Joshe

Even if it's not true, the correct position on suicide is "It's always bad and you should never do it under any circumstances." Your need to demonstrate your sophisticated, nuanced philosophy or metaphysics matters so much that you'll broadcast tacit endorsement to susceptible people.

Everyone here is getting something from being here, and in almost all cases, it’s unconscious or vague. The people who sweep Leo’s toxicity under the rug are getting something that would be threatened if they were to acknowledge it, which is why they don’t allow themselves to see it. This used to describe me as well. I suspect for most people who refuse to see, Leo is a symbol of lifestyle and spiritual excellence that they can aspire to. Also, they drew the conclusion that Leo is integrous, which blots out evidence to the contrary. Also, they like access to an “advanced” fame-adjacent figure. Imagine if someone spent years here and went through all these things but eventually it was no longer tenable to sweep the toxicity under the rug. Should we expect these people to “just leave”? Also, consider that If every critic were to just up and leave upon recognizing the toxicity, this place could be 10x the sycophancy, 10x the denigration, 10x the toxicity.

The truth of your historical record and situation is true, but it’s irrelevant. The truth to honor is that worrying about insomnia and revisiting your historical record is preventing you from solving the problem. The solution is to disengage and ignore certain thoughts. Stop feeding them because that’s the only way they survive - by you compulsively acknowledging them. This is being intentional about what you’re cultivating. If someone has crippling social anxiety, they’ll never overcome it so long as they keep acknowledging the “truth” that they suck and reliving their cringe. As long as they keep feeding those thoughts, they don’t stand a chance. I’ve often asked myself a similar question about my own cynicism. “How can I not be cynical when I see the truth of humanity? The truth creates the cynicism, not me. This is just a normal reaction to what is true”. This is all true, but I know that if I continue to see in this way, it will degrade my quality of life. Choosing to not feed my cynicism isn’t choosing to ignore what is true. It’s choosing a different truth that serves something other than my compulsion.

Because certain configurations of mind just produce it. You can understand it if you build a robust and accurate model of the human mind. And you’re right, for the configuration to meaningfully change is circumstantial/lucky, is rare, and usually happens over long periods of time where the mind doesn’t have to tend to it’s deficiency, but rather quietly and slowly forgets about it and replaces it with something new. This is because only a certain kind of mind would even be motivated to question itself. The motivational structure can be understood by understanding things like deep unconscious values, and many more mechanisms in a configuration. I've come up with the concept of "The Foundational Drive", which I think explains a lot about self-deception. This explains why some invest in ego, some invest in ideology, some invest in hedonism, and why some invest in truth-seeking. "Truth-seeking" is itself a strategy - a "reason to continue", lol. This also explains why depression, dark night, etc. are common with deep self-reflection/spirituality. Because willy nilly fucking around and removing your reason to continue has consequences. The most common strategy to solve this problem is to reorganize your reason and ego around spirituality itself, but it takes time. And once it’s stable, you can’t just remove your new reason to continue for the same reason you can’t just remove ideology from the Nazi - the system would collapse from having no organizing drive. This is all provisional and unpolished but here are a few of the mechanisms I was referring to:

Canva. lol. I think Figma would be far better than Canva, but neither would be as fast as a custom tool. I actually haven’t looked into Canva in a while. It might be the better option depending on his workflow and if they let you setup your own design tokens and create + export graphics programmatically. This was a 15-minute throw-away prototype. Fully fleshed out, you could make it so that you don’t even have to pull up the UI to create the graphic. Just type words in a text input, hit a preview button and then hit enter to have it on your blog in 30 seconds. I doubt this level of efficiency is possibly with Canva. When your graphics always follow the same template with just a few design tokens/elements, you usually just need a quick way to plug content in, not a hundred different design capabilities and an inefficient deployment process slowing you down and wasting your energy.

@Leo Gura You need something like this: You can create this with Claude Design, although you will probably need the max plan. Otherwise, I can create and refine this for you for $500, lol.

"It will still feel bad, but at least it will be profound." "The truths I share with you are not magic tricks to make you feel good." These statements seem contradictory. What benefit is a "feeling of profundity" if not to improve one's experience? Conjuring profundity IS the feel-good magic trick. "at least it will be profound" : Reframe your pain and you can get some positive along with the negative - in service of "feeling good".

Yeah, I mean, to even have the thought is weird as hell, but granting his explanation that "It's not egotism, it's just the truth of the matter that I'm the most sophisticated thinker alive". Ok, let's say that's true. Why does that truth surface so often? Of course it's not true, but if it were and if you weren't getting your ego juiced from it, you'd keep it to yourself, unless letting everyone know it on a regular basis was serving some egoic agenda. It's all just too obvious that it feels weird we're even fleshing it out, lol. Talk about being gaslit. This is the thing that bothered me most about this issue when I raised it a few months back. It's a hard view to stomach but this is what I think is going on. Shit gets dark when you pull on this thread.

Christianity is so prominent mostly due to political adoption, not because of its teachings. It just so happens to have been the religion that caught on with powerful people at a specific point in time. Christianity, like all religions (including AO), is a terror-management strategy first and foremost. When survival is sufficiently secured, the human mind starts to ask questions like "what is this all about?" People aren't starving for spirituality. They're starving for meaning, which religion/spirituality provides. Because humans don't easily live their life by pure abstract rewards they might get someday, they need to sustain their seeking with rewards accessible here and now. For Christians, that reward might be to commune with other Christians on Sunday and the reminder that they're safe in the afterlife. For enlightenment seekers, it might be the striving for and contemplation of exotic states, and the reminder that some day they will reach the mountaintop and claim their reward from the black box (at least Christians know exactly what their jackpot is.) This statement implies that the motivation behind seeking Ultimate Truth is to feel positive emotions or some exotic state where perception is altered in a positive way. Enlightenment seekers can see through Christianity but often not their own motivations and constructions. "Is my religion or spiritual project structurally different from what a Christian is doing?" A human believes in a story that generates meaning and emotions. They live that life for a time, then they die. Structurally, the spiritual seeker and the Christian are doing the same thing, as far as I can tell. Just some ideas I toy around with. My own constructions.

Yeah, that seems like the obvious thing to me and you.

You can't explain narcissism away by distinguishing grandiosity from ambition because grandiosity alone isn't the thing that makes narcissism toxic. The denigration of others as a strategy for self-elevation is the actual toxicity and the tell. There's no way to explain that one away. And I don't think Leo will ever touch it because the floor falls out quick.

Exactly. If I thought I understood reality better than everybody else, what is the point of implying it or saying it out loud on a regular basis? If I did that, I would have alarm bells ringing that my ego is being juiced. If you're often invoking or dealing in the idea that you're superior to others, it's the most obvious thing ever that your ego is getting juiced. A perceptive child can detect this.

Here are the most important principles IMO. I think #6 if probably what most people need to really contemplate.

Useful concept, thanks. "Picking apart individual claims, finding ambiguity in each one, never engaging with the cumulative picture. What the tactic prevents is seeing the PATTERN across all points taken together. The comprehensive case is damning precisely because 100 data points all pointing in the same direction can't be individually gradient-raped away. But if you never let the case be evaluated as a whole — if you keep isolating individual pieces and subjecting each one to gradient analysis — the pattern never gets assembled in the reader's mind. It's a specific tactic that motivated reasoning deploys, but with a key distinction. Motivated reasoning is the engine underneath — you're reasoning toward a conclusion you need to protect. Gradience rape is one of the tools that engine uses. The motivation determines which points get subjected to gradient analysis and which get accepted at face value. And the selectivity is what reveals the motivation. The same people who gradient-rape every piece of evidence against Leo don't apply the same scrutiny to Leo's claims. Nobody stops and says "well, 'I'm the most sophisticated thinker alive' exists on a gradient from confident to delusional, how do we know where it falls?" That claim gets accepted without scrutiny. But "Leo is a narcissist" gets subjected to endless gradient analysis — "well it could be arrogance, it could be insecurity, it could be a performance, you'd need a clinician to establish that." The asymmetry in where the scrutiny gets applied tells you the reasoning is motivated. If it were genuine epistemological rigor, it would apply equally in both directions. It doesn't. It only applies to threatening claims. " - Claude

Leo had a conversation with what he believed was God and the question he chose to ask was about how people perceive him. But this is the real move right here: "And remember, God is the ultimate narcissist because I love myself unconditionally." This is Leo coping with his condition by making God HIMSELF a narcissist. This is narcissistic architecture talking to itself through the mask of the highest authority, giving itself permission to continue. He should just come out of the narc closet after this.

Yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with camp 1 either. I think your position is pretty good, and I appreciate the good-faith interaction, which is hard to come by around here. Some have assumed the reason why a few of us care about this whole toxic Leo thing is because there was some negative interpersonal issue we experienced. There were 4 or 5 times Leo insulted me and put me down when I was just trying to have a conversation, and of course no one is gonna like that, but I'm not a child who holds grudges because I have a Leo wound, lol. I can give you a very rough sketch of why I'm in camp 3. I care about this topic for the same reason I want people to see how Christianity/religion is toxic. For the same reason I want people to see what Trump is. For the same reason I want people to see that buying an ATV for their 4 year old is dangerous. For the same reason I care that old people swerving all over the road need to have their licenses taken away before they wipe out an entire family. For some, they might look at a parent buying their 4 year old an ATV and think it's cute and the kid is going to have so much fun. But I look at it and recall that article I read that said ATVs are one of the leading causes of child deaths, and I can feel the weight of those consequences in the abstract. For me, the consequences are attached to suffering, which is felt to some degree. That's just how I am. I'm aware that me trying to make others see what I see is selfish, but I don't care. I want more clarity, less deception, less toxicity - a better world. So when I see some toxic idea or thing proliferating, I want others to see it too. This is so foreign to most people that when I express myself, they assume things like I'm trying to push my views on them(probably guilty here), I'm trying to appear intelligent or some other ego agenda, I'm worrying too much, and all sorts of other shit that just isn't true. I want reality to be the best that it can be and I know that happens by seeing clearly and not letting toxic shit proliferate. That's one way a person might wind up in camp 3.

This place is a shit show. Good luck with it. My parting hot take: Natasha lies through her teeth and is a manipulative sadist.

You're being weird man. Relax the body.

Ah, my bad.

The dataset we have on Leo is richer than the dataset we have on Trump. I know more about Leo's psychology than I do about Trumps, even though I've paid way more attention to Trump. Trump never put out hundreds of hours of monologue and never engaged in public conversations at length, which is where the real data is. Also, if after 65k posts and hundreds of hours or videos you still can't be sure who someone is, that implies they're intentionally keeping you from seeing the real them. If you don't know the real Leo by now, maybe that's your sign.

Bro, how tf can you say my position is incoherent if you don't even understand it? What you think are incongruencies are just gaps in your own understanding.

Notice I didn't have a tendency to diminish your intelligence on this topic even though I had to explain to you that narcissism isn't a conscious strategy, explain to you that it presents differently and in more sophisticated ways as intelligence scales, that perceptive narcissists can easily avoid detection, and that impulse control can't override it. You demonstrated a surface-level understanding at best. Again, just because you can't see how it's possible to arrive somewhere, doesn't mean it's not possible.

@Elliott Just to clarify, when I use "overt narcissism", I don't mean it's always visible. What I mean is that it's there and his behavioral patterns spell it out clearly. If you don't bother to see the patterns, then it won't be obvious to you. If you look objectively, and if you have a mediocre understanding of psychology, and if you know how to put 2 and 2 together, it seems to me you should see it clearly. Maybe that's a bar too high for some, IDK, but to me, it's so obviously true it feels weird to even explain that it is. I feel like you're looking at narcissism like it generally presents the same way without much variation. What do you think narcissism looks like in an intelligent person? Take 10 different narcs, each with a different level of intelligence. They'll all have different tactics. The more sophisticated ones will have far more advanced tactics than your run-of-the-mill crude narcissist, obviously. I've already explained what I think is the likely explanation for why this is allowed. Just because you can't know if someone you've watched for 10 years over the internet is a narc, doesn't mean others can't. The same way you know that Trump is a narc is the same way I know Leo is a narc.

No problem at all! The part where I mentioned he asked God why he was a narc, that's not a thing in my model of Leo. I was just highlighting it to show there have at least been moments of recognition. I don't know to what extent he recognizes it and I don't have any real data aside from that one admission. It would be interested to dive into this though because he publicly states that he's not a narc. So that would be interesting to explore. I intuit he knows it and realizes there's nothing he can do about it, and he knows that it's not something he can publicly own up to. "Yeah, I'm a narc" from the a guy who teaches consciousness and ego transcendence doesn't go over well. Also, when I say Leo is aware of it, I don't mean he's fully aware of it. I mean that he knows it's there. If I had to guess, he probably hasn't dissected it very much. But it's possible he has dissected it and is just something he lives with. Narcissism is not a selected conscious strategy. It's an operative one outside one's control. It would be like recognizing you're an introvert and not being able to do anything about it. You know you're an introvert, and you can't change it. That's what it is like to be a perceptive narcissist. It's just who and how you are and you live with it and don't experience it as a bad thing because it's what rewards you. It's native. He's not consciously seeking validation or superiority. He's not intentionally alienating people. The seeking is unconscious but the expression is granted. When a structure is that deep in you, it operates without you. When Leo's narcissism slips, it's not intentional, it's reactive. He NEEDS to elevate himself and the only way to do it is by putting someone else down. This is the main thing hiding behind his constant bashing of scientists. They're in his domain of "exploring reality" and they claim to be intellectually sophisticated, and that's Leo's turf. Regarding why the overt narcissism doesn't destroy the supply: because Leo is intelligent enough to say things like "look, when I tell you I'm the most advanced, I'm just telling you what I've observed and found to be true, it has nothing to do with any ego drive, that's absurd. You guys take me for a fool." That and several other tactics are used to give plausible deniability. And it works because almost everyone here respects and trusts Leo as an intelligent thought leader. And yes, putting this information out makes it so he can adapt. But here's the thing: he can dial it down but he won't be able to stop, because it's his nature. He's not going to starve himself of that reward indefinitely. Hopefully that clears it up, but lmk.

Anyway, I'm not liking having to continue to put Leo down to prove points, so I'm out for now.