Joshe

lol. What?? That makes no sense. I'm starting to think you were an actual Musk fanboy. 😂 The only way it could end in delusion is if I had an ego complex about his value or worth relative to mine, and I can assure you, I don't. I'm just trying to understand how you see his value and worth and why it matters to the degree you seem to think it does. You seem to give worldly achievements much more weight in your estimation of characters than I do. I don't typically give much, if any weight to achievement in my estimations of character. I think we're just operating on different wavelengths... you being a crocodile and all. It would be difficult without some luck, but once I got 300m, I could compete with the rest of them in the innovation game. Simple. 😆

Maybe I'm too generous then. That's how it would work for me 😆

I'm open to being wrong but I disagree. I think innovation on the level of Gates and Musk would be somewhat common if everyone lucked up with a few hundred million. Once you get lucky like that and get your first few hundred million, I get the sense it's not difficult to hire the world's best consultants to guide you in hiring the world's best recruiters to find the best managers to manage other managers to produce whatever you want, but first, hire the best financial consultants to set up investments/money printers so you never run out of money. I'm not saying it'd be easy, but if you have a strong will to power, a decent intellect, and a few hundred million, I don't see it as a monumental undertaking to innovate. I could be naive in this regard, as I've never done anything like it, but something makes me think having hundreds of millions of dollars lowers the barrier to innovation to such that about 20 -25% of the population would be capable of similar achievements if they simply had the initial luck and capital. Bill Gates himself acknowledges the absurd luck it took for him to become what he became. He was in the exact right place at the exact right time. If he had gone to school elsewhere, we wouldn't be talking about him right now. If Elon hadn't gotten lucky with PayPal, we wouldn't be talking about him now.

@Leo Gura Ok, so I think I take your point. You're right that I don't truly know what fruits Elon has produced and if I did know them, it might lessen my disdain for him. If that's your point, I get it. So, I just looked up what all he's actually done. The issue I'm running into is that it's hard to attribute actual gains to him that wouldn't have occurred around the same time without him. As far as I can tell, his greatest achievement was to assemble teams of engineers to figure out how to reduce costs to launch rockets and satellites. So arguably, his biggest achievement is hiring a team and pressuring them to come up with breakthroughs. Fucking around in space is not some great thing for humanity at this point in time. Sure, Starlink internet access to those living in bumfuck is a good thing, but it's doing little for humanity on the whole. Neither is shuttling things to and from government space stations. The real power of the satellites is monopolized by the elites, so I don't see how his SpaceX ventures contribute much. If he were to have hired biotechs and pressured them to work 80 hour weeks to find a cure for cancer, I still wouldn't revere him or think he was any less of an asshole. Only if he himself was technically instrumental in finding the cure... then I'd say he was owed credit, regardless of his character. He is not owed credit for getting lucky with PayPal, having a strong will to power, and then using that money mixed with some vision and strategy to build or buy out other companies and pay people to do things. I don't see that he's done much that the 70th percentile intellect with a strong will to power couldn't also achieve with PayPal money. Look at Bill Gates. He wasn't some freak of nature. He was in the right place at the right time. Same thing with Elon Musk. There is no great phenomenon... just a lucky fool with a little vision and strategy. I acknowledge he played a part in the list items below, but how much to attribute to him is debatable. Am I just biased or is it possible you attribute to him more than what seems evident from REALITY?

It's curious that you seek to temper criticism of Musk in the name of balance and reverence. That's perplexing to me, and it has nothing to do with anything personal or a bias. It's just pure curiosity. Instead of explaining your thought process, you say I just need more development, but I'm asking you to explain why balance and reverence should be applied to criticism of Musk. If you really want me to learn something, I can learn the most by you telling me your thought process of why criticism of Musk should be balanced and why he should, in some ways, be revered. I'm a big boy. I can keep up.

I don't see the point in respecting/revering a tree that once bared good fruit but now produces only poison, even if it's good fruits once contributed greatly to the tribe. I just don't get it. I say down with the tree and never look back. Your position seems sentimental to me. It's perplexing. It almost seems like a difference in empathy but I suspect it's probably to do with lack of appreciation for what it took to get from A to B. I tend to focus on what's ahead. I do reflect on what it took to get here, but then I move on. It's very possible I don't spend enough time in appreciation. Right! Hitler wasn't all bad. You gotta give him his Jew.

To see Musk in a positive light is the same level of delusion as seeing Trump in a positive light. Also, to hope Musk will change is as ridiculous as hoping Trump will change. The idea is fantasy. Also, if Musk died today, someone else would create the cars and the rockets. He's no longer a gift to mankind, he's a detriment and likely always will be.

So, I've been contemplating intuition a little bit and started wondering about memory. There's explicit memory (consciously recalling something) and there's implicit memory (unconscious), which are memories you can demonstrate without consciously thinking about them (touch typing, riding a bike, gut feelings, etc.). Not very relevant to my point but: Explicit memory heavily involves structures such as the hippocampus and surrounding medial temporal lobe areas. Implicit memory is more tied to regions like the basal ganglia and cerebellum. It seems implicit memory and intuition are closely connected. So, the "previous data" is just implicit memory. Now, what makes the implicit memory stronger in some people? Consciousness! Heightened perception feeds richer input. More perceptual input leads to richer data, which gives your brain more material to encode, leading to stronger memory traces. A person who’s more awake to subtlety (and reflects on it) provides their brain with more data points to implicitly encode. The higher the consciousness, the more raw data that gets encoded during the process, which creates stronger implicit memories through layers of added context and detail. Each experience becomes more deeply encoded in the implicit memory system because the person is processing it at a deeper level. Just as a memory becomes more accessible when we attach multiple layers of context and detail to it, these richer conscious experiences create more robust implicit memories that our intuition can draw from. When a high conscious person focuses or goes through a process, they: Notice more subtle details and patterns in their experiences Process experiences more deeply Form richer neural connections around these experiences Being more perceptive—i.e., noticing subtle cues, patterns, and details—often feeds your implicit memory with richer data, which can sharpen intuition. There are potential flaws with my theory but what do y'all think? Do you think it's possible to have heightened intuition without higher perception/consciousness? Also, "reflection" is probably a big deal as well for making implicit memories stronger. I haven't explored that but it's probably key. Addition:

It seems like it would be political suicide, but so did trying to coup the government. The fact of the matter is, the citizens are too caught up in their own lives to care about a nazi salute or a government coup or a convicted felon with a several decades long history of con artistry . Half of them probably don’t even know what a Nazi salute or a Nazi is. The majority don’t care but the vocal minority opposition does, which is who the salute was intended for.

Right, the Nazi salute isn’t surprising to me, it’s just clear evidence for those still pondering. Lol

Doesn’t matter if he’s a nazi or not. He did a nazi salute during the presidential inauguration and it was applauded and then hand waved away by nearly all in attendance. Doesn’t matter how immature or dumb he is. This is a testament to the lack of intelligence, integrity, and common decency of this new administration and its lieutenants. He did the Nazi salute because he’s emulating Trump’s playbook. Do some wild shit to get press and polarize people on your behalf. Make people defend you so they entrench themselves in your corner, which effectively creates a cult-like following. He will do more and more things like this, and it’s not because he’s simply against the woke mind virus. He’s using that as cover for gaining a following. People think he’s more ideological than what he is. He wants material gain and power. He doesn’t give two fucks about a woke mind virus. He would embrace the woke mind virus if it gave him power and material gain. It’s just his tool. This is obvious now. He doesn’t care about his trans son or humanity. He’s not heart broken about anything. Ta da! Now you know Musk.

I thought about it. I'd be down for it but I don't like dealing with clients. It can be a pain in the ass. If someone was willing to do all the sales and client/account management, I could get on board with it. Also, maybe a better idea is to come up with complete business solutions for tiny businesses. For example, there are tons of successful one-man and even 3-5 man HVAC businesses that are stuck and don't know how to scale. You could offer them a complete brand, digital, and business strategy package for like 40-50k a pop and have all the systems basically plug and play. It would take a bit of set up in the beginning but once all the systems were dialed in, it would mostly just be a matter of sales. I've heard of people doing things like this and it seems like a sweet ass gig.

If you know HTML, CSS, and basic JS, you should be able to use Claude and ChatGPT to build it. If you don't know those, you're probably a good ways out before you could produce a solid web app. And if you decide to get into modern frontend tools like React, Tailwind, etc, you'll have an even steeper climb. If you're a newbie, the problem is, you don't know what you don't know. It's very easy to build something that works but it's hard to build something that works well at scale, because to do that, you have to build things right, and there are dozens of ways you could build this app. Your entire tech stack would need to be well mapped out and understood. Such an app would need complicated state management solutions, so most would tell you to use React. I don't like React because it seems overly complicated, so I decided to build my own solutions for rendering elements in the DOM and managing their state. I plan on eventually building commercial apps myself, but first, I'm setting up a "systems builder" desktop app (screenshot below) that lays out my entire architecture with documentation and easy copy/paste for all my code. I'm creating all the building blocks I would ever need, that way, when I'm building my apps, I'll have everything ready to go. I'm using custom web components, which is where you build out your own custom elements and program them to behave however you want. Say you want to have a file drop element where people can upload a profile picture. Well, you could build it out normally with HTML, CSS, and JS, but it's not very efficient for reusing it, so you can put it all in a custom component and make it work however you want. I've designed my file drop component to work like this: Now, anytime I want a file drop element, that's all I have to do. The idea is to build things so they can be used with as little friction as possible. That little bit of HTML sets up the functionality you see above, which is actually somewhat complex behind the scenes. And, to make sure I never forget about it, I'm setting up documentation for each component, which provides a demo and code for easy copy and paste. Once this system is set up, I'll be able to scaffold out apps very efficiently. It's taken me a while to figure out the best way to set this all up because I kept realizing I was handling things suboptimally, so I had to go back to drawing board and start from scratch many times. I didn't know what I didn't know. I'm finally at a point where I feel good about the architecture and everything but it took a lot of time. So if you have the money and don't care much about this tech or acquiring the skills, it's probably better to just pay someone, otherwise, there is a good bit to learn and the only way is to get your hands dirty and keep them dirty for a couple years.

You misunderstand what current AI is. LLM stands for large language model. The whole point of it is to predict it’s next output based on a given input. They trained it on language and had it make millions of guesses and the programmers told it if the guesses were accurate. Over time, it’s predictions got better and better until eventually, it could learn unsupervised. Im not the best to communicate it but AI is not programmed the way a calculator is. That would be simple. If you think an AI is the same as a calculator but just scaled up for every possible question, then you will be shocked when you learn what it actually is. They don’t even know how it does what it does. They can’t trace all its processing. They call that “the black box”. It literally is like a giant mind. It wasn’t trained to produce a specific output, it figures it out on the fly, guided by parameters of course. For example, they have it behave friendly. They did program that in. Look up neural nets, machine learning, and natural language processing, or better yet, just ask AI to explain the mechanics of itself. # Mechanics of AI Large Language Models (LLMs) ## Architecture - Based on Transformer architecture introduced in 2017 (Vaswani et al.). - Key components: - Encoder-Decoder structure (e.g., BERT). - Most LLMs like GPT use only the decoder. - Utilizes self-attention mechanisms to process context. ## Tokenization - Text is broken down into tokens (words, subwords, or characters). - Each token is mapped to a numerical vector using embeddings. ## Training - Trained on massive datasets containing text from books, websites, and other sources. - Objective: - Predict the next token in a sequence (causal modeling). - Fill in blanks (masked modeling, e.g., BERT). - Loss function: Measures the difference between predicted and actual tokens during training. ## Context Window - LLMs have a fixed "context window" that limits how much text they can process at once. - Larger context windows allow processing of longer texts but increase computational cost. ## Attention Mechanism - Self-attention allows the model to focus on relevant parts of the input sequence. - Calculates relationships between tokens to understand context and semantics. ## Layers and Parameters - Consist of stacked transformer layers, each containing: - Attention heads. - Feed-forward networks. - The number of parameters (weights) determines model size and capability (e.g., GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters). ## Pretraining - Models are trained on general tasks using unsupervised learning. - Enables them to learn patterns, grammar, facts, and reasoning. ## Fine-tuning - Optionally adapted to specific tasks (e.g., sentiment analysis, code generation). - Done using supervised learning on domain-specific data. ## Inference - At runtime: - Given an input prompt, the model predicts and generates the next token iteratively. - Continues until it forms a complete response. ## Scaling - Larger models tend to perform better but require significant computational resources. - Scaling laws predict improvements with: - More data. - Larger models. - Longer training times. ## Limitations - Prone to generating plausible but incorrect or nonsensical answers (hallucinations). - Lack common sense and grounding in real-world truth unless externally validated. - Memory is limited to the input/output within the context window; lacks long-term memory. ## Applications - Can perform tasks like: - Text generation. - Summarization. - Translation. - Coding. - Question answering. - Used in industries such as education, customer service, and research.

I’ll have to think on that. It’s an interesting idea.

Haha. Intuition does have a mysterious quality to it though. Even with the same level of cognitive development and training, two people can progress at different rates in a skill if one has more developed pattern recognition. I think this might relate to higher consciousness or a heightened perception, though I’m not entirely sure. Additionally, an almost compulsive drive to deeply understand the subject plays a big role. When someone possesses heightened perception AND a strong, obsessive need to understand a thing, that’s when it becomes a gift. You have it with epistemology because that’s your focus, Magnus has it with chess because it’s his, and I have it with reading people because it’s where I’ve focused. It’s very interesting.

No. When you see patterns in chess a thousand times, eventually, they reveal themselves without analysis or trying to see them. That recognition of the patterns is the result of unconscious processing, not analysis. Go watch how the worlds best players mind’s work and how fast they operate. There’s no way they could analyze that fast. They rely on previously acquired patterns much more than analysis. That’s why Magnus Carlson can play 25 other players who take 10 minutes per move and Magnus only needs 3-5 seconds. He’s not analyzing orders of magnitude faster. His pattern recognition is orders of magnitude better as a result of previous analysis and high intuition, not analysis in the moment.

I get the sense he’s not interested in self-development. He parted ways with Sam after Sam jokingly showed him how wrong he was. He’s not the type to want to be corrected. He’d hate you for it. Lol.

Sam's leaked text exchange with Musk exposed a stance on COVID-19 so absurd that it would have been collectively outwitted by the consensus view held among the bottom 10% of intellects. Lol.

The tricky part is, we're always getting hunches and making assumptions about reality and we're always guessing what is and what might be. If we make a thousand guesses, many of them will be right. This applies to all people. But how many of the hunches/guesses/assumptions are incorrect? The track record of being correct is, IMO, the best way to assess development of intuition. AFAIK, a high intuitive faculty does not just randomly fall onto people. I think specific personality traits or thought patterns are required for it to develop, like curiosity, a tendency to observe, contemplate deeply, and analyze. Also, my theory is these are not enough. There must be some sort of spiritual/perceptual endowment, which I'm not sure how to explain. I think we all have intuition and surely have witnessed having an insane hunch that turned out to be correct, and it is in these kinds of instances that many would claim endowment of high intuitive faculties, but they forget about all their inaccuracies.

No. Lol. Does an amethyst count?

Hi Trenton. Im sorry you went through all that. What made you decide to start talking about it? What you’ve gone through is why I think it should be avoided, because it’s too toxic for the psyche to handle. I agree that the number is much larger than we know and almost all will take it to their graves, which says a ton about you having the courage to face it. It’s so painful to allow that truth into existence that I suspect it’s a common cause of low consciousness. Self-reflection of any kind might be avoided because sooner or later, it could lead to reflecting on that unbearable truth, so stay unconscious so that never happens. That’s just a theory I have. The brother in my story is a close family member. He recently told me the story when he was drunk, and I realized he’d been suppressing the truth since it happened. He only opened up because the booze. He started to spiral in guilt and shame and I had to steer his attention away from it out of fear of what acknowledging it any deeper could do to him. I made no judgement and told him we all make mistakes as children. He said “Josh, I know but that was a big mistake”. This was very uncharacteristic of him to admit a mistake. I just said something like “ you can’t blame yourself for things you did when you were a kid”, and soon changed topics. I usually want people to acknowledge truths, but not this time. That’s how dangerous it is. I think your book is a great idea. Your courage is commendable and surely exactly what many need. Thank you for sharing your story. I hope whatever trauma you still carry begins to lift.

As someone who is highly intuitive, I understand intuition as unconscious pattern recognition of previously discovered knowledge or insights. Then, there is automatic perception of the result from the unconscious processes, which is called intuition. Since intuition is built by observation, knowledge, and insight, it’s certainly fallible. When the unconscious patterns being recognized are valid and the stored knowledge accurate, intuition is like magic, but if the pattern recognition is faulty or the stored knowledge incorrect, intuition leads astray. You can’t just spiritual your way to intuition. It forms only from deep observation. At least, that’s what I’ve discovered about how mine works.

@Leo Gura I view David Hawkins' politics like I view your pickup artistry and psychedelic escapism—slight imperfections that don't have much bearing on integrity, but maybe that's just a sneaky rationalization.

I can't speak for "most" but if Elon were a highly developed, integrous human, I'd be glad he has the power he has. I'd like for the world's richest and most powerful people to be integrous... so it actually is about ethics/virtue and not about being jealous. Many others feel the same way, so I'm not sure "most" want to see Elon fail because they're jealous. Seems that would be mostly applicable if you were already seeking power in the upper echelons.