trenton

@Leo Gura That is an interesting counterintuitive point I noticed. My grandma told me about how she was nearly thrown out of a hospital because she did not have health insurance and she could have died so I would not be typing this right now. The hospitals charge a lot of money which a capitalist would think that this makes money. Actually it loses money if people who could otherwise pay more money throughout their lives would not die because they could not afford health care. The same counterintuitive point applies to getting the better of people in world trade, imperialism, and on an individual level criminal activity. According to seven habits of highly effective people, a win lose is ultimately a lose lose because nobody wants business with you anymore, which in the long run is bad for you even though you won. Meanwhile, someone I know, trying to survive, participated in a lot of criminal activity and he is still stuck pawning, plotting to screw others over, and people are stealing from him for all the same reasons. If society is a collective survival strategy, then eventually we are screwing ourselves over by undermining this survival mechanism. Can you find examples of selfishness not backfiring and actually being helpful? One idea is selfishness teaching us not to be selfish.

I am curious about why solutions are often not discussed in favor of making our opponents look bad. It seems that a country would be more dysfunctional if we all use our hatred of each other to avoid improving our way of life. I have several observations related to this. The pendulum swings from left to right in the United States. People tend to think I'm opposites and it causes them to miss what I describe as the third side of the coin. These are reasonable solutions that seem to come out of left field because we rarely discuss them. Here are various examples. Should we go to war? Should we not go to war? Or should we teach the Israelis and Palestinians about Spiral Dynamics? Should we impeach Trump? Should we not impeach Trump? Or should we correct the system which allows for his corruption? Should we vote Democrat? Should we vote Republican? Is it a false choice? "We need better Democrats." Should we be pro life on abortion? Pro choice? Should we have free contraceptives? (There are other more complex solutions as well like how to stop politicizing the issue) Should we ban assault weapons? Should we keep them? Or should we increase the quantity of public schools combined with some online courses in order to reduce the classroom sizes therefore reducing the number of children killed in the event of a school shooting while making a school less of a target? Examples like these are everywhere and there could be hundreds more. Sometimes I am shocked that we could easily reduce the suffering of mankind, but we are completely close minded to it. Using this information to self reflect I have some plausible reasons why this is. When I visualize myself debating people I feel a sense of pride and superiority. This is my least favorite thing debating because it leads to lying and shows how I could easily contribute to the suffering of mankind and I don't want this. So long as we have debates over discussion, we are reinforcing this unhealthy form of pride and hurting mankind. Do you notice this feeling of superiority in you? Are there other reasons we don't discuss solutions? How can we make these discussions more common? What third side of the coin solutions might you be missing in other issues and how will you find them?

@remember that was an interesting video. The Cuban population seem to contradict themselves wildly when it comes to Cuban immigration vs. Mexican immigrants. It seems like shocking hypocrisy at first, but if we apply spiral dynamics we can explain this. Trump being a reddish orange is within the range of the Cuban immigrants who are strongly nationalist, a common quality of stage blue. The arguments and positions remain irrational because it does not depend on logic, but rather the level of cognitive development. Another interesting video could be about why Mexican immigrants often prefer Democrat so we can contrast these groups of immigrants.

I think it was interesting to learn about how people live in Cuba. I felt sorry for them because I would not want to live in this way. The partial truth in this video can be how essential basic rights are to build a function community and how government corruption can filter into the rest of society like police knocking down your door. The part I was less interested in was the capitalist propaganda. They seemed to eager to jump to the conclusion that socialism is terrible. I then noticed the nice sounding words about how we wanted this in America combined with a sad piano to appeal to emotions in order to persuade me. I think this libertarian perspective is too simplistic and prone to making over generalizations about socialism.

I have contemplated many questions in a journal, but this one turned out to be much more threatening than expected. This question is actually useful if somebody contemplated a question like "how am I full of shit?". In this case I realized that I care more about preserving my identity as a person who cares about the thing than I do the thing itself which I claim to care about. This is why acting as if I care about things which I don't care about is considered bullshit and all of the justifications are considered the shit which I am full of. One good example would be if I claim to care about truth, but actually I care more about preserving the identity as somebody who cares about truth especially if it benefits my survival. There are many more examples everywhere. I also learned the source of one of my pet peeves. This would be moral righteousness. In this case moral righteousness comes about when I am seeking to preserve my identity which is why this stance of moral is a mask which is actually selfish. There are many good examples in politics. The most clear is a transgender female demanding to be called ma'am. If somebody by mistake or on purpose calls her sir, then she will get angry and morally righteous because she wants to preserve her identity as a transgender female. This leads to a lot of difficult questions like "do I actually care about any of these issues, or do I just care about my identity and my righteousness?" If I claim to care about an issue, then the actions I take become a projection of the desired identity. Taking this into account, what do I actually care about? Do I actually care about anything or nothing at all? How do I tell if I care about something? On one last funny note. You can a imagine a politician like Bernie Sanders coming out and ending an inspirational speech with "...so we can preserve our identity as the American people! Thank you very much."

I caused myself a lot of suffering after realizing that I lie to myself constantly in order to make the impression that I know my current worldview is true. I sensed this in the background constantly, but did not understand how to deal with it. It did not matter what I changed my beliefs to because that just became an alternative lie. This constant doubt linked to me not really knowing became a catalyst for me to tear myself apart by trying not to lie. Politics helped me to figure out what the problem was. One of the fascinating reasons I am drawn to politics is because I often see a reflection of myself not only in corrupt politicians, but even more interestingly in the collective ego at play. The phenomenon takes place collectively and individually. When people debate with each other, they are not getting any closer to truth, they are simply allowing themselves to be entrenched further in their current worldview. The same applies to science vs. religion. As I tried not lie, my thoughts only repeated themselves more strongly on an endless loop. The same phenomenon is occurring where all of the internal resistance to lying only leads to more lying. Similarly if a politician loses a debate, they are not going to change their mind, instead they will come up with 20 more rationalizations for why their position is still right and why they should have been elected instead. This is just digging myself deeper when I resist lying. Meanwhile, if I try to compensate by telling the truth, then I will just lie that I am telling the truth, thus moralizing only leads to more lying and it fails. I did this a lot as a child. In short moralizing is extremely self destructive even if you make all of your peers, teachers, classmates, family members, and co-workers uncomfortable, scared, confused, and angry because of your typical patterns of behavior and they think you are a freak. The contrast in the peace I experience when I stop resistance to lying and stop moralizing rather than the alternative is very liberating. This is a far better way to live life and I cannot explain how much happier I am to live life this way. It is a matter of observing all of the suffering I ever caused myself through these blunders (about 95% of all the suffering in my life) vs. peace and unconditional self acceptance. I think this work is worth my while.

One idea is something I learned from a book called "seven habits of highly effective people". In this book there is a section about synergy in habit 6 about a classroom. The principle that the author operates under is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It is common for students to run off of the script that they just have to do whatever the teacher makes them do. A second common script is that math is going to forgotten because they cannot apply it anyway. "Synergy is almost as if a group collectively agrees to subordinate old scripts and write a new one." if I start looking for ways to avoid some of the toxic scripts you could run into as a math teacher, then I see how it can be necessary to give the students some degree of freedom. I don't know what kind of math teacher you are, but there are some examples from many different kinda of math. One way in calculus would be to compare how a sailboat works to how an airplane works. This could include a wind vector problem, and you could take into account things like how long does the runway need to be for the airplane to make a smooth take off. There could be many other factors surrounding the take off which students could split into groups in order to calculate. This could create a small degree of freedom while demonstrating how calculus saves lives and how often it is applied, creating big picture thinking. Alternatively if you teach statistics then you could have a problem with lake pollution in which chemicals have seeped into the drinking water. You could know that a small amount is insignificant and would not hurt you, thus you would need to calculate how polluted the lake would have to become in order for the average glass of water let's say 16 oz for this problem to become too dangerous to drink. There could be serious real world problems like these studied in physics and chemistry as well. If it were chemistry then you could have them take a few samples from the lake and try to find if the water is dangerous to drink. This way they would be participating in something larger than themselves throughout the process which could improve interest in what they are doing. On one last note you should be aware of backfiring mechanisms. If you try too hard to avoid common scripts students run off of, it could become a self fulfilling prophesy. It is like the problem with evil and suffering. You would have to be careful to make sure not worsen the problem by trying to stop it. Therefore, you should be careful about which advice you follow and why as well as the motive for following it. Perhaps you could stay on track with a positive motivation to make teaching even better with some of these suggestions rather than by operating from fear of these scripts. I hope something I said here helps.

I studied this in high school and college. Based on the evidence I was shown, evolution as science thinks of it in animals is a very likely theory. A common argument comes from fossil evidence from different time periods. The time can be detected by how deep the fossils were buried, for example the dinosaurs are below one black layer of ash across the world. The fossils can then be taken from different time periods and then compared. This is where we can observe similarities in the animals along with gradual changes. For example, an animal similar to a modern horse had three toes. As newer fossils were gathered, the fossils looked more and more like modern hooves and a modern horse. A second argument comes from homologous structures. The textbook definition is "homologous structures are structural features with a common evolutionary origin". One example could be the tail bone in humans which is similar to a tailbone in a monkey. This suggests that these creatures may have had common ancestors which is backed by the similarities in our DNA to monkeys. In biology our DNA is very close to monkeys. Finally, vestigial structures are bones or parts of the body which are useless now, but could have been useful to ancestors. Two common examples are wisdom teeth in humans. These have to be pulled, but our ancestors may have had to eaten raw meat in order to survive, but they are useless now. Similar ancestors to humans also have a smaller brain, and skull, but a larger mouth. It is possible, that cooking and a change in diet guides our evolution to what it is now. A second example of a vestigial structure is the hair on our arms. It is possible that our ancestors were more commonly exposed to directly to extreme tempertures, but now we have less hair on our arms. https://www.thoughtco.com/about-vestigial-structures-1224771 The reason I am not totally sure of evolution is because it is hard to directly observe and prove in the way that science means it because it is hard to observe evolution directly if it takes so long. Thus, evolution is a very probable theory given the evidence, but it is hard to know for sure. Meanwhile, your religious beliefs were making you close minded, but you recognized it, good job. I would like to tell you that as time passes, religion is becoming more open to evolution, one example is Ben Shapiro although I am not saying he is good or bad in this post. There is a middle ground that God as religion understands it, can guide evolution which to actualized.org would be considered a form of creation. This does at least demonstrate that religious beliefs change over time. This can be considered another form of evolution outside of how science thinks of it in animals. Technology is another easy example, and there are many others including art styles across centuries all the way back to cave paintings. In terms of how science thinks of it, evolution is very likely.

For the past three days I was in Columbus competing in a chess tournament. I noticed an interesting trend in my performance as the tournament progressed. I wrote down my mission statement to fight for a win always and to be fully focused at my peak performance. The first game I dominated easily and was fully focused. The second game I was slightly less focused and frustrated to finally breakthrough and win. The third game I started having a harder time focusing toward the end, but still pulled out a win leaving me with 3 points. The fourth game I was full of anxiety and struggled to focus for the middle game. I was unable to use my advantage and my opponent got a draw. The fifth game was painful. I had stomach aches, a high temperature, was sweating, and has a hard time calculating simple tactics. It is amazing that I got a draw, but I was annoyed to have missed my winning chances in the last important games to secure clear first place. The final results is that I tied for first or second, but I can't tell which right now. During the tournament I had a hard time telling if I was hungry or not, and it was not until the tournament ended that I realized I did not eat dinner in two days. I also needed to go to the bathroom constantly, and in future games I will need to control this level of stress in order to ensure consistent peak performance. The most counter intuitive part is that focusing too much on winning a tournament decreases winning chances. It is helpful to see the entire process as a full machine and if one part falls apart so does the rest of the machine even if one particular piece is perfect. I managed to get a lot of good information about stress management for the next tournament.

@Commodent That is exactly what happened when I played against an opponent who was significantly stronger than me. I built up a good advantage against him, and then I started rushing an attack instead of building up slowly.

@Serotoninluv I think you described the flow state very well. This happened to me in several other chess games. My idea is that if I enter the flow state you described consistently, then I could get good results, but when I am thinking about these things it does not help.

@Elisabeth that is correct. The tournament went on for three days.

I have a question about a proposed policy to see if it would be a good idea or not. The initial premise of this proposal is that it is possible for a big corporation to calculate the consequences of a lawsuit and run a cost benefit analysis to see if it can still profit by corrupt business practices such as lying about a product's effectiveness for example. If a corporation calculates that they will make 500 million dollars from lying a product, but that they will only be sued 200 million dollars, then this can be used to exploit the criminal justice system. The proposed policy is punish those who exploit the criminal justice system much more harshly, such that the profit is only a fraction of the fine rather than the other way around. One example to achieve this would be to present evidence to the court that the lawsuits were calculated. The punishment for this would be to negate the cost benefit analysis by multiplying the profit by 2 and using this fine to make the cost benefit analysis clearly against any CEO's best interest. In this example the company would be sued 1 billion dollars instead. The exact number is arbitrary, but it does not matter so long as the fine is high enough to deter this practice. I recognize that the charges could be high enough to ruin a business entirely, but the goal is tho deter this practice and improve the integrity of the court system in which the lawsuits take place. I have a few questions about this proposal. What are some of the possible drawbacks? Is this idea effective at reducing some white collar crimes? If it is a good idea, what would it take to make a policy like this into a common law? From my point of view it seems like a simple and promising solution, but if I see this idea too simplistically, I may be overlooking something.

@WelcometoReality if you mean emptiness that comes from not knowing, there is a mixture initially. Some crying and fear that is hard to explain followed by laughter. Otherwise, I can laugh at whatever comes to mind after darting off in many directions until I find something to laugh at. I don't need to be afraid of emptiness if my fears are not really justified.

Recently, I had two insights. The first was that all models are absurd because they are representations of reality and therefore not true except for the model itself. The second was that in order to be fully open minded, I am open to the possibility that everything i believe is wrong. This entails that I know nothing and true open mindedness comes from the stance of not knowing. In exploring the full implications and entire slippery slope of not knowing anything, I struggle to grasp the full significance of not knowing. It means I don't know what to do about knowing. I don't know if actualized.org is delusional or not and same with me. How can I tell if I am delusional or not with this glimpse, and if I am not what are the full ramifications of not knowing?

I wanted to mention the fear I constantly feel. When not knowing, I become very uncomfortable. This leads my mind to darting off in a million directions. When I find any one thing, my mind then runs on a loop repeatedly about the one point. After laughing for a bit, I realize that nothing is coming from this thought loop, and then I become threatened again causing the whole situation to reset. Good observation.

That makes a lot more sense. I keep assuming a right and wrong, but I don't know if there is such a thing. In fact this assumption causes a lot of suffering because there is always doubt when I assume that there is a right. Even if I could convince everybody I was right in the back of my mind I still have doubt about it, and I feel like I'm never right. This makes it pointless for me to debate people because I am only suppressing my own self doubt the whole time.