Leo's Blog Discussion Mega-Thread

[Leo Gura]

I think Scorn wasted some amazing potential for a profound, satisfying, spiritual conclusion. Makes no sense why they didn't seize it.

[Princess Arabia]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

Relative vs absolute.

There is nothing wrong with eating poison in the absolute sense. But IF you want health, it is wrong to eat rat poison. Rat poison is wrong relative to healthy human life.

Ok. I see.

[Daniel Balan]

Hi @Leo Gura thanks for all your blog posts you published today. Really great ones. Regarding the last one, this is how all the right wing and Russian propaganda is done. Exactly the same, half truths and out of context images and texts taken from an article but 80% of the article is missing and only the 20% which is the intriguing part of the text is shown. Studying Russian propaganda is a philosophical enquiry in and of itself.

Regarding the quote where you advocate to do all the things that the average humans are too lazy and irresponsible to do, could you please share with us a list that consists of those said things? I contemplated a list but I'm sure I miss some things that are important 

Edited August 25 by Daniel Balan

[Davino]

On the Blindness of Scientism:

 

I almost fell from my sofa laughing when the dude from the video said this:

Quote

I'd be shocked, honestly, if Reality was such that psychedelics was the way to see Ultimate Reality.

That would be a shock to me

The cosmic humour here is just hilarious

 

Getting serious, how can you really care about Consciousness and avoid the evidence of dozens of people sending you emails that psychedelics are revelatory to grasp consciousness and you just omit it. How on earth! I did the same process as that dude and when I encountered psychedelics, I just tried them, and there you have it, bombastic shock.

[Leo Gura]

23 minutes ago, Davino said:

I almost fell from my sofa laughing

[Leo Gura]

40 minutes ago, Daniel Balan said:

Regarding the quote where you advocate to do all the things that the average humans are too lazy and irresponsible to do, could you please share with us a list that consists of those said things?

That list could be so vast, it depends a lot on what areas of life you're trying to master. Not everyone here is mastering the same areas.

[Daniel Balan]

11 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

That list could be so vast, it depends a lot on what areas of life you're trying to master. Not everyone here is mastering the same areas.

I personally want world class understanding of philosophy, politics, epistemology, reality, metaphysics, spirituality, mastering pivotal human endeavours such as business, relationships, money, work ethic. 

So my list is as follows:

• Reading

• Meditation

•Contemplation and deep attention to self deception and bias

• Deep introspection and self observation 

•Developing all the good aspects of all the tier 1 stages while dropping all the negative aspects. 

• Developing tier 2 thought process and behaviour 

• Being acutely aware of my own corruption both corruption of the thoughts and behavioural

• Always doing what I found to be the most emotionally difficult( this is from my favourite episode from you) 

Here my list ends, I'd like to know how your list looks like.

Edited Monday at 07:26 PM by Daniel Balan

[Adam M]

I like your blog posts, Leo. They’re enjoyable and fun (and a bit scary and unnerving) for me to read. 
 

Your reflections on loving monsters and cosmic horror is scary for me. I don’t really like imagining parasitic or otherwise nasty and deformed creatures. I know that God’s mind can handle it (and so can my mind). But I just don’t really like letting that kind of picture into my imagination. I’m trying to sculpt and curate a reality that is full of beautiful things that I find beautiful… because… I like it. 

I suppose that God can experience the aspect of itself which is “Adam’s life.” 
 

Anyways, just rambling. Thanks for the cool posts! They scare me  

 

edit: Subconsciously I fully understand what you’re saying about the possibility to “ruin the illusion for yourself” and seeing things that you can’t unsee. That would make me really uncomfortable and sad, so, I don’t do it. I think it’s okay for people to live within their tiny little bubble, because even though the goldfish can’t understand the universe… he can still have his little goldfish experience, and value and appreciate that just as much. Meaning scales all the way up and also all the way down. 
 

 

By the way, I think that you would REALLY like the netflix show called “Pantheon.” It’s super cerebral and well-written. Not going to spoil it, but I think it’s right up your alley. Worth a watch if you’re feeling up for it! The ending does NOT disappoint  @Leo Gura

Edited Tuesday at 01:39 AM by Adam M

[Leo Gura]

7 hours ago, Daniel Balan said:

I'd like to know how your list looks like.

I don't have a list. I stated a general principle.

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, Adam M said:

I like your blog posts, Leo. They’re enjoyable and fun (and a bit scary and unnerving) for me to read. 

Thanks.

I'll look into the show.

[ryoko]

@Leo Gura Have you watched Childhood's End? 

[Adam M]

I enjoyed the mechanical calculator video. That guy is an INTP to the MAX!!! Haha. The Ti function (according to Myers-Briggs as expanded by the "Objective Personality" people) is all about *complete understanding* of a thing for understanding's sake. Not necessarily for achieving a goal or fixing a problem (sure, there's some of that too). 

Since the INTP has Ne and Si in the middle as the 2nd and 3rd function, there's a lot of this bouncing back and forth between concept (Ne) and physical implementation (Si). I really trust INTP's to understand the full scope of a thing, its history, and to be ruthlessly accurate about it in most cases.

But, I won't trust them to make the audience laugh, or to smooth-talk the guards (Fe). The INTP trades social intelligence for conceptual and mechanical intelligence. Without them, we wouldn't have computers! 
 

^^ these people have the best insights about personality types. Really cutting edge in the field. 

[Rafael Thundercat]

Libertarianism post. Perfect summary. From All History teach us is that without limits humans simply go rougue. Well, even with limits they still go rougue

[Leo Gura]

4 hours ago, ryoko said:

@Leo Gura Have you watched Childhood's End? 

No. I rarely watch shows.

[Basman]

Eldritch horror is essentially "forces beyond one's comprehension". For a rat, eldritch horror would be to realize that everything that humans build, subways, electrical wiring, pipes, is beyond their comprehension. They can only see surfaces and tunnels. They only know to scuttle away when a train rumbles by. They don't even know and are wholly incapable of knowing what a train is to begin with.

[TheAlchemist]

Check this out:

https://www.actualized.org/insights/why-libertarianism-is-wrong

I like the thinking here, yet also I think the aspiration for freedom should be preserved. Although in a completely different way than the naive libertarian fantasy.

The libertarian thinks that society and regulation are limitations on freedom or attempts to control some kind of "natural" freedom. When really, society and regulation enable a much deeper kind of freedom than what the libertarian fantasizes about. A clear improvement in the quality and quantity of freedom is achived through society and regulation. 

For example, gun control is a limitation on freedom for the libertarian, but in another sense it can be seen as an expansion of freedom, by giving citizens the freedom to go to work, relax at home, go to school and live their lives without having to worry about some crazy guy running around shooting people. Or a hate speech law might be seen as a limitation of freedom by the libertarian, but can be seen as an expansion of freedom by giving minority groups and/or less priviledged groups to have more space and freedom to exist in society. A gay or trans person gets freedom to basic existence in society without being harrassed. And generally, the existence of the state enables a huge amount of freedom that we take completely for granted. 

This is a key difference between liberal western european/nordic societies vs. conservative US society, where a naive libertarian idea of freedom is embedded in their cultural code. So Americans end up thinking that freedom means being able to own guns and hate gays and muslims to shut them down. The European version is less problematic in that sense because the idea is more so that society and the collective rules (democratically developed) are what enable a different kind of and a better freedom than what the American libertarian strives for.

Edited Thursday at 02:58 PM by TheAlchemist

[Bjorn K Holmstrom]

These are my thoughts on the "Why Libertarianism Is Wrong" post:

It is a provocative post, pushing the boundaries and challenging deeply held ideologies like libertarianism, something I endorse fully. 
I think you are right to point out the naive view of human nature that often underpins it and the dangerous potential for freedom to be weaponized as the 'freedom to exploit.

This got me thinking about the issue through a developmental lens, and I wonder if your critique might be pointing to something even deeper. What if the problem isn't freedom or government itself, but the stage of development at which we conceive of them?

You argue that an un-evolved ego will use freedom for exploitation, necessitating a coercive government to stop it. This makes perfect sense. I'm curious if we can envision a future where human consciousness and our social systems co-evolve beyond this dichotomy.

Instead of a choice between top-down control vs. chaotic freedom, could the next step be designing distributed, adaptive systems, seeing as stage Yellow and systems thinking is the next step up for the world, what you might call 'emergent governance', that operate on the principle of solving problems at the lowest possible level? This wouldn't be based on the fantasy of everyone becoming a saint, but on building a smarter social architecture that makes synergy more rewarding than exploitation.

In this light, perhaps libertarianism and statism aren't right or wrong, but just stages in our collective understanding. I'd be very curious to hear your thoughts on what the prerequisites would be for humanity to outgrow the need for coercive governance altogether. What would that level of collective 'responsibility' or 'consciousness' actually look like?"

Thanks for sparking such a deep line of thought.

Edited Thursday at 03:40 PM by Bjorn K Holmstrom

[Daniel Balan]

Hi @Leo Gura! I totally disagree with the idea of nationalising things. Just compare Western Europe with Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe is 50 years behind in development due to the communist regime that nationalized everything. Look at the differences between East and West Germany that are still visible to this day. Nationalization of any kind is a step backward in development. The cold war was won by the capitalistic world for a reason. The reason being that private businesses ALWAYS outperform public businesses. Just look at the factories that the soviets built, those were profitless businesses owned by the communist state that offered piss poor products that required tons of money and resources to produce. To add in salt to injury, no one really wanted to buy those shit tractors and heavy machineries made by the soviets because they would rather buy the same goods at better quality from the western capitalist world. By studying the economy of the ussr and its satellite states we quickly realize that nation wide nationalizations means piss poor products and a giant deficit spending 

[Leo Gura]

37 minutes ago, Daniel Balan said:

Just compare Western Europe with Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe is 50 years behind in development due to the communist regime that nationalized everything.

It is an error in reasoning to regard all nationalization efforts as the same.

Airports in America are nationalized. They work just fine.

Obviously communism and even socialism is wrong. But that doesn't mean nationalizing some industries is wrong. It has to be done in an intelligent and selective way.

Quote

By studying the economy of the ussr and its satellite states we quickly realize that nation wide nationalizations means piss poor products and a giant deficit spending

USSR is an outdated model. Study China instead. China proves that it can work.

Edited Thursday at 05:01 PM by Leo Gura

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, Bjorn K Holmstrom said:

What if the problem isn't freedom or government itself, but the stage of development at which we conceive of them?

If everyone had the development level of a saint then libertarianism would be the proper form of government.

Obviously our average level of development determines what form of government is currently sustainable.

A Yellow government cannot work because less than 1% of the population is Yellow. Who's going to run it? Show me a single Yellow politician or congressman.

Edited Thursday at 05:14 PM by Leo Gura