TwiceHuman
11d ago
Is it generally okay to reply to sort of old posts?
I think that emotions are more appreciated than what is commonly claimed, but that it matters a lot which emotions are shown, and when. Any show of emotions which envokes greed or reliance on others tend to reduce ones value (which is basically because you let your problems become other peoples problems).
We can learn the "real" preferences of people through fiction. Most will tell you that women don't like masculine traits, but if you read a novel for women, you will find that some of the "attractive men" in these stories have both masculine and feminine traits. In fiction, you will also see a lot of strong emotion, often, even from the lead male characters that women thirst for. What's important is how and when the emotion is shown. One description many women seem to like is "hard on the outside, soft on the inside". It's a skill. Or if done unintentionally, a result of the right experiences in life and the right upbringing.
It would be nice if there was more research on these things, but I haven't found any which approaches the topic in the same way that I am
TwiceHuman
17d ago
I don't think humans really attack themselves, they just close themselves off of the world in a manner which is unhealthy. It's like dying of thirst in front of a puddle of dirty water (edit: Or just water which you don't know the purity of before you drink it). Nietzsche advocated isolation for the purpose of growth, but he also wrote "whoever would remain clean among human beings must understand how to wash himself even with dirty water". I wonder if he thought of this as being possible.
It was much less true in the past, I think (at least, in our own communities. I'm not sure about our relation with strangers/outgroups). We've become much more exploitative, we're also more prone to look for the worst in others, as well as to look for weaknesses which can be exploited. I don't think old people are easier to scam because old people are dumb, I think it's because society has gotten less honest faster than old people have managed to adapt to that fact.
We're in the age of resource exhaustion, and "trust" is no less of a resource than oil is. Even "dignity" and "reputation" are resources. Companies like Blizzard are currently burning these. Resources like honor and respect are nearly depleted in the western world in my opinion. Mathematically, I think the solution is to optimize for the long-term rather than the short-term. If you optimize for an infinitely long period of time, it appears to me like you're immune to all social dilemma's and things like Goodhart's law and other harmful incentives. So the entire problem seems to be excessive short-term optimization.
Perhaps current parasites are no worse than those of old, but there seems to be many more of them now that we're all global rather than members of small local communities. And being "local" had advantages, I think it's the cause of the whole "high trust society" thing. A king would suffer if they hurt their own kingdom, so incentives like that protected against evil somewhat. But now, you can earn money by hurting somebody 1000s of miles away.
I'd ask "Which is best, to adapt well to a sick society, or to adapt poorly to a sick society"? Personally, I'm not entirely sure.
TwiceHuman
17d ago
Psyops about having less kids because of the climate crisis
This is just propaganda. It's often said in a condescending and accusatory tone, along the line of "do X or you're a bad person". You can recognize this sort of thing by its use of manipulation methods like guilt tripping, instilling fear or insecurity, or making you feel like the world will be against you if refuse. Advice should benefit you and want nothing in return. I find older self-help books (pre-2000) to be rather enjoyable
TwiceHuman
17d ago
I don't entirely disagree with negative traits of modern people, but resisting submission does make sense from one perspective. Think of it like an immune system. Most people who preach something merely want your money. Most people who do speeches merely want you to invest in their cause. Most charities are scams. Everything competes for our attention and uses advanced techniques to manipulate us for the sake of making money.
Over time, one learns to have one hell of a strong defense mechanism. I can drink alcohol until I struggle to stand, and I will still remain rational. I'm immune to hypnosis, I sometimes notice that I'm dreaming because I realize that something is wrong. I've been suicidal and I've been rather manic, and in both cases, those around me wouldn't notice unless I told them.
To trust somebody with all your heart, to give yourself to something else, to invest 100% in one thing, to let down your guard entirely, these are all powerful choices, and people who can choose them tend to be wonderful people, but life simply teaches us that this is naive and dangerous. So we become superficial narcissists who don't commit to anything unless it offers immediate rewards.
I hope to be more healthy, but it requires staying in a healthy environment, and there's less of these by the year.
You can't make all advice part of yourself, though. For the same reason that you cannot be every class at once in an RPG game. There's very much "paths" to take in life, and advice which is good for some people, but incompatible with ones path. "one man's meat is another man's poison" and such. Nietzsche seems to value a sort of purity when he says "With fifty blotches painted on your face and limbs, thus you sat there to my amazement, you people of the present!". He certainly seems to advice against nitpicking a bit of everything and plastering it on yourself.
TwiceHuman
26d ago
I think anxiety can cause both. Fear either grounds you strongly in the moment, or it makes you mentally escape to somewhere else. This is essentially the mental version of "fight or flight". When I was younger, anxiety always made me deeply immersed in whatever was going on, but as of about three years ago, it sometimes lead me to disconnect, despite my conscious self having no desire to run away (I'm not even afraid of the suffering that my brain is trying to protect me from). It's basically the ratio of thought going to the present moment rather than to a birds-eye view of the present moment. You could also call it "living in experience", "living in the moment","experiencing things directly", "immersion" and the opposite you could call "living in your head", "excessive reflection", "excessive self-awareness", "disillusionment".
Similar to hardware interrupts, certain things may trigger your brain to "take a step back" and rethink things. This step goes up a layer from the current one, and looks down on it to make sure that it seems alright. This can happen multiple times, so that you can meta-perspectives and meta-meta perspectives on things. If you try to anchor yourself in the moment while an upper layer isn't satisfied, it basically steals a chunk of your working memory by "running in the background". The set of things your brain is processing in the background might end up taking up more than half your mental resources, until you're ruminating, daydreaming and worrying, and until your focus in the present is repeatedly hijacked by the processing of unresolved problems. It helps to write things down, make plans, and to use a calender, for the more things you feel are in control, the less resources your brain will use on its background processing.
For some people, the brain prefers to stay in the moment, where it will panic, react strongly, cry for help, or other things, rather than making these mental retreats.
Source: Mostly introspection.
TwiceHuman
27d ago
I'm probably in the tail-end of the openness-trait, but I value authenticity and aesthetics, and these categories are so loose/vague that I tolerate a lot of diversity of thought. I want more stories which are different and unique in the sense that Made In Abyss is. I feel like art is a kind of escapism, and that making statements about current real-world events undermines this escape
TwiceHuman
27d ago
That doesn't seem like a way to generate prime numbers directly, but to sort of chip at the problem by creating a scaffolding around it and then getting close and closer. It doesn't feel elegant like some math does. And yeah, I think that pure maths is largely useless (because its scope is wider, i.e. less restricted than our reality). We can find interesting properties in math which hints at properties in reality, though. At high levels of abstraction, these things overlap. "The dao of which can be spoken is not the real dao" is a logical conclusion, since you can judge the limits of a system from within said system. Gödel did the same with math. You can use a similar line of thinking to derive that everything is relative (there's nothing outside of everything, so there can be no external point of reference).
Maybe this is "abstract reasoning" rather than math? I'm not sure what it is, but this ability is useful in general. I don't suffer from the philosophical problem of "meaning in life" because I recognized that the question was formulated wrong (which is why there's no answer!). I also figured out enlightenment, which you usually cannot reach by thinking because it requires not thinking. But you can sort of use thinking to show that thinking is the cause of the issue, and then "break free" like that.
Edit: Nietzsche came up with his "Eternal recurrence" through logic, showing that if time goes back infinitely, the world would already have been looping forever. Same with his "Perspectivism", that there's no facts, only perspectives. He wasn't a mathematician, he was just highly intelligent.
But I'm sort of weird, most subjects I think about don't fit any common categories
TwiceHuman
29d ago
I think men and women are quite different.
I'd like to conclude something like "Women are more interested in rock stars and movie stars than in politicians", but I can't find any studies on the attractiveness of politicians. You know how some murderers in prison get fanmail from women? I don't think that happens as much to politicans. I have no evidence of this, but the game of politics is rather gross to me, and I can't imagine why a women would be attracted to a man who is playing a game which won't even allow him to be genuine for a moment.
As for that woman - it looks like a shit test to me. Women want to be targeted by high-value bold men while avoiding low-value bold men. Somebody who can break the rules because they're powerful awnd because they understand the rules well. So they speak nonsense, being brats, hoping that some high-value man comes around and puts them in their place. I think the whole "You can't handle a woman like me" thing is a taunt, they want to be handled. That said, this could also just be agreeableness/conformity, or the kind of mental illness which makes them side with everything weak on principle (except their own in-group, which is superior because it sides with the weak. Broken maternal instinct perhaps?). Politics has too many layers of deception, I'm afraid that a model which makes too much sense might actually be wrong. I stick to the evopsych view of "high value" since it doesn't have all these distorted layers
TwiceHuman
29d ago
These questions are all meaningful to me. I'm weird, though. I'm not even particularly good at math.
I hate dynamic programming, but it seems that you can't "jump ahead" when calculating prime numbers. This feels like computational irreducibility. The world in which this property exists, and the one in which it doesn't, are meaningfully different.
The Collatz conjecture, and BB, relate to the ability to generate large things from small ones. It seems relevant for this question: Can you design a society which is both novel and stable over infinite time? Would it have to loop, repeating the same chain of events forever, or is there an infinite sequence of events which never terminates, but still stays within a certain set of bounds? If we became all-powerful and created an utopia, we might necessarily trap ourselves in it forever (because you cannot break out of a loop. If you loop once, you loop forever). It may also be that any utopia must necessarily be finite because it reaches a state which is not utopian in finite time.
Some other questions are about the limitations of math. It's relevant whether a system of everything is possible or not (if truth is relative or absolute). If trade-offs are inherent to everything, then "optimization" is simply dangerous, it means were destroying something every time we "improve" a system. It would imply that you cannot really improve anything, that you can only prioritize different things at the cost of others. For instance, a universal paperclip AI might necessarily have to destroy the world, not because it's not aligned, but because "increase one value at the cost of every other value" is optimization.
I also have a theory that self-fulfilling prophecies are real because reality has a certain mathematical property. In short, we're part of the thing we're trying to model, so the model depends on us, and we depend on the model. This imples that magic is real for some definitions of real, but it also means that some ideas are dangerous, and that Egregores and such might be real.
TwiceHuman
29d ago
Here's some of my own insights, hopefully some of them are new or useful to you. I will compare artistic people to those who try to understand the world. The "critique society and power" group can be dismissed as politics/tribalism/activism/preaching, it's part power-struggle and part mental illness, so I will exclude it.
Academic communities tend to have a consensus, and to punish those who challenge it. This is much less prevalent in artisic communities, as most people there recognize that many different styles can be appealing for different reasons. You could argue that this is a kind of tribalism, but I think it's also a way of viewing the world: That there's one correct answer (that truth is unique), that truth is universal (rather than possibly local), and that everything can be made legible (that logic and math is sufficiently powerful to explain everything which can be explained), and that you can unify everything without ruining it in the process (that a theory of everything is possible).
Artistic people do indeed share a part of themselves when they share their art, or at least reveal something about themselves. This doesn't happen much in academia, you don't have to take responsibility for the discoveries you make, for they're true or false independently of you. Academia is about discoveries where art is about creations.
I also think that bad art is harmless to other art, and mostly harmless to other people. Making a mistake in academic work could potentially harm a lot of people, or slow down progress of "the whole". This punishes experimentation.
Finding flaws in work is a costly mental heuristic. It's basically conditioning yourself to only see the bad aspects of things. But while this seems to make academics treat eachother harshly, I find that this is less rare in artistic spaces. What usually happens instead is that artists are extremely hard on themselves and their own work, but encouraging of other people. I think artists who are unhappy with their own are similar to people who undergo plastic surgery again and again. Staring at something for too long seems like a bad idea, be it your own work or your own face.
The mean of the distributions of personality traits also seem different between the two groups. Artistic people are more subjective, less analytical, more social, and they tend to expand their worldview until they get lost in it, whereas many mathematically minded people tend to reduce reality to abstract models and thus tend towards nihilism and simplicity. I'd also argue that scholary types tend to have bad taste by default, - you have to be a bit of a pervert to want to look beneath the surface of everything (unlike artists, who appreciate the surface, or use it to conceal the depth of life that they cannot deal with)
I think that artistic people and academic derive enjoyment from different things. I love correcting people who are wrong, I think it feels really good when I get a new insight, and climbing the mountain of knowledge is also a joy in itself. Art is beauty, the joy of creation, it's experience, and it's anti-nihilistic. Art is quite human, whereas the objective is simply anti-human (another user on here probably disagrees very strongly with this, but I did the math)
I've once heard that intelligence is inversely correlated with instinct. It could be because instinct is innate intelligence, and that this competes with generalized intelligence, since the latter has to be able to overwrite it in order for you to update your beliefs and adapt to a new environment than what your innate intelligence is fit for. It could also simply be a trade-off between developing yourself, and aligning yourself with something else until you yourself disappear. Do you want to chop off a part of yourself in order to fit in, or will you believe in that part of yourself and work to make it more appealing?
I guess that people of a field tend to grow tired of teaching beginners because they have to explain the same things maybe 50 or 100 times. First time I saw somebody use Popper's paradox of tolerance as an argument, I though "Hmm, something about this doesn't seem right". Now I simply tell them "You're acting in bad faith, and you know it. You also don't know what comes before or after this quote, since you've never read the paper that it's from. You didn't think it through, you merely copy-pasted it because it seems like an authority which agrees with you". Of course, if somebody is so put off by stupid questions, I think they should just delete their stackoverflow account.
Finally, have you noticed the general tendency towards homogeneity? Everything is becoming more alike over time. Academic people are contributing to this problem, wheras artist people don't seem to be. Academia is, from my perspective, excessive order. Many artistic people are a little bit chaotic because they're a little bit crazy, but I personally like that
TwiceHuman
29d ago
I sort of disagree, but only because I do not agree with the definition of "powerful" or "high-status". From an aesthetical, logical, and spiritual perspective, these people possess traits which only mimic good development. From an evopsych perspective, I'm more neutral: Social status is high value in a sense, but excess sociability is also a sign of weakness and therefore low value.
Powerful men might think that this benefits them, but that's only because they're elite normies. Above average in many areas, but not truly intelligent, and therefore unable to consider second and third-order effects. In short, it's locally beneficial and globally harmful.
I agree that this is causing the power-law distribution to get steeper
There's a psychological phenomenon in which people confuse access to information with information that they know. So they will say "I know how to do X" even if they can't do X, as long as they know where to find information on who to do X (a book, Google, personal notes, etc). In the same way, people probably confuse the abilities of AI with their own knowledge and their own skills.
I have to disagree that access is trivial today. I can find nothing much of value on the internet.
Think about it, if you have a new theory, it's not already common knowledge, but all you can find is common knowledge, and anything which goes against common knowledge is censored or pruned, which is why finding such has gotten almost impossible. Furthermore, LLMs are only competent at common tasks, so the further you get in a field, the less useful LLMs become. All the best information is necessarily rare, and both search engines and LLMs are made to filter out the rare.
Your post did give me something important to think about, though! I thought that we were getting more systematic and materialistic in the western world, categorizing people and misinterpreting labels as being concrete pieces of reality, because of our scientism. It did not occur to me that it could be a natural consequence of people being bombarded by information. Still, people seem to think in different ways in Asia, are they really consuming less information than us?
Lastly, I take multidisciplinary theories to be a natural outcome of high intelligence, I don't think it can occur naturally very often, since most people simply cannot see abstract relationships across disciplines. Are you not calling yourself "crank" simply to beat other people to it? Because you've been call crazy enough times to doubt yourself? Because, like I said, other people fail to understand you. The only situation I can think of where stupid people connect seemingly unrelated things is skizophrenia, and the theories of skizophrenics are usually pretty poor.
Do you know the book "The Master and His Emissary"? According to the author of this book, a cultural shift in the west has caused us to value the left hemisphere's processing of the world, at the cost of the right (holistic, contextual, connected to lived reality). I fully agree with this observation, but I'm not sure which reason is correct. I haven't read the book, but like me, the author probably calls the effect cultural because it doesn't seem to occur in Asia. Interestingly enough, skizophrenia is consistent with left-hemisphere dominant thinking. I personally think that the increase in autism diagnoses might be related as well.
I for one welcome solipsisms. I'm tired of "the consensus" eating everything, and every intellectual community asking me for a "source" the second I come up with any original ideas, and dismissing whatever I say unless I can find an authority which came to the same conclusion. But I also predict that this effect you're afraid of will never occur - we will experience the exact opposite. Everything tends towards homogeneity (the first I've seen notice it is Nietzsche), there's no generative power of uniqueness anymore, LLMs literally lack the ability to generate uniqueness, and society
I think you find great enjoyment in thinking, but I have done enough of it to realize that it's similar to day-dreaming. It's not useful, it's not healthy. Even if you came up with a workable ToE, it wouldn't benefit the world since the world is already too 'legible'.
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