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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1313 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 21, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What are your 'load-bearing beliefs?' The ones that, if they were disproven (to your epistemic satisfaction) would actually 'collapse' your worldview and force a reckoning with your understanding of reality.

I'm definitively talking about the "is" side of the is/ought distinction. Not your moral beliefs or 'hopes' for how things will turn out.

And not focused on such dry, mostly undisputed facts like "the earth's gravity pulls things towards it center" or "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell."

Ideally beliefs that you consistently use to make predictions about actual events, despite not having sincere certainty about their accuracy.

One that I've been leaning on a lot lately: "Intelligence tends to be positively (if imperfectly) correlated with wisdom."

This is probably the one thing preserving my general optimism for humanity's future.

There are definitely high-IQ sociopaths running about, but I strongly believe that the world would be in a much worse place if the smartest apes amongst us were not also generally aware of their own limitations and were trying to make good decisions that considered more than just short term interests.

-There isn't nothing.

-Don't make the cars behind you have to slow down. This starts with knowing there are cars behind you in the first place. This extends to far more than traffic.

Various third-world countries having China-like development spurts driven by the natives.

Limits to growth. If the line go up forever/space colonization crowd is right almost all my beliefs fall apart.

I mean, we haven't figured out how to circumvent physics. There is a hard upper bound.

But it turns out that said upper bound is in theory way higher than you might intuitively expect. Harnessing the total energy output of our local sun is a good starting point. But genuinely, humanity's limit will probably be more psychological and social than physical. Can we coordinate well enough to get out there without blowing ourselves up?

Hence why I hopefully believe that intelligence and wisdom are linked.

But I like this answer. Do you have a specific expectation as to where the limit exists?

Line can't go on forever. It is trivial to check. The most an empire could grow starting from now at 5% per year is 1000 years give or take.

The biggest thing I can think of would be my beliefs that were involved into me going back to the Christian faith, I guess. I was left at an impasse for a long time as I figured out what to believe, having concluded that there must be an uncaused cause at the beginning of the universe, and that this cause could reasonably be called "God". That wasn't very useful though, because it didn't tell me much about the nature of this deity that set everything into motion. So I was at an impasse.

Eventually, I was reflecting on a couple of experiences that my dad had shared with me which seemed to be clear evidence that the god he believed in (the Christian god) was real and made himself available to us. One time, he said that when he was internally despairing about his life and asking God why he still had to endure its trials and tribulations, time came to a complete stop (from his perspective) and he heard the voice of God clearly say "you're here for [my mom]". On another occasion, he said he was doing a reading at his church, and when he looked up he saw the loft above the congregation filled with angels. I thought about these things, and concluded that I believe these two points to be true:

  1. My dad was telling the honest truth of his experiences. He might be mistaken, of course, and he might joke around about other topics, but he would never outright lie (nor joke about something this serious to him).
  2. He was not hallucinating or otherwise imagining these experiences he had. The way he tells them, they were too vivid to be anything other than real.

Taken together, these two things logically mean that my dad must have truly experienced the things he did (cue CS Lewis: "if she's not mad, and she's not lying, then logically she must be telling the truth!"). Which quite neatly solved the dilemma I was having with trying to determine what I thought the nature of God was. My dad is a Christian, and his god is real, therefore God must be like the Christian god (though I can't rule out other views of God as being inaccurate). Based on that I started pursuing the Christian faith again. Needless to say these beliefs I have about my dad and his experiences are pretty damn load bearing. I have since found other reasons to believe in my faith, but nothing quite so stark and compelling* as what I outlined here, so it would be quite a crisis for my worldview if someone were to prove those things wrong.

* Compelling to me. I realize that to someone who doesn't know my dad, these experiences he had have absolutely no evidential value, which is why I have never tried to use them to persuade someone else to believe (nor do I plan to).

Very interesting.

Me I had almost the opposite course. I kinda left the church as a result of:

A) Seeing my fellow 'christians' make absolute messes of their lives and generally ignore biblical teachings when they were inconvenient (these two facts were probably related)

B) Never having one of those "encounter with God" moments despite being very, very open to receiving one. My inherent skepticism grew simply because it was hard to feel God's intervention in my life when I didn't seem to be getting any noticeable input from 'beyond' baseline reality. It sure seemed like what you see is what you get, and all your decisionmaking is almost entirely local to your brain, aside from the bare handful of things we haven't explained.

And I'm not a fan of the "God of the gaps" approach to faith.

I had experiences which could be described as that "still, small voice" talking to me and guiding decisions, but that was easily explained as my internal dialogue.

Another factor was engaging in 'sinful' activities but seeing that this didn't immediately result in my life combusting and didn't lead me down a path to more grievous sins. Turns out I just have a solid amount of discipline and self-control just inherently.

But over time, as you notice, there's still a need for some 'initial cause' to this whole universe. Science isn't getting us any closer to explaining it, and ultimately having some kind of God behind the scenes is still a completely viable possibility, even if atheism is the 'rational' choice. And if you gotta choose one God to be behind the scenes, the Christian God does appear as the leading contender.

Still haven't had my own personal 'miracle' to restore my faith, but it also seems like rational atheism has gone and blown itself up (Effective Altruism was an interesting fad, wasn't it?), and the huge irony is there are actually good secular reasons for accepting religious teachings. If they've survived this long, they must be adaptive!!!

Yeah, I think your complaints (perhaps the wrong word but hopefully you know what I mean) are quite valid. In fairness on the first, a good church will never pretend that its members are perfect or anything, but many Christians possess a level of self righteousness and hypocrisy that is truly galling. And I certainly understand the frustration of feeling as though God is just leaving you to do your own thing, rather than being a friend who actually helps you in your life. I myself have never had a direct experience with the divine, though I have (since returning to the faith) had things happen that I find difficult to explain by way of anything other than "God must have helped me out there".

But my experiences (such as they are) and the ones I related from my dad ultimately aren't proof, which is something I don't expect I'll ever get. It seems like God, for whatever reason, never really reveals himself to people so strongly that any reasonable person would believe that he must be at work. Lots of people (smarter people than I) have tried to explain why, so I doubt I can add anything of value to that discussion, except to agree that it does seem to be true regardless of what the reasons might be. I think that this is why faith tends to be of the "God of the gaps" nature which you find unsatisfying (and I can't blame you): it seems like God always requires people to take some leap of faith from "this seems true but I can't prove it" to "I'm going to believe in it anyway".

For what it's worth, I would say that the struggle (my own journey of faith took me something like 10-12 years with insights coming only occasionally), does seem worth it in hindsight. It sucked at the time. But having gone through it, I was able to arrive at a position which I feel much more strongly certain of than if a mysterious stranger had appeared to give me the answers. I hope that it will be the same for you, if it isn't already - not per se that you will come back to the faith, but that whatever answer you do arrive/have arrived at feels right to you because you came by it as the result of trying really hard to seek the truth.

It seems like God, for whatever reason, never really reveals himself to people so strongly that any reasonable person would believe that he must be at work.

Yes, I suspect that he works in 'mysterious ways' in the sense that his intervention might just seem like a literal one-in-a-billion chance that happens to fall your way, and the entire situation works out for your benefit, even if there completely non-divine explanations.

Me, I like solid cause-effect relationships. So it'd be really nice to have an experience where I ardently pray for [outcome], and then see [outcome] occur without my direct intervention. I've had a lot of 'experimental' results where the outcome of the situation appears completely uncorrelated with whether I prayed for it or not. Obviously there could be greater plans at work that I don't see.

People are terrible, a person can be great.

People will do the right thing after first exhausting every other available option.

The stock market is completely divorced from productivity, profit, market share and consumer satisfaction.

For all the good the internet has done, many load bearing systems in society were not prepared for the effects of globalism and the information superhighway, and we have been suffering from the network effects and scale effects of the internet ever since.

Racism is a form of bias, and bias is impossible to truly eliminate as long as differences exist. It can be mitigated, but never truly removed.

Only a Sith deals in absolutes. People want to think in binary, they want absolute X and absolute Y, hard reality, a right answer and a wrong answer they can die on a hill over. Unfortunately, when the binary solution doesn't work, people lose their minds.

Any system of government works under a certain amount of people. I am uncertain as to the exact number but it's probably lower than Dunbar's.

Societal paradigms and dominant modes of thought take hold because they advantage the people, not because they are correct.

Don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity; however, JJ's razor applies. If you can't tell the difference, what does it matter?

Sadly, Porn is the most important TLP idea, even more than narcissism, and it explains modern consumerist hyperculture. We are all buying or consuming facsimiles of things to approximate or satiate the need for the thing we actually want, and numbing that need sufficiently is one of the great triumphs and tragedies of modern civilization.

Do you think Sadly, Porn is worth reading in its totality?

I would recommend reading Scott's and Rob Henderson's reviews of it, and if it piques your interest*, give it a try. But fair warning: it's probably the single most impenetrable book I've ever read in my life.

*Which is to say, if you feel personally attacked.

Absolutely the hell not - he wrote it as a didactic exercise that also functions as part of his "if you're reading it, it's for you" idea. If you already get his ideas, there's not much new there. Only someone who is interested in self-flagellation as the sort of person who looks critically at themselves would read such a book; better to better yourself through doing the actual work.

We are all buying or consuming facsimiles of things to approximate or satiate the need for the thing we actually want, and numbing that need sufficiently is one of the great triumphs and tragedies of modern civilization.

Oof.

Yeah. Even as I actively try to avoid accepting the facsimile and pursue the authentic article, I find that every nudge and unyielding social pressure is driving towards the commodified artificial version as the core urges go unsated and the avenues that will reliably lead to the desired outcome seem shut down (unless you can buy your way through).

Well, it's also because genuinely trying and pursuing and then failing to get it is cringe.

And better to die cool than live cringe.

That really only matters if your attempts are broadcast to the world/your larger social group. Which for Gen Z, many times they are.

Also I'm now at the point in my life (maybe an age thing) where I simply do not feel significant 'shame' over attempting to do things authentically, without hiding behind a veneer of irony or detachment.

You might have an insight there as to why people are completely unable to break out of their 'self-imposed' equilibrium. Gooning away to an OF model or, heaven forbid, an AI girlfriend is a private act that nobody will judge you for since it isn't broadcast. But hoo boy, approaching a real woman entails risk, and even if you acquire a woman you're still going to have to be on your best game since she can d0 all kinds of things to try and embarrass you if things sour.

The issue is that in the modern era being cringe is directly deleterious to your social and even financial circumstances. Nobody wants to associate with people who are cringe, and when connections are pretty much the best and most reliable way to get a job these days or move upwards socially or financially, you get what you incentivize. Especially when we live on a planet of cops.

Again, it's not even really an age thing; if I was an African warlord I would not give a single fig about being cringe as long as I got to shoot everyone who saw. It's about security and power, both things for which demand greatly exceeds supply.

From as long as I can remember, the true essence of cringe is being un-self aware of how your behavior is perceived, and breaking social norms whilst lacking the social capital to get away with it. The larger the audience, the worse the transgression/the greater the social capital required to overcome it.

So one defense is to have every action and phrase dipped in layers of irony so if something does run afoul of a social norm you can plausibly claim to be in on the joke, and thus almost no act or word can ever have full sincerity behind it since now its actually harder to tell what the hell the norms are if nobody can take them seriously. Just, you know, try to remember which level of irony you're on.

Millenials I think invented this particular approach, but in interacting with Gen Z, I conclude that they seem to have totalized it.

The other approach is to be at least partly aware of your behavior, but demonstrate that you simply do not care, nor take the situation seriously, and effectively 'no sell' any shame in the situation.

These are both exhausting to maintain, if you ask me.

Also I'm now at the point in my life (maybe an age thing) where I simply do not feel significant 'shame' over attempting to do things authentically.

Based. And I do think it's an age thing. Perhaps it's because as you get older you feel secure in your social circumstances (you have found your people, you know they aren't going to ditch you even if you make a momentary fool of yourself), but either way it seems to come with age. Or as CS Lewis put it: "When I was ten I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly."

There's absolutely a lot of the "I'm secure now and to some extent I can either enforce or flout social norms because I have higher status relative to others."

I also worked through a lot of my remaining insecurities in the wake of my big breakup.

I've also mastered the art of 'doubling down' when you do something cringey... just roll with it man. As long as nobody is hurt or seriously offended you can make something funny or cool just by recovering smoothly.

Tools that would have been useful to me in my twenties, but back then I wasn't even self-aware enough to know when I should feel shame, so...

Tools that would have been useful to me in my twenties

This is gesturing towards a Sunday question I've been thinking about, which is how many Xers/millennials had Silent/Boomer same-sex parents that they thought were in any way useful in providing advice in the realm of sex/dating/marriage. It seems like a lot of guys I know (I know far less about women's opinions on this issue) had to reinvent the wheel during their 20s and even into their 30s on those topics, and there seems to be a strong overlap with a not-very-helpful-with-advice Silent/Boomer father.

I sure did.

My parents were high-school sweethearts, who divorced when I turned 18, which meant my conception of idealized romance was suddenly rugpulled out from under me, and I didn't have any other good models to latch onto. And then MY high school sweetheart broke it off with me the first semester of college, which spiraled me pretty hard thereafter.

And the next ten years was exactly that, me trying to reinvent the wheel... WHILE living in a world where the standard romantic playbook was actively being destroyed.

I can't even blame my dad, he did find love afterwards, eventually, but he didn't have the experience needed to help me navigate the world I found myself in.

More comments

Any system of government works under a certain amount of people. I am uncertain as to the exact number but it's probably lower than Dunbar's.

Interesting, I'd think that any system of government works at a Dunbar number or lower. It more likely that each system of government has a scaling factor for a threshold that after which it fails or becomes inefficient leading to failure.

Incentives pretty reliably shape outcomes. There aren't just economic incentives, however.

Politics that ignore human nature and rely on blaming their opponents for spiteful non-compliance when the incentives aren't in place for the policies' success, are doomed to fail.

My load bearing beliefs are

  • Humans are mostly good.
  • Conspiracies are very hard to pull off, and
  • bad outcomes are almost always better explained by incompetence.
  • Intelligence is increasing and peace and good behavior emerge from intelligent actors even if they only want to selfishly maximize their own utils

Come at me bro

Intelligence is increasing

If you look at buildings from 200 years ago, the door frames are much lower, because people were much shorter back then. All of those short people passed on their genes to descendants who were much taller than they were. The genes themselves didn't change, but because their descendants grew up in a caloric- and nutrient-rich environment, they were better equipped to fulfil their maximum height potential as encoded in their genes than their ancestors were.

Conceivably the Flynn effect could be partly explicable by a similar dynamic, as modern people have a much better understanding of the importance of early childhood nutrition and so on than our ancestors did. But other than that, I'm sceptical of the idea that intelligence is increasing over time. In point of fact our society seems profoundly dysgenic in numerous ways. Fertility rates are in freefall across much of the West, and the only solution suggested by elites is to import millions of people from cultures in which intergenerational cousin marriage is the rule rather than the exception.

Capitalism tends to produce more efficient/powerful/good outcomes than Socialism.

I can imagine a world filled with rational and/or kind-hearted beings who were able to cooperate together efficiently under a socialist system and share things with a lot less deadweight loss than a capitalist system where people keep trying to exploit each other for profit. I just don't think that's the world we live in, I don't think that's the kind of species we are. Capitalism's greatest strength is its robustness. It can take selfishness and wastefulness and corruption and theft and stupidity, and it automatically pushes back and has individual pieces break without destroying the greater structure, so it can evolve and become stronger. Negative feedback loops instead of positive feedback. Socialism allows corruption to fester and grow like a cancer. At least, that's the world I think we live in. If that were to not be the case and whatever excuses socialists make about why it's always failed were actually true it would change a lot of my beliefs about economics, politics, and human nature.

Capitalism tends to produce more efficient/powerful/good outcomes than Socialism.

This is true for me too, but I openly invite people to attack and disprove it. Every year that goes by without someone answering The Economic Calculation Problem I get more certainty that Socialism is impossible in a technical sense at any scale above, like, small village. Every solution they've brought up is either a massive special pleading ("human nature doesn't apply to THIS scenario") or they throw in the towel and accept some market-based solutions to make it work.

And yeah, I believe that EVEN IF you had that perfectly 'altruistic' species (assuming it could survive in the galaxy) because they'd still need inbuilt feedback mechanisms that work in a decentralized way to guide their distribution of resources.

The best objections to Capitalism as it is currently practiced are ones that point out the Molochian Nature of It where it can eat up things you genuinely care about either in the name of pure survival or of maximizing some value nobody really wants maximized but is easier for people to agree upon.

I would still consider a scenario that's like 90% socialist with 10% capitalist hack to be socialist, just like I'd consider a scenario that's 90% capitalist with 10% socialist hack (like universal healthcare) to be capitalist. I'd still consider a long-term successful example of that to be pretty surprising.

Unless it's like post-singularity with some genius AI overlord who can simultaneously solve the economy, efficiently produce tons of resources, and doesn't need much human labor so can just distribute them without much concern for proper incentive structures. But I'd expect such an AI to also be able to solve capitalism's problems and create libertarian capitalist utopia too. For now, when dealing with humans, you need the signalling mechanisms.

I think it's interesting that the last two decades have shown that you don't really need post-singularity AI. Because there has been a surprising explosion in vertical integration, all the most successful growth stories of the 21st century - both on the west and in China - don't really use market forces for their supply chains all that much. It's not quite a "cybernetic planned economy" just yet, but getting halfway there has looked pretty straight forward from the outside.

Tesla and Space X (both have more than 80% of the value creation inhouse) , Amazon (especially with the rise of Amazon Essentials), Apple, Netflix, BYD, Xiaomi, ect.

I think they all discovered that markets are very efficient, but only propagating price information is not enough for the next level of business/product execution. If you do the critical value ads inhouse, you can transmit so much addition information, resulting in significantly more control, you easily outcompete anybody just relying on competition eventually bringing prices down on commodities.

Also, this remarkable transition was mostly achieved with data networks, standard ERP software and hiring enough talent. I don't think anybody know yet how large you can make this vertically integrated blob (although Amazon and BYD are certainly trying) before you run afoul of the problems that brought down all other planned economies. If AI ever actually ends up with a reliable world model, it would certainly be extremely useful for this kind of planning, potentially pushing the size of the blob up another order of magnitude.

And sure, on actual commodity inputs and on final outputs, markets still rule supreme. Still, it's a surprising underperformance of markets vs planned economies in my book.

One thing that actually blew my mind when I read it (I think it was in here?) was the idea that Amazon has essentially created "Universal Basic Employment" in the sense that virtually ANYONE can pick up a job in an Amazon Warehouse or as a delivery driver if they are otherwise out of work.

You don't need a degree to move boxes around, you don't need people skills, you probably don't even have to be completely literate. You can move to an area completely fresh and pick up the job while you search for something better.

I literally searched my local area just now and there's an opening for "Warehouse Associate" clearly stating "NO EXPERIENCE NEEDED, NO DEGREE, PART TIME OR FULL TIME, DENTAL AND HEALTH INSURANCE." Paying, allegedly $15-$18 an hour.

So there's pretty much zero excuse to ever be unemployed if you are able-bodied. Add on the Gig economy to fill in any cracks.

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