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@UnbornTao You don't need to respond to all of my stuff. Some of it is not even relevant to what I really care about - some of them are secondary. Without me writing essays lets go step by step. 1) Do you think the term enlightenment is actually a meaningful phrase or do you think its meaningless? 2) Do you think two enlightened people can have a meaningful conversation about enlightenment?

There was only one person so far who tried to defend Trump and Trump supporters in a way, where he actually tried to engage with the substance. That guy is @QandC. There wasn't a single other guy who managed not to just grab links and to give sources but also to try to engage with the substance that was mentioned in those sources. I think he wasn't successful and I think he tried to do the impossible there , because he took on a position thats close to impossible to defend, but he actually engaged with what I said and with what I brought and he brought facts as well. Its incredible that the quality of discourse on this forum is lightyears away from the quality I had with @QandC and I wouldn't even consider that high level, but it was a definitely an above average debate (unfortunately it should be considered above average , given the incredibly low standard we have here). When you push someone on this forum for sources, they get triggered. Most of the people are not even read into the things they try to argue about , and they get surprised when they get called out for being motivated reasoners and for trying to argue about things they have 0 clue about. The fact that some of you get triggered when someone asks for a source or when someone press you on the claims you make says everything about you. It shouldnt be a problem for you to say "I cant substantiate this claim of mine" or to say "I dont have any source for this, this is just my assumption" if you are honest, but if you are dishonest - then of course you are going to be triggered and wont be honest about your level of knowledge and about your intentions. I don't know how you guys expect us to have quality discourse or debate, if you just allow everyone to baselessly make any claim and to infinitely gibberate about random shit without being able to actually deliver a sound argument or without being able to substantiate anything . If you want to have quality discourse - then you need to wake up to reality, and actually be ready to defend the claims you make or just be honest about what you know about and what you base your argument or claim on. Ask yourself these questions before you open your mouth: 1) Can I make an argument that Im willing to defend with sources and with other arguments (where I can actually substantiate my claims)? 2) Can I actually engage in a substantial way with the claims or with the argument that the other guy made (Is there a clear value disagreement that I can push on, or is there a logical problem that I can point out or is there a problem about facts) 3) Am I actually read up on the things I try to argue against or I have 0 fucking clue about the surrounding facts ? If the answer is 'no' to all of those questions, then I don't know how you expect us or anyone having a good quality debate or convo with you. And I don't see how you get surprised when people use harsh rhetoric against you, when you are a motivated reasoner and when you are being dishonest about your level knowledge and you just waste people's time.

The argument of "surely there is a good reason for X" - can be used easily against you , where I can just say in an incredibly lazy way (using the same laziness you did) that "there surely is a good reason for why a good amount of users here are against Trump and it is not just purely bias." If you have anything of substance to say about why Trump was a better pick than Kamala - give us those arguments, I don't know why you waste time with accusations. Those accusations only work if you actually back them up in some way at least. I havent seen you engaging with the arguments that were brought up against Trump in other threads. You couldn't engage with any of them, all your response was is this "you guys are biased and brainwashed".

None of the people here who are cheering for Trump and Elon would have been okay with this, if the exact same thing would have went done with the previous twitter owner Jack Dorsey. Suddenly all the issues and skepticism about corruption and conflict of interest flies out the window - but we surely need to be afraid of the big bad guys in the shadows and we don't need to give a single fuck about what the richest man in the world does alongside with a billionaire president who has a bunch of millionaires and some billionares on his side.

@UnbornTao I think you are falling in another trap, where you conflate the properties of the thing thats being pointed to with the limitations of pointing or communication itself . This is similar to this: Don’t confuse the properties of your theories with properties of what your theories are about. Theories don’t need to exemplify what they are talking about. - You can have a clear theory about vagueness ; You can have a meaningful theory about meaninglessness ; You can have an intelligible theory about unintelligiblity etc

Is that supposed to be some kind of zen thing? I have several thoughts to reply to that: 1) Im not sure its necessarily a problem to have a belief about something ,especially if that belief is true compared to not having any belief about it and staying completely agnostic about it. There is a further level to this, where we say you can't even be agnostic about it (you cant be neither passive or positive or negative towards something that you don't know the meaning of - so for example if I ask you do you believe sdbgjdjfg is true - given that you don't know what sdbgjdjfg means you are not even agnostic about it ) 2)Im not convinced that its better to not have anything in mind when you do your practices and when you do spiritual work. If that supposed to be some kind of argument about the efficiency about spiritual methods being better if you have no knowledge/belief about awakening or enlightenment beforehand vs in the case when you do - thats going to be an empirical claim and I don't think you will be able to subtanstiate it. 3)Its unclear to me whether the beforehand knowledge or belief will block the given person from enlightenment - again if you want to claim this, this is going to be an empirical claim but I don't see how you can substantiate this. 4)But even if you are right, all of this an argument for is to not watch any youtube video or to not read books in this case when when you are not enlightened , but this argument is not a reason to not do any of those things (after enlightenment). The issue about recognition (namely recognizing whether you are enlightened or whether you had an awakening will be probably there though, especially if you have 0 concept about it, when you go through it). I don't think those things are entailed in what I said. Everyone here understands that talking about something is not the same as knowing something and knowing something not the same as experiencing something. Words are used to point to things when you say its not a thing, you are pointing towards it and thats enough to communicate about it. Look what you did there "something that is unknowable and formless" - you created a category which is applicable to the thing you wanted to talk about and all of those things are meaningful. What you are doing there is pointing towards it. Again what you are doing there is pointing to a concern about "it can be misinterpreted or misused" - but again thats not necessarily entailed.

I don't know how that risk is lower if we don't engage with reading materials. Also im not really sure what you mean by religion there. I don't see how this is relevant and im not even sure if we should dig into this, because this will open up some stuff that might not even be relevant to the original thing I brought up. I don't really see what your concern is. Yes communication has its own limits, thats not an argument for not commincating about things though. I also see some of you falling into the trap of "if you can't exhaustively describe something, then you can't communicate about it at all" , but that second part doesn't follow from the first one. This whole forum is about debating about a thing that can't exhaustively be described that doesn't mean though that all these talks and debates are completely meaningless. Things can be miscommunicated and misinterpreted and things can be misused - this is applicable to a lot of things, thats not a good reason though to not try to communicate.

Reading is not to replace the work ,but to become better at communicating and it is to compare the insights you have with other people who are probably much better at explicating those insights. Also if you have an insight + you read books you will be able to recognize better who is talking about the thing you have insight about and then you can point other people to that work. It can fasten up the communication quite a bit, if you don't need to write down a book amount of information in every given thread. Most of the confusion about definitions can be cleared up if there is a work or set of works that everyone is familiar with. This can also help with clearing up somewhat who had what kind of insight and what kind of awakening.

1) The first impeachment of President Donald Trump occurred on December 18, 2019. 2) Im not sure if your head is still spinning or not from the beautiful pivot that you did there - starting with Hillary denying the results and then pivoting to talking about democrats as a whole group and completely ditching your point about presidential candidates. If you want to make that point - you can do that, but if you think non.candidates denying the results of an election is the exact same as presidential candidates denying the election - you shouldn't ever engage with politics again. Now im completely sure you will engage with the other points that were made about Trump, about jan6 and about the 60+ lawsuits that were unsuccessful.

1) Hillary conceded few days after, Trump still denies the results fo the 2020 election - if you think these two things are even remotely in the same ballpark you either shouldn't enagage with politics ever again ,or you are being dishonest. 2) There were more than 60 lawsuits launched for finding evidence for voterfraud for the 2020 election . Some of the judges were appointed by Trump none of them found anything. So what you have here is that you need to claim that all of those cases were corrupt and even Trump's people went against him or you need to come back to reality and concede that the election wasn't stolen. The difference between Hillary and Trump couldn't be more clear. It isn't just that Trump didn't accept the result of the election on the day of the election. Its that Trump still denies the results of the election even after 4 years and even after 60+ lawsuits. And not to mention what he did on jan6. Again, if you think these two cases even remotely similar you shouldn't engage with politics ever again. The numbers in votes can be explained by the fact that covid was happening at that time and more people gave a fuck to engage with politics. So that can be one hypothesis, more hypothesis can be generated but again a few things about the 2020 election: 1) Even if I cant generate a hypothesis that explains the data from that doesn't follow the election was stolen and its on you to prove voter fraud and saying "here is a piece of data that I can't explain" won't be sufficient for that 2) Again you need to explain why all 60+ lawsuits were unsuccessful - that is the piece of data that you will need to explain to us. This is just another case for an ignorant Trump supporter spouting bullshit. None of you guys are read into Trump's case not even on a surface level and yet you are here to spout bs and to try to cry about liberals and democrats while you are completely clueless about everything. All of you are a waste of time.

Cool, ty.

Unfortunately I dont know any books, since Im very poorly read, but our friend @Oeaohoo might be able to help you out, since he is a well-read guy. Probably one of the most well-read guy on this forum. Im not even sure what field or what subject would be the closest to tackle with this phenomenon. Probably books on rhetoric and articles and videos around the concept of being resistant to evidence might help. It takes a lot of character to admit when one is wrong (and that wont happen during the debate or the conversation, because its in most cases just way too humiliating , especially if the debate is fiery) . The other thing is the underlying assumption about caring about truth . that actually needs to be there, but in most cases people dont care , people care about the aesthetic of caring about truth. The other thing is that we are not rational in general. We have positions grounded in feelings in most cases about the vast majority of the subjects and we don't have a clear concept about how we could be persuaded to change our position on most the beliefs we hold. Like when you ask yourself the question of "what would change my belief on this x thing" - you will realize , that when it comes to the vast majority of beliefs that you have, you don't have a clear view how it could be done.

@UnbornTao Do you have any book recommendation that roughly describes what you mean by enlightenment? As a sidenote - to elevate the productivity of the convos around enlightenment it would be probably helpful to make actualizers to read into the same materials, so at the very least those can be used as a reference for wtf is being talked about. The idea that some of you guys need to start almost all conversations from scratch and you need to establish what is meant by awakening and enlightenment is a job that is close to impossible - but if you can refer to a given book or a work, that gives the advantage of communicating with hopefully more clarity and in more detail. There is just too much nuance and detail that needs to be described in any given thread to even lay down the groundwork to start the conversation. I would say the exact same thing for more philosophical convos - it would be good to have familiarity with the same set of concepts and not using private language that no one understands, but of course, again ,this would require us reading and engaging with the same set of books and materials in detail.

That again seems to be an issue with lack of justification rather than with anger or with anything like that. You try to point to the fact that you think they are not knowledgeable enough to take the action or they are not justified in taking the action. You use anger as a proxy to infer that they are not justified or that they don't have good reasons to do what they are doing - but thats just a proxy. One can be angry and justified and knowledgeable. Those things are not mutually exclusive. There are scenarios where the certainty for a given thing is indeed high and an argument can be made for that and it is not just cope - you need to entertain this possibility - although yes, this is often not the case.

That case, what you now pushed back your take to is "if you are not justified in believing that you are right, then dont take an action" , which everyone here would agree with but that wasn't your original take. Your original take was that given that one can be always wrong, one shouldn't take any action. Which is very much different from your current take. Now given what your new take is , you should have started with this and make a case for why you think the protestors are unjustified in believing what they believe , rather than just dismissing them and saying "but they can be wrong though, why are they arrogant". Make a case for why you think they have a false sense of certainty and that they are not justified in believing the things they believe in. - this is where the substantial conversation lies, not in the "but you are arrogant though"

So protesting is out of the picture at all times, because there is always a possibility that you can be wrong , but voting is okay even though you can be wrong there as well . That kind of skepticism eats itself, because it can be mirrored, so you end up saying nothing of substance. Not doing an action is an action as well. You not protesting (and being wrong about the effects of not protesting) could have horrible consequences as well and you being passive by your logic entails that you know that you should be passive over not passive. The argument of "you can be wrong" can be applied to everything and therefore changes nothing and is not an argument for passiveness.

Another banger from Salvijus. Using your logic every time you go vote for a political party its entailed that you have self deception and plain arrogance since you "know" whats good for the country and how things will play out. You don't think for 2 seconds before you post your thoughts - do you?

The goat oeaohoo is back. I think you would be right, if most people would be actually voting based on substance and not on perceived good and bad. That perceived good and bad in most cases backed up by feelings that a given propaganda machine created in you and then circling this back to your claim - this eventually becomes a psychological issue (where the ability to persuade you will be constrained by the aritficially created feelings in you) and not an issue on disagreeing on substance and about policy. Even in the context where one actually cares about the facts and open to be persuaded on a descriptive ground - Most of the convos go like this: "I don't like policy X because it has effect Y" - well you are wrong about X creating Y, here is the evidence - "Well ,okay ,maybe but it will have effect Z as well" - You are wrong about that as well, here is evidence. And then this goes on after a while where you end up at a place where we start to talk about values rather than just about outcomes and effects. The disagreement eventually becomes about why you hold the values that you hold and why those values important to you (which also eventually becomes a psychological discussion).

Comparison doesn't meant that you compare two things across all dimensions - you can compare two different things just on 1 dimension. What happened here is that I outlined the sillyness in your logic. The idea that one can only validly judge someone if one has the exact same lifesituation (like having the same amount of kids, having the same amount of money , having the same career etc) is silly. Again when I apply your logic to other situations like to Jeffrey Epstein, you immediately backtrack and you don't want to use your logic anymore. It seems that in those situations you are perfectly okay with judging those people and you don't qualify with "well my judgement isn't credible , since I am not in a similar life situations as Jeffrey Epstein". The interesting thing is that you are not consistent with your skepticism. Because if you would be, you wouldn't even make positive judgements about Elon and Trump you would stay completely agnostic about both of them, since as you said you cant credibly judge them. But if you cant credibly judge them , that also means that you cant say any positive about them. When people judge Elon and Trump they judge them based on their actions. If you want to put a % on how much good vs bad a given person has done, then again we are going to go back to your silly skepticism problem, where im gonna say "Well you know little about Epstein, how do you know that you can correctly assess all the bad and good things that he did, maybe he did much more good than what you know about and your % about him is very much off". The other thing is that even if you can establish that given all publicy avalaible knowledge about a given person makes that person more good than bad (based on their actions) , even then one can still make comments about their negative and their bad actions.

Wait, how do you know the system is corrupt, if you werent there personally witnessing directly the corruption? Are you telling me and other people, that you believe in biased sources informing you about corruption? Wow, you don't only purely rely on your direct experience when you make an analysis?

You guys dont need to deny the spiritual development of sadhguru , you can just say that spiritual development doesn't entail that you will have an informed and well educated analysis on every single field (including politics). As I said in other threads, being a system-thinker or being spiritually developed doesn't entail that one won't give trash takes and trash analysis about a given field. You need to study that given field and you cant get around that no matter how developed your cognition is and no matter how spiritually developed you are. You need to study a fuckton, you need to understand fallacies and you need to be careful with how you make your inferences.

" You cant judge Jeffrey Epstein for what he did - I mean think about it, he had so many billionaire and millionaire friends and you have no idea what Jeffrey Esptein was in person or what he was standing for - maybe he was a great husband, maybe he was a great friend. All you have information about is what the extremely biased media told you and there is a reason why you only know about his crimes. Maybe those huge companies that provide so many jobs to so many people around the world wouldnt be there today, if Jeffrey Epstein wouldn't have been who he was. He was an extremely great middle-man for networking and probably managed to connect so many bright minds and wealthy people together. Would those wealthy people have managed to get to where they are today, without Epstein's great networking ability ? Well, we will never know. No one here can compherend the responsibility of navigating meetings and conversations with a bunch of billionaire and millionaires who are all power hungry , therefore no one has the credibility to make any judgement about what Epstein did. "

All of these people wave system thinking as an aesthetic - I have seen even Schmachtenberger giving surface level takes about certain subjects - all of these people need to be taken with a huge grain of salt. Yes, some of them are very good in certain domains, but they are very bad at other domains. The fact is that you need to have some level of specialization in a given domain to not give trash takes about it. There is no getting around this. No amount of system-thinking is going to shortcut the necessary learning and reading that you need to do. You need to spend some time and if you don't, you are going to inevitably say some dumb things . She made literally a vibe based analysis, without engaging with any piece of fact and she bases her whole analysis on a spiritual model that ranks emotions. You could literally grab any random person from the street and that person could give a political analysis with the same if not better quality.

Im not saying just content specific, im trying to point to the difference in generating functions. Its not just what kind of beliefs the majority of each party holds (which would be the issue about content), its how you get there and how you form your beliefs and based on what criteria you accept and reject things (its about your epistemic methods ). Im saying there is a qualitative difference in generating function.

Yeah but your "both siding" doesn't work when we get into specifics. Again, half of the republicans deny the result of the 2020 election even after all the lawsuits, they deny climate change , they collectively believe in a bunch of conspiracy theories. You cant make a similar case for the left. The two side different and not even close. When someone brings up insane lefty positons , most of those wont be held by the majority of the lefites, they are hold by extremely fringed twitter kids - on the conservative side though, thats not the case. It needs to be acknowledged that the two side operates differently when it comes to epistemically engaging with facts and the world. As long as we pretend that both sides are the same, we won't be able to solve things. It doesn't work in that it wont persuade already radicalized people in changing their beliefs and opinions but Im not convinced how it doesn't work for people who aren't already bought into a bunch of conspiracy theories and on people who aren't radicalized yet. At the very least - not amplifying the fuck out of ragebaits and conspiracy theories would be a good start to slow down radicalization.