trenton

It looks like the incentive structure for mass surveillance is strong enough that it is probably going to continue to happen whether we like it or not. My concern is that mass surveillance will not be applied equally to the rich and powerful and this exploit of the justice system continues and is exacerbated by this. Hunting down criminals starts to feel performative rather than having substantial justice.

@Yimpa @Basman I noticed this myself. If we watch the news, it never teaches us the fundamentals at all. It seems to only give ideology while being lost in daily events. It doesn't say anything about what the foundation of political philosophy or government. It would be a lot of work to try to keep up with news and actually keep track of every little detail. Keep in mind it isn't showing certain parts of the world because the narrative is already assumed. It is rare, but in my experience there actually were times in which politics were important to me and the those around me. I didn't have in a say in making it happen or making it end, but it did give me a critical window of opportunity to help a victim of predator loaning get out of 60,000 dollars in debt. She cried tears of joy when I gave her a way out of the trap that ruined the past 15 years of her life. It was Biden's student loan forgiveness program for victims of predatory loaning. It actually was very important, but it is rare to find life changing opportunities like these. Usually politics will not have this kind of impact on you or those around you.

Apparently, I am a Republican. But not just any republican. I am more specifically a Civic Republican. It means I believe that the wealthy and powerful should be held to equal accountability if they break the law. So long as you are against a legal system that bends for the wealthy and creates a two tiered justice system, you are a Republican. This has nothing to do with Republican party though. They are Republican In Name Only. They don't actually care if the law bends for the rich and powerful leaving them unaccountable. All Trump supporters are RINOs.

@aurum how would a leftist explain someone like Ted Bundy? Sometimes people have structural differences in their brain which make them incapable of empathy. Combine that with a joy for power and control and you end up with a sadistic serial killer. Does the leftist account for brain structure in psychopaths?

I have read about standards of rape being invented. Firstly, Marital rape wasn't fully recognized in America until 1993. The reason is that too many people simply assumed that the relationship itself conferred consent. To this day, the outcome is that in intimate relationships there are still men who use force to get sex, believing it is consensual. Therefore the rapist in his worldview claims "it was consensual" because that is how humans have thought for millennia. It required numerous horrendous cases of rape and murder to make the alternative framework of consent hard to reject. This also explains why women don't have consent rights in parts of the middle east. If developed countries haven't done this until recently, then of course less developed countries would not have these kinds of consent frameworks. In fact, ancient rape laws are defined as "rape is when a man penetrates a virgin woman without the consent of her father." This is part of what points toward "Marry the Rapist" laws and "inviting the rape." In this worldview it makes sense because if a woman has what we would consider consensual sex with a man she loves, then in their worldview it would be equivalent to inviting rape because the father did not consent. The woman may have decided she wanted to marry this man anyway despite him technically being classified as a rapist. From this point of view rape and marrying the rapist would be considered "good for the woman because she wants it" as Leo was describing. Unfortunately, this also applies to women who were violently assaulted in cases which we would consider rape in western countries. I hope it helps to clarify how wide the range is in terms of defining rape. Some frameworks make the rape of males literally impossible. Therefore pedophilia would be described as something like sodomy instead in ancient laws of sexual misconduct.

My current position regarding gun control has changed now. It is more complicated than it was previously. Here is my current policy and why. It is mixed with caveats and auxillary policies loosely related to gun control. Given that criminal gangs have access to illegal firearms anyway, I want to avoid scenarios in which I would be endangering innocent people by not giving them the gun they need. Although not well known or discussed, there are cases in which regulations delayed a person in need of a firearm long enough for them to be killed due to an active assailant. My grandpa isn't the only case. That said, people in extreme scenarios demonstrate that the aggregate welfare argument isn't as clean as it first appears due to screening delays realistically getting innocent people killed. Additionally, if a person needs to demonstrate a documented danger, then it might either already be too late or they might not be believed if they try to report an attack which often happens. The case of Carol Bowne in New Jersey, killed by an ex-partner in 2015 while her gun permit application was pending is a commonly sited example in which gun delays got an innocent person killed. Therefore, gun restrictions need to be more tailored to target specific risk profiles while recognizing that gangs and weapons traffickers ignore these policies anyway. The profiles that should be restricted more narrowly are suicidal and violent felony files. Most gun deaths in america are caused by suicide, so it makes sense to more narrowly screen for mental health problems. The problem with screening for violent felons is that most violent felons are never detected until years later if at all. An obvious example would be policing failures in cases of domestic violence in which homicide by firearm is common. Therefore, the auxillary policies for gun control should target enforcement for domestic violence. One example is how police officers commonly disregard child witnesses who truthfully report abuse from adults. Therefore, if a child witness calls 911 to report domestic abuse, the police should route the child to a program that would actually help such as 988 or something similar for crisis management. The police data on domestic violence can't be trusted because of their detection problem which undercounts the prevalence of the issue. Of course in my particular backstory, I obviously wouldn't want drug addicts like my family members having guns. That would have been a catastrophe if they had guns in that house while they couldn't be trusted. Either way the screening fails. If too strict, then people who need a gun can't get one in time. If violent felons aren't detected, then they will get guns anyway. If the screening process requires a judge to believe someone who reports danger from either direction, then that creates room for error. Either way a victim won't be believed if someone is dangerous and shouldn't have a gun or if they are in active danger and need a gun very soon. Documented danger must by definition require said danger to have already happen, in which case the threat to a person's life must therefore precede documentation. It now looks like I am tentatively leaning pro gun because of this argument with more limited restrictions. These seem to be the hardest cases to argue against for anti-gun. I think I will need to go back and see if I can steel man the anti-gun position further. If not, then I think my present policy position is sound while maintaining that mass shootings require better security if people can access illegal firearms anyway. We need a better approach for combating gang related activities such as drug, sex, and weapons trafficking that doesn't endanger innocent people who need a gun.

I have been working on project steelman for a couple months now. I came to an issue in which I seem to have gotten genuinely stumped as to what can realistically be done. Not only do policy suggestions have weak empirical backing, but the political stakes also seem nearly impossible to overcome in America given extreme polarization and ideological disagreements. Attempting to legislate such things would realistically lead to a gridlock with no sustained solution passing. Gun Control is a uniquely American problem, probably because of the Second Amendment which itself has an ambiguous meaning. Some dispute the preamble regarding the regulated Militia because it may be referring to the scope of the Amendment. "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." There is a part in this Amendment that throws me off. It talks about a Militia being necessary. I remember that this was supposedly for the American people in case the government became tyrannical so we could overthrow them. The problem is that I am not convinced that the emerging government would necessarily be any less tyrannical depending on how the new government forms in the event of a seemingly successful revolution against the government. Additionally, the American government has been extensively designed in a way that makes it resistant to attempted revolutions. I struggle to imagine a scenario in which this would go well for anybody. This is certainly something we should avoid. Imagine where America would be if the January sixth attacks were successful and MAGA killed countless officials while taking over the government themselves. Furthermore, although mass shootings drive a lot of the emotional pull around this debate, most gun deaths are the result of suicide. Personally, I don't believe I would be alive if I had access to a gun because I could have killed myself much more easily while I was stuck living with a family of drug addicts. Means prevention is the most effective way of preventing suicide. Another part I am skeptical of is the idea of using a gun for self-defense. My main objection on this point is that if too many people have guns, then there is the problem of attackers having the first move and therefore the element of surprise. The outcome is that I would expect attackers to be more successful than defenders because the defender draws his arm second. On a big enough scale, I would then imagine that overall we would all be less safe if more people had guns. There is again the problem of empirically measuring such things, so I can't be certain about these ideas. If we are dealing with a country in which there are more guns than people and the government comes to a standstill when attempting to pass legislation which may not even be enforced, then I start to become stumped in terms of what could even be done. I never really came up with a convincing method of suicide prevention in these scenarios if people often purchase guns illegally anyway. There are background checks and licensing which can therefore easily be circumvented. If suicide by firearm seems difficult to prevent, then we could try homicide and mass shooting prevention. To my understanding, women generally feel less safe in a home with an intimate partner if there is a gun in the house because of the increased likelihood of homicide from an abusive partner. From this standpoint, I would imagine that preventing abusive relationships should give people a means of exiting such situations. This can include things like avoiding isolation and maintaining contact with other support networks such as friends and family. If our lives revolve too much around intimate partners, we would create a situation of co-dependence which would become difficult to leave. Having regular check ins with an outside perspective would be important for ensuring people don't end up trapped with someone homicidal. This is part of the problem with modern romantic relationships as they are commonly structured in ways that enable abuse if it comes with isolation from others. I believe organizing relationships more consciously to avoid isolation is a strategy that works independently of government gridlock. This might be something the people would have more leverage over when it comes to safety. When it comes to preventing mass shootings, the best I could come up with would be the security measure of dispersing the target. One of the reasons schools are common targets is because they are crowded with a lot of targets. A larger quantity of schools combined with smaller classroom sizes and online courses where applicable would help keep schools less crowded, thereby reducing the number of children killed per attack, assuming we can't prevent all attacks. We can't guarantee that parents will actually pay attention to children enough to discover they are looking at gore forums which glorify violence. Some schools have started using metal detectors in case kids do try to come in with weapons, though this is criticized for security theater while making students feel less safe and presently lacking clear proof that this really deters attackers. Personally, I am kind of lost when it comes to what data is reliable from a policy standpoint. Policy doesn't seem to be particularly helpful if the government will realistically be stuck in a gridlock over the second amendment. that said, the best leverage I can see on this issue would be looking for ways to make us more secure without needing to go through gun control policy. It looks like there are some ways to circumvent this problem, though I don't know how successful or impactful the changes would be at scale. What can you come up with for project steelman on this issue.

@Basman what kind of tyrannical government do you think the pro gun position is imagining? I would understand that a coup would be justified in the event of Nazi Germany leading a genocide. There were attempted assassinations, but they failed. Meanwhile, the attempted coup on January 6th was over an election that was allegedly stolen with the evidence being extremely weak. This is part of why I argued that even if we did overthrow the American government, we would probably end up being run by a government which solely allows MAGA supporters and no one else. Why wouldn't they start a genocide against immigrants in captivity given this kind of power?

Firstly, what counts as misuse of a gun and what would proper use be? Secondly, why would the value of freedom in this context outweigh the real cost that involves taking freedom away from others? Thirdly, how do we determine who is responsible enough to handle this kind of freedom? Currently, the best argument I can imagine for pro gun would be "I like guns and I personally feel safer with access to a gun." In some situations I can imagine why a person would feel this way. In my case my grandpa loved guns. He slept with a handgun under his pillow because it made him feel safer after a traumatic incident in which a gang tied him and his best friend up, accusing one of them of being a snitch. My grandpa lied to save his own life, sacrificing his friend's life. He had nightmares about this constantly after experiencing this, so he slept with a gun under his pillow in case any gang members discovered he was the snitch and they came after him. He was secretly working with the police. For a person like this, not having a gun would sound insane because it would be a death sentence if gangs maintained access to illegal weapons and his address anyway. I find this kind of argument more convincing because I knew my grandpa. I think a strong anti-gun argument should be able to take on a scenario like this. I'm having a hard time imagining how I would argue that my grandpa should not have a gun in this situation.

If guns cause harm to third parties due to being designed to injury or kill, then it makes sense to restrict how or where they can be used. Should you be allowed to take a gun just anywhere to play with it, like a bank or a school? It is similar to why you can't smoke just anywhere as enjoying cigarettes harms third parties. If I concede that guns are useful for hunting, then that is narrow in scope regarding gun use. If guns are useful for security then that justifies the military and police having guns. If the general population has guns, then that doesn't necessarily improve security if now anybody can walk into school with a gun. There would need to be much better enforcement to prevent people from taking guns to places where guns are not supposed to be.

The idea of some number of deaths being worth the benefit of playing with guns sounds like it would be criticized for its priorities. The second argument that many dangerous items are allowed seems more interesting to me. I remember the argument "why are there so many knives in London?" In that case my argument was that guns are more efficient at killing than knives because they don't require you to close the distance in a mass shooting. This makes more people die in mass attacks compared to knives. The number of deaths per attack is lower by comparison. There is also the problem of owning cars and gasoline. If mass shooters didn't have a gun, then they might try filling a car with explosives and crashing them into crowded areas like a suicide bomber. I think the problem with this counter argument from me is that it is narrow in scope to mass killings. Most guns are used for suicide or homicide. Likewise most knives in London are used for single attacks and they are kitchen knives. I always felt scared of kitchen knives as well, but there isn't really much that can be done about that. I started connecting removing the second amendment with the prohibition of alcohol. Weapons trafficking would probably sky rocket and there would probably be more deaths than prohibition.

@Leo Gura Currently the problem I am noticing with the pro gun position is that the second amendment is load bearing. In my effort to create a steel man, I am looking for a philosophical argument for the right to own a gun independent of any legal assertion that such a right exists. Presently, I haven't found a solid argument for the right to own a gun that stands on its own regardless of the second amendment or regardless of any legal system. I will keep looking though. So far it looks like we have the right to bear arms because the second amendment says so, making it uniquely American and not really an inalienable right. I tend to naturally lean anti-gun because I didn't like being around a bunch of crazy drug addicts who couldn't be trusted with anything and a gun would have been way worse if they had one. I recall that at the end of the day, rights are inherently social constructs, so they must be groundless when questioned deeply enough. If there is no real right to bear arms, then maybe we would be better off without the second amendment, although realistically it is here to stay.

If my goal were comedy, then I would definitely do that. My goal would be to make the dumbest arguments I possibly could. For my purposes, my goal is to find the strongest arguments and see how they hold when compared to different counter arguments.

A common argument from gun rights defenders goes as follows. I will keep looking for better arguments because this one doesn't hold in my opinion. Premise 1: A person has a right to life. Premise 2: Given a right to life, it is almost universally accepted that a person has a right to defend himself if someone tries to harm him. Premise 3: In the event that a person had to fight someone bigger or stronger, the weaker person would realistically lose without a weapon. Conclusion: The right to self-defense is hollow if a person does not have access to the means of defending themselves. If a gun is that means of defending themselves, then people should be allowed to own guns. The main objection to this argument is that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. First of all, if the logic is applied consistently, then a five year old with the right to defend himself should be allowed to use a gun. The problem is that a five year old does not have the capacity for sound judgment, and most gun rights defenders would agree that a five year old should not have guns. If the right to own a gun is capacity based, then this opens up many fronts with which to dispute the right to gun ownership such as drug addicts or violent felons who demonstrate poor judgment. Therefore, the right to defend oneself does not entail entitlement to gun ownership. The rebuttal in this case succeeds in establishing that gun rights can be reasonably restricted if a person demonstrates poor capacity for sound judgment. This leads to a point where both sides agree. The bad guys shouldn't have the guns and we shouldn't have people with AR-15s running schools shooting kids. There may also be a fair case for people with depression or suicidal behaviors because they would be much more likely to kill themselves due to medical problems. In the end, I believe background checks would be a justified and defensible decision if the right to own a gun is ultimately capacity based in terms of a person's capacity for sound judgment. This probably isn't the best argument from gun rights defenders, so I will keep looking.

When you say "surpassed on the highest difficulty" do you mean that given an identical position, he played a move that was superior? The problem with this framing is that Scrabble is a game in which it is possible to lose with perfect play. Luck matters a lot and strategy can only mitigate it so much. From that perspective, I would imagine that the AI played the statistically optimal move but still lost. One advantage a human might have over an AI is reading the opponent's hand. For example, if an opponent played one move even though having a vowel would have allowed a clearly better move, then you can intuit that your opponent does not have those tiles while the AI would treat it as technically a statistical possibility. This would open a door for a human to outplay an AI in a game of imperfect information, which happens regularly in other games as well as in the case of Alpha Star.

I have been exploring the most foundational laws in logic. I have been trying to stress test them to see if they are true. This includes 1. The law of identity 2. The law of non-contradiction (also known as the law of contradiction) 3. The law of the excluded middle If you would like to try to refute them you can. The law of non-contradiction in particular seems to be the closest to refuted, though this seems debatable. Firstly, the law of identity is the most stable one in my opinion. A=A. If it is the case that existence is, then existence is. I haven't come up with a clear counter example. Secondly, that law of non-contradiction seems to hold in most cases. The closest thing to a test would be "this statement is false." Some argue that it is genuinely both true and false at the same time. Dialetheism is something I would like to check for those who claim contradiction is not an error. The counterargument is that "this statement is false" doesn't give any truth value at all and is completely vacuous. But then would that make this neither true nor false? That is still a third category of truth. The way I think about contradiction is that there are different types of contradictions that are allowed. Some contradictions resolve by disambiguating. Some by setting a reference point. Some are a difference in perspective. Some may be the result of limited human concepts for explaining reality, and this would be semantic or linguistic contradictions. The contradictions I treat as genuine problems would be self defeating performative contradictions that fail their own test. For example, "all statements are meaningless unless they can be empirically verified." Logical positivism has an actually damaging contradiction because it fails by its own standard. This is the same as claiming "nothing is true." The problem is that if that statement is true, then there is at least one truth. It the statement is false, then the truth is that the statement is false. A contradiction is not necessarily an error, but there are specific types of contradictions which are actually problematic for a logical system. Some contradictions are self defeating within a logical system. Beyond this domain, I'm not sure I would say that no contradiction is ever allowed. That can be debated. The law of the excluded middle appears to hold when formalized in a narrow and specific way. That is that a proposition is either true or false by virtue of the structure of a proposition which thus serves as a truth claim. It seems the liar paradox would be the closest attempt at a counter example. Self reference is the main source of paradox in these cases. I haven't seen any attempt that isn't self referencing. Do you think any of the laws of logic are true? If one is false, then which one and why?

Is it possible to actually have a stable definition? If I wanted to, couldn't I ask for a definition for every word with which you defined another word? This would create an infinite regress or a circular definition. Once again, it looks like the laws of logic should survive still within the domain of propositions, so long as it is considered to be on a deeper layer than language. Also I would like to check out Quine.

Wait. Are you being clever with this statement? This might be a genuine counter example to the laws of logic. If the laws of logic claim that all three are true, A, B, and C, but C is false, then by the law of the excluded middle, it must be false to claim that A, B, and C are true. If you don't intend to break logic with that proposition, then I would like to see the precise reasoning for why the law of the excluded middle breaks. I am skeptical of it because it looks like it holds given a very narrow framework for what counts as a proposition. Otherwise, in formal logic a very specific set of criteria are demanded in order to define what counts as a genuine counter example. The argument for the law of the excluded middle is that if a claim is not true, then it is false. There isn't really a middle ground between true or false. There are logical systems that use other truth values though, meaning it isn't really universal or inherent to logic itself. It only works within a very narrow domain of structured propositions. Beyond that it would collapse. I think the problem is that the law of the excluded middle assumes a mind independent reality. If reality is mind dependent, then there could easily be more truth values. I think 'indeterminate' would be a clean counter example to the law of the excluded middle. For example in sorites paradox, there is no objective heap without an arbitrary line. In that example, it is not the case that a thing either is or is not a heap. Instead a heap is indeterminate. It is therefore neither true nor false that a thing is a heap. The criteria required to defeat the law of the excluded middle is to create a proposition that is neither true nor false. I believe the heap paradox is a clean counter example. "A heap has exactly 5000 grains." This is genuinely neither true nor false. It is an arbitrary line, or a self constructed truth with no mind independent reality as to what a heap is. Does this succeed in refuting the law of the excluded middle? Otherwise, the laws of logic are narrowly defined such that they only operate within cleanly defined terms which themselves can be neither true nor false by their constructed nature.

That is where I explored when I considered this as well. If logic can't tell if the premises are true, then logically that applies to the laws of logic as well. From that standpoint it can't be known if the laws of logic are true or false. I don't think the epistemic regress problem demonstrates that the laws are false, but rather that they are unknowable in their truth value. Logic does concede that it can't tell you if it's premises are true. It therefore limits itself to the specific domain of defined propositions which in turn are structured such that they either are true or false, thus following the laws of logic. This looks like a circular argument if logic is thus used to justify logic. A proposition which enters that system will not break the system due to the rules that system set up for what counts as a proposition. Logic is therefore a system that succeeds on its terms, but not necessarily on other terms like fuzzy logic among other logic types. Succeeding on its terms does not mean it is true according to logic.

By a squared triangle, I assume you mean a three sided shape with four sides. A counter example would be a shape that is both a square and a triangle by having three and four sides. It is a fairly stable example. I think once you pin down limitations, it creates a situation in which one finite thing cannot be another finite thing. Therefore do long as you have defined parameters, there is by necessity limitations in which the defined thing logically can't be other than what it is given the limitations imposed by the definition. From that standpoint a true counterexample involving a squared triangle would probably be non duality. If you and I are one, then a square and a triangle are one. You may or may not accept this, but my point is that in order to break the law of identity, one would have to dissolve the entire concept of identity altogether in order to get to anything remotely resembling a counter example. This isn't really the game logic is designed to play. One thought I had regarding contradiction would be reality as a whole necessarily operating independently of our human concepts. For example, there is the law of impermanence in which change is unchanging. At that point how do we distinguish between reality being constant change and constant persistence? If there is no real difference between change and not change without human concepts creating ground rules and limitations, then doesn't existence itself have this paradoxical nature which can't be cleanly pinned down without human concepts ultimately collapsing under their self imposed limitations, thus leading to contradictions? What do you think about "everything except change is changing?"

He is probably conflating open mindedness and moral relativism mixed with compassion for evil with being a terrorist sympathizer who wants death to America by any means necessary. In my case, I understand what would cause a person to become a terrorist and why they would want death to America, but I also recognize that beheading innocent people doesn't actually resolve the underlying grievances they have with economic exploitation. It is designed to shock and terrorize people, but isn't actually making the middle east better off by provoking Western backlash. I could simply argue that the ends don't justify the means even if somehow destroying the twin towers would end economic exploitation, which it didn't. If a person understands evil at a deeper level, and they express this, it is common for them to be lumped together with terrorist sympathizers who share these goals. This is probably where the accusation comes from.

@Leo Gura you mentioned you were killing mosquitoes and then realized you were committing a genocide. I just now had a similar problem. I recently learned about the spotted lantern fly. It is considered a parasite that destroys a lot of trees in my part of America. The government and various authoritative sources encouraged squashing the insects and destroying the eggs. Prior to this information, I simply observed one of these insects and started trying to figure out what it might be. Once I got this information from the government that it was a parasite that it wanted help eliminating, then I started thinking that killing these parasites would make me a good citizen. I just got back home from my walk. I found one of their breeding grounds and squashed a whole bunch of them. I can't count how many. Other people saw me squashing them and cheered me on for being a good citizen. However, once the dead bodies started piling up, I started having second thoughts. I started thinking, "oh, this is mass murder." I then started thinking of this behavior was really conducive to higher consciousness. Maybe I was being helpful to ridding parasites from nearby plants, but higher consciousness and being a good citizen come apart easily when being a good citizen means commiting a genocide. Now I'm thinking about something like a Nazi who was trying to be good by ridding his nation of a parasite only to kill countless Jews.

I have stepped into the realm of dating and was easily overwhelmed. In my case I have a combination of autism and childhood trauma I'm attempting to overcome somehow. I have been recommended dating by three different therapists, partially because they believe I am nothing like what my parents made me out to be. There is this constant fear that makes me not want to share my true feelings with others, leading me to being deeply intellectual in person. I tend to be more open online than in person. In person, I seem to come off as more guarded. Even if I believe I am fine, I still instinctively feel a sense of danger and uncertainty that makes intimacy slower for me. In person, I usually open up in the following way. First, I ask who you are and what you like to do. I check for any areas of special interests or expertise which helps me to identify patterns in how you think and what you value. I don't speak emotionally immediately. Instead, I start by playing games with you such as Tic-Tac-Toe, or more complex games like chess. This throws people off, but at the same time I do get more of an opportunity to see how you think. I notice how you approach different kinds of problems and what kind of mindset you might apply. This oftentimes surfaces limiting beliefs such as "I'm not a genius, I could never be good at chess." I start to see the discomfort with deeply intellectual approaches and systematizing approaches. This doesn't mean there is something wrong with you, it just means that your specialty is outside of intellectual domains. Furthermore, I might notice personality traits in the mindset applied to a chess game, such as when I managed to detect a person's subtle aggressive mindset where it did not apply, implicating unresolved anger issues. This turned out to be true. In this sense, games are helpful for slowly mapping out how other people think while emotional talk tends to happen sideways or in smaller ways. I don't like rushing straight into intimacy. Over time, I do extend this analysis from beyond abstract strategy games. Morality is a major topic I will watch you on. I will pay attention to your moral reasoning as this is where I start to catch red flags. I get especially concerned when it comes to the morality of deception. Those who have a more loose sense of morality around deception is where I start to feel less secure. Oftentimes, I can observe how the moral reasoning corresponds to different stages of development across various psychological models. Sometimes, they appear especially self-serving and flippant. I also tend to be bothered by low brow humor which frequently spills into sexual harassment. When it comes to religious reasoning, I feel somewhat mixed. On one hand, at least they take morality seriously on some level, but the problem is the lack of critical thinking. When I deviate too far from the expected position, sometimes I end up in uncomfortable positions in which I feel judged or ostracized by those who don't question the source material to see if it is true. I did encounter some Catholics when I was out on my walk who tried to convert me, and I saw so many problems with their arguments, especially when they conflated divine authority with the church and the Bible. They also didn't like Pantheism. In terms of morality, I tend to prefer people who see value in contemplating these things. I notice that they tend to come off as warmer and more compassionate. They seem less judgmental by comparison and are able to see multiple perspectives. I have an easier time talking to and feeling safe with people who are at least at this level of moral development. This type appears to be more generally honest and open-minded. Love starts to seem more like a value they seek to embody, even by understanding those who do evil things. I still tend to come off as deeply intellectual to this type, possibly as overly logical or rational at the expense of a disconnect from my feelings. I see a mixed awareness of autism among this group, with some saying that it explains a lot, and others not recognizing why it would be significant. It might become a problem with communication if I intellectually outpace this group too much and I don't easily connect on an emotional level. For most people emotional connection and intellect are separate, but for me they are intertwined. This gradually expands into discussions of spirituality, the nature of reality, and epistemology. These tend to be the most engaging conversations when we discuss how we know what is true. We tend to hit a hard wall when I tell them some of the problems with evidence and the fact that most true things cannot be proven. This is also connected to Godel's incompleteness theorem among other breakthroughs. From there we tend to freeze up because we don't know where to go once the limits of evidence itself is demonstrated. It opens up so many possibilities while simultaneously creating a deep mystery with no easy answer. Beyond all of this, we could have shared activities as I get used to your presence. Once I get used to talking to you, I become more fluent and tend to communicate emotions more naturally. However, I struggle to lead with emotions because it feels dangerous. We need to first establish safety through repeated interactions. During this time, I tend to develop a map of your patterns so I know what to expect from you. I come off as guarded or emotionally flat, but it feels necessary in case of potential danger. Much of my intellect is designed for survival and safety such as by consciously assessing risk through the autistic mind rather than intuitively picking up on cues that neurotypicals expect me to notice. I also know that emotional warmth can be faked such that it can be used for manipulation to harm others. Hence, warmth alone isn't good enough to make me feel safe because I have been manipulated in exactly this way multiple times, including by my mother and father. Finally, I start to see a woman as beautiful when I see her as a safe enough person for emotions to surface. I appreciate more the smile and eyes. Meanwhile, if you are cruel to me in some way, then it colors my perception of your outer beauty such that I now see you as physically hideous. However, it takes me a while to get to this point. This is incompatible with the current dating environment. If I use online dating, those sites tend to be fast paced. It makes me extra uncomfortable. There is also the Leo method of cold approach which just seems straight up agonizing to me. I just feel like it would be humiliating to approach women and talk to them in that manner. I would have to abandon my identity entirely and then rapidly escalate to sexualized talk even though all of this has deeply harmed me already in childhood and it looks extremely dangerous knowing there are others who have been traumatized by this behavior. I struggle to embrace that kind of behavior with good conscience as I would be approaching women until I get laid rather than knowing them more deeply and forming a bond over time to check for relational compatibility. I can't glance at a woman, rate her between one and ten and then hit on her just like that. Attraction doesn't work like this for me. How do I go about dating if I have these sorts of barriers to intimacy? I might even prefer written communication at times, but others get overwhelmed by my thought process in that case. I feel a sense of physical pain in my head when attempting to lead with emotions as the risk of attack is too high without trust first established. I feel like the entire dating environment has too many poor assumptions baked into it and it seems incompatible with how I operate.

I don't think I mentioned that I believe I have refuted the belief in Satan. Basically, the Christian devil was never a consistent coherent character and it changed throughout the history of religion. In fact there used to be a more complex demonology with Lucifer and Satan being described as two separate entities. When you look at these inconsistencies, it helps me to see that Satan is more of a modern cultural invention in religion rather than something that was always depicted this way. In fact, Satan comes from the Jobs story describing an accuser or an adversary. Technically, I don't know that this would be a hard refutation, but it does seem like the closest you would get to refuting the existence of Satan. It is more like a weak solve which points the intuition toward Satan is not real. In this thread I was focusing on hard refutations rather than weak refutations, so I didn't mention this. I could go into more detail if needed.

I have been trying to build my own metaphysical framework from scratch without simply believing sources like Leo who claims I am God. However, I discovered that metaphysics is very difficult and it is hard to make progress when there are multiple plausible frameworks. I often start running into the limits of logic when encountering plausible unfalsifiable claims. That said, I am exploring how far logic can get us in terms of understanding the nature of reality. The progress seems worthy of our attention because although difficult and rare, it is possible to refute some metaphysical claims. This doesn't tell us what reality is, but it can tell us what it is not if some frameworks are known to be wrong on their own terms. Meanwhile, there is this persistent foundational problem of selecting axioms from which ground or guide a logical system. It starts to look like logic is fundamentally groundless if it cannot verify the axioms from which it stands. What then grounds those axioms without becoming subjectivism? That all said, we can start naming metaphysical claims that I believe are clearly refuted on their own terms. Vitalism is an example of a refuted metaphysical stance. It held that organic matter was animated by a life force such that it was impossible to generate organic matter from inorganic matter. Chemistry proved that this was possible, creating a counter example to this framework despite it being logically consistent. Preformationism was the claim that a miniature human existed inside of a sperm and an egg. This was refuted through microscopes and prenatal tests which verified how a sperm and an egg develop into an embryo without a miniature human existing in the zygote. Newtonian physics claimed that time and space were absolute. This one was famously refuted by general relativity which holds that there is no privileged now for all observers. Aristotle claimed that nature abhors a vacuum. Science has demonstrated that it is possible to create vacuums through various experiments which changed assumptions about how reality functions. Spontaneous generation held that living matter such as mice and maggots were spontaneously created from non-living matter such as meat and bread. This was refuted by sealing a flask such that the mice and maggots couldn't get into it. It suggests that it was difficult to store food away properly in ancient times to the point that people thought the food just turned into animals rather than animals getting into the food through openings in the storage. Logical positivism is self defeating because it claims that all claims need to be analytically true or verifiable. This claim is not analytically true or verifiable, therefore logical positivism refuted itself. Water monism claimed that water was the fundamental substance underlying all of reality. This is refuted by modern chemistry, atoms, and molecules. These can be manipulated into forming water through a more fundamental substance than water. This then runs into a common problem of pushing the problem down one layer. The next part I get mixed on is the unfalsifiable claims or unverifiable claims. Oftentimes unfalsifiability is treated as a sign that a frame should be rejected or as if it holds less weight. I don't think this is the correct attitude because there are definitely true things which cannot be proven, verified, or falsified. In fact if something were definitely true, then it shouldn't be falsifiable by nature of not being false. At the same time it is possible to have unfalsifiable falsehoods, meaning it becomes very hard to navigate this terrain in practice once I try to grapple with this. In my experience, I have seen things that cannot be proven or verified. This happens in criminal justice all the time. It includes he said she said scenarios, proving intent, plausible deniability, frame ups and set ups to corrupt evidence, evidence degrading over many years, and so on. From this point of view victims of crime know very well that what happened to them isn't necessarily provable or verifiable. It can include organized criminals using coded language to suppress evidence by hiding their identity so you can't prove it was them. In my worldview truth is therefore greater than what evidence can account for. This was mentioned in Leo's video about proof being a subdomain of truth as an extension of godels incompletes theorem. It seems to be proven that evidence and logic are insufficient for proving all possible truths. In terms of what logic can get us regarding metaphysics, it seems to be capable of refuting narrow metaphysical claims on their own terms through counter examples which are supposed to be impossible. Once a metaphysical claims becomes all encompassing and accounts for all possible experience, logic reaches its limits. This is why the most difficult philosophical debates involve claims which cannot be clearly falsified through more proof. I then start to hit a wall in terms of where to go next once I have multiple plausible metaphysical frameworks. Logic can refute narrow claims, but I struggle to adjudicate between multiple plausible positions which account for all observations. Leo's position is one example of such a position which cannot be falsified and in some cases cannot be verified due to genetics preventing someone from experiencing God consciousness. What do you think of finding refuted metaphysical frameworks? Can you find other examples? What are the limits of logic in this domain? Refuting metaphysical frameworks is difficult and rare, but sometimes possible.