Hahahahah that’s jokes
“Err mate I think you’ve taken too much acid, what the fuck are you on about?”
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Reminds of the quote “An idiot admires complexity; a genius admires simplicity”. It was uttered by a delusional schizophrenic programmer who thought he was talking directly to god through an OS he built, but it’s one of the best reminders that if you can’t at least simplify your ideas a little, nobody is going to be able to follow your specific thought patterns.
Encapsulating larger concepts into simple, human terms is really an art form in and of itself.
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Was thinking recently about the dramas that often unfold over nothing, and the dangers of modern cultural shifts in encouraging drama over nothing, empowering people to cause the drama. I had a realisation which explains many confusing and accusatory interactions I’ve experienced, as well as those of a friend’s. It is about the recent cultural shift towards the intrinsic virtue of respecting and even setting one’s boundaries, but there is a vector here that can exploited for controlling purposes.
A boundary here refers to limiting the extent of others’ interactions with you, what they say, how they act, and ultimately what they do in general when in your presence. A boundary can be: “don’t touch me”, and that’s great, and generally a good boundary to set; however, a boundary can also be, “don’t go quiet on me, talk to me about any problems”, yet imagine now that person A talks about their problems, but person B starts an argument when they do, so now person A doesn’t talk about the problems as much, then person B uses that to argue that person A is now breaking a boundary by going quiet. When you experience this, it’s often quite hard to keep track of it, and can be very confusing if manipulated in a clever way. I had an old manager that was excellent at this, and in retrospect can see that this is the one of the means by which he exacted his manipulations. It was hellish, but I learned a lot about manipulative behaviour and I learned to better keep track of who said what and when, so I could figure out what he was distorting and make it impossible for him to manipulate me effectively. He came to hate me for that, but hey ho, he got fired after I managed to convince the boss of the extent of it.
It’s important to remember that a boundary can relate to indirect behaviours or even the absence of one! Which makes them incredibly versatile as a means of exerting control.
We are encouraged today to exercise our boundaries, and it is considered our human right. However, some come to enjoy the sense of power they feel when they do this, and rather than exercising a boundary because of a genuine moral principle they hold, they instead exercise a boundary, even if they opportunistically make it up on the spot, because they enjoy the sense of control they feel as a result, and perhaps even enjoy any drama that proceeds afterwards. Far from its innocent beginnings, it has become a medium through which controlling individuals can exert power over others. Whilst it isn’t at all limited to women, it appears that today’s culture preferentially supports a woman’s boundaries over a man’s, so men tend to take the position of defender, whereas other women can take the special position of being both, due to their boundaries supporting each others’. I’ve seen exactly this dynamic go down in arguments in bars and parties.
The self-reinforcing nature of this power structure makes it an especially difficult problem. It is seen as automatically disrespectful, or immoral, to challenge somebody’s boundaries, so it creates a cognitive bias away from recognising when those boundaries are tools of control over others as opposed to a tool of control away from others. Thus the intrinsic virtue of boundary setter and boundary defender creates a deadlock, and a Pascal’s-Wager-like logic emerges where not supporting or respecting a boundary makes you immoral. Hence, it is extremely well hidden and plausibly deniable, which makes them difficult to escape or disperse the power structure.
The means by which these boundaries can be tailored specifically for the present circumstances are endless. For example, a person can manipulate those around them into an emotional reaction (for example, using intentionally misleading body language), and then cite their boundary against that reaction to gaslight the victim, and those around them, into believing the victim has committed an immoral act, thereby damaging the trust a group has in an individual, which can be further exploited through various means. The defenders can have their perception so warped, that they simply are unable to see why somebody might reasonably do the thing which was in violation of the boundary. The real danger, though, is that these control freaks are blend in, and are actively enabled by the cultural shift towards intrinsic respect for boundaries, and to hide behind the perceived intrinsic virtue of respecting boundaries, even if those boundaries become increasingly unreasonable.
Also related to this is the following:
While people generally share the most basic tenets of human decency, we don’t have any specific morality that we can all agree to. If we want to coexist as a group at all, we just have to negotiate a compromise, but there will always be minor disagreements that can’t be resolved in a reasonable way. We’ve just got to choose our battles and focus on what’s important, without unnecessary drama.
While probably a good thing in the end, society divides at an increasingly small scale; but it does so in the first place because we began to exercise our boundaries and sovereignty, at many levels. Although some of the earlier disagreement remains to a lesser extent, we’re probably through the most violent part of it. These days, it is more often about finer details, which take far longer to work out.
It’s so easy to get lost in the details, confused by semantics, ambiguity, and contradiction. It’s impossible to resolve it all in a way that satisfies the majority, without also agreeing to a compromise. It is for this reason that our ability to reliably infer in advance what is or is not acceptable is always going to be limited, despite our best of intentions. This is why we just need to deal with a lot of it on a case by case basis.
Ah, Terry A. Davis. Rest in peace.
I think there’s a limit to this though, and it very much depends on what you’re actually trying to achieve. There’s a trade off between accuracy and simplicity. I think Richard Feynman explained it quite well. I can’t recall his exact words, but it’s more or less: if somebody asks you a question, do they really want to know the answer to it? If they don’t really want to know, you can simply the explanation down to a cartoon level, and it will satisfy those that don’t really want to know; however, for those that do really want to know, the explanation will be insufficient.
Consider also the matter of efficiently explaining many different concepts, and how they are all related. As the concepts become increasingly abstract, and the relations between them grows, the extent to which you can meaningfully simplify them decreases. You can compensate for this by making the explanation longer, to begin from simple concepts to the full idea, butt at that rate, you may as well just start wrapping up the simplified explanations into single words, and use those instead. Sound familiar? That’s what technical terms do, and the purpose they serve is exactly to encapsulate a complicated concept into a single word, to simplify the process of referring to it.
If I’m trying to communicate a philosophical idea, and justify with reasoning and support arguments, in as concrete and irrefutable way as I can, then I’m not going to simplify them down to the extent the veracity of it becomes compromised. If you think of it like a computer program, you can’t simplify beyond the bare minimum required to completely express the concept. You can compartmentalise it, structure it in a way that’s easy to follow, and hide complexity inside of abstractions, but the entire logic of the program must be present and complete.
When I’m typing up a philosophical idea, I want to justify it, I want the arguments to be sound, and I want it to be as irrefutable as I can manage. I’m not particularly interested in having a conversation with somebody that doesn’t already have some basic understanding of the concepts, because it’ll take a really long time to explain it all. I’ve done this before, and while they were thankful for it, it was time consuming, and most of the time I just don’t want to spend my time doing that. Sometimes, if I think an idea is important enough, I will go the extra mile to build up from the foundation and reach the full conclusion, but when I do that, I steadily define the terms as I use them, and trim as much of the fat off as possible.
With that in mind, here’s an exercise for you. Explain the following paragraph in simple terms without compromising the accuracy, or in any way reducing the effectiveness of the argument as it pertains to the broader text (which I posted above).
Non-local hidden variables have not been entirely ruled out, in which there is an exchange of information that occurs between all particles that is instantaneous, thereby enabling the outcome to be deterministic if they were known. If the underlying medium were computation, then that implies there is a global context in which the entire state of the universe is transitioned from one to the next, and it is only from the perspective of an observer inside that the transfer of information is limited to the speed of light. This would allow for the apparently instantaneous exchange of information between all particles, without being able to use it for any sort of communication from the inside.
My bet is that you can’t. It will either be much longer, starting from basic language and working your way up, or it will be missing key logic and won’t capture the complete idea.
I love this. You can write as many words as you want, but if you don’t break it down into some sort of TLDR, you’re kinda wasting your breath… finger breath. on a keyboard. fingerbreath.
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A society of consumers wont survive very long.
Unless those consumers learn the value of work and are able to innovate…the problems faced will become progressively worse.
It’s hard to have philosophical conversations with people who are habitually vague.
It’s hard to have philosophical conversations with people.
It’s hard to have philosophical conversations.
It’s hard.
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19th century we saw marx come up with his societal model.
I think 18th or 17th century somebody wrote the wealth of nations which is basically capitalism.
20th century we have seen the rise of capitalism combined with socialism as a model.
21st century id say certain countries are trending towards being a consumerist societal model (murica). With industries being moved overseas…because its cheaper. With a consumer socio-economic model imo its not sustainable because some kind of industry needs to be the financial backbone of an economy…to offset spending and to generate some kind of national wealth. As well as to make supply and demand more economically equitable globally.
In a consumerist society the people aka the consumers becomes the product being sold. Instead of the people making products or having services to sell/provide because of having industry. As a result a society of consumers will yield people who lack the skills to be independently self sufficient and have to rely on other things for support. Which is problematic because it creates the expectation of entitlement, and an arbitrary form of equity that isnt based off of work ethic.
Tldr… the old adage… that nothing in life is handed to you, you gotta work for it.
Also my train of thought is segwaying into politics…im not in the mood to get into a contest. And if its not problem A then it will be problem B…so…
Also i havent done enough research about about max weber.
Tldr well be fine. Blah.
- Im used to dealing with Tiktok attention spans…so i use soundbytes.
- I highly doubt people want to read a bunch of tldr from me on idmf.
- Topic generation
- You know about the thing.
- …
- Stuff.
What gets me a bit is that it takes only a few minutes (or less) to read 10 internet-sized paragraphs of text. Yet, many today think that’s a lot of reading, for reasons already discussed.
As for wasted (finger)breath, not necessarily. In my case, at least, the act of writing leads me, every single time, to a clearer overall idea of what I think, and I discover many tangential ideas as I do it, which I often then continue in my personal notes (of which I have many). I mostly don’t go back and read them, because once I’ve written it, it’s committed to memory.
I accepted ages ago that not everybody is going to read what I say, I mostly don’t care unless I really value what somebody might have to say about it. I just enjoy the process of very clearly and exactly communicating an idea, so it’s no biggie if nobody reads it. I still got value out of doing it.
Having written software for 15 years, that kind of very explicit and verbose style of communication of an idea in a systematised and program-like manner is second nature to me, and I feel is beneficial for overall clarity of thought.
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I kinda want to build a joke mobile app. It’ll be a slot machine, where all of the symbols are social media service logos, fashion logos, etc., and it spins really fucking slowly… so exactly the kind of person that’s addicted to slot-machine-like social media will get bored of it and close the app before it’s even finished spinning. Just for the sheer absurdity of it.
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There should be a timer on it that congratulates people for staying off of facebook for as long as they’ve stared at it 
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Haha, and if you get three Facebook logos, it says “Congratulations, you have won a day off of Facebook! Enjoy the time to yourself, spend it with friends or just sit in nature for a while and remember that you’re an animal and not a machine.”
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Bouncing off of that last message… a lot of people these days don’t spend enough time in nature. We’ve disconnected from it. Marley said it in Concrete Jungle, but it’s only gotten worse.
The extent to which we suppress our basic instincts in the modern world is incredible. Think for a moment about walking down a street with cars driving past. That car should register to you as a great big fuck off elephant charging at you. You can feel, if you actually pay attention to how your body feels, the sense of danger and low-level anxiety when you walk down the street as cars whizz past. Even more so on a bridge as you look down at cars zooming past on the motorway/highway below, as if you’re in a tree hiding from these rampaging beasts as they stampede across the landscape.
Sitting under a tree always feels good. Yet we’ve suppressed our instincts to such an extent that we’ve lost a good deal of our mind-body connection, and don’t even register the yearning for trees, blue skies and fields… especially when our minds are no longer free to wander into ponder, because in every moment of time where you’re not directly engaged with something, people get their fucking phones out and stare into a portal that sucks their souls into it.
I disabled all notifications on my phone except calls and SMS. So much better. I choose if I want to look at Discord or Reddit or something, not them.
A good while back a friend and I made this…
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I’m the same way my guy, I am very verbose. I don’t really give a shit if people read what I say but I tell you what, I definitely make a point to refine and edit and make sure my posts are exactly what I intended them to be. I’m a walking loquacious sic erat scriptum go fuck yoself.
Yeah man, don’t take me too seriously most of the time, I am a bantererer and just like to talk shit and rib. You are an excellent communicator and I enjoy reading your posts. Thanks for putting the time in to be so clear in how you express yourself! It’s admirable for sure. A lot of people just fucking dump their mind on to the internet and that’s why all the robots think that they have Nazi AIDs.
Shits weird these days, but it’s definitely nice to have a REAL conversation with people on the internet… expression through words might be a thing of the past by the time we’re old… who knows. Eventually we will be telepaths and that’s fucking mental. As i’ve been exploring the possibilities of machine learning, my main goal is to find exactly what purpose humans will serve to our robot overlords once our literal brains are deemed “outdated”. better start being nice to your robovacs guys. We’re no good to them as slaves. I imagine they’ll lets us run back into nature and be more animal again.
That’ll work out great.
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Haha yeah I do the same with edits. I’ll be doing something else and it’ll suddenly pop into my head that the way I’d phrased something was misleading, or that I’d missed out some detail I think is important, so I’ll come back and edit it.
Yeah sick mate. I get ya, I banter all the fucking time, mostly in person… I’ve had people seriously tell me I’m wasting my time or just thinking too much about something they think isn’t important. I just think to myself, “well, if you weren’t a bit of an idiot maybe you’d see that there’s more to most things than meets the eye, and anyway, it’s my time to waste so fuck off” Hey ho
Defo, re: online discussions. Discord is mostly full of shit, but I’ve found some good servers with some interesting folk on there, and have spent many, many hours in conversation with people there.
About AI, if we can’t solve alignment then they may just get rid of us if we’re a nuisance to them. I have a lot to say about cognition and general intelligence… can’t be bothered right now
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Off topic sorry.
All the philosophy in the world cant un butthurt a person when their butthurt…it just kicks the butthurt into overdrive…
More knowledge is gained through real life experience than some old musings written in a book a few hundred years ago or through some self proclaimed sophist looking to make some cash.
Wtf am i talking about…go out into the world, and forge your own path…and write down your thoughts and musings based upon your experiences. After you feel like you have lived.
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I’m not sure I agree. Maybe this isn’t philosophy, but some of the times I’ve been most proud of myself is when I wanted to slap someone in the face or start a flamewar. Instead, I actually turned the other cheek, took a deep breath, smiled and went about my day. I wish I had the maturity to do that more often. It’s hard, but if I’m lucky I can catch myself, think for a second, and do the right thing in those situations.
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Its okay to not agree…
Also you turning the other cheek means that you walk the walk instead of talking the talk like most people do…so props to you
I was specifically referencing those fake social media philosophers of whom are technically sophists that ripoff and just put a spin on other philosophers ideas and sell it as consumable media content.
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This is also not philosophy, but my trick is just thinking to myself “someday, this person will die” and I instantly feel better. haha
Well… not always, but for dumb shit it works pretty well.
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