Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 11

"In the year of our Lord 1432, there arose a grievous quarrel among the brethren over the number of teeth in the mouth of a horse. For thirteen days the disputation raged without ceasing. All the ancient books and chronicles were fetched out, and wonderful and ponderous erudition such as was never before heard of in this region was made manifest. At the beginning of the fourteenth day, a youthful friar of goodly bearing asked his learned superiors for permission to add a word, and straightway, to the wonderment of the disputants, whose deep wisdom he sore vexed, he beseeched them to unbend in a manner coarse and unheard-of and to look in the open mouth of a horse and find answer to their questionings. At this, their dignity being grievously hurt, they waxed exceeding wroth; and, joining in a mighty uproar, they flew upon him and smote him, hip and thigh, and cast him out forthwith. For, said they, surely Satan hath tempted this bold neophyte to declare unholy and unheard-of ways of finding truth, contrary to all the teachings of the fathers. After many days more of grievous strife, the dove of peace sat on the assembly, and they as one man declaring the problem to be an everlasting mystery because of a grievous dearth of historical and theological evidence thereof, so ordered the same writ down."

Attributed to Francis Bacon but certainly a fictitious story.

Nevertheless, this story illustrates deep problems of epistemology: dogma, group-think, appeals to authority, shooting the messenger, demonization, and paradigm lock.

Empiricists, scientists, rationalists, and atheists like to quote this story to point out the dogmatic ways of religion and the triumph of empirical method and enlightenment values. But they draw the lesson too narrowly. There is a deeper level, a deeper lesson to this story. Two lessons actually:

1. Empirical method itself is non-obvious. It took mankind a long, long time just to understand that reality requires empirical testing to understand. Many today still haven't learned this lesson, which is why belief, faith, dogma, and superstition are so prevalent. But today scientists themselves take empirical method for granted as something simple, obvious, and given — never bothering to question its limits.
2. But the deepest lesson of all is that the real issue here is not religion vs empiricism, it is paradigm lock. And paradigm lock is not limited to any paradigm such as faith or armchair metaphysics. Paradigm lock also, and especially, applies to empiricism itself. It is actually unknown if empiricism is the correct epistemology. Just because it happens to work on a horse does not mean it will work across the board, nor that it would get mankind to ultimate truth. That assumption is an unempirical performative contradiction or a self-refuting idea.

Today, if I stand up in front of a group of scientists at a conference on the nature of mind and tell them that mind is God & Love: just unbend in a manner coarse and look within yourself to find answer to your questionings, they will fly upon me just like that youthful friar, cast me out forthwith, and declare the problem an everlasting mystery because of grievous dearth of historical and empirical evidence. 600 years have passed but the epistemic lesson has not been learned.

As non-obvious as it is that you must look inside the mouth of a horse to know how many teeth it has, it is equally non-obvious that you cannot apply this method to understand ultimate Reality. Maybe — just maybe — ultimate Reality has unenumerable teeth. What do you do then?

It's amazing that it never occurs to most scientists today that counting the number of teeth on a horse is not a good way of understanding horses, nor ultimate Reality.

If your method is to count your way up to God, you'll never arrive.

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Note: I was asked, So what's the solution? What's the right method? The solution is to do serious philosophy (epistemology & ontology). Understanding Reality requires a serious attitude towards the problem, taking nothing for granted. Epistemic mistakes happen when humans underestimate the seriousness of what it means to know anything. You must treat knowing like it's the most profound and sacred thing. Like you're defusing a nuclear bomb. Despite what scientists say, they do not have this degree of epistemic and metaphysical seriousness. The right attitude is critical. Philosophy only begins when you understand the depth of the problem. How can anything be known at all? How can anything exist at all?

This is an excellent break-down.

Nazism is a stage Red-Blue phenomenon. It's the bottom of the barrel of Blue. It appeals to people who are Blue with a strong Red streak. People with anger issues and trauma who find violence appealing. It's pre-rational, pre-scientific, mixing mythology with quack race-science. It's appealing because it offers a cheap, easy sense of life purpose, but it's a toxic life purpose. You don't need to invest serious effort to find your life purpose, you just join a group and adopt their purpose as your own. It gives an easy sense of meaning rather than doing the difficult work of confronting the meaningless nature of existence. It provides a cheap and easy sense of community. Rather than learning how to socialize in a more refined way, you can just meet every week with a group of like-minded friends, get drunk, and bond over your shared racist identity and hate of some out-group. So you can see how Nazism serves many of the lower level needs on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, but in a toxic way.

This is a good case-study in lower vs higher perspectives. See how many of the lower perspective traits I talk about in my video Lower vs Higher Perspectives apply to Nazism. The more examples you study of lower and higher perspectives the better you will train the neutral network in your mind for distinguishing them. But it's not enough to just study these examples, you want to contemplate what drives this difference in lower vs higher. Why is higher higher? Not in a technical sense but in its existential essence. Why is Nazism a lower form of intelligence? And what does it say about the nature of higher intelligence? Understanding this allows you to get of sense of what the highest intelligence must be, which gives you a North Star to orient your life towards.

In the end you see that Nazism is just self-deception. So just by taking self-deception seriously allows your mind to avoid all these severe life-traps. Nazism is a gross self-deception which is easy to see, but there are much more subtle self-deceptions, like science and rationalism. Intelligence is the mind's ability to see-through all self-deception, of ever greater subtlety, until even the self-deception of an external material world and human self is seen through.

This is why Actualized.org focuses so much on self-deception. Because if you can solve the problem of self-deception in general you solve a thousand different problems and traps at once. Understanding the mechanics of self-deception is the greatest test of mind's intelligence. Actualized.org is the comprehensive study of self-deception in ever greater subtlety. Actualized.org is the science of self-deception. By the time my work is done, Actualized.org will have unearthed and analyzed every way the mind deceives itself, because that's what mankind most needs to learn. It is vital for mankind's well-being and development that the study of self-deception be integrated into as early in the education system as possible. This is one of the highest levers for uplifting mankind, and its for this reason that it will be vehemently denied and resisted.

A new book just released called Careless People (aff link). It's written by an ex-Facebook executive now turned whistleblower. I just finished reading it. It paints a damning picture of the corrupt ego-minds that run Facebook. I highly recommend reading the book and supporting this whistleblower whom Facebook is right now trying to silence and harass with lawsuits. Facebook is trying to get this book banned, which is the biggest reason you should read it. Read this book if you want an intimate case-study in Tech Bro corruption.

The corruption of the entire Facebook ecosystem and the ego-minds who run it is appalling. Facebook is poisoning the epistemology of billions of minds across the globe. Toxic stage Orange epistemic perverts run Facebook. These perverts are now also 100% politically aligned with Trump. Facebook is a platform for oligarchic mind control. Facebook whores out the minds of billions of people to sell to the highest bidder. That's their entire business model, and their management — from Zuckerberg down — is so blind, corrupt, immature, and narcissistic that they don't even know what they're doing. Facebook is directly responsible for bad faith actors like Trump and MAGA winning elections. Political operatives love Facebook because it allows them to micro-target ignorant people with misinformation to win elections, and in return Facebook gets promises from these politicians not to tax and regulate Facebook. It's profoundly toxic to healthy democracy. And of course, if you're an investor in Facebook, or even just the S&P 500, you're benefiting from this corruption.

Notice, one of the biggest problems with super-popular podcasts run by comedians is that they unintentionally whitewash corruption. The hosts of these shows do not have enough education or epistemic seriousness to challenge or pushback on the corrupt celebrities who do rounds across these shows. Powerful celebrities are exploiting the comedian podcast circuit because comedians are not serious people and will not seriously challenge their corruption while at the same time giving their corrupt ideas tens of millions of free views and also the tacit endorsement of their personal brand. And so, in this way, the entire culture is slowly poisoned.

Look at how this works: comedians draw in the flies with honey (the promise of laughs), like clowns at the circus. Then capitalism takes over, milks the flies, and poisons their minds with pro-oligarchic, corrupt, anti-democratic cultural memes, ideology, and mind viruses. The flies are corrupted and happy about it because they don't know any better and the comedy is the Trojan Horse. Fun vibes are just the salve for the deep epistemic corruption injection. This happens because the podcast host doesn't care about truth-seeking and is just chasing views, clicks, and fame, which itself is the prime corruption. If the podcast host did care about truth-seeking, his podcast would immediately be 10-50x less popular and no celebrity or billionaire would want to attend. So it's a situation of you scratch my back, I scratch yours. Which is how all rich people operate and how corruption multiplies. This is the definition of elitism, but the insane self-deception here is that the comedic vibes make it seem like this is anti-elitist.

Every major center of marketing power has now been co-opted by either uneducated or corrupt people and used to push low quality political discourse, such that 99% of mankind has no way of making sense of political reality. This is the perfect recipe for the death of democracy. Democracy cannot survive when ignorance and corruption is up-ranked by every algorithm and every platform.

Stage Orange has reached such peak toxicity that American corporations have sold out democracy to increase next quarter's profits. And now on top of this we're getting for-profit AI — the effects of which we still haven't felt. The people running these AI companies are the same people running Facebook. When you understand this, you see the deep shit we're in.

I get a lot of whining and push-back when I call out Western Buddhists and meditators for not realizing God.

Here's the proof.

These guys both claim to be enlightened, to have realized no-self, to have accessed all 9 jhanas, to have reached cessation, but neither of them understands what reality is, what Consciousness is, what God is, what Absolute Truth is, what Love is, and much more. These hardcore technical meditators are metaphysically clueless. They have no idea what God is. I reject all this Buddhist talk. It is delusion. These people have not even deconstructed science.

Skip to timestamp 48:37

If you take Buddhism as the truth, you will not realize what I teach. If you think you're going to meditate your way to understanding what I teach, you are mistaken.

The reason I'm not a Buddhist is because it is group-think and it is not a proper understanding of the nature of Reality. This would be obvious to you if you took the issue of self-deception and philosophy seriously. But nobody does, so here we are.

The book publishing industry is corrupt.

Over the last 30 years a deluge of corrupt marketing gurus have taught everyone in the business world that to become a respected expert in any field you must publish a book. So now everyone with any degree of ambition and aspiration to fame writes a book just because they need to in order to establish that they are somebody important. Today we have millions of people writing quick, shitty books with very low substance just as part of a self-promotion racket.

Notice how every celebrity now has their own book. Did they even write it? No. It's written by someone for them just for the purposes of milking their fan-base. Writing books these days is no longer about serious intellectual contribution to mankind, it's about milking your fan-base. The bigger your fan-base, the more needed a book is to milk them to the max.

In the past, being an author used to mean something, it was an honest signal of intelligence, meaningfulness, and originality of thought. This conferred legitimate authority and status to the author. Writing a book was hard because it was supposed to be a serious effort at intellectual contribution. But today, anyone can write and publish a book in 30 days. Many books today are vacuous, padded with fluff to meet page count, full of narcissistic and insignificant personal stories, and regurgitated wisdom simply because book publishing has turned into a corporate slop mill and self-promotion vehicle. It's become so formulaic: publish a book, make it seem like you're an expert in the field, use that to get on TV shows and podcasts, pay for fake reviews and fake sales, tout your "best-seller" status all over the place, build authority, milk and up-sell your followers. Today, every celebrity is a "besting author". Best-seller lists are also corrupt and fake.

What the corrupt marketing gurus learned over the last 30 years is that the substance of the book is irrelevant to selling books, what matters is having a pre-existing fan-base to milk. Celebrities keep writing vacuous books because they know their fans are blinded enough by their celebrity to buy anything with their name on it. If Kanye West wrote a book about How To Be A Nazi, it would sell 20 million copies. That's the low we've hit.

Many books today are not even written by the author, they are ghostwritten. And of course AI will make this 10x worse. The AI-written book slop has barely begun. This has diluted and corrupted the whole book industry. And the kicker is, book buyers are not aware that this corruption has happened. They just assume a book is a book, and an author is a serious person with serious ideas.

One time I was at a Vipassana meditation retreat and my roommate was an online business/marketing type. I was partnered up with him randomly to share the same room. When he found out I have a sizable YouTube channel, he told me, "Have you written a book yet?" I said, "No". He said, "Why not? You should write a book, it only takes 30 days". He told me the story of how he wrote a book in 30 days and used it to get himself invited to local TV shows and frame himself as an expert. I told him, "If I write a book it will take 10 years to write." He laughed and said, "That's all wrong, just write a book in 30 days and use it to get on TV." I said, "No thanks, I don't want to write a book like that." He was baffled. He could not understand it. He keep insisting that I am making a mistake, that I must write a book in 30 days. This was exactly 10 years ago (2015) and my book is still nowhere ready. Only now is my understanding of reality deep enough to even begin writing a book.

There are books and there are Books.

Then again, perfectionism is also not healthy. At some point you just gotta sit down and write the fucking book, otherwise it will never get written.

But the lesson here is this: distinguish between books written for substance vs books written for self-promotion. Do not buy or read books written for self-promotion. Take your time carefully selecting the right books to read. Quality over quantity is more important than ever. Stop reading slop. If you find yourself reading what smacks of slop, don't be afraid to stop and throw the book away. Really consider the substance, depth, and originality of the book you're reading before you continue reading it. We have a bad tendency to be completionist when reading books, which is a mistake in this new era.

Toxic Orange has ruined books. The rot of Orange corruption continues to worm its way into every aspect of society. This is just one piece of the larger issue of the corruption of the epistemic ecosystem.

By the way, this issue is also known as the general pattern of the tragedy of the commons. Tragedy of the commons is when everyone shits in the public pool because there is no disincentive for it.

Fischer Random. I played white against a 1900-rated bot. My play was 2050 rated.

This is a nice trip back to the birth of the American New Age: