Joshe

Just because something becomes the focal point of attention does not mean you're attached to it. Anything can become the focal point and many things influence what the focal point becomes. Desire is a big influence, but not the only influence. In stillness, with eyes closed, it's easy for sounds to become the focal point. When the sounds cease, it's the nature of mind for the focal point to change. What it shifts to could depend on what you had for breakfast, who or what is in your current environment, stress levels, etc. Attention is opportunistic, hence the "attention economy". I'd say attention is more often hijacked by the external than it is internally directed towards one's desires/interest. (ads, horn beeps, crowd noise, communicating with people, sensory data like smells, loud noises, movement detection, etc.) It's the interpretation of the focal point that is more shaped by your "interests", while the focal point itself is more shaped by environment, recent circumstances, habits of mind, etc.

Men don’t suffer from premature ejaculation. Women do.

Yeah, you might be right. I take your feedback seriously because I know I’m prone to procrastination via strategy and intellect. You could just go do the first thing that needs done and not worry about where it fits into the scheme of life, and that would indeed be simpler, but it’s hard to become competent in these areas without strategy and developing principles and abiding by them. The reason I structured it like that is because if you attempt to shore up all these areas simultaneously, it doesn’t work because there’s too much to handle. If you try to get your finances in order, not only do you have to come up with a system for financial management, you have to come up with operating principles or rules to live by. Setting and abiding by those rules involves strategy and integration, which takes time. And I used ”1 year” just to say it could take some time, because you have to strategize and integrate. There’s definitely a trap of intellectualization though. Most of us have bad habits that prevent us from becoming our ideal self. So if we’re to become our ideal self, which involves becoming competent in the management of life, we have to remove those bad habits. Mastery wasn’t the best word. I just meant being able to fully integrate the habits and routines such that you abide by them effortlessly. And of course, they're all interdependent. It's harder to adopt such a strategy once you're already in the thick of life. I was envisioning it for youngsters. I'd be glad to go back to when I was 18 and spend a season of my life doing nothing but surviving and building those habits. It often is, but I don't see any other way to reach an ideal. IME, they don't just materialize.

Yes, and using it like this would strengthen critical thinking and communication, build vocabulary, etc. If you use it once per day like “how do I articulate this?”, you’d see massive gains over 1-2 years. Most people use AI like OP described, but intelligent people don’t use it like that. Intelligent people will be enhanced by AI, and the rest, AKA those who don’t give a fuck, will be dumbed down by it, and it has to be this way as a consequence of how they are. In the scheme of human evolution, might has been replaced by intelligence. The mightiest is no longer the fittest. The dumb do things like buy ATVs for their kids, drive motorcycles, don’t understand invisible pathogens, and they fall behind everyday as the intelligent keep pushing forward with learning, thus creating disparity in their usefulness and in their ability to survive and thrive. If humanity survives, evolution will eventually weed out those who don’t give a fuck.

I agree, but this logical approach to emotion is easier said than done. Thoughts don’t arise in a vacuum or on their own. They’re attached to one another and many are attached to formed conclusions (beliefs). But it’s not only a problem of preexisting thoughts and conclusions, but also inertia. So rather than try to fight such complexity or consciously construct a new positive reality every moment a contributor to the negative arises, one can simply stop actively creating the negative one. Simply stopping the negative is much more doable than switching from negative to positive. But IME, most people don’t want to stop. Why? Because they are biased towards their conclusions and seeing what they want to see. If you’ve ever tried to talk a depressed person out of it, you’ll notice the vast majority will say they want out but when you attempt to remove what got them there, they resist. As such, my approach is to first make them realize their thoughts and beliefs have energetic implications, and the implications of their currently held thoughts and beliefs have wound them up in depression. Hence, one must choose to stop the negative mentation. If they reject this, they are at the mercy of circumstance, as they’re essentially tying their hands behind their backs and refusing to self-direct. Thoughts and collections of thoughts (stories) are energetic inputs. The mind can only process so much at once. You cannot process sadness or depression on a roller coaster because the mind can only be in one domain at a time. So what’s happening there on a roller coaster? The negative mentation is being ceased by you being put in a situation that makes it impossible for you to cling to sad stories. The slate of consciousness is being wiped clean of all your negative mentations. Your mind is being forced onto something else. This “bypassing” can be learned. It’s just a matter of identifying the types of thoughts and beliefs that contribute to depression, and bypass them, although not as effectively as a roller coaster. Essentially, depression should be starved out via actions or thoughts that feed it nothing. Keeping the negative stories off the slate of consciousness. The solution isn’t to choose new mentations, it’s to cease existing ones. Because depression is a habit. Habits break when you stop tending to them. 40 hours of roller coasters, 8 hours a day for 5 days sounds like a good start. Bungee jump, scuba dive, etc. but the depression will return once you get back home and start engaging those negative mentations again.

Yes, without the prospect of progress, depression is likely. But the main trap is in the present moment when the negative energy seems inescapable because the mind can’t envision or see a path to a good future. A sense of doom washes over and haunts them. This is why strong self-efficacy is important and why it’s dangerous for people who lack self-efficacy to deal in ideas such as “life is ultimately meaningless”.

Not sure if it applies to everyone but Tony Robbins once said if he could sum up human happiness in a word, it would be “progress”. This has been true for me. Seems to me that suicidal ideation is a problem of energy. Every thought has an energy impact. If you have 1000 negative thoughts, your energy will be shit. 1000 positive thoughts, it will be good. What is the result of dozens or hundreds of negative thoughts daily, over the course of many years? The answer is: needing to not feel like shit anymore. Needing the negative energy that dominates you to cease. Taking responsibility for your mental activity and doing something about it is the way out, for those who truly want out. Because if you were not plagued by negative energy, you would want to live, to explore, to engage. I recommend getting intimate with James Allen.

Loss, empathy, and beauty make you cry. Thoughts trigger emotions. Stories trigger them even more. You can build channels or pathways in your psyche for every emotion. The more you beat those paths (create stories and dwell there), the more powerful they become for activating the emotion. If you create high-fidelity channels for empathy and beauty, when you watch the puppy video, you might cry out of empathy, and you might cry even harder when you stack the beauty of the rescue on top of that. With beauty, it’s in the way that you process stories and apply previously derived meaning onto the current reality. I can make myself cry if I spend time fleshing out those emotions, but I haven’t done that in a long time, so fidelity has been lost, so I did not cry at the video. There was once a time when the sight of the sky could make my eyes water. Or I’d add my own beauty to a random song and then sob. That’s how beauty makes you cry. Crying is very spiritual and cathartic. I recommend learning how to do it, and it can be learned.

I was thinking about where and how health fits into the scheme of life just yesterday and came up with what I think is the optimal order of operations. environment → time → health → money → purpose Physical world / environment must be mastered first. Once one attains near perfect discipline and mastery here, learning to keep all within one's sphere tidy and in its place, via principles of essentialism, minimalism, and efficiency, then move to the next. Time management: Once the physical domain is handled, now one needs to learn how to spend their time by applying structure and routine to the daily duties that life demands. This is where you set schedules for things like sleep, daily routines, maintenance routines, leisure activities, etc, and learn to live by them. Health: Once time management is mastered, now is time to optimize and master the energy, vitality, and longevity of the human organism. I put this third because it's a big project and hard to tackle without the previous two. Next: Financial management: Applying principles of essentialism, minimalism, etc, to make sure your capital is always increasing. Life purpose: You cannot perform this efficiently without the previous steps. It might take a year or more to build the discipline and habits for each stage. Mastery of each stage is necessary before moving to the next, at least for my vision of what it means to live right. You'll always be fighting an uphill battle if you try to jump directly to life purpose with low degrees of success in the other stages. To gamify and master each stage is my ideal. Regarding energy, the human organism did not evolve to live easily and comfortably with high cognitive volume and complexity. What is the result of spending decades pushing the limits of cognition, accumulating ever-increasing volume and complexity? I suspect the mind cannot sustain it indefinitely without loss of energy, vitality, and probably even health.

When doing strategy, I collect tons of notes, ideas worth considering, ideas that should get implemented, knowledge that I must retain, ideas to follow up on, the best jargon, terms and phrases for important pieces, on and on. When it’s time to put it all together into a single, cohesive understanding or an action plan, the sheer volume of information is daunting. When looking back at my 10,000 ft wall of ideas, I often think: did I miss anything, how does it all connect, I’m going to miss important things because the volume is too much, etc. So, trying to figure out how to wrangle complexity causes me anxiety too. I think it’s normal actually. Most people avoid complexity for this very reason. No solutions to offer, just a perspective. You’ll do great!

This will definitely hurt him, but the question is how much. Saw a news post earlier that said something like he don't want the support of anyone who is concerned about Epstein lol. Asmongold and several other big right wing influencers are bashing the shit out of him daily, and if you look at their chats, many are turning on Trump. Him attacking his own supporters like this will make it worse. He could have just bullshitted them and gave them plausible deniability, so not sure why he went this route.

That’s a good anecdote. This type of intuition is what I was referring to as the general intuitive faculty (my own term, probably not the best). I’m not sure how you’d go about improving this. Increased metacognition would allow you to be more aware of the patterns, micro-observations, subconscious cues, etc… but how do you actually train or develop this kind of intuition? I suspect one has it or they don’t, or maybe most people have it but lack awareness/metacognition such that they rarely notice it. Women do seem to be more intuitive. I think you have a good point that thinking can get in the way. Maybe the key for this kind of intuition is to just become aware of the mental processing and to reach a place where fewer and fewer things slip through the cracks. It is something like an openness. Subtle patterns would be harder to detect if one uses the majority of their mental bandwidth on thinking. For me, I bounce back and forth between open perception and thinking very quickly. If one’s default state were predominantly thinking, maybe that’s a blocker of this kind of intuition. But the other type of intuition is like the intuition of a chess master. Their trained intuition is what allows them to play 20 opponents simultaneously, just by glancing at each board for a few seconds, then make their move and move onto the next board. Every chess pro records their moves for review. So yeah, it’s a good idea to differentiate between these two types of intuition.

I highly recommend considering what the purpose of a commonplace book or second brain really is, and if it’s worth the effort it takes to build and maintain it.

I use it for ideation, exploration, and evaluation of ideas. I guess you could call it a workspace. I like to move fast, collect a lot, and distill, so I found a canvas works best for this. Being able to quickly zoom in and out and get back to ideas without having to cognitively process where notes are organized in a tree is just more efficient for me. It’s less cognitive overhead when I organize ideas spatially in the same file. And it’s also more efficient than creating new files, thinking of the file name, wondering where to store it, tailoring metadata, etc. I feel this squanders my time and energy. Also, a canvas has all my ideas and distillations in the same space, so I don’t have to worry if I’m missing ideas from other files. I only create actual notes in Obsidian when I come across gold. But I don’t really use it like a catch-all commonplace book. I trashed that idea.

You won’t be able to change their minds. I know from years of experience. The main reason why can be found in cognitive dissonance theory. Things like belief perseverance and commitment bias. People latched so hard onto Trump largely because of how many times they defended him. Since he was so despised, there were many attacks against him. Every attack against him provided opportunity for them to defend him. Each defense, numbered in the hundreds for most Trump supporters, entrenched them deeper and deeper. The degree of emotional investment involved in each defense also determines how deeply that defense serves to entrench. You can’t break that. They’ll mold reality around it, unfortunately.

You have to go much further back than that. The Jews built a bad reputation in many nations and societies, going way back. Apparently, that reputation has stuck with them to a degree and seems to be making a comeback in recent years.

Best feature by far IMO is the canvas:

Thanks! Yeah, I don't think it's some magical thing you just receive without any work. Curiosity is a good word. It's more like a muscle and thinking exercises the muscle. So if one is prone to do a lot of thinking, that seems to be a prerequisite, but not necessarily enough. If someone is highly aware of their own thoughts (metacognition), those thoughts are more real, more experiential, which means they would lodge into the subconscious more deeply, thus being more accessible for intuitive processing. This is why I think metacognition would be a force multiplier. But also, you can make things lodge even deeper in the subconscious by how you engage with the thoughts. For me, if I engage in some sort of probabilistic thinking, that seems to make things stick in my head for a very long time because I have some sort of stake in the game. When I claim something is highly likely and it turns out to be false, that really sticks out to me and I correct it. Over time, this correction mechanism pays dividends for intuition, or at least filtering intuition. In this case, the intuition or filtering is enhanced by the correction mechanism. All just speculation really, but my best understanding so far. Still haven't gotten around to checking out the yoga sutra. Thanks for the info.

Apparently, it's largely due to devious business practices and being exclusionary and parasitic to other nations. From what I understand, historically, they have leeched off other nations whilst wanting to remain separate from those nations, and this orientation towards other nations has earned them a bad reputation with lasting effects. Alice Bailey, in her book "Problems of Humanity (1947), discusses the issue. https://1lib.sk/book/29740611/fd4cf7/problems-of-humanity.html She sums up with "The Jew has set up an ancient pattern of living within other nations; as a citizen with all the rights of citizenship, he has built up a wall of taboos, of habits and religious observances which separate him off from his environment and make him non-assimilable. These must go and he must become a citizen not only in name but in fact.

Interesting. I’ll check it out. Kind of reminds me of some Alfred Adler books I’ve been listening to.

I see a connection. I just had the thought the other day that to be hyper-fixated on pickup is feminine. Pickup is often more about fulfilling emotional needs rather than physical needs. It’s essentially a response to being very needy of an emotion or reality, masquerading as a response to physical needs, intertwined with neurotic ambition and egoic superiority. A mature man would not double down into neediness by masking it with achievement. He would instead remove the neediness altogether, accept reality, and just live his life. If no fuzz comes, it’s fine. A man would accept this reality and outgrow being sad or bitter towards it, and he’d work with the lot he has been given. Women either fall into orbit or they don’t. Women often melt down when they’re not able to secure a partner. Guys who study pickup are essentially doing the same thing, but they’re using pickup as a coping mechanism and to keep the pain of not being desirable at bay, serving not only as a distraction from the pain, but also simultaneously boosting their self-esteem with the prospect of conquest and superiority. (If they don’t desire me, I will outwit them and make them desire me. Then, not only will I be desired, I’ll be superior because I orchestrated them like puppets and they don’t even have a clue.) Genius survival strategy, aye? Not all PUAs are running on this program but it’s why the PUA community at large exists. Their physical needs could be achieved without a neurotic, ambitious, hyper-strategic orientation towards the courtship process, but it’s not about physical needs, it’s about emotional needs. “Pickup is the same energy as sobbing into a pillow because you didn’t get picked for cheer squad — only now it’s a grown-ass man wearing aviators and leather boots, running A/B tests on eye contact.” So yeah, emotional neediness is characteristic of the feminine. I don’t see how you get to homosexuality though.

Now there's talk of Trump pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell.

Intuition is kind of domain specific. Whatever realms you like to dwell in, that’s the realm your intuition will develop in. I used to enjoy analyzing human psychology, behavior, and motives. As a result, I developed high intuition in that area, but this does not transfer over to the stock market, lol. Whatever you want to get good at intuiting, you have spend time in that realm observing, asking questions, making predictions, reviewing and fixing your mistakes. If we’re talking about developing the intuitive faculty itself as to be more robust in general, I’m not sure how much one can develop that, but if you could, developing metacognition seems like it could be a force multiplier. Also, I think it’s in the way you use your mind. For example, I noticed that when I observe a dog’s behavior, if I see it do something that I don’t understand, I immediately begin trying to solve that puzzle. I might spend 30 seconds contemplating it’s behavior before I come up with some reasons to explain it. I might come up 3 reasons but can confirm neither, but I will choose (predict) what I think the answer is. Then, in the future when more data comes in, I will eventually be able to solve the mystery, and because I went through the process of contemplation and prediction, it all gets lodged in my head somewhere and pops back up the moment the data I need to solve the mystery shows up. Constantly treating reality like this would give you relatively high intuition. Most people don’t give a shit about why the dog did what it did, but I want to know. As a result, I can predict dog’s behavior and know what’s going on with it in a split second. I have a feeling high intuition is strongly correlated with high Need for Cognition and metacognition. So I think a lot of it has to do with asking questions non stop and trying to find the answer but not jumping to conclusions. Leaving the possibilities on the table, waiting for them to be confirmed or removed.