Leo's Blog Discussion Mega-Thread

[Rafael Thundercat]

1 hour ago, Dryas said:

This might actually be different though. Look at the models, they’re doing reasoning and they’re insanely good at reasoning.

Frankly this sounds like copium to me because I am almost certain you would have predicted that the current paradigm of throwing compute and data at some model wouldn’t result in any kind of intelligence. But it has and it doesn’t seem to be stopping.

There is another perspective to see the escalation of AI, not the AI per se but the consequences of all the money involved

 

 

[Thought Art]

Leo's recent post about him being a weird, or out of the ordinary guy and how you need to be yourself is interesting in it's timing. I almost made a post about this today.

[Thought Art]

 

I like Deepak's take on using AI for personal growth and spiritual development. 

[Eskilon]

36 minutes ago, Rafael Thundercat said:

1 hour ago, Dryas said:

This might actually be different though. Look at the models, they’re doing reasoning and they’re insanely good at reasoning.

Frankly this sounds like copium to me because I am almost certain you would have predicted that the current paradigm of throwing compute and data at some model wouldn’t result in any kind of intelligence. But it has and it doesn’t seem to be stopping.

There is another perspective to see the escalation of AI, not the AI per se but the consequences of all the money involved

 

Great video! Thanks

[Leo Gura]

2 hours ago, Dryas said:

But it has and it doesn’t seem to be stopping.

But it is stopping. They have exahusted all the world's data and the gaps in output are nowhere fixing themselves.

The reason AI works is because it exploits real intelligence found in symbolic human data. It is not intelligent by itself.

This is a bad conflation of things which will hit a brick wall soon.

Just because they found this exploit does not mean it will keep working forever till super-God.

Edited July 24, 2025 by Leo Gura

[Leo Gura]

@Exystem I don't think we need a study to understand that AI will make most people dumber.

Any study is just a bonus.

We know how lazy and irresponsible most people are.

Edited July 25, 2025 by Leo Gura

[Anton Rogachevski]

Leo your latests episode one of your best ever. Congrats and thank you for your contribution! 

[ryoko]

Adding to the Corruption point; Spiral Dynamics is very much a self tool for scapegoating yourself. Yes, there's dumb people out there and they are what they are. After a point, you have to throw away this lens to look at things. The best use of Spiral Dynamics is to find your own values. It's not exactly straightforward, because of the inherent bias to conform to "higher" values. Nothing's higher or lower, beleive me. It's just all lying on the same infinite plane, it just happens to be in different locations. 

[Rafael Thundercat]

This one as contribution to the corruption studies. Yes MórmonS again, and this one is not about dogma corruption but money

 

[Exystem]

13 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

I don't think we need a study to understand that AI will make most people dumber.

Any study is just a bonus.

We know how lazy and irresponsible most people are.

@Leo Gura You're right. My guess is that around 80% of people will get dumber because of AI, while ~20% may boost their intelligence a lot - as if there was a threshold intelligence required to be smart enough to get the right insight into how to enhance your intelligence and prevent the cognitive decline via avoiding the traps, at least that is true for me. My verbal expression in my mother tongue (german) lately has become even more precise and information dense so several people independent of each other complimented my unique verbal style and told me they barely met someone who could express so concisely what they mean, even the most abstract stuff.

But I must admit, I have fallen for the trap of overengineering the overengineering. From prompt-engineering to context-&pipeline-engineering to cognitive architecture development I lost myself in overoptimizing the prompt-opimizer system instructions and so on.
Long story short - I'd love to see a video of yours about the traps in AI usage.

And a question - Why don't you start opening threads before recording videos that let people contribute to the topic you're going to talk about? Sometimes people may have great insight or examples that could deepen your understanding even more - or at least you become aware of how people think about the topic, where they may be at so to speak. For example a potential AI-Traps video, I think I have some quite unique niche thoughts about that. I get that you want your original thought to come through, but why not letting people inspire you at least a week before recording?

[Rafael Thundercat]

https://www.actualized.org/insights/actualized-quotes-275

Spo, there is actually a way to do robust arm chair philosophy 😂 

Song to arm contemplation 

 

 

Edited July 25, 2025 by Rafael Thundercat

[Natasha Tori Maru]

I went hard down into investigating the NXIVM cult a few years ago.

I was hoping you would showcase it!

It's fucked up on so many levels. Theres an interview with Allison Mack & Keith Raniere I came across which was really interesting for a body language read.

The branding.... sex. Racketeering. Controlling what women eat. Theres so much demented shit

Some of these YouTube videos I haven't seen - cheers for the share!

Edited July 27, 2025 by Natasha Tori Maru

[Raze]

The concept of love bombing always confuses me. On one hand when you hear about cults or just manipulative guys in general, they say the way they manipulate is showering the women in affection and praise. The Nxivm Cult leaders mother said when he was a teenager she would hear him calling many different women and telling them each they were special to him.

But generally most pickup artist advice is the opposite, they say be non-needy, don’t treat her like she’s special and put her on the pedestal, neg her and pretend you aren’t interested, “treat her like a celebrity and she’ll treat you like a fan”. 

It almost seems like the best strategy to attract her when you like her is to pretend you don't, and when you don’t like her it’s to pretend you do. 

[Raze]

You can watch the first episode of a documentary on NXIVM here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6HwK5tbTzA

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, Raze said:

The concept of love bombing always confuses me. On one hand when you hear about cults or just manipulative guys in general, they say the way they manipulate is showering the women in affection and praise. The Nxivm Cult leaders mother said when he was a teenager she would hear him calling many different women and telling them each they were special to him.

But generally most pickup artist advice is the opposite, they say be non-needy, don’t treat her like she’s special and put her on the pedestal, neg her and pretend you aren’t interested, “treat her like a celebrity and she’ll treat you like a fan”. 

It almost seems like the best strategy to attract her when you like her is to pretend you don't, and when you don’t like her it’s to pretend you do. 

It's different if you're doing cold approach or if there's already a relationship of some kind.

Lovebombing is something that takes place not in the attraction phase but further in.

[ExploringReality]

@Leo Gura  I can describe you in two ways! Your epistemically humble, great humility. And your a Truthful asshole. Has any girls you dated in the past or people you know called you a asshole or a dick? Sometimes your classic videos too really sting me because it's not fluff or sugarcoating my situation. I appreciate your teaching style, it's raw, and can sometimes hurt. You value truth over feelings, It can really damage some people because maybe they just want a teaching style that focuses on reframing emotions, validation of feelings or a softer compassionate hand, which you do have in your teachings, but it's like half your face is a dark skeleton of truth and the other half is this inspiring light

Edited July 27, 2025 by ExploringReality

[Leo Gura]

@ExploringReality I did it on purpose to make the teachings more serious.

But I have backed off from that harsh style because I realized it is counter-productive.

[RawJudah]

@Leo Gura your old way of teaching was brutal. Hitting so many pain points in the mind! But I liked it, because that’s the only way we’ll learn I guess. 

[OBEler]

8 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

@ExploringReality I did it on purpose to make the teachings more serious.

But I have backed off from that harsh style because I realized it is counter-productive.

Please come back to your old teaching style if it's more truthful. If it was too over exaggerating and black and white then I prefer this actual one. 

Please don't distort true insights just to protect some of us. I know you have some black pill in your pocket ready to throw at us. But you are too concerned.

[yetineti]

It’s not about distorting Truth. It’s about packaging it for the masses and considering the ROI.

Leo could remain harsh and probably awaken a small group of people very quickly. In the process, thousands will break.

Alternatively, if he softens his approach a bit, there might be a broader swath of people that make more incremental improvements while subsiding larger irreparable damage to more sensitive psyches.

It’s also one thing to have context awareness with different people on the forum or in an interview but I think it has been especially responsible of Leo to consider this style of harsh framing in more public contexts, like one of his actual videos that millions may see.

There is a reason why Leo has endless disclaimers and has for awhile.

Edited July 27, 2025 by yetineti