somethingsomething
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User ID: 1123
somethingsomething
9mo ago
Any specific sources that expand on this? I'm curious to hear more from this angle.
somethingsomething
9mo ago
I was thinking along these lines in regard to anxiety, which is a targeted vector. What it is targeting seems to at its core be imagined events happening or not happening. And I imagine this to be a core emotion in which these other negative emotions are used to "manage" it to various degrees of success.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
You could try a big namelist and allow one of the lines to be a name, like the original square
somethingsomething
1yr ago
I use a cheap white noise player, and I noticed that sometimes I was hearing weird ringing noises which I assumed was because of some echo effect. Recently I put it in a cardboard box and I haven't noticed that since, presumably because of dampening or something like that.
I also constantly listen to podcasts or music on my phone speakers (headphones bother me), whether I'm dealing with surrounding noise or not, and in the mild environment I'm in that gets me through distractions.
I have meditated but I find it's tricky to kind of "let go" of things. Stuff can come up in meditation and sessions can be challenging so I tend to think the quieter the better. Instead I think having some at home workout tool like a pull up bar may be better to get you out of your head.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
So I didn't realize that, I actually just downloaded it and tried a "brainstorming" session with it. There's some promise there, but it's interesting what specific ways it falls short of providing a natural conversation.
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You have to press a button every time you want to talk
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It will arbitrarily interrupt you and respond
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Each conversation can only go 15 replies deep, presumably because of some technical limitation
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The quality of its responses lean towards that "buzzkill" quality of repeating what you say and giving the most generic reply possible.
Input-wise, I think it would be really interesting to see a version of this where the microphone is always on, and the AI could try to interrupt you in your pauses, but if you kept talking it would shut up and keep listening. Just having that, with the existing tech (and removing the 15 reply limit) would be a pretty cool tool to possibly organize your thoughts in a way. But then if the AI was actually interesting to talk to in a conversational way, that would be pretty fascinating, and get quite a bit closer to the Her bar. So I'm definitely keeping an eye on it.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Days of Heaven for a movie that kind of quietly shows a lot of aspects of the 1910s around a personal romantic story. One of the great Malick films so it's one of the most beautifully shot (and edited imo) movies of all time. (oh I see you have it, nice)
I was also thinking if you wanted to use a Herzog film, Lessons of Darkness could be a good 90s one, as it just brings an interesting visual understanding towards an aspect of modern war (burning things)
Midnight Cowboy might be a good one, it's been a while since I've seen it
somethingsomething
1yr ago
It's funny, I've just started getting into classical philosophy and my therapist asked me if this was an interest I might be able to find others to share with. It's interesting that it does seem to be a "male" self-improvement kind of thing, but really, I just felt it as a click on of sudden interest and finding some good books.
I don't know anyone in my area and dont have a place to host if I did, but maybe this kind of thing is something I could work towards. Seems like you'd want a good grasp of things as a host anyway.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
As someone who also turned 30 this year and feels similarly, I just wanted to chime in.
I've been exposed to more and more people who had good liberal arts educations recently, mostly because of Andrew Sullivan's podcast where he always asks people how they grew up, but I also found myself jealous of Oppenheimer's education reading American Prometheus and I recently started watching old Firing Line episodes where education can come up and it resonates similarly for me there.
I think how year 30 cut through for me was in realizing how deeply rich the fruits of liberal intellectual pursuits can be, how on one hand you can offhandedly know Freud was flawed, but on the other you can read him, and other texts around him, and gain so much understanding in the process. I got a good math education because that institution seems to be doing fine, but liberal arts education failed to persuade me similarly.
I think the pernicious effect of losing out on a good liberal arts education is to invite "bad" liberal arts, which is to say, bad arts, bad media, bad values, to simplify. And I feel like my 20's were very much indulging in those things, while the media around me was saying this is good, this is fine, normal, etc. I think if you are a talented young person, "entertainment" can feed off that talent in a way, without giving much back in return.
I've landed somewhere a bit opposite from you, very much in solitude as I've removed most of the people from my life, but a few of them happened to be really toxic, and breaking from them left me with a pretty big wound I've been trying to recover from. So I've been trying to treat it as a Rilke-style isolation that I'll eventually be able to come out of stronger while I realign my values and pursue a wider and more fruitful liberal education to help me do so.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
That sidenote came more from a feeling than thought out logic, so I kind of have to analyze it to answer your question.
One case in a different video was Destiny getting a heartfelt call from a therapist talking about trans issues, while Destiny just "uh-huh"ed through it playing Terraria.
In this video I feel like the constant chat feed is used as this sort of distraction in order to kind of reinforce the speaker's socially dominant role, while allowing him to kind of skip through an unthorough argument.
In both cases, there is kind of a conflation of entertainment with politics and philosophy, that obviously has been only growing the past 10 years. But it's not a marriage of those things, like a well-written political book that makes you think. It's like a series of orthogonal, unrelated abomination of various styles of dopamine hits.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
My instinct though is that if critical theory would evolve to refute itself, it would be a positive evolution, and would be a kind of completion of the original theory, as in more critical theory, not less.
I haven't thought through too much the actual way it plays out in the real world. It's possible the modern critical theorists have immunized themselves. But on the other hand, you had a similar situation with the Marxists in France in the time of Foucault, and that evolution is kind of what I am proposing could happen again today. Similarly, it might be a philosopher who is "inside" the system that hits at the right time during some slump in their power, that speaks their language while subverting them.
somethingsomething
7mo ago
That doesn't account for things getting worse. If gender issues are getting worse while traditional values are receding then there must be some other variable.
somethingsomething
8mo ago
I'd be curious to hear what makes you see this kind of mental health divide because I don't think it's so clear.
For example while Jussie Smollet was an opportunist, he did not seem clear eyed to me, like something was really wrong with him to try that. And I feel like that example can be applied pretty broadly to people who do and do not benefit from wokeness. People with personality disorders will manipulate those around them for status and gain, while being completely not "clear-eyed". Isn't that kind of model more plausible, where everyone is crazy? In that sense it's kind of a codependency across victimization lines.
somethingsomething
10mo ago
Yeah that's what my foreboding final line was supposed to hint towards. Personally I was exposed to a lot of silliness online and in culture and I feel like I grew up, if a little later than I should have. I have a hard time judging which way it will go with the next generation.
somethingsomething
10mo ago
It does sounds like we have different experiences of depression. I might call mine more neurotic or distressed than what you've described. I appreciate your reply because it's making me think I'd probably rephrase my original post to add a few more qualifiers. It might reinforce my thought that depression is an analysis of a set of behaviors over time rather than a direct emotional experience. I revisited the depression symptoms list and it seems to me that a really wide range of causes could result in a subset of those symptoms.
I feel like my cause is very much a cultural learned behavior resulting out of a kind of toxic shame mindset, which I think is common, and I feel like I see it in a lot of depression communities, but it makes sense that it wouldn't be universal.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
What it sounds like you're saying with more words than necessary is to quote Nietzsche, Christianity is Platonism for the people. In other words Christianity merged Jewish monotheism/apocalypticism with platonic idealism and there's good reason to think it's not too much more complicated than that.
So you can try to get a bunch of atheists to take idealism more seriously, but if that's your goal I would put it more straightforwardly because then they can actually do their own research on idealism with the various sources that are out there. I don't think too many will find it convincing but you may get some converts.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
This is a good intro to Paul, the weirdo I was describing: https://youtube.com/watch?v=GXJUVnlGmI8
James Tabor has a lot of his own videos on ancient Christianity and Judaism at that time, and Bart on that channel also has quite a few although I tend to prefer James. Paul and Jesus by him is also a very readable and fascinating book on the topic.
somethingsomething
1yr ago
Yeah I just feel like this puts into words how I feel about GPT. For instance I basically saw the following scenario on twitter with someone musing on how it works and a reply woth someone saying "this is how" posting a screenshot of the GPT answering their question "how do you work".
You don't ask the AI how it works, you look into it's brains, you look at the code (obviously harder with ML but still). The code isn't open source so you don't know how much is canned (beyond the basic "canning" that comes with ML).
But beyond internet dummies you're really seeing a lot of journos and like philosophy or neuroscience majors jumping on the AI bandwagon. And I just want to tell them to learn to code.
somethingsomething
2mo ago
You don't want to be on the progressive stack. Being on the stack means being treated like a child, it means that your wins can always be questioned, and it means the worst representatives of your "group" become the loudest and most influential.
You want to pick yourself up by your own bootstraps and fix whatever is making you miserable as long as you have consciousness and basic analytic abilities. I think this starts by learning what is actually abnormal. To some extent, "stimming" and "masking" are things everyone does. Everyone "learns" social cues, some just are naturally better at it. Everyone acts differently among different people and everyone has certain aspects of themselves that they hide from others. It's just a matter of degree for these things, even if the degree can be quite high and even though a lot of this stuff starts with outside factors that we don't control.
But I think the dislike "NTs" have towards autistic people is very similar to the dislike towards depressives, because I think (I suppose controversially) that people with both conditions can work on themselves to basically be normal, but both people of both groups often resent the idea that they can. For autistic people, I think they should just record themselves on their phone, and just try to analyze how they are talking and how others are talking in conversation. They should find NTs they trust and ask them to itemize everything they do differently than they are supposed to.
What will the result be? Probably shame. Being told how you are wrong or different naturally results in a lot of shame. And this is where I think a lot of the pushback comes from autists, from depressives, from minority groups, etc. But that is the point where you can say, I'm a grownup, I can deal with shame and move forward.
somethingsomething
4mo ago
Yeah I see it similarly, it's not necessarily cynical (though it can be, see geeks/mops/sociopaths model), mostly it's throwing out a claim without much thought with an intensity and a direction. If challenged, they just perform rhetoric after the fact to justify it.
Personally I think this is the default way we think about things we are ignorant and emotional about and it takes deliberate action to avoid it.
somethingsomething
7mo ago
Well I think I mean categorization in a different way than what you describe. I'm aware of what you're talking about but I am thinking of the way progressives tend to isolate problems into categories and define immoral antagonists for each. Gender issues are cause by patriarchy, race issues by whiteness, economy issues by capitalists, etc.
They don't consider that (1) good intentions or moral behavior (defined by them) can have negative consequences and that (2) bad things can happen because of things outside the category that they have defined them in. That is, the idea that men were hurt because we sold jobs overseas doesn't make sense to them, because it's a gender issue with an economic cause. It must really have been the patriarchy at the root of the issue, because that's the only thing that can cause gender issues, since the patriarchy is the antagonist of the gender category.
somethingsomething
9mo ago
I think this is buying the propaganda a bit. Feminists would love if that were true, but I think it's a more complex story on how that happened.
somethingsomething
9mo ago
He interacted with the other apostles but only a apparently few times and mostly seemed to be doing his own thing with the gentiles, and they eventually seemed to be very conflicted with him over retaining Jewish law etc. I think a lot of that gets papered over in the bible to make Paul look more broadly accepted and integrated them. But just looking at the history, the whole Jewish movement in Christianity got wiped out with the persecution of Jews in Rome, and all that appears left from the original Jesus movement is the Q source and the book of James, neither of which back Paul's claims of the heavenly Jesus or heavenly apocalypse.
Which is to say, all that's left from the original Jesus movement is certain moral teachings and miracles. If that's all Christianity was I could actually see myself engaging with it as a way of integrating with a positive moral community. But the heavenly Christ mythology which every Christian is expected to believe all comes from the one guy (and the direct followers of his school of thought) who never met Jesus in real life, and there's no way I'll ever be able to buy that.
somethingsomething
9mo ago
Well he was "alone" in that he continually claims he received the vision alone, it was a direct experience with Christ that he didn't share with anyone else. I don't know why I remembered it as a cave, I may have just be confused on that.
somethingsomething
10mo ago
Recently I saw an old friend and some of his buddies that were all very left leaning and weren't aware I've shifted right. Occasionally some "white people" remarks came up that put me off, though it was nice to allow myself to actually feel put off rather than pile on with it like I used to.
But I actually did enjoy doing the tricky thing of finding agreement on more right-wing ideas while still presenting as leftist.
The best example that came up with my friends was me saying how much I like Biden because he forgave my student loans. I make enough money that this is totally ridiculous, but it's true, and it's a fun way to kind of present the absurdity of a policy I don't like, without harshly committing to any real position out loud.
By doing this I don't feel fake, it's more like, I'm saying what I believe in a crafty way, and if you really want to know what I think I'll tell you. But if these people don't poke and prod, which they won't because people just talk about themselves, then I can just drop hints as long as I'm clever about it. And the archetype of the clever right-winger can actually be very attractive or interesting to the leftist. Just watch this Bill Buckley interview with Betty Friedan: https://youtube.com/watch?v=E7BJyQmqo_Q
look them in the eyes, ask short open ended questions, have a concerned, serious expression on your face, help them move towards a conclusion that they feel like they can move forward with, and thank them for opening up with you.
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