Leo's Blog Discussion Mega-Thread

[Joshe]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

I didn't achieve non-conformiry until a few years ago. I noticed a shift in myself once I saw how conformist the mind is.

So it's not something I was born with.

Autonmous is a stage of cognitive development.

Same here. But that's just a self-awareness milestone. 

You may have freed yourself of conformity just a few years ago, but I'm betting you've been noticing it within yourself for most of your life. And each time you noticed it, you felt compelled to address it. Right? That's what I mean by "structural non-conformist".

Someone who is structurally conformist wouldn't even want to know they were operating on conformity. Much less address it should they be made aware of it. They'd sweep it under the rug because it doesn't register to them as a violation.

But for the structural non-conformist, it makes perfect sense why you'd feel compelled to address it: Because your system is built to generate its own models and evaluate by its own standards, so when it discovers it's running on something it can't trust because it didn't verify, that's a violation of one of its top values: self-verified coherence. 

The main point is that these types naturally reject conformity. Not out of some rebellion or epistemic standard, but as a structural cognitive bias toward self-verified coherence. Conformists don't feel the need to reject it because their cognitive bias is toward social coherence.

Neither chooses their bias and neither can escape it.

Regarding the autonomous stage, people such as yourself are operating on hardware that makes reaching it almost inevitable. It emerges from self-awareness after decades of running a specific architecture. 

[Leo Gura]

15 minutes ago, Joshe said:

people such as yourself are operating on hardware that makes reaching it almost inevitable.

It took a lot of work and it wouldn't be active without the work.

I have a disagreeable and skeptical personality, but that's not so rare. What I'm talking about is much rarer and requires serious work.

Frankly, I don't know anyone who has achieved what I'm talking about except Ralston. And none of his students have it.

What I'm talking about is not an innate personality type. But some personality types may find it easier to do the work.

If it was just a personality type, it would be quite common.

Edited 1 hour ago by Leo Gura