Handling What Comes Next (After 'Woke')

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If you took some people from earlier periods and said that phones would lead to interracial mingling via hook-up apps, they would be horrified also. If you told many people earlier periods that social change would lead to women being in charge of men, that would horrify them. Or all sorts of stuff that would be seen as witchcraft. What would horrify people of a certain culture in history should not be our barometer of what is or is not good or extreme. In terms of race, certain older ideas would not even consider people of other races as human.

This does not even go into the fact that the definitions given about saying that boys are becoming girls is an incorrect one. If you go back far enough all children were called girls. If you look at things like ancient Rome, there was less of a distinction made over homosexual and heterosexual relations, rather who did the sticking into who, and teen boys were considered normal as teen girls for men.

The more accurate explanation for changes from the past to now is to explain the understanding difference between sex and gender, so there is less of an aspect of boys becoming girls, but that they always were a girl, and decisions to present a certain way is a person doing what is more accurate. Just as you would explain that someone is a human despite having a different skin colour, or they had some sort of deformity.

In what is coming next, better start getting used to the idea enbies, there will be more people coming out as non-binary.

I'm guessing we'd agree that if ideology trumped the scientific method in engineering or medicine that the frame being given - such as having gotten rid of the Kulaks and teaching things that look great on paper, under ideology, for farming is a really bad way to go?

I'll give the reminder - if we sort of fantasize about the possibility of a sort of Star Trek collectivism where the very best of human nature has been built around those that properly yoke the worse sides that the goal is the same.

Where the idea of calling things a social construct is a problem is when it's applied to things that don't yield to the label.

What I think is bothering me right now is the sense that weaponized discourse has the adaptive advantage and end up beating nuanced thought. It's part of why intelligent people generally go quiet when an idiot enters the room, it can take years to build a house and one day with matches or a crane to bring it to the ground - and not through supremacy of the crane or match to the house.

I noticed several months back, and this sort of what started to turn me off to him, I saw David Packman bring on Douglas Murray as if he were a 'reasonable British conservative who wasn't a Trumper' and then went on to assume that everything he said in any degree of abstraction was bad faith or implied back that there wasn't a problem left of center and that it was more likely Douglas who was the problem. I watched that it occurred to me just how much of the battle in so many conversations is trying to clear the air that you're not whatever sort of cryto-satanist that the given side sees anyone who seems to apologize or go neutral on the other side would lump you in as for ease of use in the conversation. The other part of this, it seems like groups in diametric opposition will also seem to deliberately hide the middle-ground for the sake of war and well-informed views you can learn from across sides actually become harder to come by.

I think by the time someone realizes that they're talking to someone who readily changes their mind with better information or at least has shown that they're ammenable to evidence in an ongoing way even if reserved about that movement is trying to do a bit better than throw the seeming hyperbole case in as the general rule. I think the trouble people can see a lot of times, with the extremes of whatever camp they're not in (even more gifted to see it in their own), can tell that something like Nassim Taleb's minority rule ends up shaping culture and it tends to be the loudest, most abnoxious, and generally worst people who win that game if the broader population doesn't feel like they have veto power or worse - feel like they know how to manipulate every system of justice against them or make big enough threats (whether a poker bluff or not) that the other side has to cowe.

That's the part that I really can't stand about philosophies that would bring everything back to power. Any society that's really worth living in seems to have a good amount of focus on cooperation and yet does so without pushing it to Confucian 'the nail that sticks out gets hammered down' extremes. If it's 'just power' then there's no cooperation, we have Hobbes without any of the solutions to his state of nature.



The trouble is they would have needed to then pick up some tool like trade. The trouble with peaceful societies surviving amongst warlike ones is they have to be able to barter something for their right to exist. Not having that, and running into another militarized troop of baboons head on, it's not likely that would end well.


Yeah, when I look at this we have all kinds of talent and ability that we don't know how to value and all kinds of externalities, the people who'd use them maliciously know them incredibly well, where they can dump their own failings on lower parts of the hierarchy (or like the Wall Street pattern - privatize gains, socialize losses).

Where I perhaps take some faith over the temporal on this one - merit is as messed up as capitalism, we're still waiting for some system or set of systems that handles problems of human violence and one-up-one-down games well enough to say that we're weighing merit on more properly holistic terms, doing our best to shelter and aid those who seem to lack it in any given system (the victors are pretty weak in both character and vision without that), and not make starting on the bottom, having 'bad genes' for fitness of environment, etc. almost a predetermination for prison or such an anguished life that the given pain causes the unraveling of said society that's resting on top of it.

I think this is where any sane liberal, or any conservative Christian who takes the content of the new testament with any seriousness, would look at the goals of race and gender equality and have no problem supporting those goals. The trouble is, and every really large and amorphous group really has this, their fittest at winning zero-sum games and rising to the top are their grifters and sociopaths, and this is part of how the game theory mucks everything up - as well as I've mentioned in other threads, such intense intra-group competition that everyone's charity is spent running the Red Queen's race with their neighbor.

This is why liberal solutions really beat ideological solutions. As mentioned above - policy for crowds fails everyone and the trick then is getting it to fail the people it fails as little as it possibly can as well as protecting those it's intended to protect, and the example you gave is great - ie. puberty blockers at 11 or 12 and surgery after a certain age - that's thoughtful parsing of trade-offs in action.

I would generally get as well the idea that most people left of center would agree that approaches like the above are the best approach, the goal then is to keep their freedom and capacity to fend off ideology that's crazy enough to sound strawman-esque. That tends to be the criticism of cancel culture, from left of center, and probably the most robust one.


I think the root criticism that I agreed with James Lindsay on is that we should avoid baking ideological inauthenticity into the system because it will break quickly as people see which components aren't true, and then the way that realization collapses that load-bearing fiction then causes the system to fall in the direction it was weighted and often not in a better direction (under enough economic stress significantly worse). Anything that says upfront that social reality is a LARP and that we won't worry about tying it to baseline reality is just inflating another bubble to pop and in the chaos of that pop you have real risk of things getting worse rather than better.

With Peterson he's been blowing the dust off of the past to say 'Are we sure we've mined all the important stuff out of this before moving on?' and in the 90's and 00's it was pretty clear we hadn't, more recently with is popularity and that of other people thinking really deeply about these things and raising the quality of analysis (Bret and Eric Weinstein, Noam Chomsky getting out more, Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jordan Hall getting well known in GameB space, Samo Burja and Bismark Analysis showing up) I think the late 2010's have had as much awakening to the things we've missed from the past as they have to an increased melee and collapse of top-down gatekeeping in media, and so a lot of the really interesting stuff is drowned out by noise unless people are looking carefully for it.


The criteria of a solution in the liberal sense is that it has to make the whole, or at least most of it and it's relevant parts (ie. not worrying about true racists and biggots) function better. In a utilitarian sense the suffering does need to get weighed in as well. The trick then, at that point, is figuring out how to figure out where people are at - early in life - and find ways to guide them to be their best and embrace whatever they are in terms of their preferences or identity. The idea though is that there have to be enough collaborative games across groups to take the stress off differences themselves and allow each to learn how to best function as they are. Offloading as much of the zero-sum'ness of that as possible should be the goal.


The way I tend to look at this one - it's not true of all NT's but it seems to be more common there as they do more delegation and offloading - is that most people let numbers set their filter and they end up letting head count think for them on a lot of things, perhaps most. It's part of where a person could be wonderfully, searingly sharp - and accurate in the most important ways - about things other people haven't looked into and most people will tune that person out or ignore them if there's just one of them because their primary process is weighing averages of people against each other, a statistical outlier has no head-count, and with their statistical significance goes their ideas - often without reference to quality, particularly if it's novel information that doesn't fit in some already existing scope.

That's part of how group belief baskets end up looking like bower bird nets or forms of heraldry - the scraps of 'this and that' make up that group's political ideology and identity quite often, and Sam Harris ripped into this pretty well when he said in one of his early Waking Up podcasts - it's a real problem, a mess really, when you can look at a person's position on gun control and accurately predict their position on global warming. The two should have absolutely nothing in common and yet they tend to come as a packaged deal by accidents of history and how diametrically opposed groups ended up politicizing various things, ie. belief baskets made far more by accidents of history rather than discursive reasoning.

I'd add - if women doubling the work force halved the value of labor or adding more previously excluded minorities also added another 20-30% to the labor pool, I notice the farther right and non-neoliberal left tend to strangely agree on the facts more than those in the center and vehemently disagree on what should be done about them. This is where I'll probably spend the next ten years of my life if need be taking Darwinian game theory, on repeat, until I hate keying those words - so much of what keeps capitalism looking like this, or systems looking like this, is an international community where the major players have guns to each other's heads, some of the smaller ones as well, and where they can't out-military each other they try to out-trade each other, so it's a perpetual arms race where no one can think of a way to pull the plug on it, and that perpetual arms race seems to be so much of what stops the left from being able to have much of what it wants last particularly long or work short of anti-discrimination laws against groups which can arguably feed the machine.

What I worry about is that the fewer eyes there are on the game theory problem the more people we have running at what are really surface-layer problems, caused my game theory, and most of that energy is spent - when not wasted - ends up being a social climbing contest. Then if there is a gold rush on game theory the people who want to put peace and cooperation as the ultimate goals have to win the race for framing that conversation - otherwise it can easily be taken in quite fascistic directions.

Yes, I think we agree, mostly - except about boys being called girls if you go far back enough. I mean, that did happen, but the word only meant "child" in the 14th century. And apparently girls were distinguished into "knave-girls" and "gay-girls". So there's no indication that there wasn't any distinction made.
The word boy has roots in proto-indo-european, according to wiktionary, so I assume the distinction has been baked into language for millennia.

As to Romans: there certainly was a distinction in language, I learned enough Latin in school. And also legally.
As to homosexuality: yes, that was a meaningless concept before Christianity declared it a sin. But I read some contemporary accounts of 14th century dinner parties in the Vatican. It didn't read like they cared much back then either, at least as long as the boys were prebubescent. Also: they had animals trained to perform fellatio in the Vatican back then.

I'm totally expecting gender to lose much if not all of its meaning in the progressive part of some societies, and to stay very relevant in the rest of the human population for any foreseeable future.

I am a little confused over what may necessarily be meant as the idea of a 'liberal solution', because depending on culture and other factors, liberal can mean different things. In my view liberal positions are ones that say they are about freedom of the individual, but tend to want to do as little as possible to support those personal freedoms until there is a sufficient amount of pushback. In terms of transgender youth, it would be like saying something like saying they can think they are a boy, but they can't go into the boys changing room, be called "he", wear the male uniform, or take the puberty blockers, until enough people get angry enough. Or you get the appeals to the parent's right to choose for their child.

Saying the phrase "surgery after a certain age" can also mean a couple things. Is one saying that they need that surgery after a certain age to be allowed to be identified as you identify as? I think some circles that might even be called the liberal position, along the lines of saying that if the person wants to be identified a way they can choose to get a surgery, which is total bogus, as an adult shouldn't need to do that to be treated as they are.





And who gets to decide that Peterson really has something he is mining from the past that is important? The man mixes basic self-help stuff, that even the Left doesn't agree with, and marries it to ideas like traditional gender roles and says the reason people are not happy now is because of feminism. He has been a big proponent of the ideology of personal responsibility of everyone being responsible for their circumstances as a means for the state to do as little as possible to help the disadvantaged, and yet takes no self-reflection after some complications of trying a weird procedure of an induced coma so he can avoid responsibility of going through drug withdrawals from an addiction.

You have people saying that there is a lack of authenticity to things they have no idea about. Like cishet people saying that they get to decide sticking to their assigned gender and heterosexuality is the natural thing, while anything that diverges is either dirty deviance, or a mental illness that can be cured ether by doping up on the right drugs or the correct conversion therapy. There seems to be an inherent missunderstanding of things being called a social construct, and people interpreting that as saying that people are saying that it is not real. Rather than something we might only understand in a way that is socially constructed, and thus could be something very mailable that we could change in a way that is more true or helpful to those who might be harmed by how it is now.






I think the idea of saying that someone is a true racist or bigot is kind of a reductive idea, people are not inherently only that something. Rather you have racist and bigoted beliefs, where almost everyone can have some level of these beliefs, like everyone can be a bit bigoted. It is then only helpful to identify racist or bigoted beliefs, or people are really attached to those beliefs, and probably not worth taking serious on certain topics. People can always change though.





I don't believe that it is something specific to being an NT or not, rather than people are part of a majority group such Neurotypical, cis gendered, heterosexual and racial majorities, tend to think that their experience is the one true experience, and thus tend to think that if everyone in the majority is agreeing that it is case for everyone. It ain't a hard rule, and you will probably find people who could have more easily hidden or convinced themselves they were the same as everyone else are likely not to come out in the first place. And this is why as social change has been happening that we are finding more people, such that there are more people with autism as ever, but it has more with being able to identify these things and less stigma. This is a reason why there has been massive rises in people who identify as bisexual, when they earlier could have convinced themselves they were straight. And I am seeing a large increase in non-binary people, where before they maybe could have said they don't feel fully like the opposite gender.

Is it a problem that you are more likely to know someone's position on Climate Change if you know their opinion on Gun Control? From one angle they might not appear at all connected, but another you can see that they actually are. Someone willing to be more along the lines of saying guns for everyone and not thinking much further, is probably going to be the same person that would rather not think about personal freedoms like burning fossil fuels are causing environmental problems. It is less of a position of people sticking to the politics of their side, rather than the same people who will stick to what their church says are the same people who won't listen to scientists.

Yeah, the admittance is there to things like more freedom of the genders to enter and stay in the workforce doubled up labour pools and such, which did things like lower wages, and in ways made it something like a necessity to have both parents work. But it is not that evil should overcome the evil of the inequality that came before. It is all more the idea that the only way to win these elements of game theory from competing areas is to simply not play. If nations are competing against each other for absolute domination economically, then they should look to help each other instead. Will we really need absolutely everyone filling in a labour position to have it all run smoothly and everyone have the resources they need to live? Or can we take on changes in the economy such as UBI to guarantee that everyone has the basics they need to survive, and people can then choose to work more out of wanting a bit extra or they do something that they enjoy?

Losing all meaning, or being expanded? This is still going on what one considers gender to mean, whether one is thinking of it in terms of sex, or in something separate. There does seem to be a misunderstanding that trans people are delusional about their sex, whether what they were assigned or what their characteristics are. But as much as cis people think they are brilliant for being able to clock them, trans people are hyper aware of these things.

As an enby with some element of gender fluidity, I should be the exact kind of person that people think would be the destruction of meaning of gender. But I think you would be super surprised by how much I think about the meanings or definitions of gender, and how I understand the idea of it being inexplicable to have a shifting sense of gender. I know that it really should not be the case with already cases of trying to define a binary to include binary trans people, but I have to put that up against my own experiences. That some days I can quite masculine, others more feminine, and often I have no idea.

The perception there is probably that I want to destroy the definition of gender, but I am much more curious in understanding what we even mean as gender, so that what I am can be much more in line with what everyone else experiences with their gender. That, and not being seen as some unholy chimera of clashing parts that is a monstrous threat to others (unless people are into that sort of thing).

I mean best-faith attempt at trying to implement solutions through Enlightenment mechanisms.


To say 'I don't know' or 'that needs more unpacking' is to acknowledge that these are complexities that have to be negotiated into some type of social contract that can be performed and that's a place where I think a lot of people will contribute different pieces to it, not being as close to this issue as those who'd be better to solve it I'd leave the future in this regard and what that social contract looks like to them as well as boost signal if what they're coming up with looks both simple and elegant enough to work (to some degree, to be performable, these contracts have to collapse complexity at the superficial level to be practical).


When I first encountered him I listened to his 2015 Maps of Meaning lecture from end to end. He unpacks connections between Darwinian evolution, story-telling, and the ways in which the fabric of culture gets woven between the two. He gets into many of the founding myths of the Babylonian rites and deities, core Egyptian deities and their stories, and how these stories reified in various aspects of the Christian new testament. He gets into Rogers and Piaget, the later in particular as to how 'play' in other animals childhood forms their sense of games, fairness, and how participatory activities such as civics and economics operate. For archetypal myths he gets into Carl Jung, Mercia Eliade, and the different ways in which subconscious software (particularly archetypal patterns and narrative) tie to the firmwear layer of both individual and societal operation, or he'll talk about things like how mystical experiences will help people do things like quitting smoking and the unexpected strangeness of why it would be that such would be the case. He's rather well known for his commentary on the USSR, Leninism, Stalinism, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, etc. so I'll leave that alone but suffice to say he took a lot of content that was probably 4th year capstone in many places and put it much more in the public sphere. He's also well known for his discussion of where hierarchies come from, how baked into the firmwear (ie. neurochemical thermostats) they seem to be, this is where all the talk about 'lobsters' ends up coming in.

Maybe a critique could be made that Emil Durkheim covered a lot of the same ground that Peterson has about the functioning of religion, but Peterson tied a lot of eclectic threads together. Some of the best critiques of Peterson come from people like Bret Weinstein saying 'Sure, review it but a lot of it really is ordered in priority for a very different time with very different problems' and I remember him saying a few years ago that getting the ten commandments right for the 21st century might have the 1st commandment be something like 'Thou shalt not enrich uranium for weaponization'.


Dealing with my own problems with scary things I can't change I understand how people tend to sheer off complexity by cutting the Gordian knot, quite often they might lack the sophistication to do better but as often there are situations where they won't be able to function without a very well-fitted and non-intrusive solution, otherwise they'll tend to rebel and go too far against the complexity they're seeing because it seems to undercut their well being and capacity to participate.

With identity issues there seem to be multiple things happening. One one hand you do have people with gender dysphoria, it's a thing and it happens because nature just does this sort of thing to people somewhat indescriminately. You also have situations where people have missed developmental milestones in childhood and so they find themselves trying to suss out aspects of core identity development that they missed. The ways of dealing with that won't be identical because they're somewhat separate issues (though they could as easily as anything else happen in the same person). The goal of liberal or Enlightenment values is to figure out what people really can't change without undercutting their thriving to such a degree that the results are onerous to their health or are damaging to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness to an extent not shouldered by other citizens in a given democracy.


That was really a caveat I put in to say that when making societal decisions we don't have to listen to 'literally everyone' in their weigh in on what the best solutions are for given groups, particularly if a group is actively hostile and not even incidentally contributing any useful insights to the conversation. That there are gradients of instinctive reactions over differences can be visually perceived, or corporate settings where institutional racism or sexism can happen just by these insurance level risk-aversions where if something or someone even looks like they could be a risk in some way you don't hire them, I think that's commonly agreed to be an ongoing issue and to say that it might be wise to avoid fringe elements heckling a dialog rather than adding anything and that they'd be worth excluding in that context doesn't take away from that.

The idea is to say that if we have enough complexity we probably need to handle the commons differently and almost do something like different 'threads' of culture operating autonomously but synchronized and connected in different places. I say that because if everyone had to deal with all of the complexity all of the time we don't function well unless we're allowed significant cheat-sheets.



You're pretty much describing outsourcing of sense-making though, particularly dumping it off on peers and pastors, and particularly when scientists are 'those dang liberals'. One could argue that a person with a libertarian streak would be pro-gun (especially if they're minarchist or an-cap), could be pro market to a degree that they're okay with an unusual number of externalities (mentioned with the fossil fuel burning) but the jump to denying man-made climate change is one further that relies on more complexities and historical incidents, in particular if a lot of people who did want to attack capitalism did want to try amping up government mandates to onerous levels - and then deep pockets in the oil and gas industry would amplify the narratives of those people as if to suggest that if you're concerned about these issues you're 'one of them'.


Something that might help in that area, it's a bit long but shows how nasty of a problem unbridled game theory is:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/m ... on-moloch/

The problem we have is there's no ultimate source of authority when it comes to human rules for humans when it comes to things like competition, and when you have different units competing against each other - particularly in a cutthroat manner - you have winners and losers. When it's a deal you can't refuse then to not play is to lose and be dominated by the other players.


And one defector on such an agreement becomes the one who dominates the others.


So this is where a rephrasing of something of the old 2000's war hawk 'Peace through superior fire power' comes to mind. A political group actually needs to step up whose geeky enough and analytical enough to actually care about solutions that work rather than saying one thing, nod-nod-wink-wink, and doing another. This is part of why I was very big on Andrew Yang in the Democratic nominations, it's part of why I'm very big on the GameB community and thinkers in it like Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jordan Hall, etc.. We're dealing with complex social and economic systems and we need people who can actually deal with those complexities in as close to full-resolution as possible rather than saying 'Should we do capitalism or socialism?', neither nor will get us out of this and we need people who can get really data-driven in their suggestions on what should be tried rather than licking a finger and sticking it in the air, as a first course for making decisions, to see what public feelings are or how the campaign financiers feel about it.

I understand that for a person not confirming to the norms, the nirms become much, much more apparent, and one's self-definition takes place not indepently of these norms, but in contrast to and context if these norms. Non-binary only has meaning because there's a binary to deny. It marks an absence. (And the binary roles each are equally defined in contrast to the respective other).
But I also do think that on a scale of society, gender will *lose* a lot of its meaning, because there will be too many individual interpretations to keep track of. And that in turn will likely lead to the norms weakening to a point where nonconforming people won't necessarily have to define themselves in this narrow context.
Or, in other words: right now people will ask you what enbie is even supposed to mean.
In a few years they might just shrug and call you "they" (or whatever general-purpose pronoun society will have settled on) and that's that.

It's a bit like with second generation feminists who had to struggle to go to university and get taken seriously etc. - it's something easily forgotten by my generation and younger, because female academics are so normal now we don't even think about how special that must have been a generation or two before. - so in that context, gender roles have become much less defining, much less meaningful (though not entirely meaningless, yet), and I expect it to progress similarly with the gender binary.

I think it is at least likely we will see new words, such that currently enby is used in place of both a child and an adult (boy/girl and man/woman). Within English it has at least been getting workshopped for at least half a centaury when people go "Ladies, Gentlemen and blank", and seeing as language does not have an inherent value rather than ever evolving, we will probably be seeing more words come into existence or redefined. Even if being an enby won't be the norm, gender might start being seen in some way as something opted into rather than something decided, and similar with sexuality.

Conservative people won't want to move over, they will as usual try to enforce their view of gender from periods before, with boys liking cars and girls liking ballet. But society may otherwise come to accept mini identities within even binary genders, such as tomboy and femboy, but with probably, or hopefully, language that is not so associated with current porn. But will probably otherwise on current trends still be male, female and enby, perhaps language could be touched up so female is not something just in addition to male, with mini-identities for what archetype they might fit into.

Another misunderstanding is that trans identities erase things like tomboys, which have existed for a while and frankly have been erased by cisnormativity in it being just a phase. But following 'woke' changes being a tomboy will be seen as a more valid identity that one does not have to change from (but can), and we will see the boy versions that society is harder on stamping out in the first place, because nothing is considered worse than a boy being feminine. Homosexuality is on a fast track to dismantle heteronormativity, so there is bound to be some element of reassessing how genders/sex has been divided. Except in areas where people become really anti-gay.

Hmm. Considering the number of homosexual people is pretty large, yet heteronormativity is the norm, I don't expect gender will be an opt-in model anytime soon, given the tiny number of people not identifying with their assigned gender. I do wonder whether raising non-enby people in a gender neutral way is doing them any good. ... I mean... That's basically raising them in the wrong gender role, until they are capable of identifying as anything, no?

I did actually think of this, and is why I kind of meant something a bit more nuanced. That at least it will become more accepted that children have gender neutral toys or not as forbidden for perceived girls to like cars and perceived boys to play with dolls. Because a lot of the time kids don't care about these sorts of things until someone tells them they are the wrong gender to play with that toy. The gendered advertising to children is often ridiculous.

I don't see something in foreseeable future of it being banned to use gendered pronouns on children, but it perhaps more clear that children can choose what they want to be referred to as, and how they want to present. If little Timmy wants to be a princess from a week and called referred to as "she", that shouldn't be any weirder than parents putting a shirt on them that says "lock up your daughters" and have a five year old asked if that little girl is their girlfriend. It is super weird that children are separated into and made to act a certain way as pertaining to their sex. And it would arguably solve a lot of problems to have them able to choose the sorts of stuff they like when young, including that neither is also a choice.

My point about homosexuality becoming more accepted, is that there is going to be less of things like this boy and this girl are going to like each other because they are opposite genders/sex. The sort of junk that could see any boy as having some motive of creeping on a girl, because arguably if the boy is gay that same worry should be with the other boys, let alone us bisexuals. So there is going to need to be some looking at base assumptions in separating genders.

Something else I'm thinking about explicitly in connection to my OP and people who've been bringing up the kinds of things that have bothered me about willfully asserting fantasy in hopes of smashing undesired realities with it, Gad Saad is probably less well-known and tends toward the rationalist camp (has a lot of satire in how he deals with things) but he's discussed things like 'idea pathogens' and the idea that reality burdens many people to such a degree that there's a primal will to break out of it by any means necessary and that our genes are more than willing to provide the kinds of push to break our moral compasses in favor of what they wanted anyway - which isn't liberal democracy.

That whole gradient of thinking between Ronda Byrnes 'The Secret' and Napoleon Hill's 'Think and Grow Rich' you have various cherry-picked forms of New Thought that have been popular in the US, Kurt Andersen touched on this history as part of his book 'Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire'.

Admitting even that I've had a lot of personal interest in occult dynamics and attempting to work with what I've considered to be the possibility of recondite systems of consciousness in nature, in tracing that process I always felt like it was mandatory to find out where one was up against walls solid enough to call 'laws', I remembered that a lot of cheap/pop new age gurus would say that you're supposed to almost kamakazee what you're trying to manifest, ie. that if you want to be rich then you have to live like you're rich and spend money like your rich without any conscious or subconscious concern that you'll go broke or that you'll torch your life in a single blaze of suicidal stupidity. That always turned me off because, for one even if it were hypothetically 'true' 98-99% of people would burn up on entry and that 1-2% would be all that were needed to have these wonderful survivor-bias stories which then reinforce what people want to hear anyway, and the more obvious point (it should be obvious enough to anyone unless they're so in the pits of hell that they would have been willing to torch their life anyway) that it's ones own life and future that they're attempting to fly into a mountain to break the mountain and that a thinking person should have way, way more regard for the work their parents put into raising them and all the good and bad times that they've had to survive to get to where they're at - even if where they're at is suboptimal. Aside from that kamikaze approach to New Thought bothering me for that reason it's clear that the person wouldn't learn anything about how it worked even if they did, it would just be 'monkey do, monkey get things!', that's a large part of why my interest in occult dynamics took me down the road of wanting to find my way into the actual weeds in order to parse them rather than jump off buildings challenging the story that humans can't fly.

The sense I get from people like Gad Saad is that we're dealing with enough people who are running on something like short life-history strategy that ramming their two-seater or four-seater plane into the mountain in hopes that it breaks the mountain is something that people would indeed do in that circumstance. I see it as well when people will do insane things to their life or appearance to rake in attention on Facebook or Twitter, a bit like the incentives of 'look at me' and what it takes to actually be seen rather than ignored (getting ignored = low status = death) almost seems to be turning people toward a kind of fast-life strategy, a bit like if they don't throw themselves off a cliff to get attention then they can't break people's filters.

On that last paragraph, TBH, I have to admit that in my own life I've paid the price. I've been mostly invisible and I've noticed the hard way that if anyone is different enough in how they think, even if they got there through reasoning and even if they're above average in terms of amount of clarity and sense they're making (could be me, could be anyone in this position), people in general seem to think in a more diffuse pattern - something like 'I'm encountering someone whose different, it will take a lot of work to understand this person, I don't care if they're right or wrong, I care if putting the work in to understand them will be worth the fitness payouts, and if I never run into another person like this again or run into someone like this once every few years then it's not worth the effort' - hence you get pushed out of society by those tradeoff filters, and I've tried to bring this up in other threads and contexts (this way of thinking seemed a bit 'new' still to a lot of people) but it seems like the internet and the velocity of information seems to have just steepened those filters to where increasing numbers of people are just ignored - without even being all that different, even simple humility seems to be enough in a world where it takes manic peacocking to get people's attention. I would have been more on the 'extreme unique' side who got to see it early (as far back as 4th and 5th grade), other people are really getting nihilistic about this - and this is before we get to people dealing with poverty, tensions of being a minority, etc..


If anything, when I think about who the fantasy and 'The Secret' problem would pull in, it probably would not be the minorities or people trying to move collective action to get things done, it does seem to fit a lot of the upper middle class and wealthy white kids who show up, hijack their movement, and tell them how they need to be coddled, and they seem to do their level best to keep them in a victim status (I think of some of what Brittany King brought up in terms of her starting a BLM chapter and seeing a similar sort of bending of priorities as the white bourgeoise showed up to 'help').


This is where I do get the concern that there's enough actual solipsism out there for enough people to really say, and mean, that things like 'science', 'reason', 'epistemic sufficiency', etc. are 'white' ways of thinking and knowing that need to be disbanded and that they don't mean something highfalutin academic by it. Part of why solipsism tends to be such a reliable human trait, especially with fast-life strategy, is that its a way to relinquish moral responsibility in favor of more violent means to ends and with human history being what it is this would yield differential success in many playing fields, ie. it's the way that 'feelings don't care about facts' can - at least on a social level - make facts go away. It's part of how new fundamentalist religious and political ideologies can sweep in and grab people, and particularly the fast-life strategy sorts will wave whatever flag and agree with whatever they need to if they have reason to believe that they'll still mostly 'get what they want' from society in an arms-length sense.


That was probably a lot and it might have gotten a bit circuitous, but having seen the sides of human behavior described above, I don't think it's necessarily 'bad faith' to consider the possibility that it's an actual 'thing' that people would want to abolish STEM or, as it went last summer, say that 'defund the police means defund the police'.

I've encountered this "science is white" trope only in a few videos of people on the internet and figured they might just be individual, saying something unreflected.

But thinking about what Yuval Harari says about science - for individual scientists, it may be abouth truth, but on the whole, science is about power - .... I mean, yeah, military uses have driven most of science, because control over matter gives you strategic advantages.
But technology like that requires changes to society etc. - the stuff the UNABomber was on about.

Western societies had centuries to adapt, and those were some seriously tumultous centuries. Societies that aren't fully integrated into technological arms race can legitimately claim that they're pushed to not only take on science and technology, but also adapt to technological society, without a few centuries of easing into it.

The Chinese seem to have found a way, it took them one whole century and the West is not in agreement with how they run their society... And it took them a lot of sacrifice to get there.

I already often feel like Facebook and Twitter, at least in 2019 and 2020 and even just watching my feed, were like drinking poison from a fire hose where it seemed like so much of the information around was almost there to demoralize, demotivate, and generally do brain damage (sort of the memetic version of fixing someone's facts by clinching and kneeing them in the jaw). A lot of this sort of thing seems to bounce around and amplify in echo chambers very much the way QAnon logic does, the fingerprints tended to show up in the rioting and similarly seem to offer the moral core and foundation to the ways in which the dogmas seem to try bending reality.


I was just watching a science video about the ELT (Extremely Large Telescope) right after reading Chris Hedges article on Dying for an iPhone.

What seems really notable is that science seems often to be chasing these sort of flashy, peacocks-tail type things that can garner a lot of funding like who has the biggest, fastest, largest, etc. (very fitting of victory in Darwinian terms) whereas turning the lens of science on human sociological or economic problems seems to be a much less prominent sector (for example, IMHO, whatever chain of hands and hard work go into making vertical farming an actual thing or get fusion to work may be some of the biggest heroes in human history). I'm not against us exploring space but you see where the problem lies with capturing attention and funding.

This goes back to the perennial problem of game theory though - it's harsh, raw algorithms where what leads to general human thriving and happiness has little or nothing in common with what yields differential success and perhaps more frightening the more differential success is leveraged through technology the more extreme these games are likely to get if nothing else has teeth.

What I actually think needs to be addressed is that if us, individually, optimizing against the shape of our limitations is leading to horrible outcomes, what's the core essence of these limitations? For example does human biology need something like an ATP tune-up to take the edge off? What is it about situations of cooperation or high equality situations where defectors seem like sexy anti-heroes or where our genes are screaming at us and cranking wrist-locks on us telling us that we're failing and dying for not having harems or not being married to a baseball player or some other billionaire? I've often gotten the sense that pathological narcissism is less of a DSM personality disorder and more a strategy for winning at all costs and one that nature seems to reward because it has no moral objections to pretty much anything. There seems to be something baked into the human condition that seems to want to rip everything apart by refinement of cold core principals (until we're refined right out of the picture), and I think our challenge is getting to the source of that problem out ahead of thinking that we can dream up a system that stops a Hobbesian gene war from being a Hobbesian gene war.


They took centralized control of capitalism rather than it turning toward neofeudalism as it has in the US. Jordan Hall had a video discussion with the fan who seemed to have inadvertently gotten him kicked off of Facebook for a while by association, Brandon Hayes, discussing the issue of fascism and Brandon pretty much blurted it out - fascism's faster, and in more recent discussions Daniel Schmachtenberger's brought up just how much of a challenge to western capacity to organize solutions that the rise of China's current methods are posing (ie. we either need to polish off liberal democracy and find a way to leverage something very different from Chinese corporate fascism to survive, or, the west gets subsumed by it). If it keeps going down that road I'm not sure what we end up with, maybe there's enough collective interest among oligarchs to pay taxes to maintain national boarders or intelligence agencies to prevent terrorists from damaging their operations but it's an open question what happens to everything else - especially as automation increases.

This doesn't have a catchy title but Daniel's getting into all of the metrics and general 'tuning' of our culture, where it's off, what's off and why, etc. pretty well here. It might seem like a complete side-tangent to the threat but I noticed that where we're trying to have meeting of minds or at least agreed-upon specifics of disagreement keeps going back to the question of 'what's actually off' as well as whose propagandizing or inflating which fringe political behaviors for their own ends. I think Daniel gives a pretty balanced perspective of what the social weather is like - if one can try go take an outside perspective and look back in at it: