Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 14
Over the last 13 years I've read nearly every negative thing that's ever been written or said about me. Why? Because I am serious about feedback. Being open to feedback as you become successful and famous is very important, otherwise you quickly fall into self-deception. Feedback keeps you honest. Surrounding yourself with yes-men is a big trap.
Here's the biggest thing I learned from being a public figure and dealing with near-daily criticism for 13 years:
The key is to be non-reactive. As soon as you react emotionally, you've failed. As a public figure, you will get criticized a lot, no matter what you do. You will never please everyone. Many will love you, and some will hate you. Low consciousness, low development people will try to bait you into traps. The trap is emotional reactivity. You will be tempted to react to their negativity, judgment, ignorance, gaslighting, immaturity, low intelligence, and unconsciousness. The key is to not even take their negativity seriously. Whatever you do, if you react emotionally, you've failed the test. Don't respond on their level. You have to not be emotionally reactive. However, this does not mean that you don't read or listen to feedback. You take in all the comments, but you never react to it emotionally and you never try to wrestle with negativity. Do not wrestle with pigs because they win just by hijacking your attention and breaking your poise. As any kind of public figure you have to be wise to this mega-trap. Your job is to maintain poise. Poise is a powerful concept in this work. It's a game of maintaining poise.
You need to be open to feedback without breaking poise. That's very challenging because your instinct is to react emotionally. This require years of overriding that instinct just to become non-reactive. The more famous you become, the more ignorant and unconscious people will shit-test you.
But remember, ignorant people will try to abuse your openness to feedback. They will use your openness to gaslight you even further. So this gets very tricky.
I was listening to an expert giving advice on the biggest mistakes in fiction writing. I found it amusing when he said the biggest mistake is to end your story with, "it was all just a dream". People get pissed when a book or a film ends that way. Why? In his words, "Nothing happened. It undermines any sort of consequences. There has to be consequences. We go all the way back to square one and it's as if the book never happened."
It's so funny that that is exactly how your life works.
The denial of the dream goes so deep that people are even upset when they see it in fiction. Imagine how upset they will be when they realize that their life ends that way.
How ironic that Truth is too strange to be believable in fiction.
Imagine a scientist realizing that all of science was just his personal dream. What a self-own.
So whatever you do, don't you dare include Awakening in your fiction.
What kills fiction? Truth.
This is a nice explanation of the racial origins of Hindus, clearing up old myths.
This is an AI-generated video. This is not actually Richard Feynman speaking. I don't like sharing AI videos. However, the content of the speech is so good that I had to share it. It is a profound explanation of the speed of light. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Rayman for the PS1 is one of my favorite games of all time. It was one of the games that got me into game development as a kid. It is one of the best platforming games ever made. The art style is just magical.
I recently discovered that there exists a player made re-make of Rayman for the PC. It recreates the entire game from the ground up in a new engine but plays just like the original. But it also adds additional extras like widescreen, various resolutions, and various other things like extra gameplay options, extra levels, extra bosses, new difficulty modes, a level editor, and more. And it's free! You can download it below.
Rayman Redemption Level Editor
I was amazed that one guy made this.
Wrote 8,000 words today. Words fly. Writing is easier than making new videos. My videos require hours of exhausting contemplation. Writing doesn't.
The Jehovah's Witnesses are a case-study in self-deception. The way to master epistemology is to deeply study case-studies in self-deception like this, analyzing them for specific self-deception mechanisms, and then generalizing those mechanism across the board to every mind, including your own. That's how I mastered epistemology. I carefully, without bias, studied hundreds of major cases of self-deception across human history, and I did not hold my own worldview as above it. If you do that seriously, for years, eventually you will know every trick of the mind, of how the mind constructs paradigms and worldviews. Epistemology is not arm-chair philosophy. Epistemology is like a science. You learn it by studying real-world examples of self-deception. Observe how self-deception actually works and then realize that your mind operates by exactly the same principles as all self-deceived people. The key insight is to realize that no matter how scientific or rational you are, you are no better than a Jehovah's Witness.
This is the foundation for everything I teach. The reason my work is so powerful is that from day one of this work, 20 years ago, I never assumed I was any better than a Jehovah's Witness. This is what people misunderstand about my work. They think that I think I am above everyone else. That's exactly backwards. I know that my mind has all the same self-deception mechanisms as the most deluded humans who ever lived. That's why I take epistemology so seriously. No one takes epistemology as seriously as me. Which is why my work is what it is. The paradox is that I'm special because I know that I'm just like everyone else. You might say, "So what? Everyone knows that." No! Almost nobody understands that they are as self-deceived as the most deluded people who ever lived. This is an exceptional insight. The paradox of my work is that on the surface it seems arrogant, but actually I am more epistemically humble than any scientist. That's why my work is better than science. Not because I am arrogant but because I am humble. I was humble enough to understand that science can be as much a self-deception as Jehovah's Witnesses. But scientists are too arrogant to understand that. People see the fruit but not the tree on which it grew. People see me being arrogant in a video or on the forum or in a blog post, but they don't see the 20 years of epistemic toil and humility that I did beforehand, and so they misunderstand me. The real work that I did, no one will ever see. All you see is the fruit. Which is why I'm explaining it to you, because I want you to copy the work I did, not the fruit. Don't become a Buddhist, do what the Buddha did. Don't become a Christian, do what Christ did. Don't become an Actualized.org fanboy, do the epistemic work that Leo did.
Believing stuff is not epistemic work!
It's like, once you're a billionaire, you can afford to burn some money. That's what I'm doing when I'm a bit arrogant in my intellectual demeanor. But I didn't become rich by burning money! Get it?
When I am arrogant, that's like an agile peacock displaying its tail in front of a hungry lion. It's a display of the epistemic depth I've built over decades of work. The peacock's tail makes it more vulnerable. But an agile, masterful peacock who knows what he's doing can pull it off and not get eaten by the lion. But if a newbie does it, the lion will eat him! In this case the lion is self-deception, Maya. When I'm being arrogant, I am using lots of skill to dance around self-deception in a clever way to entertain myself. Because once you've mastered a thing, it becomes play. The mechanics of self-deception are so obvious to me that I am bored by them. What do you do once you've mastered basketball? You show off a little bit. Why? Because there's nothing else to do. It is boring for me to have a serious conversation with a scientist because he won't even understand what I'm talking about. So what do I do about that? I entertain myself. Who else will entertain me? This is very different from a closedminded belief in one's worldview.
And with all that said, I am still not immune to self-deception. A lion could eat the peacock any day. Reality will find ways to humble you.