Danioover9000

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Posts posted by Danioover9000

  1. Posted

    @something_else  A simplified example of making claims with little technical knowledge of the inner workings needed, is in a case of a murder or sexual assault, I don't need to enter into the rapists or murderer's mind completely, and completely know all his/her memories and life experiences. I just need to gather enough information from the victims, the perpetrators, the crime scenes and the situation to build my case and make educated and as accurate as possible assumptions and go forward with that, because if I don't I get stuck in only gathering information forever and the perpetrators would still be out there instead of gathering just enough and go forward with making decisions and taking action. Most of life it's rare to gain 100% knowledge and be all knowing at the get go.

  2. Posted

    @something_else

    1 hour ago, something_else said:

    I'm assuming this is directed at me. I read it, but you grossly oversimplified how AI art models work and that was what I felt like I wanted to respond to the most.

    Your main point was that AI art can't generate anything new, it can only compose existing styles. But like 99%+ of human art ever created is just composing various existing ideas/styles/objects as well. And most of that doesn't require the artist to cite every experience they had in their life that lead them to produce a certain piece of art. That was my initial point.

    'Adding your own twist' to a piece of art is really just you combining multiple experiences you have had in your life into a piece of artwork which is exactly what an AI art model is doing too. Your mind is just exponentially better at this right now so it feels like something different to you.

     

       That post was directed at me than you, but to quickly address your point about his oversimplification of A.I, his first, I think, opening post in the first page, @Scholar did say he doesn't have all the technical inner workings of artificial intelligence beforehand, so really assuming that he should have all the inner workings required to make a critique against use of the A.I. drawing programs that online businesses provide, is too reductionistic. At best, it's a safer assumption that the majority of users here, are not computer scientists or IT job related workers unless specified beforehand. That doesn't mean he's automatically not allowed to have a critique on A.I. And also, more importantly than the technical details, is the holistic understanding of how the use of A.I. technologies are impacting others in other contexts besides the one we're specifically discussing.

       Some cases, those A.I. companies also withhold some details of their A.I. programs and how they acquire and learn from their sources, so we also can't have all the technical inner workings at all, and we also can't trace every point of source as well.

        

  3. Posted

    @jimwell

    5 hours ago, jimwell said:

    xD Why being malicious?

    Nothing to be upset about. Many members here imitate Leo, in words and actions.

    But it never seriously crossed their minds they are just digging a deeper hole for themselves.

    The differences between Leo and his followers are that Leo already has millions or hundreds of thousands in his bank account and has never experienced any form of mental illness or any serious form of trauma, while his followers are being inflicted with various forms of mental illnesses, trauma, and are having financial problems. Many also lack social skills or have never had a girlfriend their entire lives.

    It's ok for Leo to shoot for the stars. It's foolish for his followers to try to do the same thing because for them, it's just spiritual bypassing. Leo's work is NOT for the majority of the population. That's the truth, whether acknowledged or not. 

       Some of the forum users, not all users mind you, have mental illnesses, mental disorders, mental traumas, financial difficulties, social and relationship difficulties, fitness and health issues.  

       Is that how much Leo really has? 100,000 to 1,000,000s of dollars? Or is it 10,000 to 100,000s of dollars?

  4. Posted

    @OBEler

    26 minutes ago, OBEler said:

    @StarStruck Yeah you can use already existing Dogma. 

    Or you can throw this dogma away and explore new terraint. Not everything is structured and known from the beginning. It is a process. Otherwise you could just follow old spiritual systems and paths, which are structured from the beginning. But they are dogmatic and limited, mostly written for people hundrets of years ago or a culture which you are not part of anymore. 

       True, you could follow older spiritual traditions and systems and their designed paths over time, based on the 10,000s of years of that path working. Although I don't know what you meant with existing dogma and the spiritual traditions being dogmatic, do you mean when they refer to each other, when you ask a master/student of Buddhism about Judaism and the Kabbalah and vice versa? If you meant it that way, I don't think that level of close mindedness and dogma is unhealthy on the surface. They are largely stage blue traditions, with their cultural baggage, that wish to preserve their way of investigating into their reality and other spiritual experiences, so the notion of a spiritual tradition and its esoteric branch mixing with another is alien and of course guarded against for good reason.

       *Terrain and *hundreds.

  7. Posted

    @EternalForest

    4 minutes ago, EternalForest said:

    @Leo Gura Kanye is a musical genius and none of your LOLs can take that away from him. The way you talk about this man truly pisses me off. I respect you a lot, and I respect Kanye a lot, so it hurts me to see you disrespect him like this time and time again.

       I agree, it hurts to see Kanye getting this treatment in this forum. This why we have to make it very clear where we are critiquing here: We are critiquing his political and religious views, his mismanagement of his state of mind. We are not critiquing at all his musical talents and skills; he certainly has a lot more to offer for Hip Hop going forward and seeing just general unspecific criticisms at him is a bit disappointing. I also think it has to do with his proximity to Donald Trump, anyone that's near him gets blanketed hate.

       Leo's point still stands though, that Kanye West's purchase of Parler, would likely give him that free space to talk right wing talking points and religion, in a manic way, that would inevitably get him and Parler canceled and silenced one way or the other. So, how do we manage him?

  9. Posted

    @Scholar

    15 hours ago, Scholar said:

    Did you watch the video? What AI does and what humans do when creating and getting inspired by art is fundamentally not the same.

    The AI's basically take an image and relate certain keywords to the shapes found within that image. When you generate a new image, it will create shapes based on on a seed and other parameters. It will generate a series of images, and at each point of the image it will ask the network of relationships, in relationship to the prompt, what kind of shape is most likely to exist next to the shapes currently existing on the image.

    It does not understand what it is drawing, it does not understand composition, anatomy, object relations and so forth. It has no interprative lense, it is not inspired, it is not studying art. It is literally taking the shapes within an image, extracting them into a network of relationships, and using that exact set of information in the process of image generation. Again, all that is happening is that it is looking at the shapes it has created (most likely given the networks of relationships related to certain keywords) and then iterating and saying "What is the most likely shape that I have extracted from the sets of images that would be placed next to all the shapes currently existing on this canvas?".

    That's fundamentally different from how humans create or learn from other artists. And in the music industry this is very clear. Because of the lack of complexity, the AI's would commit copy right infringements if they were to train on copy righted music. That's simply because music is less complex, and rhythmical relationship are far easier to note and analyze. Meaning that, with music AI's, it would become very apparent that all the AI does is say "If this were music made by artist X, what is the most likely rhythm that music would have? What is the most likely series of notes that would exist next to this set of notes?". Because individual parts of copy righted music can be copyrighted, unlike with art, you would very quickly infringe on the rights of those artists. Because all the AI does is use those very information it has found in the initial training set, and use that to generate new information that will be the most "most likely result" based on the prompts given.

     

    For this process it is not inspired by the initial training set, it is literally using the network of relationships of shapes found within the images it was trained on. So no, it's not what is happening with AI art whatsoever. And making it seem like that is just flawed thinking.

     

    Take the example of recently deceased Kim Jung Gi. Here is his artwork:

    spygames_2_-_couverture_-_basse_def.jpg

     

     

     

    Here is an image generated by an AI trained on his art:

    FeaxyqjWYAE_jkU.png

     

    If you look closer at the image, you will notice it completely lacks coherence. That's because it is not actually creating a scene, with people in in a busy market place. It is creating shapes based on training data that are most likely to exist next to other shapes. It doesn't know what a head is, what a line is, what a person is or what a market is. All it does is put down shapes based on a prompt, then put down more shapes that it feels most likely would exist at that point given the information that is related to the initial prompt.

     

     

    Fundamentally, the AI cannot create novel information. If you give the AI images of all objects in the universe, other than art, it will never be capable of ending up at where Kim Jung Gi is here. It will never be able to draw a stick figure. Why? Because it does not know what a stick figure is, it does not know what a human is, it does not know what any of the objects are. All it knows is visual relationships correlated to certain keywords, and even that it doesn'T truly know, like a calculator doesn't know what math or numbers are.

    Rock-Painting-400x400-1.jpg

    This is 40.000 year old art. The AI could never create this if it did not have these shapes in it's training data. It it had photos of all animals, all objects, all it could create is photorealistic images. It would never venture into stylization, because those shapes do not exist in it's training set.

     

    There can be no abstraction without understanding. What this means is that the AI cannot ever generate new art that is not a combination of previously existing art. This is not true for humans, because humans do abstract, and humans do have understanding, and because the process of art creation is fundamentally different in humans than in AI's. While a calculator might imitate and be very proficient at math, it is not doing what the human is doing when he is calculating something.

     

    If AI was to reign, and somehow develope enough coherence to actually create genuinely coherent art, then it would halt the evolution of art, for the reasons I have mentioned above. If AI art existed before art styles were invented, no art styles would have ever existed. Why would it? People would have never created the art, and put in thousands of hours to create abstractions and idealizations and so forth. What AI art will do, is flood the internet with art which only has human spirit within it because it is imitating the art of people who have human spirit in them.

    If you look at the art above, you can see the human spirit not because someone has learned from another artist, but because it was a human who created it. A human who knew what he was creating, a human who could abstract, understand, and then engage in the creation of genuinely novel information.

    This is not just because the AI's are not yet ready yet, but because they are not individuated consciousness. In other words, the reasons why the AI cannot create new information is because it's metaphysical limitations. But for that to be discovered scientifically, it might take hundreds if not thousands of years. For as long as that is not the case, we will stumble in the dark, and be imitating forces on nature and deluding ourselves we have surpassed the wisdom of hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

     

    Another point would be very easy to make, even if I was wrong about everything above. The difference between an artist getting inspired and creating art is that the artist does not nullify the value of the artist he is studying. I can study Iain Mccaig for my entire life. One, I will never be truly able to create art like Iain Mccaig, I will always have individual biases within my art that I will never get rid of, because I am human. I will never be able to replace the effort Iain Mccaig puts into his art, meaning even if I studied decades to copy Iain Mccaigs style perfectly, I would still have to put in the effort to create the art, therefore not nullifying his life work and his value as an artist. If I was a God, and I could look at all artists and copy their styles effortlessly, then create trillions of images that nobody can compete with, rendering them all homeless, that would be unethical. The only reason why we allow other artists to get "inspired", by each other is because of human limitations, and because the way you study art is fundamentally different from the way AI's do it. You would, of course, know this if you were an artist.

    Ever artist that studies the greats of the past and present, cannot help but add his own voice to that art. He is not just taking these images and saying "Oh look, I have these shapes now, what is the most likely shapes next to the shape if this was a drawing by Iain Mccaig?". The fact that people are framing these things as comparable is mindblowing to me, and it shows me that schools have failed in educated people about art, but that is not very surprising to me considering the level of art education I experience myself in school.

    An artist will understand the process of other artist, sure they will get inspired, maybe they will try to understand the way certain shapes are expressed, but humans are humans. We cannot help but inject our own voice into what we create. Nobody can become a second Iain Mccaig, because nobody is Iain Mccaig. To be Iain Mccaig, you have to have the genetics and the life path of Iain Mccaig. That's what makes his art what it is. If he had different dispositions, his style would look differently. And with his dispositions he added new, novel information to the world of art. He is not just a mixture of previous art styles. His art contains an imprint of his own unique consciousness, his unique sense of appeal, his unique way of understanding the world, his unique way of learning how to draw and how to try to create the illusion of life, probably even the unique anatomy of his body. All of these are factors, limitations, which create new art that humans can relate to.

    Without people like him, these AI's could do nothing but photorealism, because that's all that would exist. Photos of objects.

       First off, really good post.

       So, technically, is it more a danger of misusing A.I. then?

  10. Posted

    @Leo Gura

    1 minute ago, Leo Gura said:

    Oops! Yeah, maybe, although aren't you guilty of this kind of logic too?

    You are sneaky.

       Well, actually... I am guilty! ? I posted Steven Zapata's video on @Space A.I. is ruining art thread, so @Scholar must have got inspired to make a more concrete thread to build a more convincing case against A.I. use. So, I copied that video for that thread, then @Scholar copied that video to make his thread, and Steven Zapata must have copied those images he's drawing from his memories and imagination. Yeah, the issue of copying and copyright is a deep and convoluted one.

  11. Posted

    @something_else

    1 hour ago, something_else said:

    Ehm, sort of. This is a huge simplification. The AI isn't just copying shapes from source material. Neural networks are hierarchal and learn relationships all the way from individual pixels, to lines, to colours, to basic shapes, to complex shapes, and to entire objects and styles. Each layer of the model works at different levels of abstraction, quite similar to how your neurology works.

    My profile picture is some AI art actually, and it's a good example. I generated it years and years ago using a deep dream model. On each zoom, it passes the image through deeper and deeper (more and more abstract) layers in the network to generate more abstract imagery. I had to crop and jump frames to fit it under the limit for the site so you miss a lot of the detail. But here's the full thing. You can see how it has learnt representations of things at different levels of abstraction and is not just copying directly from source.

    And diffusion models are learning to convert random noise + text prompts into structured images, which means the process is so chaotic and unpredictable that you will get unique results that are composed of lots of distinct patterns of art that the model has learnt. Essentially the model is learning abstract representations/patterns of art which it can mix and match, it's not just learning how to copy shapes.

    It's exactly what your brain does. Your brain is an abstraction machine, just like a neural network. Your brain is just far more powerful at abstraction and can source experience from more places at the moment.

    It understands composition, anatomy and object relations, just not as well as a human does. Really, the fundamental difference is that a human can integrate emotion and a wider range of experience into the art, which obviously the machine cannot do yet.

    But the fundamental issue I was talking about was that of citing, credit and copyright. You as a human have looked at tons of art throughout your life and had tons of unique experiences that influence your art, yet you are not required to cite every single piece of that when you produce a new piece of art. Why should it be different when an AI does it?

       Because human artists are in the business of communicating divine and spiritual truths, through their drawing. So, of course it is threatening when a robot is trying to take that purpose and take the process away from artists. Arguable, the most enjoyable of artwork is the art working process and the result as well. It's just bad and lazy if robots and A.I. do all human work for us, especially creative processes.

  14. Posted

    @Derek White

    On 2022-10-22 at 9:38 PM, Derek White said:

    A Critique Of Actualized.org And Leo Gura

     

    The intention of this critique is to make people aware of some of Leo’s limitations. It might save people time and unnecessary suffering. It is not meant to invalidate or insult Actualized.org or Leo. I think Leo is a great teacher in many ways, this is just healthy criticism. Please take it lightly. Since Leo likes to criticize everyone else, I thought why not do it to him this time.

    It’s worth mentioning that I’ve personally never taken any psychedelics and I don’t consider myself some advanced spiritual person either. Some might consider this critique incomplete - which is fair. I have been watching Leo and other teachers for a long time. Nevertheless, I think it can still be helpful for people to read this. If anything, it can be an exercise in open-mindedness. 

    It’s important to note that I will only be critiquing Leo on his more core and central teaching. So don’t expect much on minutia like his dating advice or politics. Although these thing can be important to some people, and you are free to level your own critiques on him, small or big, below this post, I personally won’t be focusing much on this.

    So sit back and let’s being…

     

    Freedom from understanding

     

    This one is a little confusing and long but the most important. Stick with me please.

     

    Basically, Leo takes psychedelics and shares his findings on YouTube.

     

    Why am I telling you this? 

    I am telling you this because there are things he doesn’t explicitly tell you:

    What Leo does is pursuit of understanding. It is an endless process. There is no end to it. You can keep on accumulating new experiences and making your understanding better and better. Understanding is a limited process rooted in the ego-mind.

    So during his psychedelic trip he has an experience of God. We can say he is in a higher state of consciousness. Once it is over, he comes back to his normal state of consciousness. The experience is stored in the form of memory which gets interpreted and communicated by the ego-mind. The memory isn’t reliable because it can’t be stored. Understanding is a limited thing, whereas Truth is unlimited it can’t be bound to such things.

    So here’s what you need to know:

    Most people don’t need to do what Leo does. Leo is like a scientist. It’s his profession and passion to have new experiences and create new mental models. This pays his bills.

    Truth is beyond understanding. Truth is something living, it doesn’t come from a memory of a trip.

    Understanding (and experience) is only needed to answer a few basic questions, beyond it you don’t need it. Questions like, “Who am I?”, “What is thought?”, “What is the limitation of thought?” Basically to quiet the mind and satisfy your curiosity. To become free from this as well.

    The point of spirituality is freedom, but people get stuck in this cycle of accumulating experiences and gathering knowledge. They never become free from understanding itself. You have to use your understanding to get free from understanding.

    Getting more understanding will not change you. Your personality will remain the same. Your habits and patterns will remain the same. Your base level of consciousness will remain the same. You will remain an idiot. (If anything too many fixed ideas you got from your trips might make your ego swell and make it hard for you to look at life afresh.)

    You might regret wasting this time on understanding. It’s endless. It’s the same as exploring the physical world. You can keep exploring it deeper and deeper and arrive at new conclusions each time. Your time might be better spent on any number of things.

    It’s important to tell you that it will not get rid of suffering either, in case that’s why you are following Leo. 

    It’s important to tell you this because people have attached unrealistic expectations about this. If you’re an average person with a job and a career, you don’t need to do this. In fact this might not even be spirituality for you, it’s like a weird game of documenting peak experiences. He might say he made this clear to people, but I say he doesn't explicitly tell you this. Most people don't need this and they don't know they don't need it, they are lost and Leo doesn't help them out.

     

    Lack of balance

     

    Leo likes to talk about balance, but how balanced is his spirituality? 

    How balanced is his self-help? It is overly intellectual (as he himself admits). 

    All he’s trying to do is get peak spiritual experiences. He has completely neglected raising his base level of consciousness. As far as you know he is not doing anything to raise it. He inspires others to do the same.

     

    Arrogance, ego and the forum

     

    If you had asked me about Leo’s ego a year ago, I would have ignored it as minutia, but now I increasingly feel it is becoming a problem.

    After an awakening his ego becomes inflated for several weeks. Every time he gets an awakening you can bet it will be like this.

    You know something other people don’t. So what? What’s the big deal? What’s there to be proud about? You don’t even know it after the trip. I don’t see the point of inflating your ego.

     

    Trap of solipsism 

    “But it’s not ego, he’s trying to communicate solipsism. That’s why he says he is the best and the only one awakened.”

    No, no. If he was he wouldn’t say it like that. It would be a matter of fact statement. Anybody with some awareness can tell that what he is saying coming from ego. He thinks there’s no one he can learn from. There can be no characters in the dream more knowledgeable and aware as him. Yet he continues to be in the dream. He thinks he is the most advanced, not because of solipsism, he actually thinks that. (For anyone that thinks otherwise, you can simply use the search function and look what he said in the past.) (I'm not saying solipsism is not true.)

     

    It’s a one way conversation with him. There’s nothing you can say to him that will get through to him. There’s really no point talking to him anymore. It’s a misapplication of solipsism. 

     

    “He’s just being authentic.” 

    Being authentic doesn’t mean doing whatever comes to your mind. “I feel like murdering someone, so I will murder someone.” That’s not authentic. Again, I think it comes under a trap of solipsism.

     

    “The other teachers are not as good”

    He doesn’t know about other teachers’ methods.

    Leo doesn’t know about all these things, he has never learned from an actual Yogi, Tantric, or a Buddhist monk from the places these traditions originate from. He has never gone too deep into this. He’s not qualified to talk about it.

    He doesn’t know about devotion, about chakras, energy, and many other things. 

    It might be because he has an autoimmune disorder which prevents him from exploring other methods fully. That’s why he likes psychedelics so much. They’re quick and easy. 

    “Buddhism will never get you there.”

    Sadhguru said Buddhism is a long, drawn out process. He said Buddhist masters tell you it will take you 12 life times of sadhana to become enlightened. Buddhism in the east, the actual Buddhism, makes it clear. It doesn’t give you false expectations.

    "But re-incarnation and all that isn't real."

    Just like everything else. The walls in your house, your ego-mind, your body, and your psychedelics. How do you know it's not as real as radio waves?

    "But these teachers are genetic freaks! We can't be like them."

    So it just didn't occur to these genetic freaks that other people can never advance spiritually like them. These supposedly genetic freaks who are juggernauts of awareness, just didn't realize other people are not like them. It slipped their attention. Obviously if these people are so aware they know what they are doing and what others are capable of. I've seen videos and testimonies of people who go to these people. People's lives have changed for the better. Obviously not all the people who benefit make a YouTube channel and say exactly the same things Leo says. People are private.

     

    Being offensive and outrageous 

    I am embarrassed to share that I watch actualized.org with anybody. With post titles like, brains don’t exists and pedophilia is love. I’m sure I’m not the only one. Leo has no regard for how others might perceive his loyal followers when he does things like this.

    It’s coming from ego. The way he’s going about saying it is dumb. You don’t need to do all this to make your point. It’s unappealing, that’s why people move away from you and he feels they are moving away because they don’t understand his point. 

    “Look at this video of a murder taking place. This is love guys! Look at this! Why are you going away? Surely you’re not as awake as me! I’m the most awakened person on the planet!”

     

    Future

    I think in the future, it is possible, Leo will eventually develop occult powers with the use of psychedelics. And his ego will be even more inflated. It will become even more ugly. This is all a consequence of not neglecting his base level of consciousness. 

     

    Forum

    The forum is not a great place. Partly because Leo himself sets the precedence on how to communicate here and he himself breaks his own rules and name calls people. Even when he’s not name calling you directly, that’s what he’s trying to do indirectly. He’s so snarky too. Other than that he’s doing some version of “everything is a dream”, “this is just a figment of your dream.” 

    “It’s the internet” No. They look at Leo’s writing style and get inspired. 

    The quality of the forum is quite low. Some members with mental illnesses should’ve been reached out and told to take care of themselves before posting again. There are posts which are quite low, like “why I hate men/women” or some other thing like that. Some members should’ve been kicked out a long time ago but Leo seemed to have a soft-corner for them. There are people who have shown no progress (or even regression) and have been on the forum for a long time.

    For e.g, take Nahm’s example. He should’ve been stopped a long time ago. I come on the forum occasionally and even I noticed he was misleading members on the forum whether he meant to do it or not. And I have seen long term members being lost and no one corrects them. 

    This is important ‘cause there have been incidents of suicide and people ending up in mental hospitals among Leo’s audience. It’s not far fetched to call what he does irresponsible. 

     

    Better self-help teachers

     

    In a sense you can’t even call what Leo does self help anymore. Over the years, he has become more interested in sharing his awakening from his trips than actually understanding his audience’s problems and solving them. 90% of the time he’s just describing his awakening and it’s not of much use because you cannot get to that point by just listening to him. Just do the psychedelics in the way Leo say, there’s no point listening to him except for entertainment.

    I think, there are better more balanced self-help teachers out there. Those who don’t focus on journalling and intellectualizing too much. Intellectualizing is the number one trap today, people just sit and home and try to think through their problems instead of taking action. So that’s why I think it’s a big limitation of Leo. There is Sandeep Maheshwari for example who has a good balance of self-help and spirituality. His content is not in English however. 

    And for what we know Leo is not a very productive person either. His life might be worse than most people’s for what we knew (partially because of his autoimmune disease). I don’t he’s the ideal person to teach a balanced self-help.

    For e.g. take the difference between Sadhguru and Leo on concentration. Concentration is one of the most important things you need to become successful spiritually and materially.

    Leo has a video on concentration titled: Concentration vs Meditation - How To Develop Concentration. I’m sure everyone has seen it multiple times so I won’t talk about it.

    Now look at what Sadhguru says about concentration: he says don’t try to concentrate. Trying to concentrate is torture and you won’t be able to sustain it. Instead be involved in whatever you are doing and focus will naturally come. Not attached, not detached, but involved. Like you are involved while playing a sport. To meditate is to be involved. Involvement brings attention, and attention brings clarity. Personally this had changed my life. Here’s one article by him: https://isha.sadhguru.org/in/en/wisdom/article/key-to-staying-focused

    I think Sadhguru knows much more about attention, concentration, focus, alertness, and the overall mind than Leo. 

     

    Other minutia

     

    If I were to say something else I would just say that Leo has a slight bias toward the “western” way of life and has wrong assumptions about people from other places. The lifestyle of the “west” isn’t all that great. 

     

    They End

     

    I may edit this post later for spelling and grammatical errors, or if I want to add something to it. 

     

       Overall, a good solid critique. However, it's going to be difficult critiquing the advanced forms of Leo's work as most of that is both a semantics issue and lack of experience issues, so at best the most productive the critique gets is on the basics of this work, and maybe safety protocols and that's that.

  15. Posted

    @integral

    On 2022-10-22 at 11:09 AM, integral said:

    It depends on how healthy your absorption is for food and if you can afford losing the nutrients from ejaculation.

    If the body can’t quickly replenish the nutrients or if the nutrients are in short supply ejaculation depletes the energy levels of the body in many ways. Lower wound healing, skin issues, hair growth issues, nail growth issues, mental health issues, muscle fatigue, poor sleep quality and regeneration…

       That does make sense on some level. Nutrition and sleep quality and exercise on some level is important, as too much masturbation leads to flu like or fever like symptoms, weird chest and throat sensations, phantom pains and aches in the body's skin, a bad feeling of emptiness.

       I think NoFap, if done too seriously, can be a problem, but if it's for short term abstinence it's okay, longer or shorter durations, as long as there's the intent to increase your will power and discipline I think it's fine.

       Paradoxically, in a deeper level, actually NoFap does increase the pleasures of masturbation, or real sex, in which case it can become the most top priority for doing NoFap is for more pleasure, among other things like experiencing those self-reported benefits of the practitioners of NoFap in one's direct experience, to verify each one.

  16. Posted

       1:55:00 to 2:05:00 roughly, Leo does bring up good points about how stage green's pursuit of moral relativism, demonizing tradition morals, national morals and religious morals does lead to degradation of most parts of societies. I especially agree with him bringing up the weed and violent rap music part, there were some loosely related science experiments on water and plants, and both had two parts. The first water jug/plant had orchestral and/or spiritually themed music playing, along with a person saying nice and kind phrases to the plant/water jug. The opposite happened for the second plant and water jug, it had heavy metal rock and harsh things said to the [lant and water jug. When the samples were collected from both, and studied under a microscope, the first plant/water jug showed much greater unity and solidness of particles from the loving treatment and soothing orchestral/spiritual music, whereas the second plant/water jug had more deformed and rougher structures that formed.

       I like to think I have had an influence on Leo's choice of examples. It could have been heavy metal rock, or horrific gory paintings, or darker themed artwork, but no, it had to specifically be rap music. ?

  17. Posted

    @Tobia

    21 hours ago, Tobia said:

    @Blackhawk just like Mexico and Cuba are free to do whatever they want, host russian missiles and form military alliances with Russia and china.

    Cuba can certainly decide to host a chinese military base on its soil, right!?

    The US would turn those countries into parking lots, or stage a brutal coup and overthrow their goverments.

    Naive boy take a lesson of history and geopolitics before spitting out such idiotic childish nonsense

    LOL 

    There ain't no sovereignty for latin american countries, Iraq, Syria, Lybia, Yemen, Palestine.... the list goes on.

    Even western europe has very little sovereignty when the US dictates its interests.

       I know that how @Blackhawk wasn't optimal and carefully thought out his posts in your and my posts, but to extend some good faith, I think this topic is already triggering for some users, and maybe it's both the combination of talking to a text box and pixels and picture, which is different from a face-to-face conversation amongst us, and having hidden assumptions in how we write and generalize ideas.

  18. Posted

    @mr_engineer

    On 2022-10-22 at 7:52 PM, mr_engineer said:

    To my eyes, what you're saying implies that if I just don't make this a big deal, my stance and attitude on this issue will change. In other words, I don't really mean what I'm saying. When I do. I found that offensive, because every single word here has been well thought out on my part. I'm not kidding around here, it's an extremely serious topic. 

    I would ignore this thing if we were discussing something more casual, that doesn't matter so much. On this issue, though, because world peace is such an important value to me and I consider conflict-resolution to be a strength of mine, I felt the need to defend my credibility. 

    With all due respect, this is not a light issue. 

    I type with a lot of passion here, shall we say. Please don't make this mean that I'm not thinking clearly or that I don't know what I'm talking about. I may be wrong, but I'm not a fool. And it is very important for me to know why someone here thinks I'm wrong, so that I know what to correct in my worldview. And how to deal with conflicts in my own life. I have enough respect for this forum's intellectual wavelength to take your opinions seriously. 

       I see, then I've overstepped my assumption of your state of mind. I was curious where this conversation would go, but I think it reached it's natural course for me. Let's forget and part ways then.

  19. Posted · Edited by Danioover9000

    @Blackhawk

    On 2022-10-22 at 8:33 PM, Blackhawk said:

    ?

    I haven't left out anything.

    Are you drunk? Or why are you talking nonsense?

    Let me make it clear for you:

    Ukraine should be free to do whatever it wants.

       Ah, okay, so if Ukraine is absolutely free to do whatever it wants, can it kidnap you and your family for ransom?

       If Ukraine is free to do what it wants, is Ukraine allowed to persecute eastern Ukrainians?

       If Ukraine should be free to do what it wants, anytime in this conflict, would you let Ukraine concede to Russia?

       If Ukraine should be free to do what it wants, would you let it become a sovereign state, and a buffer state between NATO and Russian territory?

       If Ukraine should be free to do what it wants, would you let Ukraine split down the middle:  western Ukraine join NATO, and eastern Ukraine join Russia?

       And why should you stick your nose into Ukraine's free will?

  21. Posted

    @Space

    5 hours ago, Space said:

    Yea i've been watching a lot of Destiny recently so I saw these two videos. 

    He definitely has a unique ability to view topics from multiple perspectives. He's said before that if you can't genuinely argue for the opposing side then you don't fully understand them, which I think is partly true. 

    He was intentionally copying Steven Crowder's videos, that was part of the whole thing. He was trying to do what Crowder did without being so dogmatic and ideological. 

    This conversation below was quite good as well. Definitely ties in with what Leo talked about in his recent left-wing videos, how right-wingers are very strongly attached to the survival of their culture:

     

       Sorry, I meant when I said Destiny was copying Steven Crowder, is in that he's hosting outdoor debates and discussions, while having a sit down with some of those people, in college campuses. I did not mean he's literally copying Crowder's tactics and drama making. Of course, not the only thing he did, he also goes to lecture places and have live debates with other online political spokespeople, and sometimes in crowds. Majority of Destiny's content making is in his place though.

       Definitely agree with Destiny, in context to debating, you really should understand the opposite perspective of the issue you're arguing. It's a good view to take and integrate across other contexts, the steel manning method.

  22. Posted

    @trenton

    1 hour ago, trenton said:

    @Leo Gura I think you did an excellent job on your two recent videos. I was pretty glued to the video because I really want to understand healthy forms of stage blue and orange. Sometimes it can be hard to find because like the left wing, the right wing excessively demonizes And straw mans the other side. I think you have covered most of the oversights from the left pretty well. I had two points of disagreement.

    One would be how you discussed conservative blacks. According to Pew research studies blacks are more likely to vote Democrat than whites on a national scale. You seem to mean blacks in southern states, in which case it makes sense. Apparently, there are some blacks who are fed up with BLM creating a victim mindset and becoming unproductive. This seems like an interesting topic.

    The second point is trans issues. I think you made a good point that to most people who are not LGBTQ these issues are not relevant for improving their lives. Sometimes other people seem bothered that I'm a straight white male. Somehow there is a stigma to not being a victim in leftist group think. Of course I could be a victim in other ways like a bad family full of drug addicts. This might make conservatives close minded to psychedelics as it did to me initially.

    The problem is how you placed a gender transition next to a transition to another species of animal. You seem to misunderstand the actual position of most leftists on gender issues. In the case of women, sometimes they have y chromosomes that did not develop as they normally would. Some leftists distinguish this from transitioning to another species arguing that the difference between a man and an animal is more fundamentally different than the difference between a man and woman. The left does not think of gender issues like the South Park episode in which a man became a dolphin. Comparing gender transition to a unicorn transition or an animal is believed to be a misleading comparison in leftist thought. I'm not saying I agree with the leftist position on all of this, but this seems to be the actual position.

         It could be intentional to make that comparison, maybe to shock them and wake them up.

  24. Posted

    @Leo Gura

    7 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

    Destiny has a good sense of where leftists go too far. That's what makes him unique on the left.

       Yes, he's one of the very few on the left, in online spheres to have a balanced take on whichever side is going too far, also thanks to his decades of debating other people. Also, one of the rare individuals that started conservative, then went moderate conservative, then very left leaning, and now is solidly a centrist. Not many people have that kind of evolution in their politics at least.