be an "oppressed minority" it matters that the overall sentiment of society is against you, rather than just anyone. Thought I also argue this above, example 5 shows us that in order to measure the disadvantage you hold in society, you have to multiply the amount of people who are against you by the extent to which they're against you. You should also multiply this by how powerful they are (if those against you are 10 times more powerful, they count for 10 times more). Now, simply find out if the sum of the sentiments in your favor minus the sum of sentiments against you, is bigger or smaller than 0. On the makro scale, this decides if you're oppressed or not, and the average sentiment is necessarily going to be the opposite of what it claims unless it's exactly 0 (If society as a whole arrives at the conclusion that society as a whole is against you, we arrive at a contradiction).
And in order to criticize the idea from the other direction, I want to point out that groups like the KKK are, by definition, minority groups suppressed by the majority, and that this is precisely why we do not grant them this status. We collectively agree not to protect them against the collective. There's a "paradox" here (it's actually just a contradiction). It's similar to the problem of creating an institution whose job it is to make sure that institutions do not abuse their power. No institution is going to evaluate itself in a neutral manner because the evalation finds place from the inside and not the outside, and for the same reason, society necessarly cannot evaluate itself fairly. Objectivity can only exist between an object and something outside of it which is deemed to be more correct, and you eventually reach the largest scope possible.
I agree that, when reality disagrees with a model, it's because the model is wrong. But reality agrees much more with my models than with politics, since politics is basically a competition in bending reality to ones favor through the use of deception. Most popular statements are wrong, meaning that they cannot possibly be true. Try evaluating Poppers paradox of tolerance mathematically, and you'll find that people who use it as an argument simply do not understand what it implies. I'm not very good at mathematics on paper, but many mathematical concepts have become part of my intuition.
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