felipec
unbelief
Freedom of speech maximalist who is anti-woke, anti-orthodoxy, anti-establishment, and anti-capitalist.
User ID: 1796
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
Ah, I see. I didn't make it complicated intentionally, it's just a complex topic, at least in my mind. I made the text as simple as I could, the only thing that could be cut out are my comments of my thinking process while I was writing certain portions, but I added them for the readers to put themselves on the shoes of the writer a little bit. Since the topic was intuition, and I feel all of writing is intuition (as is much of art), I thought it was helpful.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
I want to come back to it as well. I didn't research anything at all, I just thought about it a lot. But doing a bit of research afterwards I've found some resources of interest for people who want to explore the topic more.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
Look, I've heard this countless times for decades: "you shouldn't have said X", "you could have said X in a different way", "you come off as Y", etc. But the truth is that my writing style works: it attacks the right people, and repels the wrong people.
I'm not interested in my prose to be "better received", if popularity is what I was aiming for, I wouldn't say what I think at all. So I'm not interested in hearing what I could have said instead of what, or what I could have omitted.
If some readers are put off by one comment I made at the very end that I genuinely thought at the moment of writing that and as a result disregard the whole thing, so be it. I think the right readers could focus on what's important.
If you want to talk about my style, my tone, or why I wrote that particular sentence, I would gladly discuss that somewhere else. In this thread I would hope to discuss the meat of what I said, which unfortunately nobody has commented anything about yet.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
The word "would" implies that was the proposed plan at the time (before USA approved it), not that this is what they finally did.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
I do think that conditional on the US being behind it, it is unlikely that Germany was not also in on it. It cuts through a particularly thorny knot for German leadership, taking a decision out of their hands that had no good political options.
Do you actually believe USA cares about its "allies" or considers them in any way peers?
It has betrayed pretty much all its "allies" to the point it's not trusted anymore by most of the world, and two quotes of Henry Kissinger explain that:
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“To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.”
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“America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests”
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
The more alarming question the article raises is
The more alarming question for USA citizens, sure. But the citizens in Germany would be alarmed in a different way: "USA are not our allies".
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
But look at the motive. Obama opposed it, Trump opposed it and sanctioned, Biden made opposition to it a top priority, multiple officials said they would stop it no matter what, and after the fact claimed it was a tremendous opportunity, and boasted about how glad they are it happened.
Doesn't it strike you as odd that somebody else did what they wanted to happen for more than ten years now?
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
a random Substack
A substack of one of the most decorated and impactful journalists of all time is "random".
OK.
I’d change my mind if mainstream outlets can point to a smoking gun.
So, a genetic fallacy then.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
I still favor a blockage/poor maintenance as the most likely theory
Poor maintenance that just happened to cause exactly what USA had wanted for more than 10 years and has pretty much said they would do if they have to.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
What's conspiratorial about it? They have been opposed for more than ten years, they have implemented sanctions on it and threatened to stop by any means. And afterwards claimed it's a great opportunity, and boasted that they are glad that it's "a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea".
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
There may be an economic motive
It's not mainly economic, it's geopolitical. USA cannot allow Europe to get cozy with Russia, it undermines their worldwide vision of a strong united West.
If USA thought they would get caught they probably wouldn't have done it.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
Of course USA blew it up, no one else had a motive. For more than ten years they have opposed it, sanctioned it, and straight up threatened to stop it any way they possibly can. Only a person who is not paying attention or has no deductive capacity would not be able to conclude that.
Here's a noncomprehensive list of the positions of top U.S. officials and presidents:
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Obama administration opposed the pipeline
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Trump administration sanctioned any company doing work on the pipeline
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Biden administration made opposition to the pipeline a top priority
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Biden said he was "determined to do whatever I can to prevent"
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Nuland said "If Russia invades, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 Will. Not. Move. Forward."
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Biden said "If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it." and after being questioned "I promise you, we will be able to do that."
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After the attack Blinked said the bombing was a "tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy," and "offers tremendous strategic opportunity for years to come."
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Nuland said "Senator Cruz, like you, I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea."
I believe Condoleezza Rice also said something along those lines.
But who could have the motive? That's a puzzler!
Here's a few more articles about the motives, which you will never find in mainstream media:
I see the same fervent faith-based beliefs among self-described rationalists. The only difference is that it's harder to prove them wrong, precisely because more often than not the beliefs are correct.
It's a sort of hot-hand fallacy: if rationality has gotten these 99 things right, what are the chances than the next is going to be wrong? Has to be zero. Right?
Of course, most people are not going to agree, because most people don't see anything wrong with the prevalent orthodoxy of their time.
But logic itself is not set in stone, there's many. See One Right Logic. If you based your entire epistemology on "logic", but turns out many beliefs rest on a feature that other logics don't share, well... You may very well be believing false things that are impossible to prove in your logic.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
I see the three things as different.
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Consciousness: doesn't control anything
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Analytical thinking: more thinking, takes more time
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Rationality: structured rules for thinking
I'm not saying rationality doesn't matter (although I think it's overrated), I'm saying the idea that thoughts can be consciously generated is an illusion.
Consciousness exists, but all it does is observe. It doesn't control anything.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
My thesis is the opposite of @felipec's: all human thought is intuition, and attempts to distill rational thought from intuition serve at best some communicative role; at worst, they are delusions. In both cases, rationality – and conscious thought – is born out of pain of stubborn mismatch, and principally amounts to a rigid pattern on intuition's surface, a tool to communicate with oneself to channel the powers of the whole – either to reduce noise in the system or to suppress doubts, affirming preconceived errors. Don't believe anyone who claims to rely on conscious mind only: he who has tricked himself has only deceit to offer you too.
I don't see how that is opposite. I believe the conscious mind has no control whatsoever, the next step is decided by the subconscious mind, an almost infinitely complex process the conscious mind has no access to (and evolutionarily had no need to). So whatever the conscious mind thinks it's deciding is an illusion.
In my view the question is not consciousness vs. unconsciousness, it's intuition vs. analytical thinking.
Analytical thinking is thinking slow (System 2), intuition is fast thinking (System 1). However, the one deciding to switch gears to analytical thinking is also the subconscious mind, which uses prior training to make that decision, so it's using intuition to decide to not rely on intuition. And at which point will the subconscious decide to stop engaging in analytical thinking? Intuition will be used to decide that a satisfactory answer was reached as well.
So yes, all human thought is ultimately intuition, but analytical thinking is the special case in which the agent does a deeper search which is more computationally intensive and thus appear "slower" to us. Usually this deeper search is forced by a hint that the initial "automatic" response might not be correct.
But the important point is that all thinking builds up intuition, and this is not a view generally accepted. Many people deride intuition as if the conclusions reached by it were not as valuable as those reached by analytical thinking. I think that's the important starting point for discussion.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
Turns out USA did blew out Nord Stream: How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline.
It was obvious to anyone paying attention, but now it's pretty much confirmed.
Of course I already see the people married to the opposite conclusion trying to discredit the journalist (on of the most decorated and impactful journalists of all time), and his sources: anonymous: (as if established publications didn't use anonymous sources).
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
I want to prompt all the contestants: @TheDag, @f3zinker, @felipec, and @Pitt19802.
Did you find the topic difficult to write about?
I think people judging our essays might be very quick to criticize and say: why didn't the writer mention X? how didn't the writer connect Y with Z? (it's obvious)
I think the readers might not be aware of the vast idea space that can be explored. It takes time to explore a branch, and as you do you realize there's many more branches that can be explored that probably would take even longer time. And if you do take the time to explore other branches, you realize that the first branch you explored was not as important as you initially thought, and might not even be worth mentioning (there's plenty of examples I ended up not mentioning).
This is particularly worse if you've never written about the topic (as I), and then of course the time limit doesn't help (although without it I probably would have delayed the work even more than I did).
It's very easy to criticize, but I think only the people that actually sat down and tried to write about the topic would understand why a particular try might not have turned out to be as fruitful as many readers would hope, but it's still worthy of praise. Also, the end result might not necessarily be a reflection of your thoughts on the subject, which are probably evolving as we speak (the very next day I had yet another insight that I feel should be worthy of writing about).
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
Having read a few Malcolm Gladwell books in my life, my first instinct is "put in your 10,000 hours".
Isn't it weird that in most submissions (3/4 in my count) the role of experience always comes up? In 2/4 Thinking, Fast and Slow is mentioned.
My insight was that intuition is analytical thinking encoded. The more hours one puts into a task, the better one becomes and intuiting. However, hours alone isn't enough, those hours have to be of a certain quality. Veritasium's video: The 4 things it takes to be an expert explores what that quality is.
The list is: valid environment, many repetitions, timely feedback, deliberate practice.
Putting 10,000 hours alone is not enough. Following your baseball examples, 10,000 hours without analytics is not going to be the same as 10,000 with analytics.
I think people are too quick to dismiss intuition based on bad examples.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
What you seem to be talking about is the overemphasis of structured analytical thought over common sense thought. This seems to be very similar to what Nassim Taleb says about the Intellectual Yet Idiots.
The best example is Taleb's hypothetical interaction between Dr. John and Fat Tony:
Taleb: “I am going to flip this fair coin 100 times, and after the 99th toss, I want each of you to tell me the probability of the 100th being heads. You should know that each toss is independent and the that the coin is fair.”
Taleb flips the coin 99 times and each of the 99 tosses results in a heads.
Taleb: “Now before, I toss the coin for the 100th time, I want each of you to tell me the probability of heads on this next toss.”
Dr. John using principles of probability arrives to the wrong answer, and Fat Tony using common sense arrives to the correct answer.
Your example of mask mandates is a good example of how Dr. John types tend to favor institutional wisdom over common sense, I did argue with many of these types what evidences was there of masks actually working, and no one ever gave me a definitive study. A lot provided this "study" An evidence review of face masks against COVID-19, but when I read it, it says the current studies don't show conclusive evidence, and this paper does is develop a model that shows how effective masks would be if certain percentage of the population uses them given that they do work.
The model actually shows that if mask do not work, 100% of the population using them do not matter.
Now, I'm in the opposite camp, my common sense tells me masks should work, not in protecting me, but in protecting others. I have seen no study proving that though. I used masks not because I knew the worked, but because I didn't know that they didn't. Small price to pay just in case they did work I guess.
I do not think the role intuition has been properly assessed though. In my entry My intuition about intuition, I try to build a case as to why I think it's much more important than people realize. However, I suspect Dr. John types are going to be biased against intuition and in favor of analytical thinking, because obviously if they are good at it, it has to be more important.
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
I think this doesn't appreciate how important intuition is.
Also you dismiss System 1 and 2 rather quickly. The important point of thinking slowly is not just that you arrive to more a "correct" conclusion, but that if you think slowly enough times, that thinking gets encoded into your System 1.
When you are driving your are not mindlessly making "involuntary" dumb decisions. Those decisions are based on all the slow thinking you did when you were being trained to drive.
Chess master players also make fast "involuntary" decisions, but these decisions are anything but dumb.
Consider how Einstein started his journey into general relativity. He explained his "happiest thought" of his life when he considered the equivalence of free falling to zero gravity and realized they must be the same phenomenon. How did he arrive to that thought? Intuition.
A toddler could not arrive to Einstein's happiest thought, only a physicist with thousands of hours of experience could, so his intuition wasn't dumb. The fact that this thought was "involuntary" doesn't make it any less valuable than considered, analytical, conscious, "voluntary" thoughts.
I believe most scientists have their most revolutionary insights in a similar way: they come "involuntarily" from "nowhere". The only thing special about Einstein's happiest thought is that he recognized it.
Most people don't introspect how they think, but any experienced mediator (mindfulness) knows that thoughts come from "nowhere", all of them. There's no such thing as "voluntary" thoughts. And it's no surprise that most mediators agree that free will cannot possibly exist, as do most neuroscientists, and philosophers (if you ask them about libertarian free will).
Therefore it stands to reason that this admiration we have for scientific "voluntary" analytical, conscious thinking, is just an illusion,
felipec
unbelief
2yr ago
Your work would probably be received better if you stopped referencing previous slights.
Everyone's a critic.
You can't tell my intuition what it should have generated. It generated what it generated.
Should it have generated something "better"? Sure, maybe, but I can only work with the intuition that I've got, which can't be not influenced by experiences in the past.
The good thing about this challenge is that if you think you could have written something better than what I wrote, well, you had the chance.
OK. Starts of poisoning the well by claiming something is false without evidence. This might work on people with no critical thinking skills, but not me.
Especially because I know the attacks have been thoroughly debunked by Aron Mate.
Not going to waste my time.
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